Writing My Wrongs

by Shaka Senghor

  I didn’t know what to expect from the sentencing. My lawyer had assured me that I was looking at no more than ten years. He said the judge would be lenient because of my age and the fact that I had been shot a couple of years earlier, so I took his advice when he said I should plead guilty. While I wasn’t excited about doing the next ten years in prison, I had seen guys get sentenced to forty, fifty, and sixty years for similar charges. Ten years wasn’t nothing, but it was a trip to the beach compared to fifty years or life behind bars.

  I wasn’t an idiot. I had a GED, and I had done well in school—but I had a hard time understanding the subtleties of the law as it applied to my plea agreement. It was my understanding that my lawyer had already made the deal to get me ten years, but when I approached the bench, the judge informed me that there was no preexisting sentence agreement in place, and I could be sentenced to any number of years, including life.

  There were so many emotions and thoughts running through my head. I was still a child, and everything about the legal system was intimidating, so instead of trying to buy time or take my case to trial, I went along with the program. I pled guilty.

  “Mr. White,” the judge said, “it is the court’s understanding that you will enter a no-contest plea to the charge of murder in the second degree.”

  He looked up at me from a stack of papers. “You do understand that this means you are forfeiting your right to a bench trial or trial by a jury of your peers. And that you are agreeing to be sentenced to any number of years up to life in prison by this judge.” I nodded.

  He then asked if I had anything to say, and I told him I did. I apologized to the victim’s family and asked them to forgive me for what I had done to their loved one. I then asked the judge for leniency.

  After I was done speaking, the judge looked down at the sentencing guidelines. I could hear deep breathing behind me and the sound of someone nervously tapping a foot on the floor. In that moment, I was too terrified to note how strange it was that my life and future were being determined by a set of calculations on a piece of paper.

  The judge finished with his calculations and looked back up at me. “In the matter of James White, it is the court’s decision that Mr. White shall be sentenced to serve two years for felony firearm possession, and fifteen to forty years for murder in the second degree, to be served consecutively in the Michigan Department of Corrections.”

  My knees buckled. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I had hardly begun to live. I couldn’t even comprehend the thought of spending two, maybe even four, decades of my life behind bars. My shoulders slumped forward as I lowered my head, and I could hear my mother and Brenda crying behind me. I was too afraid to turn around and face them. Instead, I turned and walked toward the door, with the bailiff leading me back to the bullpen.

  When I stepped into the bullpen, everyone went silent. They hadn’t heard what happened in the courtroom, but they could tell from my reaction that it was serious.

  I sat back down on the bench where I had left my bag and rested my head against the wall. My eyes felt like they were going to burst. Slowly, I began shutting down my mind, shutting out the memories of everything that used to make me happy in life. I no longer wanted to think of the things that used to be; I had a sentence to serve, and I couldn’t afford to be distracted by thoughts of everything I had lost.

  As I sat there mentally deleting the files from my past, my lawyer called me to the visiting booth. He told me about my appeal and my rights, but he might as well have been explaining the blueprints to the Great Wall of China. My sadness was already giving way to a deep, dark anger that made it impossible to think about anything else. Fortunately, no one in the bullpen asked me any questions, because my reaction would have left me with even more charges to face.

  After a minute of staring at the floor, I looked to my left and noticed Seven luring a white guy into the small bathroom area inside the bullpen. Evil and perversity dripped from his pores like sweat, and it sickened me to know that I would be spending the next seventeen years of my life around men like him.

  —

  TWO DAYS LATER, I was transferred upstate to Riverside Correctional Facility, where the state of Michigan quarantined all prisoners under the age of twenty-one. It was a two-and-a-half-hour ride from Detroit to Ionia, and when we finally pulled up to the prison, my heart started pounding. The concertina-wired fences looked menacing, like spiraling rows of teeth that were hungry for tender flesh. We circled the parking lot for a minute before pulling through a checkpoint at the front of the prison. The deputies checked their pistols, then came around to the back of the van to order us out. We climbed down and shuffled away from the van, stretching our legs as the guards funneled us inside the building.

  One of the first things I noticed was how neatly manicured the lawns were outside. The prison stood in stark contrast to the dilapidated schools that sat like scabs across Detroit’s decaying landscape. It wasn’t until years later that I understood the politics of it all. It was almost as if the state was more willing to invest money in the upkeep of prisons than in schools.

  The intake process at Riverside was similar to the one at the county jail. We were forced to strip out of our personal clothes and stand around ass-naked in front of more people than I had ever known in my entire nineteen years on earth. It was through this process that I started to become detached from my own body. I no longer felt like I belonged to myself.

  After being dressed out in state blues, we were called up one by one to the desk where an officer waited. When I got there, she asked me my name and told me that I was now prisoner number 219184, urging me to remember that number like I remembered my own name. I thought about her words as I filed over to the next window to retrieve my state-issued clothing.

  At orientation, an officer told us how prison worked and gave us a list of dos and don’ts. He told us if we violated the rules, we would be locked down in our cells or placed in the hole. He told us to never gamble, borrow money, or engage in homosexual sex, and he also cautioned us against playing basketball. He said that all of these things were hotbeds for conflict.

