I spent years not knowing who I was on the inside, a state that is its own form of prison.  From age fifteen on, I felt insecure about my past, the crime that brought me to prison, the lack of having ever actually done anything in my young life of meaning or enjoyment, and even about not fitting the ideal of what a ‘real’ prisoner should look like.  I did all I could to mask those feelings, put on a front and hold myself together in prison.

I spent my first few years of incarceration in a prison for Youthful Offenders.  There was plenty of violence there, and knowing I would later be going to an adult prison until I was forty, I decided to put on some size.  I worked out like crazy to make up for the fact that I couldn’t make a convincing ‘mean’ face if my life depended on it.  I tried to compensate with the amount of weight I could throw around, which was considerable until I injured myself so badly I couldn’t do a pushup for a couple years.  I learned the habits of hypermasculine men, things like eating a banana by breaking it into pieces first so no one could sexualize it.  I learned how to talk to others, and in some ways I found part of the person I could have been if I had not destined my future to incarceration.

Getting locked up before I came into my own, I had a bad habit – among others – of trying hard to fit in with all groups and all people, trying to find what we had in common and how we were alike.  I’d talk about money with bank robbers, drugs with addicts, smuggling with cartel members…  I’d discuss God during the years I was agnostic, leave behind a conversation over a television show with a supremacist to talk politics with a member of the Nation of Islam.  Looking back, I recognize that some of that was because I was just interested in other people and their perceptions, having come from an isolated background.  But some of it was because I didn’t want to be the odd man out, and some because I feared being alone in a very hostile and dangerous environment.  Guys who didn’t fit in didn’t tend to have a lot of friends, and guys who were too different were targeted.  I was already of small stature, childish features, and I wore glasses.  I had twenty-five years to do, and I didn’t want that to be how my life was defined on the inside.

After enough time locked up, even a kid from the suburbs can talk gangster, and I could even pass, in short spurts, as ‘hood.  I hadn’t done many drugs on the outside, but experienced a fair share after getting locked up, and growing up around the people I did, I knew more about guns than most people locked up for shooting someone.  Those things and women are the things discussed most in prison.

I was smart enough and read a lot, so I knew at least a little about most things.  This got me a job tutoring in the prison GED school when I was still too young to have graduated high school.  Teaching and helping others from all walks of life helped me to relate to others, and my time in prison was easier for a while.  Some Bloods stood up for me, some Crips tried to recruit me, some Skinheads liked me, some Latin Kings had my back, and some members of other religions tried to convert me, though I never chose to join any of them.  I could get along with just about anyone, but who was I really?  Did any of them know the real version of me?  Did I even know me for sure?  

It’s hard to quite know who you are when your own history is something you’d prefer to escape, and your present is…  well, also something you’d prefer to escape.  It’s like being lost in the woods at dusk with no way to find your way backwards and the vague understanding that you likely have a thousand miles to go.  You’re left only to push forward, survive the journey, and along the way, search for the soul that crashed like a meteorite in the wilderness years ago.

I spent my first few years learning to survive without the future in sight.  My high school class graduated while I was locked up, and the few friends who had written moved on as we grew apart and they went on to college.  Smartphones connected everyone, loved ones passed away, guys I knew on the inside were released and came back, and all the while I stayed in one place.  I lived in the moment a lot, getting lost in them and the days and years, lost in stories told by those around me of their lives and dramas.  I remember the names of girlfriends of my first five cellmates, and I remember the prison-friends I made as a teenager much better than almost anyone I’ve known in the fourteen years since.  It was like high school in some ways, those early memories seeming a big deal and sticking with you because they were a part of your formation as an autonomous individual.  Those who were there were part of the concrete of your identity during the final churning in the mixer.  

