Authors: Ja Rule
Unruly
This book is dedicated to my foundationâmy family, who is responsible for my growth: my grandparents Edward Cherry and Mary Cherry; my parents, William Jeffrey Atkins (rest in peace) and Debra Atkins; my wife, Aisha; and my children, Brittney, Jordan and Jeff Jr.
CONTENTS
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I do not speak about my exploits with pride. I'm not trying to glorify or glamorize what it took to get me to this point. My only hope is that these memories of my life may save you some pain. Give love.
JULY 2012
ONEIDA CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
THE CORRECTIONS OFFICERS WERE ALL BITCHES. THEY SPOKE
to us like the animals that they had made us. There was no respect for any of us, not even me, who had sold 30 million records, traveled the world, won countless awards and flown to meetings on private jets. Who would think a bitch-ass corrections officer would be the one to show
me
something that I should have already known?
Oneida Correctional Facility in Rome, New York, had a reputation among inmates for being a prison with racist COs and rampant misconduct among its officers. The officers would patrol the yard, always listening for some bit of conversation to get a sense of what the inmates were thinking.
It was another uneventful day in the prison yard as the sun shone on the rusty chain link fences highlighting the age and neglect of the facility. The yard always held a crisp feeling of weighty expectancy, always waiting anxiously for something to jump off. In some corners of the yard, there were the bulky inmates lifting weights, while others concentrated on their chess games. Others just stared into space, dreaming of the day when their prison nightmare would end.
Officer Smith, one of the more difficult officers, was nicknamed “the Klansman.” The Klansman may have been my age or a little younger. He had evil dark blue eyes and slicked-back hair, which revealed his large forehead. His beer belly was bursting through his tight uniform shirt.
“You know, Atkins, your kids are job security for my kids,” Officer Smith said. He just looked at me as if he had said something innocent but what he was really saying was that the cycle never gets broken for Black people.
I could feel my rage bubbling up in my stomach. The urge to choke the shit out of him was overwhelming. The only reason I didn't was because I knew that fights in the yard only caused sirens to flash, twenty-four-hour lockdowns and a lot of unnecessary paperwork.
The only thing I could safely say in response was, “Not
my
kids.”
Smith didn't know what to say to that. He had assumed a whole lot about me based on the color of my skin. He wasn't expecting me to say shit back at all. That muthafucka didn't even
know
me, my family or what we've been through. I may have been in prison, but it was partly because muthafuckas with an agenda put me there and partly because of my own doing.
“I'm not supposed to be here,” I whispered under my breath.
Officer Smith was already gone. He walked away not knowing the weight of his words. My head was heavy trying to hold them.
I wasn't
supposed
to be here, in prison, but I was. I knew then that it was my fault and my fault only. There were no more excuses. This was just one of those fucked-up Black-people moments, where we learn truths about ourselves through our oppressor's eyes. It was enlightening to understand how white people see us, as fucking
job security
. In his mind, Officer Smith, his sons and his grandsons will further their family's mission of holding Black men down in prison. They will be the keepers of “our place.” It's scary to admit, but in some ways, it's kinda true.
We don't have to be someone's fucking legacy, keeping them employed by our irresponsibility and disrespect for our communities and ourselves. Our lives mean so much more than that. Our ancestors went through too much for us to be free for me and other Black people to be doing stupid shit that gets us locked up.
After the conversation with CO Smith, I told my homies what that bitch CO had said to me. “See, he didn't say it to y'all, he said it to
me
, the most successful muthafucka in here. He was trying to break our spirits, man. He must not have understood that we are descendants of a strong race of people. We come from the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Rosa Parks. How dare that muthafucka belittle me? We can't let them break us. We can't.”
Eyes widened. Everyone was blindsided by the deep blow that had just been thrown. Several of them put their heads down, ashamed to even look at each other.
That's just what they expect from us. What they don't expect is for us to get the fuck outta here . . .
I WAS ONLY FOUR YEARS OLD WHEN MY FATHER CAME IN THE
house yelling about some dumb shit. “You should be learning, boy! Not playing with all those toys.”
