“Get some rank up here!” one man yelled.
“Get us the warden!” another said.
“Get the damn porters off the wing!” a third called out.
Inmates leveled threats at the population porters who had come with the officers to clean up the mess. These inmates were sly. They knew that once they threatened the porters, officers couldn’t send those men to death row anymore. The officers would have to clean the whole mess themselves. Chaos ensued. One inmate started a fire, with smoke billowing out into the run. Others broke their windows to get some fresh air, presumably to mitigate the effects of the smoke. I heard busting televisions. I watched as men threw urine and feces on the guards walking the row. Officers tried to quell the madness by removing men from their cells. They moved unruly inmates to “management” cells, the media-friendly euphemism used to describe solitary confinement within the prison itself. Officers donned riot gear to take on the less cooperative inmates. As I observed all this chaos through the steel bar and wire-laden front of my cell, I heard the screams as officers beat the men before removing them.
“Stop resisting, inmate!” I heard an officer yell. He wanted the cameras to pick up the sound, even as the inmate in his care took the beating without incident. The abuse was reciprocal in other instances. Young Lion yelled out to me, asking me to watch him through the reflection in the broken television just down from my cell door. He agitated and provoked the officers. I wondered what might ensue in light of the heightened tensions.
“Look out, bitch-ass officer!” he yelled. The officer failed to heed the warning. As he approached the cell, Young Lion unleashed a vicious urine attack. A nebulous yellow projectile flew from its cup right onto the lapel of the officer. Young Lion wasn’t done. He challenged officers to open the doors, to come and get him. Six officers approached his cell door, only to find him greased down like an unruly hog with whatever Vaseline he’d managed to compile from shipments. Young Lion had dumped Vaseline on the floor, too, and used his T-shirt to create a makeshift lock on the door. The officers commanded Young Lion to back up against the bars. He refused time and again. Finally, they busted through his lock and prepared to inflict damage. Young Lion got a jump on them. Before the officers knew what hit them, he charged toward them, pushing an officer and sending them tumbling on the newly greased floor. Young Lion was ahead for what seemed like a few seconds. He climbed on top of an officer and wailed away, landing punch after punch to the officer’s head. Then something changed. The six men found their feet and overwhelmed him. Where he’d been shouting his strength to anyone who would listen moments earlier, Young Lion was suddenly screaming out in pain.
“OK, OK, you got me!” he yelled. The officers tied him like a pretzel, his hands and feet bound together. They moved him from his cell on a gurney. I was little more than a spectator to it all. I didn’t know what to think of Young Lion’s spectacle. I had just gotten to death row, so it all seemed exciting to me. I felt like it was a scene right out of a movie. I understood right then how he earned his nickname. I had my own concerns—questions about my case, and the like—but they took a backseat on days like that one.
In Houston, when the floods come, low-lying areas are submerged with sand, trash, and crawly critters, leaving behind a trail of destruction. In the wake of our flood, death row looked a little like those rain-wrecked Houston lowlands. The guards cut off the water and electricity. Wet trash floated along the runs, bringing rank smells. The toilets wouldn’t flush, and we couldn’t wash our hands. The officers allowed inmates ten minutes each day for running water, but we got no advance notice on when those minutes would come. If you were asleep, you missed out.
We had paid a heavy price for our protest. But it seemed necessary. Flooding the runs was the last refuge of men who had their human connection threatened. Stuck on death row for twenty-two hours each day, men communicated through the books and notes they’d pass. The general population porters and trusties had helped with my initiation in that place, passing to me the care packages fellow inmates sent. Without that, men feared they might go crazy, and they were probably right. I watched young and old men lose their minds in the tedium of solitary living. Even though men were punished for their role in the flooding, and all of us had to live in the prison equivalent of a Houston sewage pond, the consequences were nothing compared to the effects of the manufactured loneliness the men had protested.
