After I was put out of school I had more time on my hands and started taking more risks. With my girlfriends, I snuck into strangers’ houses when they were out so we could be alone. I broke into stores at night and stole money directly from cash registers. Nothing in my days, or nights, was planned. I never considered the consequences of my actions.
I had a lot of girlfriends but I wasn’t faithful or loyal to any of them. When I was 16 I went out with a very beautiful, naive, and impressionable girl I had gone to junior high school with named Barbara. I got her pregnant. We weren’t together when our daughter was born in January 1964, but when I heard she had the baby I went to the hospital to see them. The sight of a newborn baby, my child, was strange to me. Barbara named her Brenda. I didn’t think I was capable of any emotions at that time but something made me want to keep Brenda in my life. I agreed to marry Barbara. A preacher married us in her mother’s living room and we moved into a small apartment downstairs. That arrangement lasted about three months until the street pulled me back. I abandoned them.
My only feeling of relief and release in those years came from racing horses with my friends. There was a stable on St. Ann Street that housed horses used to pull the buggies for tourists in the French Quarter. At night, my friends and I snuck into the stable, took the horses, and walked them to the park. We didn’t have saddles so we raced bareback. We ran those horses until their mouths foamed. When I was riding horses, it was the only time in my life that I wasn’t afraid of going to jail. My only fear was not being able to ride horses anymore.
Chapter 3
Car Chase
In the early spring of 1965 I was in love with a girl called Peewee. We heard about a party at a big community center in Houma, Louisiana, a small parish about 60 miles from New Orleans, and wanted to go. I drove Peewee, her little brother Harold, and some friends up there in a car they told me belonged to their uncle. I’d just turned 18. While we were inside the community center Peewee’s brother snuck out and took the car for a joyride. He hit another car while he was out. Nobody was injured but someone got the license plate number of the car he was speeding away in and reported it to the police. He came back to the party and didn’t say a word.
Afterward I was driving us back to New Orleans when a state trooper started blasting a siren and flashing lights behind us. As I was getting ready to pull over, Peewee’s brother started yelling, “Don’t pull over, don’t pull over” from the backseat of the car. In the rearview mirror I saw him waving his arms. “I stole this car,” he yelled. Without a second’s hesitation, I swerved back onto the highway and pressed my foot down on the gas pedal. Fueled by the fear of being arrested for driving a stolen car, I inadvertently led a sheriff’s squad car on a 17-mile high-speed chase down the highway, plowing through barricades erected by the sheriff’s deputies or state troopers ahead of us. I was weaving in and out of traffic through Raceland when Peewee, who had been screaming this whole time, grabbed the steering wheel suddenly and jerked it to the right. The car made a sharp turn into the embankment of a canal and flew over the water, landing on the front two tires, breaking the axle between them in half, and somehow ending upright. For a moment, nobody moved. We were on the other side of the canal from the sheriff’s deputies and state troopers. When I looked over they were already out of their cars yelling at us to get out, waving their guns.
We opened the car doors and ran as fast as we could in different directions. I came to a garage behind a house and found a large dollhouse inside where I hid, pulling dolls on top of me. Sheriff’s deputies came in and looked around and left. Sometime later I climbed out of the dollhouse and walked out of the garage. As I looked around the corner I saw Peewee, Harold, and the others standing with state troopers. Peewee was crying. I didn’t want any of them to go to jail. I walked over to the troopers and surrendered myself.
After we were arrested they brought us to the Thibodaux jail. The next day I told them I stole the car and that we were joyriding and nobody knew anything about it. Peewee, her brother, and their friends were released. They charged me with auto theft, resisting arrest, hit-and-run, and speeding; the police said I was going 108 miles per hour. I took a plea bargain and was sentenced to two years at the Thibodaux jail. They made me a trustee, which meant I had more freedom of movement than other prisoners. I was put on a work crew cutting grass and picking up trash along the highway. After a couple of weeks, I ran away.
