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

Chapter 7
Stickup Artist
They gave me a bus ticket and $10 at the front gate. Still wearing prison-issue
clothes I hitched a ride on an 18-wheeler packed with Angola produce to
Baton Rouge. I took a Greyhound bus to New Orleans. The first time I’d left
Angola I was proud that I’d survived. This time I was numb. When I got back
I didn’t go home to see my mom right away. I looked for Frank. It was pretty
much just the two of us left. The High Steppers were long over. We never
talked about our old gang anymore. Most of the guys from the gang had
moved on or were in prison. Frank was my only running partner. I didn’t stay
with my family but I saw my mom almost every day, dropping by the house.
She was a great cook and had red beans and rice with ham hocks or other
dishes on the stove for anyone who came by. She knew I was breaking the
law but didn’t ask questions. We purely enjoyed each other’s company. I
liked hearing her stories; we had good conversations. She was proud that I
was intelligent. “Boy, you can sit down on Monday and see Friday,” she’d
say. I stayed in touch with Aunt Gussie too. She worked unloading barges on
the Mississippi River for years.
The Sixth Ward was the same. Still poor but life went on. Children played
ball in the street, some of them barefoot, answering voices calling them home
for dinner. I could vaguely remember more innocent times: Dancing in the
street behind a second line band after a funeral. Collecting bottle caps to see
movies. Catching pigeons for an old man named Reb who lived in the
neighborhood. He used to pay us 25 cents for every pigeon we brought him.
We climbed everywhere to bag those pigeons, over rooftops and under
rafters, around the skylight above a bank.
At the bank, we lay across the glass skylight and watched birds inside the
bank fly beneath us. It never occurred to us that we could get in the bank the
same way the pigeons did and help ourselves to cash from teller drawers. It

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never occurred to us that Reb could do something like eat the pigeons we
brought him. But that’s what he did.
Now, at night, I broke into houses and took anything I could carry that I
thought I could fence. Radios, TVs, stereos, nice clothing. If I was lucky
there would be jewelry or money lying around. Sometimes we stole a car to
use for a night so we could get everything to our fence quickly. We’d leave
the car near where we took it. Other times we stole cars and drove them to
chop shops, selling them for parts.
I never smoked. When I was 14 or 15, I accidentally got very drunk at a
dance; I didn’t know the 7-Up I was drinking had vodka in it. I got so sick I
passed out and threw up for two days afterward, including all over a new
sweater my mom had just bought for me. I felt so bad about ruining that
sweater. I never touched alcohol again. When I was 20, shortly after I got out
of Angola the second time, I let a guy I used to run with named Leroy give
me my first shot of heroin. I didn’t want to do it—I had popped pills
occasionally but never used habit-forming drugs and didn’t want to start. I
was at his house when he was shooting up and he started messing with me,
telling me I couldn’t handle it. I told him, “Shit, I can handle it, give me
some.” That high you get when you first start shooting heroin is the best
feeling I ever had. But at some point, I no longer experienced that wonderful
high. I started shooting to keep from getting sick.
I was a weekend junkie at first. I thought I was handling dope because I
never got sick during the week. Then I got busted for something and while I
was in Orleans Parish Prison my nose started running and I was cramping up.
A friend of mine on the tier said, “Man, you got a habit.” I denied it. He said,
“I know what withdrawal looks like.”
I became so sick that I was taken to Charity Hospital. I heard the guard
tell the doctor I was a stinking-ass junkie. They gave me a shot for the nausea
and I was supposed to be taken back for a shot every day but I was never
taken back to the hospital. I kicked that habit in prison. When I beat the
charge and was released, I went back to shooting dope again. That’s how I
knew I was addicted. I wasn’t getting high. I was shooting to be normal, to
function. On the streets of New Orleans we were buying $12 bags of heroin
that had been cut down. Someone told me we could get uncut heroin for $2 a
bag in New York City so in 1968 I started driving to New York with a friend
to buy dope. We bought it in Harlem and sometimes shot up in Central Park.
When we drove home we brought it back with us.

