Booker T: From Prison to Promise: Life Before the Squared Circle (2 page)

Otherwise, there wasn’t a whole lot to do but play chess, sit around and talk, or watch whatever was on the tube. For an hour a day, the guards let us outside on the hot, black-tarred roof, where we could play basketball. Since we didn’t have the right shoes, we played in our bare feet, slipping and sliding, laughing hysterically.

Jail wasn’t exactly the most traumatic place, but most of the time dragged. As a welcome break from the monotony, we would smoke joints when someone snuck weed in. Music was another escape. I hung out by our little radio box and became a bit of a musical connoisseur. Aside from R & B and classical stuff, country music of all things started appealing to me. Randy Travis in particular became one of my favorite artists.

Two of my partners in crime, Zach and Wendell, were also in Harris County. Locked up in there together, we had random chances to see each other during court appearances and such. Those moments of seeing their familiar faces in such a strange place offered some comfort. In passing, we would nod at each other, make faces, and get in a few words.

Zach always tried to encourage me. “Man, fuck this shit, Book. We’re gonna get you out of this, okay? You don’t deserve to be in here. I got you, brother.”

Zach was old school. He had gone through two prison bids and didn’t want to see the system do to me what it had to him, breaking my life down, leaving me struggling to pick up the pieces over and over again. Zach was even willing to take the entire rap to help get me out, and that is something I will never forget. I mean, honestly, how many people would be willing to take on a possible extended sentence to help out a friend?

But as valiant as his efforts were, his testimony fell on deaf ears. Sure, the prosecutor’s team listened to everything we all had to say, and they saw that my record had been clean, but they wanted all three of us to go down for this one.

After eight months, Harris County was wearing me down. I kept remembering my mother, who had passed when I was thirteen. Her lectures echoed in my head day and night:
Junior, you know right from wrong. There’s no gray area in between. If you don’t stop, you’ll end up dead or in jail.
I came to accept that being locked up was my karma. I deserved it and could endure it free of resentment, and I wanted to do the right thing.

I began working with Gabe Niehaas, the attorney Billie had set me up with, to take a plea bargain. He was a tall, thin, white man with a chiseled face and a wealth of solid experience. I grew to respect and trust his counsel. He said I was making the best decision admitting guilt, and he informed me of one key factor: Judge Ted Poe.

Because I had been in Harris County long enough, I had seen many other guys’ cases play out. The one thing they all feared was Judge Poe, who laid down the law on dudes just like me. His sentences were notoriously harsh. As much as I had prayed I would not get him, he was exactly the one I would be facing. Paranoia set in like quick-drying cement. I couldn’t take any chances standing in front of that guy in a trial.

Gabe told me I had two choices. I could take a guilty plea for armed robbery and accept whatever sentence Poe felt was appropriate, or I could go to trial.

With all the evidence the prosecution had, including the eyewitness testimony and Robin’s tip-off, a trial by jury would be suicide. Chances were I would be found guilty and face five to ninety-nine years. That meant I could be incarcerated for anywhere from ten to fifty years. I couldn’t even fathom it.

Gabe worked with the prosecution and convinced them to allow me to plead guilty to two counts instead of all of them. In that case, I would be sentenced to five years for each, to run concurrently. It also meant if I was on good behavior, I could be out within eighteen to twenty-four months. It didn’t take more than a minute for me to realize the plea bargain was the best offer that would come my way. I decided to take it.

The nine months I had now spent in Harris County counted as time served. I knew I would be looking at no more than another twelve to fourteen months in prison. I signed the necessary papers, admitting my guilt in black and white.

With all the worry about my fate now behind me, I could see my sentence as a chance to finally come to terms with my crime and concentrate on making a fresh start.

When the time came, I said my good-byes to all my home-boys and joined the chain gang of six or seven prisoners in shackles, handcuffs, and orange jumpsuits boarding the Texas Department of Criminal Justice bus.

