I had to fit everyone on the tier into my life. Dealing with 15 personalities 24 hours a day, my own and 14 others, was always draining and exhausting. Every time somebody new came on the tier I had to learn his personality, likes, dislikes, and what set him off. At first, the tier goes quiet for a while until the guys figure him out and see how he’s going to act on the tier, whether he will blend in or make trouble. Some of these men were damaged people, with no sense of honor, no sense of decency, no moral values, no principles. Prison is a very violent place. There was always the threat of being attacked. There were prisoners who were paranoid, who stored urine and shit in their cells to use as weapons. There were prisoners who threw hot water or human waste on someone in another cell in anger or revenge. There were psychopaths who attacked others for no reason, they just felt the need to stir up trouble.
I knew everybody’s experiences in society shaped who he was in prison. I reminded myself of that when men on my tier were hard to deal with. Being in solitary confinement constantly weighed on these men, too, and could make them worse. I tried to deal with each man as an individual, in the present moment. You learn there are layers to people. You look for the good. This can set you up for disappointment. Once I did some legal work for a prisoner that reduced his sentence to “time served.” He was going to be released from prison because of the work I did for him. The day after he found out he came to the door of my cell and threw human waste at me. He was pissed off because I was watching the news and I wouldn’t let him change the TV channel to a different program. You can’t hold on to those experiences or you become bitter. Every day you start over. You look for the humanity in each individual.
I made my bed every morning. I cleaned the cell. I had my own cleanup rag I used to wipe down the walls. When they passed out a broom and mop I swept and mopped the floor of my cell. I worked out at least an hour every morning in my cell. On the days when I didn’t have yard I ran up and down the tier almost the whole hour out of my cell. Exercise is important to keep depression away. I watched an hour or two of news through the bars of my cell and read at least two hours a day. I actively stayed away from negative conversation on the tier. Sometimes I lay across my bed and propped my feet on the wall. My head would hang over the edge; it was relaxing at the time.
The repetitiveness of every day could feel very painful. I used to call it “another day in Dodge.” I tried to make the routine different. I might sit on my bunk to eat breakfast for months or maybe a year. Then I’d stand to eat breakfast for months. Then I’d sit at the table to eat breakfast. Deep down I always knew it was the same routine. I couldn’t really trick myself into believing otherwise.
As much as we hated the routine, though, we needed it for mental stability. It gave us familiarity, a sense of confidence and the illusion of control over our surroundings. Eldridge Cleaver talked about “territorial imperative”: when people know their surroundings, they know how to survive in their environment. To have the lights go on at the same time, to eat at the same time. It brought order to our lives. Once we were used to the structure of the day it was something we could count on. The smallest change could feel devastating.
Most changes happened when a new warden or colonel was put over the camp and he wanted to use his power, even when it wasn’t necessary. The old saying that unchecked power corrupts is true. I have yet to see or experience a situation where ultimate power of one human over another is benevolent, except that of mothers and fathers over their children. But there is often cruelty there too. When there was a change imposed on us it upset everybody, guards too. Prisoners felt it most. It could be something as simple as breakfast being served late.
If breakfast is at 6:30, when you get up you expect the food cart to come onto the tier at that time. When it doesn’t come, you get restless. After fifteen minutes it starts to wreak havoc on your emotions. You start pacing. You believe something is wrong in the camp or in the prison. You are reminded that you have no control over your life. You have to fight off the hopelessness. You have to fight off the anger that your tray hasn’t come. A change in routine could destroy a man’s logic. I’ve seen dudes start shaking down—shaking their bars—yelling and screaming for a breakfast tray when it didn’t come on time. Nine times out of ten they were gassed and put in the dungeon. I trained myself to see change as an opportunity rather than a threat. I developed a mental toughness. I told myself that I could survive anything but death.
Some changes I didn’t like but I understood them. They prohibited us from hanging pictures on our cell walls because paper was a fire hazard. If a prisoner squirted lighter fluid and threw a lit match against the wall the paper could go up in flames. Other rules had no safety or security reason for being, they were just a pain in the ass. One time a major over CCR implemented a new rule that we could only have one Styrofoam cup in our cell. A lot of men got written up for having more than one Styrofoam cup. Now, getting a write-up didn’t mean shit for years because there was nothing they could take away from us that really mattered. When we started getting contact visits in 1987, though, freemen suddenly had the power to make men squirm. If you were found guilty of a disciplinary infraction you’d lose contact visits for six months.
Some guards looked the other way when a rule was broken as long as there were no security risks. If something was wrong in your cell they give you a chance to straighten it out. Other guards took great pleasure in threatening you with a write-up. They’d walk by your cell and point toward you and say, “I got you.” Their intimidation didn’t work for a lot of us. I didn’t give a shit about being written up, even if it meant losing contact visits. If anybody came up to my cell and said, “I got you,” I’d say, “Fuck you. Put that in the write-up.” Down the tier, I’d hear other prisoners say things like, “Write your mama up along with me.” If we were lucky the freeman who threatened us was too lazy to do the paperwork or didn’t know how to read or write that well. The next major or colonel who ran the camp would impose other rules. He might not give a shit about how many Styrofoam cups we had, but there would be something else.
