It has been my experience that because of institutional and individual racism, African Americans are born socially dead and spend the rest of their lives fighting to live.
Echoes
Echoes of wisdom I often hear,
a mother’s strength softly in my ears.
Echoes of womanhood shining so bright,
echoes of a mother within darkest night.
Echoes of wisdoms on my mother’s lips, too young
to understand it was in a gentle kiss.
Echoes of love and echoes of fear
Arrogance of manhood wouldn’t let me hear,
Echoes of heartache I still hold close
As I mourn the loss of my one true hero.
Echoes from a mother’s womb,
heartbeats held so dear,
life begins with my first tears.
Echoes of footsteps taken in the past,
echoes of manhood standing in a looking glass.
Echoes of motherhood gentle and near,
echoes of a lost mother I will always hear.
—Albert Woodfox, 1995
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter 1In the Beginning
1960s
Chapter 2The High Steppers
Chapter 3Car Chase
Chapter 4Angola, 1960s
Chapter 5Prison Days
Chapter 6Parole and Back Again
Chapter 7Stickup Artist
Chapter 8Tony’s Green Room
Chapter 9Escape
1970s
Chapter 10Meeting the Black Panther Party
Chapter 11What Is the Party?
Chapter 12NYC Prison Riot
Chapter 13Hostages
Chapter 14Angola, 1971
Chapter 15Herman Wallace
Chapter 16April 17, 1972
Chapter 17CCR
Chapter 18King Arrives
Chapter 19CCR Wars
Chapter 20My Trial, 1973
Chapter 21Herman’s Trial, 1974
Chapter 22King Is Set Up
Chapter 23Gary Tyler
Chapter 24Food Slots
Chapter 25My Greatest Achievement
Chapter 26Strip Search Battle
1980s
Chapter 27“I Got You”
Chapter 28Sick Call
Chapter 29The Shakedown and the Sham of the Reclass Board
Chapter 30Comrades
Chapter 31Contact Visit
Chapter 32Maturity
1990s
Chapter 33Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
Chapter 34My Greatest Loss
Chapter 35Preparing for My Trial
Chapter 36Amite City
Chapter 37The Crusaders
Chapter 38My Trial, 1998
Chapter 39Back to Angola
2000–2010
Chapter 40We Stand Together
Chapter 41Hidden Evidence
Chapter 42King Leaves the Belly of the Beast
Chapter 43Torture at Camp J
Chapter 44Cruel and Unusual
Chapter 45“Are You Still Sane?”
Chapter 462008
Chapter 47Never Apart
2011–2016
Chapter 48Torture
Chapter 49Forty Years
Chapter 50Man of Steel
Chapter 51The Ends of Justice
Chapter 52Theories
Chapter 53The Struggle Continues
Chapter 54A Plea for Freedom, Not Justice
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
February 19, 2016
I woke in the dark. Everything I owned fit into two plastic garbage bags in the corner of my cell. “When are these folks gonna let you out,” my mom used to ask me. Today, Mama, I thought. The first thing I’d do is go to her grave. For years I’d lived with the burden of not saying good-bye to her. That was a heavy weight I’d been carrying.
I rose and made my bed, swept and mopped the floor. I took off my sweatpants and folded them, placing them in one of the bags. I put on an orange prison jumpsuit required for my court appearance that morning. A friend had given me street clothes to wear, for later. I laid them out on my bed.
Many people wrote to me in prison over the years, asking me how I survived four decades in a single cell, locked down 23 hours a day. I turned my cell into a university, I wrote to them, a hall of debate, a law school. By taking a stand and not backing down, I told them. I believed in humanity, I said. I loved myself. The hopelessness, the claustrophobia, the brutality, the fear, I didn’t say. I looked out the window. A news van was parked down the road outside the jail, headlights still on, though it was getting light now. I’ll be able to go anywhere. To see the night sky. I sat back on my bunk and waited.
