What if I told you that I've actually been enslaved?

So no one is paying attention, huh?

Sorry about how long it's taking to unpack this, but I'm really reliving some shit. I'm also realizing that I have no emotional precedent for this conversation because I rarely talk about prison.

I believe that the average person doesn't understand what prison in Louisiana IS.

People think about prison in terms of a general enclosed area where a bunch of miscreants go for a time out, however long that time out might be. Maybe life.

While that's true in the most general of senses, each individual prison has its own shape, culture, and personality. Each has its own issues that others don't have.

An "issue" that many Louisiana state prisons have is involuntary servitude.

Yup. Slavery.

Slavery.

Actual physical slavery.

I don't use the word slavery lightly. This is one hell of a moral accusation I'm making and I'm choosing my words wisely. But you be the judge.

Allow me to present this image for you. It's familiar. You've seen it in every slavery movie ever. Even in video games.

Forced labor. Labor under the threat of force. Involuntary servitude.

Servitude under the threat of harm, violence, or retribution.

And it's disguised as criminal justice.

In the movies you see overseers. Sometimes they're on horseback. Sometimes on foot. Most of them are armed with rifles or shotguns. A couple may have pistols. A couple may be unarmed.

In the movies there's always a weird, uncomfortable shot of the cotton field. You can see the enslaved people lined up in rows, moving together at a steady pace.

In the movies there's always a shot of a greasy ass, tobacco spitting, ungroomed, and stank ass white boy eyeing that one particular enslaved person he doesn't like... Maybe he adjusts the position of the gun and creates a little tension.

Hollywood, right?

Not in Louisiana. That's a thing. Go to almost any state prison and you'll see almost exactly what I just described.

The one variation is what the plant is. It could be okra or corn rather than cotton.

Do y'all understand what I'm trying to get across to you? I'll say it again.

Slavery.

And for a while I was one of those people in the field.

Down here prisons are plantations.

I've been down row after row after row after row of okra.
I've used baked beans cans as makeshift buckets to water row after row after row after row of tomato plants.
I've been on my hands and knees to dig up potatoes.
I've cut acre after endless acre of grass and hay.

I've seen huge strapping men pass out from the Louisiana heat. I can remember lining up to march to the "cut", hoping the horses came to their senses, popped their tethers, and bolted back to the barn.

It was so hot sometimes that we would rush to soak our shirts in the showers, sinks, toilets, whatever in the last minute of "work call" so the moisture would last as long as possible.
Also if you had a towel to spare, you done good.

I'll be using terms some of y'all don't know. You can ask.

I've been out in near freezing rain, on my hands and knees weeding mustard greens. Row after endless row of mustard greens. In a very Louisiana 35 degrees. I've got up and made my bed, suffering with the flu, to walk out into a wintry swamp and work against my will.

I've never liked authority, so I was a problem for the warden, wherever I went. In the early days, age 14, I tried to escape. Twice.

I had no idea what to do if I was successful, but I tried.

After that, I settled in for the long haul. And it was a loooooong haul. Almost two decades. I felt that I had no choice but to get comfortable unless I could get the courts rolling.

Huge help the courts were. By the time I even learned about post-conviction my time was up.

If you ask me, I was lost in the system. Y'all don't know how many times I wished I was dead.

So, yeah, I settled in. I did the prison shit. Got my GED at 15, had a whole bunch of fights in juvie. My social worker @CindiAbbott was the only person I had to talk to. She hugged me and cried they day I got transferred to adult prison at 18.

Adult prison was a different level. Severe punishment for any infraction. Bed don't have a 9 inch collar? Write up. Not walking fast enough? Write up? OH YOU TALKING BACK?! Dungeon.

I spent a lot of time in the dungeon.

I spent a lot of time in the dungeon. I spent a lot more time on extended lockdown. That's solitary confinement. I've been on extended 5 times, each time for at least 90 days. My longest ride was 9 months.

Might as well have been lost in space.

Imagine a human being saving shit, piss, cum, and milk to mix together and throw on another human being. I saw that almost every day. I've witnessed people go insane from years of isolation.

And the smell...

