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

Prologue
February 19, 2016
I woke in the dark. Everything I owned fit into two plastic garbage bags
in the corner of my cell. “When are these folks gonna let you out,” my mom
used to ask me. Today, Mama, I thought. The first thing I’d do is go to her
grave. For years I’d lived with the burden of not saying good-bye to her. That
was a heavy weight I’d been carrying.
I rose and made my bed, swept and mopped the floor. I took off my
sweatpants and folded them, placing them in one of the bags. I put on an
orange prison jumpsuit required for my court appearance that morning. A
friend had given me street clothes to wear, for later. I laid them out on my
bed.
Many people wrote to me in prison over the years, asking me how I
survived four decades in a single cell, locked down 23 hours a day. I turned
my cell into a university, I wrote to them, a hall of debate, a law school. By
taking a stand and not backing down, I told them. I believed in humanity, I
said. I loved myself. The hopelessness, the claustrophobia, the brutality, the
fear, I didn’t say. I looked out the window. A news van was parked down the
road outside the jail, headlights still on, though it was getting light now. I’ll
be able to go anywhere. To see the night sky. I sat back on my bunk and
waited.

---

Chapter 1
In the Beginning
I was born in the “Negro” wing of Charity Hospital in New Orleans, the day
after Mardi Gras, February 19, 1947. My mom, Ruby Edwards, was 17. My
father was gone. He left her, she told me, because she was from the wrong
side of the tracks. We lived in New Orleans until I was five and my mom fell
in love with a man named James B. Mable, a chef in the U.S. Navy. He was
the first and only man I ever called Daddy. They got married and had four
more children, a girl and three boys.
We moved six or seven times to different naval bases during those years.
Daddy’s job was to feed the crew of whatever ship he was assigned to. He
used to take me onto the ships on weekends when Navy personnel were
allowed to bring family. I remember walking to the edge of an aircraft carrier
to see the water and he grabbed me by the back of my shirt so I wouldn’t be
blown away by strong winds.
I was a rebellious child. When I was seven or eight, I challenged my mom
to a wrestling match. “I can beat you,” I told her. “If I win you have to wear a
dress all day,” she said. It was the worst punishment I could think of but I
agreed. She pinned me in a few seconds. I don’t know where she got the
dress but I wore it. At least I was keeping my word, she said. “A man ain’t
nothing without his word,” she told me. I heard that my whole childhood.
For a while my mom was my world. Proud, determined, and beautiful,
she took care of us. She couldn’t read or write but she could add and subtract
and was good with money; she could squeeze a penny until it screamed.
Growing up in the Jim Crow South she had a lot of practice surviving on very
little. When Daddy was on leave we stayed at his parents’ small farm where
he had grown up in La Grange, North Carolina. There, my grandparents grew
watermelons, cabbage, corn, tobacco, and sweet potatoes. Behind the house
was a chicken coop and farther back a forest where we picked wild

---

strawberries. My grandmother loved to fish but was afraid of boats. I was the
only one she trusted to row her out into the river, which, my mom being from
Louisiana, we called a bayou.
My grandmother showed me how to clean and cook the fish we caught.
She taught me how to farm. I fed the chickens and worked in the fields. I
learned to drive a team of mules at a very early age. When we “cropped
tobacca” I drove a slender buggy led by a mule that fit between rows of
tobacco. The sides of the buggy were made of cut-up burlap sacks, nailed to
posts that stuck up from each corner of the wagon. The women in the field
broke off the leaves and laid them down flat in the buggy. When the buggy
was full I drove it to the curing barn where women tied and hung the tobacco
on sticks that were then placed inside the barn on racks. Once the barn was
full the heat was turned on and the tobacco would be cured before being
shipped and sold to tobacco factories. When I was nine or ten I’d hitchhike
back and forth to a job at a tobacco factory in Winston-Salem, 170 miles each
way. Sometimes the drivers would make conversation, other times they
wouldn’t. My job was to help roll the tobacco barrels to a scale. A lot of kids
my age worked there.
When I was 11, everything changed. Daddy was forced by the Navy to
retire after 25 years and we moved to La Grange full-time. He went from
being a master chief petty officer, the highest noncommissioned rank you can
achieve in the Navy, to being a black man living on a farm in North Carolina.
Without the responsibility and respect he was given in the Navy, he lost his
self-esteem. He started drinking and took his frustration and rage out on my
mom. Daddy never hit me or my brothers or sister. He beat my mom. When
he hit my mom, she screamed and tried to fight back, but she was a small
woman. He overpowered her with his size and strength. We never knew
when he was going to explode in anger and bitterness. Nothing warned us in
advance how he would react on any given day so we lived in constant
confusion and fear. One time he beat my mom so badly his sisters came
around and told her they were afraid for her life. If she didn’t leave, they said,
he might kill her. My mom didn’t want to go but some part of her knew if she
stayed with Daddy she was in danger. Sooner or later the violence he used
against her might be used against her children. She made a secret plan with
Daddy’s sisters to take us kids and run away. Because of her limited
education and experience the only place she felt safe was in New Orleans,
where she was born and raised. So, New Orleans was her destination.

