Join me as we attempt to navigate a prison known as Savageville--a massive concrete and iron human warehouse surrounded by electrified fence and forty foot concrete walls. As you enter notice the despair and fear floating in the sad dead eyes of row after row of caged young black men.

 

 

Cell: A grey, concrete, right angled rectangle with no outlets.

 

 

Cellmate (aka Celly): Kin-Kin, short, chiseled, and hard with a shaved head and an air of the streets-impossible to either teach or fake.

 

 

Now you walk among them as a convicted felon unready to serve a lengthy sentence with two thousand others-many who will never breathe free air again. You don't yet comprehend the gang-controlled hierarchy or convict code of the concrete jungle. You have no real connection or similarities to the majority of your fellow convicts beyond sharing the same basic DNA.

 

 

Fast forward a month. You know every inch of your tomb every scratch of your steel door. You have paced your 4 feet of walkable space like a tiger in the zoo... just like the thousands before you. You have suffered indignities perpetrated by the people tasked with your protection. You have fought against the mind games of the apex predators seeking easy prey.

 

 

You have choked down 3 insipid meals a day shoved through a hole in your cell door like an animal during the "feeds." You have endured freezing 5 minute showers in rust-stained, mold­ infested, cages once a week. You have talked with the few remaining loved ones who've stood by your side throughout this ordeal on your allotted IO minutes a week-they have so many questions, you have so few answers. As night comes, you feel yourself falling deeper into the well with every passing day-the light becoming dimmer. You ponder the easy way out, the coward's solution -- you know -- but even a rock will turn to dust with enough pressure.

 

 

Cut to Day 107. It's hours after "lights out". You lay on your bunk in the darkness and hear someone rapping a deep lyrical rhythm. Have you unmoored--floating off into the abyss? You squint as you search for the source. You cannot see him, but sense your celly sitting on the floor next to your iron door looking out through the sliver of a window. "You don't mind if I spit some beats?" he asks. You're happy for the distraction. You listen to his stories of the drug game, the hustle, the pain and the dreams. You see yourself on the wings of his narrative sages. You realize everyone has wounds and scars. You let your anxiety ridden exhaustion overtake you and slip off.

 

 

The "count lights" flicker on, the clickety clack of the food cart returns, you open your eyes only to realize the music has stopped and your nightmares succumb to your reality.

 

 

***

 

 

Prison, a fever dream, has a lot to teach us. To survive in the shadows on the fringes of society you have to learn a new code for living; you have to learn to humble yourself (while still fighting the stigmas trying to label you as subhuman); you have to learn to see in the shadows.

 

 

My celly's late night rap sessions intrigued me. It took me days, and Kin Kin's help, to decipher the lyrics (Do you know what "getting small" and "cutting off someone's water" means?) and weeks to understand their deeper meaning. Prison raps, their version of current history and a reflection of their truths, is how they carry and pass along their culture. I became aware of how different cultures coexist so closely and yet, worlds apart.

 

 

We all grow up with music and rap is main-stream now, but do we ever think about its historical and cultural importance? Do we consider its ability to bridge gaps or about how it connects us? Inmates, dead but not yet buried, can spend whole lifetimes in grey crossbar hotels; yet these raps (passed from generation of prisoners to another) are carried with as much care as any precious memory we hold dear. Prison raps, more than just music, embody the soul, prayers, and history of a marginalized people struggling to be seen.

 

 

Can you see them? Will you hear them?

 

 

-L.C.-