WHO AM I?

For most of my life, I was the guy most wannabe thugs wished they could have been. Officially declared a “Menace 2 Society”, I was sentenced to almost 30 years in federal prison for my role as mastermind of a series of daring bank robberies in the 70s. Two involved shootouts. One with the police. The other with a private citizen in a bank parking lot where I narrowly missed being killed. While confined, I took part in an even more brazen prison escape. Yet, despite this seeming penchant for violence, I consoled myself with the notion that I was a saint trapped inside a gangsta’s body, and oddly enough, this wasn’t far from the truth.

I had been born on a Monday that rained. It was September 1st, Labor Day,1952, and for the next 12 years lived in exactly the same place where I had been born; a brown, three-roomed, shotgun shack, sandwiched between poverty and pain in a rundown Charlotte slum.

I had been a brilliant kid, equipped with all the mental skills required to escape the ghetto. By ten years old, I had a library fit for a scholar. By 11, I had practically mastered the dictionary, was a whiz at Scrabble, and was an honor roll student at school. At 12, I had completed my first novel, but at 13 I discovered hustling and I immediately dropped out of school, adopting “the streets” as my home. By 14, I was in Training School for assaulting a police officer. I served a year and a day, but no sooner than I was released than I embarked on a personal crime spree that landed me in prison where I was the youngest convict on the yard. I was a mere 15 years old.

Hours after my arrival in prison, the facility exploded into a vortex of violence that claimed the lives of 8 prisoners which, until the uprising in Attica a few years later, was the most brutal prison riot in the history of the country. The riots were in response to the assassination of Dr. MLK in April 1968. I had to grow up overnight as prison was no safe haven for little boys.

In no time at all, I was Public Enemy Number 1 at the Youth Center and held the record for going to the “Hole” for rule violations such as fighting, being insubordinate, and my personal favor, inciting a riot. As punishment for starting the riot, I was, at 17, shipped to a faraway prison farm where I was placed on the side of the prison that housed the older convicts, most of whom were older than my father. This tactic, employed by the prison administration, was done in the hopes that I would not exhibit the same influence over the older prisoners as I had with the younger guys. How terribly were they mistaken because shortly after my arrival on the Farm, I burned down the cornfield in protest of working conditions. Not long after this, I commandeered Sunday morning church services where the Superintendent, his wife, along with other chain-gang bigwigs and dignitaries were in attendance and gave a speech that would have made Malcolm X proud.

During my confinement, I acquired my high school diploma at 16, wrote my first play, turned militant, and when released at 19, traveled to New York to join the Black Panthers. Instead, I discovered heroin. The revolution would now have to wait as a heroin habit left little room for anything else and for a long period of time in my life, there was nothing I enjoyed more than starting my day off by committing a crime. During these times, nothing I felt or experienced pushed me towards becoming a better human being. In all honesty, I was comfortably numbed by my all-consuming rage.

By comparison, another interesting discovery I made was that being smart was not as valued a trait as being tough and I wrestled with this startling---albeit disturbing--- revelation since it left me completely unable to rationalize my deeply-held belief that the world was a beautiful place and that I was a problem. This was my dilemma, and it caused me to wallow in endless despair because I was living a double life. I was not who I was! I cannot count or recount the countless moments during the course of my life when I have cursed my very existence. Why!? Because I was born and reared in an environment that never awarded me the opportunity to benefit from my intellect because in the hood, it was imperative that I be strong. Being smart was feminine. Guys were tough. Girls were smart. End of story.

When I was 12, I played hookey from school and was lounging in the Caddy Shack at the golf course with the older guys. I listened half-heartedly as they regaled each other with the tall tales of their most recent exploits as each man, in turn, spilled the beans about what he had accomplished the night before. When I related that I had spent last night reading a book, the howling laughter was immediate, cutting me to the core of my being. It was as if I had violated the sanctity of life in the hood by wasting time reading a book. How dare I disturb the etiquette of young, black males whose only aspiration at my age should be based on becoming stronger, faster, badder.

