Prayer to The Seven African Powers
Ashé
ONE
Standing in a stiff March wind in front of the Maryland House of Corrections in Jessup, I resist the urge to pull the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head. The breeze feels different on this side, freer. I’ve been locked up for almost five years for one last gram of cocaine. Because I wouldn’t give up my connection, they had wanted to give me twenty. I pled to eight. They paroled me after four and a half—a year too late to be there for my mother when she died. I’ve been in too long.I turn around to catch the gate click shut behind me. It could have been worse, I think. It could have been like all the movies and television shows: a den of iniquity and violence, overflowing with criminals teaching each other how to be better criminals. It can be, if what you want is to be a criminal.
I just wanted to get out. I don’t want to remember going in, but I can’t help it. Walking into the cellblock, hearing the inmates hollering.
“¡Look at what we got here, fresh meat!”
“¡Oh Yeah! I see we got some tight virgin ass up in he’e.”
“I got dibs on the little Indian.”
The first night was the roughest. The few days I spent in lockup before making bail were bad enough. But this was a whole new monster. When you get to the pen, everyone is eyeing you up, checking you out. Some look at you with hungry eyes, as if you were meant to be their next meal. Some measure you up, as if deciding how much of a challenge it would be to take you out. It was the ones that didn’t look at you, the ones walking around with cold dead stares that scared me, most.
It seemed I knew what I could expect from the rest. With the zombies, as I called them in my own head, anything seemed possible. Make a mistake, hit their trigger and I was sure I’d find myself on a coroner’s table quicker than I hoped.
The worst was that first dinner call. I always feel lost my first time in any cafeteria. The pen was no different, except I was lost in the most inhospitable of environments. No time to stand still and get my bearings, I was shoved aside like some willowy branch hanging in between predators and their prey. Even when I got in line, I kept getting grabbed and pushed back until I realized I was in the rear with the group I had come in with that day. What was left when we finally made it to the front was cold and inedible, not that being warm would have made what we were served any better.
My plan had been to pass the time by finishing my high school diploma, catching up with some reading, and ingratiating myself to a few of the prisoners. I was no idiot, but my senior year in high school had been all about getting high and trying to get laid. I got plenty high, but never did manage to get laid. By the end of the third quarter, I had missed more days than not, so I decided to just stop going altogether. When I was sentenced, I figured I would at least have the time to finish what I had started. I’m not very good at that. I owed it to myself to at least finish high school.
I went to a few classes in the pen, and gave up. I couldn’t stand sitting in a classroom full of remedials. Anytime I heard someone trying to read at anything higher than a third grade level, stuttering and stammering through each word, I grit my teeth until my jaws ached. I never had the patience to sit through class, but that was unbearable. I think I went three times before dropping out. Again. I did spend plenty of time reading. And I managed to make a few friends by trying to be funny and useful.
My cellmate was going on trial for stabbing a panhandler who he felt got too aggressive. The state wanted Ricky to cop to six years. Ricky claimed that because he only stabbed the bum in the leg, that he wouldn’t cop to more than three. He would end up pleading out for five years, three suspended.
Ricky was seventeen, two years younger than I was. He didn’t say much the first of couple days, except to run down some things I should know. “Don’t step on nobody’s kicks!” By kicks, he meant tennis shoes. “That’s instant beef. Watch where you walk, cuz you so much as nudge some of these fools, they’ll shank yo’ ass without lookin’ at you. Get to the food line as fast as you can. Some folks are friends with the servers, or they pay ‘em fugs...”
“Fugs?” I interrupted.
“¡Fugs! Cigarettes. Where you from man? Anyway, they get what you might say is healthy servings. So if you late, you might be going to bed a little hungry. And if you ain’t looking to get fucked, don’t be nowhere where you by yo’self. They figure, if you there, you want some. And if you ain’t want some, you shouldn’ a been there.”
After a few days, once he realized I read a lot, he asked if I could write.
“I’m no writer, but I know how to write.”
“Can you help me throw some shit together for my girl? She sent me some nekkid pictures, and I wanna say something nice.”
“Did you try thank you?” I asked, realizing after I said it that I might have come across as belittling.
The sucking noise he made through his teeth told me I did, but forgivably so. “¡Yeah man! But I wanna do something nice for her. Like write a rap. You freestyle? You write rhymes?”
“You can probably freestyle a whole hell of a lot better than me,” I admitted, “but I can maybe help you write a decent poem.”
