Writing My Wrongs

by Shaka Senghor

  I hadn’t ever thought of becoming a spiritual advisor, but it turned out that I was a natural for the position. I started challenging the board of directors to think of different ways to educate the brothers. Our old model of having members commit literature to memory had proven ineffective, so I created study guides that would help the brothers better understand the material. I also helped the members become more disciplined when it came to standing up to the officers on the yard. Instead of the Bible and the Quran, which we used for spiritual development, I encouraged the brothers to read more revolutionary literature by authors like Assata Shakur and George Jackson.

  Not long after leaving the kitchen, I was given a job working in the recreation center, which was the heartbeat of the joint. Every hustle imaginable took place there, from drug trafficking and loan sharking to gambling and playing pool for money. It was the perfect job for me as the spiritual advisor, because it gave me access to every yard. I could set up meetings whenever I wanted under the guise of a basketball or weight-lifting callout, and whenever we had a beef on the yard, we were able to coordinate and strategize in a way that allowed us to retaliate with stealth.

  As our battles with other inmates intensified and hits were ordered, I found myself battling the same contradictions I had felt at Standish. On one hand, I was teaching the brothers that white supremacy and fascism were the enemy, but in the next breath, I was ordering the stabbings of other inmates—inmates who had brown flesh like me.

  I grew tired of being forced to respond and retaliate anytime a beef sprang up (which at the Gladiator School was a regular occurrence). Eventually, the weight on my shoulders grew so great that I decided to resign my post and step back to reassess where I was headed in life. I was growing in my consciousness, but the gravitational pull of prison life was overwhelming. I found myself in a constant internal battle, and the only time I felt at peace was when I was in the recreation center working out.

  It was around this time that I wrote an article for the prison newspaper about my sister’s battle with crack addiction and how it made me feel. I didn’t give it much thought, but a month or so later, the article prompted a conversation that would change the course of my life.

  When I arrived at work one day, I found our supervisor Tom sitting in the recreation center reading the paper. He kept looking up from the newspaper and then at me, with a curiosity that I hadn’t recognized before.

  “Shaka, did you really write this?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I wrote it, Tom,” I said with a chuckle.

  “This is really good, Shaka. I want to take it home and share it with my wife.”

  The next day he told me that his wife, who was a magazine editor, thought I had a future as a writer. I had never thought of writing as something to be taken seriously. I was serious about reading, of course, but the only future I could dream of was one where I simply got out of prison and went on with my life. I had never thought of becoming anything other than free.

  But Tom’s words stayed with me. It had been a long time since someone had said something affirming about me that wasn’t connected to violence. It made me feel like I could be good at something other than hustling drugs and hurting people.

  —

  WITHIN SIX MONTHS, I had firmly established my position in the prison. The inmates counted on me to be fair, and one of the things that separated me from others was my diplomacy. In the midst of conflict, I always tried to find a way for us all to get what we wanted in the end. I wanted my money and they wanted their lives, so more often than not, we were able to work something out.

  During the summer of 1996, things started heating up between several of the organizations and the officers. We were tired of two officers in particular. They ran the yard at the Reformatory, and in the preceding weeks had slammed several inmates to the ground and illegally confiscated property that they had no right to take. We organized silent protests, unified workout regimens, and employed other tactics to let them know that we stood together. Officers retaliated by setting up some of the leaders from our organizations, and I found myself on the receiving end of their harassment.

  An officer named Sergeant W. started shaking me down every chance he got and destroying my cell on a daily basis. I never got caught slipping, but eventually, he got me transferred to Carson City Correctional Facility, to separate me from the brothers I had been helping to organize. In my absence, though, the war at the Reformatory waged on. Not long after I transferred, several officers were jumped, and one was nearly stabbed to death.

  —

  MY MOVE TO Carson City would mark the beginning of a three-year period of back-to-back transfers from prison to prison. I spent eleven months at Carson City, another year at Oaks Correctional in Manistee, and a year or so at Gus Harrison Correctional in Adrian, where there was a lot of racial tension between the inmates and guards. Each of these prisons looked the same—large, red-brick buildings that resembled recreation centers—the go-to template during Michigan’s prison boom.

  At each stop, I became close with the Melanic brothers, working to educate the young guys and build common ground with the other organizations at the prison. I also intensified our physical training to ensure that we were balanced in our development. We would make what we called a “cook up” and eat together nearly every day, to make sure all of the brothers were getting their basic nutrition. The cook up was a concoction made of ramen noodles, cheese, summer sausage, pickles, and chili poured over nachos. It was our way of supplementing meals from the chow hall and breaking up the monotony of the prison slop that they fed us.

