America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

  I’ll say 90 percent of the people here are guilty, even if some are just basically a victim of circumstances. You do have people here because they hang with me and they haven’t done anything and they get arrested. Okay, you haven’t done nothing. But 90 percent of the people that’s here, in the Cook County Jail right now, are here for something they’ve done or they have knowledge of. Me personally, I’ve come to grips with what I’ve done. Ninety percent of the people are guilty. They might say they’re not guilty, but they are. They’ve done something. They took some part in the crime they’re being charged with, and that’s the honest to God truth.

  To get prisoners out of here or keep them from coming back, the men who are here need more information as far as jobs, and they need to be given basically like what we’re doing now in this program. This is a life-learning deck now. We study. We study this Mind of Christ book. What the chaplain has done was implemented the mind of Jesus Christ into our daily activities. We spend I’d say the better part of the day studying this book. It gives us various Bible verses. It gives us how to change our attitudes towards society and most of all towards our self, and gives us the love of God.

  Now I’m not saying that this is the only thing that will stop us, but you have to have other avenues for guys like me that don’t have job training and don’t know how to fill out an application coming out of these places or coming out of the penal institutions. Don’t even know how to be a father, let alone be a friend or a brother. We don’t bond with each other. We spend time tearing each other down. We don’t spend any time building each other up. So what we’re doing here is, we’re trying to reconstruct the way we think about society, about ourselves, about our mothers, about our children, about our brother, just anybody walking down the street. You see, in our neighborhoods now, people don’t care about that. I don’t care about someone being a professor if I have a drug problem; I’m gonna rob you. I don’t care about someone being the superintendent of Cook County Jail; if he has something I want, I’m gonna take it. They don’t teach us about humanity out there, about being humble and about being peaceful and responsible and, most importantly, responsive, because every action has a reaction. If you’ve got a bad action, you’re gonna get a bad reaction. And most of the times, that’s what we’re learning out there.

  But see right now, what I’m learning here, me personally—I can’t speak for everybody else, I can only speak for me—what I’m learning now is what a man’s supposed to be. Most of us black males growing up in the neighborhood, we don’t have fathers. Our fathers have either ran off or they’re on drugs or they’re here. And now I’m learning how to be responsible, how to cater to females, my mother, my wife, my children, and all this. How to respect another human being for who they are and what they are and what they think, and not allow that to make me feel inferior or superior, just be comfortable with who I am and working towards our goal, which is the path favored by God—to protect and serve my family. That’s what I’m learning.

  There’s not one single reason that so many black men end up in prison today. It’s not just the lack of job opportunities, or just their own responsibility, or just the fact that their fathers are not around and there’s a single head of household. It’s a multitude of things. What I’ve learned, it’s not the fact that there’s not enough jobs, because there’s jobs out there. If you look hard enough, you’re gonna find a job, I don’t care if it’s in McDonald’s. But the average guy that’s over twenty-five is not gonna work at McDonald’s. But you could find a job doing something, or you can come up with your own job, as long as it’s legal. So it’s a number of things that causes African-American males to come to jail. It could be stealing food, it could be drug addiction; man, it could be anything. You can’t just pinpoint no one thing, so you have to come up with a scope of things, and a multitude of ideas and remedies to combat that, because if you just focus on the guys that have drug addiction, but what about the guys that don’t have jobs? If you just focus on the guys that don’t have jobs, what about the guys that’s let’s just say just victim of circumstances?

  You have to set up programs for people here to have ways in getting jobs and really taking up all the spare time that they have. A lot of times you find that people just don’t have anything to do. And then they wasn’t taught how to be men. We have to start teaching these people how to be men. I mean real men, not a man because of what you’ve got between your legs, and not a man because you’ve got a child. It’s various things that make up a man—responsibility, protection, being a servant just to the family, let alone the community. These are the things that we should look at that would stop most guys from coming to jail. It took me thirty-six years to figure this out. I wish it would have happened when I was nineteen years old, but I guess that’s how I came out.

  Basically, all of us come from the same environment, so we know one another from before we got arrested. People know you by your name. Guys in different parts of the jail, H2 or B2 or D2, they know you by your name. It’s not a matter of how you hook up with other gang members after you’re arrested. They’re gonna actually know who you are when you’re walking down the walkway, when you’re coming down the boulevard, when they see you going to church or on the yard. They know who you are. There’s somebody in this place that you know from your neighborhood and then they in turn are going to relay the message that this person is here, this person is there. In jail, the gang members stay in touch with each other through chapel, anything, work, whatever; it makes no difference.

  The gangs work the same both inside prison and outside. Let’s take the officers of the jail. In all the divisions you have a superintendent, you have a chief, the captain, the lieutenant, the sarge, and then you have the officers. It works the same way with the gangs. You have a guy that’s the head, then you have the guys that follow, that will do anything and everything that he asked them to do, no question. You can use the gang structure to get anything you want, besides a female. You get whatever you want. That ain’t no problem— cigarettes, grass, food, whatever. It don’t make a difference.

