“If you want to learn,” I told him, “I can teach you, but it won’t work unless you really want to learn.” He told me he wanted to learn. We used a dictionary. I stood in front of his cell on my hour out and he came to my cell on his hour and we would go through how to read words using the sound key at the bottom of every page. The upside-down e, I told him, sounds like “eh,” and I went through all those symbols and sounds with him on each word. In between our two hours a day I told him to call me if he needed help. “Anytime you can’t get a word, holler, Goldy, no matter what time. Day or night if you have a question, just ask me.” In the following months he took me up on that.
“Fox!” he’d yell, at all hours of the night.
“What?” I answered.
“I can’t say this one,” he yelled.
“Spell it out,” I called back to him.
He called out the letters.
“Look at the key at the bottom of the page,” I yelled back. “What do you think it is?” And we went back and forth like that until he got it. Sometime later I’d hear, “Hey, Fox!”
“Yeah, Goldy. What?” I’d say.
“What’s this one?” he’d say.
The first time I heard Goldy read a sentence out of a book I told him how proud I was of all he’d learned. He thanked me and I told him to thank himself. “Ninety-nine percent of your success was because you really wanted to read,” I said. Within a year he was reading at a high school level.
The world was now open to him.
Chapter 26
Strip Search Battle
By September 1977 I’d learned enough about chattel slavery to see a connection between the unnecessary strip searches for CCR prisoners and how African American men and women were treated as slaves. Forced to strip down on the auction block before they were bought and sold, black men and women had their bodies, mouths, and genitals inspected for disease as if they were livestock. It’s one of the most humiliating experiences a human being can endure. We were strip-searched every time we left the tier, before and after, even though we were in full restraints wherever we went and we were always in the presence of one or two guards who were watching our every move. The strip search always entailed a visual cavity search. After removing our clothes, we had to open our mouths, raise our scrotum, lift our feet to show the bottoms, turn around, bend over, and spread our buttocks. Prisoners in CCR are among the most isolated and restricted men at Angola. The chances of a fully clothed man being able to hide contraband in his anus while handcuffed in the front to his waist were zero. Under these circumstances strip searches were merely another unnecessary cruelty.
In addition, the strip search at Angola always happened with several security people present. Some of the freemen made derogatory, crude, and humiliating remarks during strip searches, commenting about your anus and the size and shape of your genitalia. It was a punishment I could not endure anymore. King and Herman felt the same way. We held meetings with the prisoners on our tiers. The men lined up at their bars and we asked them if they would stand with us to stop the dehumanizing strip searches that we were forced to go through on a daily basis. We wrote up a petition, asking prison officials to change the strip search policy because the current system was degrading and served no legitimate security purpose. We also asked that when strip searches did have to be conducted, they be done in a more humane way. Herman got all the prisoners on A tier to sign it. King and I got everyone on our tier to sign. Sympathetic orderlies passed the petition to other tiers. Almost everyone in CCR signed the petition. We asked the warden to get back to us in within two weeks’ time.
While we waited for a response King and I did some legal research and found cases where courts had ruled strip searches were unconstitutional, although they were allowed in prisons under some circumstances: after the prisoner had a contact visit with attorneys or family members, for example, or when he returned to prison after leaving prison grounds. The warden never got back to us. We exchanged phone numbers of our families with one another so we could call them if anyone was taken off the tier. Because now it would get physical.
Date of Disciplinary Report: 9/24/77
Albert Woodfox #72148
During routine strip search procedure, inmate Albert Woodfox refused to bend over and spread his buttocks. Lieutenant Horace Isaac and myself ordered inmate Woodfox to bend over and spread his buttocks and he refused to do so. Inmate Woodfox had to be physically restrained over a desk with his buttocks spread open by Lieutenant Horace Isaac. Inmate Woodfox charged into Lieutenant Horace Isaac as if to do Lieutenant Isaac physical harm. In the CCR isolation hallway inmate Woodfox punched Officer John R. Christen in the mouth, busting his lips, and loosening Officer Christen’s two front teeth. Officer Christen was relieved and treated in the Feliciana Hospital. Inmate Albert Woodfox punched Officer Harry Bereas in his left jaw. Inmate Woodfox kicked Officer Emus in his left leg. An incident report has been submitted concerning this incident.
