Makes Me Wanna Holler

One night in Norfolk, an influential white “executive at some high-powered business firm” was placed in McCall’s cell (161). The man was caught doing a white-collar rip-off. In the cell filled with black men, his “world had turned upside down and inside out: Black people were in the majority, and they ran things; white people were in the minority, and they were oppressed” (161). Whites caught hell in jail, especially the sheltered ones who “wore their racial fears and prejudices on their sleeves” like the white-collar rip-off in McCall’s cell (163). By the time he left on bond, the white inmate was so anxious to get away from the black men that he flew out and left most of his belongings.

McCall relieved the boredom of prison by volunteering for a job as the inmate librarian. The job exposed him to books that, for the first time, spoke to him and beckoned his full engagement. Chief among them was Native Son, by Richard Wright. He identified with the plight of its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, “whose racial fears lead him to accidentally suffocate a white woman” and “deliver himself into the hands of the very people he despises and fears” (164). McCall states that “Native Son confirmed for me that my fears weren’t imagined and that there were rational reasons why I’d been hurting inside” (165).

McCall read the book every day, and it sparked his appetite for literature and knowledge. Finally exposed to literature to which he could relate instead of “white folks’ experiences and feelings,” he embarked on a journey of intellectual discovery, self-improvement, and religion: “Malcolm [X]’s tale helped me understand the devastating effects of self-hatred and introduced me to a universal principle: that if you change your self-perception, you can change your behavior” (165). McCall adds that:

Up to that point, I’d often wanted to think of myself as a baad nigger, and as a result, I’d tried to act like one. After reading about Malcolm X, I worked to get rid of that notion and replace it with a positive image of what I wanted to become (165-66). 

Near the end of his time at Norfolk, McCall warmed to the idea of marriage with Liz: “I wanted to make sure she’d stay around and help me do my time. Prisoners often cling to anybody they think can help ease the pain of doing time” (168). About a week before the wedding date, though, he was transferred from the jail to Southampton Correctional Center, the penitentiary eighty miles from Portsmouth where he served most of his sentence, and they never discussed marriage again. In the Receiving Unit he was assigned number 10-63-83, which became his identity. After about a month, he was transferred upstairs to a cellblock, where he reunited with many old friends from his neighborhood: “For a minute there, it felt like homecoming in Cavalier Manor” (170).

Southampton had five stages of buildings through which prisoners progressed and were granted more freedoms with increased good behavior: “C-1 was the wildest building at Southampton. More than half of the guys there were old-timers who didn’t give a shit about moving up” (171). Inmates in buildings R-1 and R-2 had their own rooms with keys and could come and go as they pleased. Southampton was a rough place with the credo, “If you ain’t no killer, don’t fuck with me” (171) and it was run by rival gangs: The Tidewater Gang, made up of inmates from Portsmouth and a few other Tidewater area cities; and the Richmond Gang. McCall writes that:

Inmates with no gang ties and those from other states had to fend for themselves. Those who couldn’t hold their own standing by themselves got eaten alive, turned into somebody’s boy, ripped off, or taken advantage of in some other way (174).

McCall wasn’t interested in gang affiliation, but he needed protection. He joined a Christian fellowship, but they couldn’t protect him like a gang. McCall found himself “torn between old alliances and a new commitment to change” (175).

Southampton was a large farm. Inmates grew vegetables and raised livestock, which fed prisoners at Southampton and other institutions in the state. McCall was assigned to pick peas and other vegetables in the farm fields, which resembled a big plantation; “a number of the whites who worked at Southampton had that southern, slaveholding mind-set,” and treated the prisoners like slaves (175). While working in the fields, white guards would exercise their dominance over the inmates by making them do things like recite racist rhetoric, such as “Niggers and flies, I despise. The more I see niggers, the more I like flies” (176).

The work was hard, and inmates were treated brutally. On one occasion, McCall rebelled and refused to obey an order, shouting “I ain’t doin’ it! Slavery is over! I’m sick a’this shit!” (176). McCall immediately regretted letting himself give in to their hate in a way that could jeopardize his parole. By a stroke of luck, the prison panel declined to punish him because the complaint against him was inaccurately worded. He took that as a sign from God and a warning, and when he returned to the fields, he worked harder than he ever had before, simply for the sake of working: “I realized that it’s your attitude about the work you do that can determine how pleasant or unpleasant it is. For the first time, I understood what my stepfather meant when he said there was dignity in all work” (177).

Soon after, McCall was reassigned to work in the prison library because in the penitentiary he was viewed as educated. This taught McCall “that education commands respect, wherever you go. Compared to most inmates, [he] was educated, and that distinction benefited [him]—it helped [him] get that plum job” (178).

