My Grandma Bea – short for Beaulah – taught us how to fish.  She’d kick back in an armed beach chair with a big floppy hat and appear to be asleep.  Every so often she’d give the line a tug.  When asked why she’d come all the way out to the lake to take a nap, she’d respond, “The wind causes ripples on the lake that distort how you see the fish, and how the fish see you.  Only by closing your eyes can you see and be seen clearly enough to catch their attention.  Everybody knows that!”

I’d been dreaming of the moment all my life – the day my Dad would show up to get me and my life, my world, would change.  Such dreams are made up of layer upon layer of desire, memory and imagination.  They make no pacts with reality.  Only plans have the power to connect the two.

My sister and I were playing a video game when Grandma Bea answered the knock at the door that afternoon with a shriek of joyful surprise, “Hey, boy!  Come on in here!”

“How are ya doing, Bea?  It’s been too long.”  

The man’s voice was unfamiliar.  The timber, the basso, the speech pattern were all new to my sister and me.  After he followed Bea into the living room, she announced in her boombastic fashion, “Boy, this is your daddy!”

Now let me pump my brakes here for a moment and cloud the water.  My sister and I had, for as long as I could remember, played the ‘I Wish Momma Was Alive’ game.  It’s a game played by all motherless children, but we only ever played it with each other.  It was our most sacred time, our most private pact, a connection all our own.

However, it was her father who had killed our mother and left us without.  Motherless.  So, when I’d express dreams of my dad coming back, it was to get us – not me.  The first thing of value I’d ever shared.  He took us both for ice cream and we all hung out on the beach.  It was cool!

Now, I’d never met my dad.  We’d traded pictures when I was about six or so, but that was it.  At twelve years old, I looked so much like him that family and friends who saw us together for the first time did a double take.  He couldn’t take his eyes off of me!  Looking back, it was obvious that I wasn’t the only one who had been dreaming.

What I didn’t know was that the emotion of such long awaited events can place blinders on the most experienced adults and blind children altogether.  Not just for a moment, but for years.   Ignorance has no shelf life, and while dreams are oft powerful, wonderful, magical things, I never thought they could be dangerous too.

My little sister, whom I‘d shared a bed with for half of my twelve years, must have seen and felt the way my dad looked at me and remembered the excuse we’d been told he’d used to leave me behind in Compton – it had been her.

My grandmother wasn’t going to allow her murdered daughter’s only childen to be raised apart at the time.  She also wasn’t going to deny a man who she had known his entire life the chance to raise his son. So, she told him that he had to take us both or he couldn’t have me. It was biblical and the excuse he needed to avoid an obligation he’d felt boxed into showing up for.  He ran from the house as if his hair was on fire!

The only reason he was here now, all these years later, was because he had fallen on hard times and had to move his three children and pregnant wife back into his mother’s three-bedroom with my aunt.  They were only 24 miles away.  But kids avoid the ‘whys’ of their rejection.  Such is the danger of dreams.  Distortions.  Ripples.

My sister must have seen how the love in his eyes excluded her from the dream, the promise I’d made in the dark, sealed with our tears and our motherless wants.  

The next week we went to visit my pregnant step-mom, my two younger brothers and my step-sister, who was about nine years old.  A ready made family.  While the adults were away on a shopping trip, I was left with all of my siblings.  My little sister locked my stepsister out of the house until she was in tears.  I scolded her for it.  I was embarrassed that she would do something like that on a visit.  

What made it worse was that, caught up in my own emotions, I never stopped to ask why she would do it.  She’d rarely ever been aggressive or mean.  But I missed it!  And it’s possibly one of the biggest mistakes in a life full of mistakes.  I was angry and I must have been cruel and unloving, rejecting the sister I’d shared a life with for the sister I’d just met – not my intent at all.

The situation had so angered my grandma Bea that she threatened to beat me over it, but all I heard was her angry attack.  So I sought to defend what I never intended in the first place, eyes wide open, I thought my vision clear at the time.

Adults do not have it in them to not think about what comes next – that is the breath catching province of children.  Adults have experienced too many consequences for that ‘next’ to be ‘the’ factor.  Their minds have been trained, much like a dog with a newspaper is taught to sit, roll over, or to play dead.

But at twelve years old, adults would yell, and I would just shut down and defend.  I didn’t know how to think my way through being wrong.  It’s vital because the best lies ever told happen in the vacuum of your mind, simply because there’s no one there to call ‘Bullshit!’  

I went to live with my father and didn’t see my sister again for more than 18 months, the longest we had ever been apart in our young lives.  We’ve never spoken of that day, that time, the things that I said and did, or the rift between us that has been growing for more than 37 years.  I  never told her how sorry I am, for all of it was my fault.  That sorrow eats away at my bones, one of the worst things I’ve ever done.

I haven’t spoken to my mother’s only other child in more than 22 years.  Still waters run deep.  Doing ninety years in prison, I get reports on the activities of her life from family even as my life stands still.  The irony of that balance is not lost on me.

I recently met her son as he came through the system, a man that I didn’t know who had only heard rumors of an uncle he never thought was real.  She still doesn’t accept my call.  Family has ever been like eating spaghetti with a spoon.  Doable, but only if you are very hungry.  Love and efforts simply are not enough at times, yet they are the only bait worthy of fishing with.

