by Mateo Hoke
PART OF THE AD-SEG MADNESS
Marquette had three tiers of barred cells, not doors. That was the reason it was so goddamned loud. Dudes screaming down the rock all day and night. I preferred the bars to the doors, just not the nerve-racking constant noise. The bars created a greater sense of freedom. I know that sounds super ironic—being behind bars giving a deeper sense of freedom—but it’s true. There was more openness.
It’s actually difficult to describe the insanity of “the hole.” It’s like the third panel of the painting Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. Surreal and grotesque. The blocks in Marquette were basically big, hollow, rectangular structures with three rows of cells stacked on top of each other back to back. Sound just bounced off the walls. When one prisoner got gassed on your side, we all got gassed. And people getting gassed is an everyday possibility in segregation.
I used to sell cigarettes in the hole. Dudes in GP would send me tobacco, candy, tape players, tapes, batteries, all kinds of stuff. Around 2002 they took all tape players and battery-operated appliances out of segregation in Michigan facilities.
In the hole is where I learned just how powerful cigarettes were. Dudes would go crazy over them. Give up their food, money, whatever. I never used to power trip over it though. I would make some fun out of it to break the monotony. At the time the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was still kind of popular, so I used to run a game show in the hole called Who Wants to Smoke?, where I would pose questions and whoever answered it first would win a cigarette. I would try and make it so that everyone in the area won at least one smoke.
MY ALONENESS WAS COMPLETE
In April 2000 my dad came to visit me with his soon-to-be wife, Kathryn. It was a decent visit. Three months later he was married to Kathryn, and three months after that doctors discovered a massive tumor on his brain.
My father died in March 2002. I shed a tear, but truthfully I didn’t feel anywhere near what I should’ve felt had I had a normal, healthy relationship with the man. The tear I shed was more for myself than my father. Now my aloneness was complete. Because I was in maximum security there was no consideration of going to the funeral.
The days became weeks, the weeks months, and the months years. I worked out, read, studied, thought, and dreamed. As a child and young man I used to dream of academic achievement, financial and career success, and the blessing of family. I was always a relationship dude who wanted a wife and four or five children. Now here I was nearly twenty years later fantasizing about going to a maximum-security prison’s general population yard. Prison had become the limit of my dreams.
I didn’t even think about being free anymore. Around 2005 I had begun to fall into serious despair. I started to envision myself hanging from beams and having other suicidal visions. In a strange, perverted way they used to give me comfort. I guess it was just the thought of my pain finally being over. In another way though, I felt that I deserved my hurt. I had taken someone’s life and nearly taken another one at Carson City. How could I expect sympathy or mercy? Just as my circumstances were the exact opposite of all that I’d planned for, I became the exact opposite of the kind of man that I ever wanted to be.
In either late July or early August, some staff at the facility ran a sting operation and broke my little smuggling ring. They thoroughly searched my cell and found food that I’d saved from a previous meal, which caused me to be placed on seven days of Nutraloaf. Nutraloaf is this horrible concoction of all the food from each meal cooked into one solid block. This was a punishment specifically for dudes in the hole who had food violations or used food containers to throw feces and the like. I never ate a bite of it though. The men in my area made sure that I never went hungry or had to eat that slop.
THE THOUGHT OF GETTING OUT OF THE HOLE!
On the afternoon of Friday, September 2, 2006, an officer came to my cell and told me to back up to the bars and cuff up. I immediately thought they wanted to shake my cell down again because of the smuggling sting. I asked the officer, “What’s this all about?” He said, “The deputy wants to talk to you.” I got to the office and Assistant Deputy Alexander was waiting for me. He said, “Someone is thinking about releasing you to population and I’m here to talk to you about it.” My heart started doing double time.
He asked what I would do if released to population. I had to wing it ’cause I really didn’t know other than the basic stuff like use the phone, eat, go to yard. He made it his business to tell me that if I attempt to do harm to any of their staff, I would be shot and killed. Marquette has gun towers everywhere. He then tells me that since it was the Friday before Labor Day he would think about it over the weekend and make the decision Tuesday. I was so wound up and excited that I literally couldn’t sleep for two days. The thought of getting out of the hole!
Tuesday came, and I didn’t hear anything. Wednesday, nothing. Thursday, I had to visit the in-unit nurse’s station for my annual birthday check-up. That afternoon me and maybe five other guys were in the yard cages when the big, heavy metal door that led to the yard area begins to open up. As soon as I heard the keys against it I had a feeling. One of the officers opens the door, steps just outside of the doorframe and said, “McFarland, Happy Birthday.” And closed the door. I literally jumped for joy. And then dropped to my knees right there in the middle of my cage. What I felt in that moment is indescribable. It was pure exhilaration. A rush of pure happiness! I didn’t know what to do with all that joy. I was bursting at the seams with it. The ironic thing is that once I got back in the block they actually rushed me out. They needed me out before count time. I obliged them. After six and a half years in D block, and eleven years, one month, and eighteen days in the hole they were letting me out and I couldn’t have been more pleased. It had been a long journey through the hole, but I was coming out strong and intact. I thank the love that my mother gave me for keeping me strong and helping me grow.
