Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  Ora Lee, Daryl, and Outlaw accompanied me down the Walk to the Main Prison control center, where I checked in, and then to Walnut 4, a dormitory for “big stripers”—as opposed to trusties—that had not yet been racially integrated. After helping me stow my belongings in a footlocker beside my assigned bunk, Ora Lee and Daryl walked me along the fence of the Big Yard, giving me a quick education about the place, the inmates there, and what would be required of me.

  Unlike the silence and solitude of death row, noisiness and bustle marked life in general population, which ran according to piercing whistles. At 5:00 a.m. a whistle woke us up; fifteen minutes later, another whistle told us to sit on the end of our bunks to be counted, although some guys just rolled over and slept through it. Inmates were counted simultaneously all over the prison—at the Main Prison, the out-camps, the hospital, administrative lockdown—and the count had to “clear” before any inmate could move. The process took about forty-five minutes when there were no problems; it could take hours if the numbers didn’t add up.

  After the morning count, men walked single file to the dining hall as their dormitories were called. Breakfast, like all our meals, was served cafeteria-style. We got bacon about twice a week and were limited to one ration, but we could have as much as we wanted of whatever else they were serving—grits, oatmeal, biscuits, French toast, cereal, and eggs. Men went straight from breakfast to their jobs, where they were required to check in by 7:00 on pain of being written up for a disciplinary infraction, “late to work,” and given weekend duty in the field, even if they weren’t ordinarily assigned to fieldwork. Fieldworkers gathered at a spot near the back gate of the Main Prison called the Sally Port at 7:00 and were marched out to the farm lines or the fields by rifle-ready guards on horseback. Fieldworkers, who labored under hot sun and in bitter cold, always hoped the count got screwed up, as it meant less time in the field for them.

  The 10:30 a.m. whistle signaled everyone to get back to their dorms. About half an hour later, another whistle told us to sit on the end of our bunks to be counted again. After the count cleared, we filed to the dining hall for lunch. We had to return to our jobs by 1:00 p.m. A whistle at 3:30 marked the end of the workday. Another put us on our bunks for the four o’clock count, after which we filed out for supper. The evening was ours, and men were free to stay out in the yard exercising or just hanging around until the next whistle, half an hour before nightfall, when everyone was required to be indoors. In the dorms, men showered, read, played Ping-Pong, gambled, argued, or listened to personal radios or the television over the constant sound of loud voices and toilets flushing. With sixty men using five toilets in each dorm, the commodes stayed busy.

  Some men belonged to one or more of the thirty or so inmate clubs and religious groups at Angola and would attend church services or club meetings in the evening. There they could learn public speaking, practice dramatic performances, or work on staying sober, among other things. Many attended to socialize with friends from other dorms or out-camps. Those inmates fortunate enough to have a designated space and a locker in the hobby shop would pass their evenings handcrafting belts, purses, paintings, wooden wall art, rocking chairs, and chests, which were sold in the visiting room and at the annual inmate rodeo—a spectacle open to the paying public that featured unskilled and largely urban inmate “cowboys,” desperate for money and attention, in daredevil events prohibited in regular rodeos, such as snatching a silver dollar from between a charging bull’s horns—which drew thousands of outsiders to the prison. Once a week, hundreds of inmates poured out of the dorms for movie night in the dining hall.

  As long as a prisoner was previously approved to be on a “call-out” outside his dorm, he could be wherever the meeting or activity was taking place, from church to the gym to the education building to the visiting room. Angola was an ant pile of nonstop movement and activity, even after dark. The 7:00 p.m. whistle marked the last major count of the day, and men were counted wherever they were without having to return to the dorm until 10:00, which was followed by lights-out half an hour later.

  “Are the guards going to hassle me about my charge?” I asked Ora Lee, referring to the interracial nature of my crime.

  “Play safe and stay in population, where there’s protection. The guards won’t do anything to you in front of witnesses,” Ora Lee said.

