transferred. It is old, dirty, rat and roach infested, and always cold. I was sent to Cypress Hall and put on the third tier. My cellmate was a civilian.
“How you doing, black man?” my cellie said with a big smile.
“Cool, asante.”
“Oh, you speak that Swahili, huh?” he asked.
“A little. My comrades have been teaching me. You?”
“Naw, but I want to learn.”
“Right.”
“Do you smoke cigarettes?”
“Naw, never have.”
“Oh, ’cause I have some tobacco. But if it bothers you I’ll smoke only on the yard.”
“Naw, it’s cool, it don’t bother me,” I replied.
He seemed like a cool cat, right up until he noticed the knife in my hand.
“Man, where you get that? You gonna get us put in the Hole, man!”
He was bug-eyed with hysteria, frantically crossing and uncrossing his arms, and his feet would not keep still.
“I keistered it and brought it from L.A. County Jail. It’s better to be caught with one than without one. We are at war, haven’t you heard?”
“
“Shhh,” I said and reduced him to silence with a mad-dog stare.
“Look, man,” he began in a lower tone, “I don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout. I ain’t involved in no war. I ain’t got no enemies. I got two years, man, and I want to go home.”
I looked at him and remembered what Salahudin had told me about brothas in the pen.
“Sanyika,” he’d said, which was what he always called me in place of Monster once I’d accepted it, “Afrikans in the pen will use every excuse they can think of to avoid aiding you in a crisis. They will cite the Bible, bad health, the weather, any and everything to get out of having to endure perhaps a little hardship as the expense for saving your life. We are neglectful like that. But let a Chicano give a distress call and you’ll have a hundred of them to deal with.” Prophecy.
“Check this out,” I said to him. “This is my weapon, my beef. I’m not getting rid of it. If you feel safe without one, fine. I don’t. If I had known you was gonna trip out I never would have let you know I had it. I’m a soldier and I ain’t gonna let nobody stick shit in me without me stickin’ somethin’ in them, ya dig?”
“Aw, man, it ain’t like that in here. Everybody cool with one another. Man, we—”
“How long you been here?”
“A week, but I—”
“You been to the pen before?”
“No, but I—”
“Well shut the fuck up then, ’cause you don’t know shit, man. You don’t know nothin’ ’bout the politics here, man,
“Politics?”
“B.G.F., E.M.E., A.B., N.F., C.C.O., U.B.N., V.G., T.S., Four-fifteen… You ever hear of them, huh?”
“Naw, sound like some code or somethin’.”
“Fool, they run these muthafuckin’ places, man. At any time they can have you murdered, man. But you don’t hear me, do you? You think just because there ain’t no guns going off ’round here now that everybody cool? Huh? All it takes is one order and any one of the cool people you kick it with will put a piece of steel right through your neck! Ain’t no ’cool’ in here.”
He was visibly frightened now. I had brought the raw reality of our situation fully down on his shoulders and said, in effect, Carry this! He was already sagging under the weight.
“Let me see that weapon,” he finally said.
The next day I was told to roll my property up and move to another hall. I still don’t know why. I was put in Sycamore Hall in a one-man cell. I was then called to the lieutenant’s office.
Lieutenant Ballard, the gang coordinator, held the briefing. He was a huge, dark-complexioned New Afrikan with a contagious smile.
“Monster Kody Scott,” he began, with a knowing grin. “I been hearing about you. I knew you was coming and I’m supposed to lock you up in the Hole. But seeing how you ain’t done nothing—yet—I got no cause to slam you.”
“Who wants me locked up?” I asked seriously.
“White folks, who else?”
“But for what?”
“You really don’t know, huh?”
“Naw, I just got here.”
“Well, it seems that some of your folks—C.C.O…” and with that he stared hard at me, “… have killed a correctional sergeant in San Quentin. So they want all you C.C.O.s locked up.”
“Oh, is that right?”
“That’s right. But I think the B.G.F.s did it, to tell you the truth.”
“Can I go now?”
“Yeah, Kody, you can go. But there’s one thing I want to ask you. Did Suma hook you up?”
“No, man, I ain’t no C.C.O.”
“But—”
I turned and walked out the door before he could finish. I was told that the only way they could classify you as a member of a prison gang is if you admitted to it or they found a constitution on you. Later I learned that this was wrong.
I went back to my block feeling pretty good about what I’d heard from Ballard. Comrades had put in some work on a pig. Fuck the pigs. I was so full of hatred that I could have been ordered to kill a pig—or anybody—and not thought twice about it.
Back in the unit the homies were playing around, just grabbing each other and stuff, when a pig hollered out the warning.
‘STOP! FIGHT!’
Everyone froze and looked to see where the fight was, not realizing that he was referring to them. The pig came running down the tier like a madman, and when he got to the homies he began to cuff Li’l Man up. Everyone was dumbfounded, but no one said a thing. So I did.
“They was just playin’, they wasn’t fightin’, man.”
“Don’t you tell me, I know what they were doing. Fighting, that’s what.”
“You stupid pig, if I had a gun I’d blow yo’ brains all over that silly-ass uniform you wearin’.”
I constructed my hand like a weapon and aimed it right in his face.
He continued cuffing Li’l Man and another homie from Hoover and told everyone else to lock it up, which we did. Ten minutes later the pig came back with a sergeant and two other pigs.
“That’s him, sir, the one with the gun.”
“What?” I said.
“Roll your shit up. You going to the Hole,” the sergeant told me.
“For what?”
“Threatening staff.”
When I got to Palm Hall—the Hole—Lieutenant Ballard wanted to see me. His office was actually located in the Hole, so he called me in to see him.
“They gotcha, I see.”
“Yeah, but that’s bullshit, man.”
“Listen to me, Kody. These folks is scared to death of y’all in the first place. And now that you have organized y’all selves, that makes it worse. Anything you do they gonna be on you, man. Anything. You young, black, and