“¡Tight! Maybe I can beatbox over it. ¡Maybe we can tape it!”
We didn’t make a soundtrack for it, but I wrote a readable letter with a few verses and only had to think of three rhymes for fuck while he made sound effects with his mouth as he stood over my ear. Soon enough, I was writing or reading for fugs for almost half the block. I didn’t even smoke, at least not cigarettes. It was a dying currency, anyway. You can no longer smoke in bars and restaurants, so it won't be long before prisons make cigarettes contraband.
I never charged them, anyway. Tradition holds that I just do what is in my power for those that ask and deserve it. I’m to ask for nothing in return, but accept anything offered.
I ended up helping these kids sort through paperwork, reading the documents from the public defenders whose faces they rarely saw before their trail date, writing letters to try to get those same public defenders to visit, or filling out their parole applications. I’d listen to them for hours, telling me about problems I could rarely help with, but I’d try to offer what advice I could. I’d done the same thing in high school.
The seat on the bus next to mine was always empty for anyone wanting to share their pain. Actually, most of the time Krissy sat there. She couldn’t stop sleeping with her brother, or any other boy that asked nicely enough, except me. She walked over to me during lunch one day, her only complaint being that she was horny as hell. I offered to help her out if she’d just sneak behind our school’s little stadium with me. She thought about it for maybe five seconds before saying no.
I don’t think anything I said ever made a difference. My schoolmates would always go back to doing the same things that ended up hurting them—problems they would bother me with sooner or later. After I left high school, I heard Krissy went down on two guys at once in the walk-in freezer of the Hardee’s they all worked in. But I never let that stop me from trying to get in her pants every time I ran into her, to no avail.
Most of the inmates in my cellblock were young like Ricky. They were awaiting trial and couldn’t afford bail. There was no room left in the Juvenile pre-trial facilities. The rest were juveniles convicted as adults. I supposed the powers-that-be either thought I wasn’t particularly dangerous, or they thought a small, nerdy guy like me might have some trouble in genpop.
Not being forced to serve my time in general population suited me fine. Here the kids tried to act like adults, but could never shake that childlike demeanor. I never could either, really. At twenty two, I wasn’t much older.
Not everyone was friendly, though. Even in the juvie block, there were some crazies who’d snap your neck just to break the boredom. But my little crew of reprobates—they even had a name, Dyin’ Tryin’—protected me.
As young as they were, some of the kids broke six feet and two hundred pounds. I almost caught some trouble a few times, but I was always able to talk my way out of it. Those conversations generally involved me shoving a fistful of cigarettes into someone’s hands, albeit a bit bent and slightly stale. Still, better than none at all. I had plenty and wasn’t using them.
All of that was on the other side of the gate, now. I need to forget about that—leave it behind. On this side, I have nearly nothing. I gave my stash of fugs to Ricky. You would’ve thought he was eight years old and I’d given him a bike for Christmas. All I have now are the clothes on my back, $40 cash and an 8X10 picture of my mother lying dead on a coroner’s table in New Jersey. She’s been dead for nearly a year, now. They wouldn’t let me see her, wouldn’t give me a furlough to go to the funeral. I got the photo last October, five months after she died, and I had to write a few letters just to get that.
On a bus headed to Baltimore, I slip the picture out of its manila envelope and stare at it. It doesn’t even look like her, face bloated like a fish left out in the hot sun too long. I trace the scars on each of her shoulders with a finger. Perhaps it’s a trick of the camera, but they seem to glow. Why wouldn’t they? The scar on each shoulder, along with the one on each foot, the one on each palm and the one over her heart represent the power she once believed she wielded.
Las Siete Potencias, The Seven African Powers, which her scars represent, are supposed to be our connection to the energy of our ancestors which anyone is supposed to have access to. Los Siete Rayos, The Seven Slashes, two of which seem to glow more as I stare at my mother’s bare shoulders, mean that she was Palo Mayombe, Keeper of the Mysteries of the Spirits, a high priestess privy to the power of the ancestors to aid those in need. I reach under my shirt collar to feel one of the scars on my own shoulder. It seems inert, dead. Mine will never glow.
I slide the picture back into its envelope. I can feel tears starting to well. Inside, I could never cry for my mother. I couldn’t afford to. Like in the wild, a sign of weakness is seen as an opportunity to strike. But I’m not inside anymore. As I finally head home, I pull my hood up over my head and let the previously dammed tears flow.
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