  “As for the white convicts, they may be racists, but they criminals first. Problem is, they’ll do a favor for your DA, the cops, or an enemy in return for help in getting out of here. Except for those on the row with us, I wouldn’t go anyplace alone with white boys, not until you get to know them better. Stay around blacks, especially the Baton Rouge dudes: You got a reputation among them from the jail.”

  Before falling asleep that night, I thought of the armed inmates in the dark, overcrowded dorm with me and hoped Daryl was right that guys getting off death row generally weren’t being messed with. I recalled Thomas “Black Jack” Goins telling me a decade earlier: “You’re lucky them white folks sent you to death row, ’cause your little ass wouldn’t survive this prison.” I didn’t understand then, but I did now. At arrest, I was just a kid, emotionally stunted, scared of my own shadow, saddled with an inferiority complex as wide as a Parisian boulevard, and sorely lacking in life skills. I was booked into the jail at five feet, seven inches tall, 115 pounds—two and a half inches shorter and considerably lighter than now. Had I been placed in Angola in 1961 with a life sentence, the prison world would have devoured me. In supreme irony, my death sentences had been blessings, protecting me long enough for me to learn and grow, literally.

  When I met the Initial Classification Board, I told them I wanted to write and asked for a job on the prison paper, The Angolite. It was a brash request, because the paper had always been produced by an all-white inmate staff. The officials exchanged meaningful looks, then told me there were no vacancies on the paper. Security Colonel Robert Bryan observed that the prison could use my writing ability—but in a different job. The next morning, I went to the industrial compound, adjacent to the back of the Big Yard, with Daryl and Ora Lee and reported for work at the prison cannery, where food from the farming operations was processed.

  I approached the foreman. “Colonel Bryan sent me to serve as your clerk.”

  “My clerk?” The stringy white supervisor spit a stream of tobacco juice in the dirt and stared hostilely at me. “No, you ain’t gonna be my clerk. Ain’t never had a nigger clerk and ain’t gonna start now. Tell you what—you go back up there to the colonel and tell him I say that if he wants you to have a clerk’s job, he can make you his own clerk in the security office.” He angrily returned to his office, where several white inmates had watched from the windows.

  Black inmate workers had also seen what transpired. They believed Bryan was using me to taunt the cannery supervisor, with whom he was feuding. The foreman knew that the only clerks allowed to work in the security office were gay white inmates, so relaying the foreman’s message would have been merely passing along the taunt. Yet, if it was learned that I wasn’t working at the cannery, I would probably get sent to the field to clear land, dig ditches, pick cotton, or harvest beans—the hardest work assignments. To avoid that prospect and to give myself time to find another job, I reported to work at the cannery every day as a manual laborer, joining the other blacks in cutting okra, making syrup, canning vegetables, sweeping floors, and performing menial tasks. I ignored the derisive laughter of the foreman and his white clerks each day when I checked in and out of the cannery, taking comfort in a rebellious determination forming within me: I refused to remain powerless in a jungle where only power mattered. I would somehow acquire some control over my life. I was determined to become a writer and to make the prison recognize me as one.

  I turned for help to Sister Benedict Shannon and Clover Swann, a New York book editor who had coached me on writing through a pen-pal correspondence when I was on death row. When they learned about my present job situation, t
heir complaints and inquiries to officials initiated a quick response.

  Returning from the cannery one afternoon, I was picked up by prison security guards, who drove me to the administration building. Sweaty and dirty, I was shown into the warden’s office, where Henderson, Deputy Warden Lloyd Hoyle, and the prison’s business manager, Jack Donnelly, were waiting for me. Henderson, a tall, lanky man, introduced me to the others, offered me coffee, and politely inquired about my transition to the general population.

  “My adjustment?” I said. “I’ve had no problems with the inmates. My only problems come from having to deal with a white administration that has no respect for blacks. I’ve been jerked around because of my color. Apparently you’ve heard about it, if my guess is right.”

  Those were dangerous words to toss at all-powerful white prison officials, but I wanted them to understand that I was not the “good nigger” they were used to dealing with. Henderson surprised me by apologizing for what had happened, telling me he didn’t condone racism.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “Does that mean you’re going to move me out of the cannery and put me on The Angolite?”