  Some of us, he said, would do easy time; others would mess up and get in a bunch of trouble. Some, he said, wouldn’t make it at all. He didn’t explain what he meant by that, but it wouldn’t be long before I learned exactly what he was talking about.

  —

  IN MY CELL that night, I stood at the window, staring out at the darkening sky. A few panes of glass were missing from the window, and I could feel the cool fall air blowing in from outside. A deep sadness gripped me as I thought about how badly I had messed up my life. I couldn’t stop thinking about the two children I would be leaving behind. My daughter from the previous relationship was now five months old, and Brenda was about five months pregnant. It was extremely painful to know I had helped bring two lives into the world but would be unable to care for and nurture them.

  I started talking to God and asking him why he had allowed this to happen to me. I couldn’t make any sense of the deep pit of darkness I had fallen into. Every bad thing that ever happened to me came floating back as I stared out at the sky. I started feeling sorry for myself, but that feeling soon turned to anger. I got angry with God. I got angry at my parents, my teachers, and everyone else I felt had let me down. I felt unlovable, like no one cared enough about me to wonder why I had veered so far off the path. Never once did I stop to think about how much I had let myself down. As my anger grew, I looked out my cell window and noticed several alley cats sniffing around a garbage can near the back of the main chow hall. In that moment, I would have given anything to be one of them, picking through the garbage, but free to roam the world.

  —

  IN THE MONTHS that followed, my social circle remained small. It was difficult being alone in prison, but I would rather do my time alone than deal with guys who were fake or who didn’t share my values. More important, I was trying to figure out how to get home to my family.
/>
  I missed everything about home, and I tried to connect with my father and Brenda whenever I could. The hardest conversation was the first time that I called my father from prison. In the middle of our call, he broke down crying, and I was at a loss for words. It was the first time that I realized I had hurt my father deeply. I could only imagine what it was like for him, having to explain to his friends that his son was in prison and would be there for nearly two decades, or longer. He told me that he and my stepmother were going to come up and see me soon, and then we hung up. Georgia and Brenda were planning to come see me as well, so for the next couple of days, I focused on my upcoming visits, pacing my cell floor each night in anticipation of getting a little piece of home.

  During the day, I read whatever novels I could get my hands on. I had even started reading the Bible. I mostly read the stories that I thought fit my situation (like Job’s), but I wasn’t gaining the sense of peace that I desired. So I put the Bible down and focused on the escape that novels provided.

  One day, I was mopping the floor when an officer called me into his office and told me to get ready because I had a visit. I was bursting with excitement as I walked back down to my cell. I went into the bathroom and freshened up, then headed to the visiting room. When I set eyes on Brenda, a deep sense of longing overcame me. She looked radiant with the baby showing, and her smile was beautiful and comforting. We embraced and kissed each other tenderly, as though it was our first time. She placed my hand on her stomach when the baby started kicking, and I felt a surge of guilt shoot through my body. Brenda looked so vulnerable and there was nothing I could do to be there for her.

  Brenda and Georgia caught me up on what was happening back in the ’hood. We talked about the baby and its due date. Brenda said that she wanted to marry me when I came home and assured me that she would always be there for me. I listened to her, but emotionally I was shutting down the part of me that would have hoped on that possibility. I knew she wouldn’t be able to handle the pressure of being there for me over the long haul, and I didn’t want to open myself up to the pain of thinking about it. Little did I know how true that intuition would prove to be. As it turned out, that visit would be the last time I’d see her during my incarceration.

  The following week, I got a second visit from my family. My father brought my stepmother, stepbrother, two younger sisters, and Brenda along with him, but Brenda wasn’t allowed to come in because of an issue with her ID. My father told me that she was in the lobby crying, but she would be all right. He said she told him to tell me that she loved me.

  We spent the visit talking about how I was adjusting to prison. As we talked, I stared at my young siblings and was struck by just how badly I had failed them as a big brother.

  My younger sister Nakia looked up at me and asked me some of the questions I feared. “Bro, are you all right? What is it like in there?” Her questions were innocent, yet loaded. Behind those seemingly simple questions was a whole lot of fear, and I now understand why this was the case. When someone gets locked up, so does their family.

  When the visit was over, I went straight back to my cell. I didn’t want to talk to anyone because I wanted to hold on to every morsel of that visit for as long as I could. I wanted the smell of my family to cling to my nostrils for as long as possible, I wanted to hold on to the feeling of their touch. It was the only reminder I had of my own humanity.

  9

  EAST MARGARET STREET

  Detroit, Michigan

  1986

  Tamica’s place was the perfect setup for me. Her building had a built-in clientele, with addicts occupying nearly every apartment on all three floors. Once our neighbors knew I had a sack, all I had to do was sit in front of the building and serve them as they hustled up whatever money they could. I had stopped smoking the laced joints, and within weeks, the money was rolling in. I could feel my swagger coming back.

