TWO NEW POEMS FOR YOU

Here are 2 new poems for your amusement. Charlie continues to work at improving his writing skills. As always, he welcomes any input, opinions, and constructive criticism.

We hope your holiday season is off to a good start.



NO FURTHER QUESTIONS


by Charles Patrick Norman



Something happened

I didn’t understand,

So I asked my friend why.

He replied, “Sometimes it bees that way.”


I felt a buzzing in my head.


Something else happened

that made no sense to me,

So I asked him again to explain.

He said, “It is what it is.”



For some reason that infuriated me,

so I reared back my fist and

punched him straight in the mouth.


The buzzing in my head went away.


He looked at me, hurt, and asked,

“Why did you do that?”

And I answered, “Sometimes it bees that way,”

and punched him in the mouth again.


Holding a rag to his bleeding lip,

he asked me, “What was that for?”

And I said, “It is what it is,

except when it ain’t.”


He shut up.


No further questions.



and another one:

YOU SAY, YET


by Charles Patrick Norman

You say life is an accident, yet

I hear a crow cawing, another answering,

And wonder at your ignorance.



You say there is no God, yet

I look at the lines in my hand

And see our lie.


You say there is no hereafter, yet

When your child lay sick

You begged God to save her.


You say there is no evil, yet

I see men caged by men

Surrounded by darkness and hate.


You say there is no hope, yet

I see a son on his father’s lap, asking,

“Daddy, when are you coming home?”

A THANKSGIVING PRAYER

One of my earliest memories was my grandfather saying “Grace” before every meal. I called my mother’s father, Floyd Franklin Walker, “Bebaw,” from the time I could talk, and my grandmother, Velva Marie, “Memaw.” We would gather round the table, with the tantalizing aromas of breakfast, dinner, or supper filling the room, and look expectantly toward Bebaw to say grace before digging in. an outwardly serious man with a gruff voice, inside Bebaw was deeply emotional, and every time he recited the blessing that his father before him said, everyone knew he was talking to God from his heart.

The prayer never changed, in homage to his father and grandfather before him, and the words became indelibly imprinted in my memory. I remember the last Thanksgiving I shared with my grandparents, in their house at 1324 Della Street in Texarkana, sitting at the big table with various aunts, uncles, cousins, and other loved ones, so many that the children were served at a table in another room, my grandmother directing the team of womenfolk who brought steaming platters to the table. Bebaw was sick with the cancer that killed him. He’d lost weight, becoming a shadow of his former dominant physical self, but when all eyes turned to him, expectantly waiting for the blessing, his voice sang out powerfully and sure.

On this Thanksgiving, despite all the travails, I have much to be thankful for, and I want to share the blessing that my grandfather bestowed to me. My dear friend, Libby, will be sharing a modest canteen meal with me inside a prison visiting park, and I hope to share this grace with her.

WALKER FAMILY GRACE

Righteous Heavenly Father,
Look down on us
with tender mercy, Lord.
Direct your blessings
to sanctify these table offerings
for the nourishment of our bodies.
We ask these things
in Jesus’ precious name.
Amen.

The following is a family photograph from 1913, when Bebaw was seven years old, at left, shading his eyes, with his parents, John Richard and Millie Francis Walker, brothers and sisters, in Texas. By that age, Bebaw had memorized his father’s prayer, just as I memorized it decades later, and now pass it along to you.

May you have a blessed Thanksgiving holiday surrounded by family and loved ones.

Charlie

11/03/2012

WHITES ONLY Poem Receives Standing Ovation

Dateline 10/31/12


On Wednesday, October 31st, I completed a legal phone call to my lawyer, William Sheppard, in Jacksonville. Perhaps it was appropriate that it was a Hallowe’en phone call. In prison, when it comes to “Trick or Treat,” there are mostly “Tricks,” and very few “treats,” but on this Hallowe’en, Bill delivered a “treat.”

Much of our call concerned confidential issues, but Bill had no problem with my sharing this information.

A newspaper article described Bill Sheppard as “the renowned civil rights lawyer,” and he is that. He is famed for his many court battles, all the way to the United States Supreme Court, over the past forty-plus years,. I am fortunate and blessed to have him fighting for me.

