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

Chapter 27
“I Got You”
Living in concrete you get used to noise. Sound bounces off the floors and
walls and echoes. When someone on the tier cracked you’d hear him cry or
scream. Some guys would moan for hours or days. Televisions were always
on and the volume was high. You heard every voice yelling up and down the
tier. Sixteen times a day someone’s door would be opened, then, an hour
later, closed. When guys argued you’d hear it. When someone’s cell was
shaken down you’d hear it. When prisoners stood in front of each other’s
cells and talked they had to yell to be heard; you’d hear every conversation.
Every time a prisoner was taken off the tier you’d hear the restraints rattle as
they were carried to the prisoner’s cell by the guard. Then you’d hear the
chain between the prisoner’s feet as he walked out and when he returned.
Prisoners on different tiers could talk to each other through the pipe chase
and everybody heard those conversations all day. Security had listening
devices in the pipe chase. I never held conversations in the pipe chase, for
that reason; everybody could hear what you were saying.
Solitary confinement is used as a punishment for the specific purpose of
breaking a prisoner. Nothing relieved the pressure of being locked in a cell 23
hours a day. In 1982, after 10 years, I still had to fight an unconscious urge to
get up, open the door, and walk out. All of us in CCR were dealing with
strong, powerful emotions all the time, maybe the strongest that exist: the
fear of losing control over yourself, the fear of losing your mind. Every day is
the same. The only thing that changes is whatever change you can construct
on your own. The only way you can survive in these cells is by adapting to
the painfulness. The pressure of the cell changed most men. Some got
depressed and went into themselves, isolated themselves, never speaking,
never leaving their cells. Others talked constantly, were confused, irrational.
When I saw that a man was about to break I’d talk to him, try to help him

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through it. I could feel what he was going through, even though I wasn’t
going through it at that moment, because I’d experienced it myself. I made a
strong effort to distract him. I occupied the headspace he was in so he wasn’t
alone. It didn’t always work. I’d see men who’d lived for years with high
moral principles and values suddenly become destructive, chaotic.
I had to fit everyone on the tier into my life. Dealing with 15 personalities
24 hours a day, my own and 14 others, was always draining and exhausting.
Every time somebody new came on the tier I had to learn his personality,
likes, dislikes, and what set him off. At first, the tier goes quiet for a while
until the guys figure him out and see how he’s going to act on the tier,
whether he will blend in or make trouble. Some of these men were damaged
people, with no sense of honor, no sense of decency, no moral values, no
principles. Prison is a very violent place. There was always the threat of
being attacked. There were prisoners who were paranoid, who stored urine
and shit in their cells to use as weapons. There were prisoners who threw hot
water or human waste on someone in another cell in anger or revenge. There
were psychopaths who attacked others for no reason, they just felt the need to
stir up trouble.
I knew everybody’s experiences in society shaped who he was in prison. I
reminded myself of that when men on my tier were hard to deal with. Being
in solitary confinement constantly weighed on these men, too, and could
make them worse. I tried to deal with each man as an individual, in the
present moment. You learn there are layers to people. You look for the good.
This can set you up for disappointment. Once I did some legal work for a
prisoner that reduced his sentence to “time served.” He was going to be
released from prison because of the work I did for him. The day after he
found out he came to the door of my cell and threw human waste at me. He
was pissed off because I was watching the news and I wouldn’t let him
change the TV channel to a different program. You can’t hold on to those
experiences or you become bitter. Every day you start over. You look for the
humanity in each individual.
I made my bed every morning. I cleaned the cell. I had my own cleanup
rag I used to wipe down the walls. When they passed out a broom and mop I
swept and mopped the floor of my cell. I worked out at least an hour every
morning in my cell. On the days when I didn’t have yard I ran up and down
the tier almost the whole hour out of my cell. Exercise is important to keep
depression away. I watched an hour or two of news through the bars of my

