Chapter 6
Parole and Back Again
Having learned absolutely nothing in prison except how to become a better predator I picked up where I left off when I got home. I went to my mom’s house first. Pop Skeeter had moved my mom, my brothers, and my sister out of our two rooms in Aunt Gussie’s house on North Villere to a house on Bertrand Street. It was tidy and clean, the way my mom liked it. My mom housed and fed me. I stayed for a couple of weeks but couldn’t settle in. My family’s routines had become alien to me. My mom didn’t tolerate me coming and going at all hours. Some nights when I got home the door would be locked and I’d fall asleep on the back porch. My brothers seemed so young to me, and they were. I would watch The Jackie Gleason Show on TV with them sometimes. I was closest to my sister, who was 14. She was just starting to date boys and I felt very protective of her.
It wasn’t long before I moved in with my old friend and running partner Frank and we ran with our old friends from the High Steppers. Eight-track tapes had become very popular while I was in prison and everyone had an eight-track tape players installed under the dashboard of their cars. Stealing eight-track tapes out of cars became very profitable. We’d take them from cars and sell them to a fence, or we’d sell them directly to guys who had players. Sometimes we’d sell a guy tapes, then break into his car later, steal them back, and sell them to someone else. When we could, we stole the tape players.
While on parole I worked at different jobs. For a while I was a porter at a hotel. They called us redcaps because we wore red hats. We took guests to their rooms with their luggage, showed them how to turn the air conditioner on and off, and checked to make sure there were enough towels. I was there for about a month when the hotel hired a new hostess, a young white woman who called us “boys” instead of redcaps. She would call one of us over and say to the guests, “This boy will show you to your room.” I asked her not to refer to me as a boy and told her that we were called redcaps by the management, but she didn’t stop. I went to the manager, a young white dude, and told him that the new hostess they hired kept referring to the redcaps as boys to the guests. I asked him to talk to her and tell her to stop calling us boys. He said he would.
The next day when she called me over to take a couple to their room she called me a boy again. “I told you I’m not a fucking boy,” I yelled at her. “I’m a fucking man. You take them to the room your motherfucking self.” And then I walked off. The manager called me in and told me I couldn’t talk to her like that and I told him to suck my dick. He fired me. I didn’t give a shit. I was only working there because I was stealing sheets, pillowcases, blankets, bedspreads, and pillows and selling them around the neighborhood anyhow. If I could have taken the mattresses I would have. It was one of my hustles. It was a way to survive, to help put food on the table and help my mom pay rent and buy clothes for me and my brothers and sister. The only part that bothered me about being fired was that I’d just figured out how to unbolt the TVs.
After that I took a job as a car jockey at an automobile dealership. My job was to pick up cars that had to be repaired and bring them back to the dealership and deliver the repaired cars back to their owners. The dealer had a very small car that could be attached to a regular-size car so that I could drive myself to a customer or drive back to the dealership after delivering a vehicle. One night at closing time the manager asked me to deliver one last car to a customer. Since he was closing up he told me after my delivery to drive the small car home for the night and just bring it to work the next morning.
That night my sister Violetta called me from a pay phone at a movie theater saying a dude in the theater was harassing her and her friend. I told her to stay inside and I’d be right over to get her. I drove the dealership car over to the theater. By the time I got there, her friend’s father had already picked up her friend, but Vi was there and when she saw me she ran outside and got in the car. We were a couple of blocks from my mom’s house when I pulled up to a stop sign next to the off-ramp for I-10. A police car with four detectives in it was parked under the overpass. They motioned me to pull over. They separated me from my sister and took us to the police precinct under the bridge, then they interrogated me, asking me where I got the car. I told them the story and they called my supervisor.