Bill’s son is a filmmaker who produced a documentary about the Honorable Judge Henry Lee Adams, Florida’s first black federal judge, and the hurdles he overcame as a black lawyer in race-sensitive Jacksonville.

The Federal Bar Association invited Bill to be the keynote speaker at its Orlando gathering commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Middle District. The Middle District encompasses federal courts from Tampa and Orlando, to Daytona Beach. 185 federal magistrates and federal district judges were in attendance. It was quite an honor for Bill. The assemblage viewed the Adams documentary, then Bill spoke.

A little over two weeks ago I wrote a poem titled, “Whites Only,” recounting my memories of traveling across the South with my family in 1959, before the civil rights era came to prominence. Because Bill and I had discussed our own experiences from that time, and he’d previously told me about the documentary, I dedicated “Whites Only” to him. I mailed the handwritten poem to Libby, who typed it and sent it to Bill. I respect Bill’s opinion on writing, and Libby sends him copies of most of my literary works. I asked if he’d gotten the poem and what he thought of it. Bill said he was moved by it, loved all my work, that each of us only has so much time in this world, and what we leave behind us matters. He said, “Charlie, if you checked out of this world this afternoon, you’d leave behind a helluva legacy of your works, already.” Coming from such a man of distinction, that encouragement meant a lot to me.

Bill told the federal judges that we can’t be complacent on this race issue, that contention continues, then he read my poem to the group. I asked him how they responded to it, and he told me, “Standing ovation!”

That amazed me, that such an austere group would respond so positively to a poem by a state prisoner and thereby validating what I was trying to communicate. It was such a pleasant surprise for me, on Hallowe’en, after the battles I’ve had with the Florida Department of Corrections over their repetitive and ongoing censorship of my First Amendment constitutional rights to communicate with the outside world. I’ve had outgoing letters containing handwritten literary works “disappear,” never received by the intended recipient, never to be seen again, taken by a prison employee mail clerk, while other letters were arbitrarily “refused,” with post-it notes declaring, “inmates can not[sic] write stories,” and “inmates can not[sic] write poems.”

I beg your pardon, but we still have a “Bill of Rights.” Further, every citizen has the right to “speak, write, and publish their thoughts,” according to the Florida Constitution. After unwavering effort, the poetry censorship has eased. Had it not, the federal judges would never had heard the poem.


I’ve asked Libby to include “Whites Only” here. I would like your comments and feedback, and any experiences you might have had that you’d like to share.

WHITES ONLY
A Poem by Charles Patrick Norman

(for Bill Sheppard)

It seemed odd, the barn roofs across rural Alabama
painted with Coca Cola and Burma Shave,
(there were no interstates in the South in 1959),
and every third billboard, it seemed, proclaimed,
“Impeach Earl Warren.” “Who is Earl Warren, Daddy?”
and, “Why do they want to impeach him?” I asked.


It seemed forever, our annual trek from Tampa
to Texarkana, to visit our grandparents, the race
across the South had only one entrant, our father
treating every gasoline refill as a NASCAR pit stop
to be done in thirteen-point-four seconds or thereabouts,
Heaven forbid, one of us say, “Daddy, I gotta pee.”


It seemed that Mississippi was one huge cotton field
hundreds of miles wide, lined with pitiful wood shanties abutting
the East-West-two-lane highway in front and outhouses
out back at the very abyss of the first green row.
“Daddy, can we stop and ask those black people
if I can use their outhouse, or just pee beside the road?”


It seemed the only gas station in Mississippi
wasn’t much bigger than the tiny shanties we passed.
The first thing I noticed were the two rusty water fountains
with signs behind them proclaiming “Whites Only” and “Colored.”
The old man sitting on the kitchen dinette chair out front
pointed with his chin when I asked for the restroom.


It seemed silly that I had to choose between two doors,
“Whites Only” and “Colored,” neither one looked special,
but I chose white, since I was one, and pulled open
the flimsy wooden door with no knob, just a round hole,
to be stopped short by the ammonia burn of stale urine,
then I gagged — the toilet stopped up, feces floating, overflowing.


