Monster

“Telephone, Kody, it’s Muhammad.”

I went to the phone.

“Asalaam Alaikum,” he greeted me.

“Walaikum Asalaam.”

“So, are you ready to roll?” he asked.

“Roll? Where?”

“To the seminar.”

Damn. I had completely forgotten about that.

“Yeah, I’m still down.”

“Great,” he said, “I’ll be right over to pick you up.”

Thirty minutes later I heard his horn. When I got to the car there was another brother inside who looked vaguely familiar. He introduced himself as Hamza. Hamza, yeah, that’s right. I’d met bro in Y.T.S. on that first encounter during the slave movie. We saluted each other as Muhammad pulled out into traffic.

“So, what’s been up, Monster?” Muhammad asked.

He always used my gang name, I believe to make me feel comfortable. Even when he introduced me to brothas and sistas in the movement he said, “This is Monster Kody from the Eight Trays.” He never downed where I was coming from and never made me feel ashamed. I must admit, though, that when he’d introduce me to revolutionaries I’d feel uneasy being announced as Monster Kody from Eight Tray. Like most bangers, I felt that the revolutionaries wanted to stop gangs, which is seldom true. They want to stop gang violence, which is ninety percent black-on-black. And the way they try to stop it is to show that black-on-black violence is a result of white- on-black violence. I knew none of this then, but felt uneasy all the same.

“Ain’t nuttin’ up, man, just dealin’ wit’ this madness out here.”

“Have you read anything on Chairman Fred?”

“Who?” I asked, not catching who he meant without the last name attached.

“Fred Hampton. The brotha in the Panther book.”

“Oh, naw, man. I ain’t read nuttin’. Been havin’ a few problems out here, you know?”

“Yeah, I heard. Someone told me you shot the street races up Sunday night.”

“Either me or them.”

“You gotta check out Chairman Fred. The brotha was dynamic and strong, sort of like you. How old are you now?”

“Nineteen.”

“Yeah, Chairman Fred was twenty-one when the pigs assassinated him. You know, Chairman Fred used to say, ’They can kill the revolutionary, but they can’t kill revolution. They can kill the liberator, but they can’t kill liberation,’ Ain’t that deep? Pigs killed Fred ’cause Fred was serious. Fred was hard as nails, brotha. You should read up on the brotha. You’ll dig him strong.”

“Yeah, I intend to. But lately, man, I’ve just been wantin’ to turn myself in to the graveyard and sleep.”

“What?! Brotha, it ain’t never that bad. That’s what the beast want you to do. Check out what H. Rap Brown say: ’We are starting to realize what America has long known. And that is every black birth in America is a political birth, because they don’t know which one is going to be the one to raise the people up.’ Bro, don’t let the beast pressure you into taking yourself out. You got a mission, remember that.”

“Righteous.”

But still I felt tired, overburdened. Today I know what that weight was, but then I didn’t. It was my conscience struggling under the weight of constant wrongdoing. Not wrongdoing in any religious sense, but doing things that were morally wrong based on the human code of ethics. Also, it was my subconscious telling me that my time was up. I knew it, I felt it, but I just couldn’t face it. No professional can. “You’re too old,” “You can’t move like you used to,” “You’re slippin’.” No one wants to hear that, especially when that life is all you have known.

At nineteen I felt like thirty. I didn’t know what to do. Dying on the trigger didn’t look so appealing anymore. I needed to do something that would be as satisfying as banging once was. Banging had taught me that I like the feeling of fighting for something. My greatest enjoyment from banging came from the sense of power it gave me. To be armed and considered dangerous felt good, but to stand in my turf that I fought to make safe was the climax of banging for me. So I knew that whatever I did after banging had to involve fighting for power and land.

When Muhammad dropped me off I began reading about Chairman Fred Hampton from the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther party. Just like Muhammad said, Fred was raw! Fred and eight other Panthers, including his pregnant fiancee, were set up by an informant and ambushed in their residence. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered. The informant and Fred’s killer were both Negroes. After reading about Fred, I really got into the book.

On September 27, a month after the street race shoot-out, our door was kicked in by the soldier-cops. They found a .25 automatic and hauled me off to the county jail. I was charged with mayhem and two counts of attempted murder. Three people had gotten shot. One, Li’l Eddie Boy, had positively identified me while in the hospital. He was the mayhem victim. The irony of this was that he and his unit had come into East Coast ’hood— sovereign territory—gunning for me. I’d defended myself and shot him in the ass in a dark alley as he ran away, yet he had positively identified me. I guess their thinking was, “If we can’t kill him, we’ll lock him up. But he must go.”

When I got to County I was immediately rushed to 4800, the Crip module. Out of 18,000 inmates in Los Angeles County at that time, all wore blue jumpsuits except the 150 Crips who were in 4800—they wore gray. Everyone who wanted to take a shot at us could, as we stood out like flies in the buttermilk. When I arrived, Li’l Fee was there, as was Big Eddie Boy, the victim’s brother. A sort of detente existed between the sets, since the Consolidated Crip Organization (CCO) had members sprinkled throughout the module keeping the peace. They did this by keeping our rage focused on the pigs, who were always antagonistically aggressive toward us—and our dicks.

I told Fee that Li’l Eddie Boy was a witness against me and he assured me that he would not come to court. At that time, Li’l Fee only had a gun charge, but a week or two later he was on the front page of the Los Angeles Sentinel wanted in connection with five murders—the Kermit Alexander family murders. The story was that it was supposed to have been a hit but that he’d gotten the wrong street, only even we weren’t doing hits. It made the Syndicate story carry a little more weight.

Li’l Fee was taken to High Power, maximum security, and Big Eddie Boy got released. Thus my contact with Li’l Eddie fell off and, surprisingly, he came to court to testify.

Slowpoke, Football, and Fishbone were in County for double murder. Diamond and Nasty were there for murder. Diamond had caught a Swan writing on the wall at St. Andrews Park and beat him to death with a baseball bat. Ckrizs was there, too. In fact, Crips from all over were there.

We were housed in Denver row and Charlie row in four-man cells and in Able row and Baker row in six-man cells. The pigs were so complacent that often there’d be six members from the same set in the same cell. A command booth was situated in the middle, and a glass catwalk ran the length of the tiers for observation by the pigs. Communal showers were located at the entrance to each tier.

For all of us, 4800 was a new testing ground, and there was always something going on.

9. 48 HOURS

Module 4800, the relatively new (to us) attempt by the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department’s Operation Safe Street (O.S.S.) to curb the gang activity in the L.A. County Jail, wasn’t working. Their attempt to isolate us in a module, alone and out of the general population, was an impossible task.

The reasons they gave for such “preferential” treatment were initially cloaked in emotional rhetoric and sprang from the April 1984 rebellion, in which seventeen Crips erupted into rampaging headbangers in the 4000 floor chow hall. Heron, an O.G. from Spooktown Compton Crips, had been beaten by the pigs for some infraction and the other bangers just weren’t going for it. Fed up with the wanton abuse from the pigs, the Crips seized the chow