Not that we showed it. To break the tension, we joked with the one white guy who had made the trip with us. Kevin was one of the few white guys who were cool enough to hang with our little circle. All too often in prison, suburban white guys tried to emulate the swagger of hip-hop artists, and it made the other inmates want to put them to the test. The ones who had the least trouble were those who didn’t try to be anyone other than themselves, and this was the case with Kevin. He was down-to-earth and had a crazy sense of humor.
In the processing room, as we waited our turns, we joked that Kevin should stick with us so the booty bandits wouldn’t get him. He told us to fuck off. We should stick with him, he said, because he could whop all of our asses. Everyone laughed.
Finally, I was given my assignment: Cell I-80, which was close to the middle of the rock on the inside of the cellblock. There were two main blocks at the Reformatory, each five stories tall. On each tier, the inside faced the prison yard, and the outside faced those big gray walls.
At the door of my cell, I looked down the tier. It seemed to stretch on into infinity.
I stepped inside and instantly became nauseous. The place smelled like raw sewage had been dumped on the floor. The hard, green, plastic-covered mattress was peeling and cracked, and the pillow was as flat as a pancake. The faucet at the sink dripped brown liquid, and the toilet was full of human waste. I held my nose and reached to flush the toilet, praying that it wouldn’t overflow. It didn’t. But I was soon to learn that the Reformatory’s hundred-year-old plumbing didn’t actually work. When you flushed your toilet, the waste would routinely show up in someone else’s. Nearly every morning, I was awakened by the smell of someone’s bowel movement floating in my toilet like an uninvited guest.
I walked out onto the yard with the guys from intake. The sun cut through the crisp fall air, but on the ground more than a thousand black and brown men surged back and forth. I had never been in a place that housed so many people.
We stood out from the rest of the inmates because we were still wearing the blue jackets we had been given in quarantine. (Inmates who were able bought clothes from one of the MDOC-approved catalogues, or had them sent from home—a small way of expressing uniqueness in an environment where you’re seen as just a number.)
The veteran inmates were in full predator mode, searching our faces to find who among us was weak enough to be considered prey. It wasn’t long before we saw a couple of guys walking off with Kevin in tow, arms draped around his shoulders. All we could do was watch helplessly. We were on enemy terrain, and at the end of the day, there was nothing we could do to save him.
Later that night, when we were back in our cells, I was awakened by the sound of jingling keys as several officers and nurses ran down the rock. I strained to see as far down the tier as I could, and the rest of the guys grew quiet as we listened to hear what was going on. After nearly an hour, the officers and nurses came back, rolling a gurney down the tier with a body on it. A white sheet was draped across the inmate’s face, and we later learned that it was Kevin. By the time we came out for chow, word had spread throughout the prison that Kevin had committed suicide.
Then on my way to breakfast the next morning, I witnessed my first stabbing. A group of us were taking the back steps down to the chow hall when a slim, dark-skinned brother slid past us, stabbed a guy several times in the neck, and calmly discarded the shank in the mailbox at the bottom of the steps. The victim clutched his neck and took off running back up the stairs. By the time we reached the walkway that led to the chow hall, officers were running into the building.
I stayed up late that night, looking around the cell for something I could make into a shank. This was a skill I would come to perfect over the years. A plastic bottle became a tool to be melted down and sharpened to a point that was sharp enough to take out an eye or puncture a lung. In the bakery, the carts that we used to cool fresh-baked bread became smorgasbords of high-quality steel shanks, and a whisk could be turned into a dozen or so ice picks. If I got my hands on a crude piece of metal, you could be sure that I would turn it into a tool of violence.
Over the next couple of months, I witnessed one act of bloodshed after another, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before I was sucked into the chaos of the big yard. Gladiator School was living up to its name.
—
WITHIN A FEW weeks, most of the guys I had transferred in with were sent to other prisons. We weren’t yet seasoned convicts, so the administration saw it fit to send us to the newer correctional facilities. Several went to Brooks, located in Muskegon. I was sent to a prison in Carson City.
