THE BUS RIDE THAT AUGUST DAY IN 1992, TO Apalachee Correctional Institution West, was the longest of my life. With Hurricane Andrew soon approaching, prison officials wanted to get us processed as soon as possible. It gave me hours to reflect on where I had been, but I had no clue where I was going. I was sure I’d be just another sorry brother forever locked in the chain gang. The prison was in Sneads.
This wasteland of a town had a population of about one thousand. The prison was the town’s main attraction of sorts. Prisons usually generate the most revenue for the town the prison is located in. Sneads sat twenty-five miles from the Alabama border. I was officially in the Deep South. The horror stories of the racial tensions in those towns where Alabama meets Florida are well documented. I would have to get used to being called a nigger by redneck COs. Some donned tattoos of black babies hung by nooses.
The living quarters were similar to those of the Tenth Floor; we were packed in one large room with bunk beds scattered throughout. At Apalachee the bloodshed was horrific. Inmates simply walked up to foes and shanked them.
I didn’t carry many weapons during my last bid. It wasn’t necessary. In here I had to adapt. Inmates got creative with the tools they made to cut rivals. We carved toothbrushes into shanks, others were molded from melted plastic. Fights usually went down in the yard. One inmate would just run up behind another one and cut him. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to see an inmate running across the yard with blood streaking down his neck. At night the screams kept me awake. I’d wake up to an inmate lying on the floor, coughing up his life. The place was a nightmare.
But once again God sent me a guide. I hadn’t listened to Booner and Junior when they tried. Fudge did his best. It seemed the only person that could reach me at this point was someone I thought was more street-certified. It had to be somebody who I thought I couldn’t beat down, someone I respected.
His name was Papa Stick. He was seventy-eight years old, the oldest in Apalachee and the oldest inmate I’ve ever met. When I first got to Apalachee, I was upset that they put me in the cot next to his. I didn’t want to spend my time next to a guy that could have been my grandfather. At night, Stick mumbled some mumbo jumbo while he read one of the hundred books he always kept. I wanted to holler at him to shut his trap, but something told me otherwise.
Although he hobbled around the prison, no one disrespected Stick. During lunch, inmates served him extra food. He was given extended library visits. Most of us at Apalachee could have been his grandsons. Oddly enough, Stick was in prison for killing a twelve-year-old boy. I didn’t know the particulars of the case, but I knew he wished he could take it back. He was an old-timer from Tampa. I noticed something else about Stick. I was the only inmate he conversed with. Well, not exactly conversed.
“An eagle lost among crows gets stuck in the cornfields,” he would tell me. Stick spoke in riddles. It was up to you to figure out the point he was making. “I can’t be bothered with these jitterbugs. If you like being stuck in a dog’s butt hole, go run with the fleas, just don’t bring the itching round me.”
At night, our conversations took my mind off the inmate across the room getting stabbed to death. Battles from the yard carried over far into the wee hours of the morning. The lower bunk left one vulnerable, but my stay on the Tenth Floor had me prepared. Inmates waited for rivals to go to sleep, then swooped in with a vengeance. I half slept most nights with my shank tucked underneath me.
Stick always shook his head at the mayhem. No one crossed him though.
“The inmates all respect you,” I told him.
“They respect you too,” he replied.
I began to see what he was trying to tell me. I was different from the other inmates. I could read and write really well. He lent me a lot of his books to read. I was pretty good at math also. Stick saw the light in me when I didn’t. Prison time forces a man to read between the lines. Other inmates studied me hard. No one understands human nature more than a convicted felon; not even a Harvard degree educates more about the inner workings of the human mind than prison halls.
Patience is a virtue learned in prison. In most cases one’s sanity and life depend on it. In the game of life, most times success depends on it. In the boardroom, a rash decision can cost big money. In prison it can cost your life.
