Scene: Death Row – a Christmas tree, ornamented, tinseled, well-lit, complete with phony gifts beneath. It crowds one half of the hall as we shoulder on around en route from and to chow. Most guys walk on by – eyes ahead; but some press close to thump a tiny colored light bulb hard enough to darken it, pinch needles into zees, or brazenly slap the crap out of plastic dec- orations, as if to say, “I’m hurting you because you’re hurting me.” Still other men oohhh and aahhh, like little kids, eyeing mint-condition memories that are kept shelved except for special occasions. Never- theless, the Lord is my shepherd- I shall not want.
II.
The other day an officer stood there peering deep into its depth of plastic branches, then grabbed it roughly, angrily even, and shook-shook-shook the fuck out of it, rattling off a noisy mess of decorations. “Nope, Sarge, nothing!” he hollered up the hall, his voice rolling over scattered ornaments and turning a sharp corner to enter the office, from where a faint, unconcerned reply returned: “Okay.” The officer scanned the wreckage. Then looked at us and shrugged. He goosestepped back back to the office. We rebuilt our tree.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. George Wilkerson lives on Death Row. He is a talented writer, always keeping us on our toes. He is an occasional contributor to WITS, 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, and his writing can be found on several other platforms. I’m happy to say, he is also the third place winner in WITS’ final writing contest of 2020.
Mr. Wilkerson can be contacted at: George T. Wilkerson #0900281 4285 Mail Service Center Raleigh, NC 27699-4285
I. My block housed only 18 to 24-year-olds. For my one hour of recreation on my first day there, weighted with full-restraints (hand- cuffs, ankle-shackles, waist-chains connect- ing them) I clank-paced the tier. Each cell door had an eight-inch square of window, some framing faces that peered at me. Marko, a feral-looking latino who had come from home to hole as a pretrial detainee, flagged me as I passed. He was breathless with excitement and blinking rapidly as he testified: “God speaks to me.” He’d tried but failed to pluck out his eyes, so, to receive divine enlightenment, he instead had committed to hand- copying the Bible’s one thousand three hundred and eighty-nine chapters, every jot and tittle using crayon-sized floppy- rubber pens that were approved (suicide-proof) for segregated inmates. He’d been at it two years, during which his hair and beard grew like Jesus’. His eyes widened, crackling with supernatural energy as he showed me a waist-high tower of babbling pages.
II. Skyler, freckled and well-muscled from toting hay bales, had never traveled past city limits until he got arrested. An accent is not an accent in one’s hometown – it’s invisible – but Skyler’s tobacco bent even further into ‘baccer. At first. Six months in, we were friends. I called his name from behind my door, since it’d been several days since we’d spoken. I pressed my ear to my door’s steel crack to catch his answer. That’s not my name. My name is Fahbo (Fabulous, in short) from New York. I’m an ahtist. I could feel his tongue wrang- ling his identity, twisting it’s straight but tilted spine into a kind of personal scoliosis, figuring nobody would care to remove his corselet. He was right.
III. This one guy loved the hole. He’s been in and out of many holes since age fifteen. This manimal fancied himself a hunter. He’d cover his cell’s light fixture, and his rear-wall’s strip of window; so, to see in, an officer was forced to shade her eyes from the tier’s glare while leaning face against the eight-inch door window. They’d hear a faint but steady friction: ch-ch-ch-ch-ch- and suddenly a milky roar would splat into the Plexiglas at mouth- level, followed by a weaponized penis thudding and rubbing it in. The guard would scream a variation of, “Oh, you nasty muthafucka! Get your sick ass down from there!” He’d built a ‘deer stand’ he bragged, by stacking books on either side of his door so he could get a clear head shot. He seemed shocked when I admitted I didn’t do it too, as if I were some strange beast.
IV. Evidently, prison administrators have figured out how to remove evolution’s rev-limiter and take off its restrictor plate. Its transformative mutations now take place in as little as six months using Therapeutic Seclusion – also known as THE HOLE, in prison lingo. No one who passes through ever leaves the same person if he entered a year ago. The hole is a tool designed to break man down to his quintessence. It hyper- bolizes by creating a parody of one’s character. I’ve seen it strip away the masks and games of faith – no time for masquerades when insanity is gaining – forcing a sort of apotheosis. I have watched it petrify pretense into cement, making men fake forever. I’ve even witnessed it dissolve humanity in atavistic acid: acting like an animal now comes naturally to him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. George Wilkerson lives on Death Row. He is a talented writer, always keeping us on our toes, and an occasional contributor to WITS. Mr. Wilkerson is 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
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
A few years ago here on Death Row, a handful of men were summoned to our unit manager’s office. They didn’t return for weeks. Prison administrators accused the men of plotting… something that was never explained. All we knew was that the guys, our friends, were put in segregation while being ‘investigated’. They returned a couple weeks later after nothing turned up, a few pounds lighter physically and also in terms of their property.
