Writing My Wrongs

by Shaka Senghor

  But as I sat back listening to the chaos around me, I felt like I had nowhere to turn. The officers had no vested interest in helping me turn my life around. In fact, to most of them, I meant job security—the state had long ago given up the hope that I could be rehabilitated. The other prisoners—well, their talent was for spreading anger and violence, not fostering emotional growth and maturity. It was up to me to become the man and father that I longed to be. So I took a long and painful look at myself, and started the hard work of carving out a sanctuary in the middle of the madness.

  I began treating my time in the hole as if I were in school, setting up my cell each morning like a classroom. I ordered more books from the library than ever before and created courses for myself in subjects from political science and African history to religion and psychology. I created quizzes and exams that I would go back to at the end of the week to make sure I was retaining the information. When I wasn’t studying or writing, I would read for pleasure late into the night.

  But real changes came when I started keeping a journal. Anytime I got angry at one of the other inmates, I would immediately grab a lined notepad and begin writing down what I wanted to do to him and why.

  One day, my neighbor blew my power while trying to get a light for his cigarette. When I asked him if he had done it, he lied, and my immediate thought was that I wanted to kill him. To me, he was a worthless piece of shit who deserved a swift and painful death. I wrote these thoughts down and returned to the pages a few days later. When I read what I had written, it disturbed me. The other inmate had been inconsiderate, no doubt, but was it really meant as a personal attack? And even if it was, did he really deserve to be harmed, or even killed, as payback?

  It’s hard to express how much this process of examination began to change me. Within the lined pages of my notepads, I got in touch with a part of me that didn’t feel fear whenever something didn’t go my way—a part of me that was capable of feeling compassion for the men around me.

  For the first time I could remember, I began to recognize my true self. At the end of the day, I realized that I hadn’t been much different from those who used weapons of ass destruction and banged senselessly on their lockers each night. Inside of me burned that same rage—rage that had nearly cost an officer his life and me the rest of my life in prison. Rage that had compelled me to take a man’s life while I was on the streets, all those years ago. I thought I had been fighting for my dignity and respect, but I hadn’t realized how undignified and disrespectful my anger caused me to be.

  As the months passed, I used my journals to document the wars between the inmates and the officers. Whenever the officers did something that we felt was unjust, we would flood the wing with water from our toilets until they cut the water off. The officers knew that if they didn’t pass out our mail in a timely fashion, or if they served our meals cold, they would soon be wading through ankle-deep water, trying to get the porters to clean it up. The way we saw it, if we didn’t fight back, they would continue to run roughshod over us.

  On one of these occasions, as I stood by my door watching the two-inch-deep pool of water ebb and flow outside of my cell, I couldn’t help thinking about all the people in Third World countries who were dying because they didn’t have clean water. Yet here we were, wasting water as a weapon of war.

  Plenty of days, I felt like the hole would consume my spirit. I swore I couldn’t take one more day smelling another human being’s bodily waste, or one more rejection from the prison’s security classification committee regarding my release from administrative segregation. But with pen and paper, I clung to my sanity. I would sit down and write out my thoughts or work through the message of an inspirational book.

  I was getting deeper into books on spirituality, faith, and meditation, and these activities helped keep me strong and resolute. I was growing to appreciate Eastern philosophy, with its emphasis on personal accountability and responsibility, and I also resumed reading the Bible and other religious texts, because I realized that spirituality is a common thread that connects all of us to one another.

  As I continued to write, I slowly began realizing that I had deep emotional issues that I had never addressed—the biggest one being the hurt from my relationship with my mother. I wrote about how I felt as a child when she would beat me over minor infractions: how vulnerable I was when she forced me to strip before beating me, or when she berated me for something that had been my siblings’ fault. At first, these memories filled me with shame—the same shame I felt on the night I had tried to take my own life. But, looking the situation in the face for the first time, I realized I had been carrying guilt that didn’t belong to me. I had been a little boy, and regardless of my behavior, no child deserves to hear his mother say, “I’m tired of your nappy-headed ass,” or, “I wish you’d never been born.”

  I wrote about my parents’ divorce and the pain it had caused me, discovering that balance and safety were the things I desired most as a child. I began to see the tug-of-war I had played, trying to live up to the expectations of two parents who had very different outlooks on the world. And I began picturing how I would do things differently if I ever got released and had the chance to be a father myself. I knew that my children deserved to grow up with the love and understanding of their parents. I knew that I would never make them feel like they were a burden to me.

  I wrote about the physical violence I had suffered in my life, and how it had made me feel toward people. The way I had come to see it, no one had ever felt anything for me, so I didn’t have the obligation to care about anybody else. I discovered layers upon layers of scars, from feeling unloved and abandoned, to feeling like no one would ever care for me or stand up in my defense. I discovered that, like many young males who grow up in distressed neighborhoods, I probably suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. I had suppressed these feelings because there was no one I could talk to about them. I didn’t have the tools to process all I had experienced, and those feelings had festered like rotten meat, turning into the source of the violence that had possessed me for all of these years.