  By the time I transferred to Adrian, I was eight years into my sentence and beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I was halfway through the minimum range of my sentence, and I had worked hard to decrease my security level. One day, my father, son, and stepmother came to visit, and I shared with them the excitement I felt knowing that I was steadily working my way through my sentence and would be in medium security soon. My father told me that he was proud of me for handling myself and staying out of trouble. I still had eight years until my earliest release date, but it felt good to know that I had made it through the first half of my sentence.

  There would be light at the end of the tunnel for me, indeed—but that’s not what would come first. A few days after that visit, the administration decided to break up the leadership of our organization, and they transferred me to a prison in Muskegon. It was there that everything I had learned would be put to the test. A test that I would fail.

  17

  BRIGHTMOOR

  West Side Detroit

  1991

  One hot summer day in July, Brenda and I were sitting in the living room when our friend Derrick stopped by and asked me to DJ a party that was happening that weekend. It had been forever since I had touched a turntable, but I said yes. Music was one of my passions, and I loved nothing more than watching people dance to whatever symphony I had composed. Brenda and I spent all week looking forward to the night, and we even took a trip to the mall to make sure we would look fresh for the occasion.

  We arrived at the party early, but people had already started showing up—a good sign that the night was going to be live. Within an hour or so, the backyard was packed and the celebration was in full swing. Everyone was drinking and smoking, but I was taking it easy because I didn’t want to get too drunk while I was spinning. That didn’t last long, though, because a few of my homeboys from another ’hood soon came through and started passing around Olde English “800” and Seagram’s gin. I knew my limits, so I let someone else take over the turntables and went to drink with my crew.

  We had a table in the back of the yard, and Brenda and I started dancing and acting silly with each other. It was the first time we had been to a party together, and we were having the time of our lives.

  Then the gunshots rang out.

  People started running out of the backyard, screaming and hollering. I pulled out my pistol and told ev
erybody in our crew to follow me to the front of the house. When we got there, one of my homeboys found me and explained what had happened. “Man, that nigga Derrick just shot a motherfucker in the chest.” Derrick was in our crew, so if he was the one doing the shooting, it meant that we had better be on the lookout, too.

  I didn’t know what was going on. The beef could have been with someone we didn’t know, and he could’ve been on his way back to retaliate. Or it could’ve been with someone we knew, and who knew where to find us. It hadn’t been long since I’d been shot, and I didn’t like knowing that someone might come to my house and retaliate for what Derrick had done.

  Derrick was nowhere to be found, so I had no way of gauging the situation. I told Brenda that it was best for us to head home, and we started walking back around the corner to our house. On the way there, I was paranoid, looking over my shoulder with every other step and keeping my eyes out for headlights.

  As we turned the corner onto our block, a Jeep pulled up to our side. I eased my finger around the trigger of the .380 in my pocket, planning to shoot through my jeans if I saw any sign of beef—but it turned out that the driver was only looking for directions. I breathed a sigh of relief and continued talking to Brenda as we walked up the driveway to the front of our house.

  Just as we were opening the door to go inside, a nondescript white sedan pulled up out front. The driver slowly lowered his window, and all I could think about was how vulnerable we were, there on the porch without anything to use for cover. Once again, I found my finger resting in the crook of the trigger in my pocket.

  Then a familiar voice called out from the backseat of the car. “Yo, Jay, you on?”

  It was Tom, one of my favorite customers. Tom was a middle-aged white dude from a West Side suburb called Novi. He talked slick and fast like he was from the ’hood, and he was known to spend several hundred dollars each time he stopped by.

  The sound of Tom’s familiar voice eased my nerves, so I told Brenda to go inside and started walking over to the car. My friend and partner in crime Mark followed close behind.

  When I reached the car, I saw two unfamiliar white men sitting in the front seat. Tom was in the back, holding more money than I had ever seen him carry. It didn’t look right.

  “Yo, why you bringing people I don’t know to my house,” I said to Tom. “You know the rules over here.”

  “They’re cool, Jay,” Tom said. “We just want to get a package. Why are you acting so uptight?”

  Tom and I started arguing. I told Tom that it looked like he was trying to make a deal for the police, and I wasn’t going to serve him. He continued begging, trying to convince me to hook him up, but I was irritated and paranoid, and I just wanted the night to be over. It was time for this conversation to end.

  “You got five minutes to get off of the block before things get bad,” I said.

  This time, it was Tom’s friend who replied. “It’s a free country,” he said. “And we don’t have to go anywhere.”

  This put me even more on edge than before. “If you know what’s good for you,” I said, “you’d get the fuck from over here.” My voice was getting louder and more menacing, but Tom’s friend wouldn’t back down.

  “Fuck you, we not leaving until we get what we came for,” he shot back.

  I had never seen a customer come in the ’hood and act so brazen. “Are y’all the police?” I asked, and told them again to leave. But Tom’s friend continued shouting out of the car.

