Three tiers with catwalks rose above me. My escorts and I climbed the concrete stairs to the second tier, then marched down the catwalk. Hard leather heels echoed off the concrete. Men shouted at each other through the bars in their cells. Faces peered out of the shadows at the three of us marching by.
I didn’t see James Cagney anywhere. I didn’t see George Raft, either. I saw a few thin white faces, but mostly in those shadows I saw the haggard red eyes of caged black men blazing out like the eyes of maniac animals. In my youth I had seen such dementia behind bars at the zoo, where brainsick creatures, torn from all that was natural and dear, stared, or paced, or lay in urine and torpor. I had smelled that same stench, and I had turned away. I had never taken my children to zoos.
Here, quarantined from daylight, men lived in order to die. They lived like subhumans, shut in Q block until the last appeal had been exhausted by the last weary lawyer, and they were granted what amounted to the mercy of Big Wooden Mama.
There is a great deal about Darryl Morgan that I learned, then and later, but I’m going to tell it now.
Darryl’s first beef was larceny, after he had broken two school windows and been placed on probation. The larceny charge came after he had boosted a tape deck from a Chrysler New Yorker and been caught trying to pawn it. Looking down from the bench, the judge said, “I want to help you, son. And I think the kind of help you need is jail therapy, because it’ll make you think about the consequences of your acts. Understand what I’m saying? Let’s try six months to a year at ACI.”
Apalachia Correctional Institute, or ACI, was in Liberty County, west of Tallahassee in the Apalachicola National Forest. Darryl entered ACI a week before his sixteenth birthday. He was housed in Dorm 5, a ramshackle single-story white wooden building that over the years had acquired the hue and wrinkled texture of a sheet that hadn’t been changed for months. The smell of sweat oozed not only from the residents’ bodies but from the walls and the creaking wooden floors.
Darryl’s supper that first evening was baked beans with chunks of pork fat, a glass of milk, a cookie with a few raisins in it. Later in Dorm 5, Darryl’s new neighbors, seventeen-year-old boys named Hubert and William, got into a religious debate. William’s last name was Smith, and he was destined to die outside the Lil’ Champ food store four years later in Jacksonville. “In this life, brother,” William said, “ain’t no such thing as no motherfucking salvation. This just one mean motherfucker from the time you born to the motherfucking end when you go.”
“Amen,” Hubert said.
Darryl had been assigned an upper bunk next to the showers. The mattress was thin, the springs sagged. By midnight his back ached. So did his knees, from growing pains.
He had never been away from home before. Not too bad. Sure don’t miss no one.
He woke at three o’clock in the morning. Hot water dripped in the shower room, steam billowed into the dorm: well over one hundred degrees in there. With the crawling mist, rising steam, the steady drip of the water as from branches, the dorm was like a tropical rain forest.
None of the other boys seemed to mind. I be as tough as they be, Darryl decided. So I don’t mind neither.
Soon he learned a new language. Your house was your bed, your slice of territory. The hole was solitary confinement. A shank was a homemade knife made from the guts of an iron cot. A one-year sentence was a bullet, two was a deuce, three a trey, five a nickel, ten a dime, twenty-five a quarter.
Darryl’s new friend, William Smith, said, “I had bad luck. I go before a dime-store judge. All this motherfucker knows is five, ten, ‘n’ a quarter. First time out of the box, motherfucker slips me a nickel. Open my mouth, I say, ‘It ain’t right, Judge, it’s too much … ,’ and he laughs. He says, ‘Keep the change, boy.’ “
Hubert and an older boy called Suitcase approached Darryl on a Saturday night. “How about us have a little fun together, dude?” Darryl knew from the look in their eyes just what they meant. He growled, “Fuck you, faggot. Touch me, I’m a kick yo’ natural ass.” He flexed his muscles.
Sunday afternoon Hubert and Suitcase and a couple of other dudes threw a blanket over Darryl’s head and stuffed a towel in his mouth. They carried him kicking and grunting to Suitcase’s cot, and fucked him in his natural ass. Four other boys, including William, were playing cards on the porch. One of the most uncool things you could do in the joint was interfere with another dude’s serious intentions, especially if those intentions were unlawful.
