Life Sentences

Writings from Inside an American Prison

• Publisher: Belt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781948742603
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kriminologie

Life Sentences is a collection of writing by six incarcerated men, a hybrid of prison memoir, philosophy, history, policy document, and manifesto. It is also a how-to guide for those who are trapped inside our own community, uninclined or unable to form loving connections with those around us, ashamed perhaps of the harm we have done them and not knowing any way forward. Mainly, though, this book is a letter of invitation, asking readers to join with the incarcerated, their families, and the editors and teachers who worked together on this unique book, so we can all continue to fly over walls, form loving connections with each other, and teach one other to be free.

CHAPTER I

LIFE

FOUND MEMORIES # 1 / Fly

I remember when my father used to take my brother and me fishing. My brother and I couldn’t sleep the night before—we’ll be up talking about all the fish that we was going to catch the next day.

Till my mother would come in the room and tell us quit talk and go to bed. She’ll say, “you know that you boys will be getting up in about three hours and if you not ready your father will leave you.” But he never left us. That was her way of making us go to bed.

We used to get up about 3:30 or 4:00. My father liked to get on the road early. First, we would stop by Mr. Herman’s house to get him. My father must’ve called him before we left the house, because he would always be waiting for us on his porch. When he got in the car, one of the first things he would always say to me and my brother was, “Who’s going to catch the biggest fish today?” And me and my brother would say at the same time, “me, me, me”, and Mr. Herman would just laugh.

We would go to different places to fish all the time, like Lake Arthur, Lake Wilhelm, Moraine State Park, or some pay lakes my father liked.

My father used to say the best time to fish was early in the mornings. So we would get there early and set up the fishing rods. My father taught me and my brother how to put the worms, corn, and dough on the rods, how to throw the rods in the water, how to watch the water and see the change in how the water moves when the fish are biting and how to reel them in.

My mother would pack a picnic basket for us for lunch. We would stay till about 4:00 or 5:00 that afternoon. Sometimes we would listen to the Pittsburgh Pirates game on the radio. A lot of the fish that we caught we would put back in the water. Sometimes we would take the fish home with us.

It was just a lot of fun for me and my brother to be out fishing with our father.

FOUND MEMORIES # 2 / Fly

I remember back in 1981. I went to the Stanley Theatre in downtown Pittsburgh to see a Rick James concert. At that time, I thought that I was God’s gift to all women. I used to wear tuxedos or suits to all the concerts. I also used to wear my hair in curls. So I’m at the concert sitting in the front row enjoying myself, and Rick James looks at me and says, “Hey you, nigger in that white tuxedo. Where the hell do you think you at? You ain’t at no after-prom. We came here to funk.”

Before he played his last three songs, someone came up to me saying that Rick wanted to see me after the show. So when I went backstage, the first thing he said to me was “Motherfucker, what made you wear a tuxedo to my show? Are you trying to show me up?” and start laughing. We start talking and hit it off so that night me Rick and a couple of guys from his band hung out. We started out by going to Bob’s Auto Pub. That was a bar in Market Square, in downtown Pittsburgh. From there we went to the Commercial Club that was located on Fifth Ave in the Hill District.

We partied till about 4:00 a.m. After that, we went to his hotel along with about six woman and continued to party, and yes, it’s true that Rick got high a lot. I thought I liked to get high, but I was not in his league. I left Rick about 2:00 p.m. the next day.

That was not the last time that I would hang out with Rick. But I will never forget the first time.

SCRATCH POETS / Malakki

Scratch Poets was an invention by me and the venerable Christian X (R.I.P.), but the idea of us coming together came from a local director who caught me DJing a party and asked me to add some music and play a small part in a movie he was doing in the city. When he came to my place to see what I did, I showed him more of me. For I was not just a DJ but a performance artist: a sound alchemist stealing pieces from various everythings (from The Munsters TV show to recording rain storms) to produce aural gold.

He told me there was a poet who would pair perfectly with what I was doing. When Chris and I met, the revolution began. He was a most terrific, gifted poet. But it wasn’t his fault. He simply gave voice to the tragic persona that tortured his inner being. I loved him and wish he didn’t kill himself because he helped me turn pieces of me and catch phrases scribbled on scrap paper into poetry. This made me a triple-threat: DJ, producer, and poet.

