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had anything to eat yet?”
    I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “No, ma’am.”
    “Are you hungry?”
    “A little bit.”
    “OK, let me fix you something to eat.”
    The detective said, “We brought him to the station this afternoon, but none of us thought about feeding him.”
    “Don’t you know he’s a growing boy?” She gave me a plate of food.
    I ate ravenously. Maybe I could just live with these people forever  … After my meal, I fell asleep. I was awakened at five o’clock the next morning. The detective took me to the police station, where Dad and his brother, my uncle Carroll, were waiting for me.
    The two of them owned a watermelon field where I started working after school and during the summer. Those two were all about work. When they weren’t working their farm, they were driving trucks. As I started contributing to the family, my relationship with Dad, who had stopped drinking, improved.
    In South Georgia, where the heat exceeded 100 degrees and the humidity neared 100 percent, I would walk through the field cutting 30-pound watermelons off the vine, place them in a line to throw them over to the road, and then toss them up onto the pickup truck. One of the older guys would back the truck up to the trailer of an 18-wheeler, where I helped pack the watermelons onto the rig. After loading thousands of watermelons, I’d ride on the truck up to Columbia, South Carolina, in the early hours of the next morning to unload and sell the watermelons. I’d get about two hours of sleep before riding back.
    When there was an hour or two to spare, my family would sometimes go for a picnic. On one of these picnics, I taught myself how to swim in the slow-moving waters of the Little Satilla River. I had no swimming technique whatsoever, but I felt at home in the water. We went there on a number of weekends: swimming and fishing for largemouth bass, crappie, redbreast, and bluegill.
    Occasionally, after working in the watermelon patch, the crew and I went blackwater swimming in Lake Grace. Because of all the tannic acid from the pine trees and other vegetation, both the Little Satilla River and Lake Grace are so black on a good day that you can’t see your feet in the water. In the summer, dragonflies hunt down mosquitoes. From the surrounding woods, squirrels chirp, ducks quack, and wild turkeys squawk. Those dark waters hold a mysterious beauty.
    By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I was running the field crew. I’d leave the side of town where the whites lived and cross the tracks to the Quarters, where the blacks lived. I’d pick up the fifteen to twenty people who were going to work in the field that day and drive them out to the field, organize them, and then work beside them, even though they were almost twice my size.
    After work one day, my watermelon crew and I had a contest to see who could swim the farthest from the pier underwater at Lake Grace. The occasional family picnic had offered me the time to improve my swimming. As I swam beneath the surface of the dark brown water, I swallowed with my mouth closed and let a little air out. When I came up, someone said, “You had to be farting. There’s no way you had that much air in your lungs.” Times like this were very rare for me. They were the few times I could truly relax and enjoy myself. Occasionally, we built campfires and talked at night.
    Dad didn’t mind if we spent a few hours swimming or fishing, but we never went hunting. My dad let me shoot his gun once in a while, but hunting was an all-day event. That would take too much time away from work. Work was his focus. If I made a mistake or didn’t work hard enough, he beat me.
    *   *   *
     
    In junior high school, I hurt my leg playing football in gym class. One of the coaches said, “Let me check your hip out.” He pulled my pants down so he could examine my right hip. He saw the hell that covered me from my lower back down to my upper legs where my dad had recently beaten