  Each time I filled a page of my journal, I felt as if a great weight had been lifted. No longer did I feel the old familiar bitterness; I was learning a new way to get it out. No longer did I need to carry my anger around inside of me in a tight little ball, keeping me one provocation away from an explosion.

  I also wrote books. The first was a novel called Shadowatchers. It was about a group of young men and women who vow to make their neighborhood a better place after speaking to the ghosts of famous civil rights figures like Rosa Parks and Malcolm X. I also penned a novel called Flagrant Foul, which followed the story of a young woman who is sent to prison after getting into her boyfriend’s car that turned out to be loaded with drugs.

  With each day that passed, I could feel myself growing stronger and stronger. The pain from years of abuse and neglect began to dissipate, and my feelings toward my fellow inmates started to soften. I stopped shaming my neighbor, who had a smoking habit that he couldn’t afford, and began slipping him a cigarette whenever he ran out. I even began to embrace the very inmates who made life on our block a living hell, counseling them and helping them navigate their way through their emotions. We would lie on the floor and talk beneath our doors or through our power sockets, sharing our thoughts on life and the struggles we were going through.

  Each day in the hole was a test of my will to survive, as the insanity continued to unfold around me, but the act of writing about the things I saw helped to take away their power.

  —

  THE OTHER THING that kept me sane was writing letters to my family. I had written them letters in general population, but being in solitary was a different experience. I was beginning to change and truly grow for the first time in my life, and I was excited to share what I was learning with my father, my siblings, and the friends I loved most. Sometimes I wouldn’t get a letter in return, but it didn’t stop me from writing.
I needed to get my thoughts and feelings out, and when I was sitting at my desk writing, it made me feel connected to the other person, even if only for an hour.

  Writing these letters made me remember the first time my son wrote me, four years into my incarceration. He was four years old at the time, and my father had mailed the letter off for him. It was written on the same green paper with the same thick black pencil that I had used as a child. I don’t remember the details of what he wrote, but I’ll always remember what was written at the bottom of the page:

  “I love you daddy.”

  Those four words pressed on my heart like boulders. I felt like a cheat. I hadn’t done one thing to earn Li’l Jay’s love. Not once had I stayed up late at night feeding him a warm bottle of milk. Not once had I changed a diaper full of his poop, rocked him to sleep, or sat by his bed to read him a story. His love was something I had not earned.

  We continued to write each other over the years, all the while growing closer and closer. I watched in amazement as Li’l Jay transformed from a curious toddler into a scholarly young man who took care of himself and treated others with respect. But the day I truly came to appreciate his growth came three years into this time in the hole, when Li’l Jay sent the most important letter I would ever receive.

  —

  WHEN THE SECOND-SHIFT officer slid a bundle of letters beneath my door, I had no idea how my life was about to change. I had taken steps to change my life through reading and journaling, but I still felt like something was missing. I had learned to not act on my anger and fear, but I still felt those impulses. And the reality was, I was still in prison, and if I wanted to survive, I needed to act according to the “law of the jungle” that governed prison life.

  I swooped up the bundle of mail and rifled through the letters to see who had taken the time to connect with me. There was a letter from a friend at another prison, one from my father, and last, a letter from Li’l Jay.

  By then, my son was ten years old, and the sight of an envelope addressed in his squiggly handwriting filled my spirit with joy. I hastily read the two other letters, then sat down to relish the one from my son. But as I tore open the envelope and began reading, I saw that this letter was different from the ones he had sent before.

  In the top right-hand corner, Li’l Jay had written in big, capital letters:

  MY MOM TOLD ME WHY YOU’RE IN JAIL, BECAUSE OF MURDER! DON’T KILL DAD PLEASE THAT IS A SIN. JESUS WATCHES WHAT YOU DO. PRAY TO HIM.

  I stared at the small paragraph for what felt like hours. My body trembled violently, and everything inside of me threatened to break in half. For the first time in my incarceration, I was hit with the truth that my son would grow up to see me as a murderer.

  I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about it before. It’s not that I was planning to hide my past from my son—it’s just that I thought I would be able to sit down and explain it to him when I felt he was mature enough for the conversation. But as I read Li’l Jay’s words, reality kicked me in the gut, and the pain of not knowing what to say spread through my body like cancer.

  I didn’t know the context of the conversation that he had with his mother. Had Brenda sat him down and explained it to him as she tried to explain my absence? Had she told him I was a killer to scare him into being a good boy? Had she told it to him out of anger or frustration?

  I didn’t know, so I wasn’t sure how to respond. The only thing I was sure of was that I had to do everything in my power to turn my life around. It was the only way I could show my son that I was not a monster.

