By that point in my sentence, I had grown tired of the challenges that came with being part of an organization—from negotiating with the officers to clashing with the elder brothers who were stuck in the old mindset of “might makes right”—but these conversations with the younger brothers fueled my desire to make a difference in the brotherhood.
As fall arrived, I was feeling good about things. The cool air always made me feel optimistic. It was a symbol that the year was coming to an end and a new one was beginning, which meant I had knocked another year off of my sentence. Freedom was beginning to feel more tangible, and I clung to anything I could use as a sign of good things to come (like Serena Williams claiming her first U.S. Open title on September 12, 1999). I could feel myself becoming a leader, a deep thinker, and a man of self-control—the kind of man that my readings of African history had inspired me to become.
That is, until one fateful day in October, when everything I had learned over the last eight years was put on the line.
—
THE DAY STARTED off normal enough, or at least as normal as a day in prison could be. I went to breakfast, and then to class. When I walked into the classroom, a few of the guys were sitting around, joking about who was going to fail an upcoming exam. “You know Shaka ole smart ass gonna pass the damn test and make the rest of us look bad,” one guy said, causing the whole class to laugh.
That afternoon, as I was walking back from my automotive technology class, I felt like my bladder was about to explode. I knew that the officers were about to do count, so I was rushing to make it to the bathroom before they locked us down for the next hour and a half. We didn’t have toilets in our cells, so using the common bathroom was the only option I had.
Suddenly, the shriek of the siren filled our unit. This was the signal for our monthly emergency count, during which we all had to drop whatever it was we were doing and return to our cells. I quickened my pace. I didn’t have much time, but I knew that if I hurried upstairs, I could get to the bathroom in time to relieve myself before lockdown.
When I reached the top of the stairs, I saw several inmates scurrying in and out of the bathroom, and my heart dropped when I noticed the officer who was standing at the door. This particular officer disliked me because, a few days earlier, he and I had gotten into a heated verbal exchange when he refused to let me onto the yard after my class got out early. I cited the prison’s policy, which said I was in the right, and he backed down—but I knew that my stand wouldn’t come without a price. I figured he would, at a minimum, go and shake my cell down and throw my meager belongings around. (Which happened right on schedule, the very next day.)
This wasn’t the first time I had witnessed this superiority complex that white officers carry on their chest like badges. In fact, even the officers who professed to have no racial prejudices were prone to exact revenge on a Black inmate if they thought he had gotten over on them. I had been working every day to better myself and learn how to resolve conflict through the proper channels, but I realized that this rubbed a lot of officers the wrong way. And now the same officer I had embarrassed was standing at the door to the bathroom.
As I approached the door, he stopped me and said, “Hey, where are you going?” The tone of his voice made it clear that he wasn’t going to let me in.
I told him that I needed to use the bathroom, but he looked me in the eye and said, “No, I don’t think so.” Meanwhile, other inmates were walking in and out of the bathroom, unimpeded.
I had two choices in that moment: I could either accept a minor misconduct for disobeying a direct order, or I could go back to my cell and urinate on myself or out the window. The latter felt like an insult to my dignity, so I brushed past the officer and entered the bathroom. The few inmates who were in there hurried out—they had heard about my confrontations with officers at other prisons and knew that things could get ugly real quick.
“That’s an assault on staff,” the officer barked as I relieved myself at the urinal. He was lying. I knew he could charge me with disobeying a direct order, but I hadn’t assaulted him. If I had, he would have immediately pushed his Personal Protection Device, to alert the other officers that he was in danger.
As I flushed the urinal and walked over to wash my hands, the officer and I exchanged glances.
“Give me your ID,” he demanded, standing in the doorway to block my exit from the bathroom.
“I don’t have my ID on me,” I said in as calm a voice as I could muster. “It’s in my cell.”
He asked me several more times for my ID, and I told him each time that I didn’t have it. He smiled sardonically, which made me realize that this was a game he was enjoying immensely. No matter how many times he asked me for my ID, I couldn’t give him what I didn’t have. He reminded me of a schoolyard bully who continues to shake the life out of a kid even after the kid tells him over and over that he doesn’t have any lunch money.
A few inmates were still crowded around the door, trying to watch what was going on. They pleaded with the officer to let me out of the bathroom, but he responded by ordering them to lock up. He then turned back to me and continued to egg me on.
“You’ll produce an ID or you won’t leave out of here,” he warned, stepping close enough for me to feel his hot breath on my face. It felt like the whole world was closing in on me. I attempted to slide past the officer, but he pushed me in the chest, demanding again that I produce an ID.
Maybe it was the officer’s display of dominance, maybe it was the built-up frustration from being mistreated by guards for the last eight years, but something in me snapped. All I could hear was the word “nigger” echoing over and over in my head, telling me that I was a piece of shit and that my personal space could be violated at will. I felt cornered. I thought of all the Black men I had read about, the ones who had been dragged from their beds in the middle of the night kicking and screaming, their cries silenced by the thick rope that was wrapped tightly around their necks. I thought of all the Black women who had been raped in slave quarters while their husbands stood by helplessly, holding in all of their rage to keep their families from being brutally beaten or murdered.
