Stand Tall

by Dewey Bozella

  That wasn’t what happened, the detectives insisted. They said that I had walked the few blocks to Emma Crapser’s house with some other teen thugs, broke in through the front door, then suffocated her when she walked in on the burglary, that I tortured and killed a ninety-two-year-old white woman.

  “Man, I’m not trying to hear that shit!” I exploded. “I didn’t do that.”

  By now, I was going off like an idiot. Why were they accusing me? What had I done to make them accuse me of murder? Where was the evidence? And how do you prove your innocence when your alibi is that you were sweet-talking a bike off somebody whose name you didn’t know and drunk-riding it home? Tony had spent the night at his girlfriend’s and didn’t see me till the next day.

  “We got you,” said the lead detective, Lieutenant Art Regula. “We finally got your ass.”

  They took me, cursing my head off, down to central booking at the county jail. First thing I saw was a KKK poster on the wall, right there in the open: WE’RE LOOKING FOR KLANSMEN, it said. Right there on the goddamn wall in the county jail. I knew then that I was in for it. They held me for twenty-eight days, brazenly violating civil rights that I had no means to protect—other than hollering that it wasn’t fair—knowing even at eighteen that three days was the maximum you could be held without charges. The guards menaced me on a daily basis, vowing to “come in there and fuck you up,” to give the “one who murdered that old lady” what he deserved. I had heard of dudes having their arms broken in that jail, of beat-downs and suspicious suicides. I put on a tough demeanor, but inside, I was scared shitless. Nobody on the outside had come looking for me, nobody had my back, nobody would even miss me. I had been disposable my whole life, and now I was a black kid suspected of murdering a white grandma, in the custody of KKK-recruiting cops. I figured it wasn’t a matter of whether they would come for me, but when.

  Inmates could be out of their cells for blocks of time during the day, to watch TV in the common room, or play cards or whatever. One day, when the tension had grown unbearable, I refused orders to lock back into our cells. If I was in that little cell, I was cornered and could be stomped by the officers who had been threatening to avenge Emma Crapser’s murder on their own terms. I took my mattress and laid it down. I would need the bed frame as a possible weapon, and the thin mattress could serve as my shield. Then I got the cleaning supplies left on the gallery for inmates to mop down their cells. I broke the broomstick in half to use as a club, and laid the mop next to it, thinking how the metal wringer on the handle could cause some damage, crack a guard’s plastic shield, if I swung it like a big hammer. The bottle of floor wax would come in handy, too. Bring it, motherfuckers, I thought, just bring it.

  “Lock in!” the guards ordered everyone.

  “I’m not gonna let you all just beat me up,” I shouted back. “You wanna bring it, bring it. I’m not locking in, man.”

  The other inmates stayed outside their cells, too, egging me on, raising the stakes from refusing an order to inciting a riot if the guards came back.

  “Lock in!”

  This time, the other inmates obeyed the order. I was on my own. I emptied the bottle of floor wax, grabbed my mattress shield, and ran to the back of the gallery.

  “Yo, man, you little fucking bastard!” A guard had discovered my floor-wax moat. If I was going to get an ass-whipping, they were going to bust their own asses first. They sent back an officer named Lopez to talk me down. Lopez had been cool with me, and eventually I realized I had no choice but to trust him when he swore that he wouldn’t let the COs come back and beat me. He was good to his word, but I lived on constant edge waiting for my arraignment.

  I finally went before a judge in late July. The prosecutor had no evidence or testimony to present. The case was instantly dismissed, but the injustice of it all followed me home, anyway.

