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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s what I ask myself every day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to my deep end.

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

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

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

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