by Jamal Joseph
During orientation, the guards instructed us to look for a movement sheet that was posted each day at the front of the cell block. The sheet was a printout with prisoners’ names, numbers, and any special moves that were happening for them on that day. Regular routines such as work assignments, meal times, and so forth were not posted on a daily basis. But parole board hearings, infirmary visits, cell block changes, and release dates were posted. If I were going to the infirmary the listing would be “Joseph, 0337, Infirmary 0900 hours.” A prisoner going to the parole board would be listed as “Jones, 3421, Parole Board 1100 hours.”
A young prisoner, whom I’ll call Johnny Smith, was raped and stabbed to death on the top tier of my cell block the first week I arrived at Leavenworth. He was due to be released in a few weeks, and a group of his homeboys got drunk with him on homemade liquor and held him down. Maybe they thought he wouldn’t tell. Maybe they were jealous that he had gotten parole. His body was placed in one of the eight-foot laundry bags used to collect sheets and left in a shower stall. The entire prison was locked down. Our cells were searched and we were made to step outside naked so the guards could check our bodies for scratches or wounds. I thought we would be locked in our cells for days or a week, but the next morning the cell doors opened at 6 a.m. so we could march to breakfast and go to our work assignments. Word was that the guys who killed Johnny had been arrested and thrown in the hole. I stopped at the front of the cell block and looked at the movement sheet as instructed. I saw my name listed for an infirmary visit at 0800 hours. Below me was an entry for the young prisoner who had been killed. “Smith, Johnny, 78127, Parole by Death.”
I stared at the movement sheet frozen, shaken, hardened, baptized in the realization that I was in a place where I might also be “paroled by death.”
Don’t snitch on another convict. Don’t steal from another convict. Do your own time. I set my focus on rule number three—I would do my own time. No organizing. No joining a prison clique. No getting involved with other people’s beefs, and especially no gambling, no drugs, no sex, these being three of the main activities that created prison beefs.
One day I sat in the prison yard reading a book, as alone and as minding-my-business as I could be. An older black prisoner named Mr. Cody walked over to me. Suave, savvy, confident, he was a man who on the streets ran a bank robbery ring and gambling joints and in prison continued to “run a few things.”
“Say, youngblood, I hear you was down with the Black Panthers and things,” said Mr. Cody, asking a question that was really a statement.
“Yes, sir,” I answered, looking up from my book.
“I hear you down with a little karate and things,” he continued.
“Yes, sir,” I answered, not too surprised that my Black Panther and karate rep had followed me to Leavenworth.
“And I hear you was down with some plays and things out there.”
“Yeah?” I answered, surprised that anyone in the joint knew about my foray into theater back in the Village.
“Uh-huh,” Mr. Cody said stroking his chin. Then he walked away.
I headed back to my cell a little anxious and concerned. Did the fact that I performed in a few plays violate the convict code? Would the other prisoners perceive me as soft and come at me in the shower or when the lights went down on movie night in the auditorium? The next day I finished my work assignment sweeping and mopping the library and gym. I returned to my reading spot in the big yard. Suddenly there was an eclipse. I looked up expecting to see the moon blocking the sun and instead saw Mr. Cody standing with two massive black prisoners. They looked like NFL linebackers but were marked with knife scars and bullet wounds, like death had struck them. In fact, those were their names: Death and Struck. “Hey, youngblood, about them plays,” Mr. Cody said with a half smile.
This is it, I thought, the convict code is about to punish me for my theater days. “Yeah,” I said as I got to my feet.
“I want you to pull together a little show for Black History Month. I done worked it out with the warden.”
With that Mr. Cody, Death, and Struck were gone, and like it or not, I had my assignment.
I went to the prison library and found copies of only two plays—Romeo and Juliet, which was definitely out of the question, and A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. I showed the play to Mr. Cody in the mess hall that night. “I only found one black play and it has women in it,” I explained.
