Since I was sentenced to remain a ward of the province until my eighteenth birthday, the government was my new mommy and daddy. First stop, Bowmanville School for Boys, just outside the small Ontario farming town of the same name. It was a reception centre where all delinquent Ontario boys, from seven to sixteen years of age were classified before being forwarded to training facilities. I knew I wouldn’t be there long, and I instantly recognized the acres of closely mowed lawns and flower-beds.
When I was eight, my father drove us to this place along with five carloads of his brothers and sisters. We had a barbecue with his youngest brother, my uncle Ronny, while he was waiting for placement in a juvie prison. Now here I was, following in the family footsteps.
I was handcuffed and shackled when the police cruiser pulled up to the one-storey, red and white administration building. I had been told this facility dated from the Second World War, when it was used as a prisoner-of-war camp for Germans. It was still run like a military operation and I could see boys walking around in military formation, heading to or from the freshly painted buildings. I wasn’t afraid, just was curious.
At the reception area, I was stripped, searched, showered and interviewed by a nurse. A staff member gave a long speech about the futility of escaping or breaking any rules. I was given bedding and a rule book and turned over to a prison escort who took me to my prison barrack. Surprise, my escort turned out to be my friend from kindergarten, Demetro Shapansky, who had been in the system for a while. He had worked his way up to a position as trustee and was in charge of escorting new boys and tracking down those who tried to escape.
He told me my cousin Perry had escaped a couple of weeks earlier and hadn’t been caught.
Demetro giggled, “If you want to split let me know. I’ll tell you the best time and direction.”
What a comfort to see his smiling face.
I spent the rest of the day locked in my barrack studying the rule book.
On my second day, I noticed some white greasy guys eye-fucking me at dinner. They were from Regent Park, and they knew my reputation. I asked Demetro if he’d sharpen up a butter knife from the kitchen so I could jump the one who wanted to test me.
The next afternoon I went to the mess hall with the little knife in the waistband of my pants. I spotted the guy I was after and he sensed that I meant business, so he stood up.
When he saw the knife he started screaming for his crew and began to back away. But his crew just sat there, unwilling to gather their balls for a beef they had nothing to do with. My target picked up a cup and threw it at me. Demetro knocked over a table and everyone jumped to their feet screaming, “Fight! Fight!”
I dropped the knife to the floor. I wasn’t afraid of any white boys throwing cups. Within seconds, ten officers swarmed in and grabbed me. I’m not saying that the system is tilted, but no one grabbed the white kid who threw the cup.
I was sent to solitary for a week. Nobody found the knife. I was not charged with assaulting another inmate, which was fortunate because, while I was in there, I had a visit from the warden. He’d read the report about the size and seriousness of my gang; the report contained an outline of how I could be helped if I was removed from them.
It was signed by Bert Novis.
As a result, I was sent to Glendale Training Facility, near Simcoe, in the heart of tobacco country. Glendale was new and intended for gifted boys. Most of the staff had degrees in child psychology. The warden, for example, had a PhD. He told me I’d been sent there because I had so many relatives and gang associates in all of the other training schools. He agreed with Novis that – if isolated – I could be turned into a productive member of society.
Glendale wasn’t as rough as some of the other boys’ training schools. A kid might get slapped around, but usually only if that kid was a bully, or if he attacked a staff member. Rape, by inmates or by staff, was a rare thing, whereas years later other schools in the system would be rocked by accusations of brutality and sexual assault by chaplains, guards and other inmates.
The plan Novis set in motion was to isolate me from my Afro-Metis roots and any connection to my old neighbourhood and culture. Being isolated from all that is familiar makes some kids crazy, others docile, others violent. Some kids ran away, others hurt themselves or lashed out. The smarter ones poured their energy into sports or school. Evolution theorist Charles Darwin observed first-hand that isolation and time can change a species. I know I changed and not for the better.
When you are separated from your family and deprived of choice – where to go, what to do, what to eat, when to sleep, when to wake and who to see – you might as well be dead.
The only way I was going to see the street again was by being a model prisoner. It wasn’t easy. Some of the kids were racist, a cast of mind they usually picked up from their parents. After I beat the shit out of one or two of them, things quieted down. Every now and then, somebody would stroll in and challenge me to a fight, if for no other reason than to gain a reputation.
Most of the guys who tried to fit in by being tough and sounding racist were from small towns where people of colour didn’t exist. They weren’t willing to go all the way, like I was. If there were times when I didn’t want to fight, it was not because I was afraid I’d lose, but because I was afraid I’d kill. As the days dragged on, I became lonelier than I’d ever been. The loneliness made me bitter. To demonstrate my unhappiness, I refused to show any compassion to anyone who was white – staff or inmate.
The only black people I saw were my parents, who drove up once a month to take me out for a bite to eat – a rare and precious privilege. But those visits were strange because they were nothing more than an illusion of freedom. Wherever we went in those small southern Ontario towns, we stood out.
On one of those occasions a group of white kids called my father a nigger and then sped off in their car down a one-way road. This was a definite mistake. Sonny hammered his car in reverse and chased after them, driving backward at sixty mph until the boys stopped to confront him.
Sonny got out of the car with a hammer in his hand. I stood by his side, carrying a knife from the fishing tackle box he habitually carried with him. I was grinning, but Sonny was dead serious. The kids had the good sense to apologize. I’d have cut them up.