Verdict: Guilty
Punishment: 10 days in isolation
Date of Disciplinary Report: 10/5/77
Albert Woodfox #72148
Prior to entering CCR isolation, this inmate was asked by Captain Travis Jones if he would submit to a complete shakedown. Inmate’s exact reply was quote you’re not looking up my ass, you ain’t quote. Woodfox was bent over the A.U. desk [clerk’s desk] by the officers, and his cheeks were searched for contraband. In the process of bending this inmate over the desk, he resisted us and tried to escape from the office. He also kicked my right shin with one of his feet while we were searching him. The only force used was [what] was needed to restrain inmate Woodfox.
Verdict: Guilty
Punishment: 10 days in isolation
We didn’t ask anyone on the tier to physically resist the strip searches. I told the prisoners they had to make their own decision about whether they would allow themselves to be humiliated and degraded. Those who resisted paid a price. All of the prisoners who resisted the strip searches were badly beaten. Some prisoners had to be taken to the hospital. When freemen came to take King off our tier he resisted. I was afraid for his life and immediately protested but I felt totally helpless: all I could do was shake the bars on my cell and scream at the security people to stop attacking him. We were all yelling and shaking our bars, cursing at the security guards, telling them to leave him alone. They came back and gassed the whole tier. They entered King’s cell and jumped him, beating him severely, and put him in the dungeon. Afterward, they took him before the disciplinary board, where he was sentenced to the Camp J punishment program. It was the harshest, most punitive camp in Angola, a three-level “program” that had just opened. A prisoner had to survive three levels of harsh deprivation without a disciplinary report for six months before being allowed back in his normal housing.
They put me and Herman in the CCR dungeon. I was sentenced to Camp J at least five different times by the disciplinary board court, but somebody blocked the transfer every time. We heard it was because one of the Miller brothers worked at Camp J at that time. I actually wanted to go to Camp J, because King was there and didn’t have support. He was still resisting strip searches over there, while Herman and I were resisting in CCR.
At first, they gave me 30 days in the dungeon. Each time a prisoner is put into the dungeon he is strip-searched first. So I was beaten on the tier for refusing to be strip-searched before leaving the tier, and then I was beaten when I refused to be strip-searched before they put me in the dungeon. At that time, because of the consent decree, prison officials were required to let prisoners out of the dungeon every 10 days for a 24-hour “break.” After the 24 hours the prisoners were put back into the dungeon to complete their time or do the next 10 days. A lot of prisoners waived their right to the 24-hour break because they just wanted to get through their time without delay and didn’t want the hassle of being moved. When I tried to waive the 24-hour break they wouldn’t let me. It gave them a chance to add to my time in
the dungeon because they knew I’d resist the strip search upon reentering the dungeon. It also gave them a chance to beat me for resisting the strip searches.
The dungeon had changed from when I was there in the sixties. Inmates got three meals a day. There wasn’t much food in the Styrofoam containers, and there was no dessert or salt and pepper, but it was better than two slices of bread. Now we got one mattress in the cell at all times, so it was easier to trade off using it among prisoners. They were now required by law to let us have our legal material. Because I was in CCR, and not the main prison, there were fewer prisoners in the building, so there were fewer men in each cell.
In every other way, the dungeon was the same, designed to torture prisoners, to mentally break them. They turned off the water in the sink for days at a time, so I was forced to drink water from the toilet. This was one of the most humiliating acts I ever endured while in solitary confinement. It taught me how strong my desire to survive was. I got so I could sit in one spot in the cell and feel the physical limitations of it yet know that my mind and emotions were unlimited. I knew I was unlimited.