So, I’ll cast again, for life, until my arm gives out.  Then I’ll switch hands.  What I won’t do is act as if the reflections cast by the ripples on the surface of the water are real.  The pain of our casting, in reality, causes a splash and sinks much deeper than we know.  It’s the ripples of our dreams that distort our vision.  So, I’ve been resting my eyes when I fish and hoping that my little sister remembers to do the same.  Who knows, maybe then we can see each other again, or at least more clearly.  But fishin’ ain’t catchin’.

---

Mr. Jones has served over three decades for a crime he committed when he was seventeen years old, a juvenile. He can be contacted at:

DeLaine Jones #7623482
Snake River Correctional Institution
777 Stanton Blvd 
Ontario, Oregon 97914-8335

People are surprisingly hard to kill despite how fragile we are as human beings, and the fact that I was unfortunate enough to do so at the age of thirteen was horribly stunning.  There were no bullets or knives.  No bombs, or weapons employed of any kind.  However, his blood is on my hands.  The shame and the fault are mine.  I’ll take them to my grave.    

Willie Lee Lacey was a man who’d worn many hats in his short sixty-six years of life, lived many lives.  At six years old he became a cattle rancher when his father told him to bring him a calf.  It took little Willie all day, but with his brothers watching, he got it done – without a rope.  He was a soldier in the U.S. Army in WWII, and fought overseas.  “Not much different from living in the south as a black man,” he used to say.  “Once you’ve seen your brother burned and hung as people from miles around party under his body, it’s all the same.”  “Don’t ever volunteer!”

He was the father of six children who loved him, all by one woman who he abused.  Not all of the hats he wore were pretty.  He came home one day to find everyone and everything gone.  A house, where once a home had stood.  They never came back despite his efforts.

A part time Mr. Fix It and pimp, he once, as word had it, pulled a wooden plank from a six foot fence to beat a whore called ‘Classy May’.  Brutal, tough and loved, Willie was also my grandpa.

He carried a huge folding buck knife, smoked a collection of pipes and rarely ever spoke.  It was as if God had given him a sack full of words, and he was just about out of them.

His woman’s name was Beaulah Charle Moore, a five foot dynamo with all the sass and pop that the fates could fit into such a small space.  She cooked everything from scratch.  That was the Belzona, Mississippi, in her blood.  She drove as if her name was Jeff Gorden just three points out of the lead, and had a name for all nine of her wigs!  That woman could peel the bark from a man at twenty yards, just talking.

To see the rendering of people’s lives, their experiences, passions, defeats, their regrets, calls for a vision that I didn’t own as a thirteen year old.  I also didn’t know that when people love you, they give you a part of their souls.  I didn’t know what I had, to respect it, that I was standing on sacred ground.  I was a simple kid who wanted to be somewhere and someone other than where and who I was, only to find that when I got there and put on those clothes, that it was cheaper to just be me. But who the hell was that – I?  Foolish.

My grandparents lived 1½ blocks away from the beach in paradise – Pismo Beach, California – one of three black families within a thirty mile radius.  It was as far away from Watts, California, or Compton, California, in every way and as on many levels, as it could be, only find a military base and you’ll find a black community.  Close that base and we move on, like the Romany gypsies.  But grandpa had anchored himself with a job in the city’s parks and recreation department.  At sixty and with little education, it was far from ideal.  However, after twenty-five years of service, he was forced to retire at the age of sixty-three, a legend in the area.  

However deep the scars of life ran in the man, he seemed to have found a measure of peace, a way of shifting into a position that didn’t stress him to the point of snapping, with all but one of those searing brands – that being the murder of my mother, his daughter.  I imagine that he saw my sister and I coming to live with him as a second bite into the apple of her life.  A chance to rectify a measure of his pain, and close the wound by sacrificing for her children.  A connection denied to the two of them in her lifetime.  But hope blinds us to the fact that patches are but scars, and that new, only means that it’s new to us. 

A murder in a family freezes people in a photograph of their pain.  To toss away the photo and move on is to forget – to say that my love for you is too heavy.  I must lay it down here so that I can survive.  For some it’s doable, for other families… not so much.

I was just hitting my teens at the time, however, I had a full mustache like Carl Weathers, and I passed for much older if I didn’t smile.  Once, while with my step-mom, the clerk asked me if it would be cash or credit?!  I could buy beer, get into adult clubs – and adult trouble.  About that time I also found I could charm (lie) the panties off an adult woman.  Game over!  You couldn’t tell me anything!

I’d stay gone for weeks.  I hustled my way to an Interceptor 1100 motorcycle and could be found anywhere from the bay area to LA at thirteen years old.  Fearless?  No, too dumb to be afraid!

My G-pops would be out looking for me with tears in his heart, anger and confusion clouding his vision, embarrassed by my actions, yet trying.

I’d eventually slink home, and he’d put it on me something tough, trying to make me fear him more than I loved running the streets.  My batteries spent, drained, out of love and respect, I’d take it.  I had no other options, not in my mind at the time.

Okay – brass tacks, as they say.  Women and girls have sway in the hearts and minds of men and boys.  Facts!  It’s how grown men find themselves dressed as princesses in wigs and full make-up, voguing like they are a star on AMC’s ‘Pose’.  It’s how women find themselves giving their all to a man with zero ROI (return on investment).  I was no longer at the wheel, but rather being driven physically, mentally, emotionally and even spiritually.  Gone!

I came home that last time to find my grandpa had suffered a heart attack and a mild stroke.  Bea also told me that all of his children were in town, and had been riding around looking for me, that my bags were packed and in the trunk of their car, and that currently they were all at the hospital, simply waiting on my return to hit the highway.  My family was putting their foot down.  Hard!