It seemed my only alternative was to seek fresh air.
After I peed on the old tires stacked high in the weeds
at the back of the station, I ran to our car,
where my father impatiently thrummed his fingers on the seat back
and my mother read “Perry Mason,” refusing to look left or
right across Mississippi, avoiding childhood memories of Arkansas cotton.


It seemed unlikely that all those people sitting on porches of
those passing shanties knew I’d peed on old tires behind
the only gas station in Mississippi, but I felt like their
black faces accused me of something, though I wasn’t sure
what, since I hadn’t done much wrong in my ten years of existence,
at least I didn’t think so, ignorance being no excuse.


Lying on the backseat remembering how my sandals stuck
to the sticky restroom floor (“Whites Only”), I saw
in my imagination a black child coming out the “Colored”
door and peering past him to see shiny porcelain sinks,
polished toilets, white tile floor glistening where the black
man cleans, never daring to enter the door proclaiming “Whites Only.”


Charlie

POWER OF POEMS TO REKINDLE MEMORIES

ON FRANKLIN STREET




By Charles Patrick Norman



The four of us on Franklin Street one Saturday we walked,

My younger brothers ran ahead to peer in store windows

While I stretched my small steps beside my father’s strides

In blind imitation of his proud strut I stalked.



We came upon a withered man in dirty clothes upon the ground,

Against a vacant building door he leaned with dried flowers in hand,

Twisted red crepe paper, green wire stems, not worth much, to me,

Yet my father reached deeply in his pocket, giving all the quarters he found.



He handed me the flower, a poppy, symbol of a long-ago great war,

I did not understand why he paid a price so dear and asked him.

He said we can never repay that man for what he sacrificed,

“I’d have given him dollars, not silver, were we not so poor.”



In times to come I found my father never passed a beggar by

Without sharing what little he had for a pencil, smile, or God bless you.

He tossed his precious packs of Camels to road prisoners from his car

In high spinning arcs that one grinning soul snatched deftly from the sky.



He’s gone now, my father, these many years, yet his heart beats on in me,

I try to do what he would do for those less fortunate than I,

Even when it is the last I have with none to come, or more,

I think of us four on Franklin Street that day, when I was young and free.

A NEW POEM

WE ARE THE SQUANDERI

By Charles Patrick Norman




We are The Squanderi, the squandered ones,

You know us, but you turn your head

At the disturbing sight that otherwise offend

Your refined senses of justice, opportunity, and

The American Dream.


Our mothers were Squanderi before us,

Pre-teen pregnant, high on drugs offered freely

Through corporate neighborhood distribution networks

That start with billionaires with ships, airplanes and warehouses,

Down to teen dealers wearing Air Jordans passing out free samples

To addict each new generation of Squanderi to their losing ways

Of stealing from their Squanderi mothers and grandmothers

Who tend them,

To selling drugs themselves to feed their habits,

To trading their Squanderi bodies

For a few hours of narcotized oblivion.

We are the Squanderi babies born with fetal alcohol syndrome,

Premature babies the size of rabbits or squirrels

Removed from Squanderi wombs,

Already twitching from withdrawals

Our primitive pleasure centers calling out

For crack cocaine before we’ve tasted

Tainted mother’s milk,

Or seeking heroin, or pills of corporate choice,

Oxycodone and her sisters.


We are The Squanderi children

Who wander, lost,

Off the bus to elementary schools miles away,

Hungry, no breakfast, no eggs, milk or juice

Like your pink-cheeked cherubs with warm clothing,

New shoes, backpacks stuffed with school supplies and cell phones.


What’s a cell phone?

It’s what the dealers hold up to their ears

Or tap with their fingers and smile.

We are The Squanderi children who sit at the back of the classroom,

Starving, vacant-eyed, staring at the backs of the heads

Of your well-tended children who raise their hands

With the answers to unintelligible questions

Of that teacher who drones on and on

And never looks our way.

It is too disturbing.

It won’t do them any good, anyway,

An education.

They are Squanderi.

We are The Squanderi.

