Stand Tall

by Dewey Bozella

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to Trena and Diamond, the two people who are in my heart and soul for life. I love you.

  A special dedication to J. Emma Crapser, who died unjustly. Through her, I learned morals, obligations, and responsibilities. And through her, I learned the importance of life, freedom, and death. J. Emma Crapser, may you be at peace, and God Bless You.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  Photo Section

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  I DON’T REMEMBER WHAT THE DAY MY LIFE DISAPPEARED LOOKED LIKE, whether there was snow on the ground or birds in the sky or boats on the river. I only saw it briefly as my guards led me in shackles from the transport van to the way station where the New York Department of Corrections sorts out its convicts before sending them on to their assigned prison. Reception, they call it. As if you were checking into a grand hotel where everyone calls you “sir” and the maids leave mints on your pillow. What a strange word, I thought, to describe the process of becoming a prisoner. It’s not about being received at all. When you come right down to it, being locked up is about being officially rejected, returned like defective human merchandise to be inventoried, catalogued, and hidden away on an unreachable shelf. I shuffled up to the desk where a corrections officer was waiting for me. He had seen my picture in that morning’s Poughkeepsie Journal, and now his eyes narrowed in recognition.

  Oh, you the one murdered that little old lady! I willed my face to stay blank and waited for him to begin issuing his orders: first, I was to remove my belt and shoelaces. No explanation was offered or required: I knew they had me on suicide watch, and anything that I could conceivably loop around my throat to cut off my airway had to be considered a potential weapon. Taking your own life, in the prison system, is regarded as just another escape attempt, and they seal off all possible exits. I handed over the belt and laces and moved to the next station. Oh, you the one! The COs assigned to processing seemed to have been handpicked for their contempt, for their ability to send us into the prison system with a clear understanding that we were now subhuman. Every word, every procedure was filled with disgust, made rough by officers who knew exactly how far they could push without getting written up for abuse. I was patted down and strip-searched, every orifice peered into and probed, the eggy breath of the barking guards hot in my face. My thick hair was shorn to the scalp in a few hard swipes, and my mustache buzzed off in one. I was ordered to stand still, arms and legs spread, while officers sprayed me with sticky pesticide like a mangy dog off the street. I felt my humiliation build, shame sparking into anger, until every last nerve ending felt like a live wire. After hours of this debasement, I suddenly itched for someone to cross the line, to lay a hand on me so I could fight. C’mon, just do it, I silently willed them. I craved that small, calculated violence of knuckles against flesh, muscle to muscle, the simple fairness of raw strength versus raw strength. Fighting was my pain reliever. It was the only way I knew how to let out the anger and hate rotting me away from the inside like poison. There was a direct line running from my heart to my fists. Still electric and bristling, I changed into my newly issued prison greens. From there, it was medical tests all day long, poked and swabbed for TB, HIV, the clap, you name it. Finally, someone issued me my ID and spit out the number I was to commit to memory and recite back at head count three times a day: “84A0172. This is who you are.” My name didn’t matter anymore; the person—the life—attached to it no longer existed. I was led back to a cell. I tossed my state-issued belongings on the bed and a small New Testament tumbled onto the lumpy inch-thin mattress. I opened it up to read. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

  Pure, uncut fear shot through me for the first time since hearing the word guilty. How in the hell was I going to deal with my sentence? Twenty years to life. To life. I could die behind bars, get buried in some potter’s field, no one there to mourn me. I started bellowing like a crazed animal, ranting, screaming at no one, at anyone, at everyone.