I showed up in the hospital room and Willie was sitting up smiling and laughing with all of his children, save mom.  I hadn’t seen my aunts and uncles in years.  They’d come together for the first time since my mother’s death to defend their father.  But when they looked up and saw me, every face fell, my grandpa’s crumbling into tears as he pointed at me, stammering through his grief, “I tried to -”  

“Just go!” they all yelled repeatedly at me.  “You’re killing him DeLaine!  You’re killing him!”  

It was as if my mother had died all over again for him in that moment.  If she had ever touched your life, you would know you could find her in my eyes.  I’d ruined far more than a moment for them.  Oddly, I never saw myself as a cause of so much pain, and I had never felt more alone, guilty, or so much shame in my young life.  

Willie Lee Lacey would pass away eighty-three days later, asleep on the couch, at the age of sixty-six.  We would never speak again.  Every time someone spoke my name he’d cry.  I was never able to apologize, or heal his heart.

It’s crazy the things you learn about yourself after the use for the information has seemingly passed.  We all want and need to be loved, but to do so is to be trusted by another’s heart.  It’s not the love you give that breaks your heart, it’s what you do with the love that you take – are given.  It’s in that space that you make or break those you love, even unto yourself.

Now, I seek to invest in people through conversations that will last a lifetime, and I dedicate my pen to all of my mother’s people.  I do this hoping I can give something I never recognized in my life, so that they will know it when they see it – hope.  Give yourself a chance to win by not giving up now. 

 Always me… DeLaine Jones

Mr. Jones has served over three decades for a crime he committed when he was seventeen years old, a juvenile. He can be contacted at:

DeLaine Jones #7623482
Snake River Correctional Institution
777 Stanton Blvd 
Ontario, Oregon 97914-8335

Charles,

Hey, I’m not sure how much love you get through the mail, brah, so I thought I’d push some your way.  It’s free, so why on earth wouldn’t I give it away?  You only have to pay for it, if you refuse to pass it on.  Funny the truths that you’ll trip over in these little cages, right?

My name is DeLaine Jones, and I’ve been on lockdown for the last thirty-three years.  I’m also a writer for WITS.  I’ve been reading about you for awhile now, meaning to get at you, but only now making the time.  I’m not sure if you’ve read any of my work, but I’d like to write a piece to you.

I’m not looking to gain from the war you’re fighting to take your next breath.  But I don’t just look like this, I’m really black!  I speak, read, watch and write through these bars, into and about a struggle that I can’t physically take part in.  But even as I gasp and choke my way to hope…  I see you, brah!

Back in the dayz when we were in chains on the other side of these bars, we as black people used to speak to other black people whom we had never met.  Not simply as a courtesy, but from a genuine concern, a want to help someone who’s chains, pains and scars resembled our own.  I personally believe that if I can in any small way, shape, or fashion, help you be heard – it is the reason for my ‘hood card’.  As I started out, you’ve got to give it away to keep it coming in, brah. 

I’m serving ninety years for crimes I committed when I was seventeen years old.  Though I don’t have a date to die, I too know the value of hope, how being touched can alter the quality of the air you breath.  That at times it’s easier to let go rather than fight to hold on for another day. That at times, we need to be held on to.  Today, I’ve got ya, brah!

So, this is us passing on an old dirt road in the deep South…  “What’s up blood, you good?” – meaning, if you need me so you can hide for a awhile and rest till you are able to run again – I’ve got you.  I’ve got a scrap or two of food that’ll tide you over too!  “You good, cuzz-in?”

I’ve only ever written about my life and the people who’ve passed through it.  It’s crazy how I can hear their voices at times when I write.  Has that ever happened to you?  For me, it comes when people encourage me.  It’s then that I hear my granny say, “We are all that we’ve got.”   Only the encouragement comes from some place other than my blood.  So I expect the givers of those words to give up at some point, to wake up tomorrow and they too will have ‘passed through.’

No family, I’m not in the same part of the river, but I can see you being drowned from where I’m being held down.  Those words are needed, welcomed even, but as we both know this is way too much water for either of us to be tryin’ to drink!

People will try to rob you of your anger, telling you to be ‘be calm’.  But as a black man in the system, ‘be calm’ is code for ‘stop struggling so that I can kill you!’

Charles, I’m not sure if I’ve ever met an innocent man before.  But I do know that they hand out far too many of these sentences without revealing every bit of information that they can get their hands on, laying it out for all to see, rather than allowing the D.A. to decide what it suits his case to present.  Who knows a diamond’s worth until it’s seen?  Under magnification at that!

It’s the systemic contradictions and racist collusions that gall.  To be willing to seek a mans’ life as payment for a life – but to be negligent in that you don’t turn over every single stone in your quest, this in respect of the very priceless substance you claim to hold so dear. 

Life!

Charles, I call the collusion systemic and racist because its not an accident that you’re black nor how you’ve come to be on death row.  Your legal counsel never bothered to ask basic and obvious questions that would have lead to the truth.  How does anyone who’s passed the bar in this country allow testimony about a sexual assault without the challenge of a rape kit?  Evidence?  Examination?  Something!

Your counsel stood by and let that become part of what the jury heard and a fact, agreed to but not supported by evidence.  The D.A. knew it and your counsel had to know it.  But it gets better!

