America Behind the Color Line (55 page)

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 to 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.

But if you let everybody out who was busted for doing crack, and you haven’t engaged on any kind of help or put them in any kind of program that would deter them from using crack cocaine or whatever drug it is, they’ll be back. It’s safe to say they’ll be back. They think they’re not gonna come back if you let them out, but they’re gonna go right back out there with no knowledge of what kind of problem they had. They’ll go out with a problem, knowing they have a problem but with no answers to fix that problem. So they’ll go back living in that same problem; they’ll go back doing the same things that they was doing, especially if you just let them go like that and they ain’t had no kind of help. That’s like coming to jail and they ain’t working on nothing. Like I used to do, working on nothing, caring about nothing, playing cards all day, dominoes, chess, and not really giving thought to what’s been happening in your life, or with what’s going on in your life and what it’s about, what’s to become of your life. Because when you leave society, that’s time that you can never get back. I once heard a man say, if I loan you $100, you can come back and give me $100 back and you’ve paid me everything that I’ve given you. But if I give you my time, you can’t give me my time back.

First and foremost thing is, I’m gonna get out there and stay out there and find a job, simple as that. It makes no difference what it is, ’cause first I had higher standards and now I’m in here heading way down. I’m gonna get a job and take care of my kids, go to church, build my family around the church structure. I’ve had three or four jobs. I worked at the Embassy Suites, I’ve worked at Delaware Cars and Limousines, I’ve worked at Allied Food. It don’t make a difference that I’ve been in prison several times. Who cares as long as you can do the job? A lot of people use that as a crutch: I’ve been to jail and I’m not gonna be able to get no jobs, so I’m just gonna do what I’ve got to do. That’s a crutch. That’s just telling me that you don’t want to do more about it. See, because if you was a real man, against all odds you keep trying. A man is not the man that goes, oh, I got a lot of courage, ’cause courage is not the apple in the field; we already know that. Even if you are afraid and you don’t think you’re gonna get the job, as long as you try and you keep on trying to keep on, trying to keep on trying until something happens, that’s courage. And believe me, if you’re persistent and consistent it’s gonna happen. You just have to be patient, and we don’t have a lot of patience. You have to be patient.

To my knowledge, the only thing that we have in here to give us better preparation is this
Mind of Christ
and studying the Bible, which has an effect on the interior. But now we need things like teaching people how to fill out applications and even just to hold a conversation without acting like a slave or without offending the person that you’re talking to, especially when you desire something from them and he’s in a position to help you. You’ve got guys that don’t even know how to communicate with those simple skills. We need programs like that set up, designed to help people do those kind of things.

One thing we could do to keep the crime level down, to keep people from going astray, would be to make everything free. I’m just kidding. The people that live in the community are actually their own problems. Say I go back to my community. I could become a professor. I move out of the neighborhood. I know I could become a professor, but I would leave the neighborhood. I wouldn’t stay, so who’s left in my neighborhood if the professor’s not living there, if the police officers are not living there?

If I was Jesse Jackson and I was trying to keep these black men from even going to prison, or trying to get them out of prison, I would encourage everybody that’s in the neighborhood who’s working on something to grab a person that they feel needs help. Not necessarily a person that they like; it could be anybody. And you take that person and show them and teach them and give them certain avenues. Not actually open the door for them; just point them in the right direction. Don’t leave the neighborhood, or if you did leave, then go back to the neighborhood. I’m not saying take all your money and squander it on the neighborhood; no. Show them how you got where you’re at. Give them kinds of programs, teach them how to fill out applications, teach them how to hold interviews, teach mothers prenatal care. You’ve got mothers out there leaving their kids on doorsteps or in hospitals, in garbage cans, for heaven’s sake, in alleys. It’s not because they don’t want the children. They feel that their lives are over. They don’t know what to do, so they say, well, I’m gonna give this child up because I know I can’t take care of it; I don’t even know how. It’s not more so the money; it’s emotionally. They don’t know how to deal with it emotionally.

If I could change daily life in prison to make things better, everybody under the age of twenty-five would have to go to school if they don’t have a GED. Everybody that’s over thirty-five would be in a separate part of the penitentiary, and the guys that’s in between, I’d let them do whatever they want to do, ’cause they don’t need anything. They’re not thinking to a level to whereas they’re gonna be productive for themselves or for anybody else. They can’t hear anything. They don’t want to hear anything, and they block everything in their self. See, the young people you can reach. The older people you don’t have to worry about because they’re like me. They’ve come to a situation in their life where they say, I no longer want to be a part of the problem; I want to be a part of the solution. But the people in the middle, they’re the problem, the people that don’t care. I’m not saying just do away with them. Let them run their course. Just set them inside of the penitentiary or the jail and let nature take its course. They’ll come around. I’m here, and I understand. They don’t care about nothing; they mess it up. They get the officers involved with certain things; they don’t care about anything.