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

part that bothered me about being fired was that I’d just figured out how to
unbolt the TVs.
After that I took a job as a car jockey at an automobile dealership. My job
was to pick up cars that had to be repaired and bring them back to the
dealership and deliver the repaired cars back to their owners. The dealer had a
very small car that could be attached to a regular-size car so that I could drive
myself to a customer or drive back to the dealership after delivering a vehicle.
One night at closing time the manager asked me to deliver one last car to a
customer. Since he was closing up he told me after my delivery to drive the
small car home for the night and just bring it to work the next morning.
That night my sister Violetta called me from a pay phone at a movie
theater saying a dude in the theater was harassing her and her friend. I told
her to stay inside and I’d be right over to get her. I drove the dealership car
over to the theater. By the time I got there, her friend’s father had already
picked up her friend, but Vi was there and when she saw me she ran outside
and got in the car. We were a couple of blocks from my mom’s house when I
pulled up to a stop sign next to the off-ramp for I-10. A police car with four
detectives in it was parked under the overpass. They motioned me to pull
over. They separated me from my sister and took us to the police precinct
under the bridge, then they interrogated me, asking me where I got the car. I
told them the story and they called my supervisor.

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My supervisor corroborated my story but told them he didn’t give me
permission to drive the car that night. The cops hung up and charged me with
car theft. I said, “Man, you know I didn’t steal the car. I wasn’t riding around.
I know you talked to my sister, she can tell you, I just picked her up.” There
was nothing I could do. What hurt the most was that I did my manager a
favor and he stabbed me in the back. Vi called my mom to pick her up. They
took me from the precinct to Orleans Parish Prison. Bail was set at $100 but
my parole officer put a hold on me so I couldn’t be released on bail. I sat in
Orleans Parish Prison for about six months before I went to court. The DA
gave me a deal, breaking the car theft charge down to “unauthorized use of a
vehicle” with credit for time served. I pleaded guilty. But I wasn’t released.
Since unauthorized use of a vehicle was a parole violation I was to be sent
back to Angola to finish my original sentence.
The day before I left I got into a fight with another prisoner at the parish
prison. I punched him in the mouth. When it was over I didn’t notice that one
of his teeth was buried in my knuckle. The next morning my hand was
swollen to three times its normal size. Since the officials at the Parish Prison
knew I was shipping out they didn’t take me to the hospital, they put me
downstairs in the waiting room. By the time I got to Angola my hand was
green and I had a fever. A captain at the Reception Center took one look at
me and sent me to the hospital. At that time, the only doctor in the prison
hospital was a prisoner, a white doctor incarcerated for killing his wife. They
called him an orderly. I probably would have lost my hand if he hadn’t
treated me. He drained my fist, put me on antibiotics, and kept me in the
hospital for four days to make sure all the infection was gone before sending
me back to the Reception Center dorm. When I was released from the
hospital he bandaged my hand and gave me “no-duty” status, which meant I
didn’t have to work until my hand healed.
On my way to the dorm I stopped to eat at the dining hall. I was in the
chow line when a white inmate guard everybody called Nigger Miles got in
my face. He got that name because he called every black prisoner “nigger.”
He was a giant. He came up to me and asked me why I wasn’t at work and I
told him I had no-duty status because of my hand. He said something along
the lines of, “Well, I got a one-armed nigger in the field, what makes you
better?” I said, “I don’t give a fuck if you have a one-eyed and one-armed
man in the field, I got no-duty status. I’m not going out in the field.” He said
after chow I’d be going to the fields, and I told him I wasn’t going to no

