I never turned anybody out. I’ve never raped anyone in my life. I didn’t steal people’s shit in prison, but one time I did break into a prisoner’s box. He had been trying to boss me around; we called it “roboting.” I couldn’t let him robot me. If I did other prisoners would lose respect for me or try to robot me themselves. To retaliate a few of us shimmed the lock on his box and took all his property. When he came back, I felt bad. I felt bad every time I did something against my nature. I never ever let my guard down though. If it wasn’t the other prisoners to worry about it was the security staff.
Freemen and inmate guards had the power of life and death in their hands and they had no respect for life. They had ultimate power over every prisoner’s life. At that time, the midsixties, there were no checks and balances; there was no oversight. It was as if the cruelty of Angola’s history, coming out of slavery and convict leasing, leaked into our present world. Angola was run like an antebellum slave plantation. A freeman would slap, humiliate, hit, and yell at a prisoner. If the prisoner talked back he would go to the dungeon. If he physically fought back he’d be badly beaten on his way to the dungeon. Freemen ganged up on prisoners in groups, and they beat prisoners who were handcuffed and in leg restraints. They hollowed out baseball bats and filled them with lead to use for beatings.
Being sent to the dungeon—being “locked up”—was a constant threat. I heard stories about the dungeon, a cellblock not far from the main prison. Prisoners were kept 24 hours a day in a cell shared by other prisoners. Total isolation. Bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We called it “the hole.” The lowest-ranking freeman could put you in the dungeon because of the way you looked at him, or if he didn’t like your face; if you didn’t walk fast enough, or if you walked too fast. Over and over we heard, “Nigger, do this or I’ll lock your ass up, nigger.” Or they called black prisoners “thing.” “What are you looking at, old thing?” “Get moving, old thing, or you’re going to the hole!” Prisoners could be kept in the dungeon for weeks. No paperwork was required.
It’s painful to remember how violent Angola was in those days. I don’t like to go into it. Freemen and inmate guards could physically assault prisoners in any way they wanted. I saw security guards beat down prisoners with baseball bats. I saw prisoners stab other prisoners outside in broad daylight on the walk. There were stabbings at Angola over nothing; prisoners would fight over a football game they were watching on TV. Everyone who wanted to be armed could be. A shank was the easiest thing in the world to get. Men wrapped magazines and phone books around their chests and backs for protection. They wore sunglasses while lying on their bunks so they could look awake while they were sleeping and fake sleep while they were awake.
Chapter 5
Prison Days
Most prisoners had nothing, so everybody was always on the hustle to survive. I prided myself on my hustle out on the street but something about the prisoners’ constant manipulation and hustle got on my nerves. There was no sincere camaraderie between any of them. The biggest myth in the world is that there is honor among thieves. Guys ratted on each other left and right. They wouldn’t do it in front of anyone, but if a prisoner was isolated by himself, nine times out of ten he would make a deal to get out of trouble. Some guys stood strong and didn’t violate the code, and I learned from them. The code was: you didn’t rat, you took your beef, and if you did something that somebody else got busted for—and it didn’t look like he’d get out of it—you came forward. I prided myself on following the code. Even back then I had enough sense to have some honor.
Every prison has a black market, and the black market at Angola was epic. Not everybody goes into prison planning to get into the black market, but sooner or later you want something and somebody comes along who can give it to you and you negotiate. Everything is bought or bartered in prison: soap, socks, sewing needles, sugar. Years later, when I was in solitary confinement, I could get something as impossible as an onion in my cell through Angola’s black market.
Almost anything could be bought, and nearly everyone could be paid off. For a carton of cigarettes, you could bribe an inmate clerk to change a disciplinary report from something serious, like fighting, to something minor, like arguing with a freeman. Paying off security happened all the way to the highest levels of the ranking officers. That’s how prisoner drug dealers operated openly on the main prison yard. Some freemen were rumored to run drugs and other contraband into the prison.
