Panther Baby

by Jamal Joseph

  I would talk to Merciful about prison being a concentration camp that was part of a military-industrial complex designed to exploit and enslave black men for the purpose of profit. Merciful would talk about the black man being God and white man being the devil.

  He would hand me a cigarette and ask a bunch of questions about the Panthers. Real cigarettes were like gold in prison. In fact, cigarettes were used as currency and also for gambling. Prisoners would shoot dice, play cards, and bet on basketball games and boxing matches with cigarettes. “Juggling” was a big loan-shark business in jail. “Jugglers” would walk through the cell block calling out “Two for one” or “Three for one.” This meant that you could get a pack of cigarettes (or cookies, deodorant, or toothpaste) today with the understanding that you would pay back two or three packs on commissary day.

  Many of the jugglers were also part of the house gang. The house gang got to stay out when the rest of the inmates were locked in their cells for the afternoon count and evening lockup. This meant they could pursue their juggling enterprise as they moved around the tiers, waxing, mopping, handing out clean sheets, and bringing food trays to inmates who were locked down in segregation for security or medical reasons.

  Merciful was part of the house gang and a juggler, but he never asked for anything back when he gave me a few cigarettes, real toothpaste (not the tin of tooth powder inmates were usually given), or a sandwich. He was just fascinated to meet a “real Black Panther” and was amazed that I appeared to be “so soft” compared with the “hard niggers” he imagined the Panthers to be.

  He asked if the Panthers were coming to break me out. I told him that the charges against us were all trumped up and that the lawyers were working to get the case dismissed. He warned me not to trust anyone because the jail was filled with snitches and “booty bandits.” Booty bandits were prisoners who liked to rape “new jacks”—new guys like myself.

  The truth is I was secretly hoping that a Panther commando squad would blow down the walls of the cell block and free me. I hated jail. The metal walls of the tiny cell seemed like they were closing in on me. I felt like I was losing my mind. I inspected myself in the metal mirror. I looked like a crazy man. My Afro was matted and wild. My T-shirt was dirty. My eyes were puffy with depression and anxiety. Merciful passed me a plastic Afro comb. “Stash that in your mattress,” he said. “The guards consider that contraband.” I picked out my Afro, then used the comb to tear a slit in my mattress and hid it. Merciful also gave me a clean pair of socks, drawers, and a T-shirt. He told me how to stop up my sink with toilet paper so I could fill it with cold water and use the prison soap to lather up and wash my dirty clothes.

  There were other prisoners in segregation. Most were inmates who were serving three to thirty days for fighting, disobeying an order, or possessing contraband. A few were mentally disturbed inmates who were waiting for beds to open up in Bellevue’s prison psych ward. The rest were labeled snitches—inmates who were being held in protective custody because they were testifying against their codefendants or other inmates.

  A few days after I arrived at Rikers, three guards came to my cell. The cell door rolled open. I stood, uncertain as to why the guards were there. “You have a visitor,” one of the guards said. I cautiously stepped outside my cell. They escorted me to the visiting room. Two dozen inmates sat on stools and talked into telephone receivers to their relatives who sat on the other side of the Plexiglas windows. I was considered a high security risk, so the guards led me past the other inmates and locked me into a small corner metal booth. The inside of the booth felt like a coffin. I dripped sweat and took slow deep breaths to keep from passing out.

  A few minutes later a guard led Noonie to a chair on the other side of the Plexiglas. She looked frail and bewildered in this concentration-camp-like environment, but I was happy to see her. Noonie smiled and started talking. I picked up my telephone receiver and gestured to her to do the same. The damn phones didn’t work. I banged on my cubicle wall, yelling for a guard. I motioned to Noonie to call for the guard on her side of the Plexiglas. She shook her head no and mouthed, “Let’s not make trouble.”

  “We’re not making trouble, Noonie,” I yelled. “I have a legal right to a visit. These phones are supposed to work. They’re treating me like an animal in here.” I pounded the cubicle wall. I saw tears forming in Noonie’s eyes and calmed myself down.

