Doing Time (29 page)

I know this dialogue is accurate. A little bird told me. His name is Fossil and he sweeps the runs and has powers of hearing equal to a sophisticated eavesdropping device the police might use. Fossil is half snitch, half self-appointed peacemaker. He's been known to give up a minor asshole to the Man so bigger fish can swim and feed in the deep. He's been around since before half the guys in here were born and is considered almost a tradition, an exhibit like in a museum.

According to Fossil, Johnny Boy followed Highside up to D5-25 to see Bumblebee and test the weed. Bumblebee came on real cordial, had a fat one already rolled and told Johnny Boy, if he liked it, could make the deal in Duke's place. He'd been watching, and thought Johnny's talents were going unappreciated, that he had more potential than was being utilized. Johnny Boy enjoyed this banter, and as he smoked the reefer, his feelings of self-importance soared. Johnny Boy played the big shot, smoked the joint deep and fast, said he could handle it no matter how strong it was. What he didn't realize was that Bumblebee had laced the joint with a heavy hit of hog tranquilizer, angel dust, a hit that would have knocked a donkey's dick in the dirt. A few minutes later the pretty mulatto slid down glassy-eyed in Bumblebee's bunk, like his body was suddenly robbed of all its bones.

Bumblebee brutalized that poor boy that afternoon, asserting his territorial rights again and again for over two hours. Later, the autopsy report would show that most of his internal organs had been ruptured. That was before Bumblebee stood outside his cell with Johnny Boy held high over his head and rattled the barred windows with his blood-curdling yell. The echoes continued after the body had fallen five stories and landed in front of cell Dl-25, just as Earl was entering the run. He threw his cane aside and started running toward the blur of tan flesh. When he reached the body the shrieking started and didn't stop until the Duke was dead.

A call came into the Major's office from the building officer about then, and I watched Lieutenant Green's face go white with fear.

“Seal off the block,” he barked into the phone. “I'm calling SWAT.”

The Lieutenant began dialing furiously, bracing himself with thoughts of what the Major would do. I slipped out the door and eased my way down to D Block. The crash gates were locked tight when I got there, and I joined the crush of inmates looking up through the bars at the open stairway. I heard a noise, but couldn't place it. Then Earl ran by and I saw that he was screaming. It was an inhuman sound, one a hyena might make after tearing off its leg in the jaws of a steel trap. The riot squad ran up, but not one of them wanted to go inside the block.

“Let ‘em cool off a little,” said a helmeted corpsman as he slapped a stout oak club into his other palm.

The Duke took the stairs three at a time, even though one foot was swathed in bandages. He carried a length of hollow pipe, flattened and sharpened like a spear. In his other hand was a shorter shiv with a double-sided blade shiny at the edges. The Duke didn't see me, He didn't see anything but the broken body of Johnny Boy magnified by his rage.

Duke met Bumblebee halfway down 5 run and drove the spear through his mouth and out the back of his head. Bumblebee was weakened by his sex and other exertions, but still managed to drive a shank under Earl's ribcage before the Duke toppled him over the railing. He landed about twenty feet from us inside the bars with a thud I could feel through my shoes.

A moment later Duke stumbled down the stairs, eyes wide and spitting up blood. He wore Bumblebee's shank rooted in a wet stain on his left side. Red gauze bandages trailed from his foot like an obscene tail. He reached the body and everyone was stunned to silence as he went to work with the short knife. Metal scraped concrete and the Duke stood up and walked toward us where we stood watching. He dragged his left foot and held up Bumblebee's head by the black knotty hair. He approached the bars and pointed at the head with his bloody shiv.

“This guy has been fuckin' with me,” the Duke said. Then he fell against the bars and slid to the floor.

1985, WalLs Unit, Texas Department of Corrections Huntsville, Texas

U.S. racism is nowhere more inescapable than in the brute facts and figures of our criminal justice system. In the general population, African-Americans constitute less than 13 percent, yet 51 percent of all prisoners nationwide are black. Thirty-two percent of black men in their twenties are under some form of criminal justice supervision. While blacks and whites are murder victims in roughly equal numbers, 82 percent of prisoners executed since 1977 were convicted of the murder of a white person.

