Dark Spell

by Mara Leveritt

  The sergeant was true to his word. Every now and then, when Jason was overwhelmed, he would come in with his pepper spray and let his own fists fly, pulling men off the boy. In those days, it was rare for anyone to be locked in the hole for fighting, as that space was reserved for stabbings, which, at this time in the unit’s history, were an almost daily occurrence. After breaking up the fights, the sergeant would ask Jason how he was holding up. Jason would respond that he was okay, even as the men around himscreamed, “Catch out, bitch!” It did not take long for Jason to learn the words’ meaning.

  This was a time when Varner held mostly African-Americans— young men who, for a variety of reasons, simmered in deep-seated anger. Within the prison, these inmates had developed their own culture—one they held tightly in common, regardless of what different gangs they may have belonged to back on the streets. Here, on this old plantation, where everyone was treated as a slave, these young men shared a double bond: they knew that they belonged to a race that had been enslaved by white Americans, and they knew that their race was now disproportionately being assigned to the latter-day slavery of imprisonment. They directed their fury at any white inmate unfortunate enough to enter Varner. In short, they were accustomed to beating the white guys out of “their” barracks.

  To “catch out” meant to give up. For a white inmate, it meant conceding that he couldn’t take the beatings anymore and asking to be transferred for his own safety—usually to protective custody. Any inmate who didn’t catch out but who quit resisting was expected to become a sex slave, to be passed around, used and abused, in order to win “protection” and make the beatings stop.

  Jason refused to catch out. And he never quit resisting. When the sergeant came in and broke things up and asked Jason if he was “all right,” he was really asking if Jason was ready to sign up for protective custody. When Jason said “I’m good,” he heard some men around him shout things like, “We’ve got a tough one, boss!” and, “He ain’t no punk bitch but we gonna fuck’m up for killin’ those kids!” Jason would grin through bloodied lips, taking what little victories he could wherever he could because, muddled as he was, it seemed he’d heard a compliment in there.

  After fighting in Seven Barracks for several hours that first Friday night, Jason won a moment’s respite as things began to slow down. By then, he’d felt blows from everyone in the barracks. As he sat in the dayroom, holding his head in his hands, and watching the blood from his face pool between his feet, he thought about his trial and the testimony about the boys’ wounds and how much they must have bled. He felt an infinite sadness at how much violence seeks to destroy the innocent.

  That’s when officers announced shower call. The shower at Varner was built to accommodate one hundred men at once, so men from two barracks were called at a time. Seven Barracks and Eight Barracks showered together. The men in Eight Barracks hadn’t been let loose on Jason yet and were beside themselves with anticipation. So Jason’s battles began anew in that shower. It was a long, brutal and ugly ordeal, but Jason was not raped. The fighting went on and on, but the culture dictated that you would not be raped if you fought. “When guys stopped standing up and fighting,” Jason said, “when they said they were tired of fighting, that’s when they ended up becoming sex slaves.” Jason never stopped fighting. The universe beat and pummeled its rage onto his body all weekend.

  At 5:30 Monday morning, Jason was led out for his first prison job, laboring on a hoe squad under Arkansas’s delta sun. Slaves and prisoners before him had bled and died at this place. He had no idea how many. All he knew was that he was a different person from the kid who had once looked forward to this day: a different Monday in a different summer working a different job for different reasons.

  “I remember when I first went out there into those prison fields under the hot blistering May sun,” he said. “My skin had turned white from being locked in a cell for nearly a year at the county jail during the trial and for the two months at the Diagnostic Unit. I welcomed the sun and it blistered me. It burned my nose, ears and neck, but it felt so good to be outside again. The hoe squad major at the time used to take me up alongside of his truck and make me march while he held his gun on me, telling me not to fall behind or he would kill me for escape. He was mean and cruel but he was not a liar. I knew he wanted to kill me—every day of hoe squad he wanted to—but God stayed his hand.”

