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Books by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Trouble the Water
(1997) /
Black Southern Voices (1992) /
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008) /
The Katrina Papers
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Imprisonment in
Holding Cells at Tulane and Broad
Seeing
Things from Inside the Circle
By
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
TKP: Friday, July 14
I resist
writing about my arrest and imprisonment
in the famous holding cells at Tulane
and Broad. When I was a
scholar-in-residence at Talladega
College, I spent several hours in a
federal correctional institution,
reading my poetry to some of the inmates
and discussing
Native Son
with them. They were an intelligent
group. In a different time and place,
some of them might have been my friends,
my colleagues. Until June 28, those
brief visits, and a fact-finding
inspection of a juvenile detention
center, had been my only contact with
the inner workings of a jail.
The
experiences I had from the early morning
of June 28 to the late afternoon of June
30 were so dehumanizing that I refused
to acknowledge that they happened.
They did happen. They were complex.
They were signs that within the criminal
justice system the guards and the
guarded abandon civilization. One guard
who weighs 350 pounds walks the halls
like a bull rhino.
The
experiences were adorned with fears, the
shock of verbal abuse, disgust, shame,
sympathy for prisoners who suffered
greater agony than I. The experiences
resonated the Arab slave caravans over
the hot sand and the European slave
ships cutting the cold water of the
Atlantic. Body odors, shit, piss,
vomit. Privileged information about the
thought patterns of the temporarily
criminal men who are being initiated
into permanent criminality and the
permanently psychotic officers of the
law who will never be mentally well
until they die of natural or unnatural
causes.
I can
not lie and say the policemen arrested
me under false pretenses. They did
not. I broke a law. I can not lie and
say that I still have respect for
policemen and policewomen. I don't. I
don't because they embody corruption of
the worst kind. I respect the bravery
of people who put their lives on the
line 24/7 as they try to keep a
semblance of order in this world. I do
not expect them to behave normally,
especially while they are having
post-Katrina stress problems. When they
become corrupt official agents of
repression, when they cross that line, I
have no respect for them. I have come
to understand, much to my sorrow, why
some people are very anxious to kill
policemen, as if killing a policeman
would solve a systemic problem. I can
not lie and say the poisons that growing
up segregated spread in my person, the
matters I have long repressed about my
Army service in Vietnam, and this new
claustrophobia of jail have not enlarged
my anger and hate. They have done a
wonderful job of expanding my capacity
to coil like a huge immortal serpent who
is waiting for the right moment to
strike any number of life problems.
In jail,
language breaks into little pieces; it
ignores syntax and grammatical
standards; it transgresses for the sake
of transgression. Speech imitates the
retarded correlative of the environment.
Speech imitates the erasure of human
rights, the compromising of civil rights
……imitates the current postures of our
government. Civil rights are dead. The
New Orleans lockup is the site for
enactments of America's racial contract,
and it is a laboratory for observing the
dynamics of benign genocide. Abandon
hope, charity, and faith all ye who
enter Broad and Tulane.
Defecation and urine stuff non-working
toilets. They complement the invisible
filth that covers every inch of the
lockup, the filth that wants to invade
the bodies and the minds of the
inhabitants. The smaller cells have
benches along two walls. The larger
cells have benches along three walls and
a steel toilet behind a four foot
privacy barrier.
One very
large cell has two rooms and a shower
that has non-working showerheads.
If more
than two prisoners try to negotiate a
cigarette behind the barrier, a guard
may threaten to do something unpleasant
to everyone in the cell. If the
prisoners are negotiating marijuana
deals behind or in front of the barrier,
the guards say nothing. I am sure the
guards can not sniff marijuana. The
police academy modifies the brains of
men and women so that they can no longer
discriminate smells or segregate terror
from discipline.
In the
best case scenario, the guards supply
the marijuana to carefully chosen
dealers to minimize the number of
prisoners who will act out. Those of us
who do not smoke the reefers can have
free contact highs to keep us calm. This
primitive containment plan works
poorly. Too many of the inmates opt not
to be smoked into zombiehood.