How does racism operate behind the walls? “I've heard some men say prison made them much more racist than they were when they went in. The opposite was true for me. I never thought of myself as a racist, yet we all have our fears,” writes Richard Stratton, who is white. “Unless we have the courage to break through the carefully structured fear that works so well in prison, we merely reinforce old biases.”

“First Day on the Job,” Henry Johnson's dramatic monologue here, shows that guards face the same choices about handling their fears as prisoners. An old white guard at Attica is breaking in a new one. Reminiscing about the time before the 1971 uprising, repression, and ensuing reform, the speaker conjures up a time when leaders like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Jomo Kenyatta, first president of Kenya, stirred the pride of African-American male inmates and the fear of their white keepers. We see how racism may be fostered to bolster the confidence of the keepers.

While some guards like Sam in Michael Wayne Hunter's story here overcome racial fears, others, like those who urge inmates to make “hits” in the same story, manipulate racial strife between inmates. Jesse Lopez reported in “Arrival at McNeil Island” (1978)* that some prisons even put into solitary confinement those “guilty of interracial association.” Some prisoners report on having been encouraged to practice racism openly inside. Others assert that the administraton causes more racial tension, for example, by exaggerating the extent of gang activity, keeping the races at each other's throats, and thus deflecting anger from the administration.

In Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville in 1993, the administration forced members of different races — often from areas foreign to racial intermingling — to cell together, according to Paul Mulryan, author of “Eleven Days Under Siege.” This often resulted in one or both parties being sent to the hole, labeled a racist and hence a gang member. Black and white prisoners, knowing that forced interracial celling caused more hatred than it prevented, organized an uprising to demand, among other things, that the practice cease. Relying on the public's assumption of racial strife and disregarding its interracial leadership, corrections officials told the press the uprising was a race riot. Of the several hundred riots in U.S. prisons since 1970, Lucasville was one of the most catastrophic: prisoners killed one guard and nine prisoners.

Trapped with hundreds of others in L Corridor with no way to exit during the riot, Mulryan was transferred to Mansfield Prison and held in the hole until he was cleared of any participation in it. There he wrote “Eleven Days,” seeking to “describe the experience as candidly as possible” without inviting repercussions. The “very real possibility” of his “narrative being used by the state as supporting evidence to prosecute someone” prevented him from using names. Later, with others cleared of responsibility for the not, Mulryan joined a class action that ended double celling.

Prison has become that rare place where, through pure demographics, African- American men clearly seem to wield power. Their real or perceived threat can fire the animosity of white gangs. Although many new prisoners feel virtually forced into gangs for pro* tection, this survival strategy can backfire. In Lance Fleming's play
Lockdown
(1995)* an Aryan gang buys drugs from a black gang and deliberately refuses to pay for them. By thus violating the code, they “force” the black gang to save face by killing two white gang members, Though the white protagonist knows the Aryans are planning a retaliative strike, he feels powerless to avert it. because snitches end in the morgue.

“Lee's Time” by Susan Rosenberg narrates a variant on this kind of moral crisis, with the difference that the prisoners are women and the issue is the highly charged one of interracial sexual contact between a prisoner and a corrections officer. Rosenberg reports that the case on which her story was loosely based was used with others to pass the federal law that makes it a felony for a C.O. to have even consensual sex with an inmate. No such law existed at the time of the event, Rosenberg says, but the extraordinary twenty-year sentence of the C.O. was actually imposed.