Chapter 1
In the Beginning
I was born in the “Negro” wing of Charity Hospital in New Orleans, the day after Mardi Gras, February 19, 1947. My mom, Ruby Edwards, was 17. My father was gone. He left her, she told me, because she was from the wrong side of the tracks. We lived in New Orleans until I was five and my mom fell in love with a man named James B. Mable, a chef in the U.S. Navy. He was the first and only man I ever called Daddy. They got married and had four more children, a girl and three boys.
We moved six or seven times to different naval bases during those years. Daddy’s job was to feed the crew of whatever ship he was assigned to. He used to take me onto the ships on weekends when Navy personnel were allowed to bring family. I remember walking to the edge of an aircraft carrier to see the water and he grabbed me by the back of my shirt so I wouldn’t be blown away by strong winds.
I was a rebellious child. When I was seven or eight, I challenged my mom to a wrestling match. “I can beat you,” I told her. “If I win you have to wear a dress all day,” she said. It was the worst punishment I could think of but I agreed. She pinned me in a few seconds. I don’t know where she got the dress but I wore it. At least I was keeping my word, she said. “A man ain’t nothing without his word,” she told me. I heard that my whole childhood.
For a while my mom was my world. Proud, determined, and beautiful, she took care of us. She couldn’t read or write but she could add and subtract and was good with money; she could squeeze a penny until it screamed. Growing up in the Jim Crow South she had a lot of practice surviving on very little. When Daddy was on leave we stayed at his parents’ small farm where he had grown up in La Grange, North Carolina. There, my grandparents grew watermelons, cabbage, corn, tobacco, and sweet potatoes. Behind the house was a chicken coop and farther back a forest where we picked wild strawberries. My grandmother loved to fish but was afraid of boats. I was the only one she trusted to row her out into the river, which, my mom being from Louisiana, we called a bayou.
My grandmother showed me how to clean and cook the fish we caught. She taught me how to farm. I fed the chickens and worked in the fields. I learned to drive a team of mules at a very early age. When we “cropped tobacca” I drove a slender buggy led by a mule that fit between rows of tobacco. The sides of the buggy were made of cut-up burlap sacks, nailed to posts that stuck up from each corner of the wagon. The women in the field broke off the leaves and laid them down flat in the buggy. When the buggy was full I drove it to the curing barn where women tied and hung the tobacco on sticks that were then placed inside the barn on racks. Once the barn was full the heat was turned on and the tobacco would be cured before being shipped and sold to tobacco factories. When I was nine or ten I’d hitchhike back and forth to a job at a tobacco factory in Winston-Salem, 170 miles each way. Sometimes the drivers would make
conversation, other times they wouldn’t. My job was to help roll the tobacco barrels to a scale. A lot of kids my age worked there.
When I was 11, everything changed. Daddy was forced by the Navy to retire after 25 years and we moved to La Grange full-time. He went from being a master chief petty officer, the highest noncommissioned rank you can achieve in the Navy, to being a black man living on a farm in North Carolina. Without the responsibility and respect he was given in the Navy, he lost his self-esteem. He started drinking and took his frustration and rage out on my mom. Daddy never hit me or my brothers or sister. He beat my mom. When he hit my mom, she screamed and tried to fight back, but she was a small woman. He overpowered her with his size and strength. We never knew when he was going to explode in anger and bitterness. Nothing warned us in advance how he would react on any given day so we lived in constant confusion and fear. One time he beat my mom so badly his sisters came around and told her they were afraid for her life. If she didn’t leave, they said, he might kill her. My mom didn’t want to go but some part of her knew if she stayed with Daddy she was in danger. Sooner or later the violence he used against her might be used against her children. She made a secret plan with Daddy’s sisters to take us kids and run away. Because of her limited education and experience the only place she felt safe was in New Orleans, where she was born and raised. So, New Orleans was her destination.