Fifty or
sixty men are shoved into cells designed
to hold thirty. I think of the slave
cells on the Isle of Goree. One cell in
particular crawls and claws to the top
of memory, the cell where the bravest
African males were murdered. The
biologically-altered Africans in the
cells at Tulane and Broad in New Orleans
are shadows of their ancestors; they are
brave but they lack pristine bravery.
Those who managed to retain pristine
bravery are dead, or perhaps they are
alive somewhere south of Key West,
Florida.
Fifty or
sixty men are in cells designed to hold
thirty. When you are arrested, you do
not expect luxury housing.
Nevertheless, you do not expect housing
that is fit only for animals, that ASPCA
might condemn. You do not anticipate
that for more than two days your
identity as a human being will be
contested and mocked. You are
unprepared for vile intimacy. You do not
anticipate that the most frequently used
word at Tulane and Broad will be
“bitch.”
In the
lockup, “bitch” does not refer to a
female dog. It refers to males whom
other males scorn. The plain gender
violation is not sufficient in the
lockup. The word must be modified, and
those most hated must be called
“pussy-bitches.” Such language of
outrage is addressed to the guards. It
angers them, makes them less receptive
to hearing any legitimate pleas from
prisoners who are diabetic or who have
other medical conditions that require
monitoring. Let the men who unthinkingly
call one another “dawg” suffer. In the
minds of the guards, the “bitches”
inside the cells can suffer. The guards
gaze upon suffering with inhuman glee,
their eyes glimmering like those of a
predator. Their behavior is amoral.
They are corrupt.
The
Latinos huddle together and speak
Spanish. Some of them do not understand
the language around them. It has to be
translated for them. The whites who have
previous prison records conduct business
smoothly with blacks who have prior
knowledge of how to behave in prison.
The blacks, whites, and Latinos who have
never been in prison are forced to take
a short-course in survival, to learn the
business. I learn real fast.
Prisoners in the lockup are fed two
sandwiches per day, once in the morning
and once in the evening. Troubled with a
drastic loss of revenue, the city of New
Orleans and the parish of Orleans can
not afford to feed prisoners more than
that. The city must husband its borrowed
dollars so it can afford to evacuate
people when the next hurricane blows
through the city.
If it
were not an utter violation of human
rights, I think the criminal justice
system would not give prisoners any food
and would force them to live on water.
I eat nothing for two and a half days.
I give my sandwiches to my comrades, my
fellow prisoners who hunger for
something more than white bread
sandwiches. I can afford to lose a pound
or two. Those who eat the sandwiches do
not die, but I suspect that the bread
and meat (or imitation meat) contains
something which might induce behavior
modification. I live on water alone for
two and a half days.
One
prisoner tells me he was beaten by the
police before they brought him in. He
is in pain. He begs me to help him get
up from the floor. I help him to rise.
The suffering must help the suffering to
rise.
And I
sleep in short stretches of no more than
five minutes, either sitting on a bench,
or sitting with trepidation on the
floor, or standing up. My legs and back
ache. The air bag slammed into my ribs
when I totaled my car. Air bag. The air
bag….Air bags are vicious lifesavers.
The police who arrested me did take me
to a hospital to have an examination
before they brought me in handcuffs to
Tulane and Broad. The law requires that
they exercise minimal human decency.
The doctors or interns—I
am too dazed to know to whom I am
speaking—determine
that my ribs are bruised not broken;
they put a band on my right wrist and
send me on my happy way. Or unhappy
way. It depends on who is controlling
the perception.
My ribs
hurt. I will not lie down on the
filth-ridden concrete and use my shoes
and shirt as a pillow. Will not. Will
the levees hold when the next hurricane
comes? Will not.