Eventually I got tired of that shit. They broke me. I took my ass into that field and got to work. My first day in the field was spent in the okra patch. Okra as far as the eye could see. I did almost 4 sacks and that okra tore my hands up. My fingers bled for days.

They call work call at 7:45 am every morning. Mon-Fri yo ass is gon work.
Five days a week I lined up for the roll. The only thing that stopped work call on a normal day was pouring rain, lightning, and extremely low visibility fog.

And snow. We liked snow.

Other than that, you got in that long as line, 2x2, and marched to the cut. Sometimes we cut trails through the woods to make a shortcut to a faraway cut. Most often we marched about 5 mi a day.

In the cut, you went to work. Sometimes you'd have a cut partner and you were responsible for each other's work. That caused a lot of beef. If someone was slacking or just was physically unable to keep up, both cut partners rode out to the dungeon.
This was a game for C.O.s.

Before you start your cut, the line has to be counted and the gunline has to be set.
The gunline is an imaginary and sometimes arbitrary line that inmates can't walk across. Cross that line and you may or may not get a warning shot. I've had several warning shots.

When a warning shot is fired, you'd better hit the ground, face down. Those guys on those horses are at the gun range every Tuesday and Thursday. If you get caught standing, that next bullet is yours.

These prisons don't have walls. They're surrounded by chain link fences topped with razor wire. There are strategically placed towers around the perimeter. The tower jockeys have assault rifles. They hit the gun range, too.

As I said, every prison is different. So what happens when you refuse to work depends on where you're housed. At DCI the first time I refused to work, I was introduced to the Body Shop.

The Body Shop is the boiler room at Cellblock B. They drag you in, hands cuffed behind your back, shackled at the ankles, and utterly defenseless.

And they beat the everloving fuck out of you.

I spent most of my time at Rayburn Correctional Center, and their method was a little different. Remember how the cops did Freddie Gray with the police van? At RCC, when you ride out, they cuff and shackle you, throw you in the back of a pickup and go off-road.

Going to the dungeon is always risky. You don't always know who's working back there. But at least you can get a couple days of sleep.

Beef with the wrong C.O. will fuck around and get you killed.
Think I'm joking? https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/crime/5-jailers-fired-over-inmate-who-died-after-vomiting-into-mask/289-dbc5c3db-6e11-4f30-9db0-8e6e98e1e0f2

Rayburn is located in Angie, LA, Washington Parish. Pretty much the heart of klan country. It was originally called WCI (Washington Correctional Institute). During my time there it was renamed to honor B.B. "Sixty" Rayburn.

Anything happens to you out there, it's far enough from NOLA or BR that no one will be the wiser. If you don't have family coming to visit, you become a target. They feel like they can do you anything and get away with it.

Unfortunately, sometimes it's true.

I say all the time that you aren't guaranteed to come home. 1 day, 1 year, ten years, don't matter.

You are not guaranteed to makeitout

Malnutrition is rampant. There's no health care. Heat stroke? Ibuprofen and an ice pack. Chest pain? Ibuprofen and and gas-x. Toothache? Gargle salt water. Oh you depressed? Thorazine, lithium, and ibuprofen.

We had funerals for inmates that passed on. It's heartbreaking to learn in this way that people are an infinite well of compassion when we're all equal. We used to secondline hard for brothers who went to the ancestors.

Sometimes people would lose hope and fall ill. Sometimes they would skip the suffering of illness and die in their sleep.

The living kept on dying or catching that cut.

It's a plantation. You gotta work or suffer the consequences.

In my free time, I taught myself how to play guitar and bass. I also got an associate degree.

I was force-fed Christianity, all the while wondering how a just god could allow people to suffer. Believe me when I tell you that cognitive dissonance is real.

Near the end of my sentence I reached something I guess was roughly akin to OG status. All of a sudden I wasn't a field nigga. I got a job in the library.

But that came with the price of alienating me from many of my peers. Ever heard of Willie Lynch syndrome? Look it up.

Side note, when Obama was elected to his first term, they pepper sprayed the dungeon out of spite.

To sum it up, slavery is still practiced here in the USA today. Please take a closer look at the constitution. That shit wasn't written for me.

Thanks everyone for your love and support.