The prisoners—mostly white clerks—who were the dealmakers for the freemen and their superiors had a lot of power. You could pay them $50 for a new job assignment, $20 for a new dorm assignment. The officer would get the cash, and in exchange the prisoner dealmaker would get free rein to gamble and pimp other prisoners without interruption. Security officers paid prisoners off too—with better jobs, safer housing, and more privileges—in exchange for information. A prison snitch was weak. He was broken. He would tell security officers whatever they wanted to hear.
Your success on the black market usually depended on what job you had. Kitchen workers had it best because they could get food and utensils, which were always in high demand. Working in the fields I had nothing to barter with. I got by because my mom always left me some money in my account when she visited. It was always a tussle for my mom to find enough extra money to visit but she came almost every month. A man in New Orleans had a bus he drove to Angola once a week for families of prisoners who had no other way to get there. It cost $12 round-trip; $6 for children. We visited in a large room lined with tables. My mom never asked about what I did on the street so we didn’t talk about my case. I never told her one of the reasons I escaped from Thibodaux jail was that nobody visited me there and I wanted to see her; I wanted to be home. I didn’t tell her I took the rap for Peewee’s brother. We didn’t talk about things like that. I asked her about Aunt Gussie, about my siblings and friends and people in the neighborhood, and she told me everything going on. I was always happy to see her. She was always happy to see me. At the end of her first visit we hugged and she promised to bring my brother Michael, who was 8; and Violetta, who was 13, next time.
Prisoners weren’t allowed to carry cash but each prisoner had an account. His wages—two cents an hour—were deposited in that account along with any cash money he got from friends and family. We were allowed to buy up to $10 or $15 worth of canteen stamps per month, which could be used at the prison store in place of money. Canteen stamps were the currency of the prison. Next to stamps were cigarettes. Freemen preferred to be paid off in canteen stamps. What they weren’t given, they took. The stamps came in a booklet and were torn off as they were used in the store. Prisoners weren’t supposed to carry loose stamps. Some freemen would shake a prisoner down on the walk and confiscate any loose stamps found on the prisoner and keep these for themselves. When a guard shook down dorms or cells he pocketed any loose canteen stamps. Prison regulations forbade guards from having canteen stamps but a freeman could pull a roll of 50 from his pocket to pay for items at the prison store and nobody would blink.
One of the greatest hardships for me in the first few months I was at Angola was getting used to the sameness of every day. Our routine started when the whistle blew around five a.m. We got dressed, washed up, and stood in line to go to breakfast. Each unit was called to the dining hall separately. Oak Unit, where whites were housed, was always called first. Next, the three black units were called in rotating order. There were two guards assigned to each unit. One went with the prisoners into the dining hall; the other one stayed in the guard booth or on the walk, directing traffic, telling prisoners to keep moving. At the dining hall, there was an entrance for whites and a separate entrance for blacks. Each prisoner was given a spoon or fork and then stood in one of the lines in the aisles between rows of tables to get food from prisoners scooping it onto trays from behind steam tables. Blacks and whites stood in separate lines because we were called to the dining hall separately—whites were served by white
prisoners—and sat at different tables. Once seated, we had 15 minutes to eat. When the freemen pointed at your table everyone at that table got up and walked out, placing everything in a bin at the door except the utensil, which we handed to a freeman under the watch of another guard. Dozens of cats congregated outside the exit doors of the dining hall and a lot of prisoners threw them scraps from their pockets on the way out. Everybody who worked that day reported to his job detail to be counted. Before lunch, we all returned to our dorms to be counted, then we went to the dining hall for the same routine for lunch. We did it all again for dinner.
After dinner, we usually had some time on the yard if we wanted. Sometimes there was a movie night (one night for white prisoners, another night for black prisoners). We could play football. Sometimes white and black prisoners played against each other. A lot of guys went back to their dorms and played cards or watched TV. This was repeated day after day. It was hard to get used to.