Putting a prisoner ‘under investigation’ is the prison’s way of segregating him without charging him, without writing him up for an infraction, without due process. It’s a way to punish in advance while searching for a legitimate reason to justify a formal write-up. It’s a discretionary tool administered in response to rumors or suspicion of a rule violation, vengeance, say, for pissing off a duty lieutenant.
Prisons are highly structured, highly controlled environments, governed by routine, every day much the same as the food – bland, monotonous, repetitive. You’d think being permanently imprisoned would mean where a person lays their head would be set in stone, right? Despite control mechanisms shaping nearly every facet of daily life, being incarcerated means shit can happen at any second. No one can be sure where they will sleep at night – their current cell, bandaged on a hospital bed, shivering in a psyche ward, handcuffed in a holding tank, waiting for a cell assignment in solitary. And anytime someone is forced to move off the unit, their personal property is searched and held to the strictest standard. Extra anything equals contraband.
Every time we get sent to the hole, we lose our personal property. Our jailers, tasked with packing our belongings for these moves, say much of our property is ‘contraband’ because it ‘exceeds space limitations’.
Right before I came here in ’06, someone wrote an anonymous note on one of the guys already here. The staff despised him, and he was accused of bullying the men on his pod. Though no one ever came forward with evidence or testimony to substantiate this claim, he was placed ‘under investigation’ and didn’t return for years.
Once you are in solitary confinement, if you violate even the most trivial policy – having an extra pair of socks, things that typically go ignored or at worst elicit a verbal warning – you earn additional write-ups. Fifteen days. Thirty days. Forty-five days. Days pile onto your stay. Receiving a series of write-ups in quick succession can get you recommended for long-term isolation, a minimum of six months but usually at least a year.
Another time, while awaiting my trial, officers raided the cell next to mine. Through an interconnected air vent, I heard the officers informing the irate and disbelieving occupant that they had to take all of his property, including the clothes he had on, because he was being put on suicide watch. I never found out whom he’d offended, but somebody – a prisoner or staff member – had filled out a sick-call in his name, posing as him and threatening to kill himself. He was forcefully stripped naked and dragged to an observation cell on the psych ward, where he spent the next two weeks.
Incarcerated people accumulate a ton of attachments, possessions, sentiments, activities, etc. We latch onto them, make them a part of us, become dependent on them. They make us heavy. For that reason, many guys in here walk around high-strung and hyper vigilant about their interaction with staff, “Man, I won’t even speak to that officer. He’s too spiteful. I don’t want him searching my cell – I’ve got too many books.” Or photos. Or art supplies. Or food. Any time I’m called to the office for an appointment or to pick up legal mail, my heart races. I question whether I’ve pissed off anyone, I wonder if I’ll return.
Before officers enter our area to search cells or arrest someone, they stop in the hall at the guard booth and start putting on blue latex gloves like nurses wear. We watch through the Plexiglas wall. Someone will holler, “MAN DOWN!” and during the fifteen seconds prior to the guards’ entrance, we ask ourselves, “Who are they coming to get? Did they glance up at my cell?”
Several toilets will flush, swallowing…. whatever. Most of us prop ourselves in doorways, or continue what we were doing in the dayroom, watching but not watching TV, playing but not playing chess, stiff but nonchalant, not wanting to draw attention to ourselves in case the guards are undecided about who they are coming for.
Some guys are sentimental hoarders, their cells thick with excesses of everything. Others keep nothing. Other than a cup, toothbrush, toothpaste, bar of soap, and neatly made bunk, their cells hardly look occupied. They give the guards nothing to hurt them with, no leverage. They’re nearly invisible and are impervious to prison life.
Incarceration has a transient quality, akin to homelessness, forcing us to continually determine which of our possessions are extra baggage. And, how do I avoid the unavoidable and unpredictable? I don’t. I simply prepare for it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. George Wilkerson lives on Death Row. He has been writing for some time, and is undeniably talented. Not only does Mr. Wilkerson sometimes share his writing with us, he was also a contributor to 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
Sharing the name of the apartment complex around it, at perhaps a quarter mile long, Coleridge Road rammed straight through the projects. It was the crossbar between two semi-parallel streets that offered alternate routes to similar destinations, though their side roads led to completely different ends. The front one was the busy mainstream people took when speeding to Asheboro’s white or blue collar districts. People motoring on it clearly had somewhere to be, somewhere to go, something to do. It was also a geographical cordon and dangerous to cross – nobody wanted to slow or stop. That intersection saw a lot of accidents. One car attempting to cross it from Coleridge got chopped in half by an SUV.
