the eighty-six days

The eighty-six days is the period Paul D spends on a chain gang in Alfred, Georgia, after being sold by schoolteacher for attempting to kill his new master, Brandywine. It is a harrowing ordeal of imprisonment, forced labor, and psychological breakdown, culminating in a flood that allows the forty-six prisoners to escape. This period fundamentally shapes Paul D's character, instilling in him a deep-seated trembling and a guarded approach to love and life, and it becomes a defining reference point for his later experiences at 124.

Imprisonment and the Box

Paul D is sent to Alfred, Georgia, after trying to kill Brandywine, the man schoolteacher sold him to. He is led in a coffle through Kentucky into Virginia, and the trembling that will define his time there begins inside him—a flutter in the chest, then the shoulder blades, gentle at first, then wild, as his blood, frozen for twenty years, thaws and breaks into pieces. When he is shoved into a wooden box—five feet deep, five feet wide, with a door of bars and a roof of scrap lumber and red dirt—his hands quit taking instruction. They will not hold his penis to urinate or a spoon to scoop lima beans. The miracle of their obedience comes with the hammer at dawn.

The Chain Gang and the Daily Ritual

Each morning, all forty-six men wake to a rifle shot. Three white men walk along the trench unlocking the doors, and the prisoners emerge, one by one, to stand in a line. They thread a chain through the loops on their leg irons, and the line turns to face the boxes. They kneel in the mist, waiting for the whim of a guard. The lead chain gives a signal—"Hiiii!" at dawn and "Hoooo!" at evening—a mercy that Paul D believes is the responsibility of a man called Hi Man, who alone knows what is enough and what is too much. They chain-dance over the fields to a trail ending in the astonishing beauty of feldspar, where Paul D's hands, with a sledge hammer in them, pay attention. They sing songs, garbling the words so they cannot be understood, tricking the syllables to yield other meanings. They sing of women, children, animals, bosses, and masters; they sing lovingly of graveyards and sisters long gone. They beat the women for having known them, the children for having been them, and they kill a boss so often they have to bring him back to life to pulp him again. They sing love songs to Mr. Death and smash his head, and they kill the flirt called Life for leading them on. The successful ones—those who have been there long enough to have maimed or buried her—keep watch over the others, their eyes saying "Help me, 's bad" or "Steady now."

The Flood and Escape

After eighty-six days, Paul D believes life is dead. He has beaten her butt all day every day until there is not a whimper in her. But then it rains. Snakes come down from the trees, and the rain continues for days. The men are locked down in the boxes, and the water rises in the trench. Paul D thinks he is screaming, but it may be somebody else. He thinks he is crying, but it is dark brown slime running down his cheeks. When the ditch caves in and mud oozes through the bars, somebody yanks the chain—once—and Paul D knows to yank it to the next man. They dive down through the mud under the bars, blind, groping, trusting the chain that holds them and Hi Man as the Delivery. They all come up, like the unshriven dead, zombies on the loose, holding the chains in their hands. They wade past the sheds, the guard shacks, the stable, and the hens, through a world that seems to be sliding, melting away. They find a camp of sick Cherokee, who call them Buffalo men and give them small axes to tap away their chains. Paul D stays with the Cherokee longer than any other, and when he finally asks how to get North, a Cherokee points and says, "Follow the tree flowers." He races from dogwood to blossoming peach, from cherry blossoms to magnolia, chinaberry, pecan, walnut, and prickly pear, until he reaches a field of apple trees in Delaware, where the weaver lady lives.

Aftermath and Significance

The eighty-six days leave Paul D with a trembling that he cannot control, a trembling that begins inside and only stops when he has a hammer in his hands. He learns to love small, to pick the tiniest stars out of the sky to own, because a big love would split him wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He shuts down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part that helps him walk, eat, sleep, and sing. The box has done what Sweet Home had not: it drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind. When he finally reaches 124, he carries the memory of those days in a tobacco tin lodged in his chest, its lid rusted shut. The eighty-six days are a testament to the dehumanizing brutality of slavery and the resilience of the human spirit, and they shape Paul D's understanding of manhood, freedom, and love for the rest of his life.