Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison (36 page)

"I ain't going back in there," I said.

"Oh you're not, huh?" He reached for me, and I skirted around him, breaking for the other side. He chased after me, while two others cut me off and tried to tackle me.

"Those fuckers are trying to rape me," I screamed. I broke loose and ran to the other side of the control booth. One of them grabbed my shirt and ripped it. Two more rushed me, and I was pinned to the floor.

"You're going back in that cell," the first deputy said.

"No I'm not," I shouted.

They picked me up and carried me to the bullpen, but I grabbed the bars to one of the empty cells. "I'll sue you motherfuckers! I'm not going back there!" With both hands I clenched hold of the bars. They lifted my legs off the floor while the others tried to wrench my hands free.

The inmates laughed from the other side.

One of the deputies elbowed me in the face, and my nose started to bleed. They dropped my feet, and one of them pushed me back against the bars.

"Just stop it," he yelled at me. The other deputies let go.

"I'm not going back there," I screamed. "I don't care. You can fuckin' shoot me."

"Yes you are," the first deputy said, and I bolted from them again.

I felt a sting on my chest, from where someone had scratched me. The deputies put me in a headlock and pulled me into an empty tank, where they knocked me to floor and started to pounce on me. They were trying to force handcuffs on me when the sergeant appeared in the doorway and ordered them to let go of me.

"OK," he said to others, "I'll take it from here."

My back felt bruised, and my side was numb. I struggled to stand up, but the best I could do was sit up. It was dark in the cell, and all I could see was his outline.

"What's your name, son?"

"I'm not going back there," I said.

"I said, what's your name?"

"Those fuckin' niggers were trying to rape nee."

"Oh, now we're niggers," a inmate shouted from across the hall.

It was the quietest I'd ever heard it get in there.

"Just calm down," the sergeant said.

"Bring him over here, Sarge," an inmate yelled. "We'll take care of it."

"Yeah, Baby," another shouted. "You snitch ass bitch."

I didn't care what they called me. Or what the deputies would do. They could bring in the goon squad and kill me for all I cared. I wasn't going back inside that cell. What those motherfuckers had already taken from me was all they were going to get.

The deputies who had grappled with me were standing outside the bullpen, laughing, just like the inmates.

"Relax," the sergeant said. He helped me off the floor and handed me his handkerchief, lifting my hand to hold it to my nose. "No one's going to do anything to you."

He stepped back from the dark holding cell, and out into the light, where I noticed for the first time that he was black.

The electric gate jolted closed with a loud bang.

"Those fucking niggers tried to rape me," a con mocked from across the hall.

The inmates laughed.

26

Black Panther ...

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

-Rilke

It was a regular cellblock, like all of the others, except I wasn't allowed out into the common area in front of the cells. They said it was for my own protection, but it felt more like punitive segregation.

After the incident in the bullpens, the sergeant had me moved upstairs to the Lavender Wing. I hadn't told them I was gay, but it didn't matter. "You'll be safe here," a deputy said. Making my way down the row, I sensed eyes staring at me as I hurried past each cell. When the deputy pulled the release brake and closed the sliding bars, I felt relieved. No one could get at me, in here.

I overhead the sergeant say he wasn't going to move me in the same transport vans that carried the inmates I had called niggers, so he postponed my transfer to Jackson. I knew, as soon as I had made that remark, that it would inflame the situation further, but I had hoped it would force the deputies into taking the action they did. Being a crazy racist, or even a snitch, was preferable to being gang raped and turned into the group bitch.

I'd also heard later, that when Nate and Loud Mouth appeared for their sentencing before Detroit Recorder's Court Judge, The Honorable Geraldine Bledsoe Ford, they both nearly fainted when she told them to look out the window and count the almost one hundred pigeons that were clustered outside. But even the ninety-nine years to life she'd given them, for the armed robbery and murder they'd committed while on parole, wasn't long enough to erase the pain of what they'd done to me. Not even a death sentence could've lessened my rage. They should have been charged with raping me, because that might have served as a deterrent to others who were doing the same. But that would've required my coming forward, which I was still too afraid to do.

"You've gotta let that kind of thinking go," Black Diamond said from the cell next to mine. "Cause that shit will just fuck with your mind."

I hadn't noticed her when I first came in, because I'd mostly kept my head down until I reached my cell. I was both upset about what happened in the bullpen, but also a tinge embarrassed for being placed on the wing with all the queens.

"Birds of a feather, honey," Black Diamond said to me.

I first heard about her in Quarantine and then again down in the bullpens. Some queens achieved almost celebrity status, and Black Diamond was among them. She wanted to be called Cat Woman, because she was dark like a panther and because of how she slinked down a prison catwalk. But the name had already been taken. Black Diamond came about because she was exceptionally ugly. "A diamond in the rough," as she'd tell it. Others said, "That bitch is so ugly that she has to sneak up on her food tray."