* * *
27. MDOC is Michigan Department of Corrections.
28. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, in 2010, Michigan incarcerated Blacks at nearly six times the rate of whites, and nearly four times the rate of Latinos.
SONYA CALICO
age: 33
born in: McAllen, Texas
interviewed in: Dallas, Texas
We begin talking with Sonya in 2017, shortly after she was released from her final two-month stint in a Dallas men’s prison. When we meet Sonya near her home in Dallas, she’s wearing a long black dress with a neckline that reveals a “trust no man” tattoo on her chest and her long nails are freshly done in various colorful designs. A tattoo on her neck reads “Mercedes,” an homage to her mother. She speaks quietly, smiling a bit when she talks about her business acumen. Though reserved, Sonya talks openly and honestly about her life, which has taken her from small-town Texas to migrant communities in Idaho and into the depths of American jails.
After being found guilty of fraud, Sonya landed in solitary in both Oklahoma and Texas. Because Sonya is transgender, she was placed in single-cell isolation, supposedly for her own protection. After being released, she got involved with the Trans Pride Initiative, a Dallas nonprofit that works to empower the trans community. With Sonya’s help, TPI was able to reform the way trans women are housed in Dallas county jail. It’s progress Sonya is proud to have been a part of. Countless trans prisoners remain in long-term isolation throughout the United States under the guise of “protective custody.”
MY PARENTS WANTED TO LIVE BETTER
When I was little, I would wanna play with girls in school. I used to hate PE class, I wouldn’t want to play nothing. I was always real feminine even when I was in elementary school. I’m not going to say that I got bullied because I wasn’t, but people used to make fun of me because they knew I was gay.
It was just something I couldn’t help. It was something I was born with. Growing up with
my girl cousins, we played dolls and I was never outside playing with the boys, none of that. I always thought I was a girl. And sometimes I would cry because I’d be like, Why do I have to live this life every day, worry about people laughing at me, making fun of me, saying I’m gay and this and that. Why me? Why me?
I was born in 1985, and I have one older brother named Louis and one younger sister, Lyzette. I’m originally from the valley, from McAllen in south Texas.29 It’s a very small border town. McAllen is a place that nobody would want to go back to. It being a border town, the population was like 95 percent Hispanic. Even the teachers would talk to us in Spanish most of the time. I didn’t learn how to speak English until I was in third grade.
I grew up seeing my parents struggle. I was born in the United States and I’m a US citizen, but both my parents are Mexican. Their names are Mercedes and Edward. They didn’t get US citizenship until I was about eighteen. When I was growing up in McAllen, they were able to find work, but always for just a little pay. Most of it was agricultural work—cabbages and fruit and stuff grew around McAllen. My parents would work in the fields for a few dollars an hour, but it was worse down in Mexico, so they didn’t really mind doing it. But I remember them coming home with their fingers all busted up and things like that.
I have some fond memories of family, especially my mom’s big family who also lived around McAllen. She has ten sisters and three brothers, and they all had a lot of kids. So I had lots of aunties and cousins. We had lots of parties, get-togethers, things like that. But my parents wanted to live better and decided to move.
First we moved to Idaho, around when I was in second grade. One of my mom’s sisters, Aunt Laura, was up there, and they paid more for agricultural work up north. What we didn’t know was that it would be so cold and snowy. I’m not going to lie, the year we stayed up in Idaho made me feel like an immigrant, or the child of immigrants, because of the living situation we had. We stayed in a camp. It was kind of like the projects for agricultural working people. We stayed in a tiny two-bedroom cabin in the fields surrounded by mountains with my aunt Laura’s family, so six kids and four adults in a little two-bedroom. And in the winter it snowed all day, every day. My parents and siblings and I would sleep on the floor with just a space heater that was mounted in the wall. We’d have to keep the stove on just to get enough heat to stay warm.
And then when we had school, we had to walk a mile through two or three feet of snow to get to the bus stop. In Idaho, unlike in McAllen, none of the teachers spoke Spanish. My teacher brought in a translator for me, but I could tell it was hard for her, and I felt really out of place. All the other kids in the class would look at me like, Where’s this person from?
I remember seeing my mom coming home from work and crying because that life was not what she wanted for us. She got in contact with another sister, Deralez, who lived in Dallas. Aunt Deralez was basically like, “I don’t know why you’re up there. Why are you even going through all that when you could come down here and start working with our family here?” My cousin used to own a warehouse back in the day where they made all kinds of plastic molds and stuff.
So we moved to Dallas when I was in third grade, when I was about ten years old. My parents both worked at the factory packing up molded plastics, things like makeup cases. It was much better money.
I remember Dallas being different, in a good way. We lived with my auntie Maria. Her apartment was much bigger than the place we’d had in Idaho. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. The one thing, though, was that Auntie Maria was the one sibling that all the others had problems with. She was just a difficult person about every little thing.