Protests require patience. It took ten days of mounting trash and official inaction for things to return to normal. I’d been away for a few days, transported back to Angleton to go through the charade of a motion for a new trial. Calvin and Lydia had filed it to help with my appeal, but like most motions for new trials, it never got off the ground. I returned to death row after a week, and little had changed. After a while, the captain agreed to let the porters pass items from inmate to inmate. No longer did the prison employ general-population inmates for this job; from then on, death row inmates served as trusties. Soon, new faces joined us on J-23, most with the same old backstories I’d heard before. All had killed someone—the death penalty is only applied to those convicted of murder—and most had done it not long after their eighteenth birthdays.
SPRING 1995:
ENEMIES AND ALLIANCES
DEATH ROW NECESSITATED ALLIANCES. Many of the new faces moving to J-23 were friends with one another. Some requested a move to our block at least in part to excise a feud with Young Lion. He had his own supporters, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before a vicious fight broke out.
From my cell on the third tier of the block, I could see into the rec yard. Most of the time, this meant watching the basketball and handball games that helped to pass the time on the row. But the rec yard was also where enemies would face off over whatever trivialities had arisen between them. I watched television through the bars of my cell, a habit that helped me connect in some way to the normal life on the outside. From the corner of my eye, I saw Young Lion playing a game of pickup basketball against Michael Lockhart, one of the new enemies who’d moved to J-23. A hook shot here, a crossover dribble there, and within five minutes, they were fighting. Lockhart got the better of Young Lion, throwing punches and taking Young Lion to the ground. As the fight ensued, allies on both sides squared off, not really to fight among themselves, but to make sure no one stepped in to stop the beating Lockhart was giving. I watched in amazement, wondering how it would all end. If no one was going to stop the fight, would they just duel it out to the death?
I got my answer a few minutes later when officers busted into the rec yard screaming instructions for them to get down. The officers donned riot gear. They meant business. The inmates in the yard lay facedown on the concrete. The officers slapped handcuffs on them. As the officers escorted Young Lion from the rec yard, they walked him by Maurice Andrews, a massive man who didn’t care for Young Lion’s antics. Young Lion pulled away from the officers just long enough to kick Maurice in the head. Young Lion went to the jail inside the jail. I knew it wasn’t the end, though. Word trickled down through the cells that war had been declared. It wouldn’t be safe to stand idly in the rec yard for the next few weeks.
Jermar Arnold, a close ally of Young Lion, was the prototypical death row inmate that legislators consider when they pass harsh laws. He stood taller than six feet and must have weighed 260 pounds. He’d cut his body with shaving razors. He routinely attempted violence on guards and inmates alike. Once, when I found myself trapped in a conversation with him, Jermar spoke of the time he killed a man in a California prison. Jermar had cut the man up, and worse, he tried to peel the victim’s skin from his body. He was as sick as he was smart. When he wasn’t intimidating those around him, he’d read for hours on end, keeping up with the latest books and magazines. The guards knew this and used it as leverage. They could make Jermar cry like a child if they threatened to take his books away.
One day not long after the fight, Jermar asked Maurice Andrews to come to the rec yard so they could
talk out their differences. The courts had given Maurice a second life, sparing him from his execution with a last-minute stay. Maurice was so glad to have escaped the state danger that he forgot about the danger on the inside. The two men were walking along the basketball court eating ice cream. I could see them from my cell and I was watching them closely. All of a sudden, Jermar ripped a large screw from the concrete wall and drove it through Maurice’s skull in an instant. Maurice was dead. Jermar grabbed Maurice’s limp body and held it to the window for all to see. He screamed as he did it, “This is for you, Young Lion!” He slammed the dead body to the ground and stomped it, over and over and over.
It was the one time when the officers seemed like they didn’t know what to do. They looked on, helpless and scared. For once, I felt some solidarity with the guards, and with the other men in our block. The danger was real. Before that moment, the politics of survival for me on death row had revolved around my case, and what I might do to prove my innocence. As I watched Jermar thrust a screw through Maurice’s skull, I realized that survival was more immediate and pragmatic than I ever thought possible.