As usual, I wasn’t thinking ahead. I didn’t have a plan. I just wanted to go home. I’d noticed that the back door of the Thibodaux jail was kept open until midnight. There was an old unlocked bicycle in the backyard. The guards watched TV with the inmates every night. I left one night while the prisoners and sheriff’s deputies watched a program on TV. I got on the bike and headed for the highway. After pedaling a couple of hours, I was tired and looking for a place to pull over when I saw there were some trucks and equipment in a gravel pit off the side of the road. I thought I could take a nap in the cab of the cement mixer so I pedaled over, climbed in, and lay down on the seat. That’s when I saw the keys in the ignition.
I taught myself how to shift gears in the cement mixer by trial and error while driving to New Orleans. I could only go about 10 miles per hour but it was better than riding a bike. When I was almost home I pulled up to a light on St. Bernard and Claiborne and a police car pulled up next to me. From the corner of my eye I saw the cops do a double take when they saw me, a skinny black kid, driving a cement mixer in the middle of the city. They waved me over. I made a left on St. Bernard and pulled over, then jumped out running. They got out of their car with guns drawn and started firing at me. I ran up neutral ground on Claiborne and then got myself to an alley beside a house where I could jump fences and lose them. When I stopped to catch my breath, I realized I left my wallet on the dashboard of the cement mixer. I didn’t hide. That’s how stupid I was. I was sitting on the front steps of a friend’s house in the Sixth Ward with her kid on my lap the next day when an unmarked police car filled with detectives from Thibodaux and New Orleans turned the corner. We saw each other at the same time. I couldn’t run with her little kid on my lap so stayed where I was. They got out of their car with guns in their hands and walked over.
“Well, well, well,” one of them said, holding my wallet. “Mr. Woodfox.”
They handcuffed me, put me in their car, and beat the shit out of me on the way to central lockup because I had led the police on a chase. I was sent back to Thibodaux and charged with escape, theft, driving without a license, resisting an officer, and speeding. The judge told me I had a choice: I could do four years at the Houma city jail or two years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, with an option to transfer out to the minimum-security DeQuincy jail in 90 days if I was well behaved. I’d seen guys in my neighborhood come back from Angola throughout my childhood. They were given the highest respect. I thought it would be an honor to go there. I chose Angola.
Chapter 4
Angola, 1960s
I learned from being in a gang that I could master my fear and still act. That lesson served me well at Angola. The horrors of the prison in 1965 cannot be exaggerated. Angola looked like a slave plantation, which it once was. The prisoner population was segregated; most prisoners were black. African American prisoners did 99 percent of the fieldwork by hand, usually without gloves or proper footwear. White guards on horseback rode up and down the lines of working prisoners, holding shotguns across their laps and constantly yelling at the men who were working, saying, “Work faster, old thing” or, “Nigger.”
Originally one of six slave-breeding plantations owned by the American slave trader Isaac Franklin, Angola was spread out over 18,000 acres of farmland when I got to it. There was a main prison called the “big yard” that housed most prisoners and there were several “camps”—outlying compounds that contained dorms, cellblocks, a dining hall, and offices—all miles apart, separated by fields of crops and swampland. The prison was surrounded b
y the Mississippi River on three sides and the Tunica Hills to the east. In 1869 the slave trader’s widow leased the land from four of his plantations to a former Confederate major who wanted to farm it. As part of a legal “convict-leasing” program established throughout the South after the Civil War, he “leased” prisoners from New Orleans and other city jails to work his farm. The convicts, many charged with minor crimes, were housed in former slave quarters and worked seven days a week. They were starved and beaten. Hundreds are said to have died every year, but that didn’t affect the business of the former Confederate major. There were always new convicts to lease. In 1901, the state of Louisiana took over and purchased the land, which became the state penitentiary, but it was always called Angola, after the African country where the plantation’s original slaves were born. It was fitting as far as I was concerned: the legacy of slavery was everywhere. It was in the ground under our feet and in the air we breathed, and wherever we looked.
