Writing My Wrongs

by Shaka Senghor

  By then, it had become clear that my move back home was not working out. My father and I began clashing over me staying out late at night and not going to school. Eventually, he and my stepmother separated, and so he and I moved into an apartment on Greenfield and Plymouth. But before long, I was arrested on a drug charge and sent to a Job Corps program in Prestonsburg, Kentucky.

  Job Corps was an eye-opening experience. Growing up, I didn’t understand much about racial dynamics. My parents had raised us to view all people as people, and since we lived in a neighborhood that was primarily white, I believed them. But during my time in Prestonsburg, I learned that bigotry still exists in some parts of the country.

  Our campus sat on a plot of land surrounded by mountains and forests. We were there to better ourselves by learning trade skills and completing our educations, but there were some in the town who didn’t like the fact that we were there.

  One day, we were evacuated from the building because of a bomb threat. Someone had called and said they would blow up the building if our “city nigger asses” didn’t leave town. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning when we were evacuated from our dorm, and we had to stand outside in the cold for what seemed like an eternity while we waited on the bomb squad to clear the building. As we stood waiting, we watched a cross burning in the woods across from the campus.

  On the face of it, I was doing everything the program was designed to do. I completed my GED and learned carpentry as part of my trade requirement. But even though I was hundreds of miles from home, I had brought my old ways with me, running a black-market store and selling six-dollar joints to give myself money for clothes, alcohol, and whatever else I wanted. Then, five months into the program, I got into a fight with a security guard who had called me “boy” when he ordered me to sit down. They terminated me from the program and packed me on the next Greyhound leaving for Detroit.

  As the miles rolled by on the interstate, I prepared myself for the lecture I knew I would receive from my father when I got home. He had tried his best to get me on the right path, but here I was: back in Detroit, back living the same life I had promised to leave, time and time again.

  Except this time, the consequences of that life would catch up with me. And those consequences would change me forever.

  12

  CARSON CITY CORRECTIONAL FACILITY

  Carson City, Michigan

  May 1992

  In the months following the birth of my son, I became deeply entrenched in my anger. I felt guilty about being an absentee father, but I hadn’t learned to take responsibility for the actions that led me to be taken out of my children’s lives. I was learning a lot about white supremacy and the role it played in filling America’s prisons with young Black males. This knowledge provided the perfect outlet for the toxic anger that was consuming me.

  I anguished over each story of lynching, rape, and oppression, and I began to feel justified in my rage toward white staff and inmates. I was growing dangerously intelligent. What I didn’t realize at the time was how distorted my thinking had become. Instead of going beneath the surface to the root causes of my negative thinking and violent behavior, I covered up my pain by directing it toward white people. This allowed me to justify my outbursts and remain unaccountable for my role in the mess that my life had become.

  On top of that, I was broke. It didn’t take much to survive financially in prison—just a few dollars here and there to buy toiletries, cigarettes, and snacks to supplement the food they served in the chow hall. But I hadn’t been assigned a job yet, and none of my family and friends had sent money in time for me to make it to the store, which was only open every other week. My bunky Murder and I were running low on cigarettes, and because we didn’t know when our next money orders would arrive, neither of us was in a position to borrow from other inmates.

  One night, Murder and I were talking about our financial predicament and the sad fact that we couldn’t even count on our so-called friends to drop a hot twenty dollars on our books. It made me think about the money my friends and I used to spend at the corner store. We would sit there all day, drinking fifths of liquor and forties of beer, smoking cigarettes and weed as we pleased. Where were those friends now that I needed them?

  Murder and I continued talking, and before long, we had devised a plan to rob merchandise from our neighbor, a middle-aged white man who ran a black-market store. We talked about how our neighbor would give the brothers one store item, charge them for two items in return, and then talk down to them when they couldn’t pay back what they owed him. He was no different from the other brothers on the cellblock, who would think nothing of busting another brother’s head or stabbing him to death over a pack of cigarettes; but in our mind, his white skin put him in the same class as the officers who policed the prison, and we decided to rob him the next time he picked up goods for his store. The plan was for me to run into the cell and subdue him while Murder came in behind me and took his stuff.

  The next day, we hung around our cell, watching our neighbor’s every move and keeping an eye on the comings and goings of the officer responsible for our tier. When we noticed our neighbor’s bunky heading for the shower, we knew the timing was right, so we eased back into our cell and cracked the door. I told Murder to look out for the officer while I walked by our neighbor’s cell to make sure he was there.

  I stepped out and walked past our neighbor’s door. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted him sitting on his bunk. I continued walking down the hall to play it off, planning to mount the attack when I returned—but when I turned around, I was shocked to see Murder halfway inside the cell, telling the guy to give up all of his store goods.

  A jolt of fear shot through my body. This wasn’t the plan, and it wasn’t going to work. Murder’s attention was split between holding up the guy and watching out for the police, and our neighbor took the opportunity to try and land a punch. Without a moment to spare, I pulled Murder out of the way and returned a blow that knocked the guy into the cell door. He staggered, covering his face, and Murder jumped on his back, choking him and trying to pull him back into the cell. What started as a robbery attempt had quickly escalated into a full-on assault; our adrenaline was pumping, and we forgot what we had come for.