  I located a small mesh covered vent below the Plexiglas window where I could shout to Noonie and place my ear to hear her response.

  “Are you okay?” I yelled.

  “I’m fine, sweetheart,” Noonie replied, “but I’m worried about you.”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. This is just all a bunch of harassment. The lawyers will have us out soon. Did anybody from the party call you?”

  “Somebody called,” Noonie said. “But I told them I didn’t have anything to say.” My heart sank as I pictured Noonie hanging up on a Panther leader.

  “But if they were from the Panthers, they were trying to help. Maybe they had information from the lawyers.”

  Noonie set her jaw like a strong African mask. “That Black Panther mess put you here. Now they want to help?”

  When Noonie got like this, there was no reasoning with her, so I left the subject of phone calls alone. She told me that Reverend Lloyd and the whole church were praying for me. I wanted to say, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” but I knew Noonie would have found a way to slap me through the Plexiglas window. I just nodded my head and mouthed the words, “Thank you.”

  The guard came for Noonie and told her the visit was over. “Over? Visits are supposed to be thirty minutes. My mother’s only been here for ten,” I yelled at the guard through the vent. “The phone doesn’t work and you’re cutting my visit short?” The guard ignored me. Noonie told me she loved me, blew me a kiss, and left. The guards left me in the visiting coffin for another hour. When they finally let me out I was drenched, weak, dehydrated, and pissed.

  Merciful was sitting in one of the regular visiting cubicles waiting for his visitor to arrive. “Peace, black man,” he said, and smiled. “You have a good visit with your people?”

  “Naw, man,” I snapped, “these pigs messed with my whole visit.”

  One of the guards escorting me was a short, stocky black dude. He spun around, jabbed his finger in my chest, and got nose to nose with me like a boxer before the first bell. “I ain’t gonna be all them damn pigs,” he spit.

  “You don’t have to be one if you don’t act like one,” I replied almost politely.

  The guard jabbed me with his finger again. “I said I ain’t gonna be all them damn pigs.”

  I knew the next words were going to get me in trouble, but I was too mad to hold back. “I’m sorry. I meant to say these motherfucking pigs are messing with my visit.”

  The guard was holding his prison key ring, which he used to deliver a hard smack against the side of my head. I staggered back. He came at me with a punch. I managed to partially block it and landed a kick in his fat belly. I was aiming for his balls, but it was enough to wobble him back. Then two white guards jumped on me and started pounding away with punches. Prison guards don’t actually carry clubs for fear that inmates will snatch them and use them as weapons against them. It’s the riot squad, or “goon squad,” that wears helmets and uses clubs, shields, and tear gas to overpower prisoners.

  Since the visiting corridor is narrow, the guards had a hard time subduing me. We banged up against the wall, trading blows until they were able to drag me to the main corridor. Once there I dropped to the ground and curled into a protective ball the way I had been trained in Panther self-defense classes. The guards handcuffed me. There were a number of inmates and guards and a black captain named Woods in the main corridor. With all the witnesses, the beating stopped. The captain told them to take me back to “seg” and write up an incident report. Captain Woods had a reputation for being hard but fair. He did not allow
guards to use “excessive force” on his watch.

  Captain Woods shadowed the guards as they took me back to my cell and locked me in. He asked me what happened. I told him about being locked in the broken cubicle and making a general statement about the pigs. He asked me who threw the first blow. I showed him the swelling that the key ring left near my eye. Captain Woods just nodded and walked away. I slept with one eye open, expecting the guards to return in larger numbers with a beat-down.

  My first week in prison felt like a year, but I knew Noonie’s trek from Rikers Island back to her apartment in the North Bronx must have felt like an eternity. There were locked gates to go through, a long wait for the bus to take her off Rikers Island, then another bus to the subway station, followed by a series of trains on the two-hour ride home. Eventually, I convinced her to visit only once each month.

