“Yeah, that’s a bad jam.”
“It’s gonna be all right, babes, you watch.”
She held my head to her breast and rubbed the side of my face with her soft hands, all the while humming “We’ve Only Just Begun.”
When I awoke the next morning, Tamu was up cooking and playing music. The fresh, wholesome aroma from the kitchen coupled with Anita Baker’s new song, “Angel,” made me feel good. The sixth sense of my melanin was catching some good vibes. Keonda came into the room and she and I talked awhile. When I was in Y.T.S., Tamu or Tamu’s mother had taught her how to say Ronald Reagan. When I was released I taught her his third name—pig. Now, over and over, she would say “Wonal Wagan pig!” and I’d say “Yeah!” I finished playing with Keonda, ate, showered, and geared up. The phone rang.
“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 fiancée, 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 détente 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.
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 hall. After the pigs were beaten and one temporarily detained for questioning, the rebels went after the trustees, the faithful servants of the pigs, who were notorious for shorting everyone on food. The trustees had also jacked up the price of donuts, which they stole from the main kitchen and sold to general population, from the established price of two dollars a bag. All were beaten and ran from the chow hall. Then the doors were barricaded and the demands began.
During the five-hour siege, the misinformation agents in the sheriff’s department told the media that the “riot” was only due to overcrowding and the breakdown of the air-conditioning system. While the pigs videotaped those in the chow hall from an elevated Plexiglas tower, acting sympathetic to the righteous complaints of the resisters, other pigs were busy evacuating the module adjacent to the chow hall—4800.
For five hours the resisters demanded to be “treated as men” and to be given “better food” and some protection from the “Nazi police”; for five hours they heard “Okay, gentlemen, you’re right,” and “Of course we are all men.” Then the resisters were made to leave the chow hall naked, walk through a gauntlet of pigs in full riot-repression gear for their well-deserved whack with the P-24 baton, and directed into 4800. The seventeen stayed naked, with no bedclothes, no visits, no showers, for three days. After that they were given bedclothes, visits, and gray jumpsuits.
The other eleven thousand prisoners wore blue jumpsuits, but the Crips had to wear gray. Every time they went to court, on a visit (under heavy escort) to the doctor, anywhere, they were subjected to the abuse of sadistic pigs who were looking for revenge. The Bloods, camouflaged in blue like the general population, also took liberty and attacked gray suits when they were caught alone or in isolated pairs.
Directly across the hall from 4800 the pigs set up the O.S.S. interdepartmental office. Ironically—or perhaps not at all—this was around the same time that the F.B.I. released a study on Crips that stated “one out of every four Crips is in jail for murder, or has done time for murder. And three out of four Crips have been arrested for weapons-related charges.” The counterintelligence of the Crips was kicked into full swing, and 4800 became the “Crip Module.”
It’s quite clear to me now what was taking place at that time. But then, in 1984, I was deaf, dumb, and blind. We helped the pigs gather intelligence on us and had no idea we were doing so. Instead of 4800 being a module to contain us and keep the general population safe, it became an intelligence satellite for law enforcement—probably the true purpose for which it was originally designed. For us, it became the ’hood, a place to call ours—another testing ground. The most astonishing thing I remember about 4800 was that there weren’t any books in the entire module, and we weren’t allowed access to the library. The decibel level was so high that when I didn’t have a headache, I felt funny.
Every set desperately tried to get their own set deep, because a deep set wielded power and could protect itself. Whenever, on our way to see a visitor or the doctor, we’d see one of our homies in blue out in the G.P. (general public), we’d tell the escort pig that the homie was a Crip, and the pig would get his name and booking number. That same night the homie would be moved to 4800, doomed like the rest of us. G.P. was smoother, much better than 4800. You could walk around unattended to visits, other modules, practically anywhere. Many Crips shunned the module for this reason. Some didn’t want to be labeled as Crip, and others couldn’t stand the stress. There were also those with dirt on them who had to dodge their homies for fear of a beating or stabbing. But when we’d see a homie in G.P., we felt like “Yo, man, bring yo’ ass home, to Cripville.”
The process of getting into 4800 was overwhelming, so cats tended to circumvent it for this reason, as well. You were made to stand and hold a placard with your name, your set name, and your ’hood on it for a series of pictures. The pictures were no doubt distributed among the pig population for intelligence. A lot of cats just didn’t want to deal with that. Inside the module were Crips ranging in age from eighteen to forty. The deepest sets were the Hoovers and the East Coasts, a deadly mixture of power. In the beginning, all the sets tried to get along, each individual making an effort to suppress his disdain for enemies that he was now face-to-face with—sometimes in the same cell.
In January 1985 this thin line of love and hate evaporated in the face of unfolding developments in the street. The first major eruption of violence occurred on a slow day, a day that looked and felt like any other day. I was in Denver-8 and my cellmates were Oldman from Nine-Deuce Hoover, Kenny Mitchel from the Sixties (he was arrested in the 1970s for robbing the Commodores), and Joe Dee from Atlantic Drive Compton Crips. We had just finished making a batch of pruno—jail-made wine—and were preparing to get drunk when we heard a voice.
“Cuz, who is that down there from East Coast?”
“Marstien,” the voice replied. I had seen Marstien at the street races on Florence and Main before the shoot-out with Li’l Fee and his crew.
“Eh, Marstien, what up, nigga? This Li’l Sad, cuz. I’m gonna come down there later and rap with you, homie.”
“Awright, cuz.”
Li’l Sad was on Denver row and Marstien was on Baker row below us. I was going to send my regards, but decided to wait until later, as I was enjoying my drink. Everyone had heard about Lajoy (Li’l Hoov) being killed days before, supposedly by East Coasts as he drove through his ’hood. So when Marstien came in, along with Vamp, for murder, it was believed that he must be in for killing Lajoy. Marstien now had two murders, as he was already in for killing a Swan.
There were at least eighteen Hoovers in 4800 at that time, and equally as many East Coasts. There were four tiers in the module, each housing sixteen cells. Those on Able and Baker were six-man cells, while those on Charlie and Denver row were four-man cells. We were not allowed in the chow hall any more as a result of the rebellion, so we ate in the dayroom. Each tier had its own dayroom, and the inhabitants ate there respectfully. Of course, every cell was full.