by T. Styles
When he was done, he threw twenty dollars on his desk, pushed me off with a forceful shove to the head, and stood up. “You got five minutes to get yourself cleaned up and get out of here. I got gym class in thirty minutes and I don’t want them seeing anything like you when it’s time.”
He marched up the stairs leading to the school, leaving me alone. I stood up, grabbed my briefcase and removed my toothbrush. Then I walked over to the sink and washed him from my mouth. A gray hair fell into the sink and tears ran down my face. Mama said I was more sensitive than a whore should be but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to be this person. I didn’t want to live this life. I wanted to have a job that’s respected and a family who needed me.
When I was done brushing my teeth, I put up my toothbrush, grabbed my briefcase and walked toward the door. It didn’t open. I forgot it locked both ways whenever you came inside so I needed a key. I was about to call Gris to let me out; when through the window by the door I saw a crowd of girls with angry expressions on their faces.
My heart jumped when I recognized one of them as Feather Holliday, the daughter of the biggest drug boss Houston had ever seen. Her long golden hair blew in the wind, and she stood in front of the flock. A cluster of girls stood behind her, like they were waiting for orders. When I leaned in more, I could see another girl. She was on the ground face up with her hands extended before her like she was trying to protect herself. I pressed my ear against the cool glass window so that I can try to catch their voices.
“Please don’t kill me, Feather,” the girl on the ground sobbed. “I didn’t know you was with him. He said ya’ll broke up. I would’ve never talked to him if I knew ya’ll were still together.”
“You should’ve been smarter, Bells,” Feather yelled. “Everybody knows once something’s mine, it’s always mine. I’m Feather Holliday, bitch, and now you gonna learn a lesson.”
When I removed my ear from the window and looked at the pack again, Feather bent down and jabbed the defenseless girl repeatedly in the stomach with a knife. My heart slammed against the walls of my chest, and I kicked and pushed the door so that I could help her.
Please, God, this can’t be happening! Don’t let this be happening!
When everything I tried didn’t work, I took my fist and banged it into the glass window, until it cracked under my blows. Glass shards stabbed into my hand and warm blood ran down my arm. Luckily for me, I don’t feel the pain quite yet. I didn’t care because I had to help that little girl. Had I been thinking rationally, instead of my fist I could’ve just used my briefcase, to smash the window.
Too late now.
I grabbed a dirty looking sweat towel from the table and wrapped it around my hand. Although it bled a lot, the cut wasn’t as bad as I thought.
By the time I finally got out of the basement, Feather and her friends had dispersed. A new crowd approached the girl now. I went toward her, trying to understand what happened. Trying to make sense of what I just saw. I stopped short of the group when I saw a few women who worked at the school walking toward her.
“What’s wrong with her?” A woman asked while holding a phone to her ear. She looked just as scared as I felt.
“Someone call 911,” said another lady who stood some feet over from the child on the ground.
I was trying to get a good look at the little girl because I wanted to know if she was okay. Her eyes were closed and she was covered in blood so it was hard to tell.
As I observed the scene further, I saw another woman who was kneeling next to the girl press her finger against the girl’s neck. She looked into the crowd and screamed, “She’s dead! Oh my, God, she’s dead!”
Overwhelmed with grief, I fell to the ground upon hearing that news. All of my life, I had avoided extreme violence. If someone wanted to fight me, I gave them a reason to love me instead. If someone shorted me after my services, I walked away no questions asked and thanked them for their time anyway. Mama said violence was just ignorant folks’ way of trying to avoid conversation. So seeing a murder did something to my soul, and made me feel weak.
I knew what had to be done, even though I don’t want to get involved. So I picked myself up off the ground and walked to the curb. Two minutes later, I hailed a cab and after some time, one picked me up.
I slid into the backseat and the driver asked, “Where to?”
“The closest police department. I gotta report a crime.”
