One day, without any warning, an officer took me out of my cell. He didn’t tell me anything; he just led me down the hallway and out the door. For a second, coming out into the sunshine, I thought my daddy had come through for me, but the officer put me in handcuffs and turned me over to a man who wasn’t wearing a uniform. The man looked at a document he had and asked, “Are you Brown, J.?”
“Yessir,” I said.
“You’re being transferred to Georgia Juvenile Training Institute at Rome.”
He led me to a half-ton van and put me in the back of it with five or six other fellas already inside. There were two benches running along each side and no windows. This was sometime around the last of June or the first of July, and it was real hot back there, like an oven. It got hotter the longer we sat there.
After a while the van pulled away, and we rode for a long time. The whole trip must have taken about ten or twelve hours. It was already dark by the time we got to Rome, but I could see we were in a compound with a whole lot of buildings. The place had been a WAC camp before. When the federal government abandoned it, the state of Georgia bought it and converted part of it into a tuberculosis hospital, Battey State, and part into a prison for juvenile offenders, GJTI.
They took us to a holding area where they cleaned us up, deloused the ones who needed it, fingerprinted us, and issued us uniforms. The uniforms were dark gray with blue pinstripes, and the shoes were high-tops, sort of like boots. After we were done at the holding area, they took us to the old army barracks where they housed us. There were two in front of the place, where the white boys stayed, and one in the back for the black kids. The barracks were surrounded by twelve-foot-high chain-link fences with barbed wire around the top.
Nobody ever really told me what to expect. I just fell in with the routine: out of bed at 6:00 A.M. and breakfast at 6:30 in a building that they’d made into a dining hall. The whites sat on one side, the black kids on the other. At 7:00 we went to work. We maintained the hospital grounds and worked in the kitchen, the laundry, and places like that. It’s a wonder we never caught TB in there—we had to have strong systems. Along with some hired labor, we helped build houses on the grounds for some of the doctors, too. Sometimes we worked on a farm about fifteen miles away. We ate lunch at noon, went back to work at 1:00, quit at 4:30, and ate supper at 5:00. After supper, if it was light, we played baseball or football. At night in the barracks we listened to the radio or played dominoes. A lot of times we used the dominoes like a deck of cards and played all kinds of poker that way. We shot dice, too, and I hadn’t lost my touch.
Most of the boys were serving time for burglary, robbery, breaking and entering, and things like that. A few had killed somebody, but it was always another black person. See, if you were black and killed another black person, the state didn’t punish you too seriously back then because they held black life cheap. They just put you away for a few years, same as they would if you’d stolen something from a white person. A separate system of justice existed for the black offender.
There were some rough cats in there, but some nice cats, too. Not too long after I got there a boy named Johnny Terry came in. I don’t remember what he’d done, but I don’t think it was much more than what I did. He later became one of the Famous Flames with me and was very free-hearted; he shared everything he had. He had a radio that he let me play whenever I wanted to, and I always wanted to because I was always trying to find a station that played the kind of music I knew. Rome didn’t have but one radio station then, and it didn’t play much music of any kind. One night when I found a station that played rhythm and blues, I got so excited I dropped the radio. Oh, man, it must’ve broken into a hundred pieces. I felt terrible because I knew what the radio meant to Johnny, and it wasn’t like he could go out and buy another one anytime he wanted to. I found some tape and some wire and put it back together as best I could. It looked pitiful, but it still worked.
“I’m sorry, Johnny, I busted your radio,” I said and handed it back to him.
“That’s all right,” he said. He just took it and laid it aside. Never even got mad. All the time I was in prison, Johnny was like that. We got to be close friends right away.
When the guards weren’t around, the big, dangerous guys tried to run everything, just like in any prison, but they didn’t run me because I knew how to use my fists. I was fast—couldn’t nobody get to me—plus I was left-handed, which gave me an advantage because most of ’em just weren’t ready for a left-hander. I was still a small kid, so I got put to the test by the bullies right away, and I identified with the other small kids and always took up for them.
For a short time, we had organized boxing, which gave me an opportunity to show the bullies without getting into trouble that they better not mess with me. Carl Noles, an old boxer who lived near Rome, came out and ran the boxing program. It didn’t last too long, though, because couldn’t nobody who got whipped forget about it after the matches were over. They’d be nursing a grudge against whoever beat ’em in the ring, looking for a chance to get even. One night it all broke out in the dormitory, and we wound up in a great big brawl. I mean we tore up the place. That was the end of the boxing.
GJTI was more like a school than a tough prison. The black kids were still segregated and were treated more like convicts than the white kids, but the place wasn’t near as bad as being in the Richmond County Jail. The security wasn’t too tight, and a lot of things were done on the honor system. The catch was that if you messed up too often they sent you to a place that was much worse.
I wanted to serve the minimum time I could and get released, but I saw pretty quick that it wasn’t going to be easy. No matter how a place like that is run there’s always two forces at work—one trying to help you and the other trying to hurt you. What makes it complicated is that both forces include guards and inmates. Some guards and inmates were really good influences, and some were really bad. One force tried to help me grow up and the other tried to turn me into a hardened criminal. A bad guard can do that just by mistreating you all the time. If you lose your cool, you wind up in the penitentiary. Prison is at best a balancing act.
Some guards did a lot of things to me, like they do in any prison. Mostly, they tried to play with my integrity because I was very intelligent. They gave me humiliating jobs or tried to provoke me into getting mad so I’d get in trouble. It’s the kind of thing goes on in prisons right today, everywhere. One guard named Wallace, who had one eye, always watched me, following me with that one eye. It was spooky.
One time a guard who didn’t like me wouldn’t let me play football. He was hoping I’d get mad and try to run away so they could send me to a much rougher prison. Some of the other boys told me the best route to take if I ran away. It was like it was all set up for me to run. I wouldn’t do it.
