Unfortunately, I found myself sent to one of the last of the last prisons still in existence way out in the middle of who knows where the fuck I was. I don’t even think that town got a name since the only thing there is the detention facility. I found myself missing the Rock, but not like I missed it when the bus drove off. Then the feeling was a promise, a prophecy. Now the missing just sank into me like somethin’ heavy I would have to carry. I felt the whole Rock hollowed out, evacuated by dynamite, fire, and foreclosure, a great big empty stone sitting inside of me, weighing me down despite it holding not a thing.
The state had seen the light, and then it heard I was coming and stopped paying the electric. New policy measures in the Youth Control got rid of all the females in the facility. I’m not talkin’ about female prisoners. They have they own facilities. I’m talkin’ about the yoga teacher girls with flowers in they hair in my dreams. They was replaced by a gang of no-neck dudes armored up and ready to throw down if we messed around. The one female still on staff was the Youth Control CEO or warden or whatever they wanna call her, head boss bitch Alannah Masterkov, a woman rumored to be an enforcer cold than the Financial District: “She will fuck you up somethin’ serious,” my cellmate, Larry, told me—more on that boy later. “Avoid her at all costs,” he cautioned. I didn’t want to find out how a female could get a rep like that. I made a mental note not to test Ms. Masterkov.
They say one of the problems with prison is that all the offender’s friends end up locked up. Being incarcerated is no different than life at home, so there’s no fear there. But I was not a typical inmate. I knew nobody except DeMichael, who was there when I got there. But blood acted like he didn’t know me. He rolled solo dolo, and the few times I glanced in his di-rection and got on his radar, he turnt away. I didn’t know what was up with him, but I figured maybe being one of the biggest boys in there instead of being the undisputed heavyweight champion had him feelin’ vulnerable for once.
*
Policy-wise, meditation and fresh food was out, while anything that would keep us from mugging a tourist was in. For example, the library was not all the way abolished. We could still hit up the little room with the books during the daytime, but the selections was cut to the basics: textbooks on vocational subjects, a few canon classics, and nothin’ radical, like no Malcolm, only Martin. No Garvey, just Atlanta Compromising. No La Raza, just los Estados Unidos. That’s how I started to read Homer, not Socrates, and it’s how I got to know about all the good Negroes without guns. These was the books Daddy had told me was nothin’ but “boojie Negro bullshit.” I always figured it was because my old man had no college and a big ego and a big brain with no books inside it hadn’t been penned by Iceberg Slim that was the reason he felt the way he did. I mean, you gotta have a damn big pair on you to tell your charcoal-colored child that W. E. B. Du Bois ain’t no more special’n the nigga doin’ the weather on the evening news. Part of becoming an adult, I believe, is learning that Mommy and Daddy ain’t God, they’s just folks same as every other mistaken person.
Not that I condemn my folks for it. They was just doin’ what they knew, which was gettin’ by. If there was a college degree in Stretching Water and Rice Five Ways, Working for the Post Office and BART, and Never Taking Your Kids Nowhere, Black Americans would have a 100 percent graduation rate. They couldn’t keep us outta PhDs in Not Learning Spanish and No Other Language, Having Your Ass Inside by Nightfall, and Not Fucking with the Same Shit White People Do. My parents didn’t read books cuz books will not save your black ass. Books don’t pay the rent. Books don’t keep you safe at night. Cash money and a loaded pistol under your nightstand will, though. So I stayed fed and sheltered as a child, and always knew my way around a firearm, but I must confess I was dumb as a rock ’fore I got locked the fuck up.
With all them cutbacks, it seemed like all it was to do in the Youth Control was hang out in my cell, read stories, tell stories, and, according to my cellie, get ready for someone to test me. At first I thought him tellin’ me that was his way of challenging me, but after a couple episodes of seeing other boys get ran up on without warning shots, the fights, the COs tear-gassing the whole world, including the two of us holding up the wall till we crawled back into our cell, I knew that boy was not about that life anymore’n yours truly was.