CHAPTER TWO
PREACHER
MARYLAND STATE PENITENTIARY
MONDAY 8:40 AM
That morning as I got dressed, I could feel it, sense it on my skin, in my flesh, in every fiber and sinew of my being. A man’s most formidable foe lurked: FEAR.
It was a feeling that was hard to shake as I stood in front of the metal mirror adjoined to a cast iron steel toilet in a five by nine cage that had been my home for over a decade. I know I couldn’t take any chances because this could very well be my last chance at freedom.
I dressed in my white khaki prison uniform and the night before, I shined my boots meticulously. The week before that, I cut my shoulder length locks and got a lot of flak from the female C.O.s at the prison, especially Wanda. She was a staunch Christian, and someone I could depend on every so often over the years. She would smuggle me in small items—a bible, snickers, and a cellphone. She was a full figured chick with a pretty face. She had five children and no man. I knew she had a crush on me. Some days when I was working out, she would enter my cell and we’d talk, read bible verses. I wondered was she going to be the one to escort me out the building to the table that awaited me.
I walked to the shelf to retrieve my bible; next to it, taped on the wall, was a tattered picture of my daughter Shamika. She was eight years old in the photo and the spitting image of my mama. The picture was taken four years ago and it had been three years since I spoke with my baby girl or her trifling mother Tanya. One year after I was convicted she got pregnant by my so-called best friend, Steve. For the sake of my daughter, I forgave her. Then suddenly there was the other court battle neither of us was prepared for.
I had been convicted on circumstantial evidence for robbing an armored Brinks truck based on one microscopic hair that was found inside a ski mask. 1.2 million dollars was still missing. One armored truck driver was dead, and another one was wounded. Two of the robbers were murdered in a fierce gun battle with the police. I was the only suspect apprehended for the heist weeks later. The city of Baltimore, Maryland, froze all my assets from the legitimate business I had on the street; and Shields Restaurant was forced to shut down. It was a greasy spoon joint but it generated several thousand dollars in revenue a week.
As soon as Tanya found out about that, she sniffed around me to see if I had the money. I guess she got tired because the letters and the visits stopped coming. Due to the amount of time I was serving, she thought I was never coming home, so she took my daughter and got ghost on me.
As I grabbed my Bible, still staring at my baby girl’s picture, a huge pregnant cockroach scurried down the wall. Normally I would have smashed it with my shiny boot but that morning my mind was in a mental fog. I needed prayer. I needed to find solace in my soul.
With my bible in hand, I sat on the steel bunk and heard it squeak under my weight as I blocked out the clamor of institutional noises—men yelling, and a TV blaring. Years ago, I learned how to block out the maddening sounds in order to keep my sanity, to salvage some semblance of my humanity.
I opened the bible to Psalm verse seven. There was a picture of my mama on her last visit to the prison. It kind of choked me up, sending a quiver down my spine. For years my mom had been a heroine junkie. In West B-More, where I’m from, “Boy” is King in the ghetto; you can find some of the best grade-A heroine in the world in my city.
My mother had been off dope for years after spending a stint in the county jail for prostitution. That was around the time she started visiting me and introduced me to the Lord. I was her only
child. She gave birth to me, while high off heroine, at the age of thirteen. I had a dark side with demons that came with being raised in the ghetto. I also had a body count and a notorious reputation that exceeded all hood expectations. At nineteen I bought my first Benz. That was right around the time I showed up on the authorities’ radar. I feel like that influenced the judge to sentence me to three life sentences and two hundred and fifty-five years.
Thanks to my mama’s persuasion I got saved and it felt good to my heart. Sort of like a cleansing, it chased the demons away. I had done so much wrong in my life that I had to purge myself of sin. It felt right as I studied my Bible and eventually attended Bible study and began to preach the word of God instead of punishing inmates and staff with a shank like I was doing when I first entered the prison system, more rebellious then at only twenty-two years old. A lot of people, including the warden, were happy to see me get saved.
