Going To Parchman

 

My new home was a nightmare. I was put in a one-man cell. The small cramped space was dimly lit and the paint was peeling from every inch of the walls and ceiling. There was a brown paper sack full of trash left in one corner; and, when I picked it up, a wave of cockroaches swarmed out. The room stunk of rotten food. When the first meal was brought to my cell, the food made my stomach roll, not just from the disgusting food but from the stench filling the room as well. Sitting down to eat, I realized I had no spoon or fork to eat the disgusting food, so I was forced to use my laminated identification card as a makeshift eating utensil.

The case manager for the building came to my cell door for an interview after I had been there for a few days, and he explained I was in lock-down for an evaluation period. I asked him how long this would last, and he said the usual length was ten percent of the total sentence. I asked what ten percent of life without parle was exactly. The stunning answer was about eight years. I was dumbfounded. I was not sure how I was going to survive in these conditions for such a long period of time.

Despite by faith being rocked at the sentencing, I was still trusting in God. I continued to study the Bible which was easy because there was nothing else to do. The prison library services were suspended at Unit 32 because of the inmates were burning the books. Fires, I quickly learned, were a regular occurrence. Often, I would wake up in the middle of the night to a chorus of screaming voices, smoke filling the room and water flooding the floors. The inmates would stop up the toilets and flush them over and over, rip their mattresses apart and set all of their bedding on fire. Often time, they did it out of boredom rather than for a real complaint. Once, while I was praying during a riot, “God please make these people shut up and go to bed”, I watched a burning pillow float past my doorway and down the hallway like a ship pillaged and set ablaze by pirates. Living life in Parchman’s Unit 32 was becoming unbearable.

Eventually, it broke me.

In the back of my mind, I believed if I was good enough God would release me from prison. I would have never spoken those words out loud to another soul, but the thought was always there in a corner of my mind. When the judge sentenced me to life without parole, it had shaken my misplaced faith; but it was my first meeting with my case manager in his office which caused me to completely lose faith.

Stepping into his office, he asked me to sit down very politely with a smile. Then, he went full blown Twilight Zone on me.

He said, “I know who you are.”

I assumed he meant he had heard about my case in the news. I was wrong. As he pulled a huge wooden crucifix from a desk drawer and thrust it towards me as if I was a vampire, he said with a maniacal smile filing his face, “Your father is the devil!” He went on to describe how God had sent him a dream and was told that I was a child of the devil and that he was to never let me out of lockdown. This was the man who had the power to let me out of Unit 32 and he was obviously insane. When I was escorted back to my cell, I could feel myself sliding down in the cold grasp of depression. While I was certain the case manager was having some sort of mental breakdown, there was a whisper of doubt filling my thoughts. Maybe his dream was from God. What if I was a child of the devil and God had never and would never forgive me? The more I thought about it, the more I began to see myself as foolish for believing God, or anyone else, could ever love me.

I placed my Bible in a box and didn’t’ open it again for nearly four years. I tried to tell myself I didn’t need God, and questioned if He was even real. Had I just fooled myself into believing in a fantasy while I was at a low point? I was done with Christianity and wanted to prove to myself I could live a life of peace and happiness apart for Christianity and a God who didn’t love me. For a while, it seemed I could.

Eventually, I was released from Unit 32 and placed in the general population. Of course, this was only after the cross-wielding case manager was fired and replaced by someone else.  My search for happiness and peace in prison was a struggle and only lasted for a short time before I couldn’t deny that I was miserable. I felt like I was right back to how I felt before my arrest—struggling to just make it through the day. I could barely sleep at night and often found myself staring at the walls which seemed to press closer and closer around me. I wanted desperately to find some way out of the nightmare I was living, but there was no way out. I knew I would have to do something, because life was becoming unbearable. Life was pointless, I felt. At the time, I was working at a food processing plant doing mind-numbing, mindless work. I was doing pretty much the exact same thing every day which served no real purpose. I felt like my entire life consisted of just breathing until I died. My faith had never recovered from the sentencing combined with the miserable living conditions and this had brought me to the point of believing God could not and would not love me.

Something would have to change because I could not see myself continuing on in the state of mind I was in, so I decided to make a plan. I had always heard that to be successful, one needed a life plan and goals to achieve. I did this in the most macabre way possible. My plan was this. Since I had already caused my mother enough grief, I would pretend everything was fine and well until the day she died. When this happened, I would kill myself. I didn’t want to die, but I couldn’t imagine spending year after pointless year in prison.

From that day on, I played the role of the well-adjusted inmate making the best of a bad situation never letting my fellow inmates or staff know what I was planning to do. I smiled, laughed and joked around thought the days, but I was dead inside. No one ever suspected what was going on in my mind except one person who managed to see through the façade. One day a guy named Mark mentioned he thought I was “emotionally void” and he was exactly right. While I pretended to be happy, my smile was merely a mask, and he had seen through it. I was truly emotionally void and empty, and I wondered how long I would last.

I wondered why I had always felt so broken inside—when I had stopped feeling. I could barely remember a time when I wasn’t pretending everything on the outside was fine while life felt like a dark shadow shrouding my every step. I had never felt okay ever. I had spent so much time trying to hide who I was and how I felt, I had forgotten who I really was.

