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

Chapter 4
Angola, 1960s
I learned from being in a gang that I could master my fear and still act. That
lesson served me well at Angola. The horrors of the prison in 1965 cannot be
exaggerated. Angola looked like a slave plantation, which it once was. The
prisoner population was segregated; most prisoners were black. African
American prisoners did 99 percent of the fieldwork by hand, usually without
gloves or proper footwear. White guards on horseback rode up and down the
lines of working prisoners, holding shotguns across their laps and constantly
yelling at the men who were working, saying, “Work faster, old thing” or,
“Nigger.”
Originally one of six slave-breeding plantations owned by the American
slave trader Isaac Franklin, Angola was spread out over 18,000 acres of
farmland when I got to it. There was a main prison called the “big yard” that
housed most prisoners and there were several “camps”—outlying compounds
that contained dorms, cellblocks, a dining hall, and offices—all miles apart,
separated by fields of crops and swampland. The prison was surrounded by
the Mississippi River on three sides and the Tunica Hills to the east. In 1869
the slave trader’s widow leased the land from four of his plantations to a
former Confederate major who wanted to farm it. As part of a legal “convict-
leasing” program established throughout the South after the Civil War, he
“leased” prisoners from New Orleans and other city jails to work his farm.
The convicts, many charged with minor crimes, were housed in former slave
quarters and worked seven days a week. They were starved and beaten.
Hundreds are said to have died every year, but that didn’t affect the business
of the former Confederate major. There were always new convicts to lease. In
1901, the state of Louisiana took over and purchased the land, which became
the state penitentiary, but it was always called Angola, after the African
country where the plantation’s original slaves were born. It was fitting as far

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as I was concerned: the legacy of slavery was everywhere. It was in the
ground under our feet and in the air we breathed, and wherever we looked.
When I arrived in June 1965 I think they were picking peas. All prisoners
first did 30 days at the Reception Center (RC), which was located just inside
Angola’s front gate. This is where we learned prison rules and met with a
doctor, social worker, and classification officer. The classification officer
determined our jobs and where we would live in the prison. I was scared
shitless but kept it hidden. Being cool can be the difference between life and
death in prison. Each dorm at RC had about 50 to 60 beds and a stream of
prisoners coming and going. I didn’t know anyone when I arrived, but I got
close to one prisoner named T. Ratty, who was also from New Orleans.
The security guards and all of the ranking officers at Angola were white,
and we called them “freemen.” Freemen came from generations of white
families born and raised in Angola prison. Segments of the ranking officers
lived on the B-Line, a small community of houses and trailers at that time.
Prisoners washed the freemen’s cars, mowed their lawns, and painted their
houses. The freemen ran the prison.
Since only 300 freemen oversaw more than 5,000 prisoners, they created
another level of security, handing out shotguns to hundreds of white and
black prisoners. Inmate guards, for the most part, oversaw prisoners of their
own their race. However, in some cases white inmate guards worked over
black prisoners—in the fields, the guard towers, and the dining hall, for
example. There was no psychiatric evaluation of these prisoners before they
were made guards. A lot of them had life sentences for murder and rape.
Nobody was trained. Inmate guards learned from other inmate guards.
Freemen, who often started working at the prison after high school, learned
from their uncles, fathers, and grandfathers who were already working at
Angola.
As soon as I arrived at RC I heard prisoners talk about “fresh fish day,”
the day first-time prisoners were taken from RC into the prison population. It
was also the day sexual predators lined up and looked for their next victims.
Sexual slavery was the culture at Angola. The administration condoned it. I
saw men being raped at RC. Freemen didn’t do anything to stop it. They
wanted prisoners who had no spirit. They wanted prisoners to fear one
another and abuse one another; it made them easier to control. If you were
raped at Angola, or what was called “turned out,” your life in prison was
virtually over. You became a “gal-boy,” a possession of your rapist. You’d be