Chance — his being in the path of a riot — causes Paul Mulryan to be doubly punished, yet also impels him to bear his careful witness and to join a suit to redress some of the underlying wrong. Chance — her overhearing a sexual encounter — obliges Lee to decide to change the way she does time. Similar chance contacts change the odds for interracial friendships in Charles Norman's memoir and Michael Wayne Hunter's story, “Sam.” Sam and the narrator also share opposition to the death penalty and grieve for Bobby Harris, the first man to be executed after California's five-year moratorium on the death penalty. It's surprising to find such triumphs over prejudice in such a violent environment. It would be profoundly ironic if the supposed dregs of our society can produce a higher standard of human responsibility than its “respectable” citizens.

I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.

— Oscar Wilde

“Twenty years ago when I was young, kid,
we kept a special room in the basement at Attica —
ripe as any butcher shop, soundproofed.
Wild Bill, your squad commander,
shackled nigger convicts to the wall
and we beat hell out of them
with rubber hoses ‘n such.
Lord, the screams in that place,
the heat and smell of blood.
Don't step on that junebug near your foot.
Had that same look in my eyes
my first day on the job,
like a child separated from his mother in a department stote.
The Sergeant assigned me to work in D Block,
had to feed the cons waitin' to appear
before the adjustment committee.
It was like feedin' hogs. I watched
the trustee pour hot coffee for each of ‘em
from a three-gallon tin can.
One of the cons in lockup begged me for a match,
dashed a mug of scaldin' hot coffee
in my face. The doctors saved my eyes,
but the skin on my face never healed right.
Friends told me they found the bugger hangin'
in his cell, one Sunday. One of his friends
must've slipped him some rope, God bless'm.

This here's your locker,
used to belong to old Deke Miller —
he shriveled up like a burnt piece of bacon
before he passed. Heard it was cancer.
When my wife ran off with a mechanic
from the next town, I staggered around for a while
like I was dazed from a blow to the heart.
Look here. See the girl with the blond pigtail?
that's Ellen, my daughter. Put her through
one of them fancy nursin' schools myself.
She's in Denver now, don't see her much
except for Christmas. Old Deke and his wife
clothed and fed her while I drank.

I was proud, hard.
But how hard is a man? —
pushed around against his will,
that King boy
tootin' his communist ass in our faces,
and singin' his heathen songs
in our streets.
And in anger, kid, in anger he swears
that no door in America will be closed to them
even if it means breakin' us
law by law.

So you see, you have to treat these bastards right.
See the con moppin' the rotunda floor?
Used to wear one of them afro haircuts
almost a foot high, and cobra-quick with a knife.
He'd call you cracker so often you'd answer
as though it was your Christian name.
But look at him now: bald, shaky in the knees.
Wild Bill pounded his head like a T-bone steak
with the south corridor keys,
slipped him back into his cell before mornin'.
Go on, ask him who Malcolm X is, or
Jomo Kenyatta. He'll shit all over himself.

You look pale, but you'll be just fine.
Cain't use the room no more, dammit.
So you gotta be smart.
They need to know the discipline of a guard's club,
the keys jangle like death bells ringin'.
We got to control their words, break ‘em
and fling ‘em into the mud like we did that King boy.
And we have to feed ‘em right always
if not pork
then with an education that will send 'em marchin'
into the fire. Know what I mean, kid?

Here, bite a chew of this tobacco —
it keeps you calm.
Don't think it's over, kid, believe me, it ain't.
There'll be another one of ‘em
screamin' and preachin' and scramblin'
for the mountaintop one of these days.

Heh heh. We should have a prison or two up there
by then, kid; maximum security.
Jobs for us all, and maybe
a special room somewhere.”

1988, Sing Sing Correctional Facility Ossining, New York

“Hey, Paul!” I heard my road dog calling me from the other side of the fence dividing the blocks from the yard. “I just heard that some rollers got downed outside L Corridor! Keep your eyes open, rap, some strange shit is going down.”

I didn't give much thought to what he had said. Fights between convicts and guards weren't exactly uncommon here. But I told him I'd keep my eyes open.

Then I heard the two guards in charge of my block yell, their voices full of panic and urgency, for the porter: “Lock up! Lock up now, damn it!”