Sometimes I would do music for other artists, and I really liked what the new street artists brought to the rap genre and the rich texture existing when they layered their gritty stories about the streets with perfect rhyme and meter seen only before in Shakespearean sonnets. Some of my poetry had reflected this but the unfortunate downside to becoming more intimate with their understanding was that I was influenced by them to “keep it real” and not just be about talk. I had walked on the wild side occasionally, but as my anxiety and other issues I was dealing with got worse, I began to indulge more and more into the dark side of the streets. It felt like I found the perfect place to hide and less light brought comfort to the pushed-down digression of my self-esteem. As the anxiety took hold of me, becoming more confrontational and ready to fight brought smiles and pleasing nods to the new circle that adopted me. Scratch Poets became secondary to this new crew of discontents. It got worse from there. The best way to explain it is Proverbs 14:12: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”

DOING DIRT / Oscar

My life pre-prison was pretty much normal. I held a job and the only exception was, I sold drugs on the side. I would work 8:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, and once out of work I would sell drugs. Cocaine: heroin to be exact. I also carried guns and occasionally if something fell in my lap would rob people. Gentleman by day. Gangster by night. Oh yeah, smoked a lot of weed in between. That is pretty much all I did. Prison was no surprise because I did a whole lot of shit and got caught up and boom. So yeah I’m keepin’ it 100% with this and it is what it is. I had to defend myself and someone was killed unfortunately; someone who I knew for a long time who was also into the same exact shit I was into. Criminal on criminal. I shouldn’t have been involved in what I was involved in but I was and when you do dirt you eat dirt and I’m eating dirt.

MY VERY YOUNG YEARS / Khalifa

I was born in McKeesport. My very young years are marred with glimpses only of childhood, rendering much the same story of practically all poor black people in that era (the 1950s). Only I (we) didn’t know we were poor, because everybody around us lived pretty much under the same conditions. Our house was in what was then called the First Ward, right next to Edgar Thomson Steel Works: I guess you can imagine the constant stench of burning or melting steel, and the coal trucks roaring back and forth all day, everyday, and the railroad train of which railroad tracks were approximately 30 feet from our house. Between the smoke-filled stack pipes—the horns of trains and the traffic of unfamiliar faces moving to and fro, there was a beer garden on two of the three corners that formed the junction of Water Street and Market, which we had to walk daily to attend school (Market Street School), that was once a Catholic rectory! By the way, I was born with bronchial asthma, so my condition often made it difficult for me to keep up with the kids my age. Which turned out at first to be alright cause it was the perfect excuse to be around adults all the time. However, that soon became a nightmare in terms of abuse (not sexually imposed on my body, as opposed to my young body being subject to fill in for husbands working late nights in the mill, or when some of the older ladies flashed memories of how they used to be loved and touched, kissed).

Unfortunately, the city’s water sewage company was about three-quarters of a block away from where our house was, so every time they would flush the system we would get the brunt of the smell, depending on how strong the wind was blowing and in which direction!

The Youghiogheny and Monongahela: when it would rain real hard and flood we’d have to go to my Aunt’s house up on Jennylind! Eventually we moved over on Water Street, a mere two blocks from where we were originally, but at least out of imminent danger of floods! Al Duffy’s tavern was on the corner of the street. On the weekends it was always jumpin’. Most of the black mill workers had bills in there so it was packed with them every weekend and the prostitutes would make sure to be easily located from Thursday to Sunday! It was a lesson as well a nightmare! Fights were always happening, dudes over women, women being accused of stealing drunks’ money, strong armed robberies of white dudes that came to buy that black gold (women). That time was a blur for real, between hospital trips and being babysitted by some older lady who wanted to not be “doing anything that afternoon” (while my mother had to go to the welfare office, in its rhythm and decadence that was seemingly unseen and accepted!)

Sometime in the mid-fifties, Harrison Village Projects was built, we had moved from First Ward to Water Street to Railroad Street—to Market Street and now was waiting for placement in the newly built projects. We felt like the Jeffersons, movin’ on up! I was three—going on nine, and I felt fifteen! I had seen things and been accused of things, learned to steal, lie and play absolutely dumb!

