My thought – ‘My life is over’. No more clothes, parties, women, vacations. No more freedom and all that joyously came with it. As we drove, I noticed beer trucks zoom past. Commuters drove by without a care as to why the ornery white van was even on the same highway as their colorful vehicle.
As I began to reflect, the silence became revealing. I noticed things I would’ve missed under other circumstances. My senses adapted with a sense of urgency. I knew the van’s muffler had to be busted because it made a hissing and popping noise every 45 seconds or whenever we slowed down and sped up again. I noticed when the driver loudly belched twice and gave a hearty laugh. Then he gave a doughy chuckle while he lifted his butt off the seat and released a silent fart that was ferociously smelly. Whatever he ate must’ve had a lot of onions in it. His partner gave him a displeased sideways look before he cracked his window, allowing the funk to exit.
The van’s radio was tuned to a country station, playing songs like Smoke Rings In The Dark and You Don’t Impress Me Much. The singer had a hook that stuck in my mind – ‘Who do you think you are? Brad Pitt?’ It was a braggadocious melody that I actually liked, even though I didn’t have a clue who Brad Pitt was.
At our first stop I was handed over to TDCJ prison officials. One of the officers looked like Boss Hog from the Dukes of Hazard, just taller. He gave the deputies a solid handshake before exchanging a few words and gestures in a code that only they could understand. “Na, look here. Can you read, boy?” The prison guard asked me in a gauche southern plantation owner’s drawl that made me sick in the ears. At this point I was so emotionally drained that I felt faint. I was broken, and I didn’t even realize it. I answered him by nodding my head ‘yes’. “A’ight. Na, we’se gonna take you inside and get you processed in our system. It’s only gonna be two ways it’ll happen. One. You act like a man, and we treat you like one. Or, two. Act like a ass, and we’ll f!@# you like one. Is we clear?”
Again, I nodded my head ‘yes’.
They took my chains and handcuffs off without a care of me attacking them. The guards seemed comfortable around the convicted, as if they’d accepted the idea that they were simply ‘inmates’ too, except they were getting paid to be there. Or their ease could’ve been due to the guard towers that held gunmen inside with their rifles aimed at me, ready to shoot with any sign of a snafu that I might cause.
I followed behind them, and when we entered the huge crimson brick building one of the guards yelled an introduction that was louder than a bullhorn, getting the attention of the other sixty or so inmates and officers. “Dead man walking! Get y’all faces against the wall!”
Prison policy demands that all non-death row inmates are supposed to face the wall in a frisk position, not looking at any death row inmate as one passes by. Why? I have no clue – makes no sense to me. As I passed by some inmates stole glances at me. Some had sympathetic eyes. Others were only frustrated that my arrival had delayed them momentarily from getting to where they wanted to be.
I was placed in a bullpen that smelled of bleach. The floor shined from being freshly buffed. Again, I was ordered to strip nude, hand over the county’s orange uniform that I had worn, and given an off-white jumpsuit with ‘DR’ painted on it. Then I was quickly ushered to an awaiting barber’s chair where the baby afro I was beginning to admire was cut into an uneven buzz cut. “Standard prison haircut. Sorry,” the inmate barber explained.
Once that was over I was brought before the classification officer. He looked like a thin, 60-year-old liberal and impressed me as educated and reasonable. He smiled at me, which was a welcome sight, and directed me to sit down. After taking a seat I learned that looks are quite deceiving. As it turned out, the man was the most disrespectful officer I met that day.
“You know, in my day your kind would’ve never gotten so much generous attention. We simply would’ve brought you out yonder, found a good ole tree to hang ya from. Just one less…” he was saying just before he cut himself off, not finishing his racist insult. He was about to say the almighty peccant N-word that has divided whites and blacks from the moment it was conceived for the sole purpose of pejorative dehumanization – but he didn’t. He didn’t have to. It was already understood who and what he was.
He would go on to ask me a bunch of questions that he fed into his computer. Questions like, “With a name like Mamou, what, you Muslim?” pronouncing the ‘s’ like a swarm of ‘z’s, in an effort to insult the religion.
“No. I’m from Louisiana.” And even though I had no previous religion, I told him I was a Christian – because that’s what my mom said would set me free. I would later find out that in 1999, Texas sent 48 men and women to death row. That was the most ever sentenced in a single year, which many defense lawyers would say indicates DA’s abused their power and overcharged the poor and minorities just to stay true to their tough on crime stance.
As soon as the interrogation was over, I was loaded into another van. This one had no window. And the guards were two redneck hillbillies that drove like NASCAR drivers down the non-scenic back roads with their music blasting to an R&B/Rap station. I just knew we were destined to get into a wreck. We sped over humps and nearly ran over a three-legged dog as we made our way around sharp curves, knocking me to the floor several times. It took about an hour before we pulled up to the back entrance of the Ellis One prison. Like so many before me, I knew nothing of the process or what to expect once I exited the van. I didn’t know anything about appeals. All I thought about at that moment was that I was about to face the executioner.