On the day Mama planned for us to go, Daddy was getting ready to leave the house when my five-year-old sister, Violetta, said she wanted to go with him. My little brother James, who was three, said he wanted to go too. Mama spoke to Violetta: “Why don’t you stay home, Vi. I think you should stay.” Violetta was Daddy’s favorite child and he said she could go with him. James could come too. We all watched them walk out the door. Mama turned to my aunties and said, “I ain’t going. Not without my children.” They told her in the strongest words possible that she had to leave because her life, and the lives of her children, depended on it. They promised they’d send Vi and James along behind us with someone. It was the hardest decision my mom ever made. She took me; my brother Haywood, who was two; and the baby, Michael, not a year yet, to the Greyhound bus station. We boarded the bus and rode all the way to New Orleans without Vi and James. Mama cried off and on the whole way. She was filled with anger, fear, and remorse because she felt as though she’d abandoned two of her children, even though she knew she’d see them in a matter of days or weeks. She never imagined that years would pass before she would see them again. Had she known, our lives would have been different, because she never would have left.
At the bus station in New Orleans, Mama called her brother on a pay phone. Uncle Joe came to get us with Aunt Gussie. They drove us to a house she was renting. I’ll never forget the address, 918 North Villere Street, in the Sixth Ward. Inside, Aunt Gussie led us down a long hallway to two small rooms in the back. One of the rooms had a fireplace and became our makeshift kitchen. Mama put a bunk bed in there for me and my brothers. She took the other room as her bedroom. In order to use the toilet, we had to walk out the front door and around the house to the backyard. It was located in a little room attached behind the house. There was a bathtub in a small room that separated Aunt Gussie’s kitchen from our two rooms, but my mom always made us take baths in a big metal tub in our kitchen. Mama warmed up water on the little stove and poured it in the tub for us. There was a slop jar in the corner we used as a temporary toilet at night. We put pine oil in it to keep down the odor. One of our chores each morning was to empty the slop jar.
The city of New Orleans is made up of wards, and we lived in the Sixth Ward, also called the Treme. It was a black neighborhood in those days, a mix of working-class and poor people. We lived in the poor section. Claiborne Avenue was the busiest street in the Treme because most of the businesses in the Sixth Ward were located there. It was our Canal Street, the main business area of New Orleans. Small black-owned businesses like grocery stores, hair salons, dress shops, laundromats, barbershops, bakeries, and bars lined Claiborne Ave. The middle of Claiborne was covered in grass and trees and called “neutral ground.” It was a favorite gathering place for people in the neighborhood during Mardi Gras season and other major holidays. Everyone set up barbecue pits and picnics on neutral ground. After school, my friends and I played tackle football there in the shade of the trees that lined Claiborne.
When we weren’t playing on neutral ground we played stickball in the street. If it wasn’t too hot, children played barefoot, saving their shoes for school. Almost all the houses in the Sixth Ward were the same, we called them “shotgun houses.” If you stood at the front door and fired a shotgun, the ball shot would go straight out the back door. Our house was a double shotgun. Every house on my street had a small porch or steps in the front where people gathered. Telephone poles were on either side of the street with sagging, crisscrossing wires between them. There wasn’t a tall building in sight, except for a church steeple here and there and Joseph A. Craig Elementary School. Every house had a side alley lined by a fence. My friends and I jumped the fences to take shortcuts from street to street. Later we jumped fences running from the police.
My mom wanted the best for us, but since she was functionally illiterate she couldn’t get what would be considered a regular job. So, she took odd jobs and did whatever was necessary to provide for us, and sometimes that included prostituting herself. Only 28 when we moved back to New Orleans, and in spite of having five children, my mom was still a very beautiful woman. She worked in bars and nightclubs as a barmaid, hustling tricks and rolling drunks. Outside there was poverty but inside our house my mom created an oasis for us. She always made enough money to buy us clothes, put food on the table, and pay Aunt Gussie rent. She cared a lot about making sure we had clothes that fit. Most of the kids I grew up with wore hand-me-down clothes that were too big or too small. Some kids wore pants that stopped at the ankles. We called them “ankle-whippers.” Mama told us she wanted us to have better than what she had when she was a child. She always got us something new to wear for the first day of school. I didn’t realize until I was much older the sacrifices she made to give us these basic necessities.