  His letter continued:

  Dear daddy, I wonder how you’re doing in there. I’m doing fine. When I think about you, it makes me feel sad with no daddy around to wake me up and go work out and be strong like you. I have to do it all by myself. It bothers me the way I miss you. I pray and pray one day my prayer may come true and we’ll be together 4 life. It’s the anger in my heart that hurts me the most without a dad in the house. My mama said I am the man of the house. She tells me I have to take over the anger so I won’t be in jail.

  These words touched me in places only a child could reach. Li’l Jay’s candor made me smile. He had not yet fallen into the adult habits of making excuses and rationalizing bad decisions. He was unhindered by arbitrarily imposed ideas of what was too impolite or embarrassing to share, so he said exactly what he felt.

  Each word seemed to scrape away the scar tissue that had formed around my heart. The words tore off my facade of ’hood toughness and prison savvy. My crime was no badge of honor in my son’s eyes—it was a scarlet letter that signified how badly I had failed him and the other young Black males in my neighborhood, many of whom would die or spend their lives in prison for trying to emulate me.

  When I finished reading, I was scared for Li’l Jay and all of the other young men who had fathers like me—fathers who were languishing away in prison cells while their sons grew up lost and angry. I had acknowledged my guilt years before, but there was a difference between that and accepting responsibility for my actions. My son’s words made me take that final step on my road to redemption.

  I sat his letter down and grabbed a pen. I owed my son the truth, but more than this, I owed him a father. Tears ran down my face as I began writing back. I told him the whole story. I explained how and why I had come to prison. I explained to him what it felt like to be a confused teenager, drunk on anger and malt liquor. I told him how it felt to be shot at the age of seventeen, and how that feeling had distorted my thinking. I made a vow to him that I would not murder again.

  When I finished writing the letter, I was emotionally drained and spiritually exhausted—but I felt better than I had at any other point in my life. Something in me had changed. I no longer needed to rationalize having taken another person’s life. The murder I committed was a senseless act of violence that had shattered people’s lives and torn families apart, including mine. But I knew in my heart that we could begin to pick up the pieces.

  For all of those years, I was consumed by anger. I worried about what would happen if I wasn’t around to save my son from going down the same path I had trod. I never would’ve thought he’d be the one to save me.

  20

  OAKS CORRECTIONAL FACILITY

  Manistee, Michigan

  April 2004

  The porters had picked up the trays from lunch, and the unit was chaotic as usual. A few inmates were banging lockers shut and yelling up and down the tier. Normally, I would have just blocked out the noise, but I couldn’t. Not today. I had too much on my mind.

  I had been in solitary confinement for four and a half years, and I was waiting to hear if this time the administration would respond positively to my request—my fourth since I had been at Oaks—and release me from the hole.

  The first two times, I’d known I didn’t stand a chance. The administration took assaults on staff seriously, so if you found yourself on the wrong end of a situation like that, you had better expect to be held in solitary for at least two years. It wasn’t until my third year in the hole that I felt I had a real chance, but I was denied then, too. How much I had changed by that point didn’t matter.

  Today as I waited, the saying “three strikes and you’re out” echoed in my head. I knew men who had been in solitary for more than twenty years.

  Finally, the counselor arrived at my door and brought the news I had been looking for. “Mr. White, you have been granted a release to general population. I really hope you take advantage of this second chance.”

  I was beyond shocked. Sure, I had hoped that I would be released, but I never believed the day would actually come.

  A week later, they released me from the hole. I did a George Jefferson stroll down the tier, walking out of the building without handcuffs and shackles for the first time in four and a half years.

  Once I got to general population, one of the first things I did was get a word processor and go straight to work typing out the books I had written on priso
n stationery while I was in the hole. By the time I was released, I was on my third novel, a detective story called Crack. It was my favorite of the three because it allowed me to take readers on a journey through the underbelly of street life.

  Day after day, I pecked away on my five-year-old word processor. Every thirteen pages, the memory would fill up, and I would have to print out all of the pages, clear the memory, and start typing again. I was in a cell by myself, so I was able to sit for eight hours at a time typing. Still, it took several days of working from breakfast to lights-out for me to finish a manuscript.

  A couple months later, they reduced the prison’s security level to close custody (a security level between medium and maximum security) and put us in cells with double bunks. I was matched up with a brother from Lansing I had heard a lot about. BX and I were a part of the same brotherhood, so we shared a lot of the same views about life. We both worked in the law library, a job BX had taken because he was serving fifty-two to seventy-five years and wanted to spend most of his time researching law. By then, I had four years left before my earliest release date—and it felt like a long wait until I met BX. He and I worked out together and talked about our sons. He was constantly reminding me how important it was for me to get out of prison so I that could use my testimony to make a difference in my community, and those words kept me motivated to stay on the right track.

  A few months later, I was transferred to Carson City. I was sad to be leaving BX—but shortly after I arrived at the new spot, there he was, coming through intake and onto my block. BX and I laughed about the coincidence and agreed that there must have been a reason we were relocated to the same joint. We immediately went to work organizing the brothers and facilitating study groups.