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One night I broke into a car and was rifling through the glove compartment
when I found a gun. I stared at it in my hand, then put it in my waistband and
walked quickly away from the car. A new feeling came over me, a
confidence I’d never felt before in my life. My chances of survival, I thought,
had just increased by 100 percent. The irony of it, the stupidity of it, was that
I had no idea what to do with it. I’d never fired a gun in my life. I didn’t tell
anyone for weeks. I kept it hidden under my shirt. One night I walked up
behind a dude on the street and pulled the gun out of my waistband and
pointed it at his head. “Give me your money, motherfucker,” I yelled. I was
real nervous, forcing myself not to show it. After a while it became normal,
like anything else you do. When I needed money, I went out and got it from a
person walking down the street. I was a stickup artist. Later, I started robbing
dope dealers. I went up to them in the alley or on a street corner where they
were selling and made them take me to where they hid their stash, or I’d go to
their homes and threaten them. I was a jack artist.
After about a year of being addicted to heroin I didn’t want to be loaded
anymore. My girlfriend at the time was named Slim. I asked her to help me
kick dope. We bought some groceries and went to our apartment. I warned
her that I was going to get sick, throw up, and shit myself, but that no matter
how sick I got, no matter what I said to her, no matter what I did, she was not
to let me out of the apartment. I said, “I mean it, Slim, no matter what I say,
no matter what I do, don’t let me leave. Do whatever you have to do to keep
me from leaving.” She promised.
Within several hours I was sweating, stinking, sick. Of course, I changed
my mind. I tried to leave. I told her to let me go. But Slim was true to her
word. We tussled and fought for the next week, falling on the floor, the bed,
all over the apartment. She held her ground. When I was too weak to fight I
ran a guilt trip on her like the pitiful disgusting piece of shit I was. I told her
if she loved me she wouldn’t let me suffer. I said anything I could think of to
make her feel sorry for me. She didn’t waver. Eventually, I started to get an
appetite. Slim fed me warm milk and chicken soup. I threw everything up.
My stomach was too raw and tender to let me eat. My bones ached. In about
two more weeks I gradually started to feel better. After that, I never touched
drugs again.
Writing about this time in my life is very difficult. I robbed people, scared
them, threatened them, intimidated them. I stole from people who had almost

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nothing. My people. Black people. I broke into their homes and took
possessions they worked hard for; took their wallets out of their pockets. I
beat people up. I was a chauvinist pig. I took advantage of people,
manipulated people. I never thought about the pain I caused. I never felt the
fear or despair people had around me. When I look back on that time I see
that the only real human connection I had in those years came from my visits
with my mom and those hours I spent at her house and around my family, but
at the time I didn’t think of it like that. Her house was nothing more than a
rest stop for me. I only thought of myself. In the year and a half after being
released from Angola the second time, from August 1967 to February 1969, I
was in and out of jail. For city charges, like shoplifting or traffic tickets, I’d
be taken to the House of Detention, which we called the House of D. For
charges of robbery and assault I’d be taken to Orleans Parish Prison.
Each time I went to the parish prison was worse than the last. It was
extremely overcrowded, filthy dirty, and dangerous. I wasn’t a bully but I
never backed down, so I was in a lot of fights. Once, to punish me and “put
me in my place,” prison officials put me on C-1, a tier that housed gay
prisoners, snitches, and other prisoners who’d asked to be checked off their
tiers out of fear. The officials were trying to tarnish my “bad boy” reputation,
to give the impression that I was a rat or that somebody punked me out. The
windows were sealed shut from the outside with metal plates because the tier
was on the first floor. There were four bunks in each cell, 15 cells on each
side of the hall. During the day, the cell doors were open and we could go to
a pen at the end of the hall called a day room or stay in the cell. At night, we
were locked down in our cells. The tier was stifling hot and unsanitary, never
cleaned. When someone came to clean the tier after a few weeks, he did
nothing more than push the filth around with a mop and a pail of dirty water.
The food was inedible. The air was so bad it could get difficult to breathe.
Even worse, I believed the longer I was on that tier, the more it could hurt
my reputation. Some people might start to think I was a coward. A prisoner’s
reputation and his word were all he had. As a form of protest, and to escape
the heat and filth, some of the prisoners started to talk about cutting
themselves. I didn’t want to join them, but I decided to do it. It might get me
off the tier. Maybe with more than a few prisoners at the hospital at the same
time someone would do something to help us. I wrote a note on a piece of
paper to my mom, telling her I was in the hospital, and I put her phone
number on it. I folded two nickels in the paper and stuck it in my waistband.

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About a dozen of us cut ourselves. I sliced my upper right arm and my
left wrist with a razor blade. In those days, there were no disposable razors,
so razors with blades were passed out, used by prisoners, then passed back to
security. The razors were always checked for blades when they were returned
but one way or another razor blades could be acquired on the black market
inside the prison. About eight or ten of us cut ourselves. A prisoner yelled for
the tier guards and they came in, swearing, giving us towels to wrap around
our wounds. Before they shackled us, I put the note in my hand, and when we
got to the hospital I flipped it over to some black guys standing by the
admittance desk; one of them picked up my note and called my mom.
Since she lived within walking distance of Charity Hospital she was there
in about 15 minutes with my brothers and my sister. I tried to talk to her and
tell her about the terrible conditions on C-1 but the prison guards who
brought us told her to stand back. I told her over one guard’s shoulders to call
the prison the next day and report what was going on. It didn’t do any good.
After the hospital staff stitched our wounds and bandaged us they sent us
back to the parish prison and we were put on the same tier, C-1. Cutting
myself was a worthless act. Nothing changed. I was housed there another few
months awaiting disposition on a burglary charge when I was released to
make room for other prisoners. It was a common practice then—and is to this
day—for the DA’s office to keep prisoners with weak, or even nonexistent,
cases in prison to “sweat” the prisoner, hoping he’d plead guilty. If they
needed space during that time for new prisoners, though, they’d go back
through those cases and let out everyone they didn’t think they could convict.
I remember being so relieved when I beat that charge and got back to the
street. I thought I was free.

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