I ran from the Caddy Shack followed by a vile stream of humiliating laughter that howled at my back. I felt reduced and I vowed, right then and there, that I would become the toughest motherfucka in the hood. No one would ever laugh at me again. And then I briefly wondered what it would be like to not go to my favorite place in the world, the public library where I had a gold star for reading more books than virtually any other schoolchild in the city.

No more Mister Nice Guy!

When I entered the 7th grade later that fall, I was such a terror in the classroom that I was granted a social promotion to the 8th grade. A social promotion is when a students fails the requirements for a regular promotion but the teachers pass the student just to get rid of him. Well, that’s how I made it to the 8th grade. I failed in every one of my classes but rode right on into 8th grade with a social promotion, but before I could commence my career as an 8th grader, the 8th grade teachers apparently knew what they were in for, and they conspired against me to get me kicked out of all schools in my county. They even had the nerve to ship me off to another city to finish the 8th grade, but by then, I had had enough of the bullshit. I quit school, never returning to public school although I did drop into prison not too long afterwards. After all, I was tough.

To date, I have spent 35 years of my life in some of the toughest prisons in the country and I have witnessed acts of violence so gut-wrenching that my faith in humanity was shaken to its core. In all honesty, I was no innocent bystander in the mayhem. Once, in 76, while in federal custody, I was voted the person most likely to become a serial killer! This unanimous vote won me a referral to the Mental Health Department where I was saved from mental murder by the white psychologist. As luck would have it, the psyche doctor and I shared the same last name and he joked that we could have been related. I told him that may be truer than he imagined since his family could have owned my family during slavery. Our bond established, he went against the normal practice of prescribing psychotropic drugs for me which he explained would “fuck me up”. Instead of putting me on drugs, he introduced me to yoga and meditation. This literally changed my life.

What began as a prison experiment turned out to be the spiritual trigger that compelled me to want to change my life, but I had to admit that prison was not the most ideal environment to want to ‘wake up and smell the roses.’ So I decided, as an alternative, to escape, and though I almost got shot in the process, I still experienced the beauty of yoga and meditation while on lockdown.

I tried, as best I could, to balance my inner need for calm against my external desire for self-preservation. It was always vitally important that I kept things in perspective because despite how much calm I wanted to usher into my penal existence, I still had to make it undeniably clear that my chain-gang swagger was still visible. Yet, I inwardly longed to be good.

Looking back, all things considered, I think I have managed rather well, yet it still bends me out of shape when the subject of my goodness comes up. Over the last two months, in no less than three conversations, the matter came up that “I was too good for my own good.” Or they rant about how they would not have done whatever it was that I had done. I thoroughly enjoy doing good. It truly warms me to my soul. No bullshitting. That’s just how I roll, but what disturbs me is that my friends make it seem like a weakness to be kind. I AIN’T WEAK! It’s just that I don’t mind being good and being gangsta.

I remember very vividly the time I was inside a bank, robbing it. Well, let me give you the background of the story. Okay, here goes. It was on a late, sunny, summer Friday around 4:00 pm when my friends and I invaded a North Carolina National bank. The bank was so crowded that when we announced our intentions, and to formally inform all present that this was indeed a stick-up, no one paid us any attention. It was as though we were invisible until one of the crew fired shots into the ceiling. Spontaneous pandemonium erupted as panic-stricken bank patrons scattered here and there in search of refuge. Guess what? It was my job that day to patrol the floor which meant it was my direct responsibility to maintain order while my partners stole money from the teller drawers. Never one to flinch from my duty, I began to knock people over, or to pull them down by their hair. Trust me, I had my work cut out for me, but when I noticed a frightened, blonde-haired girl, on the bank floor, crying, I immediately ceased what I was doing. I knelt down to comfort her, patting her gently on her shoulder and telling her that everything was going to be a’ight. The camera caught me, sawed-off shotgun in hand, kneeling down, consoling her. The newspaper dubbed me “The Gentleman Bandit.”

AND THAT WAS THE MOMENT THAT THE REAL ME SHONE THROUGH!