A welcome move to G-13 Wing in May 1995 kept things light. I’d spent six months among the so-called worst, and the constancy of danger had made death row even more difficult to endure. My move felt like most of the times the state had instructed me to pack my bags. There are no courtesy calls or bellhops in prison. In this case, an officer came with clear instructions written on a small white sheet of paper. My new destination gave me a chance at the work program, a now-defunct relic that allowed condemned prisoners to escape their cells for a few hours each day.
As I packed, I took account of the things I’d acquired in my six months on J-23. I’d saved up for an AM/FM radio and collected a handful of edible treasures. Roast beef and gravy or tuna felt like filet mignon in a place where water and bread is the wakeup fare. I smiled looking at the white shoes I’d worn to death row. The jailers hadn’t done much for me, but they’d let me keep those shoes. They were a link to a world outside of that place. A trusty helped to move my bedding from my old home to the new cage. Something about G-13 was different though. Surely, it was the same hellscape that sent men to die. But it was calmer and cleaner. Women worked on that wing of the building. If J-23 was the projects, G-13 was a suburban enclave.
My move came just in time for the height of summer. The building had no air conditioning, and we boiled as the sun beat down on the roof and walls. It must have been 110 degrees and humid, the sort of air you wear. I’ve watched those reality television shows where bearded men test themselves against the elements. To stave off extreme heat or chilling cold, they come up with unique uses of their resources and surroundings. Men on death row were no different. I’d pour cold water onto the concrete floor, strip down to nothing, and lie naked on the floor. The heat overtook even that water, rendering futile my best-laid plans.
I resisted the slow dying on death row in whatever way I could. Relationships served as my lifeblood. They were easier to make on G-13, where inmates were less concerned with in-fighting. It’s an odd thing making friends with death row inmates. I questioned what in my life had made me an illegitimate resident of the row, while many of the men occupied their cells for crimes they’d actually committed. Many of them grew up like me, playing baseball and working to make a life.
I soon became friends with Duck, a next-door neighbor who plotted to spread roast beef sandwiches along the row. He’d been on death row for two years. We’d talk about our commissary list like two housewives exchanging grocery coupons. I wanted meat, but I had a central concern.
“Duck, you think we can get some of that roast beef without gravy?”
“Where you think you’re at, man?” he replied. “You ain’t in that world anymore.”
We talked for hours about the things we’d done in the free world. Like me, he’d grown up in the rural reaches of Texas, beyond the Houston streets that eventually claimed his freedom. His was a crime that lands many on death row. He set out to rob a store, not commit a heinous murder, but when a bystander interfered, Duck’s gun went off in the subsequent struggle. We complained about the heat in our cages. We reached out to each other for mundane normalcy, to feel like we weren’t dying the slow death. I felt some pride when Duck left his cell for the work program. It was one of the few times a man would move on death row to somewhere other than the death chamber. Eventually Duck’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. I didn’t want his fate; I wanted off death row and back to my home.
