I climbed down on the floor, peeked under the door, and saw that the string was coming from the cell in front of mine. As I began pulling, I noticed a few magazines slide from beneath his door. Stuffed between the magazines was a short note in which my neighbor introduced himself and let me know that if I ever needed something else to read, I could just holler over at him. His name was Lowrider. He was an older guy, and seemed quiet and laid back, but a couple of days later, I learned that he was in the hole for having sliced up the face of an inmate who owed him some money and failed to pay on time. It was proof that even the most mild-mannered of men could be pushed to aggression in order to survive the rigors of prison life. Still, Lowrider was a cool dude, and I appreciated how on my first day at Standish, he had gone out of his way to make my life a little easier.
Within a couple of days, I had gotten into a nice routine. Standish had a well-stocked library, so I started sending over for books whenever I could. I read a few novels by Stephen King and discovered how creative an author’s imagination could be. It was also during this stretch that I read Roots for the first time and got hip to Terry McMillan. Reading was my refuge, and whenever it came time for the library to drop off our library books, I felt like Santa Claus had just come sliding down the chimney.
It was also during this time that I became acquainted with the psychological disorders that plague so many inmates. In the early nineties, a series of budget cuts had forced the state to close down a number of its mental health institutions, and this trend continued throughout the decade, during which time the patients from defunct clinics were herded into various state prisons. Patients with psychiatric needs are difficult to manage in general population, so most of them end up being housed in administrative segregation, where the hostile environment of the hole exacerbates their psychiatric problems.
One day at Standish, they moved an inmate named Reed across the hall from me. As they were putting him in the cell, he and the officers had a heated exchange. Once the officers had gotten Reed inside, I heard them ordering him to turn around so that they could remove the mask from his face. Peering out the crack beneath my door, I caught a glimpse of the officers carrying a black mesh mask that looked to be straight out of a fetish magazine. I would later learn that they placed these masks on inmates who were considered spitters or biters.
When lunchtime rolled around, the officers returned to Reed’s cell and asked him if he wanted his food loaf. He told them to get the hell away from his door; he’d rather starve to death. I looked down at the small rations on my tray, and hungry as I was, I knew I couldn’t eat without offering to share some with Reed. I liked that he wasn’t willing to bow down and accept inferior treatment.
I slid my “car”—paper that we folded and attached to a string in order to communicate with our neighbors—over to Reed’s cell with a small note attached to ask if he wanted half of my food. He wrote back that he did. I divided half my food and put it in several envelopes, and slid them across to him on my line. He pulled in the package quickly to avoid being detected by the officers.
For the next two weeks, I shared every meal with Reed, until he finally got off of meal restriction.
When they passed out our trays that day, Reed called me to the door. Sometimes on first shift, when one of the cool officers was working, they would leave our window shutters open until they picked up trays, or until they got ready to change shifts. This was the first time they had left Reed’s window open, so this was my first chance to see him face-to-face. He was a tall, corpulent brother with a full beard that made him look like a brown-skinned version of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
“What’s going on, Reed?” I asked as I approached the door.
“You know what?” he began.
“Naw, what?” I asked.
“Man, you a bitch-ass dick sucker. Now, get your hoe ass on your bunk and lay down,” he said, breaking up into a maniacal laughter.
I stood there with my mouth agape and my temper burning as Reed continued to hurl insult after insult at me. This was the first time I had been blatantly disrespected in prison, and I was completely thrown off. Add to this the fact that I had shared half of my meal with this man for two weeks, starving myself and risking being caught and placed on food loaf along with him. I made up my mind that once I was released from the hole, I was going to stab Reed in the neck the very first chance I got. I had to; otherwise the rest of the inmates would feel like they could get away with disrespecting me, or worse.
When I was released to general population a few weeks later, I waited patiently for the day that Reed would get out and I would get my shot at him. But the day never came. As I would learn over the years, there were some inmates who did their entire sentence in the hole to prevent other inmates from getting to them. Anytime these inmates were scheduled for release, they would go out of their way to catch another misconduct, forcing the Security Classification Committee to keep them locked away.
—
BY THE TIME I hit the yard again, I had been in solitary confinement for nearly a year. It felt strange, walking from the segregation unit back to the regular blocks, and it took a minute for me to adjust to walking without shackles and handcuffs.
As I approached my new unit, a group of inmates was released for chow. I walked slowly through the crowd, trying to find a familiar face, but there were none to be found. Most of the guys were in their thirties and forties, which made me feel out of place. Their faces were hopeless, creased with the bitter, jagged lines of stress that mark men doing time in prison.
I was assigned a cell and informed that our unit had already been to chow and yard, so I wouldn’t be able to leave my cell again until the following morning for breakfast. I didn’t own a radio, tape player, or television like the other inmates around me, so I pulled out the Bible and began reading it. When I tired of that, I picked up the Quran and read a few surahs, then said a prayer and sat back on my bunk, listening to the chatter around me. A few inmates stood at their doors talking to one another about what was on television, and I began to feel sad and left out. Up to that point in my bit, I hadn’t received much financial support from my family or friends, and it hurt. Televisions cost around eighty-nine dollars, and I didn’t have a quarter in my account.