  “Why is this happening to me? What have I ever done to deserve twenty years to life? What have I done? I went to school! I was getting my shit together! I didn’t do this! Yeah, I know I done wrong before, but I ain’t never murdered anybody. I did not kill anyone. Man, fuck everybody. I don’t care about life. I don’t trust nobody. Nobody. Fuck the world! Fuck everyone. God, too.” I threw the New Testament hard across the tiny room. “How’m I supposed to deal with this?” I spent my first night as 84A0172 with my mind twisting around this new reality, trying to find some reassuring surface to grip, only to fall, again and again, back into the dark well. By morning, I was spent, the panic replaced by a new kind of flatness, the dull resolve of a fighter who knows he’s lost but wills himself to stay standing no matter what. I was herded into a van and delivered to Sing Sing Correctional Facility. The bored CO doing the paperwork sifted through my bag of belongings, writing down what I could and could not have. He gestured to my surrendered pile of civilian clothes.

  “What do you want done with this? Send it home, burn it, or give it away?”

  “I ain’t got nobody to send it to,” I told him. “I got life. Do whatever you want with it.”

  1

  YOU HAVE TO TRAIN YOUR MIND FOR A LIFETIME IN PRISON. You’ve got to shadowbox with your heart, or you might slip down a hole you’ll never climb out of. I’ve seen that happen to people. Survival is all about conditioning yourself, body and mind. When you’re a fighter, you tend to look at life from that perspective. I never lost a bout when I stepped into the ring, but the Fourth of July was another story. Holidays don’t mean shit to a man in prison. Christmas, Thanksgiving, maybe you get a little something extra to eat at chow, but otherwise you’re just looking at another day with the same number of hours to dissolve away in slow motion, nothing special about that. I wasn’t one of those Hollywood movie cons who scratched hash marks in the cinder-block walls to keep track of how many days or months or years had gone by. I didn’t want to remember what a Christmas tree smelled like, or how fine the sisters looked in their colorful Easter dresses. Practice made me pretty good at forgetting what day it was, never giving emotion an opening to sneak up on me and land a haymaker. But Independence Day ambushed me in my cell at Sing Sing.

  Sing Sing hunches over the Hudson River like a gloomy old fortress atop its rocky ridge just thirty-five miles north of New York City, which is where I was born and not so much raised as released, left to run wild on the streets, either dodging trouble or making it. I’ve been a case number for most of my life as far as the State of New York is concerned. Foster care, at-risk programs, welfare checks, jail—the sorry but predictable path in my time for an African American kid who’d lost his parents, his home, and all reason to believe any other life was waiting for him. So what. Lots of people go through tough times. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not feeling sorry for myself. You might be surprised to hear that I consider myself blessed. I made my choices, and my mistakes, and I own them. I tell every kid I meet now not to be as stupid as I was. But I still can’t help wondering sometimes what might have happened to that cast-off child I was, if love had been part of the equation, if things had been
different, if God’s plan for me hadn’t been so damn complicated. I’m fifty-six years old now and still working on the puzzle.

  On the Fourth of July at Sing Sing, the cellblocks facing the Hudson would go ape after lockdown when the fireworks began going off over the water from whatever nearby park or town happened to be putting on a show. From my cell on the backside of the sprawling prison complex, I could hear the distant cracks and muffled booms of the fireworks, accompanied by the whooping and hollering of the luckier inmates who had a view through their barred windows: Yo, yo, yo! Oh, shiiit, man, look at that! Man, that’s crazy! You see that shit? I couldn’t decide whether it was funny or sad that Independence Day was the one holiday you didn’t have to be actually free to be a part of. Man, did I envy those cats with the view in the front galleries on the top tiers. I looked out onto nothing but more prison—concrete and dirt—for a good deal of that time. I was four years into my bid when my chance to move to the front finally came.

  You have to wonder why a man denied justice would want to celebrate the democracy that failed him so miserably, but there I was, gazing through the bars on my cell window like an excited kid on that first Fourth I could see. I watched in silence for a good ten minutes as the fiery fountains and starbursts exploded in bright color against the night. Beauty is so rare in prison that you take it in in gulps when you have it, until you make yourself sick.