Lunch afterward was tense. I think if I had so much as asked my dad for the pepper shaker, he’d have snapped.
I sat there with mixed emotions–glad to be free but horrified by the notion that my freedom had subjected my father to a racist confrontation that could have cost him his freedom.
As I picked at my food, I thought of an earlier time and a family trip we’d taken. Ten carloads of our mixed-race clan stopped at a small town to do some fishing. The cars pulled over and I jumped out, running across the road and over a small dam, heading for a store on the other side. We were inside for less than a minute when a small white boy my age rushed in, racing around the corner and behind the register where his mother was standing.
“Mom, Mom,” he shouted. “There’s a circus come to town. A whole bunch of niggers just pulled up in cars across the river.” Needless to say, that store suffered significant inventory losses on that long summer day.
In all, I spent one full year in training school. The average stay was six months. And what I’m about to tell you is hard for me, even now.
I was out on a pass but still reporting to a probation officer, Lou Taylor. He was a tall, well-educated black man from Windsor, Ontario, who ultimately became the head of probation services in Toronto. I was rarely in the company of such a dignified man, so when he laid out his plan to save me I didn’t question his logic.
He knew a white family in the east end of Toronto who fostered kids. He reasoned that if I was with a foster family, out of my element and in a white neighbourhood, I might slow down a bit and change.
Taylor took me to my parents’ house with a writ in his hand and had the discussion with my parents about taking me away. It was not much of a discussion, however, since that writ was law.
I felt angry and worthless at the same time.
Sonny said nothing until I was about to leave. “Hey, boy,” he called. “Don’t let anything happen to you. Something happens, you just come home.”
Meanwhile, my mother made up a suitcase. Inside she stuffed a card along with a piece of a brown sugar pudding cake. The card read: “I love you. Don’t cause any trouble. Come home soon.”
She stood on the sidewalk with the writ in her hand, crying as Taylor drove me away.
My new family were a couple of well-meaning fat people with two fridges full of food. All of their relatives came to meet me. It was an uncomfortable surprise, because the kids who were my age were all members of the east end gang my crew was used to beefing with.
I decided I needed a gun.
The first Sunday night I spent in foster care ended up with me picking a lock to a gun store. A Chinese guy saw me. I wondered if I should run. The lock was stubborn. Two cops came and grabbed me as I walked along the curb and took me to 55 Division. They smacked me around. I tried to stand up for myself. They smacked me around some more. The next morning, a judge at the juvenile court was lecturing me about what a risk to society I was.
“Your Honour, I’m only fifteen years old,” I said in my defence.
The judge looked at me askance. I wasn’t done.
“Your Honour, they beat me, and they fingerprinted me.”
That caught the judge’s attention. It was against the law to print a juvenile. His attitude changed immediately. Sternly, he told the police to destroy the prints and he dismissed the charges.
“Let him go.”
I thought I could just walk away and go home to my parents, with the foster parents out of the way because I had embarrassed and frightened them. Not so fast. My probation officer stuck his nose in and said I should be sent back to Glendale for my own good. I was “out of control.”
Not long after my return, I decided to escape.
I had relatives in Montreal. I figured it would be easy enough to go there and blend in. It was not hard to persuade some of the others to run with me.
Glendale was a lot like a modern boarding school. It held 120 guys in four units. Each of us had our own room and we had access to a library, a well-stocked kitchen and a big gym. More importantly, there was a huge yard surrounded by farmers’ fields with no fences of any kind.
The escape plan was simple. One of my chores was cleaning the laundry room. When I asked a lazy guard to open the door for me, he threw me the keys, as I knew he would. By melting a candle from the institution chapel, I made a small wax pad that I used to make an impression of the key, picked up an armload of towels and left, locking the door behind me. The next morning, I fashioned a rough key in the machine shop where I had a vocational training class.
We made our move on a Friday night. Young and fit, and we ran the five miles to the nearest town to steal a car. By the time we got there, sirens were howling. We hid behind some houses while one of the guys went to find a car. In minutes he came running back, followed by two gun-wielding cops.
We hightailed it, jumping fences and cutting down lanes until we came to a supermarket parking lot where we were greeted by those two winded cops and some of their pals, all with guns drawn.
Freedom lasted less than an hour.
Not one of my better plans.
Glendale was progressive but sometimes progressive is weird. Normally, after an escape attempt, you’d end up in the hole and lose your privileges for a long time. But the warden seemed impressed with my intellect, and my thirst for knowledge, so he decided to try a little experiment. He wanted me to spend my days locked in a glass booth with my books and my nights in the hole.
Every morning at 7:00 a.m., I was escorted to the glass booth; inside, I had a chair and books, and that was all. I was on public display. If I needed a glass of water or had to use a toilet, I tapped on the glass.
Staff sneered at me; inmates snickered and mocked me at the risk of being punished. Others discreetly tapped their left shoulders in solidarity.
I was the only non-white in the place and I began to feel diseased by the colour of my skin. I knew I could cut my hair and “act” white to lessen the social stigma. I knew others who easily passed as Italians or Arabs. But I was too much my father’s son to deny my blackness. That was never going to happen.
When my time in the glass booth was up, I continued paying the price for my attempt at freedom by doing a month of breakfast kitchen service.