When every minute of every day is spent trying to survive in a pound filled with condemned men, one learns to observe their habits. I learned what made other inmates tick. I listened more than I talked. I couldn’t survive my prison sentence without patience. Patience was my best friend. She was better to me than any lover could have been. I finally cracked Stick’s riddles. He had the rest of his life to mull over the past. He was going to die in prison. He tried to show me that my life was far from over. All I had to do was keep my head low and, like the cliché goes, “do the time and don’t let the time do me.” I could either live day by day and inch toward my freedom or race through in a rage-fueled, blood-soaked mania. I chose the latter.
“I didn’t know jitterbugs could read,” Stick would tell me. “Well, those crackers could always use another coon.”
Stick’s words hit me in the chest even if they were veiled in codes. Straight talk would only have put an already wounded young man on the defensive. If I was so special, why did God leave me stuck in here?
Oh, well. I began running with the crew from Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. We fought the inmates from Tampa and St. Petersburg. Although we were all from Florida, we divided ourselves along geographic lines and were determined to gut each other before our bids were up. The feuding got so bad that on one occasion we started a full-scale riot. Guards blamed me and a couple others for starting it and sent me to the box.
After my time in the box was up, the folks at Apalachee cut me loose. They labeled me a danger to the facility and had me transferred. I didn’t mind because my days were filled with misery at that place. I boarded the bus for Okaloosa Correctional Institution in Crestview. Wars carried over from prison to prison, so some inmates in there were waiting to cut me up for stabbing their friends at Apalachee. At Okaloosa the guards seemed more preoccupied with causing trouble than the inmates themselves.
The night I got there I was lined up with the other transfers, shackled from head to toe, getting ready to be transported to my cell. I guess we looked like a bunch of Sambos because that’s what the guards started chanting as we walked to our cells. They taunted us for more than five minutes before the other inmates started banging their cell doors. The place erupted. Inmates threw toilet paper and overturned their mattresses. The guards were outnumbered. We took over the prison. The alarms went off. Then the riot squad rushed in and pepper-sprayed us all. Some inmates got tasered. Lockdown.
I was once again blamed for the melee and processed for transfer. I soon boarded a bus headed to Baker in Sanderson. My reputation throughout the state’s penitentiary system grew with every fight. Word on the cellblocks was that the inmate Trick had a screw loose. I didn’t take any particular value in the disposition. It just seemed like my whole life someone had to try me. I could be in the park and the damn resident wino would even test me. It’s like I had a sign on my my forehead that screamed DRAMA, I’M OVER HERE!
I found myself spending most of my time at Baker in the box. One night the brilliant powers that be decided to put an emergency transfer in there with me. I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but the guards put my life at risk. Emergency transfers are inmates who are deemed mentally unstable and unfit to be with other prisoners. In other words, they’re insane. They have to be evaluated before being placed into the general population.
This inmate was cuckoo. He didn’t realize he was in prison or believe he should be in prison. I woke in the wee hours of the morning with this nut case staring down on me.
“Who you, nigga?” he asked.
This was just my luck. I was locked away with a lunatic. I didn’t think it was possible to have bad luck in prison. It’s where I ended up because I was at the bottom of my luck already.
“You’re from Miami, huh?”
Oh, boy. I knew what that meant. Hustlers from Miami had a reputation for making a lot of money. Miami dope boys had the cars and women; the combination birthed envy. It made us targets. The yelling ensued:
“I can’t stand you Miami motherfuckers! Y’all think y’all run shit! I’ll show you who run shit, motherfucker!”
He punched me square in the jaw. We began fighting. I thought the guards would let us maul each other to death down there, but they came running down the hall. They knew they could get into deep trouble because there had been recent outcries in the media about poor treatment of mentally ill inmates at Florida prisons. This is one time I was grateful for those academic types that visited the prisons.
When the guards finally had him handcuffed, I began whaling on him. There’s no such thing as a fair fight. Don’t believe the hype. In the melee I busted my head wide-open on the toilet and was sent to the infirmary. As a consolation prize for their mistake, prison officials let me choose the prison I wanted to be transferred to after my confinement. I chose Desoto.