The medical examiner shows up without the physical evidence he gathered!  Doesn’t even mention it.  The D.A. shows up without the only physical evidence that can suggest that you didn’t, in fact, commit the crime.  The Judge allows it all to happen, and your counsel, none of the sworn officers of the Court, think that it is note-worthy?  Each of their perspectives center on the same physical evidence, which happens to have been collected in a rape kit, and none of them bother to produce the only existing physical evidence?  And we ‘the public’ are to simply ignore the obviously choreographed farce?!  Allow you to kill a man based on the above?!

A lone woman from Virginia went to Texas and found the rape kit twenty years later.  It was never lost. 

Charles, I have no idea at what temperature the naiveté of white people is burned away.  Many seem baffled as to why black men would be so desperate to escape the mere presence of police if they were not guilty – as if guilt justifies murder.

For some, it’s the walk on the sun that has fried the brain’s ability to believe what it’s seeing, a quick flicker of a thing that is banished in a single blink of the eye.  In that glint, they reach for justification that makes them okay with themselves and cools their soul.  They can then dismiss and pardon and excuse themselves.

In that flicker, they find themselves on an old dirt road in the deep South, passing a person who’s breathing hard from running.  They see the pain of the other’s soul reflected in eyes they quickly turn away from, denying them to be like their own.  They don’t offer the other a place to rest until they can run again, a scrap of food to tide them over.  “You good, bro?” only crosses their minds.

In that encounter they find themselves face to face with themselves. Their guilt isn’t about Jim Crow or slavery or things of the past, but what happened this morning.  The modern day lynching of a black man that took place in a courtroom in Texas.  But hold tight, brah!  Charles, be encouraged!  If you need me so you can hide for a awhile and rest till you are able to run again – I’ve got you.  I’ve got a scrap or two of food that’ll tide you over too!

As a WITS writer, he receives pieces from other WITS writers when possible. In that way he came to know Charles Mamou’s story, also a WITS writer. I can’t think of a better piece to post this holiday season. As always – I look forward to hearing from him again. Mr. Jones has served 32 years for a crime he committed when he was seventeen years old, a juvenile. He can be contacted at:

DeLaine Jones #7623482
82911 Beach Access Road
Umatilla, OR 97882

“We are all that we’ve got!  If I don’t do for you, who else will?  The world?  They wouldn’t piss down your throat if your guts were on fire!” 

Those were words my normally silent maternal grandmother lived by.    I’ve oft sat in my cell and wondered at the cruelty – the experiences – she must have endured.  What had been done to that sweet southern girl to bring such a harsh reality?  And had those deeds matriculated into the truths that colored my thoughts and actions, the reality of my life thus far?  If you are what you eat – how about what you’re fed?

My grandmother didn’t give birth to my uncles Benni and Squeaky (Victor and Richard, respectfully), but she raised, loved, fed, nursed, and fought for them, just as she did her own.  They slept in the same beds, bathed in the same tubs, were hugged by the same arms, but I imagine it was tough for them.  Their birth mom was a heroin addict who couldn’t care for them but for her addiction.  Their father was the father of five of my grandmother’s eleven children.

Now, my Uncle Benni was slightly ‘swish’ in his gayness.  He was called ‘Benni’ after the classic Sir Elton John song, Bennie and the Jets.  Growing up, he was more apt to be found with his sisters doing each other’s hair rather than running with his brothers.  It was braids, barrettes, and clothes verses bats, balls and the hustle of the streets with brothers who clowned, taunted, jeered, and refused to show love.

“We are all that we’ve got!”

I always loved my Unc.  Yeah, he was gay, a bad thing from the way it was thrown in his face, but I didn’t know what that was.  All I knew was that he loved us and paid attention to us.  I remember once seeing the flash of anger in his eyes upon realizing we hadn’t been anywhere since the last time we saw him – five and a half months earlier.

He grabbed a newspaper and in a flurry of ironing, braiding, and cocoa butter, we were off on some adventure – the movies, a radio sponsored jam session in a far away park, the carnival, the swap meet.  Hot lines, jojo fries, cold cream sodas!

I was still just a short stack when my lil’ sister and I heard the knock at the front door at 2 a.m. one night.  We were still young enough to share a bed.  Then we heard the familiar voice that had us out of that bed in a flash!  Looking in the window, my Uncle Benni told us to open the door.  Seeing him through the window, we didn’t bother to turn on the lights in our excitement, and when we opened the door, there was snow on the ground and the air was sharp.   My grandmother sharply asked who we’d let in her house at that hour, and Unc answered to keep us out of trouble.

“It’s just Benni, Mommy, I lost my key,” he slurred by way of explanation.

We didn’t care that he was drunk.  He often came home that way. Benni’s lifestyle saw him in a lot of bars and gay clubs.  He was a performer.  He used to dress up like Diana Ross and sing in shows.  Us kids had found photos in the single bag that he kept in an upstairs closet as if it were his refusal to give up on a people who didn’t really want him around – not the gay version.

So, he lived his life mostly apart from us.  We had no idea where or how he lived, other than the shows, no idea who his friends or loves were.  We just knew he could vogue and dance his ass off.

“If we don’t do for each other, who else will?”

My sister and I took him by the hands and guided him up the stairs in the dark, where he changed into his floral muumuu and climbed into our bed.  Just as he’d shown up without warning, Unc often left in the same fashion, so we always wanted to keep him close.  The rank alcohol smell was a price we’d pay, willingly just to keep the magic of him near.

But when the two of us climbed into bed next to his already sleeping form, it was wet!  Was he so drunk he’d peed the bed?!  Finally, we turned on the lights in the room and were greeted by the horror of blood!  There were pools of it where he’d stood and sat, hand prints on walls and dressers where he’d braced himself.  Blood pooled around his still body and made the thin gown stick to his slender frame.