  THE SIGHT OF FIREWORKS AFTER SO LONG reeled my mind back to childhood, me running around all day with my little brothers and our homeboys, all of us hyper and happy and full of piss. Fourth of July was one of those holidays you didn’t need a nice home or lot of money to celebrate: it belonged to everybody. New York always pulled out all the stops, and whether you were in the projects or Park Avenue, you got the same sky. My neighborhood off Murdock Avenue in St. Albans, Queens, was full of working-class families, and there were always big, rowdy block parties on the Fourth, music blasting, everyone eating BBQ, drinking beer and cans of pop icy from the cooler, getting along and having a good time. I spent weeks getting my pocket money together so I could buy some cherry bombs or a couple of Roman candles or a box of dynamite-stick firecrackers, with enough left over for some candy to carefully ration over the long, busy day I had laid out with my younger brothers Ernie and Albert, the ones closest to me in age. We were tight like that. And we had big plans for the Fourth of July. Those little sizzle-stick things? Sparklers? Not for us, man. No way. The Murdock Avenue boys meant business.

  Yo, yo check this out! We started off small, just blowing up soda cans. They delivered a decent little blast, with enough flying shards of aluminum to make a twelve-year-old drunk on danger. Bottles worked, too. The thrill wore off too fast, though, and we boldly moved on to mailboxes, which offered only a muffled thud but were still entertaining for the hit-and-run element involved. From there, we graduated with cocky confidence to neighbors’ garbage cans. The plastic ones were disappointing, but we quickly learned that a couple of cherry bombs could reliably blow a metal one to kingdom come, like something out of a war movie, with the kind of teeth-rattling force that made us go from taunting nah, nah cherry bomb to screaming Oh, SHIT! as we hightailed it down the street while some raging grown-up charged after us: Get away from my yard, damn kids! I remember feeling reckless and badass, and, for a little knucklehead kid, powerful.

  Once we’d had our fill of detonating inanimate objects like some marauding band of grade-school guerrillas, we would thread our way through the crowds milling on the street or gathered in the park. By then we were loopy on sugar and adrenaline. We’d snatch a firecracker from the twenty-packs we wore like ammo belts, light the fuse, then just randomly throw it into a knot of unsuspecting people and wait for it to go off at their feet. Every now and then, we hit the Powerball, and some dude would grab his smoldering butt. We threw them at each other, too. Never aimed for the face, just the butt and legs. Yo, man, yo my butt is on fire! We laughed till we doubled over and the tears were rolling down our faces. Soda cans to bottles to mailboxes to garbage cans to each other. That was how the law of the jungle worked on the Fourth of July.

  Twenty years to life. That’s how it worked in Sing Sing. Bitterly I turned away from the grimy window in my six-by-ten-foot cell.

  I don’t even want to watch the damn fireworks no more, I told myself. I struggled to shove the happy memories back into their lockbox, to reclaim the numbness that was my default setting: Aight, just treat it as another day. Holidays don’t mean shit, man.

  I had forgotten my own cardinal rule and had to pay now with self-pity: look with your eyes, I reminded myself, never your heart.

  The sky fell silent and dark again, and I pushed away Dewey Bozella, the little kid laughing until his sides hurt, and lay down on my narrow iron bed, falling asleep the same way I had for thousands of nights past and would for thousands more to come, as inmate number 84A0172. Convicted murderer. There’s no way ever to take the sharp edge off those words or grow accustomed to their pain. Especially when they’re a lie, when you’re paying for another man’s crime, your whole life hijacked by people who turned their backs on the truth. That they did it so casually made it all the worse. I wasn’t the victim of some grand conspiracy or complicated setup: I was a convenient scapegoat for an ambitious prosecutor and a bumbling police department. The course of my entire life would change in their hands. All it took was one word.

  Guilty.

  That one word did what no fighter in the ring ever could: brought me to my knees, howling in agony, sobbing so hard I could barely breathe, disbelief hardening into a despair as vast and deep as a winter ocean turned to ice. There was no one in the courtroom to console me or hug me before deputies led me away in handcuffs. No family or friends had come to my brief, sorry trial. I was as alone as alone can get. “I didn’t do it!” I wailed again and again. I’m not going to lie; I was never anyone’s goody-goody, and I had been on a self-destructive road since I was in grade school. I had gotten into trouble before and had a short rap sheet for stealing. I took bicycles left outside grocery stores. I took boom boxes. I took a wallet from a guy on the street one time. But I never took anyone’s life.

