Our meals were put on the floor outside our cell doors. We stuck our hands through the bars to pull the trays underneath the door into our cell. Anytime we were taken off the tier, even if we were moving just outside the door to the bridge, we were forced to strip, bend over, and spread our buttocks for a “visual cavity search,” then after we got dressed we were put in full restraints. When we got back to the cell we were strip-searched again when the restraints came off. If we were taken outside the prison—to a hospital or to court—a black box was put over our cuffed hands. That was very painful because you couldn’t move your hands at all with the black box on.
If there is one word to describe the next years of my life it would be “defiance.” White inmate guards virtually ran CCR at the time, overseen by freemen who would come and go throughout the day. These inmate guards were brutal in their treatment of prisoners housed in CCR. They liked to threaten and taunt us, but they made sure to do it only if they were outside our cells or when we were in restraints. They weren’t stupid enough to put their hands on us if we weren’t restrained. They hated me and Herman because we didn’t put up with their racist comments. If they talked trash to us we talked trash back just as bad. Nothing that came out of their mouths could hurt us. They couldn’t match us with words and they couldn’t stop us. We talked back to them. We talked down to them. We resisted orders. If they were jumping a prisoner we shook the bars and yelled. Any act of resistance ended the same way: four or five of them would come into the cell and jump us. It’s a hell of a feeling to stand when you know you’re going to be beaten; you know there will be pain but your moral principles won’t let you back down. I was always scared shitless. Sometimes my knees would shake and almost buckle. I forced myself to learn how not to give in to fear. That was one of my greatest achievements in those years. I didn’t let fear rule me. I’d say, “Fuck you, come in here. One of you motherfuckers ain’t leaving.” You don’t fight to win, you fight so that when you look in the mirror the next time you don’t drop your eyes in shame. They never came in alone. We were always outnumbered. I was scared, but I was mentally strong.
After a couple of weeks Warden Henderson called me out of the cell to talk to me. He didn’t ask me where I was the morning Brent Miller was killed or what I was doing or who I was with. He didn’t ask me about the letter that was supposedly “intercepted” the night before Miller’s murder, signed by “the Vanguard Army.” He asked me why I killed Brent Miller. I told him I didn’t kill Brent Miller. He asked me why I hated white people. I told him I didn’t hate white people. By the time I got back to my cell I knew for sure Herman and I would be framed.
On May 5, 1972, Herman and I were indicted along with Chester Jackson, age 31; and a prisoner named Gilbert Montegut, age 21. Herman was 29. I was 25. Herman and I knew why we were being charged—prison authorities wanted to wipe out the Black Panther Party at Angola. We could only guess that Chester Jackson was being charged because prison officials believed he was with the party. Neither of us knew Gilbert Montegut. It turned out he was charged because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Montegut had been locked up in CCR by Hayden Dees for supposedly being a “militant,” along with several other prisoners, weeks before Miller was killed. Dees was forced to release him and several other prisoners from CCR a week before Miller was killed because he refused to do the proper paperwork on them. Under pressure from the federal government leaning on state officials, Henderson and Hoyle had been asking Dees for months to create paperwork behind prisoners who were locked up. Dees refused, even after Hoyle gave him an ultimatum—do the paperwork or the prisoners would be released back into the general population. Within a week of the prisoners’ release Miller was killed. Dees immediately blamed Hoyle, saying one of Miller’s killers must have come from the group Hoyle released from CCR. When Dees told the freemen that Miller died because Hoyle released all the “militants” from CCR, the guards were enraged, calling for Hoyle to be fired. One of the Miller brothers attacked Hoyle, pushing him through a plate glass door. Hoyle had to be hospitalized in Baton Rouge for his injuries.
Montegut was selected from that group to be charged with and indicted for the murder of Brent Miller because Hayden Dees said so. (Later we learned some inmates gave statements claiming Montegut was with the prisoners who threw gasoline and fire at the guard who was burned in his booth. He was never formerly charged or indicted for that. Rory Mason was the only prisoner convicted for that crime.) When Montegut was put back in CCR he was on my tier and I got to know him. He was no militant.
Almost 30 years later, a former prisoner named Billy Sinclair, who had been an editor of Angola’s award-winning magazine The Angolite for years, wrote to one of my lawyers that one of the reasons he believed Herman and I were innocent was “the character” of Gilbert Montegut and Chester Jackson. He described them as “petty criminal hoodlums, incapable of forming a single, solitary political thought, much less possessing a political ideology.” Sinclair continued, “To conclude that either Hooks or Woodfox would have joined in any kind of criminal conspiracy to kill a prison guard with these two individuals is mind-boggling.”
It didn’t take long for me and Herman to realize that most of the so-called “militants” they put on our tier in CCR—the men released from CCR with Gilbert Montegut before Miller was killed—were full of shit. They may have been running around the yard calling themselves revolutionaries, but they weren’t. A lot of these guys were still in the game. They argued standing at the bars, which we called “bar fighting.” They gambled. Every 23 hours when all the doors on the tier would open, fights broke out. One of the men might sneak into the cell of another prisoner who was in the shower and fish his box, stealing from him.
