It has been my experience that because of institutional and individual racism

Chapter 9
Escape
During my trial and after I was found guilty I was held at Orleans Parish
Prison on a tier with an old friend who was about to get out. He helped me
figure out an escape plan. The courtroom where I was due to be sentenced,
called Section B, was a room they added to the top of the courthouse because
of overcrowding. The elevator didn’t reach it; you had to walk up a flight of
stairs to get to it. My friend had been in that courtroom before. He said he
could dress up like a lawyer, get inside, and leave a gun in the bathroom for
me. The bathroom was located in the back room of the courtroom, where the
prisoners were held.
On sentencing day, October 9, 1969, I wrapped my right wrist in a
bandage to make it look like I had an injury and asked the guard not to
handcuff me on that “sore” wrist. He cuffed me by my left wrist and put me
at the end of the line of prisoners who were cuffed together. My right hand
was free. My friend got dressed up in a suit and tie that morning and, carrying
a briefcase, he had no trouble getting into the courthouse and making his way
to the third floor. I was sitting with the other prisoners when I saw him come
in the back room and enter the bathroom. After I saw him leave I told the
sheriff I had to use the toilet, so he uncuffed me from the line of prisoners
and walked me to the bathroom. I was nervous but I’d had weeks to think of
this moment. I knew it was do-or-die time. Inside the bathroom I opened the
paper towel dispenser. My friend had left a goddamn German Luger in there.
I was expecting to see a small gun that would be easy for me to hide. I
slipped the Luger inside the waistband of my pants and opened the door. I
thought the gun would slip down the front of my pants the whole time I
walked back to my seat and was cuffed to my position in the prisoners’ line.
One by one the prisoners in my group were uncuffed to go before the
judge, then brought back and cuffed together again. When it was my turn I

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stood before the judge with the gun hidden in my pants and listened with my
hands at my side as he called me derogatory names. He said I was an animal
and sentenced me to 50 years. Back at my seat I was again cuffed to the end
of the line. We walked in a line down a short flight of stairs to the elevator,
followed by a deputy.
When the elevator doors opened on the second floor we all stepped
inside. An unarmed deputy was seated next to the control panel. As soon as
the doors closed I pulled the gun from my pants with my free hand and held it
to his head. I told him to keep the doors closed and take us to the basement or
I would shoot him. I didn’t mean it but that’s what I said. I told the other
deputy to unlock my handcuff and cuff himself and the elevator operator to
the elevator railing. As he did that somebody in the basement was pressing
the call button over and over. When we got to the basement the elevator
doors opened and two armed cops were standing there. For less than a second
we all froze. But their shock at seeing a prisoner in the elevator with a gun
gave me a moment’s advantage and I took it. I told them to get inside the
elevator and told the deputy to close the doors. I held the Luger on the two
cops and told them to hand me their guns, which I dropped down the elevator
shaft through a gap in the floor. Then I handcuffed the two cops to the railing.
I turned to the other prisoners to ask if any of them wanted to go; one guy, a
white dude, said yes, so I uncuffed him.
The next time the elevator doors opened the two of us left running. We
had to make it through another set of doors to get to the street. Once outside I
ran as fast as I could toward Tulane and Broad, where a childhood friend of
mine told me he’d be parked. I jumped into the backseat of his car and
covered myself with a blanket.
My friend drove me to an apartment where I stayed the night. From there
I watched the search for me unfold on the television news. The prisoner who
ran out with me had already been captured. For some reason, the police
thought I was holed up in a block of old empty houses and they surrounded
the area. They called my mom and she went down to the houses where they
thought I was hiding. I watched her on the news crying; they said she was
begging me to turn myself in. Years later my brother told me Mama ran to
the abandoned houses not to help the police find me but to beg the police not
to kill me. The next morning my friend drove me across the state line to
Mississippi. I took a bus to Atlanta. After lying low for a few days I boarded
a Greyhound bus for New York City.