  On their first day here, the people who aren’t a member of a gang get treated. “Treated” means get played. How can I explain this? They don’t get nothing. They got to really know somebody to get somewhere. They just get the necessities. They don’t get any cigarettes; they don’t get any of that. And if they did get it, they’d probably get it took from them by somebody who is a member of a gang. It takes you a lot less than a minute to figure out you should belong to a gang in here. As soon as you walk in that door, you say to yourself, I have to get somebody so I can be somebody.

  What the gangs organize to do is nothing that’s worth noting. A hypothetical situation is a guy might be in trouble with a guy over here on another deck, and there might not be enough cats on the deck to help him fight this cat. So they’d wait till they get in the yard and they’d say, okay, we’ve got a problem with this guy; what shall we do? Okay, just hold off, we go, we’ll talk about it. If we can’t talk about it, then we fight, and then those guys get involved and everybody gets beat up but the problem gets solved. You send the message out, okay, don’t mess with them, they’re one of my guys. So that’s how they do it. There’s various ways of getting in contact with a guy you want to talk to that’s on another deck.

  People can get drugs in here. Of course they can. This is jail. I mean, just ’cause you’re in jail don’t mean that everything is gonna stop. The only thing you can’t do that’s actually normal is drive a car and have sex with a woman. That’s it. The rest of that stuff you can get. It’s here, not for sale on every deck, but in this place. You can get all those things in any penal institution, whether it’s the county jail in the Cook County Department of Corrections or IDOC, Illinois Department of Corrections. It makes no difference. The same things that’s going on on the streets is going on in here—the same power plays, the same deaths. Everything that’s going on out there is going on in here.

 
There’s not so much physical violence today in here, people getting beat up. In the earlier times, like in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I’d say there was a lot of violence. It was real easy to get into a fight. But not so much now. Guys tend to talk now ’cause there ain’t nobody too ready to catch cases. Guys don’t want to catch another case by being here. And as far as sexual violence goes, well, you can’t rape the willing. You’ve got guys that come in here that’s perverse like that. As respects somebody that’s willing, somebody that’s unwilling, most guys say, well, I’m gonna go with the willing, and you’ve got guys that would be willing to do stuff like that.

  I don’t know what percent of the inmates have sex with other men from here, ’cause that can vary, man. I could be talking to someone and they could have homosexual tendencies and I’ll not even know it. Your sexual preference is something you don’t wear on your forehead, unless you’ve said it out of your mouth. But I know the percent people say is a lie. It’s higher than most people think, probably. It’s pretty high. But it ain’t true that people who wouldn’t sleep with a man out in society will do it here. They do. If you gay in here, you gay in the world. What’s the difference? Out there you can do it and not get caught.

  If I’m in a cell with three guys and they’re having sex with each other, I’m not gonna be one of them. And it’s not too likely somebody would try to overpower me. But if they did, it would probably be cases involved, ’cause somebody going to die; somebody going to lose their life. There’s certain things that you just can’t do to a man, and when stuff like that do happen, somebody gonna wind up being hurt, or somebody wind up changing their name from Steve to Shirley or whatever. Either somebody’s gonna lose their life, or somebody’s gonna become a woman real soon. Seriously.

  The ones who adopt the persona of a woman, I see most of them coming in off the new like that. They come in and the staff knows and I think they separate them guys from the general population. That way they won’t be knocking, ’cause there are guys who tend to fight over those kind of people too, as far as the homosexuals versus the heterosexuals. The heterosexual guys, well, they consider themselves heterosexuals, but me personally, I think if you mess with one of them homosexuals, you might as well be gay too. That’s homosexual; that’s abomination. But they do; some of the heterosexual guys fight over them same as the homosexual people.

  In this jail there’s three people to one toilet, so you’ve got to do all your business right there in front of everybody. Right there. What you have to do is become immune to life, like privacy as far as using a bathroom. It’s just like the showers: there’s only two heads of them. There’s thirty-eight people up there who use the same shower. Let’s just say that during a lockup the officers say, okay, well, we want you all to take a shower one cell at the same time, for time’s sake. I have to get over what I feel as a man and get in the shower if I want to take a shower. Now me personally, I wouldn’t take a shower; I’d take a bird bath. I wouldn’t get in the shower; that is just something I won’t do. But it’s hard, man, it’s really hard. You don’t actually use the washroom while there’s a guy there. I mean at school there were females there, but a guy, come on, man, that ain’t cool.

  I’ve spent all this time in jail. How am I gonna get this time back; how can I? It’s time just lost. Gone. The worst part about being locked up is being away from my daughters, being away from the people that I know, that I can make an impact on, the people that I really, really care about. That’s the worst part, and the fact that I’m losing a lot of time doing nothing when I could be using that time for something positive. That’s the worst about it. Even other than that, I wouldn’t advise this on no man, believe me, I wouldn’t.

  I thought I could beat the system. I thought I’d never get caught, ’cause I’d never thought about the repercussions behind anything that I’ve done. We never do; none of us ever do. We never think about what could possibly happen if we do this. We just do it. And then after it happens, then you come back down to like, oh, man, if I’d have known this, I wouldn’t have done that. We never think about that. We never think about what might happen, or what could happen. All we want is what we want when we want it and how we want it.