  I would write Noonie letters assuring here that I was doing fine and that the lawyers were making progress with the case. She would send me shorter notes with encouraging Bible quotes and well wishes from church members. It was hard to talk about the Panther 21 case with Noonie. She understood and seemed to agree that it was a frame-up, but she still felt that I had gotten mixed up with the “wrong people,” while believing that the judge would let me go because it was my first mistake.

  The day after my scuffle with the visiting room guard, Captain Woods came to my cell with another officer. “Pack your stuff up, Mr. Joseph,” he said. “You’re being transferred.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Three Block,” he said. “General population.”

  This is weird, I thought. I get into a fight with three guards and actually get released from segregation? I wondered if this might be a set-up, but I rolled up my few possessions in my blanket and followed Captain Woods. As we walked down the main corridor, Captain Woods explained that the black guard who hit me had been transferred to a different unit on Rikers. “I don’t like my guards hitting inmates with key rings,” he said, “but you ain’t gonna get very far calling my guards pigs either.”

  I accepted this as compromise justice and stepped into Three Block. My new home.

  7

  Walk Slow and Drink Plenty of Cold Water

  I walked down the “flats” (the ground floor) and up the stairs to my assigned cell on the third tier. The cell block was huge. Four tiers with two inmates per cell. Four hundred adolescents with hormones raging and anger and frustration pulsing through their veins. The charges ranged from burglary and drug possession to armed robbery and murder. All of the teenagers in this section of Rikers were trial prisoners. They either could not afford bail or had been remanded without bail. It was sad to see young men locked up for relatively minor offenses because their family couldn’t afford a few hundred dollars to get them out, but that was the case for a lot of the young inmates at Rikers.

  There was a hierarchy of respect related to what you were charged with. Murder and armed robbery were on the high end. Burglary and grand larceny auto were on the low end and considered to be “meatball” cases. Because I was facing so much time (three-hundred-plus years), and because my indictment listed charges that included attempted murder of police officers and arson, I was considered among the heavies. But as Merciful put it, I “looked soft,” skinny and light-complexioned with a curly Afro. When I walked down the flats, the other inmates would stare at me and whisper. Many of them were wondering how a choirboy-looking dude like me could be hooked up with the Black Panthers.

  My cell partner was a nineteen-year-old Puerto Rican guy named Manny, who looked more like a marine recruit than an inmate. Compact physique, buzz-cut hair, and sporting a heart shaped tattoo that said MARIA. He had done two and a half years in Elmira Reformatory and was really angry at himself for catching a new three-year sentence for armed robbery. Manny never talked about the details of his case. He said the cell block was full of snitches who would give up their own mother in a second to get out of jail. Manny was “jail wise,” meaning he knew all the ins and outs of doing time. At first he had very little to say to me except “take the top bunk and don’t touch my shit,” but eventually he loosened up.

  The guards would make mail deliveries by placing letters on the bars after evening lockup. The envelopes would already be open, having been read and inspected for contraband. Manny asked me to read him a letter from his girlfriend, Maria. He seemed agitated and embarrassed about asking, saying that Maria liked to use “all these big fucking words.” I read him the letter, then helped him write a response, much like in the play I had read about Cyrano de Bergerac. In payment, Manny handed me two packs of cigarettes and asked me to give him my word that this “letter shit” would stay between us. I told him he had my word but turned down the cigarettes.

  “Knowledge is power, brother,” I said as I handed his cigarettes back. “And the power should be shared by all the people.”

  “You a strange dude,” Manny decided as he looked me up and down, “but you all right. I’m gonna teach you how to jail.

  “Walk slow and drink plenty of cold water,” Manny advised. “That’s what an old black dude taught me when I first got upstate. That means think two or three times before you make any moves, and drink lots of water to keep your kidneys clean. There’s all kinds of hepatitis and other bullshit going around in the joint.”

  Manny taught me that the cell desk could be used as a stove to make quick dishes like grilled cheese, fried salami, eggs, and even French toast. The secret to not getting caught by the guards was to grill quickly and to do it after they had made a big count or a shakedown in the hopes that they were just too tired to climb stairs and search the cell block for an errant griller.