The prison sat on a sprawling piece of land that contained two prisons and a farm, on the other side of the gate. The lawns had been landscaped by inmates, and the new buildings looked like school buildings or recreation centers compared to the old, castle-like fortress I had just left. Each unit was outfitted with microwaves, a pool table, and a universal weight machine. The food was better, and they gave us access to the gym and at least four hours in the yard every day. Overall, the inmates appeared to be less hostile than those at the Reformatory, and more optimistic.
It was a nice place, but in many ways, that made things worse by giving us the illusion that we would be treated better by the staff. By creating a more livable environment, the state was creating more docile inmates. This worked well for those who became complacent when given the extra amenities, but I hadn’t been locked up long enough to be pacified; I was still angry at the system. Whenever I disobeyed the orders of officers or got into heated exchanges with other inmates, the officers would ask older inmates to talk to me. The older inmates would come ask me to be cool so that I wouldn’t get myself in trouble. One inmate could mess it up for the rest of them, they said.
But instead of taking their advice, I felt insulted. Who did these guys think they were? They worked harder for the administration than they did for themselves, and they would put up with anything from the guards so long as they had their microwaves and more time in the yard. I appreciated these conveniences, but I damn well wasn’t trying to get comfortable.
—
I STARTED OFF in 5-Block, which had single-man cells. It was a unit for predators and inmates with behavioral problems; however, they would put anyone in 5 if they didn’t have space in the other units. For the first two weeks, I kept mostly to myself, and the only person that I talked to on a regular basis was a brother named O’Neal-El.
One day, he told me that he was trying to finish a book he had been writing. I asked him what it was about, and he told me he was writing about his neighborhood. O’Neal-El was a member of the infamous drug crew Young Boys Incorporated, and his book was a collection of stories loosely based on his experience in the streets. He asked if I wanted to read one of his stories, and I laughed at the idea of an inmate writing a book. But I didn’t have anything else to do, so I said yes.
When I started reading O’Neal-El’s stories, I couldn’t put them down. The stories were only eighty or ninety pages long, but they were detailed and vivid. When I finished, I felt like I had grown up alongside O’Neal-El and his crew, wearing Adidas Top Tens, fur-lined Max Julien coats, and wide-brimmed campaign hats.
When I told O’Neal-El this, he said I should go to the library and check out a book by Donald Goines. So I sent a request over and asked to be placed on a callout (an approved time period for inmates to be in a specific area) for the library. The next week, my request was approved, and I found myself in the library, asking the clerk if she had any Donald Goines books. She pointed me to a separate room, which was filled with books by Black authors. Upon entering the room, I checked the shelf for and found a Goines novel titled Eldorado Red.
I brought the book to the clerk for checkout, and she gave me a form to sign that said I would be charged five dollars if I lost the book or it got stolen. The only books we were required to fill out these forms for were ones written by Black authors. I mumbled to myself about racism as I looke
d around the room for other books that might interest me.
The room was full of volumes by unfamiliar names—Marcus Garvey, Ivan Van Sertima, and Cheikh Anta Diop—but I knew there had to be something to them, because they were in the same room as Donald Goines. I thumbed through a few. They might as well have been written in Sanskrit, because I had no clue what words like “revolution,” “colonialism,” or “repatriate” meant.
I slid the books back on the shelf and returned to the main area of the library, gathering up a few more novels and bringing them to the desk for checkout. The clerk promised that they would hold a few Donald Goines novels for me to pick up later.
When I got back to my cell, it was nearing time for count, so I sat down and opened up the dog-eared pages of Eldorado Red. From the first page, I was hooked. Goines’s vivid tale of inner-city life and the underground lottery had me in its spell, and his ability to articulate the pain of the streets validated the anger, frustration, and disappointment I felt toward life in the ’hood. Goines placed me back on the streets of Detroit; he made me feel alive again. I read the whole thing that night.