My Moms could smell my father's anger mounting again. She could sniff out that rancid scent that she had become too familiar with. The stench of his anger seeped from his every pore. This was an aroma that made her fear for my life and her own.
My father's tone was particularly harsh that day, and as he railed at me for holding a toy, my Moms recognized that glassy look in his eyes. She could tell that her husband had been somewhere that he didn't belong. Moms never wanted me to be on the receiving side of my father's blows. She had taken enough of them herself. There had been too many silent nights of her nursing her wounds with drugstore ice packs and old towels.
That night was not unlike all the rest. He was always yelling about something. My Moms came over to me, scooped me up off the wood floor and placed me in my room. She was proud that we had two bedrooms. The second bedroom would come in handy the night she would change our lives forever.
She trembled as she thought,
“At least, I have Jeffrey. He's worth everything I'm about to do.”
In my room, behind a closed door, I played with the toy that she'd given me. While I lost myself in it, I was losing my Dad, at the same time.
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MOMS WALKED BACK
into the living room and said to her husband, “Nigga, this is the night you gon' die. I've been stupid enough to take these beatings, but if you're going to abuse my son, like you've been abusing me, that's not going down.”
My father never said a word to her. He didn't argue. He didn't say, “I'll change,” or “You know I would never hurt Little Jeff.” Or even, “I love you.”
“I understand,” is all he said. And then there was silence.
Moms called my grandmother and said calmly into the phone, “I'm leaving Jeff today. I can't take it anymore.”
My grandmother put her second husband on the phone. Grandpa Cherry okayed the arrangement. He said, “Yes, I'll come get you and Little Jeff.”
And that was that. There was to be no more yelling and cursing. There was to be no more hitting. And there was to be no more puffy eyes and salty tear stains for Moms to try to hide. There was just to be no more daddy.
That is how he left us. With silence.
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MY MOTHER MET MY FATHER
at a party in 1974. As soon as William Jeffrey Atkins walked in the door with his half-cut T-shirt and muscular body, she immediately noticed him. She says that he was “quite interesting.” Moms admired his burgundy polyester bell-bottoms and how they hugged his slim frame. She watched her husband-to-be float into the room without a word. It wasn't until the end of the evening that he finally approached her.
“Didn't you notice me looking at you? I think I've met you before,” he said.
They danced briefly to James Brown's “The Payback,” which was the anthem of the streets at the time. The song exalted Black folks' new sense of freedom while acknowledging our collective rage. After they danced, he said, “I'm leaving now, but I'd like to call you. I'll get a pen and paper. I'll be back.”
My mother worried that the handsome stranger would float into the crowd, never to return. When he did, my mother went to a nearby table so she could write. The syrupy sound of Tavares' “She's Gone” warmed the room. Couples danced and kissed under the colorful lights and the sparkles of the disco ball. It put her into a romantic mood. On the scrap of paper, she neatly wrote “Debra Ann Moorehand, 208 100th Avenue; Hollis, Queens, 11423,” and “718-656-3234.”
William said, smiling, “I didn't plan on writing you, I was just going to call you.”
Her eagerness slightly embarrassed her. She whispered, “Just in case you wanted to write or come by . . . someday.”
As they said their goodbyes, William Jeffrey Atkins promised to call.
He didn't call for days.
When he finally did, Debra suggested that William pick her up from school. William didn't realize that Debra Moorehand was still in high school. He was a few months younger than her. He had graduated from Food and Maritime Trade School and was an aspiring baker. He agreed to pick her up after school, but with a warning: “I'll have a tie on. I'm job hunting.”
Shit went quick between them two. They dated heavily and fell in love, all within a year. Before Moms knew it, William Jeffrey Atkins was asking her to be his wife. When Moms graduated from Central Commercial High School at seventeen, she walked down the aisle not only with a boyfriend but also with a tiny diamond engagement ring on her finger. They married on September 14, 1974, when she was eighteen.
“I always felt safe with your father. No one was going to bother me with him around,” Moms later told me. Although my mother was comfortable that my Dad was making $500 a week, once he started working, she didn't realize that he was also picking up a bunch of new friends with some very bad habits.