The rear street was lazier, more meandering and accommodating, but presented dangers of its own. It veined into Asheboro’s darker areas where gunshots and crack pipes left blooming but distinctive scents in the air. Like many of its occupants, even the projects back there went only by a nickname, ‘Low Rent’, which spoke to a key feature of their character. Life itself got cheaper the deeper one went.
Like a giant middle finger flipping up from Coleridge Road into the heart of the complex, Kemp Boulevard looped about 100 yards uphill, past my apartment, where two friends and I stood sweating on a corner sidewalk. We shared a cigarette and peered downhill toward one of the other parking lots to pinpoint the tinny music that had pulled us outside to the curb – a rarely seen ice cream truck. From this distance, the kids resembled roaches as they scampered toward the sugar. Heatwaves shimmered above the asphalt, creating what appeared to be a mirage – an oasis or the birth of a metaphor for hope. Or both.
We wondered how many times it’d visit before somebody robbed it. Then we wondered whether we could trick the vendor into handing us one orange sherbet, one rainbow push-pop, and one Mickey Mouse as we pretended to dig in our pockets for money. It was 1993, hot as hell, and we were twelve and broke.
“They’d probably hand it to you… but not us,” J, the shortest but fastest of us said, meaning – ‘You’re not black’. Puff nodded his agreement, and they both grinned. I knew the look. It teased that I looked soft, innocent – untested.
“Oh, hell, nah! I’ve done more stuff than both of ya’ll!” I cited the fights, the stealing, the broken windows and sliced car tires. I was the most prolific.
“Well, you the one ain’t been to training school,” said Puff, the strongest fighter in our age bracket. He hit the dwindling cigarette.
“Only ‘cause I ain’t got caught like y’all.” The yet was implicit. I felt uneasy. We all knew prison was our inevitable destination. It was a fact of life in the projects, the only life we knew how to live. Around Coleridge, people didn’t dream of being doctors or lawyers or firemen… if they dreamed at all.
We all got quiet. I stubbed the cigarette butt. The ice cream truck turned onto Kemp, getting louder as it chugged up the hill and horseshoed around the bend. It became a big, boxy, yellowish riot of glittery stickers and calliopean music as it stopped in front of us. Suddenly we were jostled by a dozen excited children waving crumpled dollar bills or punching a fistful of loose change at the vendor.
My friends and I glanced at each other; they silently boosted me to attempt a free ice cream, but when I looked up, the vendor locked eyes with me and smiled. After a second he scowled and shook his head hard, as if to warn me, ‘Don’t you fuckin’ try it kid’. So I didn’t.
When he finally slammed and locked the serving window and pulled away from the curb, my friends and I gave chase and hopped onto the rear bumper. We clung to the panel-door seams and jumped up and down to bounce the truck, letting the driver know we were there, letting him feel our presence. Being seen and felt is its own sort of ice cream. It wasn’t slowing before turning back onto Coleridge, so rather than be slung off, we hopped off and hit the ground running. We scooped up rocks and thunked them off the truck’s back, laughing as it squealed its tires to gather speed toward the front street.
Though it soon disappeared, we still heard its discomfiting moon music a few moments more, until even that was gone, leaving a sticky residue in our hearts. Ice cream dreams never lasted long in Coleridge.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. George Wilkerson lives on Death Row. He has been writing for some time, and it is a privilege to share his voice. Not only does Mr. Wilkerson share his writing here, he was also a contributor to 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
“…to remain tight in a bud was more painful than… to blossom.” – Anais Nin
To many, Kenny’s a nobody – which is why he wanted to shine, to prove them wrong.
Would that I could share my light with Kenny, give him another chance
To fit in, to be normal. Since I can’t, I will share Kenny’s light with you,
Break it into wafers.
Death Row, Death Throws…
We slam, we scream, we fling ourselves against prison’s cosmic ennui.
We remember life from before, our memories another spectrum of light.
The texture of some memories never change; these lights refuse to go
Quietly into that goodnight.
Sometimes a soul’s meat-vehicle remains behind long after the light
Has gone. Kenny remembers the moment his light divorced his body,
Remembers when it tore itself free – remembers it half as action sequence,
Half as background requiem for a dream. His bodily
Memory knit together with eye-witness testimony, here tells
You his story, sings you a history, a chorus of blood sung
With words twinkling in air like asterisks. It was preceded
By a blinding flash of light, an insight that had sounded green, As in the moment is ripe, as in… GO.