Looking back, I could distinctly remember the last time I felt okay was when I was in the second grade. I was a kid, just like everyone else. Sure, my family was poor; but, at that age, I didn’t even know it. School was a grand adventure, and I tried to outdo all the other kids. My friend Michael and I would race each other to see who could memorize the multiplication charts first. He would just narrowly edge me out most of the time, but we both blew the rest of the class away.  I had lots of friends and the teachers like me. Why did it change?

We lived in a little white ramshackle house outside of the city limits of Ada, Oklahoma. It was the first place I can remember living, and it was a magical place for young boys to be raised. At the time, I was the baby of the family and I idolized my two older brothers, Jeremy and Malan. Since there were no neighbors around, we were pretty much suck with each other for playmates so, I was included in all of their adventures for the most part. They might have wished for other kids their own age, but I thought it was fantastic. At Christmas, we would record ourselves singing Christmas songs and preform skits we would make up on a tape recorder. Without fail, we would include a reading for our Christmas list to make sure our parents heard them. Years later, my mother found one of these tapes and would play it every year during the holidays to embarrass us all. She thought it was sweet; but, after it was played every single year, we were ready for it to disappear. The family seemed really happy from my young perspective, but looking back I can now see the dysfunction I was too young to understand then.

My father, Charlie, was cool. He had long hair and was the drummer in a country-and-western band. While they were somewhat popular in the local area, his sons thought he was a superstar. Sometimes he would show up at home with something unbelievable to young boys like go-carts, a mini-bike or take us out to shoot real guns. Sometimes, he wouldn’t show up at all.

Unknown to me at the time, he was a severe alcoholic and had trouble holding down a job. He wasn’t the best husband or father either, and there were times when my mother, Debra, would tell us to be very quiet in the mornings because daddy didn’t feel well. He was most likely hung over and my mother didn’t want to anger him. A constant occurrence of my childhood was hearing them fighting behind closed doors, but not understanding what was happening. While my mother was usually the target of his wrath, there were times his three sons were the victims of his angry shouts.

I still remember so clearly the day the food burned. My mother was working nights and my dad had passed out on the couch. When the food he was cooking started to burn, Jeremy woke him up to tell him. Instead of saving the food, he screamed at all of us telling us to never bother him for anything while he was sleeping. Eventually, instead of idolizing my father, I began to be afraid of him.

One day while he was at work and the three children were at school, my mom packed up all of our belongings and secretly moved to another house inside the city limits. I don’t know if my mother actually told us we were hiding from our dad, but that was the feeling I had. Still, as young as I was, it mostly seemed exciting because we were moving into town.

It was calm for a while after that, but it didn’t last long. Quickly, he found our new phone number and the fighting started again. Even before we were unpacked, the nightly shouting matches resumed. The only difference was, now it was over the phone. One night, while sleeping on the floor of the living room because my bed wasn’t assembled yet, the phone rang and the yelling, screaming and crying began. Lying on the floor, I wanted to cry but didn’t. I thought if I pretended it wasn’t happening, the screaming would all just magically go away. Just like the old game of peek-a-boo, if I squeezed my eyes shut tight enough it, maybe it would be gone when I opened them up. I didn’t cry and tried to hold as still as I could, pretending to be asleep. Still, it didn’t go away. It became worse, so I continued to withdraw deeper within myself where it felt a little bit safer.

Of course, there were consequences. All the bottled-up emotions would rear their ugly heads time and time again throughout my life causing countless problems. Where I had once loved school, I started skipping class in the third grade. The elementary school I attended burned down, and classes were being held at the First Baptist Church of Ada a few blocks from our house until the school was repaired. I don’t know why, but I decided I didn’t want to go. While walking to school with my brother, Malan, I just turned around and snuck back into the house and hid in my room. Eventually, my mother discovered my hiding spot and attempted to force me to go to school. I exploded. I screamed myself horse; and when that didn’t work, I pulled a knife on my mother. That got her attention. She realized something was seriously wrong and made arrangements for me to see a counselor.

 The counselor was a waste of time, thought. I learned quickly that if I just agreed with whatever he said, it would seem like progress was being made. I also learned to never admit to how I really felt thinking that I would just get into more trouble. After a few months, the sessions with the counselor ended; but nothing had changed. If anything, I was worse. There would be other attempts to get me help over the years, including a few months in a lockup mental health hospital, but I was never completely honest about how I felt and never got the help I needed.

After some time, my father moved back in with us, and the fighting and drinking continued as before. This would turn into a familiar pattern for our family. Mom and dad would reconcile, there would be a time of peace, the fighting would start again, we would move away from our father, and repeat. Two more members of the family had been added, Rachel and Zachary, but it seemed the three older boys were affected the most. We understood, to some extent, exactly what was happening. Jeremy began running away from home early on after moving to Ada; and, when he was sixteen, he moved out of the house only returning for brief stays over the years. Malan avoided home as much as possible, staying with friends and finding escape in the bottle. Like Jeremy, I began running away from home at an early age, and moved in with a girlfriend’s family when I was sixteen for a few months.

Over the years, my mother did try to help me; but I would only withdraw further. I put on a false front for the world to hide how horrible I felt and how embarrassed I was of my family’s situation. I grew my hair long and acted like a mad man most of the time. In truth, I was a hurting little boy who could no longer express true feelings except anger and wanted more than anything to just have a normal family.

My withdraw into myself and my inability to connect emotionally with others only worsened by going to prison. I was in a place that encourages you to have no emotions except hate and anger. Those two emotions are just fine. I was at the point where I no longer knew who I really was. I had worn the mask for so long, I had lost the little boy from the ancient past.