---

On the day Mama planned for us to go, Daddy was getting ready to leave
the house when my five-year-old sister, Violetta, said she wanted to go with
him. My little brother James, who was three, said he wanted to go too. Mama
spoke to Violetta: “Why don’t you stay home, Vi. I think you should stay.”
Violetta was Daddy’s favorite child and he said she could go with him. James
could come too. We all watched them walk out the door. Mama turned to my
aunties and said, “I ain’t going. Not without my children.” They told her in
the strongest words possible that she had to leave because her life, and the
lives of her children, depended on it. They promised they’d send Vi and
James along behind us with someone. It was the hardest decision my mom
ever made. She took me; my brother Haywood, who was two; and the baby,
Michael, not a year yet, to the Greyhound bus station. We boarded the bus
and rode all the way to New Orleans without Vi and James. Mama cried off
and on the whole way. She was filled with anger, fear, and remorse because
she felt as though she’d abandoned two of her children, even though she
knew she’d see them in a matter of days or weeks. She never imagined that
years would pass before she would see them again. Had she known, our lives
would have been different, because she never would have left.
At the bus station in New Orleans, Mama called her brother on a pay
phone. Uncle Joe came to get us with Aunt Gussie. They drove us to a house
she was renting. I’ll never forget the address, 918 North Villere Street, in the
Sixth Ward. Inside, Aunt Gussie led us down a long hallway to two small
rooms in the back. One of the rooms had a fireplace and became our
makeshift kitchen. Mama put a bunk bed in there for me and my brothers.
She took the other room as her bedroom. In order to use the toilet, we had to
walk out the front door and around the house to the backyard. It was located
in a little room attached behind the house. There was a bathtub in a small
room that separated Aunt Gussie’s kitchen from our two rooms, but my mom
always made us take baths in a big metal tub in our kitchen. Mama warmed
up water on the little stove and poured it in the tub for us. There was a slop
jar in the corner we used as a temporary toilet at night. We put pine oil in it to
keep down the odor. One of our chores each morning was to empty the slop
jar.
The city of New Orleans is made up of wards, and we lived in the Sixth
Ward, also called the Treme. It was a black neighborhood in those days, a
mix of working-class and poor people. We lived in the poor section.
Claiborne Avenue was the busiest street in the Treme because most of the

