Routine snaps back with a quickness. There’s the heart attack or the epileptic fit, then suddenly, the body reasserts itself and starts working again. A little different than before, maybe a little slower. Maybe it has to engineer a few workarounds, but soon enough, I’m in a cell, and I got a cellmate, and I have a new job fixing computers for a local public school, because someone finally explained to a CO who told Administration why some of the inmates call me Techie.
The block gets called to breakfast at 7 a.m., and by 7:30, I’m working. But, today, unease gets my fingers twitching. Another heart attack’s coming. It’s late: 6:20, and the cell lock still hasn’t disengaged. I get up and look out down the walkway to see everyone else still locked in their cells.
“Deuce,” I say to the big guy still sleeping in his bed. “Deuce, the ninjas are coming.”
He slaps his gums. “Wake me up when they get here,” he says, then rolls all 275 pounds of his body over.
The tablet I usually use to scroll through and read up on what news comes through the few websites we get access to is propped up by the toilet, where I usually take care of another part of my morning routine, the privacy sheet taped up to one end so that it hangs diagonally over the halfway mark of our cell.
We don’t have much by contraband, but I make a mental note, just so we have something to give the COs when they come through. If the cell’s clean, they’ll stick around for too long, expecting to find real dirt. Give them a little of what they’re looking for, and they’ll stop looking, Terrell had told me once after I’d starred up and got moved out of RNDC.
The tablet. Shit. Thumper’s tablet. They find that and I’m back in AdSeg, then waiting for me when I get back out will be no job, no privileges, and no Deuce, who might be one of the only guys in here with a routine that doesn’t fuck with mine.
“Deuce, the fucking tablet.”
He’s up on the edge of his bed now and yawns. “Fuck it. Can’t do nothin’ ’bout it now, nigga.”
In the middle of the block, the support team is already setting up a table for paperwork. Empty boxes surround it.
Two-man teams go into each cell. A little Roomba goes in with them, sometimes before, to scan first for anything that might get them or anything they might miss. There’s been talk that these guys are Augments, wired up like comic book superheroes. An inmate’s entire history gets beamed into their system, so they know if you’re trouble, they can tell what privileges you’ve been granted, who’s ever visited you and what they might’ve smuggled to you. They know what you’ve boofed without having you strip and spread your cheeks. There’s no hiding from these niggas.
They’re getting closer. Cellies get out and get cuffed, then stand by and watch as their cell gets tossed. Papers, nudes taped to the wall, extra sheets, stuff out of commissary.
Deuce has already started stripping his bed, and I start on mine. We fold our sheets and blankets, unplug our fans and wrap up the cords. Deuce leaves a few of his issues of Hustler around in strategic locations so they’ll get found.
Then the beep as they reach our cell.
I try to get a read on them as Deuce and I walk out and get cuffed and the Roomba goes in. They look bored more than anything else, but even the bored niggas can decide to make an example out of you for no reason in particular and “search” your shit by dumping coffee all over your papers, then walking all over them. And even the bored guys might see the tablet on its stand there, looking at them like a middle finger, and strike us.
I’m dizzy with worry, waiting for a head to poke out.
Then, after what seems like an hour, the Roomba crawls out, and the two guys follow and uncuff us and let us back in. It’s still there.
Almost like someone had put a blanket over it. Shielded it.
The inmate-porters sweep up the mess and push the contraband left over closer to the cells so inmates can put a hook on a string, toss it under our doors, and pull back our shit.
They let us out into the yard later the next day, and I spot Terrell across the way, but before I can say what’s up, I hear the smack of knuckles against cheek and already a crowd has gathered around the fight breaking out.
I feel my hands ball into fists. I don’t know either of the cats duking it out, not the big guy, not the little nigga, but the fire warms in me nonetheless until a CO shouts, “All right, guys. Knock it off.”
A couple dozen guards fill the yard, but nobody moves, except for a few that have their pepper spray and their shock-sticks turned on.
The CO who called out earlier does it again, half-heartedly, bored. Four more guards come out, and the first guard, now with backup, gets closer just as the big guy goes down. The guards beat the smaller guy with their shock-sticks just as the big guy drops the shank he was holding.
I don’t know what it is about today, but I feel protected. Maybe it’s the tablet.
The fight cuts our rec time short, and pretty soon, we’re back in the hall, two officers behind us, one for each line we’ve formed, holding their shock-sticks.
We’re coming down a flight of stairs when one of the COs, a younger guy I don’t recognize, stops next to me and nods for me to go back up. The others stop at the bottom of the stairs. Everyone’s looking, and I see in their eyes the look of brothers making sure nothing evil gets done to their family. There’s a chaplain waiting for me at the top of the stairs.
“You have to call home,” he says, in a voice too kind for this place.
From the kitchen window, Ella can just barely catch the edge of the Baptist church two blocks down. They’d had immigrant neighbors above them when they lived in that apartment, and one day, Mama had started praying differently. She would pray like they did, like every step on American soil was sacrosanct. The type of prayer that enlisted her whole body. Ella remembers peeking at Mama when she was supposed to have closed her eyes and how it felt like she was looking at a superhero bathed in the light of the sun from which she’d gained her powers. It was how she’d prayed right before Kev caught that attempted armed robbery charge. It was how she’d prayed after Ella’s self-exile. And whenever Ella would return to the changing neighborhood and spy on Mama, she’d see that it was how she’d prayed after that white kid in Charleston, South Carolina, had walked through the doors of that church, joined a Bible study group just like Mama’s, and then pulled out a .45-caliber pistol before opening fire.
Ella hated that kind of prayer. Sounding like they should be grateful just to be here. She remembers reading about that kid who killed those churchgoers, and she remembers praying for revenge. Praying for frogs and locusts and for rivers of blood, for every Confederate flag to find its own funeral pyre.
She’d cried a lot back then.
The videos had been ubiquitous, some more explicit than others. Six shots into the back of a man fleeing arrest on a child support warrant, or two shots ringing out and cops standing over the prone bleeding body of a young man in the midst of protests commemorating the anniversary of another boy killed by a cop. After each one, Ella had Traveled. Straight to the site of the killing, and she’d touched the ground, breathed in the air, and sucked that history deep into her body. Inhaled the violence of the previous hours. Sometimes it felt pornographic. To go to that cul de sac in McKinley, Texas, where black kids younger than her sat on the ground, handcuffed, while their white neighbors jeered and one cop grabbed a girl in a bathing suit by the arm and hurled her to the ground, then dug his knee into her back while she wailed for her mother.
She’d returned from every trip with her head in her hands.