Stand Tall

by Dewey Bozella

Stephanie was crying, saying she didn’t understand why I was being like this.

  “I don’t even have a year in,” I reminded her. “I don’t want to be thinking about when you’re going to come visit.”

  I left her sitting there at the table and walked through the door. The CO followed me out. “Listen, man, she’s sitting there waiting for you,” he urged me.

  “Tell her I’m not coming back.”

  Back in my cell, I had to fight back tears of my own. I told myself it would hurt less to let it go. Let it go, Dewey, let it go, let it go.

  IN PRISON, YOU DON’T HAVE FRIENDS. You have associates. Associates are who you hang out with. I didn’t allow anybody to be a friend. It was safer that way. I had limited experience trusting folks as it was, so doing away with trust altogether was no big sacrifice on my part. I had learned back in juvie, though, that guys who didn’t prove that they were willing to fight from the beginning would be turned into male prostitutes. First, they’d become a “Maytag,” slang for the ones being broken into servitude by being forced to wash the underwear of whoever was tormenting them. It only got more degrading after that. My moment of truth came one day when someone did something wrong on the gallery, and the inmates who were outside were called back in as a result. I had nothing to do with it, but I was the first person one of the bigger guys saw as they came back in, and I got jumped. Next time I spotted the bully with his back turned, I was lucky enough to also spot a shovel discarded nearby, and I cracked him with it. Show no mercy, otherwise you become a victim. I sent the message loud and bloody clear that day that I would be no one’s victim. I carried that attitude with me to Sing Sing.

  I quickly established my own routine: get up at 6 A.M., get ready for breakfast, eat at 7, come back for chores—I was a porter, responsible for cleaning the gallery. Then I’d go out to the yard. The yard back then was a big field of grass and dirt. In one corner, people would lift weights. There were tables where guys might play chess or cards or just talk. There were hoops for basketball, a handball court, and a diamond for playing baseball. Babe Ruth himself had once played there and hit a record-smashing homer. It was back in 1929, long before major-league players had powerful agents and big endorsements; they used to make extra cash playing exhibition games. The Yanks came to Sing Sing to take on the inmate team—“The Black Sheep”—and Babe sent the ball flying over the prison wall, a reported 620 feet. What I wouldn’t have given to see that.

  I didn’t socialize much early on, but one slim Spanish guy didn’t take that as a snub. Jose was a talker, and I guess a fresh pair of ears was too good for him to pass up, so he just kept coming up to me in the yard, shooting the breeze like we were buddies, until finally, it seemed, we were. I liked his style. We traded stories about what we did on the streets, the girls we’d been with, that kind of bull jive. We smoked a fair amount of reefer together. That and the homemade prune wine some enterprising dudes sold out of their cells kept me in a welcome fog that blurred the glare of my day-to-day life. Nothing really mattered anymore. I watched the different prison dramas unfold from my safe distance—the deadly gang rivalries between the Bloods and the Latin Kings, the seething hatred of the small tight band of white supremacists, the high-stakes drug trafficking by the Colombians who considered being locked up just a way to get the state to pay for security while they continued running their outside business as usual. Even rogue operators were in constant danger. I remember a guy named Roscoe who was acting like a tough ass, trying to bully everyone, and one day he’s out there lifting weights and gets a weight cracked over his head. My attitude came down to this: As long as you leave me alone, I don’t care if you want to kill someone else. Go ahead. I did not care. I had set my automatic cruise control and fully intended to let the next twenty years to life pass in this state of blankness.

  MY SURVIVAL PLAN WORKED FINE FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS, until I was coming in from the yard one day, through the long tunnel leading back to the flats—the ground floor of the cellblock—and all of a sudden, everything went quiet. When that stillness fell, you knew something bad had happened.

  I kept walking through the tunnel, minding the unspoken code, eyes ahead. Then I saw him: some dude lying on the floor, leaking bad. All stabbed up, in a spreading pool of blood. Young black guy with ten, twenty holes in him or better. Had to have just happened, too. No alarms or COs running with a stretcher. I didn’t feel like walking around him. Fuck it, I said to myself, and I stepped over him and kept on my way.