One morning, I was lined up to get my white kitchen service uniform and someone kicked me lightly in the butt. Instinctively, I wheeled around and horse-kicked the idiot in the chest.
It was no idiot. It was a guard named Winnery. He was two years out from serving in Vietnam. I thought he was a bit of a psycho. In an instant, he had me on the floor, twisted into knots of pain.
“Son, you ever strike me again, I will end your life.” He knelt over me and pushed his elbow into my neck. “Got it?”
I got it, and I got sent to the hole. I was surprised when Mr. Winnery came to visit me. He was quiet, with the dangerous air of a mob debt-collector. It turned out he was also an intelligent and caring staff officer.
We talked, and he shared some of the shit he went through as the only white guy in a platoon of black and Hispanic soldiers.
“‘Private white boy’ is all I heard for two years over there,” he said. “I signed up for it so I had to take it. You signed up for this so you’ve got to learn to take it also.”
I respected him, but I had not voluntarily signed up for anything. He let me out of the hole later that day.
I found that I’d moved up in the pecking order as a result of having stood up for myself with him. I will explain: boys of all shapes, creeds and colours would walk into prison and ask, “Who’s the rock of this place?” The rock was often, but not always, the toughest guy in the place. Sometimes the rock was simply a guy who wouldn’t take shit from anybody else.
After I got out of the hole every guy in the place knew that, if I’d gone after Mr. Winnery, I’d be likely to react to anyone else the same way. So I became Rick the Rock.
The tag came with responsibilities, not unlike wearing the white hat or the black hat in a western movie. I welcomed challenge.
One night in my cell I heard a new kid ask, “Who’s the rock on this range?”
He was obviously aware of adult prison lingo – a “range” being a reference to a basic cellblock with open doors, allowing the inmates to roam around like so much fenced livestock, with guards on the watch. Glendale was nowhere near that formal, but we did roam around our cellblock freely.
“It’s the big coloured boy in room fifteen,” someone answered.
Then came the challenge: “Hey, coloured boy, get off the range by supper or get ready to shine my shoes with your face.”
I stepped out of my cell. “Who’s asking?”
“I did, I’m in number ten.” I walked over and yanked open the door. Inside was a runt of a kid who curled up into a little ball and began to whine as soon as he saw me. “Please, don’t hurt me, I didn’t know you were so big.”
I let him be.
The merciful rock.
Sometimes, a rock would wait for someone young and fragile, and make a move on him. If you were weak and you went along, you thereafter led the life of a so-called “sweet kid.”
Most sweet kids were used for unpleasant chores such as cleaning rooms or washing down the units. Some guys used sweet kids as sex toys, for blow jobs or hand jobs. Sweet kids were bullied or taunted and sometimes they were raped while others kept watch and waited their turn.
But rape didn’t happen as often as friendly coercion.
I often had inmates ask to be my kid, just so they’d be left alone. But I was a loner and looking after a weak white boy, protecting him from the predatory games of other white boys, just wasn’t part of my thinking.
Hormones run high in adolescents, so life in prison was sexual by nature, but never overtly. Moves were made over time and not violently. If you brushed past someone, you might hear, “Hey, are you giving me an elbow grip?” Or if your foot brushed another’s, you might hear, “Hey, you queer, you trying to give me a toe grip?” That was often all it took to start a fight.
If the person who was touched did not react, you might say, “That elbow grip felt good; maybe I can get one later on when we’re alone.”
Glendale was largely run on the basis of mutual respect, which made it psychologically comfortable, with an attitude of “Don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you.” That’s how you get along in any of the prisons I’ve been in.
The place was like a modern school. It held 120 guys in four units. Each of us had our own room and we had access to a library, a well-stocked kitchen and a big gym. More importantly, there was a huge yard surrounded by farmers’ fields with no fences of any kind.
I had been back at Glendale about three months, when I heard a voice outside my cell door announce: “Man, another coloured boy walked in. He’s downstairs now.”
“I hope he don’t come up here, we got too many of those already,” another voice responded.
I wondered who the new brother was, hoping he wasn’t a punk someone would turn into a sweet kid.
When supper was called, I pushed my way to the front of the line as usual. Things went silent then, so I knew something was up.
“Who’s the rock?”
The tone was threatening, but I didn’t turn around. I didn’t even tense up. I was used to being called out.
“The tall guy at the front of the line. What of it?” someone shouted.
“He’ll be my sweet kid before the night is over,” came the answer
Some of the guys chuckled, and I chose that moment to set the tone.
“Let the floor hockey whistle be the bell, fool.”
When I turned around I was stunned to see it was the new black guy who came in that day.
“Brother,” I said, “I’m going to fuck you up real good, so get ready.” I heard his name was Johnny Bayliss.
The fight was set in stone. An excitement swept through our unit, knowing a really good fight was about to break the monotony of the daily routine. I would have attacked him then and there, but I didn’t want to go back to the hole. Fighting during gym sports like floor hockey was legal. I could wait.
In preparation, I ate lightly. It’s no good fighting on a full stomach, and anyone could see that this Johnny knew how to handle himself. He was coal black, in shape with the strong legs of a track star. I wasn’t happy about going up against a brother, but I knew we had to fight and I was going to fight to win.
After supper we went back to our cells and I heard Johnny out on the range, making friends. That wasn’t hard to do because a lot of guys on the range didn’t like me. It was in their interest to have a new tough friend.