In one smooth leap, I attacked the officer, punching him in the face and neck several times and knocking him to the ground. Then I scooped him up and slammed him on his back, all the while continuing to punch him. With each smashing blow, a weight seemed to lift. I was no one’s slave, and it was better to die or spend the rest of my life in prison than allow someone—officer or not—to trample on my dignity.
By the time another officer managed to twist my hands behind my back, I felt liberated. Several guards dragged the officer I had attacked—who was now unconscious—into the bathroom. Meanwhile, two other officers cuffed me and began escorting me to the hole.
As I was led away, I looked around at the inmates who had stood by watching the whole thing play out. Their eyes were full of contempt and anger, but I was shocked to see that it wasn’t directed at the officer who had bullied me. It was all directed at me. I looked into the eyes of some of the Melanic brothers who were there. These were men that I had vowed to defend and lay my life down for, but now they lowered their heads and walked away in silence. I felt condemned by my brothers, and that was far worse than anything the state could do to me.
The officers led me down to the hole and told me that I was being placed on long-term segregation. It wasn’t news to me—I had been sent there before, and for far less serious crimes. But this time, it wouldn’t be a temporary arrangement. This time, I would stay in the hole for four and a half years.
PART THREE
19
OAKS CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
Manistee, Michigan
October 1999
If there’s one thing I remember about the cell that I inhabited for four and a half years, it’s the smell. Throughout the unit, the stench of defecation, of rotting feet, of unwashed armpits and unwashed asses mingled with the lingering cloud of pepp
er spray. It pervaded everything, from the air to your clothes and the sheets on your bed, and it will forever be burned in my memory as the smell of human despair.
I had begun that day in the hole back at Muskegon. As I sat on the bed, thinking about the inmates who had betrayed me, I wondered if Nat Turner had felt what I felt when two slaves turned him in to his slave master. I wondered if Malcolm X felt the way I did as he took his last breath, bleeding out from gunshot wounds inflicted by the very people he was trying to save. I thought about all of my ancestors who had taken a stand for justice, only to have their own people turn their backs on them.
Within two hours, several officers came to my cell and told me to back up to the door so that they could handcuff and shackle me. I was being transferred. The guards hustled me out to a waiting van, which shuttled me an hour and a half north to Oaks Maximum Correctional Facility. It would be my second trip to Oaks, but my first experience serving time in the hole there.
When I arrived in the control center, several officers stood around in a small circle, holding handcuffs and shackles. The officers who had brought me in needed to get their cuffs back, so they were forced to use a complicated maneuver that would allow them to switch the cuffs without freeing my hands and feet in the process.
The switch with the handcuffs went smoothly, but when they got down to the shackles, they discovered that the officer at Muskegon had placed the shackles on upside down, making it difficult to get the key into the lock. An officer attempted to twist the shackles around so that he could see better, but that caused the metal to bite into the tender flesh on the back of my ankles. After a few frustrating minutes, another officer decided to kick the shackles, which caused them to sink deeper into my flesh.
We exchanged glares, and I said the first words I had uttered since leaving Muskegon:
“If you put your feet on me again, I guarantee I will put you in a hospital bed next to your colleague.”
The officer glared at me in silence, but he didn’t kick the shackles again. He and his partners finished making the switch and escorted me down to the block where my new cell was located.
I was immediately placed in a shower cage and strip-searched, then taken to a temporary segregation cell. As the officers opened the cage, they threatened to slam me to the ground if I made any sudden movements. I did what they said, standing still as they searched me, but on the inside, I was laughing. Beneath the guards’ bravado was a fact that I knew made them very uncomfortable: They were terrified of me. In my prior conflicts with officers, I knew they had to have been somewhat afraid, but this time was different. I could sense the fear leaping from their bodies.
Over the next couple days, I felt like an animal in a zoo exhibit. Officer after officer came to my cell, hoping to get a glimpse of this “monster” they had heard so much about. Word had circulated throughout the prison system that I had nearly beaten an officer to death at Muskegon, and that I was suspected of having ordered hits on inmates and officers at my previous stops.
As the officers filed past my cell to gawk at me, neither they nor I could guess how much our perception of each other would change over the next four and a half years. In fact, this day would mark the beginning of a very powerful transformation inside of me, one that would see me begin to confront my demons and recover the humanity I had lost during all those years of violence, anger, and pain.
But to get there, I would first have to go through Michigan’s version of hell on earth.
—
THE TIERS SMELLED and sounded of gloom. Each wing of the four-wing unit had twenty or so spartan cells, each containing only a concrete slab for a bed and a steel toilet and sink.
Within a few weeks, I would be introduced to a whole new language and culture of madness. Each day I was awakened to the sounds of footlockers being banged shut nonstop. I couldn’t tell which cells the noise was coming from, but the sound was deafening, stopping only when an officer would run up on the tier. Once the banging stopped, the officers would serve breakfast and ask us if we wanted to go out for our yard period, which amounted to five hour-long sessions a week in a cage that resembled a dog kennel.
