So I went to continuation high school, and though I learned nearly nothing, I did discover Jack London’s books, White Fang and The Call of the Wild. These little books were the first, and only, ones I read in any school. I couldn’t believe there were books about dogs, books I could read and understand.
That year was probably my best year. I had a series of jobs: temporary food service on the graveyard shift at Fort Irwin Military Base, a summer job working for CalTrans, and then a gig at Yellow Freight Trucking Company. I bought my first car even before receiving my license. In this small community, where I was expected to live my whole life, my car and good jobs were considered a success. The older folks sat on their stoops and porches praising, “Look at that Jackson boy.” Inside, however, I was still a robot thinking I was a living being.
Despite Mr. Chavez’s prediction, I did graduate from high school. I graduated without knowing how to build a complete sentence, without knowing how to do simple fractions, without knowing how to read beyond a sixth grade level, and without knowing how to communicate with my fellow human beings. I graduated without ceremony, but I was pleased to see the joy in my mom’s face. A joy that was short lived.
Not long after graduation, I was on one of my runs. I got caught up, was shot, and then killed someone. The killing was not premeditated, but it was totally my fault. In the depth of my heart and soul, I felt that what I did was wrong. I did not set out to kill anyone that night, but the fact is I did. The night I was arrested, I saw in my heart and soul that my mom knew something big was wrong. I did not tell her what happened, but the silence that fell on the moment was sorrowful and life-changing.
I was supposed to come to prison. I deserved to do some time and make amends. I was ready to be judged and convicted for the killing I had done. But I did not expect the inherently racist judicial system that inflated my charges and determined my trial and conviction.
The day of my arrest, I had signed up with the Marines. I had just turned twenty and wanted to enlarge my world. Instead my world shrank to an isolated cell on the corner of the city jail. All I could do was to pace and to try to drown out the cheers I could hear from the football games at the high school near by.
During my trial, my mom and dad came to visit me. It was sad but good to see them together, in the same room, with a common goal and bond. I could see in their eyes that something had changed. This environment did not fit them any more than it suited cattle to live in trees. Perhaps it was the first time I had really looked at my parents. It was certainly the first time I recognized that no one could get me out of the trouble I was in now. There were no magic sidewalks in the sky over the purple and red clay mountains to lead me away from this mess I had created. This trouble made all the fights with my brothers, all the problems in school, and all the mean words irrelevant. This trouble left a cut, a big open wound, in our family. I could see in my parents’ eyes that one of their own had fallen. My mom’s eyes held a million words. My dad said one of longest sentences I’d ever heard him speak—“Boy, you better pray!”
And I did pray that night and for many nights after. Incarceration brought the fact that my parents truly did want the best for me into full bloom in my heart, mind, and soul. From then on, I never lost sight of this truth. We were family, and when one falls, the others are there to pick him up. Before, I could not see the family unity due to my own uselessness, ignorance, and lack of feeling. I could not feel the unity through the beatings, fights, and mean words. I could not see from the way my dad treated my mother—hitting and abusing her—how he cared for her, though he never loved her.
I sat across the table, looking at my parents who had come to this place that for them, as for me, was alien, dark, and one step away from hell. They could only reach out with their hearts and souls but this was enough. Now my own soul and heart had eyes to see and ears to hear my parents’ silence. I realized that my mom had always told me things that could help me, and that, although my dad had rough ways and many women, he had never been in trouble with the law. He, too, had wanted the best for me. Both wanted me out of trouble, jail, and hell. Now I wondered, when I was young and my dad warned me to “never let darkness catch you not at home,” did he mean only our home on Crooks Street, or perhaps home in other ways, too.
Now I could see and feel so clearly what it meant to be part of a family, to be part of Crooks Street and the River Bottom. I had new eyes, new ears, and mind. I knew now how, in one moment, life can change on you like a twister. I had been sleep-walking for twenty years and now I had awakened. But to what?
It was like I’d had blinders on during my first two decades on earth. My ears had earplugs. Even my heart was hidden. Hearing the guilty verdict, I felt disgust for the jury. Those twelve white folks were not my peers, did not know me, and had no human right to judge me. I felt that because my victim was white and my jury was all white, I had been railroaded. So I stood up and yelled out at them in court, calling them a bunch of racist white muthafuckers. At the same time, I heard my mom and aunt cry out in pain as the sheriffs rushed me to the floor and carried me out of the courtroom.
After they found me guilty of the murder, I awaited the sentencing of life without possibility of parole or death. The jury could not choose between the two, so the judge gave me life without parole. At twenty, one cannot grasp the depth of a no-parole life sentence. There is nothing to compare it to, other than death. At twenty, one does not think he will do a life sentence. A life sentence does not sink in immediately. It can take seven to ten years to begin to understand. Life without parole is too big to grasp, or come to grips with, in the moment.
I sat down to breakfast, my first morning in prison, in a dining hall stuffed with prisoners. The noise and the mood of the place was maddening, like stepping into a huge, dark cave full of hungry bats. I could not find any familiar spot inside of myself able to relate to the bars, concrete, steel, guns, and to the guards barking out orders to hurry and eat.
I was ignorant about all prison ways. I came from the desert, the natural world—purple and red clay mountains, open spaces—and there was nothing natural about cells. Even the air was tainted and twisted with unrealness, fleeting hope, and violent unrest. I was naïve and also unconnected to any inner spirit. But my will to survive took over. I learned quickly to keep my laughter, smiles, and feelings inside and hidden behind a mask. Silence and dead-eyed frowns kept the strangers and guards at bay.
Besides, what cause was there for smiles or laughter? I had killed someone. There was nothing to talk about and no one to talk to, no one to hold my hand, nothing to dream or hope for. Never had I been so alone in a crowd. I felt I walked among bodies in one dimension while I strolled in another.
What could I compare this new life to? Perhaps the flood control tunnels under the railroad station we roamed in as kids, the way those tunnels shrunk and grew darker and more suffocating the deeper we descended. Could I compare my life in prison to Campy, the greyhound that caught five rabbits, but died slowly at home under the shade tree never catching his breath? Or could I compare this existence to hiding under our green house? I watched everything then, a completely unseen little boy. As though I was invisible, which I wanted to be.
5
By Heart
ON A TABLE at the back of the classroom, I wrote the opening of what would become my first real story. I had just turned eleven, and this classroom was not in Los Angeles, but in Turin, Italy where my father had come to teach during his sabbatical year and where we lived for six months. Three teachers rotated among the fourth- through eighth-graders at Scuola Svizzera. Mrs. Rodoti taught us history, geography, science, and Italian. Miss Lutz taught us arithmetic. Or she did so when she wasn’t crying. Miss Lutz cried often, running from the classroom to sob on the shoulder of Mrs. Lutz—our principal and