Death Row Breakout (7 page)

Now he was on the tier, looking at the numbers stenciled over each cell. Eight sixty-five… seventy two… seventy nine… eighty one… eighty two… People looked him over. A white guy with bad acne winked and nodded.

In front of eighty-three stood a colored man several years older, but forty pounds lighter, than Booker. The knot in Booker’s gullet disappeared. He stuck out his hand. “I’m your cell partner, I think. Booker Johnson.”

The man nodded and reluctantly extended a hand. “Wilkins,” he said. It was then that Booker noticed his cell partner was covered with a brownish lint. It was all over him, including his hair and the stubble of his beard. It was from the jute mill, the prison’s biggest industry, where burlap was woven for fertilizer bags and other uses. A chorus of three hundred ancient looms, so he’d heard in the dungeon, seemed to chant all day: “got ya fucked… got ya fucked… got ya fucked…”

Booker didn’t know what to say. Wilkins didn’t seem to want to talk. Booker looked at the cell through the bars… and found it hard to believe what he saw. The cell was about four feet wide. The double bunk was made of US Army cots from the Spanish-American War. The bottom bunk was made up with a cover over a lumpy straw mattress. The upper bunk was bare, flat springs.

The lockup bell rang. All the security bars were raised above the cell gates. In ragged unison, every cell gate was pulled open, the convicts stepped inside and pulled each gate shut. The security bar crashed down.

Booker and Wilkins were locked in. Wilkins stepped into the space between the foot of the bunk and the cell bars. Booker didn’t know what to do. He squeezed along the bunk to the rear and started to sit down on the toilet bowl.

“Get up to the bars for count,” Wilkins said, motioning for emphasis.

Booker came to the front of the cell. A moment later, two guards came by, five feet apart, each with a hand counter. At the end of the tier they compared their tally and called it down to a Sergeant on the floor. The Sergeant relayed it to the cell-house office. The count was called into Control, the total of the cell-house, and then each tier. Often the total would be right, but one cell-house would be one too many, and another one too few. Someone was in the wrong place.

If the count cleared, the bell rang and the unlock for the evening meal began, tier by tier from the top down. The 5th tier came out, most moving toward the center stairwell, a few climbing over the rail to wait for friends on lower tiers. Wilkins combed his hair and waited for the 4th tier unlock.

Suddenly, McGurk appeared outside the cell. He dropped a mattress on the tier. “Pull it in when the bar goes up.” Then, from pockets sewn inside an oversized denim jacket, McGurk produced a carton of green-packaged Lucky Strike cigarettes, a terrycloth hand towel, toothpaste, soap, candy and ground coffee. “I got word from Sully to look after you.” McGurk was signaled by someone down the tier who Booker couldn’t see. “Gotta go,” McGurk said, and was instantly gone.

The 4th tier security bar went up and everyone pushed open their cell gate. Convicts streamed by, glancing in as Booker threw the mattress on the top bunk. There was a hole in it. He stuck his hand in – and came out with straw. “Aww, shit,” he said. Straw was a bitch to sleep on. Convicts streamed past him, most young white men whom he thought, back then, were mean looking. They paid him no mind as he pushed the mattress into the cell and closed the gate. The stream of men was all going one way. He joined it and became a human leaf carried along.

Down the steel stairs the voices blended to the clanging feet. On the landing below, convicts awaited the third tier unlock, so they could eat with their friends. On the gun-rail, across a dozen feet of empty space, was the olive-drab uniformed guard with a rifle fastened to a strap that went around his shoulder as a sling. Nobody was going to accidentally drop a 30.06 to the convicts below.

At the bottom, the throng moved straight forward through the South Cell-house rotunda and through two doors into the vast South Mess hall, where two thousand convicts could be fed at the same time – four serving lines and narrow tables the width of the new stainless steel trays, that all faced one way. If convicts sat facing each other across a table, the inevitable result would be violence. Somebody would find someone “eyeballing” him. So he would eyeball back. “So what are you looking at, sucker?” “Fuck your mother!”