After not hearing back about our petition to the warden to stop the unnecessary strip searches, I wrote to an organization called New Orleans Legal Assistance (NOLA) asking for help in filing a lawsuit. Goldy agreed to be one of the plaintiffs in the suit with me, even though it meant he would face repercussions from the prison administration and security. NOLA filed the lawsuit for us in the 19th Judicial District Court.
We went to trial and in six months the ruling came down. We won. The judge didn’t stop strip searches completely, but he put limits on when the guards could conduct strip searches and conditions on how visual cavity searches could be carried out. The judge also ruled that any time I had remaining in the dungeon as a result of our strip search protests, around 300 days, had to be removed from my record.
Unfortunately, the judge’s ruling didn’t wipe out King’s time at Camp J. He was kept at Camp J from September 1977 to November 1979. In July 1979, he filed a lawsuit, handwritten in the sweltering heat of his Camp J cell, citing the cruel and unusual treatment of being locked down 23 hours a day for seven years, how the poor lighting in his Camp J cell damaged his eyesight, and how the lack of exercise contributed to high blood pressure and physical deterioration. He wrote that 23-hour lockdown “violates his civil and human rights and is in direct contradiction to the laws of the United States which safeguard all its inhabitants from Cruel and Unusual punishment.”
From CCR Herman also filed a habeas corpus writ in West Feliciana that same year, challenging the legality of our long-term confinement in CCR. Big John helped him file it. Both King’s and Herman’s cases were dismissed. Our battles with freemen continued through the seventies. They looked for reasons to put us in the hole. I made a screwdriver by sharpening the end of a piece of my radio antenna so I could open the back of my radio when I needed to. Every prisoner did this. They wrote me up saying it was a “trigger” for a zip gun. Another time a freeman was shaking down my cell and I saw him take something out of his pocket. I asked him, “What you taking out of your pocket?” He turned around and told me, “None of your fucking business.” Later, they came to my cell and told me I was going to the dungeon because they found gunpowder in my toothpaste. I got a write-up for that as well.
At CCR they put a sign outside the doors to A and D tiers that read PANTHER TIER: DANGER. In the late seventies, a young prisoner named Kenny Whitmore was brought to D tier and when he saw that sign, he told me later, he didn’t know what to expect. The first book I gave him was Native Son, by Richard Wright. Soon after I got on his case about something, telling him he could do anything he put his mind to, he complained, “Man, you’re more like a professor than anything dangerous.” Kenny was very interested in educating himself and became a good friend and comrade. He and I would end up living on the same tier for 20 years. In the eighties, we gave ourselves African names. Kenny took the name Zulu Heshima; Zulu means “heaven” in the Zulu language and Heshima means “honor” in Swahili. We called him Zulu. I took the names Shaka, after the great warrior and monarch of the Zulu Kingdom, Shaka Zulu; and Cinque, after Joseph Cinque, the slave who led the revolt against slave traders on the ship Amistad. For me, taking African names represented freedom, to be born again, to take back my African heritage. We called them “freedom names,” representing our liberation. Since we’d only read Joseph Cinque’s name and never heard it spoken aloud, we pronounced it “Cin-cue.” King started calling me Q. I called King the name he selected for himself, Moja, which means “one” in Swahili. One King.
Sometimes at night I wrote in my cell. I don’t consider myself a poet but when strong emotions ran through me I would sometimes put them in a poem. It was a way I could express what was inside me. In 1978, I wrote one of my first poems, called “I Wait.”
6×8 cell, and I wait!
I wait for revolution, and I wait
For unity, and I wait for peace!
I wait while people shoot up dope,
And while people smoke down grass!
Yes, I wait, am I a fool?
I wait, I wait and I wait!
People party down, and I wait!
I wait while people do the boogy,
Robot, bus stop, and hustle our lives away!