I felt most insecure in the experiences I knew nothing about, never living on my own, never having a driver’s license.  I never had a serious girlfriend, never went off to school or moved around, or saw much of anything except some childhood trips around the country.  I didn’t know how to cook or eat healthy, didn’t know how to pay taxes.  The few wild stories I had took place in prison.  Listening to others around me, I couldn’t relate, nor could they relate to me unless I avoided the subjects completely, so I asked questions and listened a lot.  

What began as defense mechanisms turned out to help me as I was fortunate enough to meet a handful of new friends on the outside, usually through my dad.  I could not meet anyone without that person making the choice to open up to me, and when they chose to, they found someone who was genuinely interested in everything they had to say.  I gained understanding of life that way, of the things normal people deal with on a day-to-day basis.  These friends helped me remain human, rather than turn into a toxic caveman.

Within prison, I discovered people often actually liked me as a person.  Sometimes I found myself, especially in my early twenties, trying to act cool, or what I thought was how someone who was cool would act, and made a fool of myself more than once.  I went through a period when I used a fair amount of substances to deal with depression and the chronic anxiety that came from feeling I’d wasted my entire life.  That feeling defined me for a couple years, because it was so true in many ways.  I committed an adult crime with a child’s mind, I harmed people I loved and created the whirlwind I fell into.  At times I did not know who I was, but whoever I was, that was all a part of me.  It was my life, and there was no running from it.

I was a loser.  Not to be self-deprecating, but I was, because I sure hadn’t acted like a winner.  But even in prison things grow, whether they be noxious weeds or better things.  I decided I didn’t want to be like that my entire life, and though I struggled through the years, bored and occasionally terrified with a few moments of wonder, I managed to grow myself.  I became quite an amazing cook as part of an introductory culinary arts vocational class, and later became a tutor/chef.  I learned enough about law to help a teen get out of prison.  I started writing, creating, drawing and constantly reading.  Eventually, I learned about so many things I would have had an interest in had I not been locked up. I learned about what I wanted, began to see what I had the ability to create instead of the destructive tendencies that brought me to prison.  I made friends, and I started having more experiences and more to talk about.  I trained dogs, wrote for books, and performed with bands in prison concerts.

Though I still preferred to listen, I started to discover who I was, to find myself in the shadows despite being behind bars for the majority of my life.  I still can’t make a mean face even if it meant my early parole, but I don’t really care.  I still get stares from the predators when I eat a banana the regular way, but my beard makes me less appetizing and at 33 they know not to mess with me.  I know how to get along with everyone, but I’m much more discerning about who I choose to talk to.  The biggest thing that has changed about me in here is getting rid of my ego, which took work, and giving up on trying to fit in.  When I did, I found that more people took to me than ever before.  Maybe that’s what becoming an adult is, as opposed to a child.  I grew up, and I did it in prison.  It’s possible to find out who you are behind bars…  but it can be a bit harder. 

ABOUT THE WRITER.  This is Chris’ first time writing for WITS, but he has been writing for some time. He wanted to share his perspective on what it is like to grow up in prison. If you would like to contact Chris, you can do so at:

Christopher Dankovich #595904
Thumb Correctional Facility
3225 John Conley Drive
Lapeer, MI 48446

I’ve often wondered why prisoners are some of the most creative people I know.  Granted, I may have a distorted perspective because I’ve been incarcerated since I was seventeen years old, and I’m now forty-three. So most of the people I’ve ever known are prisoners, but it seems like a disproportionate percentage of them are highly creative compared to the general population.  Prisons are full of extremely talented artists, musicians, singers, poets, writers, inventors, tinkerers, incredible chess players, legal minds, and a multitude of other skilled and talented people.  Why?  Why do so many highly creative people end up in prison?

I, myself, was an extremely independent and inquisitive child, always needing to know why, always needing to know how things worked, dismantling and reassembling things.  I needed a reason for everything and could be excessively obstinate if told to just believe or do something without good reason.

I was nine when we moved to a small town in East Texas with more cows than people.  I didn’t fit in and almost immediately became an outsider, a non-conformist, a rule-breaker.    