In the course of these migratory moves, my family had dwindled from ten members to seven. I was the youngest of the seven boys and three sisters. Seven of us had reached the projects: four boys, a baby-sister, and moms and pop. The projects provided a new life-- a more cohesive life, a more congested life, everybody knew everybody’s business--the cheating husbands, the wandering wives, the next-door lovers, and all the drifting single women just trying to feed their children and there were plenty of children in Harrison Village!

Ironically, our building was approximately twenty to twenty-five feet away from the river, the Yough. Damn, I thought we were rid of floods and found out quite fearfully that we were at a far greater danger, coupled with the rats coming up off the banks to escape the often floods in McKeesport. I’d seen rats in the First Ward, but they were not so offensive as these. It’s like these projects rats had no fear! They were bigger it seemed, and so stomping your feet and screamin’ didn’t mean anything, except to let them know you were scared, and that seemed to make them bolder! They’d just sit there and look at you—like you were in the wrong place messing up their groove! Eventually they became our personal prey, and we used trapping techniques which later enhanced our spy game on the people who we decided were worth following and robbing. These practices often determined whether or not we ate junk food: candy, sodas, and chips were not on the family food shopping list because of minimal income. Family treats were usually gotten from the welfare surplus warehouse on the first Monday of the month, and most likely they were sugar-coated cereals! Yeah, we hustled pop-bottles and ran store errands for the elders, we even cut grass and shoveled snow, but that was considered “work for treats,” and that money was hard earned!

I was eight, and around this time began seeing white people on somewhat of a consistent basis. I had begun hospital treatments for my asthma condition, which consisted of a variety of allergy shots to see what I was allergic to. Usually twelve shots every other Monday—six in each arm. The dizzying smell of G. C. Murphys’ perfume on these white nurses seem to nauseate me even beyond my fear of needles, and I was usually given a tootsie roll or sucker to counteract any ill feeling about the blood oftentimes that would run down my shirt sleeves from an innocent (I guess) too- soon withdrawal of the needle. It was a whole new world to me, because I was barely used to seeing European people! My world was black, with the exception of a few white (poor) kids going to Market Street School, the only other faces were like mine! I saw those same faces when we would go shopping on payday, but they acted like they never saw us! My mother would always say things like “thank you” and “no sir,” but they would say shit like, “Here you are, dear,” or “Those children are so mannerly and cute, are they yours?” I heard, but didn’t understand the underlying difference in dialect until years later, and that only served to embitter me more when they talked at me. Cause I never felt they were talking with or to me, but to a something!

While memory is blurry, times were peaceful—good in fact, when you consider no one was above the other. We were all functioning well, considering the conditions of life unfolding for us. You would see fathers down Murray field running races with the kids, mothers sitting on stoops plaiting hair, older dudes sipping wine and singing in an attempt to lure the attention of one of the older ladies just sitting outside watching who’s who! Sometimes when the ice cream truck would roll around, some hustler or preacher or pimp would be on the scene and invite all the children over to the truck and buy cones for us all. No one would be left out, and we had to wait till all the little girls got theirs first. As a matter of fact, we always had to be seen treating the girls with respect and politeness. Otherwise, there’d be consequences, reprimand, parents told, maybe even a butt-whopping, demands to know who it was that saw the misbehaving. But it was all in good intent!

School was okay, but I never really felt comfortable going. All too many times I remember not getting new school clothes, instead I was given the hand-me-downs from my brother Tommy who was a year older than me. They weren’t raggedy clothes, and for sure pressed and clean, but I knew, and sometimes someone would ask “didn’t your brother have a shirt like that?” or, flat out, “is that your brother’s?” I had no real connection with embarrassment, but I remember the feeling of being singled out and laughed at. But in project life, the joke today could always be played on the joker of yesterday. Sure enough, what went around came around, so we all kinda just capped on each other, knowing our day was coming. We were all poor and in need of something sooner or later, it was a joke on us, a way of lessening the pain of poverty. Today, they call it “desynthesizing.”

MY LIFE / Shawn

My mother had me when she was sixteen and my dad was twenty. My dad went to prison when I was four and did not get out until I was twenty-four. He did twenty years straight. I grew up with a sister and two brothers, all younger than me. I am the only one who has ever been in tr...