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cell and read at least two hours a day. I actively stayed away from negative
conversation on the tier. Sometimes I lay across my bed and propped my feet
on the wall. My head would hang over the edge; it was relaxing at the time.
The repetitiveness of every day could feel very painful. I used to call it
“another day in Dodge.” I tried to make the routine different. I might sit on
my bunk to eat breakfast for months or maybe a year. Then I’d stand to eat
breakfast for months. Then I’d sit at the table to eat breakfast. Deep down I
always knew it was the same routine. I couldn’t really trick myself into
believing otherwise.
As much as we hated the routine, though, we needed it for mental
stability. It gave us familiarity, a sense of confidence and the illusion of
control over our surroundings. Eldridge Cleaver talked about “territorial
imperative”: when people know their surroundings, they know how to
survive in their environment. To have the lights go on at the same time, to eat
at the same time. It brought order to our lives. Once we were used to the
structure of the day it was something we could count on. The smallest change
could feel devastating.
Most changes happened when a new warden or colonel was put over the
camp and he wanted to use his power, even when it wasn’t necessary. The
old saying that unchecked power corrupts is true. I have yet to see or
experience a situation where ultimate power of one human over another is
benevolent, except that of mothers and fathers over their children. But there is
often cruelty there too. When there was a change imposed on us it upset
everybody, guards too. Prisoners felt it most. It could be something as simple
as breakfast being served late.
If breakfast is at 6:30, when you get up you expect the food cart to come
onto the tier at that time. When it doesn’t come, you get restless. After fifteen
minutes it starts to wreak havoc on your emotions. You start pacing. You
believe something is wrong in the camp or in the prison. You are reminded
that you have no control over your life. You have to fight off the
hopelessness. You have to fight off the anger that your tray hasn’t come. A
change in routine could destroy a man’s logic. I’ve seen dudes start shaking
down—shaking their bars—yelling and screaming for a breakfast tray when
it didn’t come on time. Nine times out of ten they were gassed and put in the
dungeon. I trained myself to see change as an opportunity rather than a threat.
I developed a mental toughness. I told myself that I could survive anything
but death.

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Some changes I didn’t like but I understood them. They prohibited us from
hanging pictures on our cell walls because paper was a fire hazard. If a
prisoner squirted lighter fluid and threw a lit match against the wall the paper
could go up in flames. Other rules had no safety or security reason for being,
they were just a pain in the ass. One time a major over CCR implemented a
new rule that we could only have one Styrofoam cup in our cell. A lot of men
got written up for having more than one Styrofoam cup. Now, getting a write-
up didn’t mean shit for years because there was nothing they could take away
from us that really mattered. When we started getting contact visits in 1987,
though, freemen suddenly had the power to make men squirm. If you were
found guilty of a disciplinary infraction you’d lose contact visits for six
months.
Some guards looked the other way when a rule was broken as long as
there were no security risks. If something was wrong in your cell they give
you a chance to straighten it out. Other guards took great pleasure in
threatening you with a write-up. They’d walk by your cell and point toward
you and say, “I got you.” Their intimidation didn’t work for a lot of us. I
didn’t give a shit about being written up, even if it meant losing contact
visits. If anybody came up to my cell and said, “I got you,” I’d say, “Fuck
you. Put that in the write-up.” Down the tier, I’d hear other prisoners say
things like, “Write your mama up along with me.” If we were lucky the
freeman who threatened us was too lazy to do the paperwork or didn’t know
how to read or write that well. The next major or colonel who ran the camp
would impose other rules. He might not give a shit about how many
Styrofoam cups we had, but there would be something else.
Cooking in the cell was never officially allowed, but for years it was
tolerated, especially if we gave some of the food we cooked to the freemen
on duty. In those days, our families could send us a shipment of canned food
once a year or we could buy canned food, salt, and seasoning at the canteen.
We rolled toilet paper into tight rings to burn for cooking heat. For food we
couldn’t buy in the canteen, like meat or other necessities, we relied on the
black market which, for us in CCR, was a network of prisoners who had what
we called “word.” If a man has word he won’t steal from you. He won’t lie to
you. He will do what he says he’s going to do.
Since Herman, King, and I had word anybody who helped us knew he’d
get paid. There was a prisoner in the machine shop who made cooking pots
and frying pans on the side by cutting down gallon-size butter bean cans and

