“My mind was racing with thoughts I couldn’t even grasp mentally. I went home and sat in the house with all the lights out, scared to move, didn’t know what to do nor to say. My mom was gone to a choir convention in Mississippi during the time of the incident. While I sat in our house quietly and somberly in the front room, my mother pulled up with no clue of what just happened. When she came in the door, turned to lock the door, I was sitting there in the dark room. I scared her out of her wits. As a mother who knew her child, she instantly asked me, ‘Boy, what’s wrong with you sitting in here with all the lights out?’ I was so discombobulated I honestly couldn’t speak, it seemed like somebody had my soul…”
It’s been twenty-six years for me now. I’m in solitary confinement and have been for almost six months. It’s the first long stretch I’ve done in lock-up, and I’ve learned if you aren’t mentally strong, it can break you. I’ve thought about everything from being three years old, to that day, to this place I am in now. I’ve probably aged ten years in the last six months, but I think I’ve made it. My blood pressure is crazy, but I think I’ve put it under control by relaxing and focusing on better things.
I was seventeen and still in high school when my mom came home that night. I’d just shot at some men. For months I’d been shot at, intimidated, ‘bullied’, by an adult. I’d sat in a car as it was beaten with a crow bar. I’d had a gun pointed at my head. My parents knew, the school knew, the police knew. They all knew. I can never take back what happened that night.
I now understand what they mean when people talk about the school to prison pipeline. Things are a little different now in Mobile, Alabama, where I came from. I hear there are anti-bullying laws in place to protect kids like I was. There are laws to keep kids from being followed around and shot at, as well there should be. No kid should ever have to grow old in a place like this. No kid should ever be expected to know how to make people stop shooting at them.
I went from going to high school, playing football and dreaming, to living in a nightmare. No, I can’t take it back. I should never have had to. It should have never gotten to that night in my living room.
ABOUT THE WRITER: Mr. Singleton’s story has been shared here, but this is the first time he has written for WITS. I hope he continues to write about his life in the Alabama Department of Corrections. Louis Singleton can be contacted at: Louis Singleton #179665 0-24 Fountain Correctional Facility 9677 Highway 21 North Atmore, AL 36503
I don’t remember my mother’s face. Not the warmth of her smile or her loving embrace. In fact, I don’t have one memory of her at all. Sherly Ann Lacey. In a drugged-out rage, my sister’s father took her life one night while she slept. Using a shotgun, he blew her brains onto a wall. She was due to have his second child any day.
Naturally the event devastated my, her, family. She was the first of my grandmother’s eleven children to be lost so early in life.
Many will believe it was my mom’s murder that first shaped my life, but that’s not true. It was people’s reaction to it that molded who I became, shaped the conclusions I would draw in life and how I’d react to pain, loss and various levels of devastation that serve as markers in every life.
Nature verses nurture? Nurture wins hands down every time. It’s people who shape people. Hard scrabble environments do not create hard hearts or ill-formed souls. People do.
Louise Lacey, my grandmother, herself a quiet, ‘nurtured’ woman, raised my sister and I. A beauty in her day, giving birth to eleven children by three different men, and being subject to my great-grandmother, who might well have been the basis for a character from Walter Mosely’s Los Angeles, my grandmother eased into a grand-motherly figure. Love.
By the time of my mother’s murder, my granny was an old hand with children. Panic after a miss-deed or the bright blood from an accident didn’t send her reeling. When her brother beat his wife, she’d complain about the noise – after a while…
Hers was the knowledge of survival. Coming of age in the 40’s and 50’s as a black woman was as hard as it was complex. You cried when you couldn’t hold it in any longer. Then you simply dusted yourself off and did the next thing needed to survive. Tough.
I’m surely being too simple, short, and impatient with the telling of her depth of spirit, her staunch faith in God and her unshakable commitment to her family. Like the moon, she’s a silent force that has affected every part of me.
If my granny’s footprint in life was quiet, it was only because my great grand-mother’s, Josie Frederick-Hintz, was so loud. At six foot in her socks, ‘Big Joe’ was a demanding, sharp-tongued, physical woman. She chewed tobacco, ran a whore house and carried a .38 revolver until the day she died – not for show or as a bluff.
