One
There was no undoing the crime of my pertinacious heredity.
I remained a Blue.
Imprisoned, the legacy collared with a weighted neck chain.
After spending nearly a month locked inside the infirmary, stripped of all clothing and even my necessaries, I was finally given back the penitentiary garb and assigned a permanent cot in the general population. But not before they’d taken everything.
Daily, I’d suffered the doctors’ brutal, invasive examinations and their crippling drugs to rid me of the color that they felt had cursed me. That had vexed the Commonwealth.
A color that instilled fear because of a mere medical condition that me and my kin had inherited.
Since I’d arrived, my normal soft robin’s-egg-blue skin remained darkened to cobalt, a telltale sign that would betray the slightest emotion—fear, anger, grief, and even an unexpected burst of happiness.
My husband, Jackson, had pressed for us to move north, far away from the hills of ol’ Kaintuck. The home I loved, the puzzle I could never quite fit into. But I had refused to give up my ancestors’ homestead, instead hoping one day minds would change—that one dayIwould be enough to change them.
The guard called out to me, drawing me from my troubling thoughts. “Lovett, hurry it up and grab your stuff.” He jangled his keys against the metal crash gate, turning the lock.
I picked up the pillowcase with the prison belongings, my flesh sweaty and itching under the cast the medical staff had placed over the splintered bones after the lawman broke my arm during the arrest.
“Move, Lovett,” the impatient guard ordered.
I followed him out of the infirmary as he led me down darkened corridors, the scents of disinfectants, disappointments, and sorrows draping the musty Kentucky institution.
While he fumbled with the lock at another massive, barred crash gate, I stared at the thin shadows shivering across a homemade calendar’s bold, penciled-in dates. Someone had scrawledApril 1st 1953across the top of a Big Chief school tablet page and taped it onto the grimy prison wall.
April.
The promise of spring had finally arrived, but the institution stayed perennially frozen in its own merciless dead winter.
We passed through more doors and by locked cages full of hemmed-in women milling about, the guard’s heavy footsteps echoing atop their murmurs.
When we approached the next wing, tormented howling and weeping rivered against cemented walls. I looked ahead at the sign and shivered.
The officer stopped in front of the Forensic Ward to speak to a fellow guard, and I gripped the sack of meager belongings to my chest as the terror pummeled inside me. From the row of locked cells, a swell of guttural cries climbed from the hidden women, tearing at my very being.
I’d seen some of the women come through the infirmary. The ward was for inmates afflicted with bizarre and sometimes explosive behaviors, while others were plagued by the hysterics—and many of the torments and malaises that stumped doctors.
“Hi, Frank. The circus freaks are louder than usual. What’s got ’em riled up now?” the escorting officer asked.
“Nurse is late with her nightly medication rounds, and there was another suicide,” Frank said nonchalantly, pickingat his teeth with a ragged fingernail. “Is that the Blue from the infirmary?”
“Yeah.”
“You must be April foolin’ me. Didn’t get notice she’d been assigned to me.”
I tugged at the collar, fear tightening my throat.
“I’m taking her to wing B, though if she doesn’t stop scaring the women”—he dipped his head and scowled at me—“Warden will be sending her your way. Crazy blue witch has everyone skittish.”
“I wonder if her blood’s blue? Heard it wasn’t like ours.” Frank cocked his head at me, staring as if it would spew any minute.
It weren’t. Instead, the old mountain doc had explained methemoglobinemia caused it to be a chocolate brown because there’s less oxygen in me and my kin’s blood.
Frank snapped his fingers. “She reminds me of that one I had in my ward a few years back…” He snapped again. “I ’member now, it was Faye. Yeah, Faye Nash—”
“The Melungeon,” the other officer answered.