  Back in my cell, it hit me, what I had just done. Hit me so hard I was shaking. That was a human being back there, man, the voice inside my head railed at me. You walked right over him. Not even around him, man, right fucking over him. You didn’t even give a shit. What have you become? The voice wouldn’t let up. I had fallen right into what the prison system is all about.

  Who are you?

  2

  MURDER HAS BEEN A RECURRING PART OF MY LIFE SINCE I WAS NINE YEARS OLD. It’s a hard story for me to tell: first, because it hurts even now; and, second, because so many crucial details of my own history were kept from me. My childhood comes down to a faded patchwork of mismatched pieces from my own memory and the scraps of truth, lies, and misinformation everyone else gave me. For me, the real starting point is when I was nine years old. Nine is when everything changed.

  I remember the house we were living in then, a corner lot with a yard, in a mostly black neighborhood of Brooklyn. My mother, Sandra, was dark skinned and, from what I can remember, beautiful. She had six of us kids, stair-stepped one after the other. Janice was the oldest, followed by me. Then came Ernie, Albert, Michael, and Leon. Our father’s name was Albert Rader Bozella, but he went by Harry. “Dirty Harry” was the name I secretly gave him. He was a white man who wore glasses. I don’t know what he did for a living, but we weren’t busted. We always ate and had clothes on our backs and toys under the tree at Christmas. I suppose we were happy enough, as long as Dirty Harry wasn’t around. Dirty Harry didn’t live with us full-time, which was a small mercy, because when he drove up and parked his boat of a black sedan at the curb, we all went into high alert. I would run and hide from him, trying to make myself invisible, but Dirty Harry had a hair-trigger temper, and it only made him madder if I didn’t come when he hollered. Folks see the nasty scar I have on the back of my head now, they assume I got it in prison, or in some street fight before I got locked up. My father is the one who gave me that scar. It came from a baseball bat when I was eight.

  The happier memories I have of those years, that place, all revolve around my brothers. We were inseparable, a crazy tumbleweed of commotion, always blowing through the quiet suburban streets on bikes, homemade go-carts, hijacked shopping carts, or whatever else we could find with a couple of wheels. We would spend hours prowling the woods that backed up to our neighborhood, trying to catch snakes or hunting squirrels with our slingshots. I was a very active kid, to put it mildly, and I was always into something. With me leading the charge, there is no question that the Bozella boys raised more than our fair share of hell, but our mother wasn’t one to whip her children, and we knew it. The whole world had a more laid-back quality to it then. Nobody was ever warning us about child molesters or school shooters or any of that craziness kids have to worry about now. It was the 1960s, and everybody kept their doors open. The neighborhood kids migrated from one house to the next, and anyone’s mom was everyone’s mom. I remember our neighbor Miss Anne being so attached to Leon that you were as likely to find him clinging to her as to our own mother. As for me, I didn’t take to people the same way Leon did with his baby’s charm and sweet, open face. The difference between Leon at four years old and me at eight was the difference between a Christmas puppy and a feral dog. There was something still pure and unruined about Leon. Dirty Harry had made me slow to trust, and while I wouldn’t call myself shy, I did prefer to watch the grown-up world from a safe distance. I wanted adults’ approval, for sure, but I didn’t expect to win it and wasn’t
sure I could pay for it. Pride was my downfall from the time I was old enough to say the word no.

  I don’t remember ever liking, much less loving, Dirty Harry. I never even sat down to dinner with him. I think of him as a slave owner. Why my mother was with him is something I’ll never know, because he kept her down more than he ever helped her out. He was always hollering, thundering around the house like a charging bull, enraged by the whole sorry lot of us. Mom took the brunt of it, always getting smacked around no matter how hard she tried to appease him. But even then, I can’t always reconcile how I want to think of her with what I remember. My first impulse is to say that Mom always protected us kids from Dirty Harry, that she made sure this madman never put his hands on us. But then the scar on the back of my head tells another story. I have no recollection of what I did to set Dirty Harry off that day—it could have been anything from roughhousing with Albert and Ernie to not picking up some toy, or even just looking at him wrong—but I remember my father had forced me to strip naked and was getting ready to whip me. He ordered me to come to him, but I ran instead. He picked up a baseball bat and threw it at my head, splitting my scalp open. I bolted out the door, butt-assed naked into the snow, clutching a dress of my sister’s that I had snatched from the laundry on my way out. I stood there shivering in the street, blood running down my neck. My mother appeared at the door, trying to coax me inside.