  In that Poughkeepsie courtroom, on December 3, 1983, though, the State of New York took mine.

  By the time I arrived at Sing Sing at the beginning of 1984, the world’s most notorious maximum-security prison was housing some two thousand felons. I was twenty-three years old, and it would take longer than I had already lived to prove I didn’t belong there.

  THE WHOLE SORRY MESS BEGAN YEARS BEFORE I ACTUALLY LANDED IN SING SING, though, on an ordinary Thursday morning in June 1977. I had just gotten released on my own recognizance for stealing a $250 stereo down in New York City, and no sooner had I left that courtroom than along came a pair of cops to arrest me all over again. Like I said, I’ll be the first to admit that I was no choirboy, so I can’t say I was all that surprised to be crossways with the police. At the time, I was an eighteen-year-old high school dropout who’d been heading toward a life of crime for a while already—stealing shit, smoking reefer, drinking, gambling, hooking up with women much older and more troubled than I’d ever be. Relocating from the city to Poughkeepsie and moving in with my older half brother, Tony, was supposed to be a fresh start, but my efforts to turn my life around and get on the right path were hit-and-miss so far, and the local cops already had me in their scopes as trouble imported from NYC. I’d only been in town for a couple of months, but I’d made myself a fixture in Mansion Square Park, a favorite gathering spot for sketchy homeboys who were generally up to nothing good. Drinking and gambling were my preferred pastimes at Mansion Square Park, and I was still dabbling in petty crime, too, still stealing bikes and stereos when an easy opportunity arose. I’d already gotten busted in Poughkeepsie once on a larceny charge that didn’t stick. But part of me did want more out of life than the streets, and I’d lined up a low-level job on a construction site so maybe I could learn carpentry, have a trade. I was on my
way to the site that summer morning when the cops cuffed me.

  Awww, shit, I thought to myself.

  “You’re under arrest,” one of the cops said.

  “What for?” I demanded, taking a quick mental inventory of what I’d lifted of late.

  “Murder.”

  I laughed.

  “Murder?” I scoffed. This was a joke, some kind of lame-ass scare tactic. “Murder? You got the wrong man. I didn’t kill nobody. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  They hauled me in for questioning. I expected to be out in an hour tops. I hadn’t done anything, so I knew there was no way they had any evidence linking me to any crime, let alone homicide. No evidence, no charges, right? I was a cocky teenager back then, thought I knew all about handling myself with the law, but in truth, I was naive as hell. This was a mistake, I reasoned, and the truth would set me free. God’s own words. I didn’t belong to a church or lead a righteous life then, but that much I had faith in. I clung to the truth like a trusty life raft.

  Back at the station, the detectives took me into an interview room and turned on a tape recorder.

  “Tell us how you killed her.”

  “Man, I ain’t telling you shit,” I snarled back. I picked up the tape recorder and threw it across the room, shattering it. Whatever game they were playing with me, it was no longer funny.

  The detectives pressed harder, demanding to know why I had tortured a helpless old woman, murdered her in her own home, and for what? What was it, a robbery she walked in on? Where had I been on the night of June 14? Had I been in Mansion Square Park with a kid named Wayne Moseley?

  I tried to think back ten days. I vaguely remembered Moseley being around one afternoon we were playing basketball. I remembered that that was the night I stayed there too late shooting dice and drinking and missed the last bus home to Tony’s apartment in Beacon. I had cajoled some kid who was watching the game into giving me his ten-speed bike, saying I was going to get us all some beer and would be right back. Sucker just handed it over to me, and I rode it home, wobbling all the way. I felt bad about it the next day and rode the bike back to the park to return it, but the kid hadn’t shown up again.