When I arrived in June 1965 I think they were picking peas. All prisoners first did 30 days at the Reception Center (RC), which was located just inside Angola’s front gate. This is where we learned prison rules and met with a doctor, social worker, and classification officer. The classification officer determined our jobs and where we would live in the prison. I was scared shitless but kept it hidden. Being cool can be the difference between life and death in prison. Each dorm at RC had about 50 to 60 beds and a stream of prisoners coming and going. I didn’t know anyone when I arrived, but I got close to one prisoner named T. Ratty, who was also from New Orleans.
The security guards and all of the ranking officers at Angola were white, and we called them “freemen.” Freemen came from generations of white families born and raised in Angola prison. Segments of the ranking officers lived on the B-Line, a small community of houses and trailers at that time. Prisoners washed the freemen’s cars, mowed their lawns, and painted their houses. The freemen ran the prison.
Since only 300 freemen oversaw more than 5,000 prisoners, they created another level of security, handing out shotguns to hundreds of white and black prisoners. Inmate guards, for the most part, oversaw prisoners of their own their race. However, in some cases white inmate guards worked over black prisoners—in the fields, the guard towers, and the dining hall, for example. There was no psychiatric evaluation of these prisoners before they were made guards. A lot of them had life sentences for murder and rape. Nobody was trained. Inmate guards learned from other inmate guards. Freemen, who often started working at the prison after high school, learned from their uncles, fathers, and grandfathers who were already working at Angola.
As soon as I arrived at RC I heard prisoners talk about “fresh fish day,” the day first-time prisoners were taken from RC into the prison population. It was also the day sexual predators lined up and looked for their next victims. Sexual slavery was the culture at Angola. The administration condoned it. I saw men being raped at RC. Freemen didn’t do anything to stop it. They wanted prisoners who had no spirit. They wanted prisoners to fear one another and abuse one another; it made them easier to control. If you were raped at Angola, or what was called “turned out,” your life in prison was virtually over. You became a “gal-boy,” a possession of your rapist. You’d be sold, pimped, used, and abused by your rapist and even some guards. Your only way out was to kill yourself or kill your rapist. If you killed your rapist you’d be free of human bondage within the confines of the prison forever, but in exchange, you’d most likely be convicted of murder, so you’d have to spend the rest of your life at Angola.
Freemen and inmate guards took advantage of these “master/slave” relationships. They were able to control some of the most violent and powerful prisoners by threatening to move their gal-boys away from them. If a prisoner was “good,” he could keep his gal-boy, and a prison pimp would do almost anything to keep his gal-boy. Freemen also used violent rapists to intentionally hurt other prisoners, placing them in cells with a prisoner they wanted to punish or putting them in situations when they wanted to start lethal fights. Those prisoners were called “rape artists.”
Some orderlies, inmate guards, and freeman who worked at RC sold the names of young and weak new arrivals to sexual predators in the prison population. I had to seem much more confident than I felt to keep guys from trying stupid shit with me. I couldn’t look weak. I couldn’t show any fear. So I faked it. Luckily, I had a reputation as a fighter who never gave up. There were prisoners at Angola I had known on the street and they knew me or knew of me. Word spreads quickly in prison. Dudes gossiped and talked. Word was if you whip my ass today you have to whip it again tomorrow. You have to beat me every day for the rest of your life if necessary. That helped me a lot.
The main prison was divided into two sides, a trustee side and what we called the Big Stripe side, named back when maximum-security prisoners wore prison-issue jumpsuits with black and white stripes on them. By sheer luck the classification officer made me a trustee. On the Big Stripe side prisoners had to walk within certain lines or they could be shot by a guard sitting in a tower. The classification officer assigned me my job: field hand. I was put on a line they called the Bully 100 because the field foreman had a reputation of working prisoners hard. That didn’t bother me. I wasn’t afraid of hard work. I already knew how to do farmwork from living with my grandparents.