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TWO YEARS LATER,
a leap year, I was born on the rare twenty-ninth day of the shortest month of the year. That would be my first and last birthday celebration. We were Jehovah's Witnesses, so birthdays were not celebrated. The only thing my family ever did was cook a special birthday dinner after the fact. No one even said “happy birthday” to me. They didn't believe in it.
Moms worked as a secretary at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center right up until the week I was born. Every morning she would take me to my grandmother's house, work at Creedmoor from eight to four, pick me up at four thirty, take me home, make dinner and clean the house while my father was hanging out in the Village with his new friends and their bad habits.
Soon, Moms and me started to linger at my grandmother's house every evening, allowing Moms a little time to catch up with my grandmother and hear about the things that I had done to make her laugh that day. I was a well-behaved child and my father's sisters used to argue with each other over who would take care of me. We would all comfortably sink into the darkening folds of night, passing time and catching up. My grandmother and mother would reminisce about me being in the school play. I was playing Scrooge in
A Christmas Carol.
There were two of us originally given the role because the play was really long. On the day of our performance the other kid was sick. My teacher had asked me to do that kid's part, as well as my own. The teacher quickly decided that I would have to write down the other kid's lines on the inside of the robe. I did the roles so well that the audience gave me a standing ovation. My grandmother was proud. Moms giggled with pride. I loved when my grandmother told that story. It gave me a hint that I was made to entertain. That was the first time I felt the rush of being onstage.
Another evening after we got back to our pristine two bedroom apartment on the third floor of a walk-up in Queens Village, Moms cleaned the already clean house, made dinner for the two of us, gave me a bath and laid out my clothes for the next day. Tired, but not ready to go to sleep, she sat on the couch to read a book, while I played on the floor at her feet.
The young baker busted in and lashed out at Moms. In a rage, he grabbed the book out of her hands and started ripping out the pages, one by one, and then tore them into tiny pieces. He then threw them into the air, sending confetti-like scraps into the air that showered down on my head like snow.
It was on
.
My mother was ready to fight. My father punched her in the eye with such force that her brown eye turned black as night. After the scuffle, when she looked in the mirror, she knew she couldn't go to work the next day. The days ticked by but there was no improvement in her eye. Reluctantly, she returned to work with a new accessory: shades.
Mom's supervisor, also a Black woman, with a folksy, down-to-earth style, was surprised by the new look. She teased her, saying, “
Girl
, you need to take those sunglasses off. You must have gotten your ass beat last night.” My mother was so shocked and humiliated that all she could do was slowly remove the glasses that were meant to hide the truth of her marriage. The supervisor was speechless.
The ugliness of my mother's ravaged eye sobered her supervisor. She looked into my mother's troubled eyes and said, “Debra, it will happen again. You can't stay. You must leave now or it will go on. There are places you can go. There are shelters.”
My mother didn't listen.
Another time, my parents were at a wedding and my father slipped away to wander around the banquet hall to see what other party he could crash. When Moms realized that he was gone, she went to find him. Moms bragged, “It was my turn to act crazy.”
She found my father dancing and flirting with another woman. My father was always womanizing. It's almost like he did it just to make Moms mad. The humiliation, anger and shame must have choked her. She grabbed an umbrella from the hall, stormed out of the building and went to the parking lot. She walked over to their car and attempted to bust the windshield. My Dad followed her and watched her unsuccessfully assaulting the car. He came up behind her and they started going at it in the parking lot, until my uncle stopped them. When my uncle finally got them in the car, he drove and they fought all the way home, my father throwing sloppy punches over the leather seats. My Moms always said, “No one could stop him when he was enraged.”
Moms could see that my father's new habits were starting to have a grip on him. She pretended that things were going well but she knew that they weren't. Although my father was still making good money, he was also squandering it away to buy more drugs.
Moms knew in her heart that her marriage was already over. When she learned that she was pregnant, again, she was devastated. She gathered the strength to confess her fears to my father. “I'm thinking of not going through with this pregnancy.”
In response he said, “Whatever you want to do will be fine for me.” Moms scheduled an abortion and her girlfriend, Diane, agreed to go with her.
