Behind the Chicken Wire: 5 Surprising Truths About the Secret Sociology of Prison Life

 

The Money Orders, the Razor, and the Wedding That Wasn’t: Rivers and East Carroll, Part 7

The day they gave me a razor to shave, I popped it open and took out the blade.

That’s how bad it had gotten.

I was in the hole at Rivers Correctional—Concordia Parish—locked in a box, cut off from the world, under investigation for stealing thirteen thousand dollars in money orders from the prison itself. My mail was restricted. My phone calls were gone. I didn’t know what day it was. I didn’t know if it was ever going to end. And in that particular kind of silence—the kind that presses on you like water—I broke.

But I’m still here. And that matters.

Let me back up.

Rivers

Rivers Correctional sits in Concordia Parish and houses mostly state inmates—the ones I’d heard about but never really ran with until then. The compound was literally split down the middle: Shreveport boys on one side, New Orleans boys on the other. Two whole worlds on one yard, and neither side could claim dominance. I had never been in that kind of balance before. I found it fascinating.

I arrived looking rough. I’d just come out of the hole at Farmville, and my reputation had made the trip before I did. By this point in my prison life, my name had weight. People knew who I was before they ever saw my face. Fights. Knives. Lawsuits. The hole. They knew.

And then I walked in, and Wayne was there.

The Urinalysis Test

Before I get to Wayne, let me tell you about the day I took the compound.

They ran a random urinalysis—everybody line up, cup in hand. Mojo, which is synthetic marijuana, had Rivers completely lit. The administration was losing their minds trying to figure out how to test for it because it didn’t show up on a standard screen. They were doing UA after UA, catching nothing, just trying to look like they had a handle on things.

When they called my name, I took my cup, walked to the toilet, and sat down.

The guard stopped. “What you doing?”

“I’m sitting down.” I said.

“You’ll stand up like the rest of them.”

I said: “I surely am not. I got eighty men out there who don’t even look at me sideways. I am not disrespecting them by standing up.” I peed, put the cup on the shelf, and slid it over.

The guard didn’t say anything else.

In that moment, I could feel the whole unit shift. Because what I’d just done was, in prison logic, act more like a real woman than any administration had ever asked a homosexual to act. I followed the rules of the house—not their rules, our rules. That night, somebody gave me his phone.

Wayne

Wayne was slim, kind of fine, gambler type. He had money and an attitude that came from knowing it. I liked him almost immediately, and I started working on him the way I worked on men—patiently, from the side, letting them come to me. He did. We started something that turned into a relationship, and it was decent. He wasn’t Cup. The sex wasn’t the best I’d had in prison. But it was something.

The problem with Wayne was simple: he could not stop looking at free women. Every female deputy who walked on the unit, Wayne was right there—“Miss So-and-So, how you doing?”—dropping whatever he was doing to clock some woman he could never touch. I had eighty-some men on that compound wanting my attention, and this man was out here chasing the woman who held the keys.

I called him on it every time. He’d say, “That’s your dick, I’m just appreciating. You know I’m coming home to you.” I didn’t like it. But I let it go—until one Sunday morning.

Sundays in prison are the calmest days. The administration is light. People sleep in. I was half asleep in my rack when I saw the deputy do her walkthrough—nothing unusual. She stopped by the half-wall near the back, shook her head at something, and walked off. I needed to use the bathroom, so I got up and headed to the back.

Wayne was back there.

Jacking off to the guard who had just walked through.

I stared at him for a second. Then I said: “Every time we do something, every time we go to bed, you’re thinking about Miss Taylor? You got me that way?” He said, “Come on, come back”—and I said, “Finish yourself up, you nasty thing.” And I walked out.

I don’t compete with free women. Can’t touch them, can’t have them, and I am not going to make myself small enough to lose to somebody who can’t even be with you. That ended us. He sent letters for weeks after. I moved to the trustee unit and started keeping my distance.

The Law Library and the Letters

By then, I was known on the compound for two things: being willing to go to war, and knowing the law. People brought me their legal situations constantly. I didn’t charge at first. But then something happened that changed the calculus.

A man on the compound had three charges that the judge had sentenced him on at the same time—one year, one year, one year. But the judge had never said concurrent or consecutive. In Louisiana, when the judge is silent, the system runs them consecutive by default. This man was doing three years when he thought he was doing one.

I wrote a simple letter to the judge asking for clarification of his intent. The judge responded. He clarified the sentences were meant to be concurrent. That man was immediately released.

After that, everybody thought Shakie was getting people out. That’s not what happened—I put words on paper, asked a judge a question, and the judge answered. But suddenly my name was synonymous with freedom. I didn’t mind looking at cases. Nobody should be in prison longer than they’re supposed to be.