I was quickly escorted through the general population showering area, where a hundred obsequious nude inmates stood in line to take a quick shower. I recall thinking that the margin of error of one inmate rubbing up against the backside of another was extremely tight. I told myself, ‘If this is how death row inmates shower, I’ll be one smelly dude.’
I kept my face straight ahead, not allowing my curiosity to invade their privacy. The walk was quick and then that damn announcement rang out again as we entered the main hallway, “Dead man walking! Hit the wall, you maggots!” The officer barking the order tightly gripped his steel club stick, eager to beat back any inmate that wasn’t in compliance. Again, the inmates faced the wall, noses touching brick, hands and legs spread. I felt bad that so much attention was being placed on me, causing these incarcerated men more humiliation. As soon as we passed, they continued doing what they were doing as if I’d never walked by.
We reached the housing area where death row inmates were held, and my body alerted me that it had been an entire day and a half since I’d eaten anything. I was famished. I was brought to J-21’s wing and there on the floor by the entrance was a blue food tray with what appeared to be a perfectly uneaten piece of baked chicken. My mouth began to salivate in ways that were unnatural to me because I’d never experienced that kind of hunger before. I wanted that chicken so badly I didn’t care about the self-imposed dignity I’d conjured up about being a Mamou. Mamous don’t cry, we don’t beg, we don’t embarrass ourselves in public, we are to act regal even if we aren’t. Well, hunger pains are a callous dictator too, and I would have dropped to my knees and lapped that meat up with my mouth like a dog had they told me I could. I informed the guards I was extremely hungry. They smiled, checked the time on their watches and told me that chow would be served shortly.
It would be two hours before ‘chow time’ came. In the meantime I was brought to a cell that reminded me of an ecosystem of grime, filth, germs, critters, graffiti and loneliness. There was a banal smell that hung in the air.
At around 4:30 they brought us ‘chow’, which consisted of what they called tuna-pea-casserole. I’d never heard of anything like it. I tasted it, taking in a huge chunk, gagged and immediately threw up. Prison food smells and tastes different in a way that alarms your body as it enters. Natural defenses go up and try to eject the invasion. It takes months to get acclimated to the taste of half cooked foods, that are at times spoiled or not food at all.
All the TVs were on, and the rest of the guys were glued to the cartoon show on Fox called Beast Wars. I thought that was too immature for me, so I sat on my bunk. I was hungry, frustrated and angry. I threw my crying face into my hands with my mouth trembling, silently whispering a prayer to this God my mother prayed to, languidly mouthing, “I can’t do this sh**!”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. Charles “Chucky” Mamou is living on Death Row in Texas and currently working on his next novel. He can be contacted at:
Charles Mamou #999333
Polunsky Unit 12-CD-53
3872 South FM 350
Livingston, TX 77351
I am confined to a space designed to erase the last traces of humanity that remain after the war over my sanity.
When I stepped off the bus at the Robertson Unit in Abilene, Texas, in August of 1994, I was 33 years old. I had no idea what was in store for me – I call it training day.
Calendars are my enemy, sheets of paper that have the audacity to not only record but embellish the fact that I am losing time. I can regain space, never time – ever!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
Imagine being trapped in box with barely enough oxygen to sustain your body. That is what a prison cell in Virginia feels like. Inside your box, there is just enough air to prevent you from dying. Living in that box can easily destroy you mentally, trapping your mind and playing tricks on your emotions, on your sense of a sound mind and even on your intelligence.
I know absolutely no one – I repeat, no one – who stood up in the third grade after being asked the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up, Matty?” and replied with enthusiasm, “A prison guard!”
Rewind back to 1989. I was 29 years old, had a family, was gainfully employed, and had a foothold on a music career that was more love than dream. It was mid-summer, and I was alone and recording vocals in my makeshift home studio.
“I’ll take fifty boxes of the mint,” I said as casually as I could, thinking, ‘my wife is going to kill me’. But that many cookies goes a long way. I wouldn’t have to buy cookies for six months.
As a kid my father’s father used to pick me up every Saturday morning to go get a haircut from the ‘brutal barber’, Mr. Plumbar. He had a reputation of using a straight razor on little boys’ heads, then slapping alcohol across the cuts he had made when he was done. Young boys feared getting a haircut from him, and older fathers and grandfathers brought their young boys to him to prove that their sons were brave.
Nothing is sacred here. We still aren’t even provided water outside, and it’s only getting hotter. Water on a hot day should not be considered a privilege. It’s not for the attack dog – he has a big bucket of water to drink out of. That’s what it’s all about though – it’s a system designed to slowly strip away our humanity and whatever self worth we have left. In the name of justice we are left in the care of the unjust. We’ve let people down and we have to find a way to forgive ourselves and become the people we were meant to be, in a world where our authority figures view us as less worthy than the dog on the yard.