Not only did everyone face the same direction, the mess hall was segregated. The sight made Booker pause in the doorway. “Go on, man,” someone said behind him. He moved ahead. He got in the line where everyone was colored. As he inched toward the serving counter, Booker noticed that whites, Mexicans, Indians and the occasional Asian, all ate together. Only colored men were segregated. He remembered Jim-Crow from his childhood in Tennessee, where he’d felt no resentment simply because it was the normal way of the world, or so he was led to believe. Now he knew more about its evil and its implications. Goddamn white folks made it easy to hate them.

In a semi-daze, he got his tray of food and followed the man ahead to the long table of all black faces and sat down. Later, when a guard signaled the row to rise, Booker blended in. Back within the cell, the security bar dropped and a convict keyman locked each cell gate. “That’s it for the night,” said his cell partner as he stretched out on the bunk.

Booker was alone in the dark with his anger. He would die in prison 54 years later, nine of them spent on Death Row for hitting a guard with a bedpan.

He would never get his one phone call.

Entering The “House of Dracula”

They came for me after midnight on the tenth day following the sentence. I heard the rattling chains down the tier, and three deputies appeared. A fourth remained at the front to throw the lever that unlocked the cell gate. When they reached the cell, I was already waiting, my meager possessions in a shoe box tucked under my arm.

It was the darkness before dawn when the two-vehicle caravan exited the rear loading area. It was where the buses, trucks and garbage cans were kept. The stench was gross. I was in the screened off rear of a black and white station wagon. Two uniformed deputies rode in front. They followed the sedan through the predawn streets to the freeway ramp. Traffic was beginning to build, the gigantic Mack trucks and Kenilworth’s hitting the northbound highway. They would be in Sacramento by noon. When the sun was a faint orange line in the east, we departed out of Bakersfield to pass between endless green fields of cotton and strawberries filled with Mexican laborers bent to pluck the bolls and berries from the bushes. In the scorching sun, what terrible back breaking labor that was. I would rather be in a prison cell than picking cotton like a
nigger slave
, although that preference did not include the fate to which I was destined. I was lazy, not crazy.

Despite the leg irons cutting into my ankles and the handcuffs pressing dents in my wrists, and the awareness of my destination lurking constantly in my thoughts, the ride was not totally miserable. It had been almost nine months since I’d looked upon the free world. By most standards, it was a dreary length of highway, bordered by small stands selling whatever produce grew nearby, predominantly walnuts, strawberries and melons, but it was better than staring at a cell wall, or dwelling on whatever was in my brain.

When we passed truck stops or tiny communities, a local police or highway patrol cruiser was waiting and escorted us for ten or twenty miles before pulling to the side. The deputies were not related to Lewis Carroll for, though they talked of many things, none were of sailing ships, sealing wax or cabbages and kings. Their idea of a cogent intellectual comment was that all liberals were anti-American. One said it; the other concurred with a strenuous nod.

It was mid-morning when we went through Oakland and crossed the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and could see the shit-colored masonry of the California State Prison at San Quentin. “There it is, Cameron,” said the driver. “Your last home.”

“Uh huh… the House of Dracula.”

We followed the sedan off the freeway to a Stop sign, then went through the underpass to San Quentin road. On the right were old frame houses on a slope overlooking the bay and Richmond’s low green hills on the other side. The outlying gate was half a mile from the walls. An old black Lifer stood at the gateway on the signal from a gate-house watched over by a guard in the arsenal gun tower fifteen feet off shore. A female guard who looked like a truck driver and was probably a lesbian came from the gate-house to the sedan and looked at the papers the guards carried. She made a hand signal and the gate swung open. We pulled up outside the East Sallyport where we sat for fifteen minutes until the Watch Lieutenant appeared. Campbell! A miserable sonofabitch if there ever was one. This was the first time he’d been seen anywhere except behind his desk, where it was safe. There were a few inmate clerks in his office, but he’d never been on the yard or alone in a cell-house with the numbered men. And he particularly hated and feared me. Long ago he’d seen in my file that I assaulted a custodian in juvenile hall, a counselor in reform school, a correctional officer in a youth prison. He was Watch Lieutenant; the main man is running things. Above him were decision makers. They didn’t have a hands-on job. He had the responsibility for running the disciplinary court. Early on, I’d come before him, charged with messing up a count and cursing the guard. The reality – which doesn’t matter in this world – is that my bedsprings had broken, and were jamming me in the back, so I threw my mattress on the floor next to the gate. The cell was four feet wide. Lying lengthwise beside the bunk, how could they miss me? They found me on the third count, when they go cell by cell with a tablet, and cursed me for causing problems. I told the guard I didn’t want to hear the orations of Cicero -and he wrote that I called him a motherfucker. So I stood before Campbell so charged. I thought it was humorous, and at worst should cost me thirty days’ loss of privileges. But Campbell turned crimson and looked as if he was about to start foaming at the mouth, when he cut me off and said “take him to the hole”.