Herman and I talked about this hypocrisy and knew the men acting out were deeply flawed. We talked about the Panthers we had met in prison. I remembered how they were able to change everything around them by their own conduct. Herman and I started holding 15-minute meetings on the tier when we were all out on our hour. One or two prisoners came. We talked to them about how to make conditions better. We asked the men what they needed. Gradually more men came to the meetings. We asked the men what kind of tier they wanted, what kind of conduct they would like to see from one another. Based on that we created a list of rules to live by.
Hooks and I were lucky enough to have family members who visited regularly. At CCR prisoners weren’t allowed to sit at a table with our visitors. We could only have noncontact visits. Each prisoner sat in a booth and there was a diamond-cut aluminum screen between him and his visitor. We were kept in full restraints throughout the visit. The first thing my mom asked me when she visited was if they hit me or if they threatened me. She was afraid they’d hurt me. I lied and said everything was all right. I didn’t want her to deal with what I was going through. At the end of the visits she left what money she could in my account. Sometimes she could afford $15 or $20, sometimes more. (When my brother and sister got into their teens and started making money from jobs they would leave what they could too.) At the end of our visits my mom stood and kissed me through the screen.
A couple of other men on the tier also had regular visitors who put money into their accounts. Herman and I asked them to pool their money with ours for the benefit of the tier. They agreed. Next time we were out of our cells we announced to the tier that if everyone followed the rules we had created together, then everybody would be able to buy one item out of the store each week. The tier pool would pay for it. Every week we passed a piece of paper down the tier and every man wrote what he wanted; a candy bar, shower slippers, underwear, tobacco, chips, a mirror, whatever it was. On canteen day, we’d order everything on the list and each prisoner would get his item. If anyone violated the rules of the tier, he wouldn’t be able to get an item that week. That’s how we stopped guys from stealing from each other.
We practiced martial arts together on the tier. We read aloud. We held math classes, spelling classes. Every Frid
ay we passed out a spelling or math test. We talked about what was going on in the world. We encouraged debates and conversation. We told each man he had a say. “Stand up for yourself,” we told them, “for your own self-esteem, for your own dignity.” Even the roughest, most hardened person usually responds when you see the dignity and humanity in him and ask him to see it for himself. “The guards will retaliate,” we said, “but we will always face that together.”
Chapter 18
King Arrives
A few weeks after Herman and I were put in CCR, we heard that Robert King, who joined the Black Panther Party in Orleans Parish Prison, was put in a cell on another tier. I first met King when I was 18, in a dormitory at Angola. The other prisoners told me he was a Holy Roller, a Bible thumper, and I avoided him. Physically imposing, he never used his strength to intimidate anyone. He spent a lot of time on his bunk, reading the Bible. He said he liked the flow of the language. He liked the parables and the Sermon on the Mount. He had tried to talk to me but I was caught up in the game, in surviving. I thought he was hopelessly out of touch. The day he was released on parole I told him, “I can now say I lived to see the last of the old-timers go home.” He was 23. King would go on to become a semiprofessional boxer on the street—they called him Speedy King—and have several jobs until he was charged with and convicted of a robbery he didn’t commit. (The perpetrator was described as being several years older with a different complexion and appearance.) He was sentenced to 35 years. After joining the party in Orleans Parish Prison he became involved in protests there. When he arrived at Angola they put him directly into the dungeon, charged with “playing lawyer.” Then he was put in the Red Hat, and then on D tier in CCR.
I wrote him a note telling him Herman and I were on B tier, asking him if he needed anything. Over the next few days Herman and I paid trustees tobacco and candy to deliver our letters to King back and forth. We knew the freemen and white inmate guards would harass him for being a Panther. King expected this and wrote back that it was no big deal. Before King arrived in CCR I didn’t have any trust or belief that, outside of Herman, anyone could go all the way with me. There was so much turmoil and brutality. In King’s letters, I saw his strength. I saw his morality, his integrity. I believed I could trust him. Sitting in my cell I thought back to the time I first met him. I could see now that when he tried to talk to me all those years ago his interest was in getting me to go beyond myself and the influences of the street, to create a different human being. He still wanted that for the men around him. I wondered if my first meeting with King had set us on a path to be together again. Who knows what strange powers were at play, I thought. Herman, King, and I, Black Panthers at Angola, were in a terrible situation. But now there were three of us.