I WANTED TO LIVE LIKE A GIRL
I had a cousin named Cassandra who lived in the next building over from us. She lived with two brothers. She was transsexual, and my auntie Maria didn’t like her because of her lifestyle. One of my aunt’s friends lied to my aunt and told her my mom was trying to move in with Cassandra behind her back. Really my mom had asked Cassandra if she could do laundry at her apartment because Cassandra had a washer and dryer.
I remember that this was Christmas Eve. We had come back from washing clothes at Cassandra’s house and Aunt Maria was waiting for us. When we got there, she said, “I was waiting on you to get back, bitch. How you gonna dare move outta my house behind my back after I moved y’all from over there! As a matter of fact you didn’t even have to take this long to move the fuck out.” My auntie started grabbing all our stuff and she’s throwing it out the front door, and then she threw us out the house.
I was crying and crying. We didn’t have anywhere to go, so Cassandra was like, “Well, come on, I’m not gonna let y’all out like this. Why don’t you come stay over here until you figure out what you wanna do.” So Cassandra allowed us to move in with her, and then she helped my parents find their own apartment.
Cassandra was someone I always looked up to. And I had another cousin—the son of my aunt Maria, actually—who never transitioned but who dressed up as a girl every weekend. I’d be around him and Cassandra a lot when they were getting dressed up and putting makeup on and stuff. It was so interesting to me, and I just wanted to be around them.
I didn’t have any friends in middle school or high school—or only like three or four friends, and they were female. My parents were strict. They expected a lot from us kids, and I always felt like the black sheep. But by fifteen, I’d realized that I was not only gay but that I wanted to live like a girl. I wasn’t getting much out of school, and I just stopped going most of the time. I even got picked up for truancy, and my mom refused to pay the fine. I had to work it off myself. I felt like my parents wouldn’t accept who I was—I feared rejection. So I moved out when I was fifteen. I moved in with another cousin named Rosa who lived half an hour away. That’s when I got my first job, at a Sonic Drive-In. Rosa was the manager there, and she hired me to take the orders out to customers. Rosa was also someone I felt like I could tell everything to, and she and I became closer than I was with even my siblings.
It was actually just supposed to be a summer job, but I wound up liking it, so I took it upon myself to learn how to do every job there. I ended up becoming a manager at the restaurant by the time I was seventeen years old. It was just hard because I was going to school and working. That’s when I left school. I was like, You know what, I don’t even need school, I’m doing good. I was an independent person. Now, being older and looking back, I really wish that I had never left school.
When I was eighteen, I went to a gay club in Dallas for the first time, and I met my first group of friends who are still my friends to this day. I was able to go out with these friends and be so comfortable with them because they’re all gay. I decided to stay away from my family. I’d decided to transition, and I didn’t want to see them until I had. I didn’t want anyone to argue with me or try to talk me out of it. I didn’t want to see them until there was no going back.
I started getting hormone treatments from my auntie when I was eighteen. She showed me how to do it, and then eventually I started giving myself the injections. That was also around the time I first went to jail.
they’d laugh at you
My first arrest was for possession of marijuana. I was driving with a friend through Farmers Branch, which is a suburb of Dallas that’s known for racial profiling. It’s real racist there. I’m Hispanic and my friend is African American, and we got pulled over. When I asked the cops why they pulled me over, they didn’t give me a reason. But they asked to search the car.
We were coming home from picking up some Chinese food and we had two little dime bags of marijuana we’d just picked up. The bags were closed, we hadn’t even smoked. My friend put them under some lo mein noodles in the food. But the cops searched so deep they even dug in the food boxes and found the weed, and I was arrested.
I had no idea what to expect. I’d never been to jail. Even though I’d just starte
d transitioning, I was most scared about what might happen to me because I’m trans. When I got to Lew Sterrett jail, the officers at the jail asked me if I was gay.30 They had a “homosexual tank,” and that’s where they put me.31 I was in jail for about ten or fifteen days. I was lucky to be in the homosexual tank with a girl who’d transitioned. She’d been arrested for prostitution, and she kind of took me under her wing and showed me how to be in there, what to do and what not to do. So my first time in jail wasn’t so bad, but it was still kind of scary just not knowing what to expect.
In my late teens, early twenties, I continued to transition. Other than hormones, I started getting body modifications at twenty, twenty-one. When I was out at clubs I was meeting older transsexual people, and that’s where I met my godmother, Nikki Calico. She looked at me and was like, “There’s something about you that I like, and I’ve always wanted a daughter.” We were compatible—I could tell she was someone like me who just didn’t have many friends growing up. And she helped me with body modifications, how to feminize my face with fillers, that sort of thing. I took her name, Calico, in remembrance of her and in appreciation for everything she taught me and did for me. You know gay people, we consider our friends to be our family. I took her name just to continue it.
One thing about transitioning is that back in the day, if you were a transsexual and went to apply for a regular job and they knew who you were, they’d laugh at you. So there was a lot of pressure to turn to escorting. It was just something that was in the lifestyle. So I turned to that, and I was making a living at it. I’d kept in contact with the girl I’d met in jail, and she showed me how it worked.