  It’s hell in here, but you have to understand something. I was always intelligent; I just didn’t use the intelligence that God gave me. What I did was trying to be something or mold myself into something that God didn’t create me to be or didn’t ordain me to be. As a child, most African-American men stand in front of the mirror and try to emulate something that they see growing up. Most people do. I have to keep going back to the role model thing, because if I was seeing like, let’s say, a fireman every day, then that could be a role model. I’m not saying there wasn’t firemen, but they wasn’t around in my neighborhood; they didn’t actually live in my neighborhood. If a fire broke out, the firemen would come from a station that’s not in my neighborhood to put the fire out. If the ambulance driver come to my neighborhood, he would come from another place; he wouldn’t actually live in my neighborhood. I wouldn’t wake up in the morning and come outside to play and see a fireman on his way to work or see a policeman on his way to work. I’d see a drug dealer. I’d see someone stealing something. I’d see someone fight and I’d see someone arguing and when I looked to see where my father was, he wasn’t there; it was just my mom. So it wasn’t that I wasn’t intelligent, it’s just I wasn’t aware of the potential that I had. I grew up seeing those things, so that’s the thing that I emulated and that’s what I put into my life.

  There are people who are more comfortable in prison than out in the world, because they are somebody here and they’re nobodies out there. I know a lot of people like that, but they’re downstate. There’s a lot of people down there that’s doing time that would much rather be here because they don’t have any responsibility as far as what the normal people have—what we consider normal people, people that don’t get in trouble. You know, you get up in the morning, you go to work. You go to work for what? You go to work to take care of your family, to pay your bills right, and having a little few days’ necessities for yourself, things on the side. Most of the guys don’t have that. They don’t have the drive or the will to do that. They’d rather sit in jail and watch TV, play cards, and have the state provide room and food. They don’t have no light bills, no gas bills; they don’t have to take care of their children. In fact they’re having someone else take care of them. For them, the worst punishment might be to throw them out and make them do something. Make them start taking on the responsibilities that they’re supposed to have. I mean, I’m ready.

  You can’t spot people and say, this guy is gonna be here forever, he’s gonna stay in the prison system, ’cause you can’t tell. And if you’ve got a person that’s acting up, there’s a reason for him acting the way he acts. You can’t just say, okay, this guy’s gonna be here; this is one of the cats I know is not gonna ever do much in life. Look at other people that came in here and turned their lives around. People would say things about them, that they would never change. But you can’t say that, because you don’t know.

  I’m gonna get out of here. I’ll probably have to do some time in a maximum security prison someplace else, but in any event, I’m not gonna be gone for no long time. And more so than the previous times I was here, I think about whether I’m gonna be back here six months after I get out. Before, I was a kid. I wasn’t really thinking about it; I was having fun. It was cool. You get back on the street, it was like, man, you was in the county jail—did you have a fight? And stuff like that. So you was like a celebrity. I’m serious. But now I’m in the mindset where I say to myself, I really don’t want and can’t come back to this place. Now I went downhill. I’m getting old. I’ve got children. I have responsibilities now. Now what I thought was making me a man is making me feel less than a man. So now what I do is, I try to think about things that I need to put in my life, and the things I need to take out of my life, to keep me from coming t
o this place. And like I said, this Mind of Christ has been a big help. It’s teaching me and showing me certain things in certain avenues that I can use inside myself—not really getting any help from anybody else, just having the will and the desire inside myself to do something. Not great for the world, but just great for myself. And that’s the first and foremost, is to stay out of here and provide for the kids that I have.

  I was pretty well literate when I came into prison. But we have some guys that can’t read past Go; we have some guys that can’t read at all. And it’s a shame, because some of them don’t ask for help, but we have some that do. I just feel for the ones that don’t and then they’re my age and I say to myself, why don’t they ask anybody for help? I think it has a lot to do with being embarrassed with someone looking at you and looking down on you. And that’s another problem that African-American men have. We don’t know how to ask for help. We feel that it makes us weaker and inferior, and that’s not the case. Everybody needs help; that’s something else that I’ve learned. These are some of the things that I will use at my advantage when I leave this place. I know now that I can reach out and ask somebody, hey, I need some help. I don’t understand this; I don’t know how to do this.

  If you take all the drugs out of the neighborhood, that would be a bit out of hand there. They’ll just go to somebody else’s neighborhood. Wherever the drugs are, that’s where they’re gonna go. If you give them better job opportunities, that only helps if you clean them up too. It’s the drugs. That’s the key to everything. Actually, that’s the key to mass murder, to be honest. A guy that commits a murder, do you think he commits a murder because he actually hates the human being? No. Because God don’t make people that way. People are not naturally coldhearted people. Drugs turn people that way. Drugs make people think that they’re this and they’re that. Drugs take people to a different way of thinking. It’s drugs. That’s the sad thing. If you can get rid of drugs, man, I guarantee 95 percent of our problems would be done with. But then you’d have to deal with greed and stuff like that and we have our ways of dealing with that. Just take their money from them. If you just get rid of drugs, man, you wouldn’t have half the people here, not even half.