After about a month in CCR I was sitting on my bunk when I started sweating, and the walls of my cell started to move toward me at the same time. My clothes tightened around my body. I took off my shirt and pants but still felt like I was being squeezed, strangled. The ceiling was pressing down on me. It was hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to see. I forced myself to stand. I took a few steps, trying not to fall. At the end of my cell I turned and walked back to the cell door. I turned and continued, pacing back and forth for several minutes, maybe an hour. Eventually I was so tired I lay on the bunk and fell asleep. After the first couple of times this happened I started recognizing when it was coming on; my clothes tightened and I started to sweat. The atmosphere pressed down on me. Sometimes it lasted five or ten minutes, other times it lasted for hours. The only thing that helped was to pace back and forth. Usually it didn’t end until I was so exhausted from walking back and forth that I could lie down. I continued having episodes like this one, which I later learned was claustrophobia, the whole time I was in prison. For about three years I slept sitting up, propped up against the wall, believing it helped prevent claustrophobic attacks. It seemed to lessen them but they never stopped.
Chapter 19
CCR Wars
Gassing prisoners was the number one response by security to deal with any prisoner at Angola who demanded to be treated with dignity. Gas incapacitates the prisoner so the guards can easily get into the cell and beat the hell out of him. Our tier was gassed many times, and guards ran into our cells, jumped us, kicking and punching us, forcing us to the floor or onto the bunk so they could put restraints on us. Whenever they beat us they tried to cause as much pain as possible. They were willing to break some part of our bodies if possible. It’s very difficult to fight back in restraints but I did what I could. I’d spit, bite, head-butt the guards. Then they’d take us to the dungeon and write us up. On his tier King didn’t take any shit from security either, so he was gassed and bounced into and out of the CCR dungeon like us. In the seventies we were gassed so often every prisoner in CCR almost became immune to the tear gas. It was always painful at first but after the initial cloud of gas dissipated we’d forget about it until a freeman came onto the tier to make a count and he’d be wearing a gas mask. That made us laugh.
Our resistance gave us an identity. Our identity gave us strength. Our strength gave us an unbreakable will. My determination not to be broken was stronger than any other part of me, stronger than anything they did to me. The prisoners around us saw how Herman, King, and I talked back to inmate guards and freemen who trash-talked us, how we refused to go into our cells if we wanted to talk to a supervisor. They saw we were fighting for them too. For better conditions, for more respect.
We talked to the men, explaining why we needed to protest, showing them that we had leverage. We could refuse to go back into our cells when our hour was up; we could refuse to hand back the trays after a meal. We could shake our cell doors, “shaking down,” or bang on our tables or sinks with shoes, “knocking down,” and this would be heard downstairs by the camp supervisor. We could refuse to come out of our cells on our hour, we could refuse to eat the next meal, or we could write a petition of grievance and all sign it. We didn’t invent knocking down or shaking down, but we showed men there was more strength if we did it as a tier rather than as individuals. Any one of these actions, if we all did it together, was sometimes enough to get a ranking officer on the tier to talk to us. Prior to any action we took together as a tier we got a consensus, because usually security retaliated. Most of the time we were fighting to get supplies or make conditions more humane but if the tier guard was just an asshole and constantly fucking with us we’d take a vote on having him removed and we’d make an official request to whoever was running the camp: either move him or move us.
The response usually started with a lieutenant or captain coming up and threatening us, saying something like, “What the fuck you making all this noise for? We’re going to gas you motherfuckers.” And we’d say, “Man, we’re trying to get toilet paper for the last couple of days. These people won’t give us the motherfucking toilet paper.” He might say OK, no problem and leave. Then after one hour passed, and then two hours, without any word from him we’d start shaking the bars again. Next thing we knew the dark yellowish smoke of tear gas would be rolling down the tier. Or sometimes after he left he gassed the tier immediately. Sometimes when ranking officers came they turned the whole tier into a dungeon. They’d take each man, one cell at a time, put him in restraints—if he resisted he was hit with pepper spray and beaten—and walk him to the bridge outside the tier. Then they’d go in his cell and throw everything he had into the hall, lock him back in his cell, and go to the next prisoner and walk him to the bridge, empty his cell, and so forth. After all the cells were emptied they pushed everybody’s belongings into one pile at the end of the tier and we lived under dungeon rules. The pile would stay there until we could get out on our hour again; during that time, we’d go through it to find all our possessions and put them back in our cells. What wasn’t ours we’d hold up and ask the men, “Whose is this?” and walk it down to them. It took days.
Other times the captain on duty might come and talk with
some sense of doing the right thing. Once we were complaining there wasn’t enough food on our trays and the captain came up and told the tier sergeant, “Take these trays out and put food on them.” Another time, after being served expired and sour milk for days, we held our trays after a meal, refusing to put them under our doors, and told the guard we would hold them until we could see a dietician. The captain on duty brought someone to talk to us.
The most effective way of protesting was the hunger strike. If we didn’t eat for three days prison officials were required by law to notify the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. The same way freemen didn’t want ranking officers summoned to the tier, ranking officers didn’t want state officials called to the prison. They might find something wrong besides what the prisoners were protesting. Once we voted to go on a hunger strike to get toilet paper that wasn’t being passed out. Just the threat of a hunger strike, that time, got the tier guard to pass out the toilet paper.
Solitary Page 12
