Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  By morning, Big Yard inmates boycotted the dining hall and asked the trusties to support them. Trusties had more to lose, having spent years acquiring minimum-security status, which carried the prospect of better jobs, outside travel, and transfer to better facilities, not to mention a better chance at parole or executive clemency. Yet, on occasion, the trusty population had shown itself capable of being every bit as rebellious and violent as inmates on the Big Yard. Political militants among the trusties were calling upon us to boycott the dining hall at noon. Two trusties from rival families got into a fight, which was soon broken up. Many of the trusties just wanted to distance themselves from any conflict.

  We were all strung out in a neat single line stretching from the dormitories to the dining hall when someone up the line hollered, “Will y’all look at this crazy motherfucker!” Major H. D. Byargeon, the morning security shift supervisor, was shouting curses at the inmates in line. “That stupid sonuvabitch better not holler no crazy shit at me when I pass,” someone near me said. I could not believe my eyes when I saw Byargeon was carrying a baseball bat! He was clearly trying to incite a major disturbance. Adrenaline surged through me. We were ordered to return to the Trusty Yard, where violence was festering, rather than to our job assignments elsewhere. My friend Robert went to Byargeon. “Major, I think there’s some kind of misunderstanding here about—”

  “Git yoah gawdam ass back in line!” the major said, pointing to the Trusty Yard.

  Trusties living in Ash and Magnolia proceeded toward their dormitories. A large number of inmates I recognized as being from Spruce and Cypress dorms milled around the gate and barbershop area, indicating the action would be on that side of the yard. There were about fifty inmates, divided into two groups. The conflict hadn’t begun, but it was about to.

  “Say, man—them goddamn hacks in that guard shack act like ain’t nothing happening!” Daryl said to me.

  The guard at the gate appeared oblivious to what was taking place a short distance away. I looked up at the guard tower and saw the officer there smoking a cigarette, gazing idly at the empty sky. All my instincts told me this whole scene was wrong. Those guards knew something was about to go down in the clearing in front of them.

  Daryl, who had left us briefly, returned. “Jive motherfuckers got the goddamn gates locked,” he said in a low voice.

  “We all locked in,” said one of the inmates from our dorm. Like most men who did not belong to any clique or family, he was hunting for a safe harbor to weather the storm. Other inmates drew near us for the same reason. They knew that while my family was powerful and would fight if we had to, we were reasonable men who did not like violence. We were mostly model prisoners whom they could trust.

  There were now about three hundred prisoners outside the dorms, and another hundred or so inside the dorms seeking sanctuary there. Family clashes were generally confined to those involved, but because security was interfering with the natural course of things, there was no way of gauging how wide this would spread. Big Lionel Bowers suggested we all go to our dorm, pointing out that if things got bad we could hold and defend it.

  As we neared the dorm, I spotted Silky and several members of his family leaning against the railing of the Walk, idly watching the growing belligerence taking place in the clearing. “What are you up to, Silky?” I asked. “Going to referee this shit?”

  “Motherfuckers want to kill each other—I say let ’em.”

  I leaned against the railing, staring out at the men. I could see some had weapons. “Can you stop that?” I asked Silky.

  “Probably—but I thought we agreed to stay out of shit, to be low profile?”

  “We did, but this needs to be stopped. Security wants it to happen, which means it’s not in our best interests.” I shared my suspicions with him. He studied the guard tower and the general nonchalance displayed by the security officers. He leaped off the Walk with a couple of buddies following him. Voices twittered around me as we watched the young gang leader as he half walked, half ran over to the two groups about to spill each other’s blood. He stood between them, talking. The heads of the men turned, looking in the direction of the guard tower, the checkout point, the gate, and finally back at each other. They began to disassemble, slowly at first, then more quickly, anxious now to stash their weapons.

  “It’s still on between them—they just postponing it,” Silky said on his return. “They might want to kill each other, but they’ll wait and see what security has up their sleeve before they get it on again.”

  After twenty minutes, a whistle sounded, signaling everyone to report to their jobs.

  The security shifts changed at two o’clock, and the incoming shift supervisor, Major Richard Wall, made his way to the Angolite office, where several of us were discussing the situation. A short, stocky man who bristled with energy, the thirty-five-year-old was a career correctional officer who commuted daily to the prison from his home across the river in Simmsport. He had been the prison training officer before being promoted and transferred to the Main Prison. Old-line security officers regarded him as a maverick, and by traditional prison standards he was. A progressive thinker, aggressive and forceful, he would buck the established way of doing things for a new way he thought was superior, kinder to the inmate population, and more practical for management. As leader of the “across-the-river crew” of mostly Cajun officers who had traditionally been discriminated against and treated as outcasts by the ruling redneck old guard, he had the kind of backing he needed to force change in the treatment of his own men or the prisoners under his control. When other security officials refused to permit concerts in the rodeo arena, Wall, at the request of the inmates, went to Warden Henderson and got the permission, accepting personal responsibility for security at the events. Wall enjoyed enormous popularity among the prisoners and a working relationship with most of their leaders.

  “When you consider all that I’ve done for the population, will someone please tell me how the hell my shift comes on duty and gets boycotted?” he asked.

