Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison T. Parsell (ebook reader play store .txt) 📖

It was the quietest I'd ever heard it get in there.

"Just calm down," the sergeant said.

"Bring him over here, Sarge," an inmate yelled. "We'll take care of it."

"Yeah, Baby," another shouted. "You snitch ass bitch."

I didn't care what they called me. Or what the deputies would do. They could bring in the goon squad and kill me for all I cared. I wasn't going back inside that cell. What those motherfuckers had already taken from me was all they were going to get.

The deputies who had grappled with me were standing outside the bullpen, laughing, just like the inmates.

"Relax," the sergeant said. He helped me off the floor and handed me his handkerchief, lifting my hand to hold it to my nose. "No one's going to do anything to you."

He stepped back from the dark holding cell, and out into the light, where I noticed for the first time that he was black.

The electric gate jolted closed with a loud bang.

"Those fucking niggers tried to rape me," a con mocked from across the hall.

The inmates laughed.

26

Black Panther ...

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

-Rilke

It was a regular cellblock, like all of the others, except I wasn't allowed out into the common area in front of the cells. They said it was for my own protection, but it felt more like punitive segregation.

After the incident in the bullpens, the sergeant had me moved upstairs to the Lavender Wing. I hadn't told them I was gay, but it didn't matter. "You'll be safe here," a deputy said. Making my way down the row, I sensed eyes staring at me as I hurried past each cell. When the deputy pulled the release brake and closed the sliding bars, I felt relieved. No one could get at me, in here.

I overhead the sergeant say he wasn't going to move me in the same transport vans that carried the inmates I had called niggers, so he postponed my transfer to Jackson. I knew, as soon as I had made that remark, that it would inflame the situation further, but I had hoped it would force the deputies into taking the action they did. Being a crazy racist, or even a snitch, was preferable to being gang raped and turned into the group bitch.

I'd also heard later, that when Nate and Loud Mouth appeared for their sentencing before Detroit Recorder's Court Judge, The Honorable Geraldine Bledsoe Ford, they both nearly fainted when she told them to look out the window and count the almost one hundred pigeons that were clustered outside. But even the ninety-nine years to life she'd given them, for the armed robbery and murder they'd committed while on parole, wasn't long enough to erase the pain of what they'd done to me. Not even a death sentence could've lessened my rage. They should have been charged with raping me, because that might have served as a deterrent to others who were doing the same. But that would've required my coming forward, which I was still too afraid to do.

"You've gotta let that kind of thinking go," Black Diamond said from the cell next to mine. "Cause that shit will just fuck with your mind."

I hadn't noticed her when I first came in, because I'd mostly kept my head down until I reached my cell. I was both upset about what happened in the bullpen, but also a tinge embarrassed for being placed on the wing with all the queens.

"Birds of a feather, honey," Black Diamond said to me.

I first heard about her in Quarantine and then again down in the bullpens. Some queens achieved almost celebrity status, and Black Diamond was among them. She wanted to be called Cat Woman, because she was dark like a panther and because of how she slinked down a prison catwalk. But the name had already been taken. Black Diamond came about because she was exceptionally ugly. "A diamond in the rough," as she'd tell it. Others said, "That bitch is so ugly that she has to sneak up on her food tray."

She was friendly from the moment I arrived, so we talked from the front of our cells. She gave me a book to read and even leant me a few cigarettes, even though she knew I couldn't repay her. The book was Meridian a novel by Alice Walker.

"I'd lend you this other one," she said, "but I'm still reading it."

"What it is?"

"Black Widow Mama."

"That's OK," I said. "I probably wouldn't want to read it, anyhow."

"It's my life story," she said. "It's about a Chicago Drag Queen."

"Oh. Are you from Chicago?"

"No, but I'm a Black Widow, don't you know."

The queen in the cell next to her yelled, "She done killed nine of her husbands. The bitch is like a praying mantic."

"Do you mean praying mantis?" I asked.

"Whatever," the queen shouted. "The bitch is a cold-hearted killer. Got arsenic and shit runnin' through them veins."

"All right Miss Ginger. Don't get me started on your nasty self." I could picture Black Diamond's eyes pivoting back and forth. "Just put Miss Ginger on your pay-no-mind list," she said. "She got a birthday comin' up and is about to turn twenty-five, which for a prison bitch, is like turning eighty." Black Diamond stuck her arm out of her cell and snapped. "Better take your Geritol, Girl!"

"We used to have a Mary Ann in here too," she said. "But her man posted bail this morning. The lucky ho. She's probably back out on the track, clickin' those ruby heels on Woodward Avenue. Anyway, Ginger here has offered me a pack of cigarettes if I read to her, so if you want, you can listen for free. But we have to wait till shift change 'cause the book is contraband and that's when Smitty's