When it was time for my group to go into the prison population, we were boarded onto an old school bus that took us to the main prison. One guard drove the bus, another one sat next to him, both inside a cage door that separated them from the prisoners. A lot of shit went down on the bus; I heard about fights breaking out, guys getting turned out right there on the bus. The freemen in the front ignored everything. Neither of them wanted to open the cage door and walk back into the bus where we were.
As soon as the bus passed through the sally port—the security gate—to the main prison we could hear the voices of the sexual predators calling out. They stood in a line, fingers poking through the chain-link fence. The freemen allowed them to yell at the incoming prisoners. The bus stopped behind the laundry room. We were told to get off and line up. Trustees would go left to their dorms; medium-security prisoners would go to the right.
I went left toward the walk. T. Ratty followed me. The walk was long. It runs the entire length of the main prison, between all the dorms. I looked straight ahead. Voices called out, “I got you, boy.” “You’re for me.” “Look at that ass.” Some of the rapists were looking for the men they had been expecting, who were turned out at RC and whose names they had paid for. Others were trying to pick out weak prisoners to intimidate. Closer to the prison dorms there were more prisoners on the other side of the fence, not the sexual predators but men searching our faces for people they knew. I saw someone I recognized from New Orleans. I didn’t know his name but he waved me over, and I brought T. Ratty. The prisoner led us to our unit, called Cypress. There were four dorms in each unit. I was in Cypress 1. Each dorm was built to house 60 prisoners but the dorms were always overcrowded. You entered through what they called the day room, where there were benches and lockers. The main part of the building was the sleeping area, with rows of beds. Each prisoner had a bunk with a locker box attached to the head of the bunk. The TV room was located in the back of the dormitory. There were 26 of us who went down the walk that day. T. Ratty and I were the only two who didn’t get turned out.
As soon as I got to the dorm I was challenged again. Each new prisoner had to go to the clothing room to get a towel and bedding and, while he was gone, it was open season on the possessions he’d left on his bed. Everything was stolen unless you knew somebody in the dorm who would watch your shit. I didn’t have any friends there, but a few of the guys from New Orleans knew who I was, so I asked one of them to watch my few possessions and he did.
At the clothing room, there was another hustle. We got our sheets and a blanket and were supposed to get clothes suitable for our assigned jobs—gloves for field
hands, aprons for kitchen workers. More often than not, instead of handing over the clothing, the inmate clerk in the clothing room made a business out of selling the clothes to prisoners. He paid the freemen to look the other way. If you didn’t have any way to barter for or buy the clothes you were out of luck. They were always short on jackets, boots, and gloves. Field hands were supposed to get them but rarely did. Freemen used the clothing room as their own personal closet, stealing the clothes meant for prisoners for themselves or to sell outside the prison.
It wasn’t just clothing that prison officials stole. High-ranking officials would steal food and toothpaste, soap and toilet paper, anything they wanted that was meant for prisoners. If they didn’t use the merchandise, they sold it on the side. We always knew when all the meat had been taken. We’d get baloney for dinner seven days a week for months. Fried baloney, boiled baloney, spaghetti and baloney, baloney sandwiches.
I only had one incident of a prisoner trying to rape me. His name was Gilbert. I fought him off. Fighting never came easy to me, even in prison. It was always a conscious act that I willed myself to do. Sometimes I got into bullshit fights over something stupid, but most of the time I only fought when I had to: when I was protecting myself or when my reputation was at stake. To protect your reputation, you had to carry yourself a certain way. If someone challenges you and you don’t fight you’ve lost your reputation; it’s gone. What’s good one day is not worth shit tomorrow. There were all kinds of dos and don’ts, a field of land mines. You don’t talk to a guy a certain way, you don’t look at him a certain way. Remarks like, “Fuck you talking to?” or “Were you talking to me?” could lead to a fight. I always fought to the end, until I beat the other guy or he quit or someone broke it up. Most of the time I tried to stay in the background but I fought if necessary. If you weren’t willing to fight at Angola you’d get eaten alive.
Solitary Page 3