My supervisor corroborated my story but told them he didn’t give me permission to drive the car that night. The cops hung up and charged me with car theft. I said, “Man, you know I didn’t steal the car. I wasn’t riding around. I know you talked to my sister, she can tell you, I just picked her up.” There was nothing I could do. What hurt the most was that I did my manager a favor and he stabbed me in the back. Vi called my mom to pick her up. They took me from the precinct to Orleans Parish Prison. Bail was set at $100 but my parole officer put a hold on me so I couldn’t be released on bail. I sat in Orleans Parish Prison for about six months before I went to court. The DA gave me a deal, breaking the car theft charge down to “unauthorized use of a vehicle” with credit for time served. I pleaded guilty. But I wasn’t released. Since unauthorized use of a vehicle was a parole violation I was to be sent back to Angola to finish my original sentence.
The day before I left I got into a fight with another prisoner at the parish prison. I punched him in the mouth. When it was over I didn’t notice that one of his teeth was buried in my knuckle. The next morning my hand was swollen to three times its normal size. Since the officials at the Parish Prison knew I was shipping out they didn’t take me to the hospital, they put me downstairs in the waiting room. By the time I got to Angola my hand was green and I had a fever. A captain at the Reception Center took one look at me and sent me to the hospital. At that time, the only doctor in the prison hospital was a prisoner, a white doctor incarcerated for killing his wife. They called him an orderly. I probably would have lost my hand if he hadn’t treated me. He drained my fist, put me on antibiotics, and kept me in the hospital for four days to make sure all the infection was gone before sending me back to the Reception Center dorm. When I was released from the hospital he bandaged my hand and gave me “no-duty” status, which meant I didn’t have to work until my hand healed.
On my way to the dorm I stopped to eat at the dining hall. I was in the chow line when a white inmate guard everybody called Nigger Miles got in my face. He got that name because he called every black prisoner “nigger.” He was a giant. He came up to me and asked me why I wasn’t at work and I told him I had no-duty status because of my hand. He said something along the lines of, “Well, I got a one-armed nigger in the field, what makes you better?” I said, “I don’t give a fuck if you have a one-eyed and one-armed man in the field, I got no-duty status. I’m not going out in the field.” He said after chow I’d be going to the fields, and I told him I wasn’t going to no fucking field. He was an inmate guard. I knew he didn’t have the authority to overrule my no-duty status. He ordered me to stand over by the door outside the dining hall that led to a bathroom used by security people. It also housed brooms and mops used by inmate orderlies to clean up.
I walked to the door and four or five white inmate guards came up to me. They pointed to some food drippings on the floor that had spilled from trays that were being carried to prisoners on Death Row, which was next door to RC. One of the inmate guards told me to mop up the mess on the floor. Another one said to go to the bathroom to get the mop. That was an orderly’s job and I wasn’t an orderly. I said no. They ordered me to go into the bathroom again. I knew what was about to happen so as I moved toward the bathroom I braced myself. Instead of going inside I turned around and started throwing punches. I hollered and screamed so the prisoners in the dining hall would hear me. By the time other prisoners started to arrive a captain had appeared and broke up the fight. They sent me to the hospital because my hand was bleeding. After I was rebandaged they put me in the Red Hat, the oldest and worst cellblock at Angola. Built in the 1930s, the Red Hat got its name because in the old days, prisoners from that cellblock wore
straw hats that were marked by red paint so when they worked in the fields they could be identified. By the seventies nobody in the Red Hat worked; it was a dungeon. In the early seventies it was permanently closed by federal officials for being a chamber of horrors; years later it was incorporated into a museum on prison grounds.
In the Red Hat you could stand in the middle of your cell and touch the walls on either side of you. The cells were three feet wide and six feet long. The ceiling was low. The door was solid steel halfway up, with bars from the ceiling to waist level. The bunk was concrete. There was no mattress. There was a toilet in the cell but they kept the water turned off, so it didn’t work. You had to use a bucket in the corner which could only be emptied when you were let out every few days for a shower. They wanted you to smell the stench of your own body waste while eating. All the prisoners in the Red Hat were served the same food, which amounted to slop. The cell was suffocating, hot. It was dark. It was a coffin. There were vermin. I was constantly thirsty. You never knew when they would come to get you for the shower. I lay on the concrete bunk. I stood on it. I moved around a lot to stay loose. I did push-ups and jumping jacks. I did 1,000 push-ups. Then more. I stood at my cell door and called down to prisoners in the other cells; we talked. Night came then day then night. The conditions in the Red Hat were a test, I told myself. My anger, my hate, the heat, the stench, the filth, the rats, and the pressure shaped me into something new. When the freeman came to let me out I met his eyes with defiance. He took me back to the Reception Center. I’d been in there for 10 days.