  “Listen, man, you gotta leave. I can’t be around this murder thing,” Tony told me when I showed up. He had made no attempt to visit me or try to help when I got arrested, and I half wondered now but didn’t dare ask if he actually thought I had had anything to do with the crime. Tony was much older than I was and had been out of my life for years. We were just starting to build a relationship, and we couldn’t have been more different. He was as country as I was city slick, and my brush with the law over a grisly, headlining crime made him nervous. Tony was about to sign a new lease and set up house with his girlfriend, and he had a job he liked, working with at-risk kids at the Division of Youth. He wasn’t willing to bet his stability on the reputation of a brother he scarcely knew. Kicking me out was an easy choice. Thing is, I was so used to people turning their backs on me by that time, it didn’t bother me all that much. I’d lived on the streets before, and I could do it again.

  The failure to deliver an indictment against me in the Crapser murder should have been the end of the whole ugly episode, but it was just the beginning. When you’re eighteen years old, you think the world is yours for the taking, ripening like a piece of fruit on the vine; you think you have more tomorrows than you can count. You think that you could become a major-league baseball player, or a movie star like Chuck Norris. That someday you’ll be the man, driving a new car and coming home to a beautiful wife and a big house full of children who idolize you. You don’t imagine yourself falsely convicted, locked up, left to rot. But six years later, that’s exactly where I found myself. Inmate number 84A0172. Return address, Sing Sing. And still they had no evidence.

  BEHIND BARS, I WAS JUST ONE MORE VOICE in a constant background chorus of men proclaiming they were the innocent victims of an unjust system. I knew the din would swallow my shouts of rage before they ever left my throat. So I made the only choice that was wholly mine left to make: I locked my soul up, too. Sealing my true self up tight—putting my soul in solitary—was the only way I could see to survive this terrifying underworld that was my new home. Back then, someone with a life sentence was automatically stripped of the civil rights most Americans take for granted, the ones my enslaved ancestors fought to the death for. I couldn’t vote. I couldn’t marry. Couldn’t own property, apply for a loan, buy an insurance policy, or do anything else that required signing a binding contract. I was civilly dead. A goddamn walking zombie. I was just like the three pairs of green trousers and six pairs of white socks and single bar of soap issued to me, property of the State of New York, with a value next to nothing. Fuck that shit.

  For the first few months, I just stayed to myself. Cell R-31 was on the second tier of B block, which stretched out like a nightmare circus train packed with caged men, bars as far as the eye could see, 618 cells spanning the distance of two football fields. B block was where all the new inmates initially went, separated from the general population while they supposedly “adjusted” to prison life. They were in the process of some kind of renovation when I got there, and the wall back where I was had been torn down, replaced by plywood boards with gaps where the snow came through. I spent my first night there shivering beneath the thin single blanket as the winter wind and snow blew in through the makeshift wall.

  The year before I got there, B block had been the scene of a fifty-three-hour riot by inmates who held nineteen guards hostage before releasing them unharmed. B block still bristled with leftover hostilities and riot scores waiting to be settled. Tension was always a given in the cellblocks, called galleries, and prisoners outnumbered staff by more than two to one. When the state conducted its investigation into the 1983 uprising, the two-hundred-page report it issued pointed out that the majority of corrections officers dealing directly with inmates had less than a year’s experience as a CO, and every single one of them had put in for a transfer by the end of their first day on the job at Sing Sing. There were always more newjacks than veteran COs. That kind of inexperience makes both the staff and inmates jumpy. You never knew what might go down, or whether the COs would be able to stop it from escalating. No way could you rely on them to keep you safe. First week I was in Sing Sing,
I had run into an inmate I recognized. Slim had been in one of the group foster homes with me as a kid. He was doing time for robbery now. Inmates usually don’t tell each other why they’re there—it’s nobody’s business, and you don’t want to become a target for some snitch working a deal with prosecutors. I knew that even if I kept my mouth shut, my charges were unlikely to remain private. Torturing and killing an old woman would rank right down there in the scum bucket with rapists and child predators. Marked men, all. The ones who get jumped and beaten to a pulp or sliced across the face. The COs were the ones to generally put the word out: That’s the motherfucker raped that little boy! I wouldn’t go so far as to say Slim and I were actually friends, but he was as close to that as I had then, and I was grateful to have a potential ally if I needed one. No more than a week after we reconnected, though, Slim got himself killed by another inmate. I never heard what the beef was, but the swift violence of the place unnerved me. A week after Slim died, I saw a dude get stabbed in the eye. And I mean right through the eyeball. No idea what he did, or who did it to him, it happened that fast. Shit, I thought. I ain’t takin’ no shit in here. Dude even comes close to me, I’ll throw down with him. Your life was always in danger. I knew from the outset that I was going to have to develop my own security plan. In prison, brute strength isn’t what will keep you from getting stabbed up when the shit hits. Your mind will save you before your muscles do.