We all pass with varying degrees of light.
Blossom…
Perhaps the idea began as a flower – it felt like one
At the time. One of those pretty, yellow-faced ones
With white petals. Aster. Or perhaps it started as a small star-
Like flame, a sad blue torch of forked flower in the brain.
A risky idea one might symbolize in writing: *. An asterisk
Indicated omission ((of common sense?)), redaction, doubtful matters.
Portents…
–aster: a pejorative suffix denoting something that imperfectly mimics
The true thing – a bootlegged or knock-off version, for example.
–aster is also a combining form meaning ‘star’, which implies
Anyone can be a star – anyone can shine like the popular guys
Simply by stamping aster onto their chest, by declaring, “Let me
Be light!” like in Genesis.
“dis” is a prefix meaning asunder, part, away or having a negative Reversing force, as in disability. As in disaster, which is an unfavorable
Aspect of a star, emblazoned red, as in: Kenny, the stars do not fucking
Align. As in: Kenny, this will rip your asunder, break you apart, and
Your ‘you’ will go away… but Kenny refused to see this light.
Men were slamming bone-yellow dominoes into stainless steel 4-way tables,
Hollering multiples of five and clattering their bones into position. Like built-in
Bleachers, three blocky 18-inch deep steps cut into the rim of the day-
Room’s brownish-gray concrete floor, leading down to the lower cells.
Playing follow-the-leader exercises, acrobatic men would balance
On the top-step’s ledge, lean out with upsweeping arms – then leap
To grab the tier’s floor, to do pull-ups or show-off by monkeying
Up, once their bodies stopped wobbling. Kenny used to watch them,
Wishing upon those stars…
In Carnations, A
Cautionary Tale…
Slow, fleshy red haloes spread
And overlap like Venn diagrams laid on cement,
Petaling around Kenny’s blank comatose face
As a silken illustration of the relationship
Between grace and ground.
Soundgarden…
Light is such a fickle thing. Kenny had tried to swing for it with a tottering
Leap. There was a split-second grace period. *****:
In linguistics, asterisks mark an utterance that would be censored
By native speakers of the language. Generally a fall
From grace is blackhole – interesting, especially when it’s a superstar.
We anticipate a comeback… but
With us mundane asters, there is no coming back. There
Is just a discordant ** * ***
*** ** *
** ** burst of asterisks that flap in the air
Like Kenny’s arms, or a flood of cusswords at startled bus stop pigeons.
Then silence.
The very air becomes electric with prayer, or JESUS… the name
Itself a form of intercession. Then a meaty thud
And a terrible revelation
Of Kenny’s horror obscurus, his brain a pinkish-gray
Light leaking from Kenny, after aster in brain, after Kenny-aster
On air, after air on bone, after bone on stone. Thunk, crack,
The genesis of a ravaged lack of all it means to be human. A shadow
Grows from a length of gauze wrapped round and round
A star. That was in ’97.
My dawg, his dog…
Every few minutes Kenny’s dementia seems to chase down his recent
History and tear chunks from its ass. I call Kenny my ninja, since
I’m Asian. His cane we call the Cadillac to convert limpin’ to
Pimpin; his wheelchair the Escalade for which I made a cardboard
Vanity plate that dangles from its back – to infuse his disability
With style, luxury, richness. With privilege, with ease. Nowadays
He chuckles and calls himself stuntman stumbles (in his garbled drawl)
Or Stag Lee, a fitting confusion of Bruce Lee, “staggering,” and Stan
Lee the Marvel creator. Shit’s funny, but shit ain’t funny funny.
Dark Matter…
The brain is a self-contained universe made up mostly of star-shaped
Cells: astrocytes, billions and billions of them, crackle with magic energy.
Hidden in blackness, the brain explodes with asterisks of thought.
It is the seat of language, music, motion… personality. A lump
Of grace that will shine until we die, but… sometimes
Stars flicker and wink out, entire galaxies have power outages,
And the wrinkled surface of the deep becomes void: dementia
Steals the self. It would be simpler if one just vanished
The sun – not this gradual decay into the sightless realm where darkness is
awake upon the dark.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. George Wilkerson lives on Death Row. He has been writing for some time, and it is a privilege to share his voice here. He has incredible insight and actually advised WITS in certain aspects of our organization, for which we are very grateful. Mr. Wilkerson can be contacted at: George T. Wilkerson #0900281 4285 Mail Service Center Raleigh, NC 27699-4285