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Other than a phone number a friend gave me of someone to call in
Harlem when I got there, I didn’t have a plan. I was so out of my element it
wasn’t funny. I went to a bar and restaurant to use the pay phone there. After
I dialed the number two policemen walked in the front door. I hung up the
phone and left. I never tried again. My friends had given me some money
before I left New Orleans. I found a cheap room in a motel where women
turned tricks.
Harlem had changed since the last time I had been there, to buy drugs.
There seemed to be less prostitution and drug use visible on the street, less
brutality. I watched as men and women my age wearing leather jackets and
berets moved through the neighborhood, selling newspapers and talking to
people. They escorted women on “check days” to get their groceries,
protecting them from being robbed on the way to the store. I couldn’t have
described it at the time, but they were unifying Harlem, bringing people
together. I found out they were members of the Black Panther Party. I’d
never seen black people proud and unafraid like that before. They were so
confident, even around police. I was used to seeing a certain look in black
people’s eyes, fear, especially when they were around police. These Panthers
weren’t intimidated. Instead, it was the police who seemed scared. I wanted
to meet the beautiful Panther sisters who wore their hair in African styles and
their skirts above their knees. I went by the Panther office in Harlem and
looked around, picked up a newspaper, and left.
Within a few weeks I was running out of money when I heard about a guy
running a book uptown in a grocery store. It was November, still football
season; I bet on a game, putting $100 on a 10-to-1 bet. The team I picked
won. The next day I went to the store to collect my winnings and the butcher
who worked there said I had to go upstairs to get my money. Stupidly, I
followed him. Once we got in the apartment he and the owner jumped me
from behind and beat me damn near to death. Then they called the police and
said I tried to rob them. When the police came my eyes were swollen shut
and I was floating into and out of consciousness but I could hear the butcher
telling the cops I held them up at gunpoint. I tried to speak, to say he was
lying, but I couldn’t move my jaw. The police weren’t interested in my story
anyway. They took me to the hospital. Later, when they asked me my name I
gave them the name of one of my oldest childhood friends, Charles Harris.
Right after I was released from the hospital I was taken to a judge for
arraignment. A bail hearing was set and a public defender was assigned. That

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kind of speed was unheard of in Louisiana, where you could be arrested on a
charge and lie in jail for weeks before you were arraigned.
From court they took me to the Manhattan House of Detention, known as
the Tombs, a high-rise building. It was a shock to see. Angola was a farm.
Standing outside the Tombs you wouldn’t know it was a city jail. I was taken
in an elevator to a cellblock on the eighth floor. The Tombs was integrated.
For me, being from the South, it was strange at first to have a white cellmate.
He didn’t protest having a black cellmate. I didn’t protest either. Other than
that it wasn’t much different from Angola. Prison is prison. First you figure
out the routine, which doesn’t take long because every day is the same. Then
you learn the culture and how to play between the lines. The faster you do
that the quicker you adjust. At any prison there is always a pecking order.
The strong rule over the weak, the smart over the strong. All the threats,
games, manipulations, stories, and bullying were the same in the Tombs,
overseen with the same kind of cruelty and indifference by the prison
administration.
Conditions were horrible—filthy, overcrowded, and run-down. There
weren’t enough beds in the Tombs, so prisoners were forced to sleep on the
floor in cells and in the day room. The toilets would back up and it could take
days for maintenance crews to come around and fix the plumbing. Trustees
were supposed to mop up but seldom did. The food was the worst I’d ever
had; the same thing every day, boiled and with no seasoning. There were
bedbug and lice epidemics. Security would come in and spray the floors,
walls, sheets, and mattresses with poison. Every few months prisoners were
stripped naked and sprayed for bedbugs and lice.
Soon after I arrived a prisoner on the tier tried to intimidate me. It started
in the shower. He made comments about my body. I kept on showering. I
dried off, put my clothes on, and went into the day room.
 
He was sitting at a
table playing cards. I grabbed a mop bucket, walked up to him, and split his
head open with it. He was taken to the hospital, where he was treated, and he
was returned to the same floor and cellblock where I was. Now he knew not
to fuck with me and so did everyone else. I expected to be put in the dungeon
for that but I never got busted for it. The prisoner told officials he was hit
from behind and didn’t know who did it. It was violent in the Tombs but
nowhere near as violent as at Angola. At Angola men would stab each other
over a game of dominoes. In the Tombs if there was a fight there was usually
more of a reason.

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Since I lied about my identity I couldn’t write to or call my mom. She
was the only one I knew who would send me money. I started a little laundry
business to get by. I used to wash dudes’ underwear, T-shirts, socks. They
paid me with commissary items. There was a lot of cash money floating
around in the Tombs too. For cash, I gave haircuts with a razor and comb.
When I had enough saved up I played loan shark, loaning prisoners money.
They paid me back with interest. As usual I lay low, but I didn’t tolerate any
threat or any bullshit. One month passed into the next, 1969 rolled into 1970.
I continued to maintain that I was Charles Harris. I knew eventually they
would find out my true identity, but you never know what might happen, I
told myself. There is always hope.

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1970s
Understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that
generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be
done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. . . . Join us, give up your life for the
people.
—George Jackson

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