“Welcome to parent-teacher night at ______ ______ school, where we want to encourage our students to be creative and independent thinkers.”

Oh, really? When my mother was repeatedly called because I was always drawing in class, she didn’t understand why it was such a problem.  

“Is he doing his assignments?”

“Yes, ma’am, but it is distracting.”

“How is it distracting if he is sitting there quietly drawing?”

“It is distracting to the teacher.”

“How is it distracting the teacher?”

“Because he is not paying attention to her.”

“But if he is completing his assignments, then he must be paying attention!”

“It’s disrespectful to the teacher.”

“Why are you always so hard on my son if he’s not disrupting class or bothering anyone?”

“Maybe I wouldn’t be so hard on him if you sent him to my Sunday school class at my church.”

The outsider kid who is a little different winds up in a few fights with ‘the good kids’ who go to church and bully others, gaining a ‘reputation’ as a trouble-maker amongst teachers and school officials.  Those teachers and officials all attend the same churches and local functions as local police who naturally view outsiders with suspicion… and now need to keep an eye on that kid with a reputation as he is a trouble-maker in school.  That same kid is then labeled as defiant and disrespectful of authority when he refuses to submit to corporal punishment at school because: one, ‘you’re not gonna hit me and get away with it‘; two, the blatant hypocrisy of ‘I’m gonna hit you to teach you a lesson that fighting is unacceptable’; and three, even at that age I found it supremely creepy for a grown man to bend pubescent boys over a chair and spank them with a giant wooden paddle.  You’re refusing swats?  Okay, you’re staying after school for detention.

“Why are you drawing in detention?  You’re supposed to be doing homework!”

“I don’t have any homework.”

“Don’t lie to me!  Everyone has homework!”

“I finished it in class.”

“Don’t get smart with me, boy, or I’ll give you more detention for insubordination!”

“What?  I didn’t do anything wrong!”

More detention – which I refuse to attend on principle.  It gets doubled… tripled… quadrupled.  Which I find amusing… and get suspended… then assigned to alternative school for the remainder of the semester… where I breeze through my assignments and get into more trouble for drawing in class.

I finally return to regular school where an English teacher tells me, “You’re so smart and talented, but you’re not applying yourself.”  So, I apply myself on a creative writing project only to be accused of plagiarism because, well, there’s just no way that rebellious little turd wrote that!  More detention… for ‘cheating’ on an assignment.  Seriously.  For doing my assignment too well?  Why bother anymore?  More detention for refusing to do assignments.  Lah-de-fucking-dah.  More alternative school for refusing to attend detention.  More problems at home because I’m ‘getting in trouble at school’.  I come to hate school and start skipping it.

At some point Mom gets exasperated with all of it.  “Why can’t you just be like other kids?!  Why can’t you just do what they tell you to do?”

“Because it’s dumb.  It serves no purpose, and I didn’t do anything wrong!”

“I know.   But it will make things so much easier for you if you just go along with it and do as you’re told.”

“Why is that a good reason to do something I disagree with?”

“What is wrong with you?  Why are you so stubborn?”

Eventually they convince her that there might be something wrong with me.  “What is wrong with you?”  I stare at the floor and mumble that I don’t know.  “If you don’t know, then who does?!”  I continue to stare at the floor and shrug.  “Look at me!”  But no matter how hard I try, my burning eyes quickly resume studying the pattern weave of the carpet.  “Why can’t you look at me?  What is wrong with you?”

At some point I’m convinced that there is something wrong with me.  I ponder this confusing question incessantly until it is internalized among all the other confusions I cannot yet unravel at that age.

“Are you even listening to me?”

How do I explain that my mind often wanders and pieces things together on its own while my attention remains captivated by something as simple as the gleam of light on the metal sleeve that joins pencil and eraser, studying how to recreate that metallic effect in a drawing?  Do you really expect an eleven or twelve year old to understand how their mind works or be able to explain it?