As soon as I heard the call: “Gym up!” I headed for the recreation area, knowing I couldn’t afford to lose and hoping I didn’t kill this new brother in the process.
When I got to the gym, I picked up a floor hockey stick and walked toward Johnny. He had a stick in his hand, too. He pretended to play with the floor hockey ring. As I neared, he surprised me with his speed – cracking me a good one on the head.
My defence was offence. I attacked, hitting him over and over with my stick while he blocked and moved. We went at each other until our sticks were nothing more than scattered pieces on the gym floor.
Then I was on him, with feet, fists and elbows. We were rolling on the floor, fighting like wild dogs. The gym was filled with cheers.
I made a move, pulling Johnny’s ear close to my mouth as though I was going to bite it off. Instead, I hissed: “Brother, all these white boys sure are getting a kick out of us putting on a show.”
Johnny instantly stopped fighting and looked at me as though he had just awakened from a deep sleep. “Then let me the fuck up.”
I relaxed my grip and we got up slowly.
“Where you from?” I asked.
“Windsor. Who are you?”
I told him my name and that I was from Toronto’s west end and that my people were Nova Scotian.
We slapped hands and that was it. Seeing the disappointed faces of the white boys, I knew we’d done the right thing by stopping.
Johnny and I began our friendship playing chess, sharing childhood stories, and putting anyone in their place that even hinted at a racist gaze.
We became the prison track stars, the fastest in the institutional system. Both of us qualified for the southwestern Ontario track championships, me in the high jump and 250-yard dash and Johnny in the 100-yard dash.
Although we lost that competition to athletes who were properly trained, Johnny became a friend for life and a partner in crime for the next several decades. He didn’t stay in Glendale long but he did something for me that expanded my intellect tenfold and informed my life.
Johnny had a cousin who had spent a stint. Before he left, he heard that Johnny had been arrested, so he left a box of books for him in the prison library. Johnny shared them with me.
I didn’t just read the books, I studied them. Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon and Black Boy by Richard Wright – I read the pages off those books. They taught me how to live as a black man in a racist society from various social, political and economic vantage points that I’d never been exposed to.
The source of all my discipline, from then until now, is in Soul On Ice by Eldridge Cleaver.
From Cleaver I learned how to conduct myself inside. Everything he did, I did – he went to school, he did his exercises, he told the people around him to leave him alone or he’d kill them – I did the same and guys backed off.
This Cleaver-inspired discipline made me successful, if you can consider the sum of my career, in and out of jail, a success.
The same discipline kept me out of trouble in a world of danger. I knew men who were slaves to drugs and would do anything to get some. I knew men who were slaves to pussy, as addicted as any junkie, spending every cent. Not me.
I only broke with Cleaver when he talked about raping black women as a prelude to raping white women.
That’s wrong in every way.
I have never raped, or beaten a woman. My lack of aggression toward women is from my instinctive interest in them: the way they move, the pressure they put upon the earth, the energy that radiates from them That might have been because of my respect for my mother and many aunts, or it might have been the message of the Sixties to respect your revolutionary sister.
When Johnny left he promised we’d meet in Toronto once I got out. So there I was again, lonely and cut off, miserable without an ally, with nothing but my strength and my wits to keep me going. I dreamed of finding an Angela Davis-style revolutionary sister. I figured on getting Johnny’s help crossing the border at Windsor into the United States. It was a fleeting thought but it hung there.
Something had to give, and one day I just snapped and made up my mind to get out of there. I made my move in the morning when I reported for mandatory, once-a-month kitchen duty.
The head of the kitchen was a man who had been a top chef at Toronto’s elegant Royal York Hotel. He was retired, but he lived close to the prison and he was unhappy about not working at his trade, so he asked if he could teach us kids to cook and bake.
Every kid in the place got a cake on his birthday and they were as good as cake gets. The chef was friendly and polite. He loved teaching us what he knew about the inner workings of the world’s best hotel kitchens.
It was a foggy Monday morning and I got to the kitchen early, around 5 a.m. I waited for the chef, ready to greet him with a plan that would make this day different from any other in his life.
I watched him open the walk-in freezer door and enter. As usual, he left his keys in the lock. Quick as could be, I closed the door behind him and snapped the lock shut. He banged on the door, asking to be let out.
“I’m taking off,” I told him in a voice just loud enough for him to hear.
“At least you could have left me a coat.”
I didn’t want to freeze him to death. I liked him more than any other staff member in the place.
“I’ll turn up the thermostat.”
“No, no, don’t do that. Someone will be by in a minute. Just take off. You won’t last long, running around this area.”
What he didn’t realize was that I had his car keys. I also had the key to his office so I could turn off the alarm. He never left his office unlocked and now here I was in it alone and in charge. I wasn’t about to get caught running around some small town looking for a place to hide – been there, done that.
I unlocked the back door of the kitchen and stepped outside. The morning fog was so thick I could barely see the cars in the parking lot only twenty feet away.
I did see well enough to find his car. It was a big blue Ford Marquis – the poor man’s Cadillac – and a bit too flashy for a getaway car. I figured I could ditch it and get another in the next town. I hopped in and turned the key. All was good; the cops would have to wait for the fog to clear before they started searching the fields and roads around the prison. A least, that’s what I thought.