Nothing was different my second time at Angola. I was assigned the same dorm on the trustee side, Cypress 1. I had the same job, working in the fields. I knew the routine. I knew the psychology. I was 100 percent confident I wouldn’t have to worry about being bullied or raped or “paying draft,” paying someone not to bully you or beat you up or take your personal property. Everybody knew who Fox was and everybody knew you didn’t fuck with me. When I came down the walk on fresh fish day there were four or five dudes who greeted me as a friend. When I put my stuff on the bunk this time before being taken to the clothing room I didn’t have to ask anyone to watch it. My shit was still there when I got back, as I knew it would be.
I saw a lot of the same prisoners, heard the same stories. I didn’t talk a lot. If I did I was lying, trying to create an aura of toughness I didn’t actually feel. In prison, you never talk about your charge but you talk about everything else. Multiple times. Multiple ways. Multiple versions. What you (supposedly) did, what someone did to you, what you will do when you get out.
Prisoners bragged about their hustle. If you robbed people on the street with a gun you were a stickup artist. If you robbed drug dealers you were a jack artist. We called shoplifters “boosters.” There were con artists, bank robbers, carjackers, drug dealers, pimps. Stories in prison are endless daydreams, described in detail, and—in the black dorms—spoken in the flow and rhythm of Ebonics. The beauty of Ebonics is that it’s so specific, and forever changing. So were our stories in prison.
In prison, you are part of a human herd. In the human herd survival of the fittest is all there is. You become instinctive, not intellectual. Therein lies the secret to the master’s control. One minute you’re treated like a baby, being handed a spoon to eat with or being told where to stand. The next, with utter indifference, you’re being counted several times a day—you have no choice, you have no privacy. The next moment you’re threatened, pushed, tested. You develop a sixth sense as a means of survival, instincts to help you size up what’s going on around you at all times and help you make all the internal adjustments necessary to respond when it will save your life, but never before. Taking action at the wrong time could get you killed.
Once you have a reputation you have to do what it takes to keep it; you do things you don’t want to because it’s expected of you. I lay low as much as I could and tried to fit into the background and play my role. I knew my survival depended on my ability to respond violently if needed. But by some grace, maybe the love of my mother, I hadn’t totally lost my humanity. I was always poised to be aggressive, but I also knew it wasn’t who I was.
In those days, if you didn’t have a sentence of life in prison, you only had to do half your time; it was called two-for-one, the “good time” system. Every day you were in prison and stayed out of trouble you got credited for two days. My first time at Angola I did eight months—a third of my sentence—before I was paroled. When I was sent back after violating parole my “good time” was recalculated; I had to do half of my remaining 16 months. After eight months I was discharged on August 31, 1967.
Chapter 7
Stickup Artist
They gave me a bus ticket and $10 at the front gate. Still wearing prison-issue clothes I hitched a ride on an 18-wheeler packed with Angola produce to Baton Rouge. I took a Greyhound bus to New Orleans. The first time I’d left Angola I was proud that I’d survived. This time I was numb. When I got back I didn’t go home to see my mom right away. I looked for Frank. It was pretty much just the two of us left. The High Steppers were long over. We never talked about our old gang anymore. Most of the guys from the gang had moved on or were in prison. Frank was my only running partner. I didn’t stay with my family but I saw my mom almost every day, dropping by the house. She was a great cook and had red beans and rice with ham hocks or other dishes on the stove for anyone who came by. She knew I was breaking the law but didn’t ask questions. We purely enjoyed each other’s company. I liked hearing her stories; we had good conversations. She was proud that I was intelligent. “Boy, you can sit down on Monday and see Friday,” she’d say. I stayed in touch with Aunt Gussie too. She worked unloading barges on the Mississippi River for years.