  Jason understood that the major was not the only person who would relish the opportunity to kill him. In the hierarchy of prison, his crime made him lower than scum. Yes, he was convicted of murder, but Varner held many who’d killed. Killing a child, though—that was worse. And killing a child as part of a Satanic ritual that included sexual mutilation? Even in the harshness of Varner, that was beyond depraved. Jason was marked, and he knew it. “The way Fogleman spun the story,” he said, “touched every single group’s hate buttons.”67

  Jason worked on the hoe squad for sixty days under supervision of horse-mounted guards called riders. There was a school at the prison, and Jason wanted to get his GED, or General Education Development certificate, which is the equivalent of a high school diploma. But he’d heard the riders “talk bad about people who signed up to go to school to get out of work.” He decided that, before signing up for school, he would try to earn the guards’ respect. “As limited as my choices were,” he said, “I wasn’t going to make one that would reduce my chances around there.”

  Summer—and the intensity of work in the fields—drew to an end. Jason had survived his first two months at Varner. Having completed his mandatory stint on the hoe squad, he was eligible to appear before another classification board. This one consisted of the warden, the assistant warden, the field major, the building major, and most other department heads at the prison, and it presented him with the opportunity to have his class raised a notch, to 1-C status. Any member of the board could prevent that, but no one objected. Next, Jason was asked if he had any work experience. He told them, “I was about to get my first job when this junk happened.” Concluding that Jason had no skills, the administrators assigned him to work in the kitchen.

  While working in the kitchen, Jason applied to attend school and earn his GED. But he was told the program was not available to him because he had “too much time.” In other words, inmates sentenced to life in prison did not need education and therefore should not take up space in the prison’s educational programs. In response, Jason filed a grievance against the administration. It was the only grievance—or official complaint—he would ever file. He was just seventeen and had been in prison for less than a year. “I choose my battles,” he explained. “Having a crappy mattress? I’m not going to win that battle, and it’s just going to label me a trouble maker. But my education was something worth fighting for.”

  The prison relented.68 Jason worked the morning shift in the kitchen, from 3:30 to 11:30 a.m., and then went to school from noon to 3:30. Free-world teachers taught the classes, and when an inmate passed a preliminary test, he could take the GED exam. “It was all very simple, very rudimentary,” Jason recalled. “All I had was a tenth-grade education, and I never had taken any higher levels of math.” Still, within thirty days of starting school, he’d earned his GED.69

  From his start as a dishwasher, Jason worked his way into the bakery that served twenty five hundred men daily. “The kitchen was freaking hot, and the oven was huge,” he said. “You could drive a car into it.” But this was heat with benefits. While bread baked, Jason could take a breather in the kitchen’s air-conditioned office and listen to the radio. The job seemed so relatively normal that Jason forgot the constant presence of watchful guards. Jason’s first experience with getting nabbed by “the police” came while he was a baker. He had found a quarter in a hallway and pocketed it, even though he knew that, in prison, free-world money is contraband. Nor was that the worst of it. A bit earlier, another inmate had helped Jason out when he had a headache by giving him two Motrin capsules that the other in
mate had received from the infirmary. Jason had swallowed one and kept the other. It too was contraband.

  “There was this officer who saw me as someone who just got to prison and didn’t know prison ways,” Jason said. “He had the philosophy that every inmate has something they’re not supposed to have.” The officer shook Jason down, found the quarter and the Motrin, and hauled him to the warden’s office.70 Jason said the meeting went something like this: “They said, ‘We don’t want to bust you on this,’ and I was thinking, ‘I agree it’s petty.’ They said you can get out of this if you tell us what this certain clerk was doing. Write a statement. I was, like, ‘I don’t even know this guy.’ They thought I was lying, so they wrote me a disciplinary for it.”71

  Years later, Jason wrote a poem about that shake-down:

  The List Nefarious: Contraband.

