Willie talked of the nightclubs in a small town called Port Allen, about Sharrone Monet, the woman he met, and his visits to her house. He talked freely:
“One night the police and several others broke into the woman’s house when we were in bed.”
“Was this a White woman in Louisiana, man?”
“Don’t fool yourself, man, Louisiana wasn’t as segregated as they pretended. There’s more sexual integration in the south than in the north.”
After being released from prison, Willie had looked for her but never found her, and he wasn’t able to determine her whereabouts.
“Sharrone may have gone back to New Orleans. I asked around when I got out, but I couldn’t get a word.”
“What happened to dad; how did he take it?”
“Dad was torn up, embarrassed, and ashamed of the indigent debtor status. We were living large, man, and it’s hard to go back to poverty after that. He felt crushed and needed a new start. California was his new start—a rebirth.”

Lomax thought on Willie’s words. “Angola was two years that brought changes to my life. That Baptist foundation we got at home was shaken by Angola. It’ll shake anybody, brother.” Lomax thought, then asked Willie to talk about his Angola years.
“I want to know everything, man; I want to see you and me face to face, through our family’s eyes and experiences. That’s necessary for me. Willie.”
“But is that really possible, Lo?”
“The family is the house I came out of, and it has a lot to do with who I am, how I view life. The secrets of the house are my secrets too; they shouldn’t be secreted from me, if they are a part of me. They helped make me, and I want to know them, that’s all.”

Willie described Angola Prison as a sprawling, dark institution in the belly of the Louisiana swampland, built on some 20,000 acres. It was divided into four camps that housed men, Black men on one side and White men on the other. In this dreary hole in hell, as Willie described it, there were forebodings unimaginable to the outside world; there were lapses in security, places where there was no security; dark, steamy places, and small crevices that not even the guards knew about; and there were sex cells that forged Angola into a jungle of depravity. The weak and undefended became sex and torture slaves who were used for any acts thinkable by the physically strong. In this prison, Willie had two years of experiences that altered his life and perception of the world. He shared things with Lomax he hadn’t shared with the rest of the family, hoping that Lomax was mature and smart enough to handle them confidentially; that was important to him--they were still vivid in him.
“What I’m telling you, Lo, must stay with you, OK?”
“Hey, man, I’m your brother.”
“It’s painful shit, man, and embarrassing too.”
“It’s been a long time, Willie.”
“The shit still haunts me. Weakness is hard for men to admit. And some nightmarish shit went down that I couldn’t do anything to stop. I remember when I first went in, I was so scared, I vomited all over the place at orientation; my stomach went into spasms so much, I was placed in the hospital for a week. I saw them huge dudes, and all the stuff I had heard about prison came alive. I knew I was dead. You ever been so scared your mind just freezes?”
“I don’t, I don’t know, man. I can’t remember anyway.”
“You got to have some sorta fear in prison or you not human. I’ve seen dudes gang-raped with coke bottles until they die. They do things just to generate fear. It was absolutely insane, man, and the longer you stay there, you get used to it and become a part of it.” He stopped, took his time. But Lomax had no idea what he was doing or what was going on at the other end of the line. Willie spoke again:

“Insanity doesn’t masquerade as normality in prison, it just exists with a life of its own—a type of diversity of life forms that you have ta live with each and every day of your life and hope it doesn’t kill you. After that, what you think you come out with, if you come out at all?” As Willie paused again, Lomax perceived a change in his tone and diction. Lomax waited, then asked:
“How did you survive, man?”

Willie was silent for a moment, debating if he should share the most intimate details and embarrassments of his life. He had never talked about these matters, but he needed to talk about them to somebody; he had Lomax’s confidence, but his uncertainty was also because he knew the impact this information would have on Lomax’s perception. He questioned himself almost aloud:
“What would Lo think of me, if I tell him? Would he still see me as a man, the same way? Truth can blind; sometimes it ain’t good to share information. They ain’t always ready for it or able to take it, although they always say they wantta know.” Willie felt that the truth had to have the right conditions and the right planting. He pondered these concepts and decided Lomax may be able to handle the truth given carefully; anyway, he had asked for it. With some shame and rage still lurking just beneath the surface, he painted a picture of his imprisonment that burned into Lomax’s consciousness. As Willie painted his Angola experience to Lomax, he relived those events:

“Hey, you lil pretty nigga. I wont you. Oh, yeah, I wont you!”
“I ain’t a homosexual, man; I gotta wife and a son!”
“I hope you ain’t callin’ me no faggot, nigga! I wouldn’t take kind to dat. Dis ain’t bout bein’ no fag.... You be my hoe, or all dees niggas kin have you as day hoe. Day ain’t gonna treat you like I treat you. I’m strong enough to take care mine. Kin you handle yo’s?”
“This ain’t right, man. Don’t do this!”
“Dis ain’t ‘bout no right and wrong, nigga. You come here wit dat moral shit; what right is you talking ‘bout, nigga? You don’t set no rules in here; we do. You my hoe, den I stop other niggas from fuckin’ ya; dat’s not about no right and wrong, dat’s about power. You in Angola now, and I got da power, so I set da rules! Welcome to da joint! We make da rules, and you gotta live wit them, if you gonna live at all. What’s it gonna be?”