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affixing handles to the pans with metal. He’d get the pan to a trustee or an
orderly who worked at CCR and that man would bring it to the tier when he
was there for his job. He’d put the pan in the shower. I’d get it from the
shower when I was out on my hour and pay the trustee with some kind of
barter item; it might be stamps, a pair of tennis shoes or pair of jeans,
tobacco, legal work, or whatever I’d negotiated with the prisoner who made
the pan. Sometimes the guy who brought the pan wanted a cut, sometimes
not. A lot of prisoners helped us for nothing because they’d heard about us
and respected us. We went through similar steps to get anything else we
needed. We cooked meals in our cells, fried chicken or pork chops and heated
up red beans, black-eyed peas, whatever they had in stock.
King was famous for the praline candy he made in his cell. He used a
recipe from a prisoner cook he’d met years before named Cap Pistol. He
started by using pats of butter, packages of sugar, and cartons of milk he
saved from his tray. Once he caramelized it in a homemade pan over just the
right fire, he poured it onto a manila envelope to cool and harden. Other
prisoners started giving him their butter, milk, and sugar and, eventually, he’d
get more butter and sugar on Angola’s black market. King’s candy heating
over a flame could be smelled up and down the tier. Trustees brought him
pecans grown on the grounds of Angola to put in it. King regularly made a
batch of candy and had it delivered to prisoners on Death Row. Occasionally
a security officer brought King a pound bag of sugar in exchange for some
candy.
In the mideighties, a new warden banned cooking in the cells. We still did
it; we just hid it better. I moved my lockbox to the middle of the cell to cook
behind it. We had what we called “peepers” on our cell bars, pieces of a
broken mirror stuck on with chewing gum so we could see at a glance who
was coming down the tier. If a freeman was coming I killed the fire and
pushed the food and cooking pan out of sight. King made his candy on the
seat of his toilet so if the freeman came he could push the fire into the water.
Eventually they banned glass mirrors from the tiers, so we had to buy metal
mirrors from the prison store. They were OK for combing your hair or seeing
the guy in the next cell, but when you held the metal to look down the tier
you could only see a little way before the reflection was warped.
Every tier on CCR had one miniature chess set and one miniature
checkers set that the prisoners shared. I got a chess set for my cell from a
prisoner who left CCR. Eventually Herman, King, and I each had a set in our

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cells and two of us often had a game going. If King and I had a game we’d
call out the moves down the tier. We could play a game with Herman by
passing notes. I always thought Herman could be a chess master. He could
play from memory. In the dungeon King made chess pieces out of toilet
paper to play with whoever was in his cell. If Herman was missing any chess
pieces in his cell he made pieces out of soap. At some point Herman came up
with the ingenious idea to start chess tournaments in CCR. It gave the men
something to feel positive about, something to do. We taught the men who
wanted to learn chess and everybody looked forward to the tournaments.
Dominoes were popular on the tier too. When we were out on our hour
we were sometimes allowed to sit on the floor in front of the cell of another
prisoner and play dominoes or cards, depending on which tier sergeant was
on duty. I sometimes played chess, dominoes, or checkers with the man in the
next cell. The game would be laid out on the floor between us. Since there
wasn’t much freedom of movement, we’d use a pencil to push our piece into
place as needed. We all came up with “outlaw rules” for dominoes to make
games more challenging. Trash-talking was a big part of any game: trying to
psych your opponent out, break his concentration. If a guy’s game was
garbage we told him he had to stand in the garbage can.
We weren’t allowed to have calendars until the midnineties. If they found
a calendar in one of our cells, even a homemade one, they tore it up and
threw it away. I never knew why. I wondered if it was because they wanted
us to lose track of time, another way to break us. I asked a major about it
once and he said he didn’t know, but maybe it was because we weren’t
allowed to have the pictures of the women in bathing suits attached to the
calendars.
No calendars were needed to tell us when spring turned into summer. The
heat of a Louisiana summer in a cell is almost unbearable. Years after leaving
prison men who have endured a summer in a cellblock never forget it. There
is no air circulation. No breeze ever. The small fans we were allowed to have
in our cells didn’t do any good. The mosquitos ate us alive. Until we got
screens we burned socks to keep the mosquitos away. The smoke looked like
a London fog hovering over the tier. We were all in our underwear. It was so
hot it was difficult to write letters because sweat would fall from our
foreheads and hands and the pen would skip on the damp paper or tear holes
in it. Sometimes I slept on the floor, hoping it would be cooler than my bunk,