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sold, pimped, used, and abused by your rapist and even some guards. Your
only way out was to kill yourself or kill your rapist. If you killed your rapist
you’d be free of human bondage within the confines of the prison forever, but
in exchange, you’d most likely be convicted of murder, so you’d have to
spend the rest of your life at Angola.
Freemen and inmate guards took advantage of these “master/slave”
relationships. They were able to control some of the most violent and
powerful prisoners by threatening to move their gal-boys away from them. If
a prisoner was “good,” he could keep his gal-boy, and a prison pimp would
do almost anything to keep his gal-boy. Freemen also used violent rapists to
intentionally hurt other prisoners, placing them in cells with a prisoner they
wanted to punish or putting them in situations when they wanted to start
lethal fights. Those prisoners were called “rape artists.”
Some orderlies, inmate guards, and freeman who worked at RC sold the
names of young and weak new arrivals to sexual predators in the prison
population. I had to seem much more confident than I felt to keep guys from
trying stupid shit with me. I couldn’t look weak. I couldn’t show any fear. So
I faked it. Luckily, I had a reputation as a fighter who never gave up. There
were prisoners at Angola I had known on the street and they knew me or
knew of me. Word spreads quickly in prison. Dudes gossiped and talked.
Word was if you whip my ass today you have to whip it again tomorrow.
You have to beat me every day for the rest of your life if necessary. That
helped me a lot.
The main prison was divided into two sides, a trustee side and what we
called the Big Stripe side, named back when maximum-security prisoners
wore prison-issue jumpsuits with black and white stripes on them. By sheer
luck the classification officer made me a trustee. On the Big Stripe side
prisoners had to walk within certain lines or they could be shot by a guard
sitting in a tower. The classification officer assigned me my job: field hand. I
was put on a line they called the Bully 100 because the field foreman had a
reputation of working prisoners hard. That didn’t bother me. I wasn’t afraid
of hard work. I already knew how to do farmwork from living with my
grandparents.
When it was time for my group to go into the prison population, we were
boarded onto an old school bus that took us to the main prison. One guard
drove the bus, another one sat next to him, both inside a cage door that
separated them from the prisoners. A lot of shit went down on the bus; I

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heard about fights breaking out, guys getting turned out right there on the
bus. The freemen in the front ignored everything. Neither of them wanted to
open the cage door and walk back into the bus where we were.
As soon as the bus passed through the sally port—the security gate—to
the main prison we could hear the voices of the sexual predators calling out.
They stood in a line, fingers poking through the chain-link fence. The
freemen allowed them to yell at the incoming prisoners. The bus stopped
behind the laundry room. We were told to get off and line up. Trustees would
go left to their dorms; medium-security prisoners would go to the right.
I went left toward the walk. T. Ratty followed me. The walk was long. It
runs the entire length of the main prison, between all the dorms. I looked
straight ahead. Voices called out, “I got you, boy.” “You’re for me.” “Look at
that ass.” Some of the rapists were looking for the men they had been
expecting, who were turned out at RC and whose names they had paid for.
Others were trying to pick out weak prisoners to intimidate. Closer to the
prison dorms there were more prisoners on the other side of the fence, not the
sexual predators but men searching our faces for people they knew. I saw
someone I recognized from New Orleans. I didn’t know his name but he
waved me over, and I brought T. Ratty. The prisoner led us to our unit, called
Cypress. There were four dorms in each unit. I was in Cypress 1. Each dorm
was built to house 60 prisoners but the dorms were always overcrowded. You
entered through what they called the day room, where there were benches and
lockers. The main part of the building was the sleeping area, with rows of
beds. Each prisoner had a bunk with a locker box attached to the head of the
bunk. The TV room was located in the back of the dormitory. There were 26
of us who went down the walk that day. T. Ratty and I were the only two who
didn’t get turned out.
As soon as I got to the dorm I was challenged again. Each new prisoner
had to go to the clothing room to get a towel and bedding and, while he was
gone, it was open season on the possessions he’d left on his bed. Everything
was stolen unless you knew somebody in the dorm who would watch your
shit. I didn’t have any friends there, but a few of the guys from New Orleans
knew who I was, so I asked one of them to watch my few possessions and he
did.
At the clothing room, there was another hustle. We got our sheets and a
blanket and were supposed to get clothes suitable for our assigned jobs—
gloves for field hands, aprons for kitchen workers. More often than not,