  “Dewey, come in, you’re going to freeze,” she pleaded.

  “Not until he leaves,” I cried.

  She eventually prevailed over me, and Dirty Harry, and I folded myself half frozen into her warm arms. I would’ve given anything to have loved and felt loved by a father even half as much as I loved and felt loved by my mother.

  Maybe we looked like a regular family to everybody else, but I think the neighbors must have known. My mother’s women friends, like Miss Anne, didn’t come around to visit when Dirty Harry’s car was at the curb. There was something always different about us: a family in the strictly segregated 1960s in which a white man was married to a dark woman with their light-skinned kids in a black neighborhood. My first inkling that we weren’t Dirty Harry’s only family came when I was nine, and my mother, heavily pregnant with her seventh child, summoned me to her one warm afternoon when we were in the backyard. Dirty Harry was grilling a chicken I had watched run headless around our yard after he butchered it.

  “Dewey, I have something to tell you,” my mother said. “I want you to know you got another brother and three sisters. They’re going to be coming and living with us real soon. I want you to take care of them. Will you promise to take care of your brothers and sisters for me?”

  I listened, astonished by the news. I nodded excitedly.

  “I will,” I told her. “I promise.”

  It didn’t dawn on me at that age to ask who these sudden siblings were, where they had been, or why they were moving in now. And I likewise didn’t wonder where four extra people were going to sleep in our modest house. The backstory didn’t matter to me; I just waited for them to appear. My sister, Janice, would probably welcome some more girls in the house, and a spare brother would strengthen the ranks if any of us needed backup in a schoolyard beef. As for Dirty Harry, he didn’t say a word to us kids about these other kids of his, and we knew instinctively not to ask him any questions.

  A couple of days after my mother’s announcement, I came home from school and saw Dirty Harry’s car outside. I could hear my mother screaming before I got to the door. They were in the living room, and he was pummeling her as she cowered and tried to escape. I launched myself at him like a missile, barreling into him with all my small might, trying to break it up. He picked me up without breaking stride and threw me across the room like a rag doll. I ran outside, and next thing I knew, there were lights and sirens. Miss Anne and other neighbors had heard the screaming, too, and called for help. I hid in the yard and watched. There were police cars and an ambulance. The police were talking to Dirty Harry outside. Neighbors were gathering in the street. Miss Anne clutched little Leon. I watched a stretcher being loaded into the ambulance.

  That was the last time I ever saw my mother.

  Neighbors took us in that night, and after that, social services came and we were all split up. Miss Anne wanted to keep Leon. I didn’t know what had happened or where we were being taken. The grown-ups all just went about their official business, handing me off from one place to the next. I was soon a different boy than I had been just days before, and I knew exactly when I changed: in that moment when my father hurled me against the wall, and I felt the impact as much inside as I did outside, solid as pain. Shutting down, and shutting people out, made me feel safe, like a deadbolt sliding into place.

  MY FIRST STOP IN THE FOSTER-CARE SYSTEM was with a couple who gave me a room by myself—the first I’d ever had—and enrolled me in a new school. They were kind to me, and their house was peaceful and quiet. I liked them and wanted to stay, and they wanted to keep me, but a week later, the lady from social services turned up again and said I couldn’t live there anymore. No one said why. People back then thought you should protect children from the truth if it was sad or ugly, as if silence were a shelter. I would beat against its walls with my questions: What happened to my mother and father? Where were my brothers and sisters? I had promised to take care of them. Why couldn’t we go home?

  “Where’s my mother?” I wailed when social services delivered me to a group home. I cried like there was no tomorrow.

  “Your mother’s gone,” is all the foster-care people would tell me.

  “I want my brothers! I want to be with my brothers!”

