Booker T: From Prison to Promise: Life Before the Squared Circle Read Free Page A

was just forty-nine strangers and me. The guys were hanging around their racks or milling about, talking and smoking cigarettes. Nobody bothered or paid any attention to me at all, which was fine. I wasn’t paying any attention to them either. I stayed to myself. I was feeling defiant, but that was nothing new to me.
    When I took a second to look around, I noticed the toilet right out in the open. When a guy had to do his business, he would do it in front of everybody, which was totally mortifying. You can imagine the sounds and smells. Sometimes people would crack jokes at some guy’s expense while he sat on the bowl. Everyone would be dying laughing like a bunch of kids.
    On the other end was a little area with a counter where dudes made coffee or “spreads.” A spread was any variety of improvised snack made with items bought in the commissary or stolen from the kitchen. The guys would have canned goods like tuna or chicken, chili or stew, maybe packs of Ramen noodles, and then get creative making combinations. They might take the noodles, add some chicken and cheese, spice it up really well, and go to town. There were no limits to the variety guys came up with. Everyone considered himself to be a jailhouse chef with a definitive palate and an expert in the art of the spread. I would soon learn that those commissary items were worth their weight in gold. The prisoners regularly traded them for things like cigarettes, issues of
Playboy,
or joints.
    My arrival was uneventful. It was a pretty quiet and calm unit, not to mention I was six foot two and two hundred pounds. All the other dudes could pretty much take one look and decide not to mess with me. I wasn’t exactly a hard-ass or anything, but my expression was consistent and pretty serious. Had I been shifty, nervous, or afraid to look someone in the eye, he would have spotted it a mile away and tested me.
    After taking all my gear to the rack, I tried to settle in. I made up the bed and put up a picture of Red. I had not seen her since my arrest in April, and now it was January. I lay there staring at the ceiling trying to wrap my mind around what had happened over the last nine months. This was the real deal. I was in prison. Real prison.
    Thinking of Red and her excitement over my thug ways made me long for all those sleepless nights of smoking weed, counting drug money, and plotting the whole scheme that had landed me here. But I couldn’t go back.
    At around eleven that night the lights were shut off, but there was no way I was ready to go to sleep. With my rack sticking out between these concrete walls, I felt like I was lying in the middle of a hospital cafeteria. I was stuck with a herd of dudes snoring, whimpering, coughing, and sneezing—a symphony of annoyance in this room without a trace of light or hope.
    Regret swirled in my head.
What the fuck did I get myself into?
At only twenty-two years old, I was a convicted felon feeling like I had just been erased from the world forever. I wanted to kick myself all over the place.
    Even though the room was dark, I could see silhouettes of guys walking around doing their thing. Some sat in a small group passing a joint, quietly talking about getting back to the free world, while others made coffee and spreads. Just because it was lights-out didn’t mean they had to sleep, so it was still business as usual for those who didn’t want to lie quietly with their thoughts.
    After I had stared at nothing and thought about everything for about an hour, my mind drifted back to my mother and those words that had haunted me since my first night in Harris County Jail:
You’ll end up dead or in jail.
    For the first time in years, I really missed her. I thought of the rest of my family too, my brothers and sisters. The story of our lives—together and divided, hellish at the time—played out in my mind as I nodded off to sleep.

2
BOOKER FROM THE BEGINNING
    There were eight of us kids. In order from oldest to youngest,