PREVIOUSLY: I’m sittin’ in the cell wonderin’ what’s gonna happen when I go back to court. How much time I was gonna get? Would I see the street again? A couple weeks later, me and my co-defenders went back to court. I called it “Let’s Make a Deal Day,” ’cause that was one thing I did know was gonna happen. They say “If you wanna take a deal today we can offer you ten years. We’ll close up the case and it’ll never be opened again.” My lawyer tell me I ain’t gotta take it. Each of my co-defendants had different lawyers and no one took a deal that day. Nobody wanna take nothin’. I asked my lawyer, “What would be the decision if you was wearin’ the shoes I’m wearin’ on my feet?” He said, If I had your shoes on my feet, I wouldn’t want anyone to tell me what I should do. Let me look into the case, maybe I might can beat it, get it dismissed.” But most of the times when the FBI involved, they got some solid concrete against you. He say, “If I can get the judge to agree with me to put you in a rehab program would you go along with that?” I told him, “I’d take it if my codees were ok with it. I wouldn’t let them down in any way…”
At the jail they gave job assignments. You could work in the kitchen, you could work in receiving, work on the paint crew. You write a request and the warden look at it and review your record. He make sure you don’t have capitol offenses, like murder or rape.
So I start working from seven am to seven pm in receiving: passing out jumpsuits, deordorant, soap, towels, toothpaste to new roll-ins. That give me more chance to keep my mind off what I’m facin’.
One day they brought a guy from up in the jail hollerin’ and screamin’, “My eyes burnin’! I can’t see a thing.”
They maced him—I don’t know what he did. He was cursin’ and sayin’, “Y’all tryin to blind me!”
They took the guy, throw him in the shower, and cut the water on. After that I say to myself, What the hell goin on?
That’s when the guard was telling us, “Go up front and close the door.” I don’t know what happen but it wasn’t nothin’ good. This kinda thing happen a lot. Guys getting maced and brought down to clean ’em up and then they brought them to the hole.
The hole is like a small steel cage that’s underground and right beside the morgue and inhabited also by big rats that run around and where the guards can see you nonstop.
I started to get talkin’ with some guards and correction officers that work in the prison. The ask where I was from, what I was in there for.
I told them I was from New Orleans. Some of them I trust, some I didn’t. I started to feel like whatever happen, I just gotta face the truth. That’s when I start minglin‘ with some guys; I open up. Some of them been in the feds doin‘ time for the same case like I had.
Some of them said, “Man, you might get ten years.
(to be continued)
I hope you’ll check out my book, Still Standing: How an Ex-Con Found Salvation in the Floodwaters of Katrina. It’s available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle form.