Off we went to the unknown. I still had not been told which prison I would enter, and the road trip felt like a walk in the dark. My hands were sweaty, but I never let my nerves show. Inmates can smell fear and weakness a mile away, and I didn’t want to open that Pandora’s box. Before I knew it, we were pulling in to the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, or Huntsville Unit, nicknamed The Wall because of the infamous old red brick walls erected in 1849.

Everyone going to prison in Texas went through The Wall for processing, or diagnostics, which is a basic set of checkups of blood, urine, dental work, and overall physical stature to evaluate each person’s condition before he’s sent to his final prison destination.

Although I would be at The Wall only one week, I quickly noted that jail and prison are very different things. When I first walked in, the meaning of it all overwhelmed me. There were four floors of cells, and an eerie feeling hung in the air. The Wall was and still is the most heavily used death row execution facility in the United States. I could almost taste the panic and death all around me. If ever a prison was haunted, The Wall is.

My cell was about eight-by-ten feet and contained a little steel toilet and a bunk bed. Crazy scribbles covered the wall, some dating back to the late seventies. I stared at those writings and got depressed. The gravity of how much of my life would be spent like this was indescribable.

I made sure to be pretty open around the other guys. I didn’t want to come off as unfriendly or introverted, which could have landed me in trouble. You have to understand that in prison everyone is constantly sizing you up, determining how strong or weak your mentality is. It could mean the difference between being respected or preyed upon. It wasn’t any different than the streets, which I knew plenty about. It’s pretty simple, actually. If you handle yourself well, people will know not to get in your face.

It had never been hard for me to get along with everyone, no matter where I was. Besides, there wasn’t much time to run into trouble with the other prisoners. We were on lockdown about twenty-two hours a day the week I was there.

For the most part, I had nothing to do other than get to know my celly. We had no outside or inside recreation, not even chess or dominoes. All we had was time. Time to eat, to shower, and to stare at the walls.

And stare and contemplate I did. I wondered where my final prison stop would be. No one had told me anything. I was on a journey like Dorothy’s in
The Wizard of Oz,
having been ripped away from the comforts of my home and sent on a trip among strange characters on a seemingly unending road. My road wasn’t paved with yellow bricks but with gray concrete.

Finally my last day at The Wall came. At four in the morning, early enough to avoid the possibility of rousing other inmates and trouble, the guards escorted me and about twenty more prisoners through the dim halls. With one tiny bulb suspended a few dozen feet above us, I could see only the grim outline of each face.

I was relieved as we left behind the pungent air tinged by the regular use of the electric chair. As on my previous trip, I was shackled and led into an ominous old bus and cuffed to the seat. We pulled out of the confines of The Wall, leaving Huntsville permanently behind.

Since it was still dark, I couldn’t see anything through the tinted and barred windows. It was still so early that I felt like a zombie in a foggy daze. My anxiety kicked in. Though no one said much, two of the guys were laughing, and I wondered,
How in the fuck can they be having a good time right now?
It must not have been their first ride to prison.

The trip in the blackness was a sixty-mile straight shot to Navasota, Texas. The bus made a turn onto Wallace Pack Road toward Pack 2, a work prison that held about fifteen hundred inmates serving for anything from arson to rape to armed robbery and murder. The day was breaking, and so was I.

Wide awake, I watched the intricate process as the bus entered the yard. The first razor wire gate opened, and we rode in and stopped while it shut behind us. A second gate released, and we pulled up to the main area. We were unlocked from our seats and led single file to the building. Armed guards were lined up as far as the eye could see on both sides.

Quickly I surveyed the surrounding outside areas, all woods void of leaves and life. It was January and cold even by Texas standards. The grounds were expansive and went a few hundred yards in each direction before hitting the tree line. Also visible on the outskirts of the property were a couple of rickety field houses where the guards must have lived.

Once inside I was unshackled, stripped, and given a cavity search. That was a real treat, let me tell you. Humiliating? Yes. Angering? Absolutely. Then I was taken to the laundry room and handed a blanket and my three sets of whites—my basic prison gear consisting of white shirts, pants, and sheets. I was responsible for keeping these cleaned and pressed at all times. Nothing was to be lost or stolen, or there would be penalties. As the guards rattled off the instructions, I tried to absorb the onslaught of information.