White prisoners did almost all the administrative work at Angola at that time. The inmate clerk jobs were exclusively held by white prisoners. White prisoners also had most of the jobs on cleaning crews, at the mechanic shops, and at the businesses on prison grounds: the sugar mill, cannery, and tag plant. Black prisoners were mostly in the field, reporting to the sally port after breakfast to be taken out to the fields on the flatbeds of 18-wheelers or on long wagons called “hootenannies,” which were pulled by tractors. Our work in the field changed with the season. We planted crops: cabbage, cotton, spinach, okra, corn, and other vegetables. We harvested the crops when they were grown. There was no farm machinery to help, and most of us didn’t have gloves or proper footwear. Picking cotton was one of the worst jobs in the field. If you didn’t do it right you’d tear up your hands. One time we were clearing out a pasture and I found a trembling baby rabbit in the weeds. His mother was nowhere to be seen, most likely killed by prisoners ahead of me and already over a fire out on the headland, where coffee and food were prepared for the foremen. I picked him up and put him in my pocket to give to my sister Violetta when she visited next time with my mom. Back at the dorm I kept him in a shoebox under my bed. When I gave Vi the baby rabbit she called him Stuff. He became a beloved pet and got real big living in my mom’s house.
The hardest job I ever had in my life was cutting sugarcane, Angola’s main crop. Cutting cane was so brutal that prisoners would pay somebody to break their hands, legs, or ankles, or they would cut themselves during cane season, to get out of doing it. There were old-timers at Angola who made good money breaking prisoners’ bones so men could get out of work. Cutting cane was especially hard in the winter, when it was so cold you couldn’t feel your face. At the end of the day we piled all the cane knives on top of one another. When we came back the next morning they’d be frozen together. We had to set them by a fire to separate them.
We worked side by side in groups of four called crews. The two men inside were called the down row, the two outside were called the fly row. With each step you bent over and grabbed a cane stalk at the bottom with one hand and whacked it with a cane knife held in the other. These long razor-sharp knives had short wooden handles and were difficult to hold over long periods of time. Over and over, bend, whack, stand, on each step. The down row was supposed to stay ahead of the fly row to cut a center path that the fly row could push the cut cane stalks onto. We were pushed to go as fast as we could the whole time. It was the speed they pushed on us that made it so hard. They would put the fittest, fastest workers in the group that went first. Everyone else was supposed to keep up with them. Within each group, if the fly row couldn’t keep up with the down row, the field foreman or freeman would start calling the prisoners’ names. Some guys just couldn’t keep up no matter how hard they tried. If they weren’t able to speed up, the whole crew would be written up for a work offense. In cane season, we worked seven days a week. It was Angola’s most profitable crop; we planted more cane than anything else.
I never got used to the verbal disrespect out in the fields: being called a nigger and constantly told to “hurry up, boy.” I couldn’t stand it, but I could shut it out. I wouldn’t allow a freeman or an inmate guard to put his hand on me though. One day the field foreman grabbed my arm and I resisted, cussing him out. He called the patrol and told them to take me to the hole. A freeman appeared in a police cruiser and drove me to the dungeon. I was charged with aggravated disobedience.
By that time, I didn’t think I could be shocked by anything, but the brutality and pain in the dungeon were worse than anything I’d ever seen. There were four or five men in each six-by-nine-foot cell. There was no bunk, table, or chair in the cell, just a toilet and a sink. Everyone was stripped of all his clothes and underwear and given a jumpsuit to wear. Nobody had any possessions. Each prisoner got two slices of bread three times a day. At five p.m., a guard passed one mattress into the cell. At five a.m., the guard removed the mattress. Usually one or two inmates ran the cell. In some cells bullies took the mattress for themselves all night. During the hours when there was no mattress they would take the jumpsuit off the back of a cellmate and make a pallet out of it to sit on, while that man was forced to stand naked.
Some men almost starved to death because the bullyboys in charge took their bread. It’s hard to say how much the freemen knew of the abuse in the cells. But when they looked through the cell door to take their count, they couldn’t help but notice some of the men in the cells weren’t wearing their jumpsuits. Authorities never did anything to stop it.