  I was measuring the guy up for a good punch when I felt someone jump on my back. All I could think about was his bunky sneaking up on me from behind, so I reached back and quickly leaned forward, flipping him over my back and onto the concrete floor, where he landed with a thud. It was then that I realized that this wasn’t the guy’s bunky; it was an officer. Before the reality of what I had done could kick in, several officers had rushed me to the wall and put me in handcuffs.

  A dozen of the guards rushed to the unit, grabbing Murder and throwing him in handcuffs. As they led us away, we could hear the crackling over the radio. The officers had sent out an emergency call to the infirmary because our neighbor had begun having a seizure. The officer who had me by the cuffs told me that I would be charged with murder if the guy died en route to the hospital.

  “I don’t give a fuck,” I snapped. “I ain’t never going home anyway.”

  The officer ignored my bravado. He had seen it all before, and he knew that I really did care, or at least wanted to.

  They brought me to the segregation unit, placing me in a shower cage with a steel door, where I stayed in handcuffs for fifteen minutes. After what felt like an eternity, an officer with the face of a hound dog came to the shower cage and ordered me to back up to the slot in the cage door where he could unlock the handcuffs. But when I backed up to the slot and held my hands up where he could reach them, he unlocked the right-hand cuff and jerked my left arm through the slot, pulling downward in a violent motion.

  “So you like to assault white men, huh? You li’l asshole.” The skin was tearing from my arm as he pulled down on the cuffs even harder.

  “Bitch, when they let me out of the hole, I’m going to kill your hoe ass,” I p
romised through clenched teeth, my arm bone threatening to snap against the bottom of the slot.

  The officer grinned. “Next time, think twice about who you put your hands on, dickhead,” he said, releasing my hand from the cuff. I wrapped my shirt around my arm to stop the flow of blood, cursing the officer and continuing to tell him what I would do to him when I got out of there.

  After a moment, more officers showed up to take me to a new cell. I didn’t know what they would try to do to me, so when they told me to turn around and place my hands behind my back, I hesitated and tensed up. It was then that one of the officers noticed me bleeding and asked if I wanted to see a nurse. Something about his show of concern caused me to relax, so I told him I was okay and allowed him to cuff me up.

  As I was being escorted to a cell, another officer mentioned that they had rushed our neighbor to the hospital, and it wasn’t looking good for us. He also asked me why I was wasting my young life. This was a question I had been asked quite often when I was young, and I never was able to give an answer. All I knew was that I was hurting inside and didn’t give a fuck if I lived or died. I felt like my life was over, so there was nothing more to waste.

  When I entered the cell, I sat down on the bunk and thought briefly about what my father would think when he learned that I had been charged with another count of murder. At the time, I didn’t expect that I would ever get out of prison; but that didn’t mean I wanted to kill another person, especially not over a bag of commissary.

  I stood looking out of the window for what felt like hours before a sergeant came to my cell and read off the charges. I was given a major misconduct for assault on staff, assault on an inmate, and dangerous contraband, for a weapon they had discovered in my cell.

  Within two days, Murder and I were transferred back to the Michigan Reformatory, where I would be placed on long-term segregation status.

  —

  DURING THE FORTY-MINUTE ride back to Ionia, images of the hole tumbled through my head like a gymnast. In prison vernacular, we called it “lay down.” As one prisoner put it, “Because down here, all you can do is lay your ass down and read, lay your ass down and write, or lay your ass down and talk shit all day.” The administration used the much more lofty euphemism “administrative segregation,” which sounded clinical and maybe even benevolent. But when the officers weren’t on record, they called it the hole just like the rest of us.

  I had been in the hole before, but never for more than sixty days. I had heard the horror stories about long-term solitary: how inmates had been found hung in their cells, or mysteriously suffocated with their own socks. I had heard how the officers would come in your cell with the goon squad and beat you two breaths short of death. More than any of the other thoughts, this one worried me most. I had just injured one officer and threatened another. What if they had called their buddies at MR to give me a nice work-over?

  After being processed in, I was escorted to a cellblock known as the “Graves.” The inmates called it that because once you were thrown in the “Graves,” it was as though you were dead to everyone in general population. The cells were so small that you felt like you had been squeezed into a coffin.

  The first thing I noticed on entering the cellblock was the gloomy ambiance that filled the whole place. The windows were painted a somber gray, and the only natural light came from the couple of slivers that snuck through when the officers were nice enough to leave one of the windows cracked. If you wanted to know if it was morning or night, you asked an officer or guessed based on when they passed out our meals.

  When I reached my cell, the bars squeaked open, and the officer ordered me to step inside. Once the bars had closed, he removed my handcuffs and left. I looked around in disgust at the dingy cell. The bed was six inches off of the floor, and the toilet was stuffed behind a small footlocker. In order to sit down and take a dump, I had to remove my whole jumpsuit—it was the only way I could jam my legs behind the locker.