---

businesses in the Sixth Ward were located there. It was our Canal Street, the
main business area of New Orleans. Small black-owned businesses like
grocery stores, hair salons, dress shops, laundromats, barbershops, bakeries,
and bars lined Claiborne Ave. The middle of Claiborne was covered in grass
and trees and called “neutral ground.” It was a favorite gathering place for
people in the neighborhood during Mardi Gras season and other major
holidays. Everyone set up barbecue pits and picnics on neutral ground. After
school, my friends and I played tackle football there in the shade of the trees
that lined Claiborne.
When we weren’t playing on neutral ground we played stickball in the
street. If it wasn’t too hot, children played barefoot, saving their shoes for
school. Almost all the houses in the Sixth Ward were the same, we called
them “shotgun houses.” If you stood at the front door and fired a shotgun, the
ball shot would go straight out the back door. Our house was a double
shotgun. Every house on my street had a small porch or steps in the front
where people gathered. Telephone poles were on either side of the street with
sagging, crisscrossing wires between them. There wasn’t a tall building in
sight, except for a church steeple here and there and Joseph A. Craig
Elementary School. Every house had a side alley lined by a fence. My friends
and I jumped the fences to take shortcuts from street to street. Later we
jumped fences running from the police.
My mom wanted the best for us, but since she was functionally illiterate she
couldn’t get what would be considered a regular job. So, she took odd jobs
and did whatever was necessary to provide for us, and sometimes that
included prostituting herself. Only 28 when we moved back to New Orleans,
and in spite of having five children, my mom was still a very beautiful
woman. She worked in bars and nightclubs as a barmaid, hustling tricks and
rolling drunks. Outside there was poverty but inside our house my mom
created an oasis for us. She always made enough money to buy us clothes,
put food on the table, and pay Aunt Gussie rent. She cared a lot about making
sure we had clothes that fit. Most of the kids I grew up with wore hand-me-
down clothes that were too big or too small. Some kids wore pants that
stopped at the ankles. We called them “ankle-whippers.” Mama told us she
wanted us to have better than what she had when she was a child. She always
got us something new to wear for the first day of school. I didn’t realize until
I was much older the sacrifices she made to give us these basic necessities.

---

She used to say, “I don’t want my children to do the things I have to do to
make a living.” And, “I want my children to have a better life.” But
sometimes our need to survive poverty got in the way. When money was
tight and there was no food in the house I shoplifted bread and canned goods.
It never felt like a crime to me, it was survival. In every other way, we made
do. For some meals, Aunt Gussie and I would fish for perch or mullet in
Bayou St. John. If my shoes had holes on the bottom I put a layer of
newspaper inside so I could still wear them. I was proud though. I didn’t
want anyone to see the holes in my shoes. At church when it was time to
kneel I would half crouch, kneeling on one knee so I could keep the shoe
with the holes flat on the floor so nobody behind me would see the holes.
One time a nun walked to the end of my pew and loudly told me to kneel on
both knees. When I wouldn’t do it, she ordered me to come out into the aisle
between the pews. I walked to where she was standing and once again she
ordered me to kneel. Now everyone was looking at me. If I knelt the whole
congregation behind me would see the holes in my shoe. I refused. She
grabbed my collarbone and tried to force me to my knees. When I resisted
she told me to get out. I went back to church sometimes with my mom but I
never forgot the cruelty of this nun.
Aunt Gussie went to a Baptist church. Sometimes she took me to a gospel
concert at her church, and I enjoyed the harmonies and voices. Aunt Gussie
used to give me a dollar on Thursdays to go get her a “blessed candle” from
her church. One Thursday on the way to get her a candle I noticed her pastor
in the corner store when I walked by. He was holding a box full of candles,
which cost 50 cents each at the store. I followed him. I wanted to watch him
bless the candles, and expected to see him perform some kind of ceremony
when he got to the church, but he just took the candles from the box and put
them on the table for people to buy for a dollar. That was a shock because
back in those days 50 cents was a lot of money.
I never believed in God, even as a child. I couldn’t understand the idea of
an all-powerful being. But I always considered myself to be spiritual. For me,
spirituality is a feeling of connection beyond yourself. We had an old dog we
called Trixie and at times I felt as though I knew what Trixie was thinking.
To me that was spiritual.
During the days, my brothers and I were sometimes on our own. My mom
might be sleeping off a hangover or was too exhausted to get up from

