“DeSean, I’m holding you down. But why are we holding this nigga down? He don’t even put in no work. He wants to keep his hands clean. He’s over there having picnics with the fucking foreigners and protecting the fucking faggots. Murder Money Mayhem never been about that. Him and his crew out here praying like a group of grandmas. What the fuck is up with that?” Slaughter was furious. He had been in a silent uproar ever since Teacher Ali had given the class definitions of the contradictions and differences between criminals and revolutionaries, and prisoners and political prisoners.
“I already stated my position. Long as him and his crew don’t fuck up the money I ain’t got no beef with him,” Narcotics said. “But I agree with what Slaughter was saying about them foreign Spanish niggas. I never liked the way they hustle. They fair with their own kind but cheat niggas. They charge us more for the product and give us less on the cut. They always deal with niggas curbside on the block, don’t even want you in the lobby of their building or up in their cribs, like we ain’t all doing the same thing. They don’t give a fuck when we exposed. Something goes down, them motherfuckers be all on their walkie-talkies speaking Spanish, warning their crew about the movement of the beast on the block. But once they got our money in their pocket, they don’t give a fuck if the cops sweep us up. Sometimes I even wondered if they was letting the beast know which black guys was up in their area copping. Using us as a decoy. Sacrificing us to cover up their own dealings,” Narcotic said.
“That’s the Dominicans, not the Puerto Ricans,” Puerto Rican Paco said. “I helped Black make the connection with them Spanish-speaking dudes ’cause it wasn’t nothing to it. It was just a soccer game and that shit went off good. You know how it is. Usually we warring with them. It was nice to have a few days of peace. And it was good for business. They ain’t got their hands in our pockets. We ain’t preventing them from earning, either—all good. There’s enough to go around,” Paco said.
“Non cypher, Slaughter, if you had knowledge of self, you’d recognize the position you putting DeSean in. He can’t flip on his brother’s orders. He won’t go against the gods. You shouldn’t even be asking him to do that. If you got a beef with Black, just go head-up with him. If it’s not one-on-one, this whole place gon’ get turned out. We each gon’ get boxed up,” Jamar said.
“I’m not no motherfucking caveman. Fuck fighting with fists. Fuck face-to-face and head-up. I’m coming in the cover of darkness, cutting hearts out of chests, causing bloodshed. That’s more respectful. I got one man in my scope. Y’all already know. I won’t cross DeSean or fuck up the money. And I don’t mind getting only my hands dirty,” Slaughter said.
“Yeah, but that one man, if you hit him up, you got Murder Money Mayhem versus the Muslims. They def’ gon’ retaliate. The Latin Kings usually stay out of our business but like you said, since the soccer joint, they might try and jump in on his side. He got them other foreign dudes with him and cats from all the boroughs who he helped in them study groups,” Mathematics said.
“You proving my point right there,” Slaughter said. “He think he bigger than the M3s. He think he’s bigger than us. He gotta go.” No one gave a response. There was only silence. That was the exchange they had in the cypher before dawn, in the same space, at the same time, as the prayer.
That same day back then, I still ate my morning meal with the M3s. It was the first meal we ever had in complete silence. In fact, there was a strange silence throughout that whole day. Teacher Mack peeped it when no one in the class would answer his questions no matter how he poked and provoked. When we got to Teacher Karim Ali’s class, he wasn’t there. Instead, there was a meek man whose presence was the opposite of Teacher Ali. Once he said he was our new teacher, the whole class went deaf, dumb, and blind. It was as though the same bodies were in the room, but each soul had slipped beneath the slim space at the bottom of the door and escaped down the corridor. Lunch was silent and the corrections officers had no clue. It was intriguing, how leery the silence made the COs. One of them was so stupid, he began barking orders at a time when everyone was following orders out of routine and without error.
On the yard there was no movement. Everyone was grouped up in their sections, no games being played. Just silent signaling and a few sharp weapons being passed off on the low and then concealed.
Dinnertime silence, same thing.
All males moving through the corridors close in the line but never touching. One line exiting the cafeteria area, while another entering from the opposite direction. Another CO was holding back a third line till the two lines moved through. Fourth line was paused on the stairs, guarded by their CO. I was heading my line as usual. There was a push from behind, men falling forward like dominoes, then balancing back up. “Keep your hands to your sides. Stay to your right. Keep the line moving, ladies,” CO Gordon called out. I heard a scuffle. Turning, I saw Slaughter, who was in the middle of my line, moving like an offensive lineman but instantly being blocked by the men who stood in between me and him. “Ladies, step back into the line,” the CO said. But my man immediately in front of Slaughter was bleeding. All eyes followed the trail of the blood and in less than a second, lines two and three jumped in, forming a mass that was no longer on the right of the line in either direction. The COs began pulling bodies back. But like an onion, the men were layered too deep, and the stabbing motions were swift and silent. The fourth line of inmates flooded through the doorway ’cause their CO left his position to clamp down on the fight. Fists were flying and bodies were piling up. The alarm went off on a day of silence. Riot patrol came blasting through the door. Their response so immediate it was as though they expected it. The pepper spray was let off and had inmates trying to cover their eyes, some coughing up dinner.