McCall writes that “[i]t was a macho thing for a guy to be able to handle his time. Still, every once in a while, time got to everybody, no matter how tough they were” (180). Spring and summer were the most difficult seasons to be locked-up, because everyone was fantasizing about life in their neighborhoods; winter was the easiest because life outside wasn’t very interesting anyway. People serving life sentences were so affected by it that they would sometimes provoke fights in the hopes they’d be killed. Time hit McCall hard around his one-year mark. It was 1976 and he still had two years left before he could be paroled: “I’d heard white people brag about being free, white, and twenty-one. There I was, black, twenty-one, and in the penitentiary. It seemed I’d gotten it all wrong” (181). He started a journal to cope.

When the time got to some inmates, like Cincinnati, a hustler friend of McCall’s, they attempted escape: “Cincinnati handled time and played chess like he lived: He failed to think far ahead and he chased pawns all over the board” (183). One day, Cincinnati proposed to McCall that they escape. Escape had crossed McCall’s mind, but “[w]hen [he] thought it through, [he] always saw a great chance of getting busted or leading such a miserable life on the run that it would be another form of imprisonment” (184). Cincinnati didn’t think it through. He escaped and was free for a few weeks, but was eventually caught and sent to a maximum-security prison.

Liz had been distant for a while, and on a visit, she told him she was seeing someone else. Alone, McCall spiraled. He frequently suffered intense migraines, anger, frustration, and began to slip. He came very close to adding more time to his sentence when he attacked someone for publicly disrespecting him. It came out one day that before he was locked up, he stuck up a guy, now an inmate, named Tony. When he found out, Tony got mad and started ripping pages off books in the library, in order to egg on McCall. McCall took the bait and tried to shiv Tony. Luckily, no one saw and he missed. Rather than fight, they agreed to drop it. 

McCall writes about sexual frustration while incarcerated:

You ain’t seen no tension until you seen that shit. You haven’t felt any pressure until you’ve lived around dudes—hundreds of them—who act like they’re in a desert with nothing but sand, and they start seeing mirages, luscious, eye-popping, thirst-quenching mirages. It brings new meaning to the warning ‘Watch your back’ (191).

Prison was a rough world and many guys locked up hadn’t seen a woman in years, maybe decades. There were many ways for someone to be made someone else’s “bitch.” McCall was confident that it wouldn’t happen to him because he knew he’d kill if he had to, to prevent that from happening. He didn’t want to add any time to his sentence, but even more than that, he didn’t want to be raped: “I ain’t gonna bother nobody, but ain’t nobody gonna take advantage of me. Surviving was going to be a chess match that I had to win” (192).

McCall writes that:

At Southampton, there were chasers (otherwise known as ‘booty bandits’) and chasees, cats who didn’t have the will and heart to kill, even for the sake of keeping somebody, literally, off their ass. On the sidelines, there were cats who out of principle or revulsion chose to suck in the energy, suffer, and sit out the prison mating dance. They watched and watched out (194).

McCall recalls the story of a guy named Tooty, who was taunted by some of the guys in the yard- feminized. Tooty had been someone who seemed tough, but when he didn’t put the guys in check, he showed them that he was weak and could be turned into someone’s bitch: “[A] guy was even more of a man if he could ‘flip’ another man, turn him into a homosexual” (195). After Tooty revealed his vulnerability, the guys taunted him regularly. They chiseled at his exposed weakness until they whittled it down completely and one day, they ran a train on Tooty: “That whole ordeal taught me a lot about the power of the mind. It demonstrated that if you don’t know who you are and if you don’t believe fully in yourself, others sense it, no matter how much you try to front it off” (196).

Sometimes gangs even competed and even went to war for a “new bitch,” (197) as happened between the Tidewater and Richmond gangs for Pauline, a very feminine gay man who had just arrived at Southampton. McCall spoke to Pauline and learned that he was molested as a child. After that, Pauline had “spent much of his life at odds with himself” and eventually acknowledged that he felt “like [he] was meant to be a woman” (198). Pauline helped McCall see gay men in a new, more understanding way. Still, Pauline made him uneasy. He enjoyed talking with him, but had to get away: “He made me feel self-conscious and awkward, and I felt even more uneasy about the prospect of being seen—by guards or inmates—talking with someone who was gay” (198). Pauline ultimately chose a member of the Richmond Gang.

Prison helped McCall see women in a different light than he had before: “They brought balance, beauty of spirit, and sanity. Lots and lots of simple sanity” (200). He promised God that if he made it out of prison, he would never mistreat another woman. 