We tried to wake him, but he was far beyond our childish ability to help or revive him.  We didn’t know what it was to be gay, or why it was bad, but we’d seen people die before.  Uncle Benni was dying.

“The world!?  The world don’t give a damn about you.  They wouldn’t piss down your throat if your guts were on fire!”

It seems that two guys accosted him outside of a gay bar with large knives, thinking that intoxication and queer equaled soft, easy money.  They call it ‘rolling fags’.  They were wrong.  Benni still had a bloody bottle opener in his pocket and a blood soaked wad of cash, two hundred and eighty some odd dollars.   You see, he’d promised my sister and I that he’d take us to the carnival on the waterfront and didn’t want to let us down.

He came home from the hospital with bandages everywhere and more than three hundred stitches.  My grandmother had his brothers place him on a couch she’d made up for him in the living room.  She walked him to the bath when he needed, changed his bandages, and took care of him like he was who he was – her child. 

My other uncles were proud of him, and I noticed that their jokes included him after that.  Things had changed.  The rest of the family could see that there was more – a lot more – than being gay to the loved one lying on the couch all cut up.  It’s a shame he had to be cut open that bad for them to see what was inside, how special he was to us.

Victor ‘Benni’ Deloney would pass away in his sleep from pneumonia in a room full of family and friends, none of which ever knew him.  I got this time and never got the chance to say good-bye.  I have no idea just where his spirit is today, but I promise that he’s putting on one hell of a show.

I also have no idea why we, with all our flaws, sins and contradictions, are so quick to place conditions and labels on those we set out to love, as though who someone else is constitutes an attack on us.  My glory and my sins are my own.

I don’t think my uncle Benni was looking for agreement when he would stay away for so long, alone in the world.  I remember the force of his smile on that couch.  He loved his family who loved him back, at least on that day.  No, I think he stayed away looking for clan, kin, la familia.  He tramped home on that cold winter’s night so he could die among his people because we were all he had.  I was happy we could all be there for him.  If not us, then who?   I just hope we were enough, that he knew he was more than that for my sister and me. 

Mr. Jones has served 32 years for a crime he committed when he was seventeen years old, a juvenile. He can be contacted at:

DeLaine Jones #7623482
82911 Beach Access Road
Umatilla, OR 97882

My grandmother had a stroke while sitting on the sofa reading the newspaper.  She had mis-read an article about the escape of my crime partner.  In the article, my name was used to explain our high profile case.  Thinking I had escaped too, she had a stroke.  In her mind and experience, black men in conflict with white authority meant my death/murder.   1 + 1 = 2.  Facts!  She never spoke again.

Most believe change is like travel, taking you just as long to return from that wrong spot in life as it took you to get there.  They’re wrong.  Change is delivered within the heart of an explosion!   There’s a BOOM! of action.  It’s how mothers lift cars off their children, how addicts stiff arm drugs and how people find themselves back in school after the age of forty in pursuit of a degree.   It’s a BOOM!, not a slow process.

I was eleven years old the first time I was chosen to play on the junior neighborhood basketball team. Twelve to fifteen lowriders of people from four or five different Blood gangs and Piru hoods would gather in this or that park.  It wasn’t just a tournament, it was part car show, part cookout, part fashion show.  People would show up in their bright ‘hood colors, sporting both new and old R.I.P. shirts and hats.  The girls and women wore cut off shorts, lip gloss shining, hair freshly pressed, permed, and curled, with edges laid down like a senator before a lobbyist.   Boys and men with fresh cuts and cornrows, ice-white t-shirts and matching kicks that lived in a box most of the year.

Black and brown faces flashed brilliantly at me, setting complexions and spirits ablaze, sparkles of pride and  joy flashing in the eyes of everyone I met.   It was like an African village in my mind, and we were all family.  All love.  All good.  All ‘hood.  Nothing is ever ‘one thing’ to all people in life. 

After the weekend long tournament we were heading back home with my Uncle James and his wife Lisa.  Myself and two of my homeboy teammates were in the backseat of Unc’s ’72 Impala low rider.  Carl was bragging about his skills in a tournament we’d lost, no less.  Kilo was asleep in the corner. 

When the red and blue lights filled our car it froze my heart, as I recalled images I’d seen of police beatings, battering rams, black men being choked out, half clad black women being dragged from beds into streets, babies torn from arms and hearing screams that are colored red and blue to this day. 

I elbowed Kilo awake as my uncle swore in fustration and rage at what he knew was to come.

“Fuck!” he banged the wheel,  “Boys, put your hands on the roof, and don’t move until they get you out of the car, and don’t say shit!”  Fear led to anger, trying to get us home alive.

Aunty Lisa stuffed two grams of marijuana in her mouth, handing some butts to Unc, both placing their hands on the dash as the second squad car pulled up.  The officers spilled out to help circle our car, their hands on their guns, angry eyes and stoneset faces.  What did they see in our eyes?

One approached the window and Unc asked why he was stopped, demanding to know.  They pulled us out and we were hand-cuffed, facedown on the sidewalk, still warm from the setting sun.  “We smell marijuana.  Tear it up!”

“If you’re going to search us, call a female to search my wife!” my uncle demanded.  He’d been talking the entire time, drawing their attention.  

A cop dropped a knee on his head, splitting it open on the concrete, growling, “Shut the fuck up, bitch! I’m sick of your fuckin’ mouth!” 