“That’s okay, youngblood,” he said, smiling. “Just look around the mess hall and pick out two or three you want in the play, and we’ll put dresses on them.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking about the dresses, but he wouldn’t be deterred from me putting on some kind of Black History Month show.
I went back to my cell, grabbed a pad and pencil, and began writing a play. I called it Parole by Death. The setting: Death Row—five men struggling with the criminal misjustice system and their conscience, days before there is to be a lottery to decide which one of them will die.
In addition to being an actress, my wife, Joyce, was a playwright whose work had been produced by Joseph Papp and Woodie King Jr. She sent me copies of her plays and other scripts so I could understand more about dramatic structure and format. Joyce would send me the plays to study, as would my good friend and attorney Bill Mogulescu. They would make sure the plays came via bookstores or theater companies. Had they come through regular mail, the guards would have simply trashed them.
Mr. Cody secured a rehearsal space in a storage room near the gym. He also provided the cast: Death and Struck, neither of whom had an interest in acting. But Mr. Cody had aspirations of being a producer, and what Mr. Cody wanted, Mr. Cody got. As part of our rehearsals, I developed a technique of teaching acting through improv. I would create a situation that people were familiar with, throw them in the mix, and then deconstruct the scene to show them what acting techniques they had been using without realizing.
“Freeze,” I shouted at a heightened moment in a scene between Death and Struck. They were panting and staring each other down like boxers in the ring. “Death, Struck. Wow, that was amazing! I really felt your commitment to your characters and to the scene. Death, you looked at Struck with such intensity when you told him you would stab him fifteen times and eat his liver for a snack. Struck, you were so present when you told Death you were gonna bash in his skull with the mop wringer until his brains oozed out of his ears. Great damn work!”
They continued to stare at each other as I moved from praise to deconstruction. “Now, when an actor gives a long talk or a speech, like I’m doing, that’s called a monologue. When two actors are talking back and forth, the way you guys were, that’s called dialogue. Say that with me: dialogue.”
Death kept staring at Struck and barely moved his lips as he growled. “I wasn’t dialogin’! I’m gonna kill this fool for real.”
Struck seemed to swell twice his size with anger. “You’ll be dead before you can blink, punk-ass son of a bitch.”
I jumped between them and grunted as I struggled to push them apart. “Okay, fellas. Let’s go back to our centering exercise. This is how we get rid of that negative emotion. Feet together, hands up, and breathe. You’re a tree.” I raised my arms and spread them as I demonstrated the yogalike posture. “Once again; breathe. You’re a tree.” Death and Struck looked at me like I was crazy.
At that moment Tito and Raphael, two of the leaders of the Latino crew LaRasa, strolled into the rehearsal space. Tito and Raphael had six or seven murders between them since they’d been in the joint. They had killed people in prison hallways, corridors, and mess halls in plain view of the guards, almost chuckling as the guards handcuffed them afterwards. “Give me the ten years,” they would taunt. “You want to take away my driver’s license while you’re at it?”
Of all the prison crews, LaRasa was the worst to have a beef with. They would pursue a vendetta to the bitter end. A LaRasa member who worked in the plumbing shop would toss a piece of metal out of
the window into the big yard. Another member would file the metal against concrete every day for a month, shaping it into an ice pick. He would get a piece of plastic wrap from a LaRasa member who worked in the kitchen, get Vaseline or antibacterial ointment from another member who worked in the infirmary, wrap the ice pick in plastic, lubricate it, then insert it in his anus so he could bring it through the metal detector into the main prison. He would mount it on a piece of wood and use it to take out the vendetta victim in front of everybody in the cell block.
Tito and Raphael sat on a broken workout bench and watched the rehearsal. Death, Struck, and I were in telepathic communication with the same thought: LaRasa has left their court and come to our rehearsal. Who are they here to kill? One of the unwritten statutes of the convict code goes “The main thing is just don’t panic.” So everyone acted cool. Death and Struck put their arms up and started swaying with me. “Look, Jamal, I’m a tree,” Death grunted. “I’m a palm tree.” Still looking at Tito and Raphael out of the corner of our eyes, we began rehearsing and improvising one of the scenes from the play.