After the COs would subdue the squabble, CEO Masterkov would announce a lockdown so that it wouldn’t be a round two. More cell time. The COs brought us each a book while we was locked down. Most fools just threw the book under they bed and never touched it. I did my share of diamond push-ups, too, don’t get it twisted, but when my chest hit the floor and I could see the spine of the book staring at me, it was like it was talkin’ to me, tellin’ me that it had a story to tell that mattered as much as mines.
The COs who paid close attention knew I returned my books worn, the pages stretched and smudged. They would sometimes hook me up with multiple books so I wouldn’t have to reread the same stories over and over. That’s how I became a reader. That’s how I learnt about Frederick Douglass pledging to fight every man at the docks just for the right to work, about Richard Wright by way of a down-ass Irishman sneakin’ literature out the Memphis library and into his young mind, about Harriet Jacobs tellin’ mofos how after the Nat Turner drama the slave masters got real particular about the love and forgiveness and Jesus part of the Bible. I would read about this or that harrowing affair that the author errantly found theyself in and I would think about what I would do, how I would move given the same circumstances, and if in the end I could survive like they did.
When I was reading, I was all good. I was under ancestral protections. But it was a whole ’nother story once the book was closed and I went outside my cell where others might read me, study me. I knew it wouldn’t be too long ’fore they stopped studying me and assigned me my exam.
*
He was twenty-three years old, gang-affiliated, had hubcaps for shoulders from being locked up since Obama got in office. I’m pretty sure you coulda fit two of me inside old boy. He was a DeMichael Bradley–sized dude, maybe bigger. Later, I would learn his name: Mandela or somethin’, some righteous black shit. Whoever named him ain’t raise him, though, I’m sure of that, cuz as I was walking back to my bunk with my first care package cradled in my arms, I heard his whisper at my back. “You know a li’l nigga like you gon’ get asked for that.”
I turnt around. The care package was nothin’ special. Edit that—I wadn’t even sure what was in it cuz I had yet to open it and my parents never had been the type to just lavish me with gifts, especially after I went and fucked up and got locked up. I assumed they’d sent me some shirts and underwear, nonperishable snack food, maybe some music if I was lucky.
I was the opposite of lucky. Just holding the package in my hands and feeling home again was the best part, not the gifts. I just wanted to feel home in my hands, and here this dude was wanting me to hand over what little I still possessed. I looked around for DeMichael. He had the size to help me with this fool, but blood was nowhere to be found, as usual. It was just me and the monster. I wanted to tell him no, I did not consent to the monstrosity, and so, lacking impulse control and whatnot, that’s what the fuck I did: “NO,” I blurted, which surprised me. I could tell dude was surprised by me. Here was this little kid, not even a gangbanger, just a regular kid seeing fit to challenge him. For a long second, me and the monster just stood there staring straight confusion at each other. His hand, which was already outstretched to snatch the package from me, hung there in the air like a dead tree limb fittin’ to fall on top of me. I was thinkin’ the same thing he probably was, which was What the fuck is this kid thinkin’? When the stickup man asks you for your things, you give them to him and go the other way. Live to fight another day, as they say.
I don’t remember what happened next, who unfroze first, me or the monster, or whether it was he who snatched my package from me, or if I bitched up and handed it to him. All’s I remember is the w
eight I felt press against my empty palms as I walked back to my cell and Larry’s expression once I arrived. The pity in his eyes. Don’t nobody wanna be pitied, but there I was done had my cookies took, so how else was he supposed to see me? Nigga ain’t say a single word, just let me climb in my bed and put the covers over myself, and still I felt weight where there wadn’t any in my hands. My hands would not leave me be. I ran them through what was left of the separation at my scalp; I could still feel the difference between the two sides, even with my hair cut low. Still anxious, I started doing things with my fingers, contortions of triangles, circles, and cubes. I don’t like building things in real life, never been much with my hands. But I started stackin’ like the gang kids stack, one sign, one crew, then another and another. I discovered I could stack whole houses, massive architecture, cities and nations of gang sets. It’s strange how you pick up certain things just from hanging around and half noticing the world around you and don’t even know that you know all this stuff even though it’s right there for you, hovering in the darker corners of your mind. The stackin’ finally did the trick. Building a world by hand is hard. I got tired and teary-eyed. My hands were shaking as my mind drifted away.