William talked to Darryl that evening, trying to explain the way things were. “A dude tell you, ‘I wanna fuck you,’ you say ‘no,’ he feel insulted. Hubert and Suitcase don’t wanna hurt you. Hubert, he gentle as a lamb. They just need some place to stick they meat.”
After seven months Darryl returned to Jacksonville. For a while he had a job at a car wash. He found a girlfriend named Pauline. When Pauline got pregnant he needed money to pay for an abortion. A friend said, “Be cool. We go down to the beach tonight. Find us some fun-lovin' dudes with cash in their jeans.”
Using two-by-fours to threaten, they jackrolled drunks and white teenagers successfully for two weeks, and on the third weekend were caught by a black undercover cop posing as a drunk. The juvenile court judge sentenced Darryl to a year at the Arthur C. Dozier School for Boys.
The Arthur C. Dozier School for Boys was in the Florida Panhandle, only twenty miles from the Georgia state line. In the official state literature it was called a “treatment center for delinquents.” The residents chopped sorghum and harvested sugarcane and sometimes went to school.
The boys lived in bunks with armed guards outside. When it grew dark there was nothing to do except talk and play cards and jerk off and cornhole and suck dick. Darryl made friends with two boys named Hog and Isaac. They agreed they would have sex together when they got horny but would stand united against anyone who tried to rape any of them.
Isaac had two decks of playing cards under his pillow. He said to Darryl, “You got big hands. I teach you to shuffle the cards good, do some tricks. We do some neat things.” At lunch breaks he showed Darryl how to shuffle so the cards didn’t change places, how to make a one-hand cut, how to deal off the bottom of the deck.
Darryl’s house in the bunk was five feet by eight feet, bounded on the sides by four-foot-high sheets of stiff cardboard supported by the backs of his neighbors’ upright lockers. Between Darryl’s lockers a thin plank of plywood rested on two hinges to form a wobbly desk area. On it, Darryl placed a photograph of Pauline. One day while the boys were at work, a group of hacks and the superintendent ripped apart the cubicles in the bunks. All the flimsy plywood desks and the personal decorations were removed and destroyed. The photograph of Pauline was gone.
Hog said quietly, “I never had nothing on my locker or under my bed. I don’t keep nothing personal, ‘cause I know them pigs tear it off sooner or later, and I catch them doing it I bust some hack’s motherfucking head and get sent to the hole. And I don’t need that shit. So I got nothing. They can’t take that away from me.”
Back on the street after eight months, Darryl discovered that Pauline had gone to Miami. He decided to go down there and claim her and his possible child. But he had no money. He was seventeen. He could work as a laborer, a dishwasher, a waiter, janitor, porter, maybe a mechanic or a carpenter if he learned how. Pump gas. Couldn’t be a cabdriver or a barber now, because he had a record.
Don’t know how to do this, don’t know how to do that. What I know? Know how to jackroll drunks, bust windows, set fires, crack warehouses, grab money from cash registers, stick a dude up, break into cars with slimjims and slaphammers, and swipe a tape deck. Know who dealing in weed, coke, dust, black tar, hash, speed, uppers, downers, smack, meth, acid, spikes, and hypos. Got me some connections now from the joint—I find you a Saturday Night Special, a sawed-off, a blade, gravity knife, butterfly knife, a bayonet. Man, I find you a fucking Uzi you want one bad enough. Want a cooncan game, I know where they playing
. A color TV? I knows the truck one just fell off of.
Just need something to do. Goof around … you know, have some fun. What I learn in the joint is, people got to prove things to people. Watch people’s faces when they see you—they scared, or they don’t care? One or the other, nothing between. Like if I had a .357 magnum right now, you’d do whatever I want you to do, right? I be Jesse James, John Wayne, that dude Shaft from Harlem. And you couldn’t do nothing about it. All my life, people been doing that to me. Now I like to get that feeling where they do what I want them to do.
So he snatched fifty dollars from a Burger King cash register in a town called Middleburg, but was picked up by the cops that evening in Jacksonville; he was too recognizable. He did four months in Clay County Jail. He said to his cellmate there, “I can do this kinda time standing on my head.”