My real talent was write-up hearings. When a guard wrote someone up and they went to the disciplinary board, inmates had the right to defend themselves, call witnesses, and present their case. I loved that room. I got so many write-ups thrown out on technicalities—misspellings, procedural errors, vague language—that guards started writing people up less, because they knew I’d be in that hearing dismantling their paperwork.

The Money Order Scheme

My trustee job put me in the administrative section of the facility. On visiting days—Saturdays and Sundays—when your family came and brought money for the machines, the visitor gave it to Miss Phillips. She collected money orders, I made copies, put them in the finance box, and dropped the originals into the locked drop box that fed the prison’s bank.

One day, I did the math.

There were no cameras on the administrative side. The money went from Miss Phillips to me. The inmates’ accounts were already credited at the visitation window the moment the transaction happened—they had already eaten the food, bought the snacks, spent what they were going to spend. Nobody would notice a missing money order until the books were balanced. And they balanced the books every quarter.

Three months was a long time.

I started pocketing the money orders. My sister worked for an attorney, so anything I sent to her came out as legal mail—sealed, uninspected, legally protected. She passed the money orders to a friend in New Orleans who cashed them. Over about two to three months, I pulled close to thirteen thousand dollars from that prison.

I want to be clear about something: I didn’t steal from the inmates. Their accounts were already credited. I stole from the prison.

I also want to be clear about something else: I knew it was wrong. I knew it was greed. I knew it was going to catch up with me. I did it anyway. Because I had learned, somewhere in nine years of watching this system, that I had a talent for bending things—and because those people had broken me enough times that I wanted something of my own. That’s not a justification. It’s just the truth.

Under Investigation

When the quarterly books came up thirteen thousand dollars short, they went through every person who had touched money. The visitation lady. Miss Phillips. Miss Phillips told them exactly what she did: she collected the money orders and handed them to me.

They called me in. The warden said he knew I was stealing. I said, “I’m a prisoner. What would I do with a money order? How would I even get it out?” He said he’d find out. I said, “Fine. But you don’t have proof. And you will not be reading my legal mail.” He locked me up under investigation.

In Louisiana, under investigation has no timeline. No hearing, no deadline. They put you in a box and look until they find something, or until they get tired. It can take months. It can take longer.

This time in the hole was different from every other time. Before, I always had some thread back to the world—magazines, letters, commissary, something. This time they restricted everything. No mail in or out. No commissary. No news. No contact with my sister, who I knew was trying to figure out what had happened to me. I lost track of time. I lost track of myself.

The depression that came in that hole wasn’t like anything I’d felt before. I went through phases: hating myself, hating the world, hating the people who put me there, hating the people who hadn’t. I stared at the ceiling for hours. The only things that happened were the meals through the flap and, twice a week, a razor slid under the door so you could shave.

The Razor

One of those days—I genuinely do not know which one—I popped the razor open and took out the blade.

I had thought about it, the way you think about things when you’re alone in a box with nothing but your own head. I didn’t see an end. I didn’t see the investigation completing, or a punishment given, or any version of a future. I just saw the box, and the walls, and the silence that had been pressing down on me for months.

I want to be honest with you about how I thought in that moment, because it tells you something about where I was. I am right-handed. And I thought: if I want to do both wrists, I should use my dominant hand first, because even once it’s cut, it will have more dexterity than the left. So I took the blade in my left hand and I cut my right wrist.

When I saw the blood, I panicked.

I am terrified of blood. I had completely forgotten that about myself until that moment. The blood was everywhere—my hand, the floor, the wall—and I started screaming and banging on the door. “I need help. I need help.” They got me out. They took me to the medical unit, and then to the local hospital. And somewhere in that space—between the hospital and consciousness—I heard something.

God told me: “You stupid child. I have so much planned for you. How dare you.” And He wasn’t gentle about it. He wasn’t wearing a white robe and speaking softly. He was real with me. He was angry with me. He said I was going to change people’s minds about things, and that I had stories to tell, and that I did not have his permission to leave.

I believed Him.

When I got back to the facility and went through suicide watch and sat with the psychologist, I was different. Still broken, still shaken, still a mess. But I knew something I hadn’t known before, down in my bones, in a way that has never left me.

I was supposed to still be here.

* * *

East Carroll

They shipped me to East Carroll Detention Center—ECDC—a small facility, nothing like the big compounds I’d been through. Two things I noticed immediately: the food was terrible in a specific, creative way (they put sugar in the beans; they put sugar in everything), and when I walked into my unit that first night, the whispers started before I even found my rack.

My reputation had made the trip before I did. Again.