We descend upon “the convenience store” in our flocks

Like robins on a strawberry field,

Hoping to snatch a Twix or Skittles or beef jerky

Or a bag of Lays Potato Chips

Before we are shooed and hustled out the door

By the dark-skinned man who curses us

In some unknown tongue learned

In even worse slums of Mumbai, or Bombay,

Or whatever they’re calling it now,

A man now driving a shiny foreign car

Manufactured in Tennessee or Alabama

By Japanese or Germans or other folks

Who were shooting at Grandpa

Scant decades ago, and are now our friends

In prosperity that never seems to trickle down

To the bottom of the barrel where we squirm

And fend for ourselves,

Too many hands with manicured nails above us

Scooping out the meat before the broth reaches us.


When we Squanderi are hungry we will do things

That do not occur to you or us when our bellies are full,

Like the day the food stamps come on the card

And Grandma fries a chicken and potatoes

And we drink milk for two or three days

Until the gallon jug is empty.


What are food stamps, you ask?


We are The Squanderi children,

Diseased, impregnated

By those who squander our bodies

And discard us along with our sick babies,

Like those before us, waiting in lines,

Visiting our wasted mothers with brown teeth

Rotted from crystal meth along with their minds.


What did you bring me?

In jails and distant prisons, but not our fathers,

Who we wouldn’t recognize anyway

Unless Maury Povich gives DNA tests

To the neighborhood dope men on TV,

A lengthy process of elimination,

“You are NOT the Father!”


We are The Squanderi who used to fill up the mental hospitals

Until the rich politicians closed them down

So they could free up more tax dollars to steal,

Let them eat cake, or stand in line at the Salvation Army

Or some do-gooder soup kitchen like everyone else.

So now we live in homeless shelters, or cardboard boxes

In alleys, under eight-lane bridges, or city parks,

Panhandling

The Good Citizens who hold their breaths

And turn up their noses,

Offended by the stench of The Squanderi.


Don’t give them anything—

It only encourages them.

Why don’t those people get jobs

And better themselves, instead of taking

Government handouts from taxpaying citizens?


Jobs doing what?

Picking tomatoes at some corporate agricultural conglomerate

Twenty miles from the projects where not even

Illegal immigrant farmworkers dare to tread,

In fear of the white men in jackets with “ICE”

On the backs?

And then what?

Find our way back to town and trade

Twenty dollars to the teen with the cell phone

To his ear

For a few yellow crack rocks?


We are The Squanderi, who fill the juvenile “homes,”

The courts, the jails, the prisons

With “mandatory lifes,”

And some of us, the lucky ones,

Get strapped into polished wood chairs

With electrical connections pioneered by

Thomas Alva Edison and George Westinghouse

(Ask Mr. Google — he knows everything),

Better known for consumer products

That make your lives easier, insulated

So that your pink-cheeked cherubs

Won’t be “accidentally” electrocuted

By the dishwasher or plasma screen TV.


The jolts of electricity fry our brains

One last good time,

Smoke comes out our ears until

Our unwanted Squanderi bodies

Are carted away

For further cremation

With those Squanderi before us,

Ashes to ashes.


Or “The Authorities” will pump our veins full

With corporate drugs designed for “euthanasia”

Of dogs and cats and other surplus animals

Like us, The Squanderi,

They “put us to sleep” like Fido and Muffy,

One last shot of chemical dependency,

A final buzz at the buzzer,

SWISH,

We’ll never be this high or low again.


Thanks, I needed that. Better to die now

Than spend an eternity in your cages

Built by other Squanderi, supervised by

Fat white men with clipboards, hard hats and shiny trucks.

We are The Squanderi. Pay no attention to us.

We are not of your class or your world.

We are just “The Wasted Ones,”

On the way to the dump

With the other trash.

Pray to your God that you never join us.


Charlie

THE WEED WHACKER

Dateline: 09/22/2012

How does one defend himself against wrong? In prison, a person has limited choices in how to respond to actions by others, especially when the wrongs are committed by prison employees, both guards and others.

To supposedly offer otherwise disenfranchised prisoners an avenue to redress any wrongs committed against them by prison staff members, in accordance with Federal regulations, Florida implemented a “grievance system” that is designed to provide a means to solve certain problems that affect them.

It sounds good in theory, but in application it often becomes a triggering event that sparks retaliation against the prisoner who dares to complain.