Born in 1911 in Louisiana, Big Joe had owned a grocery store, bowling alley, brothel, after-hours gambling den and a total of five different rental properties throughout Los Angeles. She pinned her money in a silk pouch to her bra.
Josie gave birth to two children and raised her brother’s son after his murder. Systemic racism, sexism, abject poverty, rape, molestation, robbery, abuse, beatings, murder, jealous, insecure and ambitious men, their equally motivated, if shrewder, counter-parts in women – Josie not only survived it all in the big city as a veraciously stunning beauty, she was also able to, at times, win herself a few slices of pie.
But those pieces of ‘white only pie’ come at a cost. Josie’s size in life demanded control and that others, people she loved, be smaller in life to make room for the demands of who she needed to be – the boss!
Her biological son, my great-uncle Bill, Jr., was a con who became a homosexual after being violently raped in prison. He was serving time for counterfeiting U.S. Treasury notes, five dollar bills. Her brother’s son, Lemule, would become a vicious, small time pimp.
Large personalities, small egos, violent drama, they were characters you couldn’t make up. My grandfather was from a cattle ranch in Texas, a pimp and hustler who discharged from the army in California.
They were all largely uneducated people save by life itself. Like the rest of us, they had flaws. The one that has been a prominent force in my life was their silence. They seemed to need to marshal their energies to hold it all in and to move forward.
Through my self-education while in prison, I’ve become fairly articulate, but I remember the silence of a time before I became a reader, before I saw the value of language and communication, before I learned to read, comprehend and apply ideas to further my own understanding of me, my world, my actions. Silence.
I know how the lack of the ability to express one’s self in words pushes the thunder of action deep into one’s ears. You’re not deaf… there is no sound!
I came up in the 80’s, MTV, BET, videos, PC, crack victims, empires and hip-hop culture. My family’s silence was a foreign language subtitled on silent film.
Now listen! We all believe our own struggles to be the worst. It’s that forest through the trees thing. But by growing up never having a single meaningful conversation with the adults in my life, I kind of raised myself. I sat waiting for something or someone to influence me, but no one ever took notice.
We are all born into motion. That’s what life is – motion. A body in motion will stay in motion until it’s acted upon by an equal and opposite force. I crashed into Mr. Michael B. Huston.
Teenagers, kids, are like vacuum chambers that suck up everything indiscriminately. Facts, emotions, ideas, words, anything floating through their lives. Sadly, sometimes, the adults who rear them contribute the most trash to the bombardment when they are the primary force policing the intake. They may sit back, looking confused and even offended as the young life bursts for lack of any meaningful release. At around thirteen to fifteen or so, they act out, rebel at the mistreatment.
Now, I grew up on violence without ever being told it was wrong to do this or that to people. Not simply the violence put forth by the men of my family and neighborhood against the women of my home and in my world, but poverty creates its own hellish acceptance of might as a viable means, be it for respect or fear.
When my father, the Baptist preacher, found out I’d been doing robberies when I’d shot and paralyzed Mr. Huston – then an Assistant Attorney General to the State of Oregon – he expressed shock and hurt. “How could you do something so obviously wrong?!” I remember him blurting over the phone as I sat in a juvenile detention center.
The answer, though I didn’t know how to articulate it as a seventeen year old, was that I really didn’t know that it was all that big a deal, that people would place such a huge value on life.
That will sound twisted to some, but as a child it was extremely remedial to me. This may go a long way in explain the Black Lives Matter movement to some. I’d just tried to kill ‘myself’ a few months earlier. There was no panic, anger, or fear from the community. There was no rush to review the issue before various boards. As a child, I never received care or treatment for my mental health.
I’d ingested a small mountain of heart, blood pressure and pain pills. Then I got into bed. I remember passing out. Kids test the boundaries of their world. I didn’t believe I wanted to deal with any more pain in my life, so as no one was ever looking, I sought to move on.
If my life, my ‘black life’ didn’t matter to the world, why would I come to the conclusion as a child that his white one did? Not that race was a factor for me or Mr. Huston at the time. The justice system made that point emphatically.