*
I was visited. The old man peppered me with questions. How was I doin’? I was OK—not dead. Was anyone messin’ with me? Nah. Did I like the comics they sent? They could send different ones if those wadn’t my favorites. I would prefer some boojie intellectual books next time, but I was grateful for whatever literature they gave. What about the candy? You ain’t let it get stale, did you? Nah, I ate it all. Were the guards civil? Yeah, no problems so far. Was I exercising? Was I reading? Was I depressed? Was I X? Y? Or Z?
“I’m good,” I lied.
“Ain’t no problems,” I told them, even though, truth be told, half they gifts transferred ownership ’fore I could enjoy them.
“I just have to keep my head down and serve out my bid. No lasting harm will come to me,” I assured.
I could tell Momma was verging on tears, but she kept them inside her mask. She is not the one to tell the world that she’s hurting. None of us is.
“Stand up,” Daddy commanded. I flinched. “You heard me, boy. Stand up. And lift up yo’ shirt.”
“What?”
“You heard me, Cope.”
I heard him so I did as I was told. I raised up my shirt so he could see for hisself that no one had cut or in no other visible way abused his boy. But it’s so many ways to be hurt and most of them you cain’t see. I heard the way his voice relaxed, and it was then I realized all the fear hiding in him. I remembered his trembling hand upon the Treasure Island letter. His fear for me. His love, too. Love without protection.
*
There was the white boy, Larry. Larry, my cellmate, who I got along good with despite all the rules written and unwritten. The segregation of inmates was another area where reforms had reformed the reforms with poor results. Apparently, in the days of the Youth Authority, race relations was Jim Crow–ed badder’n a Birmingham bus before the boycott. Going to the pen was like getting drafted into the military, except instead of fighting for America, you had to fight for your race, be it black or Mexican or white or the others. There was no personal choice in the matter, just get to scrappin’ based on skin color. Then the reform came thru like MLK and Obama combined, had people of different races and rival gangs, boys with drugs and guns on they records and blood anger in they hearts, bunked up in the same cell, like alliances and disputes and history wadn’t shit. And that didn’t go too good—nuff said.
Now, with the Youth Control taking over, the new hype was “limited integration based on past data.” What had been shown to work to keep kids and officers safe while also “decreasing racial and gang tensions” would be “implemented as policy effective immediately.” For example, the “newly processed inmates without gang-affiliated data,” prime poodles like yours truly, might bunk with those of a different race, while them that had such affiliated data was placed back under Jim Crow.
Larry had a lighter sentence’n even I did, which was probably a complexion-related concession cuz cousin had actually put his paws on people. I was fit to be sainted by comparison, cuz, unless you count the back of Vista’s hand, I had never been in a fight in my life. Meanwhile, Larry had got hisself kicked outta every public school in his town for fights that he apparently started and finished. That sorta thing was enough to get you locked up if you did it enough. But the nigga was cool even still. What I liked about Larry, besides him being one of the few pale niggas in the Youth Control, making America a little more equal every day he was incarcerated, was he was entertaining.
When Masterkov had us on lockdown, which was most of the time, even my reading had its limits: I couldn’t read 24/7. My eyes got tired, or my head would start to hurt, or I would just remember that I am not Malcolm X. And I could only do but so many body-weight exercises ’fore my biceps wouldn’t move no more. Fortunate for me, Larry had him all kinda stories to tell, stories for days, that boy; he told me of secret orange grove opium farms and meth lab explosions, red-eyed rednecks and they rifles (which Larry said he used only for hunting, explaining to me how to endanger an eagle at any distance), and fishing trips on the water by hisself out in the middle of nowhere where the world is just trees and blue sky and a warm sun.