Two years ago, my mother was brutally murdered in her home. The prison wouldn’t let me go to her funeral and that hurt the most. From that moment on, as my ritual, I kissed my mama’s photo and began to read my bible.
“O Lord my God, in thee I put my trust, save me from all that persecute me, and deliver me…”
I got down on my knees with my forehead pressed against the threadbare wool blanket on the bunk. Someone knocked on the door. I ignored it and began a silent prayer for my only child and my mama. I prayed for freedom. I prayed for redemption and all the people who had been placed in harm’s way because of me.
I truly was remorseful.
After I got off my knees, I wiped my pants and peered through the cell door window, half expecting to see Wanda’s beautiful, bright smile. Instead, it was Bryant’s beady, crooked eyes. He had an impish grin that I knew all too well.
With a nod, I signaled for him to come in. As usual, he was his old jovial, hyperactive self. His short-cropped Afro was nappy and flat on one side like he had just woke up. He was skinny as a rail in a white t-shirt and sagging gray sweatpants. I could see the string hanging from the shank in his pants when he bopped over and plopped down on my bunk. Bryant was one of the most dangerous dudes I knew and he was from East Baltimore. He had a street resume similar to mine. In prison we had mutual respect for each other and had become good friends, but on the streets we were trying to kill each other over drug turf and money. Nothing personal, it was just the nature of the ghetto: eat or be eaten.
“Preacher, boy, you straight? You ‘bout to go in front of them crackers again. They gonna free a nigga this time,” he said, half serious. The platinum and diamonds in his teeth shimmered. For some reason, his words taunted me.
“Yea, I’m straight; it’s in God’s hands this time,” I said with all the courage I could muster. Because of a survival mechanism fine-tuned from years of hustling in the streets that became enhanced by prison time, a convict can sense fear, smell it, detect it, making a man susceptible to becoming a victim. I had seen firsthand how fear could turn a grown man into a homosexual, or worse.
As I placed my Bible back on the shelf and checked my reflection in the mirror one last time, Bryant commented, “Nigga, you look nervous as a mothafucka.” He chuckled.
I spun around. “Come on, dawg, what I tell you about all that cursing in my cell?”
He looked at me with a half-smile. The truth was he had been where I was going, so to him my fear was palpable. Of course he could see it, because he knew it. The parole board had turned him down. Giving him a forty-five year hit, meaning he had to wait forty-five years to go back in front of the parole board. I faced a similar fate. The only difference was the Maryland Court of Appeals had overturned two of my most serious convictions. One of them was the Brinks truck heist; the other was a first-degree murder charge for killing the Brinks truck guard. The court ruling was based on police corruption that was discovered a year ago. I had been resentenced to ten to life, meaning I could spend the rest of my life in prison even though I was eligible for parole. I had already served over ten years. It was solely up to the discretion of the parole board.
I don’t care what nobody says; there wasn’t a convict in the entire penitentiary that was not intimidated by the parole board members if he really wanted to go home. The board consisted mostly of ancient white folks who had been on the board for decades. Eighty-eight percent of the inmates that went in front of them were turned down. Years later I found out why the parole board wouldn’t release too many convicts: doing so would affect their hefty salaries, so it was better to keep them incarcerated for job security.
“You need to smoke something so you won’t do like you did last time?” Bryant joked playfully.
“This time I’m going in there prepared and prayed up. It’s all in God’s hands. No weapon formed against me shall prosper,” I said in my most evangelical cadence.
Bryant sniggered. “Ray Lewis was saying the same damn thing and we won the Super Bowl. Whatever it takes, my nigga,” he said with some semblance of seriousness and casually picked up the old edition Jet Magazine off the metal table and thumbed through it.