---

hustling all night. Often, she didn’t get home until six in the morning.
Sometimes I snuck into her room after she went to bed and hid the money she
made that night so if her boyfriend came around that day he wouldn’t get it. It
didn’t do any good. If my mother was in love with a man she would give him
anything she had, including her money.
Aunt Gussie cooked and helped out. We all did chores, cleaning the
floors, ironing our clothes. I remember pressing clothes with an old-fashioned
iron that was heated on the stove. We learned to take care of ourselves. We
always took care of one another. When I was 12 my baby brother Donald was
born. His dad was a merchant marine named Pete who had an off-and-on
relationship with my mom for many years.
Everything in those days was segregated between whites and blacks. Black
people weren’t allowed to go to a lot of places because of Jim Crow laws. At
the movies, black people could only sit in the balcony. We were barred from
sitting in the seats downstairs. We weren’t allowed to stand in the lobby or at
the concession counter. To buy popcorn or any of the other snacks we had to
wait by the lobby door until a white usher walked by so we could give him
our money and order. The usher would bring back our change and candy or
popcorn, or whatever was left over at the concessions.
The only time I really had contact with white people was when we went
to the French Quarter or to the shopping district on Canal Street. The first
time I felt that a white person could be a threat to me I was standing at a bus
stop at the corner of Dumaine and Villere with my mom when two white
police officers drove by in a patrol car. She put her hand on my shoulder
protectively and moved me behind her. As I got older I noticed white people
would address black grown-ups as “boy” or “girl” and I felt the disrespect of
it.
The first time I was called a nigger by a white person I was around 12. I
was waiting with dozens of other kids at the end of the Mardi Gras parade
behind the Municipal Auditorium where the people on the floats, who were
all white in those days, gave away whatever beads and trinkets they had left.
On one of the floats the man tossing the trinkets was holding a real beautiful
strand of pearl-colored beads. I thought they’d make a nice gift for my mom
on her birthday. I called out to him, “Hey mister, hey mister,” and reached
out my hand. He pointed to me as he held the beads above his head and
tossed them toward me. As the beads came close to me I reached up and a

---

white girl standing next to me put her hand up and caught them at the same
time I did. I didn’t let go. I gestured to the man on the float and told her,
“Hey, he was throwing the beads to me.” I told her I wanted to give them to
my mom. She looked at the man on the float, who was still pointing at me,
then she ripped the beads apart and called me nigger. The pain I felt from that
young white girl calling me nigger will be with me forever.
Most of the policemen were white in those days. They came through our
neighborhood picking up black men for standing on the corner, charging
them with loitering or vagrancy, looking to meet their quota of arrests. Once
in custody, who knows what charges would be put on those men. My friends
and I knew it would be whatever the police wanted. We always knew the
police picked up the men in our neighborhood because they were black and
for no other reason. We never talked about it though. We couldn’t have
articulated racism if we tried. We didn’t understand the depths of it, the
sophistication of it. We only absorbed the misery of it.
In sixth grade I attended a social studies class that taught me my place in
the world. We had an African American teacher for a classroom of black
children who lived in the same all-black neighborhood, using a textbook that
only depicted what was happening in white America. The pictures and stories
in the textbook had nothing to do with our reality. It wasn’t the first time I
became aware that that white people had it better. But it was the first time it
began to dawn on me that everybody knew white people had it better. It was
the first time I understood that something was terribly wrong in the world,
and nobody was talking about it.
In that same social studies class I was taught that women like my mom,
who worked in bars, were considered a disgrace to society. I had always
detested the men my mom brought home but until I took this class I never
judged her, it was just a way of life. I began to look down on her. I didn’t
realize at that time that my mom didn’t have choices, that she worked in bars
to take care of me and my brothers, and I was unforgiving. Deep down I
never stopped loving my mom. But I hated her too. One of the greatest
regrets of my life is that I allowed myself to believe that the strongest, most
beautiful, and most powerful woman in my life didn’t matter.
Around this age I also started to hear stories about men in the Ku Klux
Klan lynching black people. Like all blacks, I was scared to death of the
Klan. I didn’t venture much into the white community. For the most part, my
friends and I stayed in the black neighborhoods of New Orleans. It was where

---

we felt safe. Eventually it was where we committed our crimes. For a while I
went on to excel at school, in the classroom, and in sports. I was small for my
age but I was on the football team and the volleyball team. We didn’t have a
basketball team at my school but we often played basketball in the park.
Playing sports was the only time in my life I knew what to do at any given
moment. But the lessons of that sixth-grade class had weakened me in a way
I can’t describe. I stayed in school for three more years, but somewhere
inside me I was done with school. I turned my attention to the street. There, I
quickly learned everyone had one choice: to be a rabbit or a wolf. I chose to
be a wolf.

---

1960s
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one
class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them,
neither persons nor property will be safe.
—Frederick Douglass

---