As someone whose spirit and will have never been broken by the yoke of incarceration and who refuses to silently absorb whatever unjust punishments certain bellicose and domineering types decide to inflict upon me, during my 34 years of imprisonment I have made full use of the remedies guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States of Constitution to redress grievances against the government, to my repeated detriment.

“Don’t get mad, get even,” could be the credo adopted by many subjects of complaint, since retaliation is a common result of filing a grievance in prison. Prisoners are retaliated against in many ways, and over time, if I haven’t experienced the retaliation personally, I’ve observed it happen to others, from unwarranted disciplinary reports, removal from decent prison jobs, to lockup in solitary confinement, to punitive transfers to distant, more severe locations far from home. I have personally experienced all of these. Other less fortunate prisoners who dared to file grievances against sadistic guards have weathered gassing with pepper spray, beatings, and even death.

One of the first things my friend, Jack Murphy, told me when I came to prison at “The Rock,” Raiford, Florida, was how to tell when a prison employee was lying:

“If their lips are moving, they’re lying.”

Perhaps that may seem like a broad judgment, but time after time I’ve found it to be true.

“I won’t lie to you, but I will lie on you.”

A guard who bragged that he had written over 400 disciplinary reports (D.R.’s) in one year told me that. He got promoted to sergeant. A year later he got fired for brutality and lying. He’s serving beer in a biker bar now. During his tenure as a “correctional officer,” he often boasted about how many prisoners he’d retaliated against for “writing him up” by planting contraband under their mattresses during contrived cell searched and by outright lies on D.R.’s.

That man is an extreme example, but not a unique one. Since I’ve been steadily fighting a series of retaliation and reprisals against me since about January, 2010, that so far have resulted in multiple false D.R.’s and two punitive transfers, it may prove enlightening to relate some incidents of reprisal and retaliation that have happened to me over the years. These incidents further illustrate the means and methods of how official retaliation is accomplished. Sometimes I wonder if they have a training manual and a course entitled, “How To Retaliate Against Prisoners And Get Away With It,” since the prevalence of these incidents is so widespread.



I’ve never written about how they retaliated against me at Avon Park C. I., but now is a good time. It is a classic.

I was punitively transferred from Polk C. I., near my family, to Martin C.I., almost 200 miles away, and spent eleven months trying to get transferred out of there. Through the intervention of a lawyer I finally made it out and was sent to Avon Park C. I., about ninety miles closer to home. Avon Park was known as a “sweet camp,” with better facilities and programs.

With my experience in printing and graphic arts, I got a good job as a vocational aide in the graphic arts department, which meant I taught graphic arts to about twenty students, and worked on projects for the administration and Central Office in Tallahassee. When I wasn’t working Monday through Friday, I enjoyed the abundance of nature and wildlife that surrounded the prison.

Avon Park is a fairly old prison, relatively small, and is nestled inside a corner of the massive Avon Park Air Force Base and Bombing Range, a piece of state property dwarfed by the federal swamp that dominates the ecology. During hunting season, deer, wild hogs, and turkey are pursued heavily through the woods and thickets. Drainage ditches crisscross the prison grounds in a losing battle to hold back the swamp. Sometimes the weed-filled ditches are four or five feet deep in murky water. Cottonmouth snakes (a.k.a. water moccasins) and other water snakes are frequently seen undulating through the ditch water, along with bull frogs that incessantly call to prospective mates all night. Prisoners buy bags of peanuts to feed the over-population of gray squirrels that boldly take the offerings from outstretched hands, and sometimes bite thumbs down to the bone with their yellowed incisors. Hawks and owls swoop down inside the fences and harvest the less-cautious and less-alert squirrels. Outside the perimeter fences herds of deer and flocks of wild turkeys appear in the early morning and evenings. Everglades kites, turkey vultures, black vultures and ospreys fly overhead, when the fighter jets and bombers aren’t making their training runs nearby, blasting the bejesus out of the bombing range. At night, gangs of twenty or thirty raccoons would sneak into the prison and turn over metal garbage cans and glean anything edible from the trash.

All was not right in paradise, as I found out after I filed a long-forgotten grievance to one of the prison plutocrats. Retaliation, next stop. Teach me a lesson.