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fucking field. He was an inmate guard. I knew he didn’t have the authority to
overrule my no-duty status. He ordered me to stand over by the door outside
the dining hall that led to a bathroom used by security people. It also housed
brooms and mops used by inmate orderlies to clean up.
I walked to the door and four or five white inmate guards came up to me.
They pointed to some food drippings on the floor that had spilled from trays
that were being carried to prisoners on Death Row, which was next door to
RC. One of the inmate guards told me to mop up the mess on the floor.
Another one said to go to the bathroom to get the mop. That was an orderly’s
job and I wasn’t an orderly. I said no. They ordered me to go into the
bathroom again. I knew what was about to happen so as I moved toward the
bathroom I braced myself. Instead of going inside I turned around and started
throwing punches. I hollered and screamed so the prisoners in the dining hall
would hear me. By the time other prisoners started to arrive a captain had
appeared and broke up the fight. They sent me to the hospital because my
hand was bleeding. After I was rebandaged they put me in the Red Hat, the
oldest and worst cellblock at Angola. Built in the 1930s, the Red Hat got its
name because in the old days, prisoners from that cellblock wore straw hats
that were marked by red paint so when they worked in the fields they could
be identified. By the seventies nobody in the Red Hat worked; it was a
dungeon. In the early seventies it was permanently closed by federal officials
for being a chamber of horrors; years later it was incorporated into a museum
on prison grounds.
In the Red Hat you could stand in the middle of your cell and touch the
walls on either side of you. The cells were three feet wide and six feet long.
The ceiling was low. The door was solid steel halfway up, with bars from the
ceiling to waist level. The bunk was concrete. There was no mattress. There
was a toilet in the cell but they kept the water turned off, so it didn’t work.
You had to use a bucket in the corner which could only be emptied when you
were let out every few days for a shower. They wanted you to smell the
stench of your own body waste while eating. All the prisoners in the Red Hat
were served the same food, which amounted to slop. The cell was
suffocating, hot. It was dark. It was a coffin. There were vermin. I was
constantly thirsty. You never knew when they would come to get you for the
shower. I lay on the concrete bunk. I stood on it. I moved around a lot to stay
loose. I did push-ups and jumping jacks. I did 1,000 push-ups. Then more. I
stood at my cell door and called down to prisoners in the other cells; we

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talked. Night came then day then night. The conditions in the Red Hat were a
test, I told myself. My anger, my hate, the heat, the stench, the filth, the rats,
and the pressure shaped me into something new. When the freeman came to
let me out I met his eyes with defiance. He took me back to the Reception
Center. I’d been in there for 10 days.
Nothing was different my second time at Angola. I was assigned the same
dorm on the trustee side, Cypress 1. I had the same job, working in the fields.
I knew the routine. I knew the psychology. I was 100 percent confident I
wouldn’t have to worry about being bullied or raped or “paying draft,”
paying someone not to bully you or beat you up or take your personal
property. Everybody knew who Fox was and everybody knew you didn’t
fuck with me. When I came down the walk on fresh fish day there were four
or five dudes who greeted me as a friend. When I put my stuff on the bunk
this time before being taken to the clothing room I didn’t have to ask anyone
to watch it. My shit was still there when I got back, as I knew it would be.
I saw a lot of the same prisoners, heard the same stories. I didn’t talk a
lot. If I did I was lying, trying to create an aura of toughness I didn’t actually
feel. In prison, you never talk about your charge but you talk about
everything else. Multiple times. Multiple ways. Multiple versions. What you
(supposedly) did, what someone did to you, what you will do when you get
out.
Prisoners bragged about their hustle. If you robbed people on the street
with a gun you were a stickup artist. If you robbed drug dealers you were a
jack artist. We called shoplifters “boosters.” There were con artists, bank
robbers, carjackers, drug dealers, pimps. Stories in prison are endless
daydreams, described in detail, and—in the black dorms—spoken in the flow
and rhythm of Ebonics. The beauty of Ebonics is that it’s so specific, and
forever changing. So were our stories in prison.
In prison, you are part of a human herd. In the human herd survival of the
fittest is all there is. You become instinctive, not intellectual. Therein lies the
secret to the master’s control. One minute you’re treated like a baby, being
handed a spoon to eat with or being told where to stand. The next, with utter
indifference, you’re being counted several times a day—you have no choice,
you have no privacy. The next moment you’re threatened, pushed, tested.
You develop a sixth sense as a means of survival, instincts to help you size

---

up what’s going on around you at all times and help you make all the internal
adjustments necessary to respond when it will save your life, but never
before. Taking action at the wrong time could get you killed.
Once you have a reputation you have to do what it takes to keep it; you
do things you don’t want to because it’s expected of you. I lay low as much
as I could and tried to fit into the background and play my role. I
 
knew my
survival depended on my ability to respond violently if needed. But by some
grace, maybe the love of my mother, I hadn’t totally lost my humanity. I was
always poised to be aggressive, but I also knew it wasn’t who I was.
In those days, if you didn’t have a sentence of life in prison, you only had
to do half your time; it was called two-for-one, the “good time” system.
Every day you were in prison and stayed out of trouble you got credited for
two days. My first time at Angola I did eight months—a third of my sentence
—before I was paroled. When I was sent back after violating parole my
“good time” was recalculated; I had to do half of my remaining 16 months.
After eight months I was discharged on August 31, 1967.

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