The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk

do?”
    “We?”
    “We.”
    “I wish I knew,” Hijohn said. “I sure wish I knew. Thanks, brother.”
    Their eyes met, just for a brief flash. “I’ll try to stay with you,” Bird whispered.
    Hijohn’s eyes acknowledged the whisper, as he moved away in silence.

    Back in the cell block, the men kept an uneasy territorial truce. They were divided into distinct and separate groups, Bird found. Each group had its own tables, its own section of bunks. They called themselves Blacks and Latins and Asians, whom the others called Slants. The terms seemed only loosely related to color or culture. Nobody spoke any Spanish, and whenever a few unwary words escaped his own tongue Littlejohn silenced him. Some of the Blacks looked white or Asian and some of the Latins looked black. Nevertheless, they identified each other clearly enough by hand signs, Bird guessed, or body language, or subtle differences in the way they wore the common uniform. And the identification with one group or another determined everything:where you slept, whom you ate with, whom you could count on, whom you had to watch out for.
    Bird was outside it all. No one needed an ally who couldn’t remember who he was, or feared an enemy who might forget what he was doing in the middle of a battle. Littlejohn took shelter in the aura of his protection and guarded him, making sure he remembered to eat, to dress, to stand for count, shepherding him away from avoidable dangers, keeping him out of the others’ way. He was tended like some big, friendly, protective, potentially dangerous dog.
    Hijohn walked over to the table where a group of men were playing cards with a homemade deck. He sat down.
    “Deal me in,” he said.
    The men didn’t bother to look at him.
    “Go hang with your own kind,” one of them muttered.
    “I am with my own kind.”
    “You ain’t black.”
    Hijohn stood up. Suddenly the room was silent, everybody watching him. “All of us in here are the same kind,” he said.
    It seemed to Bird that the temperature of the air dropped about ten degrees. Nobody breathed.
    “I come from the hills,” Hijohn went on. He was breathing hard, and his wizened face seemed pressed into one wrinkled point with some inner effort he was making. “We’ve learned that the hard way. They set us against each other so they can rule. We’ve got to unite.”
    He reminded Bird of an apple doll, and it seemed wrong somehow. He should look grander or more heroic.
    “You talk like that, they kill you, man,” somebody muttered from across the room.
    “We’re all going to die,” Hijohn said.
    “Some of us quicker than others.”
    “When have you ever had a chance to live? Are you alive in here? For how long? Until they throw your ass out onto some work levee and you fry in toxins?”
    “What do you want, man?”
    But he never got a chance to answer, because the door opened and the guards took him away.
    Bird lay on his bunk, staring blankly up at the wires that held the mattress above him. He could feel Hijohn, somewhere, in pain. Bird wanted to help him, but all he could manage to do was drift into his mind, feeling the blows as they came, a helpless witness. It was night, and around him men slept. Hisouter ears could hear muffled cries and moans through the walls, or maybe he only imagined he could hear them. Hijohn’s pain weighed on him like a stone, while some memory of his own burgeoned up beneath him. Between the two of them, he was crushed, could hardly breathe, yet he kept feeling that if he could only remember something, something he knew, he would be able to help this man, even if only to help him die.
    Then he was falling into a dark place, a memory, where he still floated unbounded, out of context. He was alone in a dark cell, but he didn’t remember how he’d gotten there. He had no idea whether it was day or night. There was a thin blanket over him, but he felt cold. His right hand was shackled to something—he couldn’t move it more than