A few months later he was caught with goods from an auto parts warehouse burglary. He was eighteen, an adult, and he drew seven years.
The joint was called Branville, and a sign painted on the wall of the chow hall read:
IF YOU WOULD HAVE A MAN STAY AS HE IS, THEN TREAT HIM AS HE IS. IF YOU WOULD HAVE A MAN CHANGE, THEN TREAT HIM AS THE PERSON YOU WOULD WANT HIM TO BECOME.
By some dude named Goethe. Darryl looked at that sign and thought: one thing sure, this Goethe dude never did no time.
Isaac was there at Branville, and so was Darryl’s old friend from ACI, William Smith. Old home week. Best part of the joint, keep meeting old friends. Stick around long enough, you never lonely.
At Branville there was a factory that made furniture. They made desks for prosecutors. They made swivel chairs for judges. Men working there earned eleven cents an hour. But Darryl was put in food service, washing dishes, earning nothing. He lived in a dormitory with seventy howling maniacs. They played sports at Branville. Darryl was six feet four by then, over two hundred pounds. They gave him a baseball glove and put him in right field. He was a poor fielder, but with brute power he could hit; when he connected with the bat, the softball soared and struck high up on the concrete walls.
The team played games against teams in the local North Florida Factory League. The factory teams were almost all young white men. In the first game that Darryl played in, Branville lost by the score of 33 to 5. Darryl got two hits, made one leaping catch of a line drive, and let one ball scoot between his legs for an inside-the-park home run. After the game he said to William, “How come we not good enough to beat these dudes? We all brothers ‘cept for the white motherfucker at second base and Rivera on third. Brothers up in the majors, the NBA, they beat the shit out of the white boys. What wrong with us? Don’t we wanna win?”
Isaac was in the same cell block, happy with his decks of cards. He ran a little poker game, won a few cartons of cigarettes a week. Booze was made at Branville—yeast from the bakery, sugar, raisins, and apples from the chow hall, alcohol from the medical department. Darryl won some cartons of Marlboros playing poker. He bought a pint of home brew. He felt sick, threw up, was found by a hack in the shower room with what was left of the pint and sent to the hole for a month.
The door of his cell was steel, with just a tiny slit for a food tray and mail. Darryl never got any mail, he never received a visit in any joint he had ever been in. It was winter in northern Florida, and heat came from a pipe that extended from ceiling to floor. He threw water on the pipe and it sizzled.
In the morning he looked through the iron bars of the window. He could see a pewter sky, half of an unused pitted concrete tennis court, a gun tower, and some men in gray sweatsuits jogging through the fog like ghosts.
There was a dude across the way called Crazy. Crazy told Darryl that he’d been in the hole for eight months.
“What you do?” Darryl asked.
“Don’t remember,” Crazy said. “Musta been something pretty good, though.”
With a long wire, Crazy passed Darryl an old crumpled Camel pack with three Marlboros and a Viceroy in it, and a book of damp matches. Now Darryl was in Crazy’s debt and couldn’t tell him to shut the fuck up when Crazy shouted at the top of his lungs all evening long until after midnight to a brother called Teabag, who was on the tier above. It sounded to Darryl like they were yelling in Swahili.
Twice a week each man was allowed a shower and an hour’s exercise in a walled yard. During Darryl’s month in the hole there was a murder in the shower room. Teabag went berserk, killed one dude he didn’t like, and cut two others—he’d been carrying a shank under a towel. Darryl asked another brother why Teabag had shanked the two other dudes. The brother said the hack had asked Teabag that same question, and Teabag had looked puzzled and said, “Well, they was standing right there.”
When Darryl got out of the hole, there was a movie in the Branville auditorium that Sunday afternoon. The movie was Hotel. One of the characters, a professional thief, was played by Karl Malden. The men yelled for him whenever he was on-screen. At the end, led away in handcuffs by the police, Karl still managed to steal an ashtray. The men cheered wildly.
Coming out of the movie into the suddenly bright sunlight, Darryl felt a moment or two of dislocation. In the yard he could see a couple of palm trees, a few men in T-shirts and denims tossing a football back and forth. A jogger moved by, face slick with sweat, sneakers scraping on concrete. Darryl heard the iron of the weights clank in the distance as dudes did bench presses and curls.