  I went shopping down in Highland Park and came back with some fly Ballys, a handful of silk shirts, and a couple of outfits from Guess. I started hanging around the corner on a street named Savannah, where all the neighborhood girls would go. They adored me, no doubt because I was generous with my ill-gotten capital, and their attention made me feel like a ’hood celebrity.

  Tamica’s neighborhood was right down the street from Palmer Park, which was prime real estate for drugs and prostitution. The transvestites who hung out in the park spent hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars a day. My friends from Savannah would hang out at a nearby restaurant called Ted’s, and we would laugh as we watched streams of balding white men roam up and down Woodward, trying to find themselves a transvestite or crack whore. Most of them drove luxury sedans and had traveled there from the suburbs.

  This was one of the ’hood’s many contradictions. Affluent white men were free to come into our community to buy drugs and sex as they pleased. If they got pulled over for soliciting, more often than not they were given a slap on the wrist and returned to the safety of the suburbs. But for us, the parks we had once played in as children were no longer safe, and the streets that had once been a source of pride were now forgotten cesspools that the city would rather forget. I continued selling over the course of that year, and things were beginning to look promising. My two older brothers had come up from Chicago, and we began flipping sacks together. Soon, I moved with my brother Alan back to our old neighborhood. Alan’s girlfriend also moved up with their daughter, making our house feel like a home for the first time I could remember. It wasn’t long, however, before the brutality of the streets reared its ugly head again.

  One day, we were all standing outside kicking it when a female named Pig came running down the street, screaming and crying. She told us that her cousin Shannon Bell had been shot and killed.

  Damn, I thought. I was just talking to him the other day. I hadn’t seen Shannon much since our days in elementary school, but we ran into each other on Glenfield from time to time and would hang out whenever he came to visit Pig and her sister. Now he was gone, shot dead at the tender age of fifteen. Detroit was experiencing another long, bloody year, so we weren’t surprised when the violence claimed someone we knew. But in the back of our minds, we all had the same lingering questions: Who’s gonna be next? and How soon will it be?

  We never expressed this fear out loud, but our body language spoke for us. Our movements were tense. Our eyes became alert when strangers approached us, and we reacted impulsively to any potential threat. Clearly, the stakes had been raised.

  The ’hood was at war with itself, turning its anger inward like a bloodthirsty cannibal. It destroyed life and left in its wake a stream of torn families, abandoned children, and a vicious cycle of gun violence. No one deserves to see their homies die at such a young age, but that was our reality, and it desensitized us to the good and joy that life could offer. I grew colder inside—if you were cold, at least it meant you weren’t weak.

  I no longer cared if I lived or died. In fact, I started looking forward to the day of my demise. It was a twisted thought, but it gave me a sense of control. If I embraced death, then I wouldn’t have to live in fear of dying—at least that’s what I told myself. The reality was that my true fear was of living, because living had become too painful. Around each corner, I saw a bullet with my name on it. In every car that sped by, I saw a death machine chauffeured by the grim reaper himself.

  I knew that it was only a matter of time before I would have to kill or be killed. If I was quick on the draw, it would be the former. But if not, I would join the hundreds of young men and women who were lost in the war that rages through our community. How can a child expect to exist like this and not go insane?

  —

  ONE NIGHT TOWARD the end of summer, I was sitting in the living room when I heard loud noises coming from our front porch. When I looked out of the window, I noticed a man with a gun pointed at my brother Alan’s head. Alan’s girlfriend stood nearby with her hands in the air.

  I immediately lea
pt into action. I grabbed a pistol out of the closet, ran out of the back door, and then circled the house. Rounding the front corner, I hollered for the gunman to back away from my brother. As soon as he saw me, he pushed Alan and took off running. I squeezed off several shots as he disappeared around the corner.

  My brother and his girl were unharmed, and the gunman had gotten away. But my heart was pounding from fear and excitement. It was the first time I had fired a gun at another human being.

  Not long after that, Alan decided to relocate to the West Side, to a neighborhood called Brightmoor. Before he moved, he told one of his old friends that she and her daughters could share the house with me, and she became somewhat of a guardian. But my behavior didn’t change under her watch—I continued drinking and sexing and dealing drugs until, finally, my brother Art told me that I needed to move off of Glenfield. He was tired of coming over and seeing the house full of weed smoke, noise, and teenagers trying to act like they were grown.

  I thought I was ready to get my life back on track, so I called my father and let him know that I wanted to come home.

  10

  MICHIGAN REFORMATORY

  Ionia, Michigan

  October 1991

  Thirty days after I completed quarantine, the state transferred me and a motley crew of other inmates to the Michigan Reformatory. The place was known by the name “Gladiator School,” a reference to the Roman Colosseum, where fights to the death were held for people’s entertainment. At MR, stabbings were a daily occurrence, we were told, and other vicious acts of brutality were as much a part of the culture as the putrid slop they served in the chow line.

  As our prison van drove up, the high, gray walls surrounding this antiquated behemoth of a prison stamped out any thoughts of freedom. In its place, we felt only fear.