After yard, the unit would simmer down, and I would pace the floor as I listened to the other inmates play chess by hollering out their moves beneath their cell doors. They would use the back of notepads to make chessboards, and they tore paper into small bits that they could use as pieces. The games were very competitive, and were often gambled on by other inmates, who would pay up in the only currency we had in the hole: toiletries and stamped envelopes. In these quieter moments on the tier, it was fascinating to hear the other inmates calling out their moves—but the quiet moments didn’t last for long.
You’d think that enclosing inmates within their own cells for twenty-three hours a day would minimize conflict, but even in the hole, beefs formed constantly over gambling debts, arguments over religious views, and inmates who had butted into conversations that weren’t meant for them. In an attempt to gain a semblance of control over their environment, the inmates would take these slights as opportunities to wage battle with each other and the officers.
The weapon of choice was what we called “weapons of ass destruction.” These feces-filled bottles were smuggled to the showers or yard cages, where they could be deployed like water pistols on unsuspecting victims. If they couldn’t get you in that way, they would make shit patties and slide them underneath your door. (I stayed out of this. I had no interest in playing with my own feces, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to risk subjecting myself to the bodily fluids of another inmate.)
One day, two inmates were arguing over an unpaid gambling debt, and one of them manipulated his food slot open, waiting for one of the officers to escort his enemy to the shower. When the two of them walked by, he kicked the food slot open and squirted a thick stream of feces from his colostomy bag onto the inmate and the officer. The smell of shit hung in the air like a miasmic cloud for the next couple of days.
For every measure of prevention that the officers came up with, the inmates devised a way around it. At one point, they drilled bolts into the food slots to keep the inmates from being able to open them, but several inmates went into MacGyver mode trying to figure out a way to jimmy the locks. It didn’t take long. First, they slid a comb attached to a piece of string over the top of their door, with their across-the-hall neighbor guiding their movements. Once the comb was lined up with the bolt, they would pull up on it until the lock came undone. After that, all they had to do was slide a cable cord beneath the door, twist it around the knob, and continue twisting until the slot popped open and the weapons of ass destruction could be employed again.
Another weapon in the hole was sleep deprivation. Sometimes when inmates were in conflict with each other, they’d beat on the steel toilets or walls all night with a brush or the hard plastic shower shoes we had been given. This, of course, impacted the whole wing, but there was never any regard for innocent bystanders, and this often led to others being drawn into the wars. Within moments of the lights going out, the tier would erupt with the sound of multiple toilets being banged on and men hollering and screaming through the cracks beneath their cell doors. Sometimes the banging would last for weeks, or until one of the culprits was moved to a cell in a different unit. Another method of getting even was to blow the power in your neighbor’s cell by shoving a staple into your electrical outlet. The three inmates who shared your breaker would lose power, which would keep them from being able to watch the three channels of TV that we had.
I was terrified by the depth of the psychosis that I witnessed on a daily basis. From the guy beating on his door to the man down the hall who took a magazine staple and ripped his scrotum open, or my neighbor who would cut himself and destroy his cell in a rage, I got to the point where I could no longer tell who was crazy. The staff psychiatrist claimed that these inmates were just “acting out,” but during my years in the hole, I had learned that isolation causes a disconn
ect in the deepest part of the human psyche. The feeling of being alone, vulnerable, and unable to make real decisions was suffocating, and the monotony of being in a small cell without normal human contact or face-to-face interactions could drive even the most well-behaved inmate to the brink of insanity. There is nothing humane about being caged in a cell for twenty-three hours a day, and when you add this to all of the other stresses that inmates face—the torture of regrets from your past, the neglect and abandonment from your family members—you have a surefire recipe for disaster.
One night, a Latino inmate chose to end his life. His ordeal had begun weeks before, when the officers began harassing him constantly because of his sexual orientation. On a daily basis, I would hear the officers call him names like “dick-sucking fuckboy” and “queer booty bandit.”
One night, he woke everyone up with a loud and chilling rendition of the Lord’s Prayer. It freaked us out, but this was just a warm-up for the next day, when he set the cell on fire while he was inside. As the inmate’s screams filled the cellblock, officers rushed onto the wing, opened his door, and hosed him down with a fire extinguisher before taking him to suicide watch for twenty-four hours. Within two weeks, he had attempted the same thing again, so they removed him from the cell and never brought him back.
Every day that I spent in the hole, there was something going on that challenged my humanity. There were days when I felt hopeless as I listened to a man across the hall beat senselessly on his door for hours at a time and I couldn’t get away from the thoughts and regrets that had plagued me throughout my entire sentence. The worst part was that I had no idea when I would be released from this madhouse.
—
BY THE TIME I had been in the hole for two years, I had grown tired of seeing grown men descending to craziness. I knew that if something didn’t change, I would end up just like them. This was when I broke down in front of the mirror, forgiving everyone I had held anger for, all of those years. I was tired of living in a ball of bitterness and rage, and I was tired of hurting people, including myself. For the first time in my life, I was starting to see my anger for what it really was: a destructive force that would tear me apart unless I found a way to change.
Writing My Wrongs Page 16