Stupid, Darryl thought. Got to be something better. But what? Nineteen, and this all I know.
On parole after twenty months in residence at Branville, he returned home to bunk down on the wooden boards of the back porch of his mother’s house.
“… Mama there, drinking herself into the dirt. Sister selling pussy and sleeping on the job. A.J. live up at the Palmetto Club, cut the white man’s grass. He say to us, ‘Anytime you happen to pass by my place, I’d sure appreciate it.’
“I borrow a Colt forty-five from a dude I knew. I hike down to St. Augustine on a Saddy night and score off some faggots in a nightclub parking lot. Rule of the street is, live good while the bread’s there. You ever hear what that TV brother Redd Foxx say to the white dude? ‘Want to know what’s it like to be a nigger? Friday, take out all you got in the bank. Spend it by Sunday.’ Say that, peoples laugh. But it true. You do what you do not because you stupid but ‘cause you know what’s coming. You got a sense of the future—there ain’t none, man.
“One dude say to me and a couple of friends, ‘Run up and down Main or Union, niggers, take what you want! Take their lives if you got to, but get what you need! We must make our own world, and we can’t do this unless the white man is dead! Kill him, my man— gather the fruit of the sun!’
“ ‘I ain’t ready for that shit,’ I say.”
He hadn’t read Malcolm X then, he said. Racial justice were words mouthed by other men; they passed him by like fast foreign cars. In music he liked soul: Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, the Motown sound, Isaac Hayes and the Shaft theme, which set his fingers snapping. But they were only background rhythms to the pointless flow of his life on the street. When he passed the Mount Calvary Baptist Church on Front Street he heard the passionate cries of big-bosomed gospel singers but never went inside.
He worked for a while pumping gas in a Mobil station, sold some weed on the side in the playground of the white kids’ high school. A dude called Shorty Bigshoes ran the policy racket in black Jacksonville. Darryl went to Shorty Bigshoes for a job.
“You ain’t got the class for the numbers,” Shorty Bigshoes told him.
“I can learn,” Darryl said.
“Man, you been arrested for every petty crime in the book. You never did settle down to no one kind of hustle. You been locked up too much, doing life on the installment plan. The cops know you too good. I’m giving you the best idea you ever had—put the life down, get you a lunch pail.”
A lunch pail was a legitimate job.
Shorty Bigshoes’ words carried weight. Darryl went to his so- called s
tepfather at the golf club. He asked for help.
A.J. said to him, “I’m gonna speak to you of the good, the bad, and the ugly, while standing between questions and answers, knowing and not knowing. You listen real careful. Such uglinesses are now living on our planet and we pretends not to know why. But I can tell you—because the bad has changed places with the good! Godliness and respect for elders changed places with macho man and worship for the angry side of life is why! Pollution’s the theme of this part of the century, outer and inner, and we hiding our heads in the muck of it so’s not to see how high the tide’s rising. Am I connecting? Touching what’s left of your soul? You’ve always possessed a special tenderness for the aged and infant. You’ve always cared about animals—you remember your cat, Snuffy, got run over by a red GMC pickup? How you cried? Where all that gone to?”
“What you been smoking?” Darryl asked.
“The pipe of amazing truth, boy!”
“You a sick man, A.J. Was you run over Snuffy in the pickup, was a black Ford, and you was drunk. You whupped my ass every chance you got. You fucked my sister in the back of that pickup when she was ten years old, and after that you did it to her every chance you got, and that’s why she is what she is, a sleepy hoo-er. You never in your life give me the kinda help I need.”
To Darryl’s surprise, a few days later A.J. came round to Marguerite’s clapboard house and told him that a friend named James was head gardener at a fancy beach estate. James did the hiring of all groundskeeping staff. They needed a handyman.
“Handy at what?”
“Don’t matter. James teach you. Just go where it says on this here piece of paper. You see James. Tell him you willing to learn.”
James, a sinewy, bald old man, asked Darryl if he believed in Lord Jesus and the Christian work ethic. As if he were talking to a white man, Darryl said, “Yes, sah! I sure does!”
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller Page 15