  “We’d like to,” Hoyle said, “but we can’t do it right now. The Angolite already has a full staff. But we can do something even better, and it would allow you the time and freedom to do all the writing you want to—work on a book or something.* If you’d like, we can put you at Camp H. It’s about a mile away from the Main Prison—real quiet place, the kind of environment writers like.” Camp H, which held both medium-security prisoners and trusties, was popularly perceived to be a dumping ground for homosexuals, the mentally ill, and the weak.

  Interpreting this as an attempt to isolate me from the Main Prison population, I declined. But I accepted Donnelly’s offer of a clerical job in the Main Prison’s canteen. Canteen jobs were much sought after for access to the store’s inventory and the opportunity to steal. Of more value to me was the ability to retreat to the seclusion of an office with a typewriter whenever the store was closed.

  I hadn’t been working at the canteen long when I read in a newspaper that one of the wardens said there were no blacks on the staff of The Angolite because it was difficult to find black prisoners who could write. Considering my conversations with Henderson, Hoyle, and Donnelly, I was peeved. I took up an offer from the all-black Angola Lifers’ Association, one of the prison’s biggest inmate self-help organizations, to produce a newsletter for them. I put together an all-black staff and produced not a newsletter but a newsmagazine, twice the size of The Angolite. I introduced it to the membership as The Lifer magazine, “a publication by and for black prisoners,” deliberately tapping into black resentment. Blacks made up 85 percent of the inmate population and, having been historically shut out of the all-white Angolite, they embraced the idea of having their own magazine and competing with it. Surreptitiously printed on the classification department’s copy machine, The Lifer was distributed free in the prison and sent out to a network of outside supporters who sold it in churches and meetings in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Revenue from the sales financed the next edition. The New Orleans chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union served as legal counsel and held our funds in a local bank account. We succeeded in making our point that black prisoners could write and produce a publication. It did not mean the prison administration had to assign blacks to The Angolite, but it did give the lie to its claim of a lack of black writing talent.

  The competition between The Lifer and The Angolite divided the to publishers. Nothing had come of it. inmate population along racial lines and catapulted me to instant prominence in Angola, especially among the black prisoners, as they regarded me as being unafraid to take on the white administration. For the first time in my life I was popular. I began writing press releases for black prison organizations, and as leaders of the prison’s numerous self-help organizations saw positive articles about the black clubs’ activities in mainstream newspapers, they asked me to do public relations for their organizations as well.

  In 1973, as I was establishing The Lifer, I decided to apply to the Louisiana pardon board for executive clemency. By the standards of the day, I was overdue for release from my life sentence, as Louisiana’s practice, since 1926, had been to release lifers who had a record of good behavior after ten years and six months, upon the virtually automatic recommendation of the warden and pro forma approval by the governor. As Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Sanders had declared in 1971, “No true life sentence exists in Louisiana law.” My Master Prison Record reflected a long-passed “10–6” discharge date of August 16, 1971. Other lifers, including those once condemned to death, were flowing out of the penitentiary in a steady stream.

  Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court voided all death sentences in 1972, Freeman Lavergne, a lifelong friend of my mother and one of the most powerful black leaders in Lake Charles, came to see me one day in the Calcasieu Parish jail. The first black business manager for Labor Local 207, who eventually became vice president of the local AFL-CIO chapter, Lavergne was a close ally of district attorney Frank Salter, who was part owner of a construction business that hired union labor. Lavergne was the first person from the local community, besides my mother and Sister Benedict, to visit me in the eleven years since my arrest. Because of his standing in the community, I was brought to a private office for the visit.

  “I have a message for you, son, and I think you’ll see it as good news,” the stocky Lavergne said, leaning back in his chair. “Your case has been dragging on in the courts through three trials and for more than a decade. Frank Salter wants it to die a quiet death. He doesn’t need another reversal of your conviction by the federal court. So here’s the deal. You don’t appeal your conviction. You take the life sentence the Supreme Court’s going to give you, lie low for a couple of years, apply for a ten-six time cut, and Salter won’t oppose executive clemency for you.”