  To my surprise, it was relatively quiet on the block, but I would soon learn that this was the calm before the storm. Most of the inmates in the hole slept the bulk of their days away, only waking up to get their food trays. And when the final meal of the day had been passed out, the cellblock would come alive.

  When the officer made his rounds, I asked him for some cleaning supplies, but he informed me that the porters wouldn’t pass them out until they came around for lunch. I continued to stand at the bars and wait—there was no way I was going to sit or lie down on a mattress that someone else had sweated and farted on.

  The food portions, when they arrived, were nearly a half-size smaller than what I was used to receiving in general population. I devoured the small meal like a ravenous wolf, then placed my tray in the small slot of my cell door. I didn’t really like milk, so I left the carton sitting on the locker. But when they came around to pick up trays, one of the porters whispered that I had better hide the milk in my locker unless I wanted to be placed on “food loaf.” I had never heard of food loaf, the hard loaf of mashed-up food that is served to inmates as punishment.

  I put the carton back on the tray, but the porter shot me another look that said, “Man, you crazy.” That milk I had thrown back on the tray could have bought me a bag of cereal, some juice, or an extra piece of toast. In fact, in the hole, it was an unspoken rule that nothing was to be thrown out. If you could eat it or smoke it, it could be bartered to your advantage.

  As I lay back on my bunk (which I had sanitized using supplies from the porter), my mind raced with all the thoughts I had run from in general population. I dreamt of how soft Brenda’s lips used to feel against mine. I dreamt of how good it felt to guzzle down an ice-cold 40 on a hot summer day. I dreamt of the late-night laughter that echoed through the ’hood as we sat on the porch kicking it at two o’clock in the morning. My dreams were a kaleidoscope of all that my life had been, and all that I had lost.

  I found myself thinking about how I had arrived at this point in my life. Growing up, I never imagined that I would end up caged in a cell, living out my life like an animal. I’m too smart for this shit, I thought angrily as I stared up at the paint-chipped ceiling.

  At some point, all inmates begin to wonder if their existence is really a nightmare, from which at any moment they could wake up and be back home in their own beds. But as the years of your incarceration stretch on, you soon learn that prison is all too real. And for me, things were about to get more real than I could have ever imagined.

  —

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER dinner, the hum of conversation could be heard as inmates discussed religion, politics, and stories from their lives on the streets. As I sat back on my bunk, listening to guys from Flint, Saginaw, and Lansing talking about their neighborhoods, it felt like I was reliving my own memories of life before prison.

  After a while, I got bored with the other inmates’ conversations, so I decided to get up and write a few letters. I wrote one to Brenda, then another to my ex-girlfriend Nycci, and before I knew it, I was writing everyone I knew. The hours spun by quickly as I scratched out letter after letter with the dull tip of a two-inch pencil.

  It was through these letters that I realized writing could serve as a means of escape. With a pencil and a piece of paper, it was almost like I could travel outside of prison and go wherever I desired. I could stand on the corner in my neighborhood, and no one could stop me. I could drive down the freeway to see my ex-girlfriend in Ohio, and the bars and wired fences couldn’t hold me back. Writing was freedom, so I wrote till my fingers were sore.

  When the lights went out at midnight, the cellblock had an eerie feel to it. I was on the bottom floor, toward the end of the tier, and there were no lights in the hall near my cell. I climbed into my bunk and prayed that I could drift off to sleep before the memories of life on the outside came back to haunt me; otherwise, I knew that I would go insane.

  As I lay there willing myself to sleep, the world around me exploded into chaos. “Get y’all
bitch ass up!” a loud voice called. “Ain’t no sleep around here.” This was followed by a sound as loud and startling as a shotgun blast. Boom! Boom! Boom! The sound came relentlessly as the inmate banged down the lid of his footlocker over and over, setting into motion a chain of events that I will never forget.

  For the next four hours the hole became an anarchist stronghold as inmates banged their lockers and hurled racial epithets and homophobic remarks through the air like hand grenades. Some stuffed their toilets with sheets and flushed until water cascaded over the tier like Niagara Falls. I stared out of my cell in disbelief as my floor turned into a wading pool. Trash and sheets that had been set on fire flew out of cells. The officers tried to restore order by turning off the water supply, but the mayhem continued. By the time the cellblock had begun to calm down, dawn was slowly creeping up on us.

  By then, the only thing stirring in the tier was a giant rat the size of a possum, which the inmates had named “Food Loaf,” after the brick of mashed-up food that was fed to disobedient inmates. I watched as Food Loaf sludged through the murky water to retrieve the soggy bread and rotted apple cores that had been thrown out onto the cellblock floors. He moved with a quiet confidence about him that came from having been around hundreds of inmates every day.

  At first, I wondered why none of the inmates had killed Food Loaf. His other mousy cousins hadn’t been so lucky—it’s hard to live alongside vermin who climb in your bed at night or get into your footlocker and nibble on the food you have stored away. But Food Loaf was different. He was kind of like us—an outcast, and a lone survivor—and we could identify with that. So we allowed him to coexist with us.