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

Chapter 18
King Arrives
A few weeks after Herman and I were put in CCR, we heard that Robert
King, who joined the Black Panther Party in Orleans Parish Prison, was put
in a cell on another tier. I first met King when I was 18, in a dormitory at
Angola. The other prisoners told me he was a Holy Roller, a Bible thumper,
and I avoided him. Physically imposing, he never used his strength to
intimidate anyone. He spent a lot of time on his bunk, reading the Bible. He
said he liked the flow of the language. He liked the parables and the Sermon
on the Mount. He had tried to talk to me but I was caught up in the game, in
surviving. I thought he was hopelessly out of touch. The day he was released
on parole I told him, “I can now say I lived to see the last of the old-timers go
home.” He was 23. King would go on to become a semiprofessional boxer on
the street—they called him Speedy King—and have several jobs until he was
charged with and convicted of a robbery he didn’t commit. (The perpetrator
was described as being several years older with a different complexion and
appearance.) He was sentenced to 35 years. After joining the party in Orleans
Parish Prison he became involved in protests there. When he arrived at
Angola they put him directly into the dungeon, charged with “playing
lawyer.” Then he was put in the Red Hat, and then on D tier in CCR.
I wrote him a note telling him Herman and I were on B tier, asking him if
he needed anything. Over the next few days Herman and I paid trustees
tobacco and candy to deliver our letters to King back and forth. We knew the
freemen and white inmate guards would harass him for being a Panther. King
expected this and wrote back that it was no big deal. Before King arrived in
CCR I didn’t have any trust or belief that, outside of Herman, anyone could
go all the way with me. There was so much turmoil and brutality. In King’s
letters, I saw his strength. I saw his morality, his integrity. I believed I could
trust him. Sitting in my cell I thought back to the time I first met him. I could

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see now that when he tried to talk to me all those years ago his interest was in
getting me to go beyond myself and the influences of the street, to create a
different human being. He still wanted that for the men around him. I
wondered if my first meeting with King had set us on a path to be together
again. Who knows what strange powers were at play, I thought. Herman,
King, and I, Black Panthers at Angola, were in a terrible situation. But now
there were three of us.
After about a month in CCR I was sitting on my bunk when I started
sweating, and the walls of my cell started to move toward me at the same
time. My clothes tightened around my body. I took off my shirt and pants but
still felt like I was being squeezed, strangled. The ceiling was pressing down
on me. It was hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to see. I forced myself to
stand. I took a few steps, trying not to fall. At the end of my cell I turned and
walked back to the cell door. I turned and continued, pacing back and forth
for several minutes, maybe an hour. Eventually I was so tired I lay on the
bunk and fell asleep. After the first couple of times this happened I started
recognizing when it was coming on; my clothes tightened and I started to
sweat. The atmosphere pressed down on me. Sometimes it lasted five or ten
minutes, other times it lasted for hours. The only thing that helped was to
pace back and forth. Usually it didn’t end until I was so exhausted from
walking back and forth that I could lie down. I continued having episodes
like this one, which I later learned was claustrophobia, the whole time I was
in prison. For about three years I slept sitting up, propped up against the wall,
believing it helped prevent claustrophobic attacks. It seemed to lessen them
but they never stopped.

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