In my cell, the first thing I did was make it clear that nobody wanted the trouble that would come from fucking with me. My reputation as a fighter who doesn’t give up helped me in the dungeon maybe more than anywhere else in prison. It’s easier to fight in the dungeon than in a normal cell. There’s no bunk sticking out, no table; there’s more room. When the mattress was handed in I suggested we share it and nobody challenged me. We put it in the middle so everyone could put his head on it, or we took turns using it. Nobody stole anyone’s bread. Even so, the experience of being in the dungeon was pure misery. There were roaches, rats. There was no room. We were completely isolated. We couldn’t call home. The only way we knew what was going on in the prison was if new prisoners were brought in. It got painful sitting and lying on that concrete. Hips, knees, back—all that would be hurting at one time or another. The dungeon could destroy every fragment of a man’s dignity and self-respect. The harsh conditions were so hurtful that strong men would cry. They broke.
The only way anyone got out of the dungeon was if the colonel, who was head of security at Angola, let you out when he was making his rounds. He’d come every day, carrying a stack of index cards that had the names of prisoners on them and what each one had done to be put in the dungeon. He walked down the tier slowly. It played to the colonel’s ego to have that much control over our lives. Some prisoners stood in there for 30, 45, or 60 days, “under investigation.” Some men would beg for release in a childlike voice when they saw him, crying, “I’ll be good. Please let me out.” I was hurting too, but I was too proud to show it. When he got to the door of my cell I’d turn my back on him and walk to the back of the cell behind everyone else. I was in there for 15 days.
I hated prison, but in those first months I’d adjusted to Angola. I could have transferred out after three months and gone to DeQuincy, a jail for first-time offenders, but I never did the paperwork. I didn’t want to start over. I knew the routine at Angola. I was surviving. A lot of prisoners bonded over where they were from. There was a Shreveport group, a Baton Rouge group, a Lafayette group. I was in a clique of guys from New Orleans.
We had weekends off from work except when it was cane-cutting season. On Sunday, we could get visits. After dinner, there was some free time and we were allowed to stay outside, usually until dark. We played football and lay around on the yard. When freemen started to yell, “Clear the yard, count time, clear the yard,” we all filed back into our dorms. When the last count
of the day was done, the whistle blew and they locked the doors. If you weren’t in your dorm by then you were taken to the dungeon.
Inside the dorm, it was chaos. Fights would break out over a game of cards. I saw guys get beat up and raped in the dorm. I stayed away from the violence. Sometimes I watched TV, depending on what was on. I played dominoes. Some prisoners used religion to give themselves hope in the knowledge they would never go free. They grouped together at night beside someone’s bunk or went into the day room to have religious discussions and read the Bible. We called them “Holy Rollers.” Most of the time the other prisoners and I would kick it, just talk. Ninety-nine percent of what we said was a lie. We had absolutely nothing to boast about from our real lives.
The musician Charles Neville was in the New Orleans group. He used to give guys tattoos. In those days, I prided myself on having a pretty lethal right punch so I told him I wanted a skull and crossbones inside my right arm. He used the stick-and-poke method, dipping a needle wrapped in thread into the ink from a pen. When he finished I asked him to put the word “DEATH” over it in capital letters.
I was always scared though. Always. I was far from home. I was constantly seeing acts of violence, constantly seeing guys being raped, and I lived with the knowledge that that could be me at some point in time. By February 1966, a week before my birthday, I had done a third of my 24-month sentence and was eligible for parole. I don’t recall being asked any questions by the parole board. A freeman drove me and a few other prisoners due for release to the front gate in an old school bus. When I went through the gate I didn’t have anyone waiting for me so I started walking down the 26-mile road that led to the highway. I hitched a ride to the bus station at Baton Rouge and got on the Greyhound bus to New Orleans. I had no purpose, no direction, and no goals, but I had survived Angola. I believed it was a test of my strength. Proof of my courage. Nobody would mess with me now. I would soon be 19 and I was a badass, I told myself, because to survive in the street that was required.
Solitary Page 4