She was friendly from the moment I arrived, so we talked from the front of our cells. She gave me a book to read and even leant me a few cigarettes, even though she knew I couldn't repay her. The book was Meridian a novel by Alice Walker.

"I'd lend you this other one," she said, "but I'm still reading it."

"What it is?"

"Black Widow Mama."

"That's OK," I said. "I probably wouldn't want to read it, anyhow."

"It's my life story," she said. "It's about a Chicago Drag Queen."

"Oh. Are you from Chicago?"

"No, but I'm a Black Widow, don't you know."

The queen in the cell next to her yelled, "She done killed nine of her husbands. The bitch is like a praying mantic."

"Do you mean praying mantis?" I asked.

"Whatever," the queen shouted. "The bitch is a cold-hearted killer. Got arsenic and shit runnin' through them veins."

"All right Miss Ginger. Don't get me started on your nasty self." I could picture Black Diamond's eyes pivoting back and forth. "Just put Miss Ginger on your pay-no-mind list," she said. "She got a birthday comin' up and is about to turn twenty-five, which for a prison bitch, is like turning eighty." Black Diamond stuck her arm out of her cell and snapped. "Better take your Geritol, Girl!"

"We used to have a Mary Ann in here too," she said. "But her man posted bail this morning. The lucky ho. She's probably back out on the track, clickin' those ruby heels on Woodward Avenue. Anyway, Ginger here has offered me a pack of cigarettes if I read to her, so if you want, you can listen for free. But we have to wait till shift change 'cause the book is contraband and that's when Smitty's on." The jail prohibited books or magazines about queers. "Smitty's one of us," she whispered, "but we still have to do it on the Q.T."

"On the Q.T.?"

"On the Quiet Tip, girl! How long have you been down?"

I didn't respond.

"I'm just sayin', cause you need to toughen up if you want to make it in here, girl."

"I'm not a girl," I said.

"Well, you're a girl in here, honey."

"You tell her, Miss Thing," another queen shouted.

"You might as well have a vagina honey, 'cause once you're up here with all these scandalous queens, your ho' card is thoroughly punched."

"Speak for yourself," Ginger yelled. "Some of us ladies know how to be discreet."

"Uh-huh," Black Diamond said. "You forget, bitch, I knew your ass in juvenile hall. Back when you were doin' boys for Hostess Ding-Dongs."

"Hello!" someone chirped from the end of the hall, as if keeping score.

Thanks to the meal cart express, they all knew what happened down in the bullpen, as well as what had happened upstairs with Nate. "And even if they didn't," she said. "They know about you now, 'cause you're up here on Queens Row with us."

"That's right," Ginger added. "Ain't no secrets in here. Everyone knows what happened to you."

"Even at Riverside," Black Diamond said.

It took a moment for that to sink in, and I felt my heart sink with it. I sat back on my bunk without saying anything. So everyone knew. I felt humiliated and ashamed.

"Girrlll. You had it going on. If Miss Thing here could've passed herself off as straight and got up on one of those regular floors! I'd a been right up there on it."

I didn't respond.

"But I know what you mean, though. That shit is fucked up when you don't want it, and they decide they're going to just up and take it from you."

"That's right," Ginger said. "But there ain't a whole lot you can do about it."

"Yes there is," Black Diamond said. "You can hurry up and get yourself a man. These motherfuckers think that just 'cause we like dick, it means they can fuck us whenever they want, even if we don't want it."

"And the guards ain't gonna help you none, either," Ginger said.

"I thought you liked dick? is what one of them guards told me," Black Diamond said. "That was after a bunch of motherfuckcrs had Miss Thing spread out over a card table. Shit, I was in the infirmary for almost a month after that. But I don't like to think about that. Shit gets too damn depressing."

I just listened as Black Diamond went on. Perhaps it should have felt validating to hear someone else share an experience that was somewhat similar to my own. I knew I wasn't alone-but Black Diamond was right-it gets too damn depressing to even think about it. So I don't-I changed the subject in my mind.

"`Well a dick's a dick,' is what one of these men told me-and he was serious, too. Uh-uh, I told him-it don't work like that. Is a pussy a pussy? And he said, `Hell no'-so what makes you think it's the same for me? So that's why you need to be real careful with yourself, white boy. 'Cause these motherfuckers all know you're on Queens Row, and they all know your business, so when you go back down to them bullpens-you need to be extra careful with yourself."

"Thanks," I said. It was good advice about being careful, but I rejected the notion of being branded by being placed on Queens Row. And I started being careful right then, by placing the book and cigarettes she had given me back on the cross section of her bars. "Thanks anyway," I said.

When Black Diamond first gave me the book and cigarettes-I told her that I couldn't repay her. She said, "That's OK, you can hook me up later. I'm sure there's something we can swap." I was pretty distrustful of everyone by then, but I thought I was safe, being locked up in a single-man cell, but then I learned they showered us two at a time, and that her cell and mine were numbers 9 and 10.