I do not
know what time it is. The time I need
to know about is not at Tulane and
Broad. It is in the classroom where I
am not. It is on Poydras Street, inside
the Hilton New Orleans Riverside,
sleeping on a comfortable bed in Room
2843. It is back at the hotel where I
should be preparing to administer final
exams and to attend Dillard’s
baccalaureate and commencement. It do
not know what time it is. Time knows
what it is. It is flowing past the hotel
on the surface of the Mississippi River.
I have lost count of how many times I
have asked to be allowed to make the one
free phone call I am entitled to make.
The NOPD gives as much attention to
civil rights as it gives attention to
grammatical issues in Sanskrit.
My tee
shirt is uncomfortable, sticky. It is
beginning to smell. I should wash it,
put it in the washing machine at home. I
am beginning to smell. I no longer smell
Catholic. I smell Sunni or Shiite. I
should wash me. I want to take my shoes
off. My shoes tell me they want to stay
on my feet. I taste blood in my mouth.
I scratch my face. My beard is growing.
White hair is growing on my brown face.
I need a shave. My face says it is June
29.
The
walls are grey or green or some ugly
color only a convict could love. The
lighting is bad. My eyes are not giving
very accurate reports on what they are
looking at. My hearing is good, though,
too good.
My ears
are weary of sounds of discomfort of the
bitches shouting wolf tickets at the
guards who are bitches the nonstop
cursing the bitches bitching the awkward
success of the young guys to create rap
rhythms why don’t they hip hop jazz
complaints about the lockup blues if
they so fucking bad as they claim they
ought to rap criminal injustice I say
loud enough to be heard. The guy next to
me looks surprised. You are a professor
he says. You are not supposed to talk
like that. I guess he be knowing what he
talking ‘bout. But I don’t give a shit.
The rappers stop trying to rap. They go
back to burning their lips with
“roaches.”
The
marijuana trade thrives in the lockup.
The police officers have blind noses.
They can neither smell nor see the
inmates who openly suck on joints.
And how
does the marijuana get inside the
panopticon of the lockup?
I need
to be outside the lockup. Claustrophobia—Confinement
and I have never been friends. The
articulate young man from Atlanta
sitting next to me is sleeping. His
head keeps falling on my shoulder. I
nudge it off. He jerks upright without
awakening. His head falls again, and
again I nudge it off. It falls a third
time. Let him sleep. I may need a
stranger’s shoulder one day.
Meanwhile, one inmate, a skinny little
guy, is performing a one-man play on
why one should not do drugs. He
complains loudly that fleas are biting
him. He scratches and slaps his arms,
his legs, his head, his thighs. He
punctuates his performance with
apologies. He calls for his mother. He
repeats his scratching and slapping with
precision. He says it is heroine. He
mumbles. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be this
way. I’m sorry.” Some of the brothers
who are trying to sleep tell him to shut
up. He ignores them. “I’m sorry.” The
brothers forget him and go back to
sleep.
I grab
my chest frequently. Several of the
inmates ask if my heart is o.k. Yes.
I’m still breathing. Can’t you
motherfuckers see that I am still
breathing? Goddamn.
The
wearier I become, the more I slip into
the role of the jailbird, become a
member of the clan. It is good to see
things from inside the circle. You can
witness the mutual destruction of
humanity, how quickly people devolve
into the state of nature. You can feel
the moral ground being swept from under
your feet. You can have microscopic
views of vulgar madness and racially
motivated random violence.
Despite
having experience in Vietnam that now
serves me well, I am not prepared for
the fresh reminders of why soldiers
abuse the enemy and feel no guilt. I do
not want to contemplate why torture is
so delicious, but I do think about
torture. I feel tortured. I think of
people who were tortured in
Mississippi, Rome, France, Uganda, Cuba
and Japan, tortured during the period of
the Inquisition, tortured in Latin
America, in Nazi concentration camps. I
think of those suffering the continual
rape of their humanity in Guantanamo
Bay, in Iraq, in the hidden, top-secret
interrogation centers in the hidden
geographies of the world, centers that
our President and our CIA do not know
exist. My flesh screams. This is not New
Orleans. We are in Baghdad. We are not
in Tulane and Broad. We are in Abu
Ghraib. Or Haditha. Or Guantanamo.