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instead of handing over the clothing, the inmate clerk in the clothing room
made a business out of selling the clothes to prisoners. He paid the freemen to
look the other way. If you didn’t have any way to barter for or buy the clothes
you were out of luck. They were always short on jackets, boots, and gloves.
Field hands were supposed to get them but rarely did. Freemen used the
clothing room as their own personal closet, stealing the clothes meant for
prisoners for themselves or to sell outside the prison.
It wasn’t just clothing that prison officials stole. High-ranking officials
would steal food and toothpaste, soap and toilet paper, anything they wanted
that was meant for prisoners. If they didn’t use the merchandise, they sold it
on the side. We always knew when all the meat had been taken. We’d get
baloney for dinner seven days a week for months. Fried baloney, boiled
baloney, spaghetti and baloney, baloney sandwiches.
I only had one incident of a prisoner trying to rape me. His name was
Gilbert. I fought him off. Fighting never came easy to me, even in prison. It
was always a conscious act that I willed myself to do. Sometimes I got into
bullshit fights over something stupid, but most of the time I only fought when
I had to: when I was protecting myself or when my reputation was at stake.
To protect your reputation, you had to carry yourself a certain way. If
someone challenges you and you don’t fight you’ve lost your reputation; it’s
gone. What’s good one day is not worth shit tomorrow. There were all kinds
of dos and don’ts, a field of land mines. You don’t talk to a guy a certain
way, you don’t look at him a certain way. Remarks like, “Fuck you talking
to?” or “Were you talking to me?” could lead to a fight. I always fought to
the end, until I beat the other guy or he quit or someone broke it up. Most of
the time I tried to stay in the background but I fought if necessary. If you
weren’t willing to fight at Angola you’d get eaten alive.
I never turned anybody out. I’ve never raped anyone in my life. I didn’t
steal people’s shit in prison, but one time I did break into a prisoner’s box. He
had been trying to boss me around; we called it “roboting.” I couldn’t let him
robot me. If I did other prisoners would lose respect for me or try to robot me
themselves. To retaliate a few of us shimmed the lock on his box and took all
his property. When he came back, I felt bad. I felt bad every time I did
something against my nature. I never ever let my guard down though. If it
wasn’t the other prisoners to worry about it was the security staff.
Freemen and inmate guards had the power of life and death in their hands
and they had no respect for life. They had ultimate power over every

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prisoner’s life. At that time, the midsixties, there were no checks and
balances; there was no oversight. It was as if the cruelty of Angola’s history,
coming out of slavery and convict leasing, leaked into our present world.
Angola was run like an antebellum slave plantation. A freeman would slap,
humiliate, hit, and yell at a prisoner. If the prisoner talked back he would go
to the dungeon. If he physically fought back he’d be badly beaten on his way
to the dungeon. Freemen ganged up on prisoners in groups, and they beat
prisoners who were handcuffed and in leg restraints. They hollowed out
baseball bats and filled them with lead to use for beatings.
Being sent to the dungeon—being “locked up”—was a constant threat. I
heard stories about the dungeon, a cellblock not far from the main prison.
Prisoners were kept 24 hours a day in a cell shared by other prisoners. Total
isolation. Bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We called it “the hole.” The
lowest-ranking freeman could put you in the dungeon because of the way you
looked at him, or if he didn’t like your face; if you didn’t walk fast enough,
or if you walked too fast. Over and over we heard, “Nigger, do this or I’ll
lock your ass up, nigger.” Or they called black prisoners “thing.” “What are
you looking at, old thing?” “Get moving, old thing, or you’re going to the
hole!” Prisoners could be kept in the dungeon for weeks. No paperwork was
required.
It’s painful to remember how violent Angola was in those days. I don’t
like to go into it. Freemen and inmate guards could physically assault
prisoners in any way they wanted. I saw security guards beat down prisoners
with baseball bats. I saw prisoners stab other prisoners outside in broad
daylight on the walk. There were stabbings at Angola over nothing; prisoners
would fight over a football game they were watching on TV. Everyone who
wanted to be armed could be. A shank was the easiest thing in the world to
get. Men wrapped magazines and phone books around their chests and backs
for protection. They wore sunglasses while lying on their bunks so they could
look awake while they were sleeping and fake sleep while they were awake.

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