  We laughed. “That’s got nothing to do with you, Major,” one of my friends said. “It started at breakfast on the morning shift.”

  “I don’t have anything to do with that shift,” said Wall. It was common knowledge that the mostly redneck morning crew and the mostly across-the-river afternoon shift did not get along. “I’m talking about my shift. How did we end up with this?”

  “They tried to leave you with more than just a boycott,” I said. We told him what had taken place. He shook his head and cursed under his breath. “Those sonuvabitches just dropped this shit in my lap and split.”

  “They’re up to something,” I said. “The question is, what?”

  “My guess is that this is to discredit me and my shift,” he said. “And if the trusties stage a sympathy boycott at supper, then the whole thing will have escalated under me, the shift that is supposed to have the best rapport with the inmate population.” He shrugged, breathed deeply. “This is going to shoot my credibility to hell. Can you hear them laughing next time I vouch for something on behalf of the population?” He paused, then looked meaningfully at me. “Won’t help your boy Phelps, either. In fact, this could all be aimed at sabotaging his chances of becoming corrections director. If this place blows up, his enemies will use it as proof that he can’t handle the job. Byargeon and the morning crew hate Phelps. They don’t want to see him get that job.”

  The employees’ choice for director was rumored to be Ross Maggio, head of the agribusiness division of the corrections department. He would be bad news for the inmates, and he would reempower the guards.

  “You doing anything for Phelps on this boycott business?” Wall asked.

  “No,” I said. “He didn’t ask for help.”

  “Well, I’m asking: Can y’all do something about this? The Big Yard ain’t gonna convince nobody they’re suffering from food poisoning when the trusties ate the same food, from the same pots, and not one has c
omplained. The health department got food samples and they’re analyzing them right now, and common sense tells you they ain’t gonna find nothing. Look, I got a responsibility to see that my men return home to their families in good health and without a scratch on them, but I have that same kind of obligation to all those inmates in the Main Prison who don’t want trouble, who just want to do their time and tend to their own business. If you can do something about straightening up this mess before it turns ugly, I’d appreciate you doing it—as a favor to me and my men. We’ll owe you one.”

  After he left, we all looked at each other. “He’s right,” Daryl said, speaking for all of us.

  “Okay—we all agree it’s stupid and that Wall is right,” Robert, the most political of us, said. “But he wants us to cut our own throats. There are some dangerous fuckers on that yard who’re gonna look at us as selling them out.”

  That was always the problem. Even when you had reason on your side, the fear of being perceived as a coward, of surrendering, or of selling out, often prevented inmates from doing the right thing. In a world so given to extreme machismo and the criminal ethic, the appearance of having violated the tenets of that world could cost one dearly.

  “It’s all in how you present it to them,” I said. I recalled what Silky had done. “You just point out what happened at noon and ask, Why? In fact, we owe it to them to give them that information.”

  Robert rose from his chair enthusiastically. “Look, if everything goes down right, we benefit from both sides,” he said. “Wall and his shift will owe us a favor, and the dudes down the Walk will appreciate our rescuing them from a bad situation, ’cause you know they’re going to think that security was setting them up for a kill.”

  We split up and headed to different areas to spread our information. But stopping the boycott would require more than information; it would require physical leadership. I found Wall and told him we needed the dormitories to be released for supper in a precise sequence. When the whistle sounded at five o’clock, our dorm, Cypress 3, was released first. Although my guts were in a knot, I betrayed no anxiety as my family stepped onto the Walk and began marching toward the dining hall as hundreds of trusties watched us. After a pause that seemed longer than it was, the rest of our dorm fell in behind us. Our strongest allies, from Cypress 4, followed suit, and their whole dorm joined in. We were 120 men strong as we filed past Cypress 1 and Cypress 2, doubling our strength as we picked up their numbers. Silky and his family brought all four Spruce dorms into the march. There were nearly 500 men on the Walk by the time the men in Ash and Magnolia caught sight of us. As we led the way, all 1,000 trusties went to supper. With no support from our ranks, the Big Yard inmates went to breakfast the next morning. We had broken the boycott while maintaining the peace.

  Phelps visited the Angolite office the next day, wondering how it was that everything had returned to normal.

  I told him the whole story, but said I wasn’t quite sure why the whole thing had gotten started.

  “The inmates said it was food poisoning,” said Phelps.

  “There was no food poisoning. I ate the same food,” I said. “This was about you. Nothing else makes sense.”

  “Me?”

  “It might come as a surprise to you, but prisoners don’t always start the disturbances. I know the morning security shift was trying to instigate something more than a boycott. We got involved because one of your better security officers asked for help.”

  “Tell me—had I asked, would you have interceded?”

  I smiled. “You know, when we last talked, I was kind of expecting you to. But you didn’t.”

  “No, I didn’t. I don’t feel that I should have to ask,” he said. He told me I was as responsible for the prison as he was.

  “Whoa, Chief—we live in two different worlds,” I said, a bit heatedly.

