ANTHONY WOOLEY

ANTHONY WOOLEY

By Ike Griffin 

Note: Names of individuals and institutions have been changed.

It was the second or third Kairos weekend at Ferguson Unit that I met Anthony Wooley. He sat to my immediate left at the table of St. James. Tony was what you would call a well turned out man of less than thirty years of age, mild of manner and imposing of build. His ready, infectious smile set a tone for the table family of James, acceleratin bonding that inevitably takes place on such a weekend. Six inmates, all dressed in white prison garb, and three free-world volunteers began to share our lives in an easy, unguarded manner.

From DeKalb, Texas, Tony had married a girl from Texarkana and soon found himself embroiled in a sex perversion scandal that led him to prison. Tony was doing five years, but professed innocence of the crime. Working in prisons, we hear innocent pleas regularly, so I smiled understandingly, but thought less of him for trying to sell his story to what he thought was a gullible volunteer. I thought no more of it. It is not the job of a volunteer to become an advocate for a prisoner, though that happens from time to time. The Kairos volunteer’s job is to let thr residents know that we care about them, guilty or not. As time went by and the Kairos team returned monthly for a reunion with the participants, Tony and I got to know one another better and he revealed more of his story.

According to Tony, he had begun dating a beautiful white girl from Texarkana in High School. Of course their dating had to be done in secret because her father, a highly placed county law official, had forbidden his daughter to date blacks. After graduation from High School, she went on to college and Tony took a job in a diesel motor repair shop. After one year in college, the girl decided she was past the age of majority and agreed to elope with Tony. After a few months of working on reconciliation with her family, her father arranged to have them both arrested for sexual deviancy. At the trial, a prostitute came forth to testify she had had sex with both of them in a threesome on several occasions. Tony was sentenced to five years and his wife to three years in the state system. Tony was stunned that his wife's father hated him so much he was willing to fabricate testimony that would send his own daughter to prison. 

Tony's wife was nearing the end of her sentence and eventually was released and returned to her parents' home in Texarkana where she came under immediate pressure to seek a divorce. Tony continued to keep me posted as we met monthly. His wife lived at home under hostile conditions, but refused to initiate divorce proceedings. Instead, she continued to communicate with Tony, though the mail was not sent to her parents' home. She was able to contact the prostitute who had testified at their trial and convinced her to sign an affidavit saying she had been paid to testify in the manner she had but had not, in fact, had sex with either Tony or his wife.  

For the next two years, Tony suffered through the anxiety of knowing the pressure his wife endured living with her parents, one of whom she was secretly battling. She was working to get Tony out of prison, and her father maneuvering to keep him in. As his end of sentence date approached, Tony learned that the state was reviewing his sentence, and finally, he received word that his sentence was being reversed, but it would take a matter of weeks to expedite the paperwork. Ironically, Tony was ultimately declared innocent of the original charges, but had served more than the original sentence. He returned to his home in DeKalb. 

Mickey and I were driving over to New Orleans a few months after Tony's release and I decided to stop by DeKalb to look him up and see how he was progressing. I had no address for him, but DeKalb is a small town. We stopped at a local car wash in town and I asked a couple of the employees if they knew Tony Wooley. Their verbal response said they did not know him, but their body language clearly said the opposite. They obviously did not trust me. I bored them with a history of my work in Ferguson Unit and the circumstances of my relationship with Tony. Finally, one of them said, "He lives in the house with a porch two blocks down. He is probably on the porch right now. Sure enough, he was. 

Tony was working at the same diesel repair shop where he had worked before incarceration. His wife was still living with her parents, but they were seeing one another while Tony gradually rebuilt credibility, accumulating reserves lost in the prison experience. His plan was to move her back to live with him after he could hold his head up as a respectable citizen who could support a family. Tony wanted to forgive and forget past differences with his in-laws. He felt the best chance for that might happen when a grandchild presented itself for their consideration.

A year later, I called Tony to check on having a diesel engine overhauled for Kairos and learned all his plans had worked out; his family was united, with a grandchild opening the door to occasional, if not overly warm, visits with his in-laws.

JEREMY

JEREMY ROBERTO PACHECO

By Ike Griffin

Note: Names of individuals and institutions have been changed. Circumstances are real, and are encountered frequently enough to believe they are representative of any number of the incarcerated.

Jeremy was tried as an adult at the age of 15 and incarcerated in the Ferguson Unit, known as “a gladiator school” in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Most of the inmates at Ferguson were young, average age about 23, but Jeremy was one of the youngest. He was approximately 20 years of age when we met on a Kairos weekend in 1986.

Though his father lived in Florida, Jeremy had moved to Texas with his mother when he was 8 years old. After his parents divorced, his mother re-married and moved Jeremy and an older sister to a town near San Antonio, Texas. Shortly after the move, his step-father began to sexually abuse him, as well as his sister. Unable to live with the pain and guilt, Jeremy ran away from home at the age of 10. Sexually abused children almost invariably report feelings of guilt regardless of their inability to prevent being abused. Jeremy lived on the street in San Antonio. Soon, he was picked up by a sugar daddy who gave him refuge, but who also demanded sexual favors and introduced him to drugs. Jeremy, being a very attractive, small statured kid with an innocent countenance, developed an income delivering drugs.