The Sixth Ward was the same. Still poor but life went on. Children played ball in the street, some of them barefoot, answering voices calling them home for dinner. I could vaguely remember more innocent times: Dancing in the street behind a second line band after a funeral. Collecting bottle caps to see movies. Catching pigeons for an old man named Reb who lived in the neighborhood. He used to pay us 25 cents for every pigeon we brought him. We climbed everywhere to bag those pigeons, over rooftops and under rafters, around the skylight above a bank.
At the bank, we lay across the glass skylight and watched birds inside the bank fly beneath us. It never occurred to us that we could get in the bank the same way the pigeons did and help ourselves to cash from teller drawers. It never occurred to us that Reb could do something like eat the pigeons we brought him. But that’s what he did.
Now, at night, I broke into houses and took anything I could carry that I thought I could fence. Radios, TVs, stereos, nice clothing. If I was lucky there would be jewelry or money lying around. Sometimes we stole a car to use for a night so we could get everything to our fence quickly. We’d leave the car near where we took it. Other times we stole cars and drove them to chop shops, selling them for parts.
I never smoked. When I was 14 or 15, I accidentally got very drunk at a dance; I didn’t know the 7-Up I was drinking had vodka in it. I got so sick I passed out and threw up for two days afterward, including all over a new sweater my mom had just bought for me. I felt so bad about ruining that sweater. I never touched alcohol again. When I was 20, shortly after I got out of Angola the second time, I let a guy I used to run with named Leroy give me my first shot of heroin. I didn’t want to do it—I had popped pills occasionally but never used habit-forming drugs and didn’t want to start. I was at his house when he was shooting up and he started messing with me, telling me I couldn’t handle it. I told him, “Shit, I can handle it, give me some.” That high you get when you first start shooting heroin is the best feeling I ever had. But at some point, I no longer experienced that wonderful high. I started shooting to keep from getting sick.
I was a weekend junkie at first. I thought I was handling dope because I never got sick during the week. Then I got busted for something and while I was i
n Orleans Parish Prison my nose started running and I was cramping up. A friend of mine on the tier said, “Man, you got a habit.” I denied it. He said, “I know what withdrawal looks like.”
I became so sick that I was taken to Charity Hospital. I heard the guard tell the doctor I was a stinking-ass junkie. They gave me a shot for the nausea and I was supposed to be taken back for a shot every day but I was never taken back to the hospital. I kicked that habit in prison. When I beat the charge and was released, I went back to shooting dope again. That’s how I knew I was addicted. I wasn’t getting high. I was shooting to be normal, to function. On the streets of New Orleans we were buying $12 bags of heroin that had been cut down. Someone told me we could get uncut heroin for $2 a bag in New York City so in 1968 I started driving to New York with a friend to buy dope. We bought it in Harlem and sometimes shot up in Central Park. When we drove home we brought it back with us.
One night I broke into a car and was rifling through the glove compartment when I found a gun. I stared at it in my hand, then put it in my waistband and walked quickly away from the car. A new feeling came over me, a confidence I’d never felt before in my life. My chances of survival, I thought, had just increased by 100 percent. The irony of it, the stupidity of it, was that I had no idea what to do with it. I’d never fired a gun in my life. I didn’t tell anyone for weeks. I kept it hidden under my shirt. One night I walked up behind a dude on the street and pulled the gun out of my waistband and pointed it at his head. “Give me your money, motherfucker,” I yelled. I was real nervous, forcing myself not to show it. After a while it became normal, like anything else you do. When I needed money, I went out and got it from a person walking down the street. I was a stickup artist. Later, I started robbing dope dealers. I went up to them in the alley or on a street corner where they were selling and made them take me to where they hid their stash, or I’d go to their homes and threaten them. I was a jack artist.
Solitary Page 5
