And the old man settled into the easy chair. Skyler sat next to Raisin on the bed.
"Kuta's Gullah, what some folks here speak, though you wouldn't know nothing about that. It means turtle. I'm called that, 'cause when I was born, I was such a little thing, the midwife held me up in the palm of her hand, lying on my back, and I was so small they didn't expect me to live. She says: 'Why, this little babe's no bigger than a turtle.' And so I was. But I kicked my legs and I kept on kicking and I just willed myself to keep on living. Even when I was growed, the name stuck."
"And what's that?" asked Raisin, pointing at a trumpet hanging from the wall by a peg.
Skyler knew Raisin knew the answer; they had seen bands playing on television.
"That," said Kuta proudly. "That's my instrument." He fixed Raisin with a stare. "You usually ask so many questions — or is that the snake talking?"
But he didn't wait for an answer. He told a long tale about his younger days playing the trumpet in jazz bands on the mainland. He talked about juke joints in New Orleans and life on the road, playing for ten bucks a night and gambling it away and waking up next to beautiful women whose names he could not recall.
"Nothing like the travelin' life," he declared, rubbing a gray beard that stood out against his black leathery chin. "Broadening to the spirit. Good for the soul. A man needs travelin' the way a fish needs the ocean."
And as he talked, Skyler looked at Raisin and could see that he, too, was entranced.
They stayed, that first day, more than an hour. Kuta saw them off, standing on his doorstep, leaning his bulk against the frame, while Raisin asked one final question — could they come again to visit? Kuta pawed his cheek, thinking.
"You know you ain't supposed to be 'round here."
Silence again. Finally, the old man looked them over, sizing them up.
"Shoot. I guess it's no harm, so long as you don't go tellin' nobody. Specially those Orderlies. I don't want no trouble, now."
When they returned to the Lab, Raisin limping on one leg and Skyler trying to shoulder his weight, they talked excitedly. Skyler hadn't seen Raisin like this in years. It seemed a whole new world had opened up, and their minds were suddenly reeling with new possibilities.
"We got to be careful," Skyler said as they approached the Campus. "Can you walk without a limp?"
"Damn right I can."
And he did.
The boys returned six days later. Kuta was sitting under a palm tree, repairing a fishing net, which was spread out on the sand before him. Raisin walked up and sat on a rock five feet away, silently watching as the bony black hands moved a three-inch needle back and forth through the wire mesh. Skyler sat next to Raisin and they stayed like that, awkward and silent for quite a while, until finally Kuta broke the silence.
"What you lookin' at, child?"
Raisin shrugged, gave a hint of a smile and replied simply: "You."
"What's a matter? Never seen a body work before?"
"Not sitting down."
And so was born an unusual friendship.
Skyler and Raisin visited Kuta about once every two weeks, whenever they could get together and whenever they dared to risk it, moving cautiously along the path to make sure they were unobserved and looking in his window to see if he was alone. He always was. He had been married twice, but both women lived on the mainland and he hadn't seen either for years. He seemed equally fond of both wives, and he loved talking about them — especially how good they were in bed.
Talk like this intrigued Skyler and Raisin because they had been separated from girls for the past year and any mention of sex was forbidden at the lab. They asked so many questions about it, that one day Kuta slapped his knee laughing and vowed to take them to a house he knew in Charleston — a prospect that almost literally took their breath away.
Raisin jumped at the idea, then sulked when Kuta said he was joking. He was always trying to get Kuta to take them out in his boat—"just to go fishing," he pleaded, though Skyler suspected there was more to it than that — and Kuta kept coming up with excuses: the boat needed repair, the engine had thrown a valve, the tide was wrong. Finally one day he looked Raisin straight in the eye and said: "You know those people in that Big House would have my hide. They own just about the whole island. What you tryin' to do to me, child?"
Still, the old man seemed to luxuriate in his role as life guide. He filled their heads with Gullah history — recounting such stories as the ancestors who had stepped off a slave ship onto this very island and turned to march directly back into the ocean toward Africa, a mass drowning. At times, talking about the Lab, he would turn serious, shaking his head and pronouncing "something wrong-headed" about its strict doctrines. He thought it peculiar to get all those inoculations—"they turning you into pincushions, for what?" he demanded. And he derived a pleasure in dispensing subversive notions.
"Don't see no harm in running," he would say. "A boy's gotta stretch his legs if he's to become a man. And what's wrong in leaving the island? It don't make no sense to stay cooped up here your whole life."
For their part, the old man was a window to the outside world, the only person they had ever met who was not in the Lab. They loved the forbidden hours in his shack, sitting on the bed with broken springs, hanging on his every word. The trumpet was always hanging from its peg upon the wall, and on special occasions — meaning when the spirit moved him — Kuta would take it down and play a riff or two, his cheeks bulging like a blowfish.
He had a television, but they preferred listening to the radio. It was turned during the afternoons to a DJ called Bozman, who spilled out the words in singsong Gullah.
"Disya one fa all ob de oomen. Dey a good-good one fa dancin."
And Kuta would translate: "This one's for all the women out there. It's good dance music."
The broadcast — from the mainland — almost made them shiver, it was so illicit and enthralling.
It did not escape Skyler that all this talk of freedom and sex was feeding Raisin's discontent. Increasingly, he began talking of his dream of going to "the other side." As the months passed, he became more and more rebellious, always in trouble of one kind or another. He began standing up to the Orderlies, talking back, openly obstreperous. And punishments lost their effect. His head was shaved bald, which was meant to humiliate him; he seemed to wear it as a badge of honor. Food was withheld; he grew uncomplainingly thin.
One morning, Raisin was called in to see the Psychologist Physician. There was a report that he had been seen masturbating, which he did not deny. Nor did he deny hiding the dinnertime pills; he seemed to enjoy leading a search party of three Orderlies that marched straight to the barracks and found the cache of tablets under his bed.
The Elders confined him to the Campus — he had long since lost his right to gather honey — which meant he could no longer slip away to see Kuta. Skyler realized that the prohibition would be hard to bear. One afternoon, Raisin was discovered in the woods; Skyler alone knew where he had been. He was removed from the barracks and consigned for three nights to solitary confinement in "the Box." Skyler tried to visit him there. The first night, he got close enough to hear Raisin talking to himself, playing with his toy soldier, but he had to leave when someone approached. The next night, he found that the Orderlies had placed the guard dogs around it, and their fierce barking kept him away.
Soon, Skyler saw Raisin only at a distance in odd moments, his bald head bobbing as he carried out garbage from the Meal House or cleaned the toilets or submitted to some other discipline. He was confined for days on end in the basement of the Big House — locked inside a room at night, according to the rumors. It was Patrick who told Skyler this, and he broke the news gently, out of deference to their friendship.