I wait while people drag ass!
Education, agitation, organization,
I’m still waiting!
Justice! I’m waiting
and I wait, and wait, and wait!
Gates flying open, people running,
Jumping, screaming, laughing, and
I wait!
Can I be wrong to wait?
I even wait for answers that never
Come, foolish huh! But I wait!
I’m waiting for justice for those
Murdered, pigs killing our youth,
And I wait for it to stop!
People waiting for food stamps,
hunger stalks, waiting for medical
aid, bodies die! Decent homes cause
there’s too many rats, roaches, and
snails, I’m still waiting!
I wait for truth in schools, I ask
for truth, and I’m told to WAIT!
I wait while youth dies from my body,
death stalks my soul, and I wait!
I wait while revolutions of liberations
sweep across the world, Amerikkka, I’m
Waiting!
I wait for black man and woman to discover
love, I wait for them to discover it, yes,
I wait! I wait for the embrace of family,
sound of father, brother, black men, and son,
and I still wait! Seconds turn to years, years
turn to centuries, and I wait!
WHY!
In 1979, Herman and I happened to be outside on the CCR yard at the same time. We were in pens next to one another, so we could stand at the chain-link fence between us and talk instead of calling out across the yard the way we normally did. We asked each other if we were doing the right thing. Was it worth it to go through all the suffering we’d experienced? Should we change anything? Did we have regrets? We both came to the conclusion that everything we’d been through was necessary. We knew that we were not locked up in a cell 23 hours a day because of what we did. We were there because of who we were. Sacrifice was required in order to achieve change. Neither of us had any regrets. We never talked about it again.
Around this time, Goldy was released from Angola. Months later we heard he died on the street using dope.
1980s
Nelson Mandela taught me that if you have a noble cause, you are able to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. Malcolm X taught me that it doesn’t matter where you start out; what matters is where you end up. George Jackson taught me that if you’re not willing to die for what you believe in, you don’t believe in anything.
Chapter 27
“I Got You�
�
Living in concrete you get used to noise. Sound bounces off the floors and walls and echoes. When someone on the tier cracked you’d hear him cry or scream. Some guys would moan for hours or days. Televisions were always on and the volume was high. You heard every voice yelling up and down the tier. Sixteen times a day someone’s door would be opened, then, an hour later, closed. When guys argued you’d hear it. When someone’s cell was shaken down you’d hear it. When prisoners stood in front of each other’s cells and talked they had to yell to be heard; you’d hear every conversation. Every time a prisoner was taken off the tier you’d hear the restraints rattle as they were carried to the prisoner’s cell by the guard. Then you’d hear the chain between the prisoner’s feet as he walked out and when he returned. Prisoners on different tiers could talk to each other through the pipe chase and everybody heard those conversations all day. Security had listening devices in the pipe chase. I never held conversations in the pipe chase, for that reason; everybody could hear what you were saying.
Solitary confinement is used as a punishment for the specific purpose of breaking a prisoner. Nothing relieved the pressure of being locked in a cell 23 hours a day. In 1982, after 10 years, I still had to fight an unconscious urge to get up, open the door, and walk out. All of us in CCR were dealing with strong, powerful emotions all the time, maybe the strongest that exist: the fear of losing control over yourself, the fear of losing your mind. Every day is the same. The only thing that changes is whatever change you can construct on your own. The only way you can survive in these cells is by adapting to the painfulness. The pressure of the cell changed most men. Some got depressed and went into themselves, isolated themselves, never speaking, never leaving their cells. Others talked constantly, were confused, irrational. When I saw that a man was about to break I’d talk to him, try to help him through it. I could feel what he was going through, even though I wasn’t going through it at that moment, because I’d experienced it myself. I made a strong effort to distract him. I occupied the headspace he was in so he wasn’t alone. It didn’t always work. I’d see men who’d lived for years with high moral principles and values suddenly become destructive, chaotic.
Solitary Page 18