The big convict was all over Willie, paralyzing him with fear, and Willie’s strength was gone out of him. He wanted to run, to fight; he wanted to die, but most of all, he wanted to wake up and find that this was not happening. Here he was alone, in one of those unsecured places—a secret underbelly in the laundry room—with a 225 pound, six feet two inches tall, muscular convict who had a hard on for him and five of his henchmen outside guarding the door. Here he was, a fully grown, heterosexual man, about to be raped by another man. This had been so far removed from his conscious possibilities that it was almost impossible to believe it was happening to him. It was like a bad dream from which he couldn’t wake. But this was real. He could plead with this con, but it would do no good; Willie couldn’t allow this to simply happen—his pride wouldn’t let him accept it without a fight, so the fight was on, and when the con’s henchmen heard the noise, they came in to assist. Willie was subdued and was forced to become their pleasure.
“Life’s got a funny way of coming at you, man.”
“What you mean?"
“I mean, what a head of a house does sometimes positions the whole family or its members, one way or another.”
“I don’t understand that, brother.”

He told Lomax of a lifer named Ruffing who was an old friend of their father. He had worked for him as a cab driver and had gotten into an argument with a White fare and ended up killing the man. Their father’s business was hurt, and Ruffing got life.

“He was there when I got there, and he had heard about my case; he knew I was in the joint, but in a different camp. He’d been there for years as a second term lifer; so, he had a power base in prison--he had whores, henchmen, a business of drugs and prostitution, and he had influence with the guards. He traded for me, when he heard of my troubles, and worked out a deal with the guards to have me transferred to his unit. Once I was transferred, he told me he was repaying a debt to dad, and I was under his protection. He said: ‘I don’t need no mo hoes. Dis here is a matter of respect and payback to yo daddy fa when I was in the world.’”
Willie was silent, trying to control his emotions, as he could still taste the fear and anguish he knew in Angola--it was a sort of abscess he thought he had gotten away from.

“That’s how I made it—under protection cause dad happened to do right by a brother, and he was doing some payback; alotta dudes didn’t have that, man. Life fucks with you that way. Ain’t about justice and fairness, not even morality. Lomax cut in:
“Where are the guards when all this is happening?”
“Come on, man, the guards don’t run the prison, the prisoners do. The guards are earning salaries and hoping to be safe.” Lomax tried to imagine himself under those conditions. He couldn’t. Willie was now on his prison soapbox:
“Dudes turned out, even when they were back on the streets—turned out for life. And most of them were us, man, us! It was the luck of the draw I was traded and protected because of something dad did; I don’t know where I’d be, but for that. But I do know that the longer you stay in the joint, the more you change. A lot of weird shit happens and that changes you.”
Lomax was enthralled:
“Like what, man?”
Willie thought for a while, then said:
“You can’t endure shit over and over again and it not change you. You change, man! Whether you want to or not, you change--you can’t do anything about it. It changes you in ways you don’t see, in ways you don’t want, and they’re real changes, depending on how much and how bad the shit is. People talk about time changing you and time healing you. Time ain’t shit, man; shit is shit! All time does is allow shit to happen. It ain’t time, it’s shit that works on you. You face so much shit, you soon be doin’ it. I did some stuff I ain’t proud of at all. Ain’t no way you in the joint and not disgrace yourself; you lose a lotta your humanity, or all of it, man. Prison is hell... and hell don’t make no saints; and it sho don’t make no angels. If you ain’t a monster going in, you gonna be one comin’ out!” Willie was like a soapbox philosopher enraged by now. He had tried to pretend that this situation was behind him for good.

“The book says hell’s enlarging itself; it’s right; states adding more prison space daily.... It’s another world; you ain’t got nothing but respect and your wits, but respect ain’t respect as we know it; it’s ‘bout power--getting somebody to do what you say do, and your desires get twisted in prison. If there’s anything you do learn in the joint that’s positive, it’s flexibility. That’s what it takes to survive, and survive is what you do until you can get out. And much of what you do to survive stays with you, and it’s hard to break, if you break it at all, once back in the world. That’s what’s happening to some of the young brothers. They come back to the world with a prison mind-set, and them rules are different, man. But they too dumb to know that, so the lil brothers shoot each other because of some twisted ideas of respect that don’t mean respect for life.They should be killing those SOBs who developed a system so inhuman that it causes men, especially Black men, to become decadent and self-hating.”
Willie stopped and rested his thoughts and his anger. Lomax felt relieved.
“Oh, yeah, prison changed me. I ain’t no Malcolm, but I see some of the things he saw.”
Lomax asked:
“How long was it before you adjusted back to the world?”
“I haven’t; I ain’t back yet. I don’t see things right. Some days I’m back to me. Well, most of the time. But then something snaps in me, like everyday bullshit, and I go back to the prison mind. That’s scary.” Lomax spoke as a way of adding to the conversation:
“When they build them prisons and house all them brothers, at some point these brothers are gonna get out and some will know exactly what happened to them. And some ain’t gonna kill other brothers, but they gonna kill White people.” [Pages 89-96]

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