  Someone took me in a room, sat me down, and took all my hair off. I had a big Afro, just like the cool older kids were wearing then. I may have been pint-sized, but my hair gave me swagger. I fought and screamed as they shaved my head and clouds of dark hair floated to the floor. I hated that. I hated the way I looked, the way they wanted me to be. I was lonely and frustrated and angry. As soon as the door opened, I bolted, and took off running. They caught me right away, wanted to know where I thought I was going.

  “I’m just trying to find my brothers. Where are they?”

  “We don’t know where they’re at.”

  I wasn’t a troublemaker then. Not yet. I wasn’t stealing or robbing or getting into fights. But in the group home, I was in a dorm room with a bunch of other kids, and they had their own reasons for being angry, and most of them were bigger and tougher than I was. You had to learn fast how to fight in a place like that. Especially if you looked like me, with light skin and a slight build. The other boys started right in with the taunts: “You can’t fight, you a punk!” “You a pretty boy!”

  I’ll tell it to you straight, without any political correctness bullshit: Back when you had slaves, people used to say there were three kinds—field nigger, backyard nigger, and house nigger. What you were depended on your skin coloring. The darkest-skinned slaves worked the fields, then one notch up from that were the yard workers. But the slaves with the fairest skin, closest to white, they were the favored ones and given the jobs inside the master’s house. They bowed and scraped for his leftovers. In modern times, being called a house nigger is about the worst insult one African American can hurl at another; it’s saying you’re beneath contempt, that you’re nothing but a toady who thinks you’re better than everybody else. In the group home, I was considered the house nigger. The half-breed who thought he was black but looked white. I got good enough at throwing a punch that the other kids left me alone. I was still miserable. We had to clean the toilets, mop the floors, and do a whole raft of chores. You couldn’t get milk and cookies at night, or take a shower when you felt like it, or watch cartoons on a Saturday morning. I started smoking cigarettes. I kept running away. Sometimes I could manage to stay out a day or two until they found me. I’d beg food from a restaurant, and sometimes they’d give me something, sometimes not. I learned how to snatch an apple off a fruit stand, or
a banana, and keep moving. Social services kept putting me in different group homes. One of them forced me to wear a diaper, figuring wrongly that I would be too humiliated to make a run for it. I was sent to some type of meeting to get counseling for anger.

  “Why are you mad?” the group leader wanted to know.

  “What do you think I’m mad about? Where’s my family?”

  SOMEONE FINALLY TOLD ME that my mother was dead, and I came to understand that my father had murdered her and the child she was carrying. I assumed Dirty Harry was in jail. But if there was a funeral for my mother, no one told me or took me, and if she had any people out there in the world, they never came for me. No matter. I didn’t need anyone anymore. That only led to disappointment. That was the way it had always played out for me so far.

  When I was around eleven, social services packed me up from the latest group home and drove me to the Bronx, where a foster family by the name of Coleman was going to take me in. I went inside the apartment and got the surprise of my life: all four of my younger brothers were there, too. We were finally going to get to live together again. I was happier than I had ever been. We were going to be part of a real family, stay in one school for a whole grade or longer, live an ordinary life like other kids. It’s funny now to think how we had been through so much, but just fell back in together without pause, never stopping to fill in the blank of two missing years. Had my younger brothers been together all that time? Were they treated all right? Had Leon been with Miss Anne? I didn’t ask then, and it’s too late now. We just went on.

  The Colemans—Ma and Pops now—already had a son of their own, Maurice, called Geese, who was around five or six at the time but still clung to his mother like a toddler. Mrs. Coleman was very laid-back, in her thirties, and heavyset. She was probably pretty as hell when she was younger and slimmer, you could tell by her face. She was a housewife. They must have taken in foster kids before, because Mrs. Coleman didn’t seem all that anxious about adding five rowdy boys to the household. Mr. Coleman worked as a security guard and came home every night. The two of them spoiled Geese rotten, and it became clear soon enough that we weren’t going to be one big family so much as two separate ones, with my brothers and me as the less-worthy branch. The Colemans moved from the apartment in the Bronx to a duplex in St. Albans, Queens, where we could all fit. There was an upstairs apartment and a downstairs one. My brothers and I were put upstairs, and the Colemans locked the door to the main house downstairs at night. Mrs. Coleman also shooed us out if we didn’t keep quiet while she was watching her favorite soap opera, One Life to Live.