“There is something wrong with you.  You must be crazy or on drugs.”  (Not yet!)  “Why did you do that?!”

“Because I was…”

“Did you do it or not?  Yes or no?  I don’t want excuses!”

“I’m trying to explain!”

“Don’t talk back to me!  What is wrong with you?  Do as I say, not as I do.  Because I said so.  Don’t you dare look at me that way!”

I silently wonder – what way?  Is it the confusion that bothers you?  The pain?  Or the contempt?

“What is wrong with you?  What is wrong with you?!”

What is wrong with me?  Why am I so different?  Why do I always feel alone even among friends?  Why is it that the only time I’m at peace is when I’m drawing or writing?  Except now my drawings grow increasingly disturbing, and I often destroy them.  The same with my writing.  I destroy it before anyone reads my innermost thoughts, the ones preoccupied with despair and misery.  I destroy it before they have evidence that something truly is wrong with me.  Destroy it all.  Destroy everything and withdraw farther into myself.

“Ma’am, have you considered taking him to a psychologist?”

“Ma’am, I think our son has ADHD and needs to be on medication.”

Hey, kid, take your meds.  Take your drugs.  Take drugs so people will like you, so they will accept you, because there is something wrong with you that drugs will fix.  People don’t like you unless you take your drugs because who you are is unacceptable, not good enough.

“Doctor, the Ritalin isn’t working!”  

People fear what they don’t understand.  Now my own parents are afraid of me.  “Son, you can’t live here anymore, we don’t want you here.  We’re going to put you somewhere where you can get the help you need…” somewhere that you’ll be beaten and hospitalized twice, sexually abused, and placed on Thorazine because nothing transforms a confused thirteen-year-old boy into a drooling obedient little zombie like horse tranquilizers!  At least until insurance runs out and stops paying for the institutionalization.  (Yes, my thirteenth birthday was a suicidal tendencies song.)

Nowhere else to go but home (if you can call it that), even though they don’t want me there.  But if I run away, they report me to the police.  Now the police are always looking for me because I’m a ‘troubled kid’. 

“Take your meds!  Why aren’t you taking your meds?”  Why do I need to be on drugs for people to like me?  Or to like myself?  Is that even me?  Hmmm… I wonder what those drugs are like?  The drugs don’t fill the void, I simply no longer care about it, no longer care about all the confusion in my head from all the fears, shame, and self-doubt I‘ve internalized; numb that pain; it’s easier to be numb, to shut off all my emotions and pretend I don’t care about anything.  It doesn’t matter, I’ll probably get hit by a bus anyhow.  At least I’m accepted by others, even if I can’t accept myself.  I can at least tolerate myself from one day to the next. 

I find myself drawn toward music and imagery that explores the angry dark depths within.  It is safer and more cathartic than opening a vein.  And less of a mess.  And I haven’t quite succumbed to that demon yet, but it’s breathing down my neck.  I no longer bother to conceal my drawings or writings; maybe it is a subtle cry for help or to be understood?  

“Son, why are you drawing such vile things?  You used to draw such beautiful things… now it is all darkness, death, pain, and depressing drawings.  Stop drawing that stuff!  Why are you listening to that kind of music?  You’re not allowed to listen to that!  You’re not allowed to draw that!  You’re not allowed to express that!  You’re not allowed to think that!”  Yeah… because trying to control a highly creative but very confused and depressed nonconformist by dictating what they are allowed to think or how to express themselves is really going to work out well.  Hmmm… maybe if you beat him into a bloody mess that will cure the anger and resentment, make him more submissive?  And when the local cops see the bloody results and laugh about it, or a teacher tells that kid he probably deserved it, that won’t result in any further resentment or rage or lack of respect for authority, will it?  Nahhh…

“Son, why are you so full of rage and self-destructive nihilism?  Why don’t you care about anything?  Why are you on drugs?  What is wrong with you?!”

Is it really so difficult to figure out why so many highly creative people self-destruct and end up in prison?  Does our culture really value highly creative kids who have difficulty conforming with the other ninety percent?  