Tito kept shifting his muscular tattooed frame like something was disturbing him. He silently grew angrier and angrier. A few minutes later he stood up, pointed at me, and grimaced. “Yo, ese, let me talk to you a minute.” He pulled me into a corner and bored into me with a cobralike stare. I shifted my feet into a neutral karate stance, arms at my side but ready for an attack. Just be cool, Jamal, I coached myself. Talk to him man to man, don’t be too timid or aggressive, but if you see him reach around to his asshole for a knife, try to take the whole damn arm and run out the gym for help.
“Yo, ese. We know what you’re up here doing,” Tito said, leaning in close, “because there ain’t no secrets in the big top. But I had to come to check it out for myself. I been sitting here watching this shit for about ten minutes and I’m gonna tell you something, ese, that guy you’re working with, that fucking guy, ese, he’s not feeling his character.”
“Well, Tito, why don’t you jump into the scene and try,” I said, flabbergasted that he was actually here to critique the acting.
“You ain’t said nothing but a thing, ese,” Tito replied as he took off his bandanna and joined Death and Struck. Turns out that Tito had done plays in high school and showed a lot of promise as an actor even while he was gangbanging. He jumped into the scene and was terrific, not only at acting but at getting Death and Struck to relax too. Rafael also joined the group. That night I rewrote the play to include Latino characters.
A few days later, a white prisoner named Reb, who was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, came to rehearsal. Reb was a fourth-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. He and I had whipped each other’s asses on a couple of occasions during a “friendly workout.” It was really a mutual test to see if the Panther or the Aryan was a better martial artist. Both the matches were a draw and we headed back to the cell blocks with lots of bruises and mutual respect, at least when it came to karate. Reb came to rehearsal to see if the blacks and Latinos were forming an alliance. He left with a role in the play.
That night I rewrote the play again to add a white character. Over the next few weeks, more prisoners joined the ensemble, black, white, Latino, Native American. The word “truce” was never spoken, but it was understood that our creative space needed to be a safe space where beefs and affiliations were excluded. In effect, we created our own court. We would improvise, rehearse, and argue near the bleachers in the big yard. “You expect me to say these lines, Jamal? What’s my motivation?” I would shake my head and use my pencil to scribble a new line as we continued to have a theater troupe fight under the shadow of the gun tower.
The warden and the prison administration were suspicious and skeptical about our play, especially when we asked permission to build a theater set. We wrote a letter, had a meeting in the warden’s office, and invited him to a rehearsal, which he refused to attend. It looked like the whole play was in jeopardy until the recreation supervisor, Mr. Rathmore, agreed to help. Mr. Rathmore was an African American athlete who went to college on a football scholarship. He became a correction officer and was promoted to recreation supervisor, a job that was more about coaching and counseling than lockdowns and beat-downs. Mr. Rathmore agreed to do overtime without pay to supervise our set construction. Even with Mr. Rathmore putting his reputation, if not his job, on the line, the most the warden would agree to was one performance, with one day to build the set and one night to tear it down.
Mr. Rathmore understood the value of education and arts in prison. He let us use the storage room for our play rehearsals. He also set up a music room and used part of his recreation budget to buy used instruments. A few of the prisoners had played on the outside and were pretty good musicians. They approached me about forming a pit band that could be part of the show. That Parole by Death was meant to be a heavy drama, not a musical, seemed not to deter them. I went back to my cell and rewrote the play once again so that there was “musical narration” in the beginning, middle, and end. By now the cast had grown to fifteen guys. Plus there were stagehands, lighting and sound techs, and the band. The Black History Month play had transformed into a major, multicultural production.