I hit the highway as fast as I could, but as the fog began to lift I was exposed to anyone driving past me. I figured I’d better do what I could to look older than my fifteen years. So I picked a butt out of the ashtray, stuck it in my mouth and slid the chef’s sunglasses on. Passing car after car, I was putting as much distance between Glendale and me as I could.
An hour away from town, a cop car pulled up beside me with his siren blaring and lights on. He waved his revolver, motioning me to pull over.
That’s not how I planned to give up.
I hit the gas pedal hard but less than a minute later – with the car veering dangerously – a posse of cruisers boxed me in. All I could do was skid to a halt.
There would be no glass booth this time and no hole. On the way back to Glendale, I lay on the floor of the prison station wagon, hands cuffed behind my back, while the guard in the passenger’s seat got up on his knees and did his best to teach me who was the boss. Using the butt end of a baseball bat to inflict as much pain as he could, he dug and churned it into my stomach, legs, back and balls.
I wish he had just hit me in the head and knocked me out but I had to listen to his vitriolic pontificating about my smart-ass attitude, my colour and the punitive tax burden required to maintain incorrigible kids like me. Like my father had done years earlier when he whipped me for squirting water at a white man, this guard punctuated each statement with a blow or a grinding poke. I wanted to kill him.
Later on that day, bruised and filled with rage, I was taken to the warden’s office. I heard him talking calmly to my mother on the phone, telling her how I’d been picked up and was okay. When he finished on the phone he leaped up, pointing at me and screaming: “Take this asshole straight to the max in Guelph and let’s be done with him; don’t take his cuffs off and don’t stop for anything.”
I wanted to put it to him, “Warden, what good is your Ph.D. if you’re not going to use it to help me?” but thought I had already pushed past his comfort zone.
On the road to Guelph I sat in the back of the now-familiar station wagon. Once we got into the city, I memorized every street as we headed for the reformatory, in case I need to be free again.
The facility at Guelph was an entirely different story. There was an adult prison across from it and both had barred cells like you see in the movies. Off the top, everyone had to spend three weeks in the hole. There were only forty-eight of us at the Hillcrest Training School, which accommodated boys from seven to seventeen who had proven themselves the hardest of cases. Without a doubt, it was a no-nonsense training school. As a matter of policy, they let us fight things out on the spot rather than let things fester.
In a way, this created a kind of economics.
For example, you couldn’t smoke in jail, but the guards liked to lock down the ranges now and then and watch us fight. I guess it relieved their boredom. One day, I asked one of the guards if I could get a TM – a tailor-made cigarette – if I fought one of the tougher guys from another range. This was a risk. You could get sent to the hole for trying to bribe a guard, but he liked the idea. The fight was set.
After that, every week I was able to fight for cigarettes, which I could then barter for pop or candy. Getting those smokes got me lots of respect from guys who hadn’t had a smoke in months.
I only lost once while I was there.
Owen, Junior and many others from my family and from the Projects ended up in the big jail a mile away. It had 1,200 inmates who were all serving two years less a day. I could see their prison from my cell. Naturally, we communicated. I got lots of kites – notes that kept me up to date on family in prison and outside – and they were sent in a variety of ways; messages were stuffed in food containers, in laundry carts, even in loaves of bread and jugs of milk. The warden finally asked my father to take me to visit Owen and Junior to ask them to stop sending me kites. It seems that food products containing foreign objects were deemed contaminated and disposed of, which was costing the institution too much money.
I spent eight months in Guelph, studying, fighting and minding my own business. They had an excellent English teacher, Ms. Rose, who took me on passes to participate in public speaking competitions. A child psychologist talked with me. Many compassionate guards helped out with community recreation programs and work programs, such as spending a couple of weeks at maple sugar farm. These attempts to modify my delinquent behaviour found their mark.
Finally, I guess they figured I was cured of whatever criminality had brought me there in the first place and they told me they were letting me go.
The timing was fortunate. I had been so bored, and so lonely, that I seriously considered knifing someone as soon as I turned sixteen, so that they’d be forced to send me into the adult system. I needed to be with familiar faces – friends and family – people who knew me and understood me.
Before I left, the warden called me to his office to give me a speech about doing the right thing. He was tall and elderly with decades of dealing with tough teenagers behind him. “Follow me,” he said, and we went to one of the empty classrooms on the second floor. He sat me down and gave me a pep talk. I still remember what he said.
“Richard, you’re smart enough and tough enough to be anything you want to be in this world, but there’s little we can do to help you here in this facility. You have to come up with a plan that will guide you into the future.
“If you choose crime, how can we stop you? The prison next door is filled with your friends and family. But I’m betting you won’t choose crime. I’m betting that you’ll use that brain in your head and strive to stay out of prisons like this one. That choice is up to you, and you alone.”
I don’t know if he was betting, but he was certainly hoping. With that, he stood up, shook my hand and wished me good luck.
Free at last, free at last.
I walked out of jail, and into my father’s waiting white-on-white 1963 Chrysler. I didn’t look back as we drove away. My main concern was getting some money.
In prison, I had earned a whopping thirty cents a week, which was used to pay for candies and toiletries. It took three weeks to save enough for a bottle of shampoo. So, I had no savings. All I had in my pocket was a provincial probation order to go see my probation officer, Lou Taylor.
The drive home was awkward.