  My nature is to be on the quiet side unless I’m threatened, so it was easy just to stay to myself, blend in, and watch while I tried to get a sense of my new home. I would pretend to be watching TV or listening to music with a group of guys during rec, but really I was studying them, figuring out Sing Sing’s unwritten prisoners’ code and who wielded the most power. I never sat down, and I kept my back to the wall. Gang members often controlled the phones, and if you didn’t know anybody or have money to pay them off, you wouldn’t get your turn. I didn’t have anyone to call, anyway, so that was a beef I could easily avoid. You could also get jumped or find yourself stuck in the throat if you changed the channel on the block’s communal television without permission from the prisoner currently in charge. The violence didn’t surprise me, but something else I quickly observed about Sing Sing did. Man, that place is loose. Anything you could get on the street, you could get inside, no problem. And the COs didn’t just look the other way; plenty of them were in on the action. Four guards and a sergeant had been indicted on corruption charges the year before I got there, but the party went on, from what I could tell, earning Sing Sing its nickname, Swing Swing. It was wilder than the old Times Square.

  The code among inmates boiled down to one simple unbreakable rule: Mind your own damn business if you don’t want to get hurt, and respect everyone until they disrespect you. You accidentally bump a guy in line or walking to the yard, you stop, meet his eye, and say “excuse me, man” like you mean it, or you may feel a shiv jammed into your gut next time you pass his man Trini. If you’re out walking on the gallery, you make sure to keep your eyes straight ahead and never look into another man’s cell. Different galleries were known for different activities. J and N galleries offered prostitution during the day shift, and L and P galleries took over the sex trade at night. If you weren’t pimping or partaking, you stayed away and let the others do their thing. The yard was a drug bazaar. Then you had the covert food concessions run by felons with a culinary talent. If you wanted to gamble, there was 21 and blackjack and poker in M gallery. In prison, cigarettes are the basic currency. You can even turn packs of cigarettes into cash, which is forbidden but necessary for certain illicit transactions. At the commissary, smokes were a dollar a pack in the early ’80s, but not everyone had money in their canteen accounts—some had it garnished because they owed the state money, and others didn’t have any family or people on the outside to deposit the funds allowed. That was my situation early on. But say you have a pack of cigarettes. Here’s how the hustle works: You trade the one-dollar pack for two bags of chips and a soda that would have cost you a buck fifty in the canteen. You’re already ahead fifty cents, but then you can sell those chips and soda for whatever the market will bear—either bartering for more items, or getting more cash from some hungry inmate who was on keep-lock and had lost his commissary privileges. If you have a carton of cigarettes, you can really make out, selling seven packs for ten dollars. You can then take that ten dollars (or the equivalent in cigarettes) and give it to the female CO moonlighting in the back of J gallery, and that’s how you get sex. This is what ten dollars can get you in Swing Swing:

  Two sticks of reefer, or a bag of dope

  Blow job from a female CO

  Five pieces of raw chicken stolen from the mess hall’s walk-in refrigerator

  As for me, I was down for the reefer or the chicken dinner, but mess with a CO? Forget it. There were some lady guards who weren’t half bad-looking and all, even though prison rules specifically banned them from wearing makeup or perfume or anything that might be seen as “enticing” to the inmates. I had never lacked for female companionship on the outside and had been living with a woman I’ll call Stephanie and her little girl before getting sent away; it was as close to settled down as I’d ever been, and it had given me a feel for what being part of a real family might be like. There were trailers for conjugal visits at Sing Sing, but that was only for married couples, and back in 1983, you still couldn’t get married while incarcerated if you had a murder conviction. Despite my sorry reality, I knew that hooking up with a female officer, even in a quick, strictly business transaction, was stupid. She could set you up at the drop of a hat. Aside from that, if anything went down—someone’s cell getting tossed and his bank or his dope confiscated, or a weapon found—you would immediately be seen as a likely snitch. And suspicion of rat is the same as confirmation of rat in a place like Sing Sing. Gonna get you jumped either way.

  The constant dirty gray light, the jingle of keys and clank clank clank of cell doors being locked one by one, the smell of a thousand men all remind you every minute even through your sleep that you’re in prison. That, and the loneliness. Right from the start, I felt more imprisoned by my own emotions than by the bars on my cell. I was always waiting for things that never materialized. A visit, a letter, a package. I thought about people on the outside all the time—my brothers, friends, Stephanie and her baby daughter, whom I’ll call Angie. Stephanie was a year older than I was, a single mom who was trying to get her life together. She had a job at IBM and was going to community college. We met in line at the store. Angie was just six months old when I moved in, and she considered me her father. I used to carry her around in my arms, change her diaper, push her in the stroller when Stephanie and I took her out for some fresh air. We’d known each other for nearly four years when I got convicted. She came to see me when I was being held downstate, before getting processed to Sing Sing. I remember being so damn glad to see her, how it just made my day.

  “I have an appeal in,” I told her excitedly. “Things may—”

  “Dewey,” she interrupted. “I gotta tell you something.”

  I felt my heart dive. She was going to tell me she was leaving me.

  “Dewey, I had an abortion.”

  “What you mean?” I cried out. “You mean to fucking tell me you killed the only thing I had left in my life?” The only thing worse than my anger in that moment was my pain. “Girl or boy?” I demanded.

  “Girl,” she said, crying.

  I looked at her and saw she was lying. It had been a son.

  We held on to each other, though, and she wrote me in Sing Sing, promising to visit. I was there for three months before she finally showed up, her chatter about Angie and how fast she was growing falling over me like a shaft of sunlight. She promised to come back the next week. The day I was expecting her, I got up, showered, and dressed in clothes that had been cleaned by an inmate who worked in the prison laundry. You put your clothes in with the general population laundry, they were go
ing to come back dingier than they went in, all mixed in with you didn’t want to know what. But give the laundry dude a pack of cigarettes, he’d do your clothes separately on the side, deliver them back clean and neatly folded. I wanted to look my best for Stephanie. I waited to be called to the visiting room. Hours passed. She never showed. At mail call, I’d have correspondence from my lawyers now and then, and once in a while, a letter from her. The baby’s good, she’d write, I miss you, sorry I didn’t make it, I’ll be there next week. Only she wasn’t. It was tearing me apart.

  One day, I was in the yard when I heard someone call my name: “Dewey!” I turned, but no one was there. No long after, it happened again. “Yo, Dewey, look out, look out!” I wheeled around, hands up, ready to fight. No one again. It was as if I had just gotten a preview of what could happen if I let my sentence stake a claim on my sanity. This has got to stop, I’m not going to bug out. I had to stay focused on the here and now. I made an important decision: I had to let everybody go, in my mind, had to get rid of them, turn my heart to ice. If I didn’t get rid of the people I cared for, I was just going to get hurt. I had to let them go in order to do my time. I’d rather deal with loneliness than anticipation.

  When Stephanie showed up again six months after her first visit, I was cold as hell to her in the visiting room. Gave her a quick hug, no kiss. I asked how Angie was doing. Then I told her straight up: “You gotta go. I gotta cut you off. I got to do my bid.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, hurt and confused.

  “Move on with your life. Do what you gotta do, but don’t come back.”