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

After being in this prison system more years than I have lived on the streets, I’m feeling things I’ve never felt before – like my life was a waste.  The world is almost thirty years ahead of me.  When I think of people, I think of what life was like outside this prison in 1994.  I still see the people who were once my school mates as kids.  I still feel like a kid.  I was one when I came here.  I don’t still think like a kid, but I still shoot basketball and exercise just like when I left the world.  I am 44.

I’ve spent over half my life thinking about the events that led up to the night of January 11, 1994 – the day before my eighteenth birthday.  Mobile is different now.  If I lived there now, it never would have happened.  There is a Coalition Against Bullying now.  They have Anti-Bullying Awareness Weeks.   There is something called a ‘Bullyblocker’.  You text a number if you are being bullied – your text goes straight to the District Attorney’s office.  I guess it’s too late for me to text that.  I did contact the right people at that time though.  I went to my parents, the school, and the police.  It’s all on record.  I just didn’t have that Bullyblocker number.  I would have used it if I had – and I wouldn’t be here.

What makes me different than a kid that lives in Mobile today?  I was bullied by men that didn’t even go to my high school. There is no doubt the things that were done to me would have gotten a response if I had texted a hotline.  It exceeded bullying.  I was pushed around, chased, stalked – I was in high school and shot at on more than one occasion.  If none of that had happened, what happened on January 11, 1994, wouldn’t have happened.  People make excuses for themselves all the time.  That’s not what this is.  That’s just reality.  If the people who were supposed to had resolved the issue like they were supposed to, I, Louis Singleton, Jr., would never have done what I did.  I wasn’t raised to hurt anyone. That’s not who I was or am.

I’m smarter though.   I refuse to give into the criminal life.  I get on to young brothers who can’t seem to give up the drug life – until I break it down for them.  They have big dreams of being Big Time Drug Dealers.  They call me Unk.  I try to encourage them to get out and do better for themselves.  The at-home training my late mother gave me is embedded heavily in me.  Knowing the difference between right and wrong will always be in me, no matter where they send me. 

I’m living in the Alabama prison system, one of, if not the, worst prison system in America.  Respect is at an all time low, but I never disrespect anyone, never have, never will.  My mom taught me better.  I hope those that were affected by my actions forgive me.  I don’t expect them to understand because, truly, you’d have to walk in my shoes.  You’d have to be the seventeen year old kid who was getting shot at.  I don’t want that for anybody.

They see me as a ‘violent offender’.  I’m not violent.  That label doesn’t make me violent.  I was seventeen, and it was a violent crime that never would have happened if I had been able to text that magic number and get help.  I’m not even allowed to talk at my own parole hearing.  They don’t see me.  They see ‘violent offender’. 

My first coach told me to never give up, no matter how badly you are losing the game.  I haven’t forgotten that to this day.   It’s the fourth quarter, the score is 44-10, the other team has the ball with 3:54 left on the clock.  Play hard until the clock says 0:00.  One time I was in a game playing defensive back, and a guy beat me on a broken coverage.  He was running to the end zone, and I was chasing him.  He got so far in front of me, I stopped pursuing him.  He scored.  I got chewed out heavily for that.  Anything could have happened.  He could have dropped the ball.  From that day on, I’ve never given up.    

ABOUT THE WRITER:  Mr. Singleton’s story can be found here. WITS is grateful for his honest and heartfelt writing, and I hope he continues to write about his life in the Alabama Department of Corrections. Louis Singleton can be contacted at:
Louis Singleton #179665
Fountain Correctional Center
9677 Highway 21 North
Atmore, AL 36503

I don’t remember my mother’s face.  Not the warmth of her smile or her loving embrace.  In fact, I don’t have one memory of her at all.   Sherly Ann Lacey.   In a drugged-out rage, my sister’s father took her life one night while she slept.   Using a shotgun, he blew her brains onto a wall.  She was due to have his second child any day.

Naturally the event devastated my, her, family.  She was the first of my grandmother’s eleven children to be lost so early in life.

Many will believe it was my mom’s murder that first shaped my life, but that’s not true.   It was people’s reaction to it that molded who I became, shaped the conclusions I would draw in life and how I’d react to pain, loss and various levels of devastation that serve as markers in every life. 