I was thoroughly and completely confused. As I sat in Court, it was like returning to Central Park, only to find it’s been moved! You know the address, turn the corner, and it’s not there! But how could you, I, be that wrong?
“How could I do something so obviously wrong – ‘toanother’?” is the unspoken end to the question.
It’s a question of value(s). Poor, uneducated black boys and girls are taught in a plethora of ways that they have little to no value. So why does it come as such a shock when their value of others falls short in word or deed?
The best lies ever told take place in the vacuum of the mind, there’s no one other to refute, challenge, or evaluate them. So, speak the thought, the feeling, and force the conversation out into the ‘now’. It’s the thing that gives value to human beings… love spoken into a life that is loved – valued, even.
ABOUT THE WRITER. Mr. Jones has an honest and thought provoking style of writing that is exciting to work with. I look forward to hearing more of his insight as well as more of his life’s experiences. Mr. Jones has served 32 years for a crime he committed when he was seventeen years old. He can be contacted at:
DeLaine Jones #7623482 777 Stanton Blvd. Ontario, OR 97914
We shared this book with one of our writers recently and he found it very helpful. In the month of December, 2020, we will be choosing a random WITS writer to recieve a copy. So – just send in an essay or poem that gets posted before December is over, and you could be randomly chosen. Let us know how you like it! We might give it away again.
Please share with your writer friends. Submission is considered permission to edit and post.
As a Boy Scout grasping the basics of wilderness survival and hiking through buzzing, mosquito-infested forests while life as I knew it faded behind, I first had to grapple with transience and the pain and fear interwoven with impermanence. Everything I carried served a practical function, and after being rolled up, tucked, folded, stacked and packed, it altogether occupied six cubic feet, or so my canvas rucksack advertised.
An object’s value was the sum of its utility minus its volume and mass, measured in cubic inches and ounces. The less I had, the freer I felt. My sense of liberty kindled when I was limited to basic necessities, my creativity sparked to life by the demands of simple survival. One of my handiest items was twine, a fat spool of the sturdy kind for starting fires, building snares, catching fish, dangling food from a tree branch, wrapping tourniquets, and generally for binding. Many things find a higher purpose when bound.
Now I camp in a cell with the square footage of a tent. According to prison policy, I should be able to fold tuck, roll, stack and pack all my belongings into three boxy, flimsy, white plastic shopping bags about the size of brown paper grocery bags, all amounting to a total of six cubic feet.
Books qualify as personal property, no more than ten. It takes ten books to adequately study my faith, but it also takes ten law books to adequately work on my legal appeals and get my body off death row. That’s 2.5 cubic feet of mental and spiritual acuity for me.
I own one cubic foot of hygiene items, luxuries to prevent odors, rashes and to preserve dignity, to soothe my itchy need to feel neat and clean. Two more cubic feet are crammed with my creativity – paper, pens, poetry, essays, drawings, notebooks full of ideas.
That leaves half a cubic foot for commissary food and sentimentality. I own a large brown envelope packed with tattered pages scrawled on by my dad before he died and crappy-but-cute kindergarten drawings by my nieces who swear I’m the world’s best uncle even though I was already here when they were born. I also have a two-inch stack of photos of my brothers and me when we were little boys, of our parents prior to their divorce, of people I’ve never met and places I’ve never been but that are important to my friends or family and therefore important to me.
That’s how I fill and maintain my six feet of cubic space, carved from a hard place. Technically, then, my commissary food is actually considered contraband and could be confiscated. To keep anything new is to discard something old.
I keep my life packed up in bags that tear easily, which is fine by me. In the end my real treasures – my faith, my memory, my love and my creativity – they all inhabit the infinite space inside my soul, incorruptible, ethereal, eternal… and free to bloom.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. George Wilkerson lives on Death Row. He is a talented writer and occasional contributor to WITS. Mr. Wilkerson is also a co-author of Crimson Letters, an eye-opening book released in 2020, sharing the voices of those living on North Carolina’s Death Row.
Mr. Wilkerson can be contacted at: George T. Wilkerson #0900281 4285 Mail Service Center Raleigh, NC 27699-4285