Sonny was disappointed in me. I thought he was hypocritical. He was not a thief but every now and then he’d buy stolen goods. He wasn’t a rat but he beat the hell out of us if he thought we were stealing. I was often beaten for hanging around with my cousins, because my mother and father thought they were bad influences.
They had no idea.
A few of my aunts and uncles were rounders and hustlers. A few of their children grew up to become pimps, whores, thieves and armed robbers. But the truth is that I became the leader of my generation of Afro-Metis in Toronto by turning to crime to get a piece of the proverbial Canadian pie.
I learned fearlessness and other leadership tools in jail. I learned from observing Sonny, not from talking to him and not from him teaching me. We were never close like that. If he really knew what was going on, he’d have known that my cousins should have been beaten for hanging around with me.
As the countryside rolled by, Sonny tried to convince me of the virtues of being a square john and leading a clean life. While he was talking, a Molson’s beer truck skidded as it turned onto an overpass high above the 401 highway and it rolled in front of us, spilling hissing kegs of beer.
Sonny jerked the car hard right and left to avoid hitting the kegs. When we stopped and went back to see what had happened, we saw that the driver had been thrown clear of the truck to the highway below, obviously dead.
Whoever he was, he was just trying to do his job. He expected to get home at the end of the day. Death was his reward for being a square john.
So, what difference did it make, I thought, as I looked down at his broken body?
We pulled into Alexandra Park, and I breathed deeply, enjoying the familiar stench of the inner city, glad to be away from the clean country air.
I walked into the depths of the Projects and stopped dead in my tracks: there was a girl I knew standing in her doorway, as lovely as ever. I’d had a soft spot for her. She had her back to me. I called her name. She looked over her shoulder at me and her smile lit up the sky.
When she turned around to face me I could see that she was eight months’ pregnant. I was dumbstruck. Later, I found out that the father was one of my friends.
The buddies I had left behind came out to take a look at me. They were all a year older. Some had just been released from adult prison, others had good jobs and would soon leave the gang. For some there was nothing to do but hope for better times ahead with the gang they’d known since childhood.
After his stint in the Ontario Reformatory, everyone called Owen Crookendale “The Crook.”
“Welcome back to Hell,” he said, greeting me with an impish grin and handing me an expensive knife. Then everybody slapped hands or patted me on the back. My reputation as a solid guy was secure.
Crime is a gamble: some win, but most don’t. I saw myself as a winner and I was pretty sure I was going to roll the dice again, even if the probation order in my pocket forbade me from hanging out with guys who didn’t respect the law.
I had to be careful if I wanted to stay out of reform school before my eighteenth birthday. I also had to get some money, get some clothes, and find a girlfriend.
Naturally, I hung out with the same guys I’d grown up with, but three new guys came into the Projects for us to befriend.
Everett was a smooth-talking, light-skinned teenager who I met on a school trip to Buxton; a rural community that had black roots similar to Africville in Nova Scotia where some of my relatives lived. He was an amateur boxer, but he was more confident with the knife he carried than he was with his fists. He’d only been in Toronto a week when he met my cousin Marlene. He quickly became her pimp and remained so for the next several years.
Brian Bush was tall, slim, dark brown and athletic. He also had a way with the ladies, and he seemed smarter than most of the crowd in the Projects. His father hung out at my father’s bar years earlier, which helped him fit in.
Like me, Brian had a white mother but he didn’t live with her. He survived on the street by wits and cunning. He might have been black and unemployed, but lived better than most of us off of the crime available in the Spadina area. He carried a straight razor and had no fear of using it.
In addition to his quick wit, Brian was paranoid – a combination that kept the rest of us alert and busy analyzing the relationships we developed with anyone who came into contact with us. He quickly became a major influence in the gang.
Then my great friend Johnny Bayliss from Glendale showed up. Johnny was like a brother to me. He was renting an apartment near the University of Toronto. I gave him a solid gold, single-shot .22 calibre derringer when he got married. Owen and I stole the derringer from a gun shop on Yonge Street. Guns are better than toaster ovens.
Johnny’s wife was a beautiful university student. One night they got into a heated argument that drew the police. He was busted with the golden gun – landing him in jail for thirty days and leaving him with an adult record.
That arrest would haunt us both years later.
Knowing that I needed a car to find a job, my father gave me his Chrysler. A bunch of us piled in and rode around for the day. I woke up in the morning to the siren sounds of fire trucks racing into the Projects. Someone had torched my car.
I became suspicious of everyone and offered a reward for the arsonist, vowing to set him on fire if I found him. It’s a good thing I never did.
Before the smoke cleared, the Dorsey brothers from Blind River came to town, wanting to make friends. To me, anything north of Sudbury was the North Pole. I didn’t think black people lived that far north.
They were country boys, who grew up using guns to hunt. Guys who knew how to use guns were needed in the Projects in those days, so they had no trouble fitting in.
Levern Dorsey and I became lifelong friends. We rented an apartment together in Little Italy. Soon after, Everett, Junior and Owen moved in. Before long we’d filled every nook and cranny in the place with guns.
With so many armed teenaged boys in the building, none of the neighbourhood tough guys dared to mess with us. We didn’t have to worry about anyone breaking in or harassing the girls who came to see us.
Levern loved to till-tap – stealing money out of cash registers while storeowners were momentarily distracted by some ploy.
Our attitude was that everything white people owned was rightfully ours. There was even a slogan for it: “All the white man has belongs to the black man.”