When that thought hit me, it nearly caused me to break down. I began cursing everyone who had ever said they loved me. I felt like it was me against the world. My anger began to boil and rage, and I started doing push-ups to release some of the pain and frustration. I don’t remember how many I did in the first set, but I do remember how I refused to get up until my muscles were burning and so tight that I thought they would pop.
On the yard the next day, I met up with a guy I had known on the outside named Day Day. When Day Day found out I had just been released from the hole, he sent me some candy bars and bags of chips, and told me to let him know if I ever needed anything. He also introduced me to a few Melanic brothers who were in our unit. I had officially joined the organization back at Carson City, but I was having trouble feeling at home in it. The brothers I had met were cool, but like the inmates I had seen on the way to my block, they were older, and we didn’t have much in common.
For the first couple of weeks, I kept mostly to myself. Every morning, I would do push-ups in my cell before taking a shower and spending the rest of the day reading until the wee hours of the morning. When they turned the lights out, I would stand by my door, reading by the sliver of light that crept through the window.
After a couple of weeks, I started hooping with Day Day and a few other guys in the unit, and they invited me to join their basketball team. The basketball court was one of the proving grounds on the yard. The games were competitive and the tempers ran hot, so if you stepped onto the court, you had better be ready to defend yourself, in every sense of the word. “No blood, no foul” was the rule, and with the amount of trash talking that went on, it was common for inmates to play basketball with a shank in the sole of their shoe. A
hard foul could lead to a stabbing or, worse, a riot.
Winning meant everything to us. We had been told we were losers our entire lives, and none of us wanted to have that confirmed in anything that we did. In reality, these were meaningless games designed to keep us distracted from our situation, but we took losing personally, as if it defined who we were. Despite the fact that basketball was a constant source of conflict, stabbings, and even murder, the courts stayed full, and the libraries stayed empty.
The first conflict I was involved in at Standish came when KO, one of my Melanic brothers, cursed out a brother name Rimmer-Bey, who was officiating the game. Rimmer-Bey was a respected member of the Moorish Science Temple of America, a group also known as the Moabites. The gym became tense when KO refused to back down from his insults, and one of Rimmer-Bey’s cronies came over, acting like he was going to fight.
We were firm believers that you should always come to the aid of a worthy brother, so I stepped up, ready to jump in the fray. The fight never came, but I would learn later that the guy who had come to Rimmer-Bey’s defense had been a hit man back in Jackson. The guys marveled at how I stood up to him, and it added to my credibility on the yard.
When the basketball season concluded, I vowed not to participate next time, because I realized that KO was a hothead serving a life sentence, and the basketball court was where he took out his frustration. I had just gotten out of solitary, and I wasn’t trying to go back over a basketball game.
—
AFTER ABOUT A MONTH, I was transferred to another unit. I was fortunate to be put in a cell there near a few cool guys who would sneak me their radios and tape players whenever they could, letting me use them for a couple of days at a time. Some other brothers in the unit would send me books by J. A. Rogers, Ivan Van Sertima, Marcus Garvey, and Dr. Chancellor Williams. With each book that they fed me, I felt a part of my soul growing and opening up to commune with my ancestors. I immersed myself in African history and imagined what it was like in ancient Kemet (which had been renamed Egypt by the Greeks). I thought about the pyramids, which have stood the test of time, and wondered how they had been engineered. I thought about Timbuktu and how that society had created a vast trove of knowledge that was the envy of the world. In the short time I was at Standish, I learned more about African history than I had ever learned during all of my years in school.
One day on the yard, I heard a lot of buzz among the brothers. They were excited because a Melanic named Baruti was being moved into our unit. Baruti had a head full of long locks that flowed down his back, and he was ripped with lean muscle from his routine of running several miles a day. The brothers held Baruti in high esteem for his discipline and integrity. He was being moved there after serving time in Ionia Super Max; he had been charged with having caused the death of another inmate. If you believed what the brothers were saying, Baruti had been charged on flimsy evidence and shady testimony. But I always took this kind of information with a grain of salt.
When I finally met Baruti, I was impressed with his calm, quiet demeanor. He wasn’t boastful about his exploits in prison. Instead, he was a wise teacher who taught mostly through his actions. Every morning when we hit the yard, he would focus on his exercise, running vigorously to outpace and outdistance everyone out there. On the days we held study group to discuss what we were reading and what was happening in the world, he always gave me encouraging words. He told me never to take anything at face value and to always be diligent in my research. When I made valid points to help build up the brothers, he would give me a nod and tell me to continue.
Baruti began treating me as if he were an uncle or an older brother, and our relationship made me proud to be a Melanic. He invited me to work out at the pull-up bars with him and a brother named Tim Gree-Bey. At first, the other guys laughed at me; even though I had an athletic build and could do push-ups all day, I could only manage one or two pull-ups before my arms started shaking with exhaustion. But Baruti and Tim told me to never give up, and within a couple of weeks, I went from doing one or two reps a set to doing ten to fifteen.