There was still one other obstacle to deal with, though. Convicts were some of the best hecklers on the planet. I had seen fights break out during prison football and softball games because of the heckling coming from the sidelines. “Ray Charles could catch the ball better than you, you hunchback, gimp-legged, fraud-ass son of a bitch.” Movie night was even worse. The hecklers would crack jokes and hurl insults that were so funny that, had they been able to hear them, the screen actors no doubt would have been reduced to tears.
My actors were some of the baddest dudes in the penitentiary. They had robbed banks; killed people; shot it out with FBI agents; and stared down knife blades, gun barrels, and in one case, a tank. But stage fright was kicking their asses. I could see the jitters mounting as we got closer to performance day. Despite my pep talks and relaxation exercises, I could tell that my actors were feeling “some type of way” about getting on stage in front of their convict peers. So I decided to send my cast into battle early. I organized a “heckler’s rehearsal,” a sneak preview where the best hecklers in the joint could go hard at the cast. The hecklers were good, and they did not disappoint. “Oh, so Leon, you think you’re an actor now? Why don’t you act like you gonna pay me those cigarettes you owe me, punk?” At first the actors would crack up or get mad, but by the end of rehearsal they had learned to ignore the insults, dodge the jokes, and stay in character.
When we opened the curtains a few nights later, the expected jeers and insults came from the packed auditorium, but the actors kept on going. Five minutes into the play, an amazing thing happened. The audience kept shouting out comments, but they were in context with the action on stage. As the play continued, they grew quiet during the tense moments and roared during the funny ones. At the end they stood and gave the actors—their peers, their cell mates, in some cases their enemies—a five-minute standing ovation.
The warden and the guards were convinced that there would be trouble during the play. Captain Foster thought the whole thing was a hoax, a distraction for an escape attempt or a gang war. The guards searched out cells several times before the play, allegedly looking for weapons and escape tools, but the real intention was to rattle us. The play turned out to be one of the most peaceful evenings ever in the prison. No stabbings. No fights. No arguments. No drugs—with the exception of our spotlight operator, Troy, who got drunk on prison wine (made from yeast and fermented potatoes) and missed half of his cues. The prisoners left their beefs and rivalries in the yard and cell blocks and came together to watch a show. We worked till two in the morning under the supervision of Mr. Rathmore, tearing the set down. We were exhausted but not tired. It’s the “good-tired feeling” you get when you have worked really hard at something you believe in.
The next afternoon I passed by the au
ditorium on my way back from recreation period in the big yard. The auditorium door was open, which was unusual. Every door and gate in Leavenworth stays locked, with a guard nearby. I entered and stood in the back of the auditorium. The stage was empty, but my mental cinema could clearly see and hear the performance and the applause from the night before. One by one, my cast and crew drifted in and stood near me quietly watching the stage. Joseph Omiwale, Willie “Subhi” Post, Ernest “Nitro” Jenkins, Mr. Cody, Death, Struck, Tito, Raphael, Abdush Shakur, Donald Lowery, and Native American leader Leonard Peltier, who was our adviser and dramaturge. Abdush broke our collective meditation. “It’s true what they say,” he said with a smile. “You always return to the scene of the crime.”
We laughed and continued to linger in the auditorium, even though we knew we were “out of bounds” and could all be sent to the hole for being in an unauthorized area without an escort.
“When is the next play?” Omiwale asked.
“I haven’t written it,” I replied with a shrug, never having considered a play beyond the Black History Month extravaganza.
“So write the damn thing,” Subhi said, implying that I should stop fucking around and get to work.
Over the next three years I wrote several more plays, which we mounted. I collaborated with the musicians to write songs for the productions and wrote a collection of poetry. Susan L. Taylor, the editor of Essence magazine, saw one of the poems and published it. I was still a prisoner, but I’d found a new kind of freedom.
17
Pain to Power
All power to the people. The phrase I learned as a fifteen-year-old Panther in training came back to me as I looked around the prison yard. “Black power to black people, white power to white people, brown power to brown people, red power to red people, yellow power to yellow people, and Panther power to the vanguard,” my Panther teachers emphasized.