Two years into his sentence, McCall listened to a man named Jim speak. Jim was serving a life sentence for murder and had been in for almost fifteen years. Jim was admired and remained a free thinker during his time in prison. He educated himself in prison and was “a self-assured, articulate brother with an unyielding commitment to what he called ‘black folks’ struggle’” (203). Jim reminded McCall of Chicago and drew him in preaching about black pride and lying white men. Jim even challenged McCall’s Christianity, which he deemed “the white man’s religion”:

He said white folks love for blacks to embrace Christianity because they use it to control us. He said whites encourage us to follow Martin Luther King, Jr., because he was a passive Christian, and they urge us to reject Malcolm X because he challenged us to stand up against white oppression (204).

The control issue convinced McCall to leave Christianity, as he “wanted no part of anything used by white people to control blacks” (204).

Jim also taught McCall about distortions of history by white people, which always portrayed whites in a superior light. He learned about the ways he was lied to and indoctrinated in school and concluded that “while schools had been integrated for blacks and whites, administrators had still failed to integrate the information” (205). McCall realized that:

Black people had been systematically brainwashed, and our parents had paid their tax dollars for the schools, biased textbooks, and curriculums that helped carry that out. Without realizing it, we’d been taught to hate ourselves and love white people, and it was causing us to self-destruct (206).

McCall, Jim, and a few other inmates spoke regularly and formed their own writers’ guild.

Prior to meeting Jim, McCall associated manhood with physical dominance, but Jim made him realize he had it wrong, as Jim “could whip a man with his sharp mind and choice of words” (208). McCall started looking macho dudes in the eyes to see what was there. In most of their eyes, he saw fear. Suddenly, he perceived the people around him for what they were (and what he had been): “streetwise, pseudo baad-asses who were really frightened boys, bluffing, trying to mask their fear of the world behind muscular frames” (209). McCall wanted the kind of respect Jim commanded. 

McCall writes that “[i]n the late spring of 1977, [he] was approved for a two-day furlough” (211). McCall’s stepfather picked him up. In prison, McCall realized the value of the lessons his stepfather had been trying to teach him since he was a boy. He made it home, saw his family and Liz, and played with his son. He saw a few of his old friends too, but limited his time with them. He spent the night at a hotel with Liz. They tried to rekindle their relationship, but they’d “both changed and grown, it seemed, in different directions” (213). He went back to prison the next day knowing their relationship was over.

McCall knew his case would be a tough one for the parole board and became stressed when his parole eligibility date drew near. He thought about what he would do if he were paroled. He wanted to go back to college, but didn’t know what to study. He was interested in anything literary, but he reminded himself that “[w]hite people pursue careers; black folks pursue jobs” (214). He decided that he would attend college, but he would also leave prison with a trade. It would help him make money when he got out and would also help his parole chances. He chose the printing trade. To learn the trade, he was transferred to St. Brides Correctional Center, a much more laid-back prison than Southampton. Most inmates were there on light convictions or close enough to parole eligibility that they didn’t want to compromise their chances: “St. Brides was easy time” (215).

McCall writes that “[n]o African American spends much time in prison without being exposed to the doctrines of black Muslims […] Brothers respected Muslims for being disciplined, religious people and, at the same time, warriors” (217). At St. Brides, McCall met a Muslim named Rasool, who turned him onto the book Natural Psychology and Human Transformation, which convinced McCall that for his entire life before prison, he was stuck in an initial stage of development, focused only on satisfying his base appetites. Further, he reasoned:

that much of American culture was conditioned that way—self-absorbed, driven mainly by greed for material possessions, and uninterested in evolving to a higher stage or extending concern beyond self to other human beings (219).

While at St. Brides, McCall also wrote to the head of Norfolk State University’s journalism program and explained his situation. On the encouragement of the head of the program, McCall wrote a paper and applied for a scholarship, which he received. If he was paroled, McCall would leave prison not only a better man, but also a college-bound man with a trade.

McCall’s parole hearing was before a panel of several white men and one black woman. After a few questions, they asked him, “So, Mr. McCall, what do you plan to do to better yourself if you get out, and what arrangements have you made to carry out those plans” (220)? This was the most important question and he was ready for it:

I rapped. I rapped hard. I rapped harder than I’d ever rapped in my life. I came straight from the heart. I came from so deep within the heart that I surprised myself. But I meant every word I said. I was changed. I knew it, and I wanted to make sure they knew it (221).

About a month later, he made parole.

On February 3, 1978, McCall was released from prison:

I cast a long, hard look at the prison, and tears began streaming uncontrollably down my face. I felt a strange mixture of pain and pride. I was mostly proud that I had survived, and I told myself, then and there, I can do ANYTHING” (223).

McCall adds, “I had just as much right to be alive and happy as anybody else, and I wasn’t going to let anybody, especially not white folks, make me feel otherwise” (224).