Diane talked Moms' ear off all day before the appointment. “Debbie, I'll take care of the baby, if you don't want it,” she finally said.
“I'm not going to carry a baby for nine whole months and then give it to someone else. That's just not right,” Moms said.
Moms just braced herself for being a single mother of two. After all, her own mother had struggled with four. Moms remembered her own childhood with a lonely mother whose drunken first husband, Moms' father, was living in the bottle. My Moms and her siblings were all latchkey kids. Moms knew she
could
survive, even if it meant that my little sister and me would let ourselves into an empty apartment, with only the streets to raise us.
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MOMS CARRIED THE BABY
from March to November. It was the autumn of my fifth year and the pregnancy was almost over. Although she was going to the doctor for her regular checkups, the hospitals weren't using high-tech ultrasound machines to check on babies in the hood. That shit was for rich people, I guess. Back then, as long as the doctor heard a heartbeat they told the mother that she and the baby were fine.
During the last month of the pregnancy, my Aunt Kathy asked Moms an innocent question, as they sat in the Atkins kitchen, shooting the shit. “Debra, has the baby been kicking?”
My Moms knew at that moment that something might be wrong. No one had asked that question during the whole nine months. Moms thought back to her first pregnancy and the hell I put her through with my constant kicking and moving. I had been eager for life.
“This baby girl is just lazy, not like my Jeffrey,” Moms told herself and Aunt Kathy. The very next day when she went to the doctor, he said he couldn't hear the heartbeat anymore.
Only silence.
The doctor said that the baby was just floating inside of Moms, not even fully developed, even though Moms had been getting fatter over the past nine months. My father had been using cocaine and selling it for over a year. That might have had something to do with how the pregnancy got fucked-up.
The doctor sent Moms home with a dead baby in her belly, saying that she should deliver the baby “naturally.” Later that same day, Moms was overcome with pain. When the baby finally did come out, the delivery was effortless. Moms didn't even have to push. The nurse took the baby away. Moms refused to look at the twisted sight of an almost-life.
“I turned her into a person by giving her a name:
Kristen
,” Moms said, longingly.
The only solid explanation that my five-year-old mind was offered was Moms' terse words: “Kristen was stillborn.” I didn't understand, really, but I sensed the ache of emptiness that was familiar.
As a child I didn't understand death. I wasn't there to grieve with my mother after my sister was stillborn. It wasn't until later on in my life that I grieved. I talk about Kristen's death in my song “Daddy's Little Baby,” as well as my daughter Brittany's birth. I always wanted a sibling. But it never happened. I carry Kristen in my heart. She's a constant reminder that responsibility comes with being alive.
This means early on I was a survivor.
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*
July 11, 2011
Today I can truly say I've been through it all. A young kid comes in today and they put him in the 18 cell right next to mine. He looked kinda depressed coming in but nothing out of the ordinary. A few hours go past and all of a sudden I hear someone choking. He's trying to kill his self. We all heard it. Everyone runs to their cell doors and start kicking, banging and calling the COs. Now, I've seen a person get shot and I've even seen someone die from a drug overdose, but this was different, this was suicide. It was like I could hear the life leaving his body. The COs rush in the cell and save him. I didn't even think some shit like this was possible in these cells. He tied his bed sheet to a pole that's attached to a sink, which is about 3 feet off the ground. He made some sort of noose, wrapped it around his neck and then threw himself forward into a boston crab carmel clutch type position. I never understood why a person would wanna kill themselves. Life is love & love is living. It's God's most precious gift. After they brought him back to his cell in the suicide suit, he cried for hours. We tried to console him, telling him it's never that bad to wanna kill yourself. Turns out he just turned 18 and got a girlfriend who is only 16. Her parents pressed charges and now he's locked up on sex offender charges. He was in school for graphic arts to learn how to make video games. It's sad 'cause he's still a kid, himselfâa good kid, at that. Now, he'll be forever labeled rapist or sex offender when really he's probably just a kid in love. Wow it's crazy how 2 years can be so close but yet so far when you're 18 & 16. It seems far because he's now an adult and she's still a teen. When you're 10 & 12 it's cute and innocent. When you're 18 & 20 nobody gives a fuck.