Next thing I know, my name appeared on the daily job change sheet, from vocational graphic arts to “inside grounds,” a catch-all job category that served as a dumping ground for a couple hundred unskilled and otherwise unemployable prisoners who had very little to do but hang out, pick up an occasional cigarette butt or piece of litter, or cut grass. There is no unemployment in prison. Everyone has a job, even if it is in name only and little or no work is actually done. What are you going to do with a thousand men crammed in one small space, to justify giving them the “gain time” earned according to law? Nothing.

As soon as someone saw my name posted on the job change sheet and ran to tell me, I “knew what time it was,” as they say in prison. The vengeful plutocrat was expressing his displeasure with my grievance.

It became apparent to me that a simple job change was not the end of the retaliation, just the beginning, as soon as I reported to the Inside Grounds sergeant. I knew that going from a cushy position in the air conditioning to the “outside” was not the extent of the punishment. The sergeant, a large middle-aged guard in charge of the horde of “workers,” made his speech with hesitation and difficulty.

“Norman, I got nothing to do with this,” he said. “I’m just following orders, and for your own good I suggest you do the same.”

“Yessir.”

“Go sign for a weed whacker, and make sure it’s full of gas,” he said. “Get you a handful of them plastic replacement strings, then go over there and change out of your blues into those old work blues. Get a pair of goggles and rubber boots from my clerk. You’re my new ditch man.”

Great. The ditch man, armed with a weed whacker, would wade into the water-saturated ditches and whack the continuously growing weeds that slowed down the flow of water from the institution grounds to the swamp. The ditch man was the acknowledged worst job on the compound, relegated to whichever poor soul had been unfortunate enough to bring down the wrath of some vengeful official. There were only two prisoners assigned to the ditch crew. When the ditches were done, all the grass growing along the fences, buildings, roads and sidewalks had to be edged. With the year-round growing season and ideal conditions for weeds, weed whacking was a never-ending job, one you could not escape unless you went to lockup or were replaced by someone in even less favor than you.

I knew exactly how their minds were working. All they knew about me was their perception that I was the scholarly, academic type, better suited for a classroom or office, not the type to respond well to menial labor or getting my hands dirty. I could hear the plutocrat’s orders to the sergeant:

“Put Norman in the ditch with the weed whacker and the moccasins. (Ha Ha) He’ll never do it, so when he says no, LOCK HIM UP for refusing to work. That’ll teach him.”

“Yessir.”

Sorry, no sir, I wasn’t falling for such a crude, transparent ploy.

I changed out of my prison blue uniform, washed and pressed neatly by the laundry man (for a small, weekly fee), and into the ragged work blues reserved for the worst, dirtiest jobs. I took off my clean tennis shoes and put on the shin-high rubber boots. A lot of good they’d do me in chest-high water. I made sure the weed whacker was fully gassed, got the plastic foot-long lengths of string that spun around in a blur to cut the weeds, put on my goggles to keep the mud and weeds out of my eyes, and off I went to find a nice ditch.

It took a little getting used to, but soon I had the hang of it. A couple of former ditch crewmen who’d graduated to cigarette butt pickup gave me valuable pointers. I was determined to be the weed whackingest s.o.b. anyone had ever seen at Avon Park. I was going to raise the bar so high that they’d be talking about me for years to come.

I gingerly climbed into a shallow ditch, about a foot deep, first, to practice, to get the gas right, but soon I was off and running. I would gently nudge the water moccasins that came toward me out of the way. Occasionally, I would catch one behind its head and toss it on the bank, creating pandemonium among the lollygagging unemployed with nothing else to do, who meandered in my wake, watching, like I was live-action TV. I was a country boy! I grew up around all sorts of snakes. There’re few things more pleasing to a country boy than to toss a snake into a crowd of city boys who are scared to death of snakes. Watch them scatter!

When the weed whacker machine ran out of gas a couple of hours later, and I emerged from a particularly deep and muddy ditch, I looked like “The Swamp Monster.” Soaking wet, covered in mud, weeds and grass clippings from head to toe, my goggles were so heavily coated with muck that I could hardly see out of them. When I took them off, the only white place visible was where the goggles had blocked the mud and weed scraps.