We were all facedown on the floor, hands tied behind our backs with tight, sharp, thick plastic cuffs, heavy knees and heavier boots pinned on our backs to hold us in position. Blood, shit, vomit, and piss on the floor. The medical team arrived, identifying the injured and moving them onto the gurneys to be transported out for treatment. Slaughter was laid out. He had a sharp shank lodged deep in his side like a skewer and his intestines oozing out like sauce. I smiled. He looked like shish kebab. He looked down at me from that hospital gurney with that Brooklyn dirty smirk. They moved him out. DeSean and me and all of the M3s were locked in that deadpan stare, from the floor. A CO had his heavy boot pressed down on the side of DeSean’s face.
“You good?” DeSean asked me, from his uncomfortable position. I nodded.
* * *
I’m back in the box.
27. DOING TIME
“Three months in the box. Three months in population. Three months back in the box. Is that your plan? Thought you was a little smarter than that,” the she-officer said. But I could hear the excitement in her tone. She was glad I was back under her control and on her tier.
“Relax,” I told her. “I took care of the three things that you care most about.”
“Three things?” she asked.
“I earned my GED. That test was easy. I took it before I had even completed their test preparation course. The SAT exam took more concentration, but the challenge was good. In between the chaos, I had nothing better to do than study,” I said.
“What was your score? The perfect SAT score is 1600. I know that. My son studied for that test as well.”
“I just sat for it before I ended up in here. Didn’t get the scores back yet.”
“I see. And what is the third thing that you took care of that I care about the most?” she asked, with a little wiggle in her tone.
“Myself,” I said, opening my arms and striking a stance so she could see I studied but I also kept up my workout, and my warrior body was the evidence. And in a dark, dirty, dreary place, in the middle of the night, she laughed. Then she became unusually quiet.
“You did good with your studies, but I heard you fell in with them ‘murder boys.’ That’s not so bright of a move.”
“All the more reason to stay away from them and distinguish yourself.”
“You think Rikers is the same as the boarding school where your son studies?” I asked her. “I’m a prisoner in a jail, shoulder to shoulder with every other prisoner locked and hemmed in the same space.”
“I don’t know why y’all boys have to fight each other. You’re the same as the male inmates in the adult lockup areas. They should’ve beat those racist white boys’ asses from Howard Beach who murdered that black boy from Bedford-Stuyvesant. If y’all was doing something like that, even my colleagues would’ve stepped out of your way. Every decent person in New York is heated over that shit. Meanwhile, our higher-ups are hammering the COs to protect them white-boy inmates, the murderers, from getting mobbed and hurt. Since y’all inmates are fighting each other every day anyway, y’all should’ve taken care of that.” Then she gave me the grimy details of the Michael Griffith, Howard Beach case and how an angry white gang of neighbors attacked Griffith and his three companions after their car broke down and they entered a white neighborhood looking for help. The white gang, who outnumbered the four black men, beat and then chased twenty-three-year-old Griffith onto the highway, where he was killed by a vehicle being driven by a white police officer’s son.
“He got killed by white thugs who terrorized him and then ran him down and left him like roadkill,” the she-officer said.
I could tell that she thought her “colleagues,” the other corrections officers at Rikers, had some sense of honor and allegiance. She believed that the COs would somehow link hands with the inmates and stand down while we thrashed the racist white boys for a racial attack and an unjust murder. Obviously that was not and is not the case. There is no honor among COs, same as there is no honor among thieves. And, if the COs link hands with some inmates, it would only be to bring drugs and other contraband, which they are supposed to keep out, in. And, if they ever stand down, it’s to watch and allow and encourage a strategic hit being carried out against an inmate by another inmate who is a part of their dirty CO import-export drug ring. Like the hit that Slaughter tried but failed to carry out against me. I peeped over time how the COs like to maintain “their house.” Keep the inmates fighting each other instead of them. Keep the inmates medicated so they didn’t have the energy to resist. Choose a small group of inmates to be house leaders, and give them the space to crush and correct all the other inmates while they keep the crime circulating on the inside to supplement their income. The COs wanted desperately to chill like the hustlers they supposedly hated but secretly loved and admired and wanted to be like. They wanted to chill the way those hustlers chilled before their arrest. They wanted to get the same response from the women that the hustlers got, instead of being bossed by the angry bitches who they had fucked and fucked over and now owed a heap of child support. The COs were failures at business, failures as fathers, failures at family. The COs were desperate men.
Jail orientation had been over for me. Now I saw the setup clearly in great detail. However, I was not about to debate the topic with a woman. No matter how filthy a hole or a predicament is, a woman is still naïve in her mind, understanding of the schemes of men. No matter how low men might go, women can never fall as low as men or be as filthy as the filthiest man, because women are the wombs that carry, then push life into existence. That is the amazing difference that Allah originated between male and female, while at the same time creating man and woman from the same one soul.