Cooking in the cell was never officially allowed, but for years it was tolerated, especially if we gave some of the food we cooked to the freemen on duty. In those days, our families could send us a shipment of canned food once a year or we could buy canned food, salt, and seasoning at the canteen. We rolled toilet paper into tight rings to burn for cooking heat. For food we couldn’t buy in the canteen, like meat or other necessities, we relied on the black market which, for us in CCR, was a network of prisoners who had what we called “word.” If a man has word he won’t steal from you. He won’t lie to you. He will do what he says he’s going to do.
Since Herman, King, and I had word anybody who helped us knew he’d get paid. There was a prisoner in the machine shop who made cooking pots and frying pans on the side by cutting down gallon-size butter bean cans and affixing handles to the pans with metal. He’d get the pan to a trustee or an orderly who worked at CCR and that man would bring it to the tier when he was there for his job. He’d put the pan in the shower. I’d get it from the shower when I was out on my hour and pay the trustee with some kind of barter item; it might be stamps, a pair of tennis shoes or pair of jeans, tobacco, legal work, or whatever I’d negotiated with the prisoner who made the pan. Sometimes the guy who brought the pan wanted a cut, sometimes not. A lot of prisoners helped us for nothing because they’d heard about us and respected us. We went through similar steps to get anything else we needed. We cooked meals in our cells, fried chicken or pork chops and heated up red beans, black-eyed peas, whatever they had in stock.
King was famous for the praline candy he made in his cell. He used a recipe from a prisoner cook he’d met years before named Cap Pistol. He started by using pats of butter, packages of sugar, and cartons of milk he saved from his tray. Once he caramelized it in a homemade pan over just the right fire, he poured it onto a manila envelope to cool and harden. Other prisoners started givi
ng him their butter, milk, and sugar and, eventually, he’d get more butter and sugar on Angola’s black market. King’s candy heating over a flame could be smelled up and down the tier. Trustees brought him pecans grown on the grounds of Angola to put in it. King regularly made a batch of candy and had it delivered to prisoners on Death Row. Occasionally a security officer brought King a pound bag of sugar in exchange for some candy.
In the mideighties, a new warden banned cooking in the cells. We still did it; we just hid it better. I moved my lockbox to the middle of the cell to cook behind it. We had what we called “peepers” on our cell bars, pieces of a broken mirror stuck on with chewing gum so we could see at a glance who was coming down the tier. If a freeman was coming I killed the fire and pushed the food and cooking pan out of sight. King made his candy on the seat of his toilet so if the freeman came he could push the fire into the water. Eventually they banned glass mirrors from the tiers, so we had to buy metal mirrors from the prison store. They were OK for combing your hair or seeing the guy in the next cell, but when you held the metal to look down the tier you could only see a little way before the reflection was warped.
Every tier on CCR had one miniature chess set and one miniature checkers set that the prisoners shared. I got a chess set for my cell from a prisoner who left CCR. Eventually Herman, King, and I each had a set in our cells and two of us often had a game going. If King and I had a game we’d call out the moves down the tier. We could play a game with Herman by passing notes. I always thought Herman could be a chess master. He could play from memory. In the dungeon King made chess pieces out of toilet paper to play with whoever was in his cell. If Herman was missing any chess pieces in his cell he made pieces out of soap. At some point Herman came up with the ingenious idea to start chess tournaments in CCR. It gave the men something to feel positive about, something to do. We taught the men who wanted to learn chess and everybody looked forward to the tournaments.
Dominoes were popular on the tier too. When we were out on our hour we were sometimes allowed to sit on the floor in front of the cell of another prisoner and play dominoes or cards, depending on which tier sergeant was on duty. I sometimes played chess, dominoes, or checkers with the man in the next cell. The game would be laid out on the floor between us. Since there wasn’t much freedom of movement, we’d use a pencil to push our piece into place as needed. We all came up with “outlaw rules” for dominoes to make games more challenging. Trash-talking was a big part of any game: trying to psych your opponent out, break his concentration. If a guy’s game was garbage we told him he had to stand in the garbage can.
We weren’t allowed to have calendars until the midnineties. If they found a calendar in one of our cells, even a homemade one, they tore it up and threw it away. I never knew why. I wondered if it was because they wanted us to lose track of time, another way to break us. I asked a major about it once and he said he didn’t know, but maybe it was because we weren’t allowed to have the pictures of the women in bathing suits attached to the calendars.
No calendars were needed to tell us when spring turned into summer. The heat of a Louisiana summer in a cell is almost unbearable. Years after leaving prison men who have endured a summer in a cellblock never forget it. There is no air circulation. No breeze ever. The small fans we were allowed to have in our cells didn’t do any good. The mosquitos ate us alive. Until we got screens we burned socks to keep the mosquitos away. The smoke looked like a London fog hovering over the tier. We were all in our underwear. It was so hot it was difficult to write letters because sweat would fall from our foreheads and hands and the pen would skip on the damp paper or tear holes in it. Sometimes I slept on the floor, hoping it would be cooler than my bunk, even though mice would sometimes run across my feet or legs or insects would crawl on me. It wasn’t cooler. Sometimes to try to block out the sun that was coming through the windows across from us we hung sheets on our bars, even though that was against the rules.
