“Everybody stand up and follow the man in front of you. You are going to be fingerprinted several times and have your photo taken. One set of prints goes to the Justice Department, one to the F.B.I., one to the State Capitol, one to the…”

I didn’t even try to hear the rest. Hell, I had heard it all before in Youth Authority, where prints are taken and sent to the same groups of people. In youth camps run by the county, you are treated as a statistic by group. But in Youth Authority, which is run by the state of California, you become a potential case study as an individual. The F.B.I. and the rest of the authorities have the names of everyone who has ever been to Youth Authority in a huge data bank in Washington. When you go to state or federal prison, they simply update their data bank. If you get involved in anything they think is noteworthy—and everything is noteworthy to a hunter—they put it in your file in their data bank. They know what you may do long before it happens, as well as what you have the potential to do. Because gang actions are seen as self-destructive and not a threat to the security of this country, it’s not necessary for them to stop you. But if you begin to question the right of those in authority or resist the chains that constantly bind you, then you’ll be elevated as a security risk and more than likely put in the Agitators Index file. I’ve been in the Agitators Index since 1986.

I took the photos and went through the mundane routine of prints. (As if mine had changed since I’d left Y.A.) At my first opportunity I stepped to the Chicano, surprising him.

“What’s up, man, you know me or somethin’? Huh? You got a problem wit’ me?”

He was shorter than I and weighed thirty pounds less, which really didn’t mean a thing, because in prison, fighting was for those you liked. Stabbing was for the enemy.

“Ain’t your name Kody, Monster Kody?”

“Yeah, that’s me. Why? What up?”

“You don’t remember me?”

“Naw,” I said, eyeing him suspiciously. “From where?”

“Juvenile hall and camp. I’m Cooper from El Monte Flores.” And he broke into a wide, boyish grin.

Yes, I did know him! He and I were friends from the seventies. Every time I went to the Hall he was there. When I went to camp, he was there. I missed him in Y.A., but now here he was again in prison.

“Goddamn, yeah, I’m knowin’ you. What up, Copper? How much time you got?”

“Fifteen to life. And you?”

“Just seven.”

“I’ll be here when you get back!”

“Fuck that, I ain’t comin’ back.”

We talked a bit more before we had to break it up. This was not camp or juvenile hall, where our relationships were not governed by politics. This was state prison, where talking to the wrong person could very well get you killed. I wondered if he had gotten hooked up.

The group of us went through a few other stages of questions and answers before having to go get blood tests, immunizations, and physicals. After that we were given our bed numbers. Chino is the reception center for southern California. You go through all your indoctrination there: school testing, health testing, and a visit with a counselor for placement in a permanent prison. One usually stays at Chino for a month or two before being 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?”

“War?!”

“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, nothin’!”

“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.

“Boom,” I said.

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 strong. That’s why they can’t see you out in the street. In here, you organized, unified, and uncontrollable, so you gotta be put in the Hole. Be cool, man, or you’ll be in the Hole for your whole seven years.”

“I’ll try, man.”

I wanted to say more but couldn’t articulate it. I wanted to know why “white folks” hated us so much, were so afraid of us. I had a thousand questions, but Ballard was still a pig, New Afrikan or not.

I was put on the first tier in the last cell. My neighbor was Chocolate from Four Tray Hoover. He was also a C.C.O. member, as well as one of the Hoovers who had stabbed the East Coasts in 4800. He had two knives. I told him what they had me for and we talked about other things. I asked if he felt that he’d be in trouble with the organization for participating in tribalism. He said that he didn’t know, but that he had been worried about it. He had a pretty good grasp on Kiswahili and said he’d help me with mine.

Not an hour later, after Ballard had gone home, an American pig with an enormous belly came to my cell.

“Scott?”

“Yeah.”

“We made a mistake by putting you over here, you belong in Cypress Deep Seg, so—”

“Deep Seg?” I said in a what-the-fuck-is-that voice.

“Aw, cuz, it’s fucked up in Deep Seg,” Chocolate said. “Man, why y’all doin’ him like that, he don’t belong in no damn Deep Seg,” he said to the pig.

“Get your shit together, Scott,” the pig ordered, ignoring Chocolate. “We’ll be back in five minutes to get you.”

He walked away.

“Eh, comrade, what is Deep Seg?” I asked, perplexed.

“It’s only four little tiny cells way in the back of Cypress on the first tier. It’s fucked up back there. It’s for total fuck-ups.”

“Damn! I don’t know why they trippin’ on me like this. Talkin’ ’bout a mistake. That’s bullshit!”

“Scott, you ’bout ready?” said the pig, who had returned and was standing in front of my cage. He’d been gone for forty seconds.

I didn’t say a thing, just backed up to the bars so he could chain me up for the escort across the hall to Deep Segregation. The pig tried to make small talk, but I didn’t respond. How could he make conversation, and expect a response, with a man he was putting in a Hole inside a Hole?

I was marched through so many gates and doors that I felt like Maxwell Smart. It was depressing. When we finally got to the small cage—and I couldn’t believe how small—I was made to strip and go through the degrading motions. One last stab at my humanity. I was locked behind a series of bars, then a door with a heavy plate of steel that, when closed, could isolate me from any light whatsoever. There was no light in the cell. There was an opening in the upper left corner, and from the back of the cell an outside floodlight stuck through, protected by wire mesh. The bed was a hard, concrete slab no wider than a child’s little red wagon. The sink and toilet were attached together and both reeked with atrocious fumes of bile, defecation, urine, and God knows what else.

Before he left I asked the pig if I could have some cleaning material for the cell, and he replied that I wouldn’t be able to see anything no way and that I’d get used to the smell in a few days. And with that he closed the big door and let down the heavy metal covering over my window, leaving me in total darkness.

“Hey,” I hollered, reaching for the bars in front of me. “Hey, turn on the lights. Hey! I know you hear me!”

But I got no response.

I felt my way over to the bed and sat down. I thought long and hard about what Muhammad had called repression, about what Elimu had taught me about resistance, and what Ballard had said about the white folks’ fear of us. I thought that I hadn’t even resisted yet, but still I was being treated like this. Little did I know that I had been resisting all my life. By not being a good black American I was resisting. But my resistance was retarded because it had no political objective. I was an unconscious resister.

Repression is funny. It can breed resistance, though it doesn’t mean that the resistance will be political, positive, or revolutionary.

So I sat there in total darkness, in total silence, repressed to the max. I had nothing to feed on that could explain this level of action to me. There was no mattress on the concrete, so I lay back on the hard slab and went over the words in my head that, while unconnected, didn’t have any meaning to me whatsoever. As I lay there I remembered my mother coming to Y.T.S. to see me, crying and shaking her head.

“Baby, I got something to tell you. Something you are old enough to know now.”

“What is it, Mom?”

“Scott is not your father. Baby, your last name isn’t supposed to be Scott. Oh, Kody, I… listen, do you remember seeing this book?”

In her hands she was holding a blue-and-white book with a football player in uniform on the cover.

“Yeah, I’ve seen that book around the house.”

“Well, this is your father, baby. His name is Dick Bass. He played football for the Rams.”

“Wait a minute, Mom, I’m confused here. Who is Scott, then? I mean whose father is he?”

“He’s Shaun, Kerwin, and Kendis’s father. Kevin and Kim have the same father, but he’s not Scott.”