I continued to absorb as much wisdom as I could during the study sessions with the older brothers. We called these sessions “building,” because their point was to help us construct new lives for ourselves based on spiritual and cultural principles of reciprocity, love, and compassion. “No matter what you do while you are in here,” Baruti would tell me, “never give up on learning and trying to be a better person.” I didn’t always listen to him, but over the years, I would find all that he shared with me to be of great value.
I will never forget how the brothers in the library embraced me when they saw that I came consistently to check out books. Whenever a new title arrived by a Black author, they would hold it for me, and eventually it got to the point where anytime I showed up, they would already have books picked out for me. The brothers made me give detailed reports on the books they gave me, in part because they wanted to know whether they were worth reading, but also because they wanted to make sure I had read them myself. It was because of the wise counsel of Baruti and the other brothers, and the way they challenged me to think, that I was able to leave prison with a sense of purpose.
—
BUT THIS DIDN’T mean that everything I learned or did in the Melanics was positive. This was still prison, still a place ruled by the law of the jungle. And it was through our organization that I became even more practiced in the art of calculated violence.
One day on the yard, I was informed that we were having a security meeting. These informal meetings were organized by the members who were responsible for protecting the brotherhood. Earlier that day, an inmate in another cellblock had gotten into an altercation with one of our members, and it ended with him kicking the brother’s store goods all over the yard. On its own, this might seem like a petty incident, but it wasn’t something we could overlook. If we didn’t retaliate, it could expose us to a more serious attack by other organizations.
During our security meeting, we discovered that the inmate who was responsible for the attack would be working on the yard crew when we were let out for recreation the next day. We began planning our retaliation, and the head of security asked if I wanted to help execute the mission. I agreed without hesitation. I was tired of seeing the other organizations watching us, waiting to see if we would do anything about the incident. Another brother, who was built like an all-pro NFL safety, said he would ride with me, so we strategized with the security staff to set the play in motion the following day. The tricky part would be finding a way to do it without being caught by the officers or the security cameras.
When we settled on a plan, I went back to my regular routine of working out and talking to Tim and Baruti. I wasn’t allowed to discuss the security meeting, but I could tell that the two of them knew what was going on. As we continued working out, Baruti stopped me and said something that it would take a few years for me to appreciate. He told me that I should never allow anyone to misuse me, including my comrades.
At the time, I didn’t fully understand what he was trying to say, but over the years, it would come to make sense. Baruti could see the loyalty I had for my brothers and our cause, but he also saw the naïveté that was common among young, impressionable inmates like me. We held a quixotic view of the movement, and our loyalty was often misguided—something the older, wiser members many times took advantage of. Baruti knew he couldn’t tell me not to go through with the play, but as I reflect on that day, I know that’s what he wished he could say.
When we arrived on the yard the next day, it was time to set our play in motion. The tension in the air was thick. We had alerted the other organizations that we were going to retaliate, and they were all waiting to see when it would happen. For the first time I could remember in my time at Standish, the basketball court was empty.
I could feel my hands sweating as I walked across the yard to meet at the security council’s regular spot. We greeted one another, an
d after a quick briefing, one of the brothers produced a crudely sharpened piece of steel with torn bedsheets wrapped around the bottom as a handle. He passed me the shank, and it looked menacing sitting in my hand. The brother who had agreed to ride with me produced a shank of his own, and we went over the plan for one last time before leaving the meeting post.
We left our spot and walked a few laps around the track, waiting for our prey to reach a location where we knew the cameras wouldn’t be able to see us. As many cameras and gun towers as the prisons had, there were always blind spots, and every inmate knew they were death traps. But our target was clueless as to what was about to happen, and it didn’t take long for him to begin moving in the direction we desired. As he approached the camera’s blind spot, we quickened our pace, sneaking up behind him. Before he could put together what was happening, it was too late.
I grabbed him by his shirt and stabbed him several times in the back and side. When the shank first pierced his skin, he hollered out “What I do?” We stabbed him a few more times before he took off running across the yard.
We then turned and walked toward the far end of the track, where the other security members were waiting to retrieve the shanks. Once the weapons were secured, we took off jogging on the track, blending in with the rest of the joggers, and by the time we reached the pull-up bars, the officers were administering first aid to our target. Within minutes, a siren sounded, and the guards ordered all of us in the yard to go back to our units.
The following day, the yard was abuzz over the stabbing, and our reputation was restored. It was the law of the jungle, and we had acquitted ourselves in full. But even as I basked in the praise of my brothers and the fear of the other inmates, I was feeling conflicted. On one hand, here I was learning about our history and culture and reading about how we needed to love and care for our brothers. On the other hand, whenever a brother did something that we felt violated our code of honor, we dealt with it by stabbing him or busting him in the head. It was a contradiction that never sat well with me, and it wouldn’t be long before it challenged me to make some tough decisions about the Melanics and my role in the organization.
Writing My Wrongs Page 13