She used to say, “I don’t want my children to do the things I have to do to make a living.” And, “I want my children to have a better life.” But sometimes our need to survive poverty got in the way. When money was tight and there was no food in the house I shoplifted bread and canned goods. It never felt like a crime to me, it was survival. In every other way, we made do. For some meals, Aunt Gussie and I would fish for perch or mullet in Bayou St. John. If my shoes had holes on the bottom I put a layer of newspaper inside so I could still wear them. I was proud though. I didn’t want anyone to see the holes in my shoes. At church when it was time to kneel I would half crouch, kneeling on one knee so I could keep the shoe with the holes flat on the floor so nobody behind me would see the holes. One time a nun walked to the end of my pew and loudly told me to kneel on both knees. When I wouldn’t do it, she ordered me to come out into the aisle between the pews. I walked to where she was standing and once again she ordered me to kneel. Now everyone was looking at me. If I knelt the whole congregation behind me would see the holes in my shoe. I refused. She grabbed my collarbone and tried to force me to my knees. When I resisted she told me to get out. I went back to church sometimes with my mom but I never forgot the cruelty of this nun.
Aunt Gussie went to a Baptist church. Sometimes she took me to a gospel concert at her church, and I enjoyed the harmonies and voices. Aunt Gussie used to give me a dollar on Thursdays to go get her a “blessed candle” from her church. One Thursday on the way to get her a candle I noticed her pastor in the corner store when I walked by. He was holding a box full of candles, which cost 50 cents each at the store. I followed him. I wanted to watch him bless the candles, and expected to see him perform some kind of ceremony when he got to the church, but he just took the candles from the box and put them on the table for people to b
uy for a dollar. That was a shock because back in those days 50 cents was a lot of money.
I never believed in God, even as a child. I couldn’t understand the idea of an all-powerful being. But I always considered myself to be spiritual. For me, spirituality is a feeling of connection beyond yourself. We had an old dog we called Trixie and at times I felt as though I knew what Trixie was thinking. To me that was spiritual.
During the days, my brothers and I were sometimes on our own. My mom might be sleeping off a hangover or was too exhausted to get up from hustling all night. Often, she didn’t get home until six in the morning. Sometimes I snuck into her room after she went to bed and hid the money she made that night so if her boyfriend came around that day he wouldn’t get it. It didn’t do any good. If my mother was in love with a man she would give him anything she had, including her money.
Aunt Gussie cooked and helped out. We all did chores, cleaning the floors, ironing our clothes. I remember pressing clothes with an old-fashioned iron that was heated on the stove. We learned to take care of ourselves. We always took care of one another. When I was 12 my baby brother Donald was born. His dad was a merchant marine named Pete who had an off-and-on relationship with my mom for many years.
Everything in those days was segregated between whites and blacks. Black people weren’t allowed to go to a lot of places because of Jim Crow laws. At the movies, black people could only sit in the balcony. We were barred from sitting in the seats downstairs. We weren’t allowed to stand in the lobby or at the concession counter. To buy popcorn or any of the other snacks we had to wait by the lobby door until a white usher walked by so we could give him our money and order. The usher would bring back our change and candy or popcorn, or whatever was left over at the concessions.
The only time I really had contact with white people was when we went to the French Quarter or to the shopping district on Canal Street. The first time I felt that a white person could be a threat to me I was standing at a bus stop at the corner of Dumaine and Villere with my mom when two white police officers drove by in a patrol car. She put her hand on my shoulder protectively and moved me behind her. As I got older I noticed white people would address black grown-ups as “boy” or “girl” and I felt the disrespect of it.
Solitary Page 1