Prisoners gave me a wide berth as I trudged back to the inside grounds shed. I was tired, I’d strenuously exerted myself, but I wasn’t done.

The sergeant’s jaw dropped when he saw me coming. He didn’t know who I was at first. Unlike the others who tried to stay out of the water higher than the tops of their boots, I had totally immersed myself in my job. My white teeth must have provided a great contrast to my mud-coated face when I smiled at the sergeant.

“Norman?” The sergeant appeared confused.

“Yessir.”

“Are you quitting>” He would reluctantly obey orders and lock me up if I refused to work.

“No, sir, I’m out of gas.”

He looked me up and down.

“Well, you done a lot already, I can tell,” he said. “Take the rest of the day off. Take your clean clothes with you, dump them you got on, take you a good shower, and go eat lunch. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“No, sir,” I said. “I’m not halfway done. I’ve got that big ditch on the east side to do. I love my job. This is the most fun I’ve had in years.”

“It is?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, uh, get you some more gas and get back to work. You’re doing a good job.”

“Thanks.”

I was the first one to work, and the last one to leave. He had to come get me to tell me it was time to go. Please don’t throw me into the briar patch!

My goals were two-fold: stay out of lockup, and spite the hell out of them. After that, I planned to get out of the ditch.

I called my friend and attorney, Gary, and filled him in on what was going down, what they were doing to me. He said to hang on for another week ─ he was going to pay a visit to the prison, come see me.

I could do another week. I didn’t like it, but I’d never let them know it.

I was chest-deep in a ditch the following week when the sergeant rushed to me, out of breath.

“Norman, get out of that ditch right now. I’ll take the equipment back. Get your ass to the dorm, take you a shower and put on some clean clothes. You got a lawyer up front to see you. The colonel called down here for you. Hurry up!”

I can play dumb when I really need to. I just act like everyone else.

“A lawyer?” I said, handing him the weed whacker. I pulled the goggles down around my neck, sat on the ground, poured the water out of my rubber boots, put them back on, and squished my way past the sergeant.

“Where you going, Norman?”

I didn’t even look back. “I’m going to see my lawyer.”

“You can’t go like that. You gotta get cleaned up.”

“No way, sarge. At two hundred dollars an hour, it’ll cost me a hundred bucks t change clothes. I’m going just like this.”

And I did.

The woman in the control room buzzed me through two gates into the gatehouse. I was caked in mud and weed fragments from head to toe, except for the reverse raccoon eyes where the goggles had kept my eye area clear. I looked at myself in the reflective glass, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon stared back. The Lord loves the working man, they say. I walked through the door into the hallway leading to the visiting room. The large colonel, the head guard, stood with his back to me, talking to my lawyer, Gary, well-dressed and very clean in a tailored suit. Gary saw me approaching and somehow knew it was me. He smiled at me while the colonel was talking.

“Sir, I swear to you that no one is retaliating against your client. We don’t do that. You ought to know that inmates lie. Inmates get job changes all the time, based on the needs of the institution and the correctional goals─”

“Excuse me,” Gary said, cutting him off in mid-lie, stepping around him and extending his hand to me.

I hesitated. “I don’t think you want to get that close to me, Gary. You can see for yourself what I’ve been doing all morning.”

“That’s all right,” he said, shaking my hand. “The colonel was just telling me what a good job you had.”

Perhaps the best word to describe the colonel’s expression was flabbergasted. Speechless. Tongue-tied. Some words finally stumbled out of his mouth.

“”I apologize, sir. I had no idea. I don’t know what to say. This won’t happen again.”

He hurried off to chew out someone, and Gary and I spent an hour talking.

When I got to inside grounds the sergeant met me at the door.

“Norman, you’re off the ditch crew. Take the day off. Go to the library, the chapel, take a walk, take a nap, I don’t care. I got orders to check you off every day. Don’t bother coming down here. Do what you want to do.”

“Yessir.”

The retaliation was over. A few weeks later my transfer to Sumter C. I. in Bushnell came through. I spent a fairly productive three and a half years there before I was subjected to another round of retaliation, but that is another story.

Charlie