  Holy Bible

  Yellow legal pad full of notes

  Polaroid of family

  a Motrin

  a quarter

  one Speedstick deodorant—dry

  a bar of state soap

  a white three-inch toothbrush with flayed bristles

  a clear tube of Maximum Security Toothpaste—made in China

  two Top Ramen—chicken flavor

  one coffee cup, coffee-stained and plastic

  Opening my locker box

  he is determined to find

  contraband

  Looking inside

  you may decide the box

  is empty

  but it is not.

  Picking up The Holy Bible

  he flips the pages

  they go f-l-l-l-l-l-l-i-i-i-p-p-p-p

  as he thumbs The Book

  upside down

  a single photo floats

  to the ground

  a young woman with blonde hair

  and three equally blonde boys

  in tow

  the one laughing is me

  my arms strain against the chains

  as his boot covers the photo

  dismissively

  the deodorant and toothbrush

  scrape along the bottom metal

  of the box as he shoves them

  aside

  his boots are black

  polished to perfection

  I can see my brother's spiky hair

  and crooked smile

  peeking past the cleats

  as if willing me to remember

  the days we played

  hide and seek

  amidst rows and rows

  of soybeans and cotton

  "Ollyollyoxenfreeeeeeeeee..."

  he doesn't touch

  the state soap

  leaving it to congeal in the box's corner

  instead he reaches for

  the brown stained plastic

  coffee cup

  further in the box

  he leans in deep

  for his prize

  his boots grind away

  at my mother's face

  something brown and muddy

  where her eyes once shined

  gone is her smiling mouth

  that kissed us good night

  "Sweet dreams, sweet dreams,

  sweet dreams..."

  "Aha! What's this?"

  He asks, twinkling in his eyes

  rattling and rolling its contents inside

  He empties the cup into his palm

  His eyebrow shoots up

  "Ooooooooh" he sings in triumph

  as a quarter and Motrin

  tumble into his hand

  "That's contraband."

  Inside prisons, as outside, information can be power, a unit of exchange, something to be bartered. Likewise, not having information—or having it but being unwilling to turn it over— can get a person hurt. Jason wasn’t a snitch, and in the case of the errant clerk, he didn’t even have the information the police wanted. For his silence, Jason got busted from 1-C to 4-C status and ordered back to the hoe squad. Jason returned to the fields clueless as to what awaited him.

  “Emptiness is filling me to the point of agony.”

  ~ Metallica

  “It was summertime,” he recalled, “and we were coming in from hoe squad. It was very bright and hot. When you would come in from outside, it would take a minute for your eyes to adjust. I had just stepped inside the door when somebody just threw me in a choke hold. I saw stars. I had tunnel vision. I knew it was over with. So I started fighting as hard as I could. Somehow I got loose. But then, somebody hit me. I spun around and I saw three guys. I was trying to run away, but I ran straight into this big dude. I mean, he was big. He held me up over his head. I was upside down, perpendicular to the floor, and I could see that I was at eye-level to the exit sign over the door. Then he just brought me down as hard as he could onto the concrete floor. And I was out.”

  The next thing Jason remembered was the sensation of having a long, lighted wooden match stuck up his nostril. Someone was kneeling over him with smelling salts. “It felt like fire inside my head, and my head felt like broken pottery. I tried to raise my hand up, and it was like the gears in my shoulder and arm didn’t work. Then I passed out again.”

  When he woke up in the infirmary, he had no idea how long he’d been out. He saw Mojo and heard him say, “JB, man, you all right?” Then he passed out again. Over the next several hours, Jason would come to and pass out several more times. Once he heard a sergeant ask, “Is this one of the guys who jumped on you?” Jason tried to focus his eyes, “I can’t see,” he said. “Bring him closer.” The inmate’s face was shoved close to Jason’s. Jason said, “Yeah, that’s one of them.” Then he passed out again. He remembered the warden coming— and passing out again. He couldn’t stay conscious for more than a second or two.