Red fire flashed through my brain. I hunched my back, grabbed the bottom of Campbell’s desk and,
oopsie daisy
, over it went, drawers crashing, papers flying. The guards who stand as backup during disciplinary court were instantly administering a choke-hold and dragging me down on my back. I was nineteen and weighed a hundred and fifty.

Campbell wasn’t hurt, but he was screaming like a banshee. Of course it went to full committee and, although the Associate Warden did see a little humor in the incident, he had to back the lieutenant and he gave me the maximum twenty-nine days in the hole, and indefinite lockup in administrative segregation, which is different. There, you can have an amenity or two.

I did a year in administrative segregation. Campbell wanted me charged in outside court. Now he was greeting me on my journey to Condemned Row; out here with four deputies and half a dozen correctional officers.

Shit! Double Shit!

He went head-to-head with the deputy in charge of the caravan. The deputy handed him the court orders with the seals and warrants and produced a clipboard with a body receipt for him to sign.

Now he owned me. I was chained and unable to do anything to defend myself except spit on him, which I would do, futile as it would be.

But,
mirabele dictum
, he never once turned his eyes to me. Carrying the papers, he turned back to the sally port, “Okay, bring the asshole in!” With that, he gave the order and disappeared. Everything would now turn like silent machinery.

They hoisted me down because the step was too high for me to manage in leg-irons. I had to tiptoe in tiny steps, rather like a Chinese woman with bound feet. Any other way and the steel anklets would bang against the anklebone at each stride.

Into the doorway they hustled me. Ahead was a gate of steel straps from an earlier time. Beyond was a twenty-foot tunnel with a high, round ceiling and benches bolted along each wall. Near the other end was a solid steel door on each side. One went into the Visiting Room, the other to Receiving and Release. Next to the Receiving and Release door was a urinal and a tiny hand-rinse sink. Everyone walking in and out of San Quentin passed through the East Sally Port. At that point, I was the only convict inside the tunnel, although every convict who worked outside the walls went in and out through this tunnel.

“Hold it,” a guard said, putting his arm in front of me. The Sergeant opened the Receiving and Release door and stuck his head inside. A moment later he pulled back and motioned. “Siddown, Cameron,” he said. Then the other escort said, “There’s three dressouts in there. About halfway finished.”

So I sat down to wait – and thought of other times. Years ago a black revolutionary, who was also a
cause celebre
among the far left and young Blacks, George Jackson by name, came out here on a visit. He had many visitors, and many rumors swirled around him. He was awaiting trial for allegedly killing a guard. When he was returned to the adjustment center, he produced a gun, chaos ensued and, before it was over, two guards, two convicts and George were dead. The media outcry began, “How’d he get the gun?”

He must have gotten it on the visit, but how had he gotten it into the adjustment center? He was frisked when he came out of the visiting room, and was under a guard’s eyes until the escorts arrived to take him back. He sat where I was sitting now, on the bench. It was pretty much accepted, fantastic as it seemed, that the pistol was concealed in his Afro, fashionable at the time.

I don’t think so.

Earlier that day, it was said, a black convict who worked in the personnel snack bar passed through and stopped to piss. He took the pistol wrapped in a bandanna, and pushed it up under the sink. He then continued on his business.

When George came out of the visiting room, he was told by an old, white-haired guard, to sit down while escorts were summoned by phone. George sat, then motioned that he had to piss. The old guard was five feet from the enclosed urinal, but he could see George’s head and, down below, his legs from the knees to his feet. He couldn’t see George’s hands or waist. George moved the bandanna and its contents into his waistband.