After several years of demands for ice, the administration finally put coolers containing ice at the front of the tier in the eighties. Orderlies filled them in the morning after breakfast and in the evening after the last meal. Everyone had some kind of cup or container to use for ice. On my hour out of the cell, I filled containers with ice for guys if asked. I filled my own container with ice before going back to my cell and put it in my sink. When it melted I soaked a towel in the cold water and wiped myself down. Sometimes I put my entire sheet in the ice water and wrapped it around me. They put a large fan at the front of the tier and, after our continued complaints and protests, they put another fan at the back of the tier. Neither of them did anything but circulate the hot air and humidity and make a lot of noise. We were in pain and suffering from the heat and kept protesting. Eventually they placed five fans on racks attached to the wall across from the cells in the hall of each CCR tier but it never got cool in the summertime, just like it never got warm in the wintertime.
In the winter I could hear and smell the heaters come on in the morning, but it never got warm in our cells. Every prisoner was given one blanket. If you could pay an orderly to bring you a blanket you’d have two. On cold days, I put on two T-shirts, two sweatshirts, a pair of sweatpants over my jeans, two pairs of socks, and a hat and I wrapped my blanket around me like I was in a papoose. Then I crawled under my second blanket and waited for warmth. What surprises me in looking back on it is how much the human body can take.
My favorite time of day was two or three in the morning. Everybody was usually asleep. There was no one on the tier out on his hour. The TV volume was low. It was relatively peaceful and quiet. I could concentrate and focus. I liked to read during this time, or think. It was my time to deal with the pressure of being confined in a six-by-nine cell for 23 hours a day, to deal with my emotions and the thoughts deep inside me. I looked back on things that happened during the day and how I’d reacted. I might think about it and ask myself why I did this or why I did that. I almost always acted based on my gut instinct. Later, I found that usually my first instinct was right. I thought about what I saw on the news during that day. Watching the news, good or bad, helped keep me stimulated. I thought about conversations I’d had or other activities on the tier. Sometimes I reread certain passages from books I liked or I wrote out imaginary budgets for day-to-day living. I’d give myself a job making $200 a week, for example, then create a ledger on a piece of paper, listing how much I could afford to pay for rent, gas, electricity, and food on that income. I often thought of myself in the free world: having dinner with my family, driving a car, going to the store, going on vacation. I fantasized about going to Yosemite National Park, which I’d seen in a National Geographic program on TV. It was a way to reinforce my belief that one day I would be free. I learned that dreams and fantasies are not bound by physical limitations, because there are no limitations of the mind or the imagination.
Everyone always asks me if we had windows in solitary confinement. There was always a window of some kind visible to us, usually in the wall across from our cells. In the seventies, our windows looked out over the Death Row yard. In the eighties, our windows looked out over the CCR yard. On my hour out, I used to stand at the window and yell down to Herman if he was on the yard, exercising. (Whenever Herman was on a tier that looked out over the yard he would yell down to me or King on the yard, if one of us was out there, when he was out on his hour.) Once I had a cell that looked out on a forest and I could see birds and skunks and various animals but eventually they bulldozed the trees to move the forest back for security reasons. Another time, for a brief while, I had a window in my cell. It didn’t make me feel any less confined but I could open and close it myself. I kept my window open when it rained, for the freshness. Looking out of windows we could never see the sky directly above us; we could see only as far as the horizon. When we were moved to a new cell all we got was a different angle of the same view. We called it the never-ending view.
By the early eighties Herman, K
ing, and I knew we were forgotten. The Black Panther Party no longer existed. (The organization is said to have officially ended operations in 1982.) We’d written many letters to organizations asking for help. I can’t ever recall getting a letter in reply. I was disappointed. In some ways I felt betrayed. We were forgotten by the party, by political organizations, by people involved in the struggle. I felt frustrated. We were dismissed or ignored by the numerous lawyers and legal aid organizations we wrote, asking them to look at our cases. To us it was obvious there was a grave miscarriage of justice in our situation. When we didn’t get any replies to our letters, though, we knew we had no choice but to continue our struggle on our own. We became our own support committee. We became our own means of inspiration to one another.
Chapter 28
Sick Call
I never went to the hospital unless it was absolutely necessary. Medical treatment at Angola was—as it is at all prisons—deplorable. There are long delays, bad doctors, and a lot of misdiagnoses in prison hospitals. At Angola, aspirin was given for everything. To be put in restraints, then driven in a patrol car to the hospital, then have to sit for hours in a small individual pen the size of a mop closet that smelled like urine and vomit for two aspirin wasn’t worth it to me. I could get aspirin out of the canteen. Also, in order to see a doctor, versus a nurse, you had to declare yourself an emergency. I never felt that any sickness or injury I had was an emergency. A lot of times for cuts and bruises I used an old remedy my grandmother taught me: my own saliva. It worked well to speed healing.
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