  The cell toilet could be used as a refrigerator. The inmates would soap it up, scrub it clean, flush it a few times to get the water ice cold, and drop in tiny sealed cartons of milk or plastic sealed packets of salami and other meat to keep it cold. If you had to go to the bathroom, you took the items out, did your business, scrubbed the toilet, and turned it back into a refrigerator. Clothes could get a hot-water wash by taking them with you to the showers; pressing was accomplished by laying them out under your mattress before turning in for the night.

  At night, after lock-in, inmates would throw empty cookie boxes attached to thin ropes made from braided sheets out of their cells, running them either down the tier or over the railing. This technique was called running a line. The intent was to get your cookie box to your homeboy in another part of the cell block so that you could pass or receive some snacks, a few cigarettes, a “kite” (a letter), or drugs. Many fights and stabbings happened because someone intercepted a line and stole the goods or because an inmate refused to get out of bed or off the toilet to pass a line that landed in front of his cell.

  Torn strips of prison sheets could also be braided into thick rope. This “Rikers rope” was used in escapes and suicides: Witness one kid, a seventeen-year-old black inmate named Teddy, who wandered around the cell block looking like a homeless guy. It was clear that Teddy needed some counseling and medical attention, so I went to the guards and they told me that it was really none of my business, but he was on the list for a transfer to Bellevue. That night Teddy used Rikers rope to hang himself from the light box in his cell.

  We saw Teddy’s hanging body as we marched down the tier for breakfast. Neck swollen, eyes bulging, saliva drooling from enlarged purple lips. “Yo guards, a hangup on Three Tier. Hangup!” Manny yelled. “Hangup” was slang for a hanging, and the guards came running. Manny and I grabbed Teddy’s legs and lifted his body while a guard cut the rope. We laid him on the floor. Other guards arrived and yanked us out of the way even though we were trying to help. “Shit. He’s dead,” one of the guards shouted as he checked Teddy’s pulse. A siren buzzed and lock-down orders came through the loudspeaker. The doors of our cells rolled shut as the guards carried Teddy’s body out on a stretcher.

  Inmates called out to each other from their cells saying that Teddy hung himsel
f because he had gotten two years for grand larceny auto and was scared to go upstate to do his bid. Others said he was tired of being pressed by the booty bandits. I had seen Teddy go into the shower room with some of the guys from the house gang; now I realized they were taking him there to have sex.

  An hour after they had discovered Teddy’s suicide, the goon squad came to shake down the cell block. There was a symphony of running water as inmates flushed their lines, Rikers rope, and other contraband before the goon squad could get to their cells.

  There were numerous places around the cell to stash contraband items, including street money, drugs, and weapons. Air vents, lighting fixtures, and bunk-bed legs could all hold items that had been epoxyed with toothpaste and camouflaged with paint made from tooth powder and cigarette ashes.

  Manny showed me his weapons stash, which consisted of two homemade knives called shanks, figas, or figs. A figa was a piece of a jailhouse mattress spring that had been straightened, filed into an ice-pick tip, and crowned with a handle made from a sheet or a blanket. It was a wicked-looking weapon that could easily puncture the body and inflict major damage. Manny also knew how to fashion bedsprings into brass knuckles. Rikers was known as a gladiator school, and it appeared I was celling with a master blacksmith.

  Manny had very little to say to me outside the cell. He was a loner who didn’t hang out with anybody. “I just want to do my bid and get the fuck out of here and back to my girl and my baby daughter.” Most other inmates would hang out in different groups on the flats—the Thugs; the Five Percenters; the Latin Brothers; and the Workout Kids, who did a thousand sit-ups and push-ups a day.

  Three times a day a guard’s voice would blare through the loudspeaker system ordering us to line up for chow. We would march in two lines down the corridor to the mess hall where inmates could briefly mingle with their homeboys and codefendants in the other cell blocks. Our only utensil was a spoon, which worked fine for the watery oatmeal but was challenging on the rubbery meats and half-cooked potatoes. On the way out of the mess hall each inmate had to place his tray on the stack and his used spoon in a bucket, all overseen by several guards.