Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

We finally got a day with summer-like heat so we spent some time out in the woods, clearing brush and such. After getting worn down by the temperature-enhanced exercise, Parchman Farm came to mind as always; both the prison camp in the ‘real’ world and the setting for a number of Six Sentence Stories written over the years. Here’s a link to earlier Sixes.

Hosted by Denise

This week’s prompt word:

STRIKE

Lionel Jordan kept his head bent from the moment he stepped from the iron-strapped wagon that carried him and six others down from Clarksdale; his bowed head sprang from a survival instinct in the men of Sunflower County as depressing to appreciate as it was effective. That his arrival at Camp 11 was unheralded, reflected, in turn, an unspoken courtesy on the part of most inmates, that was a tattered remnant of life before incarceration.

The sound of the strike of a match was the only warning before light flared in the penumbra created by the brim of his straw hat; the darkness persisted even in the scarce shade, the fear and the rage in his eyes, protected from discovery.

Noontime meals along the turn-row of the cotton fields of Sunflower County weren’t but little different from the gathering of free working-men; like it or not, gossip was surely the most common of sustenance, and word was the tall fella in the clean stripes was from up North and the outrage in his face spoke truth to that assumption.

The old man, watching the battle rage in the face of the newest prisoner at Parchman Farm, leaned back against the gum tree, one surface older and rougher than the other, neither giving an inch.

“I can’t think of two words that’d bring a man more trouble here at the Farm than, “They can’t”; heard by the wrong guard or worse, the Warden, might as well raise your fist and scream, ‘Revolution!’.”