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first night, everyone was giving me this look: “I’m dangerous. Don’t fuck with me.” So I went,
“Shit, these people are hardened criminals. I shouldn’t be here, because I am not a criminal.”
Then the next day everything turned over quickly. One by one, guys left to go to their
hearings, I stayed to wait for my lawyer, and new people started to pitch up. Now I was the
veteran, doing my colored-gangster routine, giving the new guys the same look: “I’m
dangerous. Don’t fuck with me.” And they looked at me and went, “Shit, he’s a hardened
criminal. I shouldn’t be here, because I am not like him.” And round and round we went.
At a certain point it occurred to me that every single person in that cell might be faking
it. We were all decent guys from nice neighborhoods and good families, picked up for unpaid
parking tickets and other infractions. We could have been having a great time sharing meals,
playing cards, and talking about women and soccer. But that didn’t happen, because everyone
had adopted this dangerous pose and nobody talked because everyone was afraid of who the
other guys were pretending to be. Now those guys were going to get out and go home to their
families and say, “Oh, honey, that was rough. Those were some real criminals in there. There
was this one colored guy. Man, he was a killer.”
Once I had the game sorted out, I was good again. I relaxed. I was back to thinking, I got
this. This is no big deal. The food was actually decent. For breakfast they brought you these
peanut butter sandwiches on thick slices of bread. Lunch was chicken and rice. The tea was
too hot, and it was more water than tea, but it was drinkable. There were older, hard-time
prisoners close to parole, and their detail was to come and clean the cells and circulate books
and magazines for you to read. It was quite relaxing.
There was one point when I remember eating a meal and saying to myself, This isn’t so
bad. I hang around with a bunch of dudes. There’s no chores. No bills to pay. No one
constantly nagging me and telling me what to do. Peanut butter sandwiches? Shit, I eat
peanut butter sandwiches all the time. This is pretty sweet. I could do this. I was so afraid of
the ass-whooping waiting for me at home that I genuinely considered going to prison. For a
brief moment I thought I had a plan. “I’ll go away for a couple of years, come back, and say I
was kidnapped, and mom will never know and she’ll just be happy to see me.”
—
On the third day, the cops brought in the largest man I’d ever seen. This guy was huge. Giant
muscles. Dark skin. Hardened face. He looked like he could kill all of us. Me and the other
prisoners who’d been acting tough with one another—the second he walked in our tough-guy
routines were over. Everyone was terrified. We all stared at him. “Oh, fuck…”
For whatever reason this guy was half naked when the cops picked him up. He was
wearing clothes the police had scrounged up for him at the station, this torn-up wifebeater
that was way too small, pants so short on him they looked like capris. He looked like a black
version of the Incredible Hulk.
This guy went and sat alone in the corner. Nobody said a word. Everyone watched and
waited, nervously, to see what he would do. Then one of the cops came back and called the
Hulk over; they needed information from him. The cop started asking him a bunch of
questions, but the guy kept shaking his head and saying he didn’t understand. The cop was
speaking Zulu. The Hulk was speaking Tsonga. Black person to black person, and neither