  ”What the fuck you mean are we the police? We came to spend money and you acting all tough and shit. You ain’t that fucking tough!” he screamed. It was too dark for me to make out the features of his face, but I could see him leaning forward in the passenger’s seat like he was about to jump out of the car. That’s when I pulled out my pistol.

  Mark, who had been watching the whole scene unfold, jumped in to calm things down. “Fuck them, Jay, let’s go in. They not talking about shit, and it ain’t worth getting caught up.” We turned and started walking toward the house.

  Then, suddenly, Tom’s friend opened the car door. Something in me snapped. Memories of getting shot flashed through my head, and every one of my instincts screamed that it was about to happen again. I spun back around with the pistol in my hand.

  Tom’s friend said something else, but to this day, I can’t remember what it was. I’m not sure I even heard him. All I recall is the feeling of danger that surged through me as I fired several shots—BANG! BANG! BANG!—into the car. The tires screeched as they sped off down the block and around the corner.

  I never saw the guy’s face—never saw if he had anything in his hand or not. I hadn’t heard him yell out in pain, and I didn’t know where the shots I fired had landed. But something in my soul told me that a terrible thing had happened. In that moment, I knew the guy had died. I had shot several people before, but only to scare them off. This time was different; this time, I had shot to kill.

  When I went back into the house, everyone looked at me like I was a ghost. Their faces were solemn and their eyes were accusatory, as if they knew the shots had been fatal, too. I saw a level of fear in their faces that had never been there before. Brenda and I decided to pack up, lock the house down, and go spend the night at her cousin’s house.

  When we got there, I told Brenda that I knew I had killed the man, and she broke down crying in my arms. The consequences of our life on the streets had finally hit home, and in the worst way. Here was Brenda, pregnant and ready for a brighter future together, and I had done something that promised to rob our little family of any hope of a better life. I had helped to bring a new life into the world—but now I was taking my life out of it.

  —

  FOR YEARS, the circumstances of my arrest were a focal point of my bitterness.

  The day after the shooting, a detective showed up at my door, and I learned that everyone I thought of as a friend had turned his or her back on me. In my naïveté, I had expected them to stay true to the code of the streets, but when the officers came knocking, every last one of them made a statement against me. In the police station at 1300 Beaubien, I hung my head in shame as the officers read statement after statement, driving home the reality that my friends had given me up. I felt betrayed—but what the hell did I know about right and wrong? I had just killed a man over a meaningless argument.

  I was a fool, and had been one for a long time. Each time I had hit the block to hustle, I was putting my life in someone else’s hands. Each time I had carried a gun under the influence of alcohol, I was taking the chance that something could go horribly wrong. Each time I had talked about getting my life in order, only to go back to the streets, I was rolling the dice and gambling with my future.

  Now I was charged with open murder in a case that I had no chance of winning. The game was over, and I had no future left to gamble.

  18

  MUSKEGON CORRECTIONAL FACILITY

  Muskegon, Michigan

  1999

  Among the inmates in Michigan’s prison system, Muskegon Correctional Facility had earned a reputation as one of the best places you could be transferred. It was one of the only prisons in Michigan that allowed inmates to ride bikes, play golf, and hang out almost anywhere in the prison. Ironically, it also had a reputation as one of the most dangerous facilities, because guys there would get too comfortable and forget that, despite the relaxed environment, they were still in prison.

  I arrived in the sweltering heat of summer and was assigned to a double cell with a brother who was days away from going home. When he told me that he would be getting out in a few weeks, a small knot grew in my stomach. While I was happy to see a brother leaving, I was saddened by the reality that I wouldn’t be walking out of those doors behind him. This was why I had long ago blocked out thoughts of what it would be like to be released from prison—it was the only way I could keep myself from going insane.

  I eased back into my regular routine of working out, studying, and bui
lding with the brothers at that prison. I enrolled in an automotive tech class, and my life seemed to be moving in a positive direction.

  The summer was moving along quickly, and our Melanic brotherhood was preparing for our annual Day of Remembrance celebration, where we honored the memory and legacy of the millions of Africans who were enslaved or died during the transatlantic slave trade. We fasted for twenty-four hours in preparation for our annual banquet in the chow hall, where we would reflect on our ancestors and the opportunities we had to make a positive contribution to the world.

  At the ceremony, I gave a passionate speech about the sacrifices made by our prophet Nat Turner in his attempt to liberate our ancestors from bondage. Many of the brothers had already admired Turner for the bravery that empowered him to take up arms against his slave masters, but I reminded them that his greatest sacrifice was risking his life to learn how to read, which in turn had made him a better leader. For the brothers who had grown up in the ’hood, it was a revelation to hear that the written word was as powerful a weapon as a loaded gun.

  When the ceremony ended, some of the younger brothers began gravitating toward me. They told me that they respected my balance and integrity, and they had never heard anyone use history to help them understand what was happening to them in the present. They were inspired to learn more so that they, too, could lead and make a difference when they were released.