  At some point he realized that a night had passed and he needed to use the restroom. He tried to shift out of the bed but collapsed as soon as his feet hit the floor. He passed out again, and this time when he woke it was night, and he was still on the infirmary floor. He managed to stand up, and realizing that he could, he walked out of the infirmary. “A nurse asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘To the barracks,’ and I walked to the barracks. I had a real headache. The guys in the barracks gave me some contraband Motrin, and I went to the bathroom.”

  Having left the infirmary, Jason was still assigned to the hoe squad, so guards demanded that he go out to the fields. “They didn’t give me a sling, or anything for the pain, and ordered me to hoe squad. I didn’t go. So they wrote me a disciplinary.” That meant he had to go before a prison judge. When Jason made his appearance, he recalled, “The judge said, ‘You’re the guy with the broken bones?’ Then he said, ‘Okay,” and let me off the squad for a couple of weeks.”

  Even when Jason had to return to work, he could barely climb up onto the tractor, and once in the fields, he couldn’t keep up with the work. That angered another inmate, who was about to attack him for that. But Jason had some defenders. As he recalled, “Another guy knocked that guy flat out.” It was Montavious Gordon, a kid who’d spent time in the Craighead County Detention Center with Jason and who believed in his innocence. Eventually, a doctor called Jason to the infirmary again, where he was given some x-rays. The images showed a fractured skull and a broken collarbone. The doctor gave Jason some exercises to do to rehabilitate his shoulder.

  There were two TVs in Jason’s barracks. One Saturday, about a week after Jason’s short stint in the infirmary, one of the sets was tuned to Soul Train, and the other to a movie. Jason was sitting in front of the one showing the film, when another inmate came over and flipped the dial to Soul Train. “I’m looking pretty rough,” Jason recalled, “but I said, ‘Hey, I’m watching that movie.’ We exchanged a few choice words, and I ended up watching the show. Well, later that night, when I was on the toilet, a few guys come into the bathroom. One of them jumped me. He kicked me in the face and chest. I ducked my head and he punched my forehead. I heard his hand break or
pop. I jumped up and hit him in the jaw. Just then a sergeant came in and took him off. The back of my head was broken from the earlier incident, but the front of my skull was thicker. Everyone’s is. My head was not further injured, but it hadn’t stopped hurting from the original injury. I had blood draining from my nose forever, big thick clots for a month, like it was coming from my brain.”

  That was Varner. “People were trying to kill each other in there every day, every hour,” Jason said. “There was so much hate.” Besides “Gladiator School,” Varner Unit was also nicknamed “Little Saigon.” Prisoners who’d been to other units knew it as the ADC’s toughest. Guards knew they had their hands full and often felt at risk. Jason said, “It was nothing to see a building major walking around with a black eye. It was pretty rough. I got into lots of fights. I got the crap beat out of me for years. But I’d go straight back into the same barracks. I didn’t run from them. You earn respect by going back in. For me, that meant just being myself. By just talking to people. Or by standing up for myself in fights. But it doesn’t happen overnight.”

  Violence was not limited to the Varner Unit where Jason was. In 1995, an inmate at another unit got out of his cell and stabbed a guard to death. News like that made it out of the prison, but most other news did not. While some prisoners were isolated within cells in each prison, the prisons themselves were isolated, located in rural parts of the state, unconnected to public transportation, distanced from most of the cities where relatives lived. When Jason arrived at Varner, even telephone calls to families were prohibited.

  But in 1995, Arkansas caught up with most other states and began allowing prisoners controlled access to telephones. People from the free world could still not call in, but prisoners could make calls to a limited number of people who were pre-approved by the corrections department—and who were willing to pay steep charges to accept the collect calls. Jason’s mother could not accept many collect calls, so he mostly wrote to her. But news was withheld on both ends. When his stepfather Terry died, nobody told Jason. He, in turn, never told his mom about the broken collarbone and fractured skull.