The next morning, a girl came to show me around—tall, from New Orleans, introduced herself as Rosetta. She walked me to breakfast like she’d been waiting. That’s all I needed. Then I heard about Mother.

Mother was another older homosexual on the compound who had her own operation—two boys on the yard, her own name, her own thing. When word got back to me that she was referring to herself as a “Mother” figure on the compound and expecting a certain kind of deference, something in me lit up. I sent a message: next time she sees me, she better address me as Mother.

Mother sent back word: she would not.

I started making a plastic knife.

The W I Didn’t Earn

I never did find Mother with my knife on me. One day I was in the medical hallway getting my blood pressure medication and psychotropics, and she came out of her unit right in front of me. No knife. No tennis shoes. Nothing but me and my mouth.

I got in her face. “You got something to call me?” She had heard enough about my reputation to know she didn’t want this fight, but she stood her ground anyway. We tussled. And in that tussle—I am going to be honest about this—Mother got a W on me. I’m bigger. I’m older. And I just ran out of energy first.

She got a W on the world-famous Shakie.

Do you know what that did? The next day she walked through the unit with her head high, playing with her hair. Every punk on that yard felt the shift. Because if Mother could get a W on me, what did that mean about the rest of the food chain? Everything I’d built on that compound was suddenly in question.

I started planning how to get it back. But here’s what happened instead: when Mother heard I was serious—that I had a real knife and real intentions—she used her trustee connections to move herself to the other unit. Gone. She transferred to where I could never reach her.

She had the W. She knew it was borrowed time. She left with it.

The compound went back to normal. Everybody remembered who I was. But that W lived somewhere in the back of my mind for a long time.

The Chemical Queen

Captain Jones gave me the chemical job. Every day, twice a day, I went to every unit on the compound with the bleach and cleaning supplies. Logged them in, picked them up. You don’t leave chemicals unsupervised in a prison—an unsupervised bleach bottle is basically a weapon.

The real value of that job was the movement.

I had a homeboy from the Sixth Ward who was getting contraband into the facility through his girl’s visits—weed, pills, whatever was moving. He needed a carrier. I could go unit to unit without raising a flag. A woman on chemicals is just doing her job. So I became the delivery system. He’d hand me something earmarked for a specific person in a specific unit, I’d drop it on my rounds and collect the money. We were hitting.

I never called home for money. Never asked anyone to put it on my books. I moved it myself. That was always my way.

Love Through the Fence

And then there was Terry.

Terry—I called him Tara sometimes—was from Slidell, the Ninth Ward crowd that had moved post-Katrina. Short, fine, Creole-looking, with pretty eyes and a face he was always touching up. He was in the unit on the other side of the fence from mine. He had his homeboys, his thing, his world.

His homeboy Slim One also had a thing going on my side of the fence. Slim One was from Angola originally, tall, skinny, much younger than me—at least ten years—and he made a production of being naked every single time I came around with chemicals. Every time. I noticed. I am not going to pretend I didn’t. But I wasn’t interested.

Terry started it through notes. He passed a letter through a mutual homeboy—a proper introduction, like he had taken his time with it. His history, his neighborhood, what the storm had done, what brought him here. I wrote back. We wrote every day.

We couldn’t be in the same unit. The trustee yard had a fence that ran along the main compound, and what we built was what I can only call a fence relationship. I’d come out on my chemical rounds or just on the yard, sit on a bucket on my side, and Terry would sit on his. His boys ran interference so nobody wandered too close. We talked for hours. We held hands through the chain link. We did other things through the chain link that I will let your imagination handle.

I fell in love with him through a fence.

The Wedding That Wasn’t

One day, through that fence, Terry told me he wanted me for himself. I said: if you want me for real, you marry me. Prison weddings are not new—homosexual men in prison have always gone to church service together, held hands in front of the congregation, and called it done. But the way I did it was different.

I made handwritten invitations.

I invited every punk on the compound. I assigned roles: Rosetta as maid of honor, Terry’s little homeboy as best man. I planned a full reception with commissary food. I did my eyebrows. The girls on the unit made foundation out of baby powder and marker ink—you squeeze the ink out of the marker cartridge, mix it with the powder, and you get something close enough to work. I got my face done right. I got a haircut. I felt like a bride.

We took the church car to the cafeteria service. I was there early. I sat down. I waited.

Terry never showed up.

I sat through the entire church service in front of every punk on that compound who I had personally invited, in full DIY makeup with my eyebrows arched and my face done, waiting for a man who had decided not to come. The jokes started before the service was over.

“Girl, where your man at?” Silence from me.