By the time my next callout came, I nearly ran to the library, and when I got there, it was as though the clerks had known I was coming. They had watched other inmates become intoxicated by Donald’s work, and they knew I would be back. They smiled as they handed over Dopefiend and Whoreson, the books they had reserved for me. I took the books in my hand as though they were the Holy Grail and rushed back to my cell, where I proceeded to read through the day and late into the night. By the time I lay down at three in the morning, my eyes burned with the strain. But I couldn’t wait for sunlight so that I could keep indulging what was fast becoming my deepest passion.
The following week, I was transferred to a unit where the cells were double-bunked. My bunky went by the name Murder, which seemed funny to me at the time, because he must have weighed 140 pounds soaking wet. We hit it off immediately. He was originally from Chicago, but had family on the East Side of Detroit, where I had grown up.
Murder and I found different ways to ensure that we each had some alone time in the cell—an arrangement that keeps bunkies from getting on each other’s nerves. When we were in the cell together, Murder would usually watch television while I read. He wasn’t into sports as much as I was, and the only movies he seemed to enjoy were old westerns, none of which appealed to me at the time.
Outside of reading, music was my main means of escape. I was raised in a household where, over the course of one day, you would hear my parents, aunts, and uncles playing artists as diverse as Anita Baker, Pink Floyd, Luther Vandross, Prince, and Parliament Funkadelic. When rap entered my small world, I was hooked, and I killed a lot of time in prison by sitting in the dayroom listening to other inmates as they freestyled and recited the lyrics from their favorite rappers.
It was during one of these sessions that I met a tall, gangly brother who went by the name DJ X. He had a deep, raspy voice and would rap nonstop while beating on his chest. One day, he began using a bunch of names that I wasn’t familiar with, like Huey P. Newton, George Jackson, and Malcolm X. I had heard a few of their names while listening to X Clan and Public Enemy, but I didn’t have a working knowledge of who they were.
When DJ X was done rapping, I asked him about the names he had mentioned. He stared at me with an incredulous look on his face. He couldn’t believe that I didn’t know about Nat Turner, Assata Shakur, and the other men and women he had mentioned in his song. I assured him that I was ignorant, and he suggested that I check out The Autobiography of Malcolm X the next time I made a trip to the library.
—
WHEN I PICKED up Malcolm X’s autobiography, the picture of an intelligent-looking man in horn-rimmed glasses seemed familiar. I had noticed a few brothers wearing T-shirts with Malcolm’s image on the front, and I had also seen in the news that Spike Lee was making a movie based on the book, but I hadn’t stopped long enough to discover what all the hoopla was about. All I knew was that white people appeared to be upset about the movie—as upset as they had gotten when a school named after Malcolm X had opened up in Detroit.
As the pieces started coming together in my mind, I got the feeling that Malcolm X had to be a serious gangster. (I mean, you have to admit that there’s a badass sound to the name Malcolm X.) But when I read the back cover of the book, I felt disappointed. The synopsis made it sound like I was about to read another in a long list of stories about Black people who just wanted to get along. I had grown tired of hearing about Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the story of Rosa Parks on the bus. To me, these stories only served two purposes: one, to make white people feel guilt-free, and two, to appease Black people and ensure that they remained docile in their attempts to get equal respect. But despite my apprehension, I decided to go ahead and read the book. Without question, it was one of the best and most important decisions I have ever made.
Donald Goines’s novels had created in me a desire to read, but Malcolm’s words snatched my eyes open and embedded in me a burning desire to do something meaningful with my life. His ability to go from a common street thug to a world-renowned orator and scholar inspired me in a way that nothing had before.
Once I had read Malcolm, I began reading with a purpose. I devoured everything from political science to erotica to contemporary fiction and philosophy—but the most important objects of my study were books of Black history, as told by people of African descent.