Just then the prison P.A. system blared; my heart somersaulted in my chest as I listened for my name. Bryant stopped scanning the pages to stare at me. Then there was a loud knock at the cell door. In my peripheral, I saw Bryant flinch, lean forward and adjust the shank in his pants as he planted his feet firmly on the concrete floor, giving me that look. Last week some convicts from my neighborhood ran up in a dude’s cell, took the dope he had just smuggled in up his anus from a visit and then gutted him like a hog. They placed his body on his bunk then pulled the cover over his head The C.O.s didn’t discover the body until count time that evening.
The homie Tat-Tat was at the door. He fogged up the window by placing his nose against the glass playfully. I nodded for him to come in. For some reason, everybody was in a playful mood and it irked me. As soon as he opened the door I caught a whiff of potent weed, chain gang hooch alcohol and giddy laughter. To my dismay Mario and Jun followed Tat-Tat into the cell.
Bryant hopped up off the bunk, “Where it’s at? Where it’s at? Where that sag at, nigga? I smell it.”
They were all drunk and high, which for them was a great way to medicate themselves against the painful sting of serving multiple life sentences. In that cell alone, there was at least five hundred years in prison sentences. All of them had been to the parole board and all of them had received that infamous letter stamped, “Denied.”
My homies acted like Kush junkies but we were all from Baltimore, so that meant we were bonded by blood no matter what. There were many times they embarrassed me in front of the prison’s Christian community but if they was going to war, I was going with them.
In the crowded cell, I pretended to listen to them give me advice on how to beat the parole board but really I was listening for my name to be called.
“I bet your ass won’t go in there rapping slick no more to them crackers,” Jun clowned me.
More laughter.
At my last hearing, I cursed out the members of the board. The prison S.O.R.T. was called to come and get me. They shackled me and took me, kicking and yelling, straight to solitary confinement. I was young and dumb then. At the time, I didn’t know that the parole hearing was nothing short of a Kangaroo court with racist white people and one house nigga.
There was a sharp knock at the cell door, and then it swung open bringing with it the murmur of voices and the fragrance of a woman’s perfume, as Wanda stood in the doorway. A mammoth of a woman, her double D breasts thrust forward as she said, “Get dressed. They’re going to call for you any minute to go to the parole hearing.”
As usual, her hair was stylishly coiffed in a chignon bun, embellished with gold ornaments. Her cheeks were rosy with makeup that only an attractive, full-figured woman could pull off.
****
As the homies trailed out the cell, everybody giving me dap, Wanda stood stoically. In passing, Jun looked up at her ample breasts, which were at
eye level. “Damn, I want to climb them mountains, Shawty.”
“Damn, and I want to put you little nasty ass back in the hole, SHAWTY,” Wanda retorted, imitating him.
She was serious as she reached for her handcuffs. Jun took off running down the tier. The homies roared with laughter. Wanda and Jun had a bit of a history. When she first started working at the prison, Jun had gunned her down more than once. Each time she had him placed in the hole and each time he got out the hole, he gunned her down again.
She stepped inside my cell and shut the door. This was normally nothing unusual but today it was different, like an awkward moment. Time lulled, the crackling of her walkie-talkie resonated loudly in the small cell. She turned it down and shifted on her feet and looked at me.
“Don’t go in there acting a fool this time. Just go in there respectful. You got a chance at going home.” With her arched brow forming a tight line across her delicate forehead her words sounded like a plea. She nibbled on her bottom lip and turned her head.
“Yea, I’m going home this time,” I said with bravado I wasn’t feeling.
My confidence was really a façade at that moment, built on years of prayer and blind faith. I gathered my papers, placing them in a folder that I was prepared to present to the parole board. Since the last time I saw them, my prison record was exemplary. I had earned my G.E.D. I was only three credits short of getting my bachelor’s degree by taking prison correspondence classes. I had started a prison ministry that worked with troubled youth from the streets. The Warden, Drew, was impressed with my work. Convicts looked up to me, and I had sincerely found refuge in Christ. Whenever there was a problem at the prison with my homies, Drew would seek out my assistance.