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

Chapter 6
Parole and Back Again
Having learned absolutely nothing in prison except how to become a better
predator I picked up where I left off when I got home. I went to my mom’s
house first. Pop Skeeter had moved my mom, my brothers, and my sister out
of our two rooms in Aunt Gussie’s house on North Villere to a house on
Bertrand Street. It was tidy and clean, the way my mom liked it. My mom
housed and fed me. I stayed for a couple of weeks but couldn’t settle in. My
family’s routines had become alien to me. My mom didn’t tolerate me
coming and going at all hours. Some nights when I got home the door would
be locked and I’d fall asleep on the back porch. My brothers seemed so
young to me, and they were. I would watch 
The Jackie Gleason Show
on TV
with them sometimes. I was closest to my sister, who was 14. She was just
starting to date boys and I felt very protective of her.
It wasn’t long before I moved in with my old friend and running partner
Frank and we ran with our old friends from the High Steppers. Eight-track
tapes had become very popular while I was in prison and everyone had an
eight-track tape players installed under the dashboard of their cars. Stealing
eight-track tapes out of cars became very profitable. We’d take them from
cars and sell them to a fence, or we’d sell them directly to guys who had
players. Sometimes we’d sell a guy tapes, then break into his car later, steal
them back, and sell them to someone else. When we could, we stole the tape
players.
While on parole I worked at different jobs. For a while I was a porter at a
hotel. They called us redcaps because we wore red hats. We took guests to
their rooms with their luggage, showed them how to turn the air conditioner
on and off, and checked to make sure there were enough towels. I was there
for about a month when the hotel hired a new hostess, a young white woman
who called us “boys” instead of redcaps. She would call one of us over and

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say to the guests, “This boy will show you to your room.” I asked her not to
refer to me as a boy and told her that we were called redcaps by the
management, but she didn’t stop. I went to the manager, a young white dude,
and told him that the new hostess they hired kept referring to the redcaps as
boys to the guests. I asked him to talk to her and tell her to stop calling us
boys. He said he would.
The next day when she called me over to take a couple to their room she
called me a boy again. “I told you I’m not a fucking boy,” I yelled at her.
“I’m a fucking man. You take them to the room your motherfucking self.”
And then I walked off. The manager called me in and told me I couldn’t talk
to her like that and I told him to suck my dick. He fired me. I didn’t give a
shit. I was only working there because I was stealing sheets, pillowcases,
blankets, bedspreads, and pillows and selling them around the neighborhood
anyhow. If I could have taken the mattresses I would have. It was one of my
hustles. It was a way to survive, to help put food on the table and help my
mom pay rent and buy clothes for me and my brothers and sister. The only