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR. Aaron Striz is a first time writer for WITS, and he also won the most recent writing contest asking people to share what they felt was a significant factor in their incarceration. Aaron was a juvenile when he was first incarcerated and he is now in his forties – which gives him incredible insight. His ability to express that should go further than this creative writing platform, and would be beneficial in the field of social work as well as criminal justice.
Aaron Striz has also used his gifts to advocate for himself and those he lives with regarding issues such as solitary confinement. I feel it is important to note that Aaron was originally incarcerated at the age of 17, which would not be long after the experiences shared in this essay. Not long after his incarceration, he did try to escape and he has spent a great deal of his time in solitary confinement. He was sentenced to life, he won’t be eligible for parole until he has served thirty years, and although I am not familiar with his case, a quick search indicates there was no loss of life.

Aaron Striz can be contacted at:
Aaron Striz #838215
Wynne Unit
810 FM 2821
Huntsville, TX 77320

Becoming incarcerated at seventeen meant a few things for me. In the state of Virginia it meant I could be tried as an adult and given an adult sentence. It also meant I could not be housed with the adults until my eighteenth birthday. That didn’t stop them from sending me to the adult jail though. It just meant I had to stay in solitary confinement for three months.

At my jail, solitary confinement had a nickname: The Yellow Brick Road. I was told it was called this due to the mustard yellow concrete floor in each cell. I once asked a guard why it was yellow. His response still echoes in my mind – “‘Cause we can see the blood better.” As a 17-year-old girl with no previous incarceration experience, his statement and the callous way he said it was shocking to me. What did he mean, ‘blood’? Whose blood? Why would someone be bleeding? I later found out that people often tried to commit suicide in the isolation units. Apparently it happened often enough that they spent money to paint the floors.

That yellow floor drove me crazy. I remember sitting at the door day-in-and-day-out peeling up the paint with my nails. By the time I left that cell there was a grey patch of concrete where I sat each day. I am sure they covered it with more disappointing yellow. I hope that the next person at least got to experience some relief in the concrete island I created.

Those first three months of my incarceration left a stain on my soul that I will never forget. I can recall the feelings of desperation, hopelessness, and loneliness anytime I summon up the memories. Being isolated at seventeen so suddenly and abruptly after being free just moments before left a mark on me that I think is unique to incarcerated juveniles. In that cell with the small slab of concrete and the covered window is where I celebrated my eighteenth birthday. I did decide to celebrate though. By this point I was indigent, but I had saved a Hostess cupcake and a bottle of Sprite from months before. I sang myself Happy Birthday and ate the last of my canteen.

Once I turned eighteen I thought I’d be able to move to general population. This wasn’t the case. Now they said they were keeping me in protective custody because my case was high profile. Well, as a teenager does, I listened to the advice of my peers, which in this case were other ladies in solitary. Through the doors they yelled and encouraged me to tell them I was having suicidal thoughts. They said I’d have to spend a few days in the strip cell but then they’d put me in population. Ashamedly, I followed their advice. Luckily, they were right. My foray into population was met with comments about everything from my body to my crime. I was so excited to have human contact again that it didn’t matter what they said. I was free.

Looking back, I believe that the true reason solitary confinement at the jail was called The Yellow Brick Road had little to do with the floor at all. More so I believe it was called that because of the psychological effect it left on those housed there. There’s really only one way to describe the thoughts that run through your mind while sitting alone and staring at that mustard stained floor. Click your heels hard Dorothy and stop thinking about how badly you want to go home.

ABOUT THE WRITER.  I am excited to say Ashleigh has placed second in our most recent writing contest regarding solitary confinement. I think what makes her stand out is her unique style of honest creativity. She is a natural writer. I hope we continue to hear from her. Ashleigh can be contacted at:

Ashleigh Dye #1454863
Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women
144 Prison Lane
Troy, VA 22974

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’.

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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