  It sounded like business as usual. It was the way the back end of the criminal justice system worked. You got your time, kept your nose clean, and got your “gold seal”—the commutation of sentence. A first offender with a sterling prison record, I had no reason to think the gold seal wouldn’t come to me as it did to everyone else. But I was relieved to know the district attorney would not oppose my release via executive clemency, the only exit for lifers.

  However, rather than lie low and wait a couple of years, as Lavergne advised, I sought clemency in 1973. In January 1974, the pardon board denied my application, which was not unusual. They often turned an inmate down on his first request, to see how he would respond to adversity: Would he become angry, develop discipline problems, give up trying after suffering a setback? The hearing was a low-key assessment by the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, and the sentencing judge. It didn’t make the newspapers. Salter made no attempt to appear before the board to oppose my request. I took the board’s rejection in stride and figured that with one denial under my belt, I’d wait a couple of years and try again.

  When the canteen replaced its inmate workers with female employees to end the chronic problem of inmate theft, Donnelly arranged for me to be assigned to the classification department, where I enjoyed the support of the officers in my varied prison endeavors and freelance writing.

  The popularity of The Lifer outside prison made me realize there was an audience for my writing. The 1971 Attica uprising and massacre followed by the San Quentin bloodbath that claimed the lives of militant convict George Jackson and five others hung over the nation’s penal system and generated serious interest in what was going on behind prison walls. Questions about justice and equality were being raised everywhere. Angola was a place everyone had heard of but few knew much about. And the more I learned, the more I felt the public needed to know.

  Like almost everyone else, before I found out firsthand what prison was like, I thought it was just a purgatory where criminals were warehoused and punished before being returned to society. I was surpri
sed to learn that it was a world unto itself, with its own peculiar culture, belief system, lifestyle, power structure, economy, and currency. It had its own heroes, like Leadbelly, who sang his way out of Angola and into international stardom; and Charlie Frazier, whose cell in the notorious “Red Hat” disciplinary building was welded shut for seven years after he shot his way out of the prison in a bloody escape. It was a world divided into “them” and “us” by a deep abyss of ignorance, prejudice, and misunderstanding. It was a world in which the forces of good and evil struggled daily with no guarantee as to which would triumph. It was a world that placed a high premium on exercising extreme care—in word, deed, and appearance—and upon keeping one’s word, whether it was to help someone or to hurt them. It was a world where inmates punished unacceptable behavior even more severely than authorities did. It was a world fraught with cruelty and danger but alive with hope, aspiration, and wide-ranging activity. There was certainly human wreckage—tortured souls and destroyed lives. But people also labored and fought to create meaningful lives in an abnormal place, and to find purpose and a measure of satisfaction in a human wasteland. Prison was more than just Hell’s storehouse.

  There was a huge discrepancy between popular perception and the reality of what was happening behind bars. With America wracked by civil disobedience over the Vietnam War, violent revolutionary groups, black militancy, and ghetto riots, some of the nation’s inmates embraced militant antiauthoritarian rhetoric. Outside supporters of political militants publicly promoted romanticized notions of Angola prisoners united in resistance to official authority; in fact, genuine militants could not get a foothold in Angola, because gangsters, inmate leaders, slaveowners, and even run-of-the-mill criminal hustlers regarded militants as a threat to their own interests. They readily identified so-called militants to security guards in exchange for favors, often naming personal rivals or enemies as “revolutionaries.” While Angola was the most violent prison in the nation, the bloodletting—with a few notable exceptions—was not due to political militancy. The violence was essentially about disrespect, vengeance, sex, turf, property, criminality, money, drugs, domestic disputes, and the inability of individuals to get along peaceably in a jungle atmosphere. Although I kept a weapon handy at all times—first, the knife; later, an iron handle of a mop wringer innocently sitting in the corner of my office—I never needed to use it. Occasionally, violence was invoked as a matter of principle, to prevent a third party from being victimized. But the reality was a far cry from the militancy that many believed kept the prison bloody. As I came to understand how Angola functioned, I continued to regard educating the public about Angola as both an opportunity and a mission.