“Ain’t nothin’ better, Cope. I swear to you. One day when all this is over and we’re grown, you and your wife are gonna come visit me on my land and we’ll have us a big cookout. You’ll get to appreciate country life. You might even decide you prefer it to the big city.” Other times, though, his mood was sadder. “Where I’m from is a dying place, Cope. It’s all addicts back home. People are either taking it to get high or they’re making it and selling it. There’s only two ways to make it out, by prison or that pinewood.”
Really, Larry’s decrepit old farm country sounded a whole lot like the so-called inner city. And sure enough, by the time I was finishing up my bid, a few more handfuls of white boys had been dropped into the Youth Control.
It took less than a week for one of them peckerwoods to show his ass and his ignorance, which only required that he get his hands on a writing utensil: NIGERS GO BAK TO AFRIKKA, he wrote on a wall in the kitchen. Wadn’t even educated enough to put three Ks in “Afrikka.” Damn shame. But most of them were all right, or at least no worse’n the rest of us.
The white boys came from Turlock and Hemet, Bakersfield and Blythe, but the hometowns and the color of the skin didn’t mean much behind bars. The white kids just had on different birthday clothes, but everything after birth seemed similar: raw luck, bad decisions, bad breaks, diagnosed disruptive or retarded, now expelled, medicated, and incarcerated and segregated inside a facility where everyone was scared of everyone else even though we was really just one hurting child with however many different faces, different names.
**✦
We ain’t gotta hurry. They got a four-hundred-year head start on the story, ain’t no few hours here or there gonna make a difference. These jokers can unseal whatever they wanna unseal and say whatever they wanna say. I don’t give a yickety yack about that. I’m unsealing my memories so that it won’t be a single thing they reveal about me that ain’t already been told. After all, it’s the life in between the incidents that’s the real story, and only I can verify that. (And I don’t think they know you quite as good as they think they do neither—but that’s another story.)
Peep game: DeMichael Quantavius Chesnutt Bradley was the sole inmate besides myself who made the library room a regular part of his routine. But where I kept my head in a book for as many hours as I could, Black Hercules refused to spend his library time constructively. Black Hercules didn’t read a single thing, he just sat in a chair in the corner drawing pictures on blank sheets of paper. When I think back on it now, I realize it wadn’t time wasted, DeMichael was practicing conflict avoidance simply by staying clear of the other inmates.
I knew
he remembered me from school and the neighborhood. But DeMichael made a point of keeping his distance even from me. It was like he was taking the Fifth forever, in all situations. Like he had been programmed by his encounters with the po-lice to not say shit and not even to cast an eye at anyone. I found it sad that the biggest, baddest muhfucka breathing had had his lights dimmed like that.
And then one day out the silent blue yonder, he sat down beside me like we was back in elementary and shit. Just kids again, not inmates. Our shoulders bumped and I sank back a little. He gestured at the book I was reading, Booker T. Washington’s autobiography. It was the kinda conservative, safe book the Youth Control allowed me to read. I flipped to the title page and showed him: Up from Slavery.
“You could write the sequel, call it Back Down in that Motherfucker. I never thought I’d see you in here, family,” DeMichael’s voice whispered, then boomed thru the room. “You was always so well behaved.”
“They put me in day school on the island, then the judge went and got his back up and sentenced me here.”
“That’s how they do. They don’t care about us. Blood, I remember the first time I got in trouble: I banked that crazy lady who was trying to choke the shit out our teacher, you remember that? They sent me to the island. That place, man, aye’body jokes about don’t drink the water and the ghetto flu and shit, but for real for real, somethin’ about that muhfucka just ain’t right. I don’t know anybody who got sent there who came out the same as when they went in. By the time I got back to Oakland, I was swole than a motherfucker. Twice as angry as before and could fight twice as good, too. I just kept gettin’ in trouble after that, ended up here.”
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 8