When I tell one inmate that we are in
Abu Ghraib, he smiles and tells me that
in New Orleans every African-American
male gets arrested or is threatened with
being arrested. He says we are not in a
foreign land. We are at home. I am glad
he pulled my coat and pulled me out of
fantasy.
I have
been in jail for more than fifty hours
before the authorities decide that I can
make one free phone call. My friends
Thomas (Tony) King and Lolis Edward
Elie engineer my getting out of the
lockup. I am allowed to make a phone
call at 5:15 AM, and I call Tony,
instructing him to notify the Security
Chief at Dillard about my whereabouts
and to call Lolis later in the morning,
because Lolis is not an early riser.
Lolis called the jail when he got the
news and arranged for me to be released
on my own recognizance. Despite the
noble efforts my friends make on my
behalf, NOPD takes its own sweet time to
process me out. I have to be moved to
three different cells as they process
the paperwork. My legs have to be
shackled when I am taken upstairs to
Traffic Court. After I have admitted my
guilt in traffic court, I have to be
retained several more hours.
When I
finally reach the area for
out-processing, I have to suffer more
humiliation. The young women who have
the job of giving us papers to sign and
the envelopes that contain personal
belongings that were confiscated when we
entered are obviously more interested in
their plans for the weekend than they
are in getting the job done promptly.
They laugh and chatter. They behave like
Millennials, like contemporary
heifers. A few of us are anxious and
restless. Two guys move toward the
opening near the counter to see what is
the holdup. One of the women looks into
the mirror that is angled so that she
can see us in the hallway. She yells,
"If you don't sit your asses down, you
will not get processed out today." My
ass sits down on the hard bench. When
she calls my name, I think of Walter "Wolfman"
Washington singing "Ballgame on a Rainy
Day." I feel soaked. It is slightly
after 3:00 PM when I walk out into the
sunlight.
In every
country, including our highly civilized
society, women and men who have chosen
to preserve law and order or sacred
traditions transform their jobs into
legalized excuses to shed civilization
the way a snake sheds skin; they can not
resist the temptations of barbarian
power. They love to see people cringe.
They have orgasms as people suffer. You
have to be there to know it. If you
have never been in jail in New Orleans,
I strongly recommend that you get
yourself arrested on a minor charge and
spend more than a day in the lockup.
You will have an awakening. You will be
enlightened. In jail, God speaks more
plainly than He does at a Quaker meeting
or in a Greek Orthodox church. Your new
neighbors will speak plainly also as
they spew yellow elixirs of vomit and
unwashed language. You will not have to
read Dante's
Inferno. You will not have to
read Amiri Baraka's
The System of Dante's Hell. It
will incorporate you. You will think
that Sartre's Huis Clos (No
Exit) describes a suburb of
Heaven.
Reprinted by permission of the author
from
The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and
Recovery
(University of New Orleans Press, 2008)
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*
The Katrina Papers:
A Journal of Trauma and Recovery
By Jerry W.
Ward, Jr.
The Katrina Papers is not your
average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of
writing, including intellectual autobiography,
personal narrative, political/cultural analysis,
spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry.
Though it is the record of one man's experience of
Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a
part of his life and work as a scholar, political
activist, and professor. The Katrina Papers
provides space not only for the traumatic events but
also for ruminations on authors such as Richard
Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The
result is a complex though thoroughly accessible
book. The struggle with form—the search for a
medium proper to the complex social, personal, and
political ramifications of an event unprecedented in
this scholar's life and in American social history—lies at the very heart of The Katrina Papers. It
depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view
which takes the local as its nexus for understanding
the global. It resists the temptation to simplify
or clarify when simplification and clarification are
not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very
direct, but he always refuses to simplify the
complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the
process and the historical moment that he is
witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is
both pedagogical and inspiring.—Hank Lazer
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posted 26 November
2008 |