We firmly believed that the police and the government existed simply to protect all that had been stolen from us during hundreds of years our slavery.
In the summer of my sixteenth birthday, Sonny tried to get me some legitimate work. He worked on the docks as a stevedore that year. Each morning he went down to the shipyards and stood in line with hundreds of other strong men, hoping to be picked for work that day so he could put food on the table for his family.
I went along out of curiosity and to appease my father for all that he had done for me while I was locked up. I already had more than a day’s wages in my pocket that I had stolen the day before from a store till.
We stood in line, father and son amid a throng of hungry men. Within seconds I heard, “Sonny, is that man with you?” My father nodded with a little smirk on his face and off we went through the gate to one of the huge ships anchored there.
The work was steady; it was hard, done by hard men. It could be dangerous but it paid well and was treasured work among those who lined up for it. I knew my dad had connections and wanted me to go further than him. However, his idea of a good blue-collar job as a measurement of success wasn’t my idea of success.
All morning I kept wondering how the hell was I going to get out of working beside my father loading and unloading heavy boxes deep inside the sweaty, smelly hold of the ship.
I got lucky when one of four chains hoisting a forklift out of the ship’s hold broke, sending two tons of metal flying toward the boxes I was stacking. Men shouted and I jumped out of the way, while the skid of boxes was swept to the holding deck far below lined with metal rebar that stood up like iron spikes. We looked down at the boxes speared like shish kabobs.
“You’re one lucky son of a gun,” said the foreman, slapping me on the back.
The next day my brother, Dwane, took my place at the shipyard. I went to the bank to open an account with the thirty-two bucks I made. There was no ill feeling between my dad and me.
If you look at Atkinson family photos from Nova Scotia, you see a strong native influence. I consider myself Afro-Metis. It fits me better than mixed race and certainly sounds better than half-breed. The historical differences between my black and native brothers are that the blacks had better resistance to white diseases, worked hard by nature and were imprisoned and forced to work at gun point in a strange land. In contrast, my red brothers were nearly wiped off the face of the earth through warfare, disease and outright murder.
If I suffered any guilt about the thefts I habitually committed, I rationalized it. The native in me whispered that white people could afford to lose a little of what they stole. The black man in me complained that they owed me centuries worth of back pay. The white man in me tried to arbitrate: “Why can’t we all just get along and steal together?”
There was another rationalization, derived from reading – this one from Thomas Edison. “Everybody steals in commerce and industry. I’ve stolen myself. But I know how to steal.”
If it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me. There were also multitudes of honest people lining up to buy our stolen goods. We walked the neighbourhood, till-tapping at every opportunity. Over time, we stole thousands of dollars just on our way home from school.
Yes, I was back in high school.
We stuck our noses in factories, on the pretence of looking for work, knowing that black teens with Afros were unlikely to get factory work. In actuality, we weren’t asking for jobs. We were casing places, looking at, manipulating and testing alarm systems so that we could come back later and break in, stealing clothes or anything else we could fence.
What we treasured most were the guns we sometimes came across. Levern soon had so many guns he became a dealer. Some of the guns we sold to an arms dealer who worked for mob boss Paul Volpe, known as The Fox.
I got to know Chucky Yanover better in jail, years later, where he regaled me with stories of the international arms trade.
Our gang spent some time ripping off drug dealers in Rochdale College, a residence of the University of Toronto.
At the time, in the late Sixties, Rochdale was the place to be for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Thousands of white, middle-class kids passed through there every month, as if it were Mecca. There were love-ins and lots of white girls loved big, black, inner city tough guys.
Let’s face it, hippies were easy marks. We were so busy robbing them that the hippies enlisted a motorcycle club, The Vagabonds, to protect them from gangs like ours. Eventually, there was a meeting and we were asked not to enter Rochdale if we were armed, putting an end to our easy pickings.
The temperature of the times might have been peace and love, but there was also plenty of love and hate. One afternoon I was walking along Dundas with Owen the Crook when I noticed a line of cop cars in front of the wall that ran along the Projects.
Owen chuckled. “Good time to take one of those pigs and kick his head in.”
I said, “I’d rather shoot one from a couple of blocks away with my sniper rifle.”
We approached slowly, to see what was going on. There was a crowd gathered by the cars and, as we got closer I heard the voice of my aunt Babes, screaming.
I pushed to the edge of the crowd.
A couple of cops were dragging Babes by the hair along the sidewalk toward their car. She was a big woman, full of struggle. The crowd was crazy, seeing her treated as if she were a rabid dog.
Some cops had their guns out, pointing them at the crowd, warning people not to get close. Other cops beat my aunt with their nightsticks while they dragged her along.
My cousin Dewey was in the crowd, sobbing. He told me that his brother, Wade, pushed Bert Novis through a plate-glass window in the building next to their house. Novis was trying to arrest him and Wade ran upstairs to a friend’s apartment on the fourth floor with the cops in pursuit.
Wade jumped out the window – landing hard – but he didn’t break any bones and limped away. Then the cops went to my aunt’s house in the Projects, where they broke down the door and began tearing the place apart.
Babes’ husband, my uncle Frankie, was a postman who organized a baseball league to help get kids off the street. He assumed he could reason with the cops. He assumed wrong. They beat him unconscious in his doorway.