My reading of Black history gave me a sense of pride and dignity that I didn’t have prior to coming to prison. I learned about African kingdoms like Mali, Ashanti, and Timbuktu through classic works by the scholars Chancellor Williams, Cheikh Anta Diop, Dr. Yosef Ben Jochannan, and J. A. Rogers. I learned that my ancestors were more than passive observers of history; they were in fact an integral part of the development of civilization as we know it today. I discovered our great contributions to the world, and it was a shot in the arm for my self-worth. It also helped me understand why the majority of the prison population looked like me and why there were so many deep-rooted racial antagonisms inside of prison.
In school, we hadn’t learned about freedom fighters like Nat Turner, Toussaint-Louverture, Ann Nzingha, Assata Shakur, Malcolm X, and Huey P. Newton. The things we learned about Black history seemed designed to keep us dreaming of a better tomorrow, one that would only come when white America felt sorry enough to treat us as equals. This never sat well with me and, for the most part, left me feeling angry, inferior, and confused.
The more I read Malcolm X’s autobiography, the more things started to make sense to me. Coming into prison, I was confused about religion. I had long ago given up the blond-haired, blue-eyed version of Jesus, whom my mother worshipped and had raised us to believe in. When we went to church or Sunday school, we were discouraged from raising critical questions and told to take anything the preacher and the Bible said at face value.
Anytime I found myself in serious trouble, I would pray to Jesus and ask him to pull me out of the mess. My motivation wasn’t to establish a real relationship with God—it was to get my ass out of hot water. But that didn’t mean that a small part of me didn’t desire a sincere spiritual connection to the source of all life.
Malcolm’s autobiography was the first book to make me question the faith in which I had been raised. His insights into how Christianity had been used to make African people passive in the face of such horrendous treatment by slave masters made me look at things differently. I started to question why all of the characters in the Bible were depicted as white when we saw them at church. I wanted to know where all the Black people were in the Bible. I knew we hadn’t just fallen from the sky, but when I asked other Christians, I was either met with a blank stare or told it didn’t matter, that God wasn’t a color. It was the politically correct thing for them to say, but they said it nervously, suggesting that they knew differently. The fact is, color does matter—especially when you’re lo
oking for evidence that God cares about people like you.
The more disenchanted I became with Christianity, the more intrigued I became with Islam. From the time I was a child, I had envisioned a world that was all-inclusive and a God that was all-loving, regardless of color. Malcolm’s experience in Mecca and his description of Islam as a religion that didn’t discriminate made me feel good, so I began researching the Islamic organizations in prison, looking for one to join.
At the time, there were four dominant Islamic groups in the prisons of Michigan: the Sunni Muslim sect, which holds traditional Islamic beliefs; the Nation of Islam, which has strong Black nationalist views and follows the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Minister Farrakhan; the Moorish Science Temple of America, which follows the teachings of Prophet Noble Drew Ali; and finally, the Melanic Islamic Palace of the Rising Sun. The Melanics profess a militant Afrocentric ideology, and it was for this reason that they drew my interest. I was impressed by the discipline and cultural perspective of the few members I had encountered, and I admired the red, black, and green badge that they wore, because it reminded me of X Clan and other rappers that I loved.
The Melanics used the Bible and the Quran as their spiritual books of choice, but not exclusively so. Members were encouraged to read other religious texts and drink from the many streams that our ancestors had used to quench their thirst for spiritual rejuvenation. It wasn’t uncommon for a Melanic spiritual advisor to quote David Walker’s Appeal or George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye during a sermon, then turn to a passage in the Bible or a surah in the Quran. Instead of trying to dazzle us with an imaginary paradise or the terrifying threat of eternal damnation, the spiritual advisors set out to help us understand our daily realities. This approach reminded me of Malcolm, and how instead of standing at the podium as though he were on the mountaintop, he came down and walked among the people. He related to their struggle, pain, and frustration because he had lived it himself.
Writing My Wrongs Page 9