Nature verses nurture?  Nurture wins hands down every time.  It’s people who shape people.  Hard scrabble environments do not create hard hearts or ill-formed souls.  People do.

Louise Lacey, my grandmother, herself a quiet, ‘nurtured’ woman, raised my sister and I.  A beauty in her day, giving birth to eleven children by three different men, and being subject to my great-grandmother, who might well have been the basis for a character from Walter Mosely’s Los Angeles, my grandmother eased into a grand-motherly figure.  Love.

By the time of my mother’s murder, my granny was an old hand with children.  Panic after a miss-deed or the bright blood from an accident didn’t send her reeling.  When her brother beat his wife, she’d complain about the noise – after a while…

Hers was the knowledge of survival.  Coming of age in the 40’s and 50’s as a black woman was as hard as it was complex.  You cried when you couldn’t hold it in any longer.  Then you simply dusted yourself off and did the next thing needed to survive.  Tough.

I’m surely being too simple, short, and impatient with the telling of her depth of spirit, her staunch faith in God and her unshakable commitment to her family.  Like the moon, she’s a silent force that has affected every part of me.

If my granny’s footprint in life was quiet, it was only because my great grand-mother’s, Josie Frederick-Hintz, was so loud.  At six foot in her socks, ‘Big Joe’ was a demanding, sharp-tongued, physical woman. She chewed tobacco, ran a whore house and carried a .38 revolver until the day she died – not  for show or as a bluff.

Born in 1911 in Louisiana, Big Joe had owned a grocery store, bowling alley, brothel, after-hours gambling den and a total of five different rental properties throughout Los Angeles.  She pinned her money in a silk pouch to her bra.

Josie gave birth to two children and raised her brother’s son after his murder.  Systemic racism, sexism, abject poverty, rape, molestation, robbery, abuse, beatings, murder,  jealous, insecure and ambitious men, their equally motivated, if shrewder, counter-parts in women  – Josie not only survived it all in the big city as a veraciously stunning beauty, she was also able to, at times, win herself a few slices of pie.

But those pieces of ‘white only pie’ come at a cost.  Josie’s size in life demanded control and that others, people she loved, be smaller in life to make room for the demands of  who she needed to be – the boss!

Her biological son, my great-uncle Bill, Jr., was a con who became a homosexual after being violently raped in prison.  He was serving time for counterfeiting U.S. Treasury notes, five dollar bills.  Her brother’s son, Lemule, would become a vicious, small time pimp.

Large personalities, small egos, violent drama, they were characters you couldn’t make up.  My grandfather was from a cattle ranch in Texas, a pimp and hustler who discharged from the army in California.

They were all largely uneducated people save by life itself.  Like the rest of us, they had flaws.  The one that has been a prominent force in my life was their silence.  They seemed to need to marshal their energies to hold it all in and to move forward.

Through my self-education while in prison, I’ve become fairly articulate, but I remember the silence of a time before I became a reader, before I saw the value of language and communication, before I learned to read, comprehend and apply ideas to further my own understanding of me, my world, my actions.  Silence.

I know how the lack of the ability to express one’s self in words pushes the thunder of action deep into one’s ears.  You’re not deaf…  there is no sound!

I came up in the 80’s, MTV, BET, videos, PC, crack victims, empires and hip-hop culture.  My family’s silence was a foreign language subtitled on silent film.

Now listen!  We all believe our own struggles to be the worst.  It’s that forest through the trees thing. But by growing up never having a single meaningful conversation with the adults in my life, I kind of raised myself.   I sat waiting for something or someone to influence me, but no one ever took notice.

We are all born into motion.  That’s what life is – motion.   A body in motion will stay in motion until it’s acted upon by an equal and opposite force.  I crashed into Mr. Michael B. Huston.

Teenagers, kids, are like vacuum chambers that suck up everything indiscriminately.  Facts, emotions, ideas, words, anything floating through their lives.  Sadly, sometimes, the adults who rear them contribute the most trash to the bombardment when they are the primary force policing the intake.  They may sit back, looking confused and even offended as the young life bursts for lack of any meaningful release.  At around thirteen to fifteen or so, they act out, rebel at the mistreatment. 