Aunt Lisa cried out.  I looked back at the other kids, turning away from Carl’s tears so he wouldn’t see my own.  Kilo’s eyes were trying to eat up his face, shared fear bonding us for life. 

They kept searching  us and tearing up the car, but when they got to Aunty Lisa, Unc lost it.  The cop on his head pulled his gun and let off a shot into the grass next to my uncle James’ head.   That’s when Lisa lost it, Unc bucked, and the beating began, Josh Gibson-like swings that sent blood sailing through the night air like rubies dancing under the red and blue lights.

My uncle would need 87 stitches to close up his body and head.  He’d lose the hearing in his left ear, the sight in his left eye and his motor skills would be forever impaired.  He’d also lose his mind and memory in part.  He’ll forever need care, requiring someone to help his confusion and explain the situation to him daily. 

I was numb and fozen until the boom of the gun, until Unc’s life pooled on the sidewalk, until I saw one of his braids soaked in that life laying in the dirt. 

Aunty Lisa was the only one to notice I was having serious issues, in need of help.   “We’ve got to fight back!” she cried as she hugged me tight, her tears baptising me into a new light, a new attitude, my value – duty or honor maybe?

“We’ve got to fight back, because they’re never goin’ to stop swingin’ on us,” she cried, trying to set my young, battered mind and spirit for the war she knew would be my life.  A war she was sure I’d already lost.  It was in the way she held me.

To flip it, it didn’t take more than a fraction of a second for me to pull that trigger and change the world for countless others, people I’ll never meet.  They feel that fraction of a second every day.

Is there a ‘boom’ when the change is positive?  Or is it drowned out in the echoing reverb of so much negativity?  Does it count if it goes unheard?  And if not heard or recognized, did it happen at all?

Time is the only measuring rod, and change is the only thing to be measured.  It should be forever flowing, constantly cutting into the landscape of a life in ways both unforeseen and unpredictable, forcing us to feel everything or hide from it.  To lie.

My Aunt Lisa would be found naked on the side of the road in some bushes in the state of Arkansas.  I can only pray she knows that I’m still fighting back, because she was right – they’ll never stop swinging. I’ve changed.   Boom!

Mr. Jones can be contacted at:
DeLaine Jones #7623482
777 Stanton Blvd.
Ontario, OR 97914

I used to extort people in prison for money.  Not the soft or the weak, I was more of a bully’s bully.   Prison can be like the N.B.A. – the guy who sits on the end of the bench is better at this than anyone you’ve ever known.   He’s earned his spot on the team.

I’d see a look in my victim’s eyes, the silent conversation most people turn their heads to avoid having with those less fortunate than they are.  They saw me as the proverbial thug.  A brute.  Simple minded.  Someone peaking at the bottom of life, much the way boxers and MMA fighters are viewed – violent because life after high school couldn’t be hash-tagged and the words needed to file articles of incorporation were too big to sound out. 

I was someone society needed bars to separate itself from.  I was one of those who’d never get it, who had chosen a pistol over a pen as the problem solving tool of choice.   Though it hurts to admit – it was true.  That was me. 

For the longest time, I could only be seen through my writing, and until I began to push this pen into the light, I spent my life dodging everyone’s gaze.  Caught without my pen and out in the open, I’d regurgitate snatches of things I’d heard, cutting and pasting quips into the proper spaces in conversations, twisting my face into the appropriate expressions, only to then slowly recoil from sight in the safety of silently vulturizing the words, thoughts, and comprehension of others.  No one would know I was stupid, that I had serious issues simply reading the English language, that I was a fake and a thief of other people’s skills and experiences.  Why would I ever allow anyone to see that in me?  So, like a child, I’d flash, I’d rage, I’d lash out to draw eyes elsewhere.  Savage Illusion.

In high school I could dunk a basketball, but I couldn’t read.  I had to sound out words as I’d learned to do from Sesame Street as a kid.  Never having owned a dictionary or even seen one in my family, I was able to understand a few words and reason out the jist of what was being said.  It was like trying to decode a message written in a long dead Russian language.  It made me feel small and hopeless.  I felt that the world had somehow regressed into an antebellum-ish landscape, I an escaped slave, yearning for the freedom the secret of which was hidden in a language everyone else could speak, one I wasn’t smart enough to master.  I’d gaze wistfully at TV shows where parents played music for their unborn, read their babies bedtime stories or used hooked on phonics to teach their two-year-olds to read at a level higher than my own.

I imagine my teachers must’ve known, they must have noticed the string of clichés, quotes and song lyrics I would line together to answer questions and escape conversations, to appear what I thought to be ‘smart’ and not be rejected.  Surely, teachers noticed the chair that I threw through a glass door in 7^th grade.  The teacher was demanding I read aloud in class.  Look at the violence – not me!  It cost my g-mom $100 we didn’t have and me a week of school and a beating with an extension cord, a price I gladly paid.

Maybe it was because I was a multi-sport star athlete in a results-driven society that the lack of substance to my shine was deemed ‘good enough’.  After all, according to one history teacher, I’d be ‘dead within five years of this conversation’.  I was advanced to the 10^th grade, and it became someone else’s turn to fear-teach me history.

Yes, I was that kid.  The one who’d fight you for joking that I was stupid, going from zero to sixty in a snap.  Hearing what a friend never said.  Being embarrassed by laughter that rattled like a tommy gun’s 45’s into my soul.  Laughter only I could hear.  Can a gangster doubt, feel alone?