Another time a guard named Boatwright put his hands up like a boxer and talked about how nobody could get a punch through. Some of the fellas were sitting around in the barracks when he went on and on about how good his defense was. “You couldn’t get in there, I don’t care what you do,” he said.
I sat and listened to him talk for a long time until eventually I said, “Captain Boat”—we called all the guards Captain—“I can get in there.”
“Naw, you can’t,” he said.
“Yessir, I sure can,” I said, “but if I do, you’re going to put me in the hole.” The hole was solitary confinement, where they put you on bread and water for several days when you did something serious. Hitting a guard was very serious.
He said, “Naw, I won’t put you in the hole. Forget I’m a guard and see can you get in there.”
“You promise you won’t put me in the hole, Captain Boat?”
“I swear. Now come on.”
He danced around a little bit and shuffled his fists. I guess he thought because he weighed about 200 pounds and I was about 135 he could whup me real bad, and that was probably what he wanted to do. I stood up, went into my left-handed stance, leading with my right and circling to the right. He wasn’t ready for that. Before he knew it I hit him about twenty licks and beat him up pretty good without knocking him down. When I stopped throwing punches, he turned and walked out of there fast.
He kept his promise; he didn’t put me in the hole. But after a while I started wishing I had gone to the hole. From then on he caused me a lot of problems, being real hateful because he just couldn’t live with the fact that I beat him up. He always gave me the hardest jobs and tried to irritate me while I was doing them by yelling at me the whole time. I let it go; his pride was hurt, and I knew that a man whose pride is hurt is dangerous.
The assistant warden was very mean to me, too. He would probably say he was just being a strict disciplinarian, though. One day he said I was supposed to put my stool in a jar for a stool test. I did it and went back to his office carrying it at my side. I guess he couldn’t see it because he said, “I thought I told you to get a stool sample.”
“I got it,” I said. “I brought it back in the jar like you told me.”
“Where is it?”
I set it on his desk. He liked to had a fit.
“Don’t you set your shit on my desk!” he yelled.
He grabbed me and threw me against the wall, but he didn’t beat me because I wouldn’t have taken it. I was different from the other people. None of the bad guards ever really beat me because they saw something in my eye that said I wasn’t going to accept it—from any man.
There were a lot of good guards in there, men who tried to help me. A guard named Mr. Avery showed me how to do jobs right and taught me things. I even played basketball with his boy. For a long time after I got out I went to see him at Christmas. The warden, Walter Matthews, treated me like a son. Really, he’s the person who raised me. Didn’t nobody do it when I was at home, that’s for sure.
Mr. Matthews got mad at me only once the whole time I was in prison. I don’t even remember what for, but I think it was one of those times like when you get really mad at your child because you love him so much. We were standing in his office and he was trying to tell me something, but I wouldn’t listen so he slapped me. Didn’t hit me. Slapped me. And almost cried after he did it. I guess he slapped me to see if I would hit him back. I would have hit him back if he hadn’t been a good man, but I would never have hit Mr. Matthews because he was in my corner. It would have been like hitting my father. Anyway, right after he slapped me, he hugged me. He was a good man, and after I got out I visited him many times, too, right up until his death.
In another part of the prison they had a few girl inmates. Most of them were real dangerous because almost all of them were in there for killing somebody. I didn’t care. They were women, and I wanted to impress ’em. Sometimes we worked with them around the hospital, and I always tried to look sharp, which was one reason I didn’t like the baggy pants they gave us in the kitchen. But a lot of it went back to not having decent clothes as a kid. Really, it was wanting better clothes that got me into prison in the first place. I’d do anything to look better. The gray pants that we wore were all right—we called ’em coyotes—but unless they were new they wouldn’t hold a crease. Whenever I worked in the laundry I pulled out new pants and put my number, 33, on ’em and took the number off the pants I had on and exchanged ’em. I got all the new pants that way for a long time, then one day they caught me and gave me an old baggy pair and put me out on the farm.
Man, I couldn’t stand being seen in those things, so I soaked ’em with starch and hung ’em upside the wall until they dried stiff as a board. Then I took a hot iron and steam-pressed ’em. Made ’em shine and hold a crease. Then I cut the tops off my high top shoes and made ’em look like slip-ons. When the guards saw that, they got mad and said they wouldn’t give me any more shoes. So Johnny Terry, who was working on the trash truck, brought me some saddle oxfords. I cleaned ’em up and had somebody half-sole ’em and put big strings in ’em. The next day I was with the farm detail formed up at the gate. The guard said, “Brown, J. Step out.” He made me stand in front of the other cats while he said “Look here. See how he refuses to be like the rest of y’all. Look how clean he is.” I looked like a politician going to work. Nobody could keep me down.
There was one girl in particular I wanted to look sharp for. Her name was Eva. We looked at each other all the time, but I couldn’t figure out how to get together with her. One guard who was always real good to me could tell I had my eye on her. One day he said to me, “James, you kinda like that little ole gal, don’t you?”
“What gal is that, Captain?” I asked.
“Come on, now. You know who I mean—Geneva.” That was her real name. I just smiled, waiting to see what he was driving at. “Well, there’s a big linen closet near the laundry,” he said. “It’s right roomy in there. If nobody was looking, two people could get real comfortable in there.”
That guard liked me and he liked her, and he was just helping us, the way some people will, just being human. He was another good man. He didn’t have to say any more. The next time Eva and I worked in the laundry, as soon as that guard nodded that the coast was clear, we took off for that closet. It was roomy in there, and there were all those linens to make a nice bed out of. It wasn’t the honeymoon suite, but I don’t think anybody in a honeymoon suite ever enjoyed themselves more than Eva and I did that day.