Babes, who was loud at the quietest of times and tougher than Frankie at all times, came running to his aid. They beat her down as well. Now they were dragging her off and I could see uncle Frankie in the back seat of a cruiser with his cuffed hands around his head.
I ran home to tell my father, but the news travelled faster than I did. I found my father pushing little bullets into a pearl-handled .22 pistol, the one I’d used the night I shot over the head of the plainclothes officer when I was fourteen.
“This is war, Ricky,” he told me. I breathed a sigh of satisfaction. War was what I wanted. Meanwhile, the crowd outside was growing and I knew some of them were carrying weapons. One of our white neighbours kept yelling: “Remember Kent State!”
Just then, a native guy who lived around the corner came walking down the street with two shotguns propped up on his shoulders. He was walking slowly, swaying a little.
“What side you folks on?” he asked.
My father said, “We’re on whatever side you’re on, friend.”
The big native nodded in agreement and kept on walking to the corner of Denison Avenue and Dundas, where two passing cop cars skidded to a halt. They swarmed him, disarmed him and hauled him away.
The crowd did not want to quit and I eagerly joined them. It grew larger as the sun went down and their hatred for the police grew, fuelled in some cases by alcohol. When a streetcar came barrelling along the tracks, someone threw a rock and soon a crowd of people were throwing a hailstorm of stones at the streetcar. The riders inside hit the floor and cries of terror flooded through the open windows.
A radio station put out a bulletin warning people that Dundas Street between Bathurst and Spadina was closed because a streetcar had left the tracks.
That was right but it wasn’t the whole story. There was no mention in the bulletin of the cops running wild, no mention of any racial trouble and no mention of a hundred or more angry people – black and white – screaming for revenge.
Is that not racism? Black lives didn’t matter then.
I noticed my parole officer, Lou Taylor, walking around, talking to some of the guys he had on his caseload and trying to be an instrument of peace. He stopped to talk to me, unaware that I had a .38 Smith & Wesson tucked under my coat and a knife hidden in my boot. He warned me that I had a curfew and couldn’t stay out all night.
When the police formed a protective line, I took off down a laneway and stopped by a musty old garage. I snapped the lock with the blade of my knife, climbed a ladder and went inside to retrieve a canvas bag from behind some loose boards. In the laneway, I pulled out what I’d been looking for – an 8mm German sniper rifle with a scope.
I’d bought it a few months earlier using a stolen ID and hid it for a moment just like this. I knew those laneways cold. I was safe as long as I kept my head down.
I headed for a row of stores and houses on Kensington, climbing fences and leaping along rooftops until I was leaning over the edge of a brick wall, looking down on the crowd and the cops, about 200 yards away. I pulled back the bolt, chambered a shell and flicked off the safety, pressing my cheek against the stock and peering through the scope. Suddenly, it was as if everyone was only inches away. I scanned the crowd, looking for that special someone, knowing that if I did pull the trigger I could get off the roof and across Spadina Avenue before anyone knew what had happened.
Out of nowhere, I heard the roar of the motorcycles. Some thirty black bikers wearing patches from Buffalo, New York, rode up two-by-two, led by my uncle Glen. The crowd cheered and the cops began looking nervous.
Soon, a familiar brown car drove rounded the corner on Dundas not far from the public school. I pulled the rifle tight against my shoulder to steady it, breathing slowly and rhythmically. Four detectives got out of the car. I had what I wanted: Bert Novis, at my mercy.
Novis scanned the crowd and the nearby rooftops, knowing that we often climbed up high to throw bricks and rocks down at them. He didn’t look in my direction. He wouldn’t have seen me anyway.
But I could see him perfectly.
I adjusted the scope and lined up his big pink face in my sights. I had all the excuse I needed – the cops had beaten my aunt. As I cupped the trigger with my finger, my father, along with Bob Ellis from St. Christopher House and a couple of community leaders, stepped forward and began to talk to the detectives. Damn.
There was my father shaking hands with Bert Novis. Shit. Another cop car pulled up. Novis opened the door and out stepped Babes and Frankie, looking around nervously. Shit again.
My father and Bob Ellis had negotiated the release of my aunt and uncle, saving the city of Toronto from a bloody wake-up call. Unwittingly, my father had also saved Bert Novis’s life.
I tucked my handgun inside a small chimney and slid off the roof with the rifle. A quirk of the law at the time meant that if I’d been stopped, frisked and found with a handgun, I’d have been sent straight back to the juvie slammer. The rifle? No problem, as long as I could prove I was sixteen.
I wasn’t going to take a chance, so I put it back in its hiding place. The neighbourhood was quiet afterward; the way a house is when there’s been a blow-up between a husband and wife.
But not all the tension was gone.
A few days after the near-bloodshed, my friend Demetro strolled into the Projects to check out his old crew. I hadn’t seen him since our time together at the Bowmanville School for Boys. Always the bully, Everett took offence.
“We don’t want any honkies not from around here, hanging around here, not any more. There’s too much shit going down, too many people talking to the cops, too many of us niggers going down.”
He drew his knife and challenged Demetro to a fight, then and there. The big Ukrainian wasn’t afraid but he didn’t know how the rest of us would react if he stood up for himself. He looked at me to see if I would back him up.
I said nothing. If we really were on the verge of a race war, I wanted to keep my position clear. So I lost an old friend, Demetro, as a result of the hatred felt by a new friend, Everett.
That’s life in a gang.