It was my father, the preacher, who noticed during my weekly phone call from prison.   Ever the pragmatic intellect who too often believes love isn’t real unless it bruises, he said to me, “You’re speaking in clichés, and you’re spitting back the thoughts of others, DeLaine.  You have your own mind!  Stop being so damn lazy and use it!” 

It was in segregation – 23 hours a day lockdown and isolation – I taught myself to read.  With my spirit feeding on itself in a soup of depression, I learned to escape.  It took all of thirty-two years for me to submit my first piece for publication though.  Something I was forced to do, really.  You see, when I’d tell people I was a writer, they’d ask if I was published.   Can’t be a writer unless someone else says you’re worthy.

Dismiss, change the subject.  Move along, little wannabe…  man?  Worthy?  Extorting the extortionist?

When I received the first response from Walk In Those Shoes with a copy of the piece they’d published, I lost it!  I danced like a fool, and cried like a snitch in a gangster’s convention.  It was as if Beyonce and Cardi B had taken my virginity at the same time!

Every person is responsible for their own self worth, but to have the validation of others for something that has meant so much to me?  All I can say is – can you see me now?!

Mr. Jones has validated what we do with his words, and – we DO believe in him and all our writers. I was thrilled the judges saw what I did, and he is also our first place winner. Mr. Jones can be contacted at:
DeLaine Jones #7623482
82911 Beach Access Road
Umatilla, OR 97882

It’s the look in his eyes as he spits some slick disrespect in my face, not bothering to stop at my cell, casually flaunting his freedom.  It shouldn’t come as a surprise to me.  It was such seemingly casual violence on my part that saw me into a cage after all.

But the sting of helplessness, of a raw, exposed nerve, the vulnerability, leaves a metallic, blood-like taste in my mouth, slashes at my soul…  It’s a feeling I quickly cover with splashes of rage, the most potent form of emotion I can find.  Funny that it lives next door to passion and across from love in me.

It’s a child’s reaction to the inability to deal with a moral responsibility seeking to overwhelm me, to rise in me until it covers my nose and I can’t breath for the insanity in my mind…  a refuge denied to a man with a gun in his face.

The greater the fear, the thicker the lid of the angry outburst needs to be to hold it down, the fear of being at another’s mercy, subject to their whims, their madness.

This is what people felt when a kid stuck a gun in their faces and took their money, their freedom, boldly stomping through their lives as if they didn’t matter.  Was my stride the same as George Zimmerman’s, the officers’, the guards’?  Did I have the same ‘fuck you’ strut and that same look in my eyes?

“It ain’t no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun.”

I fall back on my bunk, into the prison of my life, swallowing the taste in my mouth.  Life is about the connections you make, if and when you are able to put the pieces together.  An I.Q. test measures how quickly a person can pick up a concept, make a connection, spot a pattern.  Is there a test to show whether someone cares enough to make the attempt?  That info seems more valuable to me somehow. 

This isn’t who or where I wanted to be, living within circles within circles of violence, violence with no goal of shaping me into the dreams of my grandmother, my father.

Change.  That’s what’s left after trans-for-mation.  No matter what I change, or who or what I forge myself into, the things that truly confine my life will not budge.  They’re built to outlast me.  Despair?  No, reality.

Hear me.  Most people live in a world of ‘potential’.  Some one(s) planned on me being in this cage more than eighty years before I was born.  How do I change that?  How did they know that I would shoot that white man?  That my seventeen year old black face wouldn’t be remembered by him in either rage or fear?

In the face of such forgiveness, how could I fail to forgive the guard?  His ignorance hadn’t left me with a bullet in my spine, unable to walk or live without pain.  I couldn’t say the same for my own.

Moral culpability is the substance that adulthood is made of, the mortar that binds the actions of our lives together like so many river stones.  But the energy of such a powerful emotion – rage – doesn’t simply evaporate under the heat of responsibility.  It was only then, after I pulled that trigger, that I recognized the extreme danger – Quicksand!

This is where brown boys who are guilty get reduced to numbers in boxes, like lotto balls, to consume what is left of themselves.  It happens in secret – a private meal washed down with a grandmother’s tears, as the child she loves crumbles under the weight of a basketball score in years.

That’s all that was left after I sacrificed my childhood’s hopes with the blast that shattered multiple lives, only to rise like smoke on the winds of reason. I couldn’t to this day tell you why I pulled the trigger. Reason will ever be the enemy of children.

It’s what was left after the white D.A. and my white attorney saw a seventeen-year-old  brown boy agree to plead guilty and to ninety years in prison.

It’s what was left after the white judge refused to find anything redeemable in my childish eyes.  I was guilty, nothing more.

What is left is twisted into this callous on my soul.  Armor.  A thickening of the skin, instinctively grown to protect the child in me from what I’d done – what was being done to me.  An act that none of the only white faces, save my three people, in the courtroom seemed to look interested in, watching the judge hand down a ninety year sentence for a non-homicide offense to the brown kid that I was. 

Should race have excused or defended me?  Never.  But when the lines of brown boys waiting to be sent to prison by predominantly angry white judges stretches into the horizon… and has done for decades…

If you are looking for the stereotypical black rage found in the ink of most prison pens that allows one to dismiss the words as broken, to look away from the destruction by fire of brown skinned boys measured not by the love and mercy due a child at their worst but in metric tons – this is not that.

To not look away is to see, to see is to know, and to know as an adult makes us morally culpable to act. Adults should expect the morals of their justice system to reflect their own values.  It’s the only way the American system works.

