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

Chapter 24
Food Slots
One of the most degrading practices at CCR was being served our meals on
the floor. There were no slots in our cell doors that a tray would fit through,
so the orderlies put our food trays on the floor outside our cells and we had to
slide them under our cell doors. Sometime in the midseventies it got to us.
The tier was dirtier than usual. It hadn’t been cleaned in a week. King was in
the cell next to me. He and I started talking back and forth. “Man, I can’t
believe this shit. They’re sliding the food across the dirt to us like we’re
dogs.”
“They’re treating us like we’re animals in the zoo.”
“I’m not a goddamn animal, I’m a man.”
“This is degrading and dehumanizing.”
“When are we going to demand to be treated like men?”
We reached out to Herman and he said, Let’s go. We filed a petition of
grievance with the warden complaining about being fed off the floor like
animals. We asked that food slots be cut into our cell doors so that we could
be fed like human beings. We asked him to get back to us within two weeks.
We spent the following days talking to the other prisoners on our tiers,
building a consensus. We never heard back from the warden and decided to
go on a hunger strike. We circulated a letter to all the CCR tiers asking
prisoners for their support. Everyone on all the tiers signed on to participate.
They still delivered our meals. Three times a day. When they put the trays
on the floor outside our cells we left them there. We only drank water from
the sinks in our cells. After a week or so of not eating I didn’t have a lot of
energy to do anything. After two weeks, I stopped going out on the yard. We
sat on the floor by the bars and talked a lot. It sounds crazy but we talked
about food. We described our favorite dishes in detail to one another, meals
our mothers made, our women made, our favorite foods. Someone would say,

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“Man, nobody can fry a pork chop like my mom, with meat falling off the
bone” or “My mom made the best red beans in the world.” We talked about
what would be the first meal we ate when we got out of prison. Occasionally
an orderly came to our cells to tell on a guy down the tier who took a bite of
food off his tray. We overlooked that. We didn’t want to call anyone out and
then have men turn on one another. It’s very difficult to resist food sitting in
front of you when you’re starving. Even harder because the quality of the
food was mysteriously improved during those weeks. They served fried
chicken, sausage, and fried fish—not the normal meals. At least once a day
one of the ranking officers would come onto the tier, saying something like,
“You ready to eat now? You gonna eat?” Some prisoners would just say no,
some would mouth off and say, “Man, what’s it look like? Why you asking
me stupid shit like that? No I ain’t going to eat.” Then the officer would say
something like, “Man, I’m just doing my job,” and leave.
After a few weeks, two of the tiers on CCR started eating again. D tier,
where King and I were, and A tier, where Herman was, stayed on the hunger
strike. It was extremely painful, sometimes excruciating. When the body
doesn’t get nourishment, it starts to feed on itself, at least that’s what it felt
like. After about 40 days King, Herman, and I wrote back and forth asking
one another how long we were going to do this. Everybody’s cheekbones and
collarbones were jutting out from weight loss.
Just when we were discussing other strategies to get the prison to cut food
slots, the administration sent a prisoner from A tier to talk to me and King.
He said security officials wanted to know what it would take to call off the
hunger strike. We told him we wanted slots cut in the doors. King added that
while we waited for the slots to be cut, we wanted to be able to hold our trays
through the bars while eating, rather than drag our food under the filthy cell
doors. The next day, camp supervisors came onto the tier and announced that
they were going to cut the food slots and that we could stand and eat through
the bars if we wanted to. We agreed, having no idea that we would eat
standing at our bars for the next year and a half. Our hunger strike lasted 45
days. The first meal served after we went off the hunger strike was breakfast.
We stood at our cell doors as they were passing out the trays and I was about
to reach my hand through the bars for my tray until I saw it was oatmeal. I
hated oatmeal. After waiting for so long I could go a couple of hours more
for lunch.
At first, we held our trays through the bars with one hand and fed

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ourselves with the other hand, then King had the idea to make slings from
strips of T-shirt or other fabric that we could hang from our bars and rest our
trays on while we ate. Someone put cardboard in his sling to make a little
shelf and then we all did that. Some guys elaborately decorated their
cardboard. It took us weeks to get our strength back. Over 18 months prison
officials cut slots in the bars in almost every cellblock in the prison before
they got to CCR. They hoped to break us during that time so we would give
in and eat food passed under the cell door off the floor again. They didn’t
succeed. When they started cutting slots at CCR they cut all the slots on A, B,
and C tiers before they got to D tier, where King and I were housed. When
they finally got to our tier they cut all the slots in the cell doors except for
four. They said they ran out of materials. Those of us on D tier—even the
prisoners who had slots cut—continued to eat standing. Weeks later we
threatened another hunger strike if they didn’t finish cutting the slots on our
tier. Later that day we saw the truck bringing in welding equipment out the
window. They finished the job. Prison officials had hoped to break the unity
on our tier that had held us together for 18 months. They couldn’t.
A year later King was sent to a punishment program called Camp J for
resisting strip searches. At Camp J they were still pushing trays under the cell
doors at mealtimes. King had to start all over again, educating the other
prisoners about their rights. He refused to touch food from a tray that had
been on the floor. Prison officials wouldn’t let him hang a sling on his door
and eat at his bars at Camp J. So he talked to the orderlies who brought the
food individually, and most allowed him to take the tray from them with his
outstretched hand through the bars, and with his other hand he removed the
paper plates of food, folding them to bring them through his bars into his cell.
He ate like that for two years. They cut the food slots at Camp J after King
was moved back to CCR.
In 1977 prison authorities finally released the “stipulation and consent
decree,” signed by state and federal officials, outlining the changes that
would be made to decentralize state prisons, reduce overcrowding, and
improve conditions at Angola. The federal government would govern
Louisiana state prisons for decades to come.
A new warden, Ross Maggio, was appointed and he was credited with
breaking up much of the power held by the families who had worked at
Angola for generations. Violence was still prevalent in the main prison and
out-camps, but over time it became less bloody, once the prison started using

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metal detectors to search prisoners. Guards used these on the men before they
entered the dorms, and on the grounds, turning up knives and other weapons
hidden there. In the following years—for decades—Angola would
continually be in court for violating the consent decree, not following through
on improvements or policies the state had agreed to. Twenty years after the
judge’s ruling, the prison was still under federal control because the
administration never completely fulfilled its obligations to meet the goals and
standards in the agreement. Not until 1998, when Republicans passed a law
in Congress that allowed any elected official to file in federal court to
dissolve a consent decree if “most” of the conditions of the consent decree
had been met, did Angola get out from under the Hayes Williams consent
decree. When the consent decree was newly released we requested a copy of
it. We didn’t know at the time that we were deliberately given an edited
version that had CCR privileges redacted.

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