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even though mice would sometimes run across my feet or legs or insects
would crawl on me. It wasn’t cooler. Sometimes to try to block out the sun
that was coming through the windows across from us we hung sheets on our
bars, even though that was against the rules.
After several years of demands for ice, the administration finally put
coolers containing ice at the front of the tier in the eighties. Orderlies filled
them in the morning after breakfast and in the evening after the last meal.
Everyone had some kind of cup or container to use for ice. On my hour out of
the cell, I filled containers with ice for guys if asked. I filled my own
container with ice before going back to my cell and put it in my sink. When it
melted I soaked a towel in the cold water and wiped myself down.
Sometimes I put my entire sheet in the ice water and wrapped it around me.
They put a large fan at the front of the tier and, after our continued
complaints and protests, they put another fan at the back of the tier. Neither
of them did anything but circulate the hot air and humidity and make a lot of
noise. We were in pain and suffering from the heat and kept protesting.
Eventually they placed five fans on racks attached to the wall across from the
cells in the hall of each CCR tier but it never got cool in the summertime, just
like it never got warm in the wintertime.
In the winter I could hear and smell the heaters come on in the morning,
but it never got warm in our cells. Every prisoner was given one blanket. If
you could pay an orderly to bring you a blanket you’d have two. On cold
days, I put on two T-shirts, two sweatshirts, a pair of sweatpants over my
jeans, two pairs of socks, and a hat and I wrapped my blanket around me like
I was in a papoose. Then I crawled under my second blanket and waited for
warmth. What surprises me in looking back on it is how much the human
body can take.
My favorite time of day was two or three in the morning. Everybody was
usually asleep. There was no one on the tier out on his hour. The TV volume
was low. It was relatively peaceful and quiet. I could concentrate and focus. I
liked to read during this time, or think. It was my time to deal with the
pressure of being confined in a six-by-nine cell for 23 hours a day, to deal
with my emotions and the thoughts deep inside me. I looked back on things
that happened during the day and how I’d reacted. I might think about it and
ask myself why I did this or why I did that. I almost always acted based on
my gut instinct. Later, I found that usually my first instinct was right. I

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thought about what I saw on the news during that day. Watching the news,
good or bad, helped keep me stimulated. I thought about conversations I’d
had or other activities on the tier. Sometimes I reread certain passages from
books I liked or I wrote out imaginary budgets for day-to-day living. I’d give
myself a job making $200 a week, for example, then create a ledger on a
piece of paper, listing how much I could afford to pay for rent, gas,
electricity, and food on that income. I often thought of myself in the free
world: having dinner with my family, driving a car, going to the store, going
on vacation. I fantasized about going to Yosemite National Park, which I’d
seen in a National Geographic program on TV. It was a way to reinforce my
belief that one day I would be free. I learned that dreams and fantasies are not
bound by physical limitations, because there are no limitations of the mind or
the imagination.
Everyone always asks me if we had windows in solitary confinement.
There was always a window of some kind visible to us, usually in the wall
across from our cells. In the seventies, our windows looked out over the
Death Row yard. In the eighties, our windows looked out over the CCR yard.
On my hour out, I used to stand at the window and yell down to Herman if he
was on the yard, exercising. (Whenever Herman was on a tier that looked out
over the yard he would yell down to me or King on the yard, if one of us was
out there, when he was out on his hour.) Once I had a cell that looked out on
a forest and I could see birds and skunks and various animals but eventually
they bulldozed the trees to move the forest back for security reasons. Another
time, for a brief while, I had a window in my cell. It didn’t make me feel any
less confined but I could open and close it myself. I kept my window open
when it rained, for the freshness. Looking out of windows we could never see
the sky directly above us; we could see only as far as the horizon. When we
were moved to a new cell all we got was a different angle of the same view.
We called it the never-ending view.
By the early eighties Herman, King, and I knew we were forgotten. The
Black Panther Party no longer existed. (The organization is said to have
officially ended operations in 1982.) We’d written many letters to
organizations asking for help. I can’t ever recall getting a letter in reply. I was
disappointed. In some ways I felt betrayed. We were forgotten by the party,
by political organizations, by people involved in the struggle. I felt frustrated.
We were dismissed or ignored by the numerous lawyers and legal aid

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organizations we wrote, asking them to look at our cases. To us it was
obvious there was a grave miscarriage of justice in our situation. When we
didn’t get any replies to our letters, though, we knew we had no choice but to
continue our struggle on our own. We became our own support committee.
We became our own means of inspiration to one another.

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