There are white people standing with the black lives movement, armed with their own rage at what they have seen and know to be deadly and murderously wrong with what is being reflected back from our justice system.  “What are they doing out there?” is what some ask.  What should be asked now that they’ve seen and know is, “What am I doing in here?” 

It’s what I ask myself every day.

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
82911 Beach Access Road
Umatilla, OR 97882

I can’t swim.  I can’t even float.  It’s not very dignified for a former athlete, but I paddle like a dog, and I’m ashamed to admit my little sister taught herself to swim before I ever knew what dog paddling was.

Some would say that learning to swim is about overcoming large fears.  Others would say it’s about overcoming the fear of death and gaining confidence in self. To not learn to swim efficiently speaks of some form of cowardice, a lack of heart – something that can’t be taught.  The ability is held in such high esteem that fathers throw their frightened children into the deep, forcing them to literally ‘sink or swim’.

I was eight years old when I left the three foot end of the pool to get in line to dive off the high dive and into the twelve foot end.  I knew I couldn’t swim, and I was likely to die.  I simply did not care to let this chance pass me by.  Some would claim I’d been thrown into the deep end long before that moment. 

My heart threatened to break a rib with its hammering, but I’d been my little sister’s protector and her go-to, and whenever she called my name I’d never failed to answer the bell. I could not allow her to continue to see me fail, to see me in fear.  So, I got in line.  I braved the line not only to confront my fear of death, but my fear of seeing disappointment in my lil sister’s eyes.  Truth be told, there were few things in life I feared more.  Her love and adoration were, in my mind, forever bound to my ability to protect her, to lead the way, to provide something that neither of us had.  Self-worth maybe?  Identity?

It all began before that day at the pool.  We lived in Compton, California, on Primrose Street.  I was still young, it was before I’d started school, before crack and the justice system ravaged my family, but after my mom was murdered.  My “G”-mom was simply trying to do right by her daughter’s children, keeping us together, safe and fed while trying to keep herself together mentally and emotionally.  She was trying to find a way to hold on to her God’s hand while her own heart and hands were overflowing with pain.

My granny must have been watching from the shadow of the screen door when my sister and I were fighting in the backyard over a toy.  To win, I pushed her down, and she began to cry.  In a flash, the door banged open and my grandmother had me in her clutches.  She lit into me in a real way, and through my tears, she took my cheeks in her hand and pointed to the little girl on the ground.

“That is your sister, not some stranger on the street, but your sister!   You are the only big brother she has!  Don’t you ever hurt her, and you better not let anyone else ever hurt her!!  Do you hear me?!”

Where I come from there’s a phrase for learning to face the very real dangers of life outside the protection of your home.  We refer to facing death and learning to survive in the deep end as ‘stepping off the porch’.  This was my splash! moment.

I was in middle school when I stabbed a middle-schooler for pushing my lil sister down and taking her money as she waited in the candy store line for me. I’d come home with my sister in hand and a black eye that was talking to me.  I’d confronted the kid and he’d took a swing – my first fight ever.  He parked me on my butt like he was taking a driver’s test.  My black eye elicited a warning from my granny.  She better not hear from that school about me fighting, she’d sent me to school to learn, not to fight.  No one cared to ask why I had a black eye.  Why should they?  This was my little sister, not theirs, so it was up to me to deal with it, right?

When my uncles and grandmother found out what happened from my sister and my attempt to wash my bloody school clothes with some Tide, a hairbrush and the water hose, they all called me crazy.  Angry.  ‘Touched’.  All but my grandmother.  She never condemned me over what I’d done, nor did she admonish me over the situation.  She merely looked at me with a new tilt of curiosity to her head, like she was seeing me for the first time.

I bounced twice from the high dive and did a triple tuck back flip (my grade school had a gymnastics team).  I hit the water head first with my arms extended to break the surface, body like an arrow.  Best dive of the day!  Then I sank right to the bottom, twelve feet of water!

Panic?  Never that.  I could see the ladder on the other side of the pool.  I’d just ‘walk’ over to it and climb out.  I pushed off to get a few sips of air into taxed lungs, only to start panting like a dog.  A few sips wouldn’t do!  Sputtering and choking and thrashing, I sank again.  The older kid who came to save me came from behind. I fought, thinking it was an attack.  I sank yet again!  I passed out in the pool.  My lil sis watched me die trying to lead the way – to continue to be her hero.  They dragged my lifeless body from the pool and revived me.

Welcome to my deep end.

I once had to face down a kid who had his heart set on chopping me with a machete over my sister.  Once brained a grown man with a brick who tried to rape her.  I’m otherwise a non-confrontational person, but when it comes to my mother’s only daughter?  I would hurt you.  Bad.

What I didn’t know was that there were threats in our own home.  Family members came to live with us, having fallen on tough times financially.   I was only a kid, mom was dead – murdered – and neither of our fathers were worth the ink it would cost to write their names.  I never knew the love and trust garnered from helping with homework could lead to the ripping of a soul or that the resulting screams are seldom heard because those who cause them are likely the same who stand at the gates in defense. 

When she became pregnant at fifteen due to this molestation, I was in chains already, after being on the row for months.  My lil sis was alone.  She came to see me – alone.  Her belly large, her eyes pregnant with fear and secret pain.  We held each other and wept, just as we had in the backyard in Compton, California, on Primrose Street. We both drowned that day.  Who knows, maybe if I had learned to swim, things could have been different.  Maybe some cries can only be heard under water, when you are out of breath – in the deep end.

DeLaine Jones #7623482
777 Stanton Blvd.
Ontario, OR 97914

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 – ‘to another’?”  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