  “Your free world is about the pursuit of happiness; this prison world, the struggle to survive.” He had the luxury of being moral and civic-minded, of believing in justice and that right triumphs over wrong. Prison required me to tend to my own business and interfere in others’ only at my own peril.

  “What I’m saying is that you live here; you can’t just criticize what’s wrong and do nothing about it,” he said. “Who do you expect to fix it—me, alone? The prison employees? Most of them are here only because they need a job. As soon as they find something better, they’ll leave this place behind without a thought. Besides, when you leave a problem to be fixed by others, you may not like the way they do it.”

  “Don’t throw that responsibility on me,” I said. “Your society created this system and has had the power to fix it anytime it chose. Even the reformers of your world only want to sweep the streets of Hell clean.”

  “You can’t always do what you want or be what you want. Sometimes circumstances impose obligations on you,” he said. He told me change would come only through strong individuals who knew what to do, if they were not afraid to do it. In his view, I was obliged to be one of them, like it or not.

  “You operate in the background, removed from the chaos of this place. Even with The Angolite, Bill Brown is the putative editor. I wonder how you would behave if you were forced to operate in the open.”

  “That’s not likely to happen,” I said.

  “We’ll see, because you’re coming out from behind the scenes.”

  On a Friday afternoon, two white police officers from the town of LaPlace, where Bill Brown was to give a speech, arrived at the prison to pick Bill and me up. I had recently been approved as an outside speaker. The trip would be a learning experience for me. It was the first time in my fifteen-year imprisonment that I was allowed out of Angola without having to wear handcuffs and shackles. We reached the local jail after a three-hour drive. The sheriff, Lloyd Johnson, welcomed us and invited us to consider ourselves guests, not prisoners. Our cell remained open so we could go in and out as we pleased. In the employees’ coffee room we chatted with a couple of female officers and answered their questions about Angola.

  The next morning, accompanied by an unarmed plainclothes officer, we went to the local community center, where an all-day drug-abuse-prevention fair was being conducted for the general public by narcotics law enforcement agencies and the local Jaycees chapter. I felt a little uneasy and out of place at the virtually all-white event until I was introduced to a group of Jaycees and their wives, who immediately lavished attention on me the way whites do with lone blacks to make them feel comfortable.

  I was acutely aware that I could simply excuse myself to go to the restroom and walk off into freedom at any time. In the not-too-distant past, this opportunity would have been a dream come true. I had twice planned to escape from the East Baton Rouge Parish jail; the first plan failed when my compatriots neglected to unlock my cell before running off (and promptly getting caught), and I scuttled the second plan when I saw cigarette tips glowing against the night in police cars waiting just outside the jail for us. During the twelve years Louisiana was trying to execute me, I had been desperate.

  Things were different now. I was serving life in a system that had historically required only ten and a half years to satisfy that sentence. Lifers going before the new pardon board had been winning recommendations for sentence commutations. Robert Jackson, who had been on death row with me, had his life term reduced to thirty years, which made him eligible for parole. I had recently been visited by pardon board member William Carroll and the board chairman, John Hunter. Carroll patted my file, sitting on the table in front of him, and said, “I don’t have any questions about you. I see no problems—none at all.” Hunter agreed. I felt I was merely biding my time until I was freed.

  Becoming an outside speaker was the most sought-after brass ring inmates at Angola reached for, the one that would bring contact with society and the hope of getting help or a girlfriend. Model prisoners could also become visiting-room concession workers; drivers of trucks, patrols, or ambulances; hospital workers; a
dministration building orderlies, clerks, or B-Line workers; workers at satellite facilities, such as the minimum-security state police barracks; even servants at the governor’s mansion. But being an outside speaker required a unanimous vote of all the wardens, a difficult feat. The speaking program had been created to convince the public there was a need for prison reform. Inmates were effective public relations agents because the media and the public saw them as being more credible than officials.

  When the day’s program ended, we returned to the local jail. “The Jaycees’ people been telling me that you boys put on a real good presentation today,” Sheriff Johnson told us over coffee. “That’s good. They’re a large and influential organization here. I like to keep ’em happy. They asked me to get y’all for them and, to be frank, I wasn’t sure I could do it. The warden told me it was voluntary, and y’all come only if y’all want to. So I sure appreciate y’all coming. Now the Jaycees owe me a favor, and that’s what it’s all about.” He laughed. “I feel like I oughta do a little something for y’all.” He paused. “You think if I call the warden and told him that we needed y’all to stay over for another meeting tomorrow, that he’d okay it? If y’all have girlfriends, call them to come meet you, and y’all just have a little holiday on me.” He smiled knowingly.

  I couldn’t believe my ears. I did have a girlfriend, Dot, a beautiful black-haired white woman of about forty with a figure years of dancing had given her. I had met her the previous year at a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ gathering at Angola. She tried to interest me in the Word, and we fell in love. She was my first girlfriend. She had told her husband, a business executive, who had no objection to Dot and me exchanging passion-filled letters. But he did not know about her prison visits, granted at the discretion of prison authorities for inmates who got few or no visits, or about the speaking trips for which Phelps had just made me eligible. I knew Dot would go anywhere to be with me, although her race might sometimes present problems.