At the internal jail hearing before I got convicted of another tier-three violation and boxed for another three months, I sat in complete silence. I’m not an actor. I already knew that the men in the room who had authority already knew what they planned as my outcome. Me stating my defense would’ve been nothing but theater. I already knew that even the one female authority in the room would agree with whatever the male authorities guided her to agree with. I had already discovered by then that one CO in our dorm was Slaughter’s uncle on the low. The inmate nephew was dirty. The uncle CO was dirty. I do my research. Same as I studied faces, scars, jewels, and relations on my Brooklyn block when I first arrived in America, and the same as I matched the faces I studied with the apartments they lived in and cars they drove, the children they had and the habits and deeds they did, I did the same study in here.
At Rikers, I concluded, all of these inmates had brothers and cousins, uncles and fathers, and in some cases even grandfathers and mothers who were either inmates themselves or working as COs or administrative employees. It was against the jail rules for the COs to be working with inmates who were their friends and relatives. It was even a violation for the COs to be friendly, familiar, and casual with any inmate. But which man or woman from any of our ’hoods who had earned the well-sweated position of being a corrections officer was gonna forfeit their position, paycheck, or benefits by admitting they was born gang- and crime-related?
Ironically (one of those SAT vocabulary words), I was accused and convicted in the internal jail hearing of conspiring to create, organize, and run a gang that was disruptive to the day-to-day lawful standard and routine in the jail. Somehow, by making prayers and “causing” other inmates to gather and make prayers, by forming study groups and helping other inmates to study, by reading and teaching other inmates how to read and understand at least the letters they were receiving, and by working out in teams and organizing sports events that involved gangs, I had committed several code violations. The violation was not the praying itself, or the reading or the teaching or the working out, or basketball or soccer games. The crime was the organizing of males. Since I had been organizing, I must have been “conspiring.” According to them, I had triggered a dangerous “day of silence” which had never happened at Rikers before. Now silence was a crime. Groups of silent men were a threat, a terror, a resistance.
The truth is, I had not organized men to be silent. Silence comes to men who after learning what they did not already know or understand become thoughtful. Thoughtfulness leads to consideration. Consideration leads to feelings. Feelings lead to brotherhood. Brotherhood leads to unity. Unity leads to defense against perceived and actual threats and injustices. I never once asked the male youth inmates to protect me. They chose to put their bodies in front of Slaughter once the rumor was out that he would take my life. They chose to move to protect me, I believe, because I had treated each youth not by race or language or the place of birth or territory they came from or claimed. And the same way I came to respect any male in my life who actually taught me something unique and useful that helped me to survive, build, and thrive, some of the inmates had come to respect me.
My father had taught me, when I was young enough to hear and consider, that language should never separate one good person from another. He said that any man could learn another man’s language if he could shut up long enough to listen, and sit still long enough to study. All I had done was obey the words and lessons of my father, remain mostly silent and watchful, and learn the language of men, even the ones who were speaking the same language differently.
During my hearing as I sat silently, I was reminded of the words of YesYesYall. He once said to all of the M3s in the cypher, “Word up, by listening to what Teacher Karim Ali be teaching in class, or praying like Black, we gon’ get in more heat and have more trouble than we already got for drugs, money, and murder.” YesYesYall was sharp, but he usually hid his intelligence inside his jokes. In the end, he was right. Without me selling or buying any drugs or contraband, without me even having any money on my commissary or purchasing anything at all, without me making or having any weapons other than my hands and feet, or using any violence or waging any wars, I was pegged as a gang leader who had organized a prayer and study group that influenced and caused a deadly silence that incited a riot.
* * *
“Three years, it’s a shonda, but, it’s t
he best I could do,” my green-eyed lawyer said.
“A shonda?” I repeated.
“Yes, a shame,” she said. I smiled.
“I don’t know what kind of math you are doing. But when we first met, you were talking twenty-five years to life, and even pointed out a case where someone my same age was convicted and sentenced to execution. Every time I see you, the number of years I might serve decreases. Now here you are with a deal signed and sealed saying three years. I’m almost done serving one. You did a good job,” I told her.
“Three years would be great, and probably even impossible, if they had one shred of evidence against you. The fact is they do not and they have had ample time to gather it if it existed, and if they were capable,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s spring all over again. You got a date, a fiancé, a husband?” I asked her.
“I probably would have all three if I wasn’t out working for you!” she said, and laughed.
“You’ve had ample time to organize that,” I said, flipping her words back. She smiled.
“Do you know what I think is really gracious about you, Jordan?” she suddenly asked me. I didn’t answer. I felt choked by that fake name. After almost a full year of being locked up, “gracious” is not how I would describe myself. In fact, “the Most Gracious” is one way that all Muslims describe Allah. What I am honestly is striving and surviving.
“You have lost your grandfather. You have lost your freedom. You are convicted and about to lose three more years of your life, one at Rikers, although they could lawfully hold you here for up to two years, then one or two years at God only knows which prison, where God only knows which schmucks will be in charge. But you are still smiling,” she said warmly to me.
A Moment of Silence: Midnight III Page 45