Five long months passed on G-13 before I got the call-up for the work program. I started out working in the garment factory sewing officers’ uniforms, and then I got a trusty, or porter, job working on the pod. I would set up the food cart and help pass out the trays to the inmates in their cells. While they were eating, I would pick up all the clothes out of the showers. Then I’d collect all the trays and sweep up the wing. I felt like a janitor. I was a janitor. Prison officials use a host of carrots and sticks to motivate inmates, even on death row. Bad behavior is punished with beatings, or in a more official sense, with trips to even more restrictive solitary confinement. The system worked, for the most part. The camaraderie among the guys in the work program was totally different than the general population, even on death row. Guys had an incentive not to mess up. The less restrictive movement meant a lot to most guys. You did have some knuckleheads that snuck through the cracks, but they would only stay long enough to get in trouble and go back to the more restrictive setting. Guys on this wing played basketball all day. Some would be right next to the basketball court playing handball, or several guys would huddle over in a corner talking about the laws around the death penalty, or a particular issue coming up in their case. And then you had a few guys over in another corner smoking weed or shooting dice, always beyond the watchful eyes of guards, even though everyone knew full well what was going on. It was all part of the give-and-take we traded to cope and minimize violence. Overall, the vibe was totally different at G-13. Inmates and officers got a chance to get to know one another really well in that environment. One female officer came up pregnant. The institution was losing control. Every time they would shake down the cells, they would find weed, money, and crack. No matter how many times they raided, they would always find something. It had gotten so bad that when you were escorted off the wing to go to a visit or the doctor, the smell of weed would be so strong in the hallways the officers just started ignoring it for the most part. Death row had been taken over by the inmates through the guards. I felt better in this environment. But I didn’t fool myself. I knew where I was. I still had no real freedom beyond my imagination.
NOVEMBER 1997:
THE NEW NORMAL–WORK, PLAY, AND FAMILY ON DEATH ROW
IF YOU CONDUCTED A POLL asking the public to identify the men on death row with a handful of monikers, “father” would likely fall very low on the list. But most men there had children, and many of them kept on caring, even while disconnected from their families by the walls and the impending doom of an execution date. If staying clean and full felt like a challenge on death row, then staying a parent felt like a climb up Mount Everest.
I had to watch my sons grow up behind a Plexiglas window when my mother would bring them to visit me in prison, which occurred every three to four months. That was extremely hard on me. Before my arrest, I had been an everyday dad, not this. I would talk to them about what was going on in their lives, and give them my best fatherly advice. After every visit, I had to watch them walk away after putting their hand up to their hearts, and telling me that they loved me. I always made sure that I told them that I loved them when I could. But, as I watched them leave, I knew that it would be awhile before I saw them again. The next time they would have grown a little hair under their lips, then a little hair under their chins. They would eventually go through school without my being able to attend a parent/teacher meeting, or help them with their homework. I would eventually miss out on al
l their sporting events. I would miss out on seeing them having their first crush on a girl, and needing some advice. I knew I would miss out on the total experience of being able to be a dad to my children, and then they would become young men just like that. Men that I wouldn’t get a chance to raise. Men I could only hope one day to get to know. They would become dads, too, as I became a pa-pa to their children, from behind those bars. Life would eventually move forward while I would always be stuck in the same year that I had been arrested. Nothing changed in prison, ever, while I knew so much was happening without me on the outside. So much I should have been there for, so much that was taken away from me and that I could never go back and experience.
My mother would often write to keep me informed with what was going on with the family. One evening I got a letter from her. I opened it, happy to be receiving mail for the day, until I read the contents of it. The letter started off with a greeting and then went on to explain that my oldest son Terrell had had a stroke but was doing better. She had waited until he was out of the woods before she wrote to tell me about his situation. The letter went on to state that he had to be life-flighted to the hospital in Houston. A nurse kept working with him as he was slipping away. He ended up comatose for two weeks in ICU. The doctors talked to my family about pulling the plug on him because he was showing no signs of progress. They decided to give it from that Saturday to Monday to see if he would show some signs of change. Sunday morning my son came out of his coma. I had to learn all of this in a letter that I read from my cell; I was not a part of it. I was a spectator to my own son’s tragedy. It hurt.
I immediately asked an officer to let me make a phone call home to my mother. I told him about my mother’s letter and what had happened with my son. He showed the letter to the major running my wing, and a few minutes later they brought me to the offices and allowed me to call her. My mom and I talked for a few minutes, and she reassured me that Terrell was doing much better. I was escorted back to my cell where I lay and fought back tears for not being able to be there for my oldest son. I had always been there for him. I eventually talked to my neighbor about my son and was able to get it off my chest. I just had to believe that he was going to be OK. I couldn’t afford to start breaking down about every piece of bad news I received. I sunk very low that day.
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