Now, I grew up on violence without ever being told it was wrong to do this or that to people.  Not simply the violence put forth by the men of my family and neighborhood against the women of my home and in my world, but poverty creates its own hellish acceptance of might as a viable means, be it for respect or fear.

When my father, the Baptist preacher, found out I’d been doing robberies when I’d shot and paralyzed Mr. Huston – then an Assistant Attorney General to the State of Oregon – he expressed shock and hurt.  “How could you do something so obviously wrong?!” I remember him blurting over the phone as I sat in a juvenile detention center.   

The answer, though I didn’t know how to articulate it as a seventeen year old, was that I really didn’t know that it was all that big a deal, that people would place such a huge value on life.

That will sound twisted to some, but as a child it was extremely remedial to me.  This may go a long way in explain the Black Lives Matter movement to some.   I’d just tried to kill ‘myself’ a few months earlier. There was no panic, anger, or fear from the community.  There was no rush to review the issue before various boards.  As a child, I never received care or treatment for my mental health.

I’d ingested a small mountain of heart, blood pressure and pain pills.  Then I got into bed.  I remember passing out.   Kids test the boundaries of their world.  I didn’t believe I wanted to deal with any more pain in my life, so as no one was ever looking, I sought to move on.

If my life, my ‘black life’ didn’t matter to the world, why would I come to the conclusion as a child that his white one did?  Not that race was a factor for me or Mr. Huston at the time.  The justice system made that point emphatically.

I was thoroughly and completely confused.  As I sat in Court, it was like returning to Central Park, only to find it’s been moved!  You know the address, turn the corner, and it’s not there!  But how could you, I, be that wrong?

“How could I do something so obviously wrong – ‘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

I’ve never thought of myself as extra ordinary.  Like many born into a family of poverty, I desired more than I’d been shown in my life.

In my family the acme of success was my uncle who’d been hired by the state as a janitor in my grade school.  The job came with benefits, union wages, and security.  He helped two of his brothers get jobs as well – one of the rare times I’d seen the slow moving man smile.

When people discover I’ve been in prison more than thirty-two years on a ninety year non-homicide sentence – I was seventeen years old at the time – they assume I made some bad decisions.  I point out people’s moves in life can only be judged by their options at the time, and their eyes climb their foreheads in shock, as if to say, “Surely, you had better options than to shoot someone!”

On a rare occasion, I’ll see a head tilt to the side, a body’s way of reflecting the brain’s strenuous attempt to see an issue, the world, me? from a different angle.

Sadly, if there is one thing visible in me, it’s my anger.  Most people who live in a cage as long as I have come to a place where, for the sake of sanity, a balance has to be struck that allows reason.  I’ve always rejected it, that tipping point between the retention of hope, the most valuable of things seen and unseen, on one side and the slow carving off of pieces of myself as I sit on the opposite scale.  

Some give chunks of their souls away in an attempt to boost the economy.  The more you have, the more you spend, right, hoping it may come back around…  Call it karma, or simply planting different seeds in the hope of just a little rain, the effort and sacrifice no less noble because of its desperation or timing.  Outside of either, few will lay so much of themselves on the alter for another.

Some toss pieces of self on the fiery blaze of their rage, seeking to stave off the icy bleakness of reality through violence, drugs, and homosexuality, anything to dodge being deprived of human touch and love, the ever thirsty phantoms of hope.

So, my little cousin paroled today with tears in his eyes and a very detailed business plan that I helped him with.  I’ve studied for more than fifteen years now, connecting dots of knowledge to create plans that I may never touch myself.  I pray I have done all I can to teach him how to do the same for himself.   We fought three times before I had his attention, each blow given and received costing me another piece of myself.

I sent him back to a family of poverty, the same one that once set my options before me, but this kid had all the hope that I could give in his pocket.  Don’t worry.  I’ll find more somewhere…  After all, what are any of us worth without it? 

ABOUT THE WRITER. When a gifted writer submits their work to WITS, it is the fuel that keeps this going. Writing that shares the human heart is what we look for, which is exactly what Mr. Jones shared with us. 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