Once those procedures were taken care of, the rest of the new prisoners and I were led through a hall about half the length of a football field with the stalest of air like any old high school’s. Bars separated us from the other inmates to the left and right. All those dudes ran up to get a good look at us, talking smack and howling catcalls like, “Fresh meat!”

I kept real cool. These guys looked like any number of the people from the streets back home and didn’t intimidate me in the slightest. In fact, a lot of them seemed desperate and downtrodden. However, some of the younger ones were obviously bitter and trying to hide behind false bravado. I didn’t make eye contact with any of those dudes. I held my head high, where it was going to stay for the duration of my time at Pack 2.

I was led to my dormitory, which had a wide-open setup. Lined up in two neat rows were fifty racks, which are small beds with lockers at the end, just like in the military. Once I got to my rack, there weren’t any formal introductions. The guard didn’t have much to say other than, “This is prison. Mind your own business, and you’ll be fine.”

Thanks for the advice,
I thought.
I already know that shit.

Now it was just forty-nine strangers and me. The guys were hanging around their racks or milling about, talking and smoking cigarettes. Nobody bothered or paid any attention to me at all, which was fine. I wasn’t paying any attention to them either. I stayed to myself. I was feeling defiant, but that was nothing new to me.

When I took a second to look around, I noticed the toilet right out in the open. When a guy had to do his business, he would do it in front of everybody, which was totally mortifying. You can imagine the sounds and smells. Sometimes people would crack jokes at some guy’s expense while he sat on the bowl. Everyone would be dying laughing like a bunch of kids.

On the other end was a little area with a counter where dudes made coffee or “spreads.” A spread was any variety of improvised snack made with items bought in the commissary or stolen from the kitchen. The guys would have canned goods like tuna or chicken, chili or stew, maybe packs of Ramen noodles, and then get creative making combinations. They might take the noodles, add some chicken and cheese, spice it up really well, and go to town. There were no limits to the variety guys came up with. Everyone considered himself to be a jailhouse chef with a definitive palate and an expert in the art of the spread. I would soon learn that those commissary items were worth their weight in gold. The prisoners regularly traded them for things like cigarettes, issues of
Playboy,
or joints.

My arrival was uneventful. It was a pretty quiet and calm unit, not to mention I was six foot two and two hundred pounds. All the other dudes could pretty much take one look and decide not to mess with me. I wasn’t exactly a hard-ass or anything, but my expression was consistent and pretty serious. Had I been shifty, nervous, or afraid to look someone in the eye, he would have spotted it a mile away and tested me.

After taking all my gear to the rack, I tried to settle in. I made up the bed and put up a picture of Red. I had not seen her since my arrest in April, and now it was January. I lay there staring at the ceiling trying to wrap my mind around what had happened over the last nine months. This was the real deal. I was in prison. Real prison.

Thinking of Red and her excitement over my thug ways made me long for all those sleepless nights of smoking weed, counting drug money, and plotting the whole scheme that had landed me here. But I couldn’t go back.

At around eleven that night the lights were shut off, but there was no way I was ready to go to sleep. With my rack sticking out between these concrete walls, I felt like I was lying in the middle of a hospital cafeteria. I was stuck with a herd of dudes snoring, whimpering, coughing, and sneezing—a symphony of annoyance in this room without a trace of light or hope.

Regret swirled in my head.
What the fuck did I get myself into?
At only twenty-two years old, I was a convicted felon feeling like I had just been erased from the world forever. I wanted to kick myself all over the place.

Even though the room was dark, I could see silhouettes of guys walking around doing their thing. Some sat in a small group passing a joint, quietly talking about getting back to the free world, while others made coffee and spreads. Just because it was lights-out didn’t mean they had to sleep, so it was still business as usual for those who didn’t want to lie quietly with their thoughts.