At the age of 12 Jeremy ran into his first serious clash with the juvenile justice system. Found guilty of dealing drugs, the judge first put him into foster care but was willing to turn him over to his older sister, who had also left the abusive atmosphere of their home and had established herself in San Antonio, working at a respectable day job. No one mentioned to the judge that she supplemented her income through prostitution at night. Jeremy’s life was marginally better living with his sister in her one bedroom apartment, but when she entertained her boyfriends at night, Jeremy had to sleep in the closet among the shoes and remain very quiet.

I have often tried to imagine what life must have been like for Jeremy at this point. Forced by circumstances of survival into male prostitution and drug running as an adolescent, he was known in the neighborhood for certain activities and he received no encouragement to change from his contemporaries. Life became painful enough for him that at age 14 he killed a man, was tried and sent to an adult prison a year later. The torments continued, following him into prison.

Being more clever than most inmates, Jeremy was able to find jobs in safer environments of the prison, primarily as a clerk in an office with supervision. When I met Jeremy, he was a Chaplain’s clerk, safe from harassment inside and anxious to shape a better life for himself upon his eventual release. Jeremy developed a team of eight or ten men who wrote letters to troubled youth, encouraging them to get hold of their lives, straighten up, ask for help, do anything to stay out of prison. Addressing each letter Dear Teen-Ager, the team of writers used their own lives as examples of experience to avoid. They were limited to both sides of a single sheet of paper to tell their story and make their plea. Each letter was hand written and original. Once a month, I would collect all the letters and distribute them to 9th grade counselors in the public school system, who would give letters to students that needed to hear from someone who had been through some of their experience and ended badly.

Needless to say, after a couple of years, I knew the writers’ stories quite well. It is interesting to note that the more often they wrote their story, the more honest and fearless they became exposing themselves. I was fortunate to see some of these men released and attended the wedding of one of the men after he was settled. This is the same man who had confessed to me that he had participated in the gang rape of one of the other men in the writing group. I was there when he sought forgiveness of his victim and the same was granted… the two men became friends who would protect rather than exploit one another.

Eventually, Jeremy grew too old for the inmate profile at his prison and was transferred to a new unit. He asked that I write a letter to the warden explaining his writing project and requesting he be given authority to continue. This outreach required special privileges in regard to access to supplies, congregating with a team of writers, and passing letters out of the institution via a trusted volunteer to local school counseling services. To my knowledge, Jeremy continued the project for 15 years, through 4 institutions.

I want to think that Jeremy will make a successful transition into society; he has certainly done much to build a support community for himself, seeking to leave the old sex offender label behind, but the odds are against him. The sex offender label is so limiting in where he can live, what jobs he can apply for, how he can be received by society even if they know him, respect him and trust him.

It was not the homosexual community that abused him. It was heterosexual men who tormented him, forcing him into prostitution, drug dealing and worse. Heterosexual inmates continued to torment him in prison. What he learned from them was how completely effective sexual abuse can be in dominating another human being to establish a pecking order. That is a particularly difficult truth to forget. Actually, it cannot be forgotten once experienced. One can only learn to live with the memory, and the memory can be tolerated if love and respect is found from another human being.

THE VET

JOE WILSON- VIETNAM VET
By Ike Griffin
Note: Names of individuals and institutions have been changed. Circumstances are real, and are encountered frequently enough to believe they are representative of any number of the incarcerated.

“Fifteen or twenty minutes of fuzzy thinking can ruin your entire life.” (Joe Wilson, Union Correctional Institution, Florida, 1990)

I have now known Joe for eighteen years. Our first meeting was at Union, where he was playing a guitar on a Kairos weekend. His rendition of “Lights of The City” first grabbed my attention. He was transferred from Union C.I. to Tomoka C.I., where he volunteered for the first Horizon class, initiated in 1999. Joe became a Peer Facilitator for a family pod of eight men.

Born in central Pennsylvania to a middle class family mid-way through the twentieth century, Joe’s childhood was unremarkable in the way that “normal” is unremarkable. Life did not present much of a challenge for Joe. “Normal” in America during the ‘50s could be pretty spectacular. However, Joe thought of himself as ordinary.

Possessed of a loveable personality, he put great store in quality of friendship and loyalty. He was reliable, responsible, and willing to sacrifice if called upon to fulfill his cultural vision of male virtue, that of protector of those who came into his sphere of caring. Unassuming as he was, he saw himself as good, not heroic.

After graduation from High School in 1968, Joe enrolled at Penn State intending to prepare for life as an electrical engineer. Difficulty in a required class convinced him that he had set his sights on the wrong career path. He dropped out of school to re-think his future. Responsibility and failure weighed on him intensely, and he enlisted in the armed services. Joe joined the U.S. Army hoping to regain his confidence after a poor start in school. The tide of popularity against the Viet Nam war did nothing for his self image. If you asked him, he would say that he was proud to wear the uniform and to serve, but the pride did not manifest itself in his feeling of acceptance, and he wore the uniform as little as possible when off duty.

Upon release from duty in 1975, Joe returned to Penn State. Student routine was familiar but things were different now. Students and faculty had nothing but contempt for the Viet Nam