I sat. I listened to the sermon. And when they dismissed us, I walked back to my unit with my face on the floor. Rosetta was right there with me. Her saying, “It’s okay, he probably—” and me saying nothing. I was devastated in a way I did not have language for.

When I found out the reason, I almost broke something. Slim One had told him. Told Terry about me and Slim One, about what had been going on in the laundry room and the law library and everywhere else. Terry stood me up because he’d found out I wasn’t being faithful to what we were building through the fence.

When I confronted Slim One, he grinned. “I can’t let you marry him and get all that attention when you been sneaking with me.” I said, “You’re a hater.” He wasn’t wrong. But the timing was spectacular.

Slim One, For Real

 

So I married Slim One instead.

I kept it smaller—a few girls, a few homeboys, a quick ceremony at church service, hands held, and that was that. No invitations. No reception. No DIY makeup. Just the two of us and the people who mattered.

Being married to Slim One was strange at first. He was so young. He wanted to talk about hood stuff all day—who beat who, who got ran out of where—and I was trying to have a real conversation. But here’s what I’ll tell you: he kept his job in the kitchen, he got himself moved to the trustee unit so we could see each other every day, and when my grandmother died, he was there.

When you lose someone while you’re in prison, grief has nowhere to go. You can’t go to the funeral. You can’t hug anybody who knew them. Your emotions are already running hot and ragged and sideways from years of this life, and then somebody you love is just gone, and you are still in a box. It just sits in you.

Slim One came to me every morning after my grandmother passed. He kissed me on the mouth—which a lot of men in prison won’t do with a homosexual, and I want to be clear about how much that meant—he hugged me, he asked if I was okay. He was a boy playing at being a man, but in that moment he was exactly the right version of both.

I fell in love with him. For real this time.

The Bus

When they called my name for re-entry, I knew I was getting close. Re-entry was a 90-day program the state was running for inmates nearing the end of their sentence—they’d ship you back to your parish of origin, run you through the program, and start getting you ready to come home. I was from New Orleans. They were sending me to Orleans Parish.

Slim One helped me pack every bag.

When the time came and the captain showed up and there was nothing left to do, Slim One started crying. A grown man, in prison, crying because I was leaving. He walked my things to the door. He held on. And it was so genuinely sweet and sad that I started crying too, right there in front of God and the facility and whoever was watching from the window.

They put me on the bus. He was at the window. He watched until I was gone.

We wrote letters for the rest of my sentence. We talked about what it would be like when we were both on the outside. And then when we were both home—him before me, I think—he called my phone one time. One time. To say, and I quote: “I just want to tell you fuck you one last time.” Because I had promised to send him fifty dollars and couldn’t make it happen. The state was taking my money in restitution, I was barely keeping myself fed, and I couldn’t get him fifty dollars. He felt I had lied to him. He said what he said, and he blocked me.

That is the man I cried for at the window.

You cannot make this up.

A Prison Daughter

One more thing before I close out East Carroll and Orleans Parish re-entry, and it’s a story some of you already know if you follow me on social media.

When I was doing time, my best friend Eric would go out and send me pictures of the club. I missed everything while I was in—Netflix launched, Instagram was born, the culture shifted in ways I only heard about through letters. Eric would take pictures at the club and mail them to me. A little piece of the world.

In one of those pictures was a man I didn’t recognize. Fine, clearly at the gay club, just living in the background of the frame. I didn’t know who he was.

When I got to East Carroll, one of my homeboys found that picture in my locker and started asking questions—didn’t recognize it as gay club territory. And that’s when it came out: that man in the background was on the compound. He was in the facility. And he had been presenting as straight the whole time.

I’ll call him D-Banger.

When the news broke—picture evidence that D-Banger had been at the gay club—the whole compound had opinions. Sit down to pee. Face the wall in the shower. Follow the rules of the house. D-Banger was absolutely not ready for any of it.

I took him under my wing. I showed him how to navigate a male facility as a feminine person. What respect looked like, what it cost, how to earn it, and how to keep it. He became my prison daughter. I was his mother.

When we both got home and reconnected in the real world, something had shifted for both of us. We were grown. We were both men, both living fully in who we were. The mother-daughter dynamic became father-son. He is my son out here now.

I made a monster. A whole, confident, gorgeous monster. I’m proud of him.

* * *

I started this part of the story in the hole with a razor blade.

I’m ending it having left a prison with bags packed, tears on my face, and a daughter on the compound who would carry something I gave her into the free world.

In between those two moments, I stole thirteen thousand dollars, got a W put on me, planned a wedding nobody came to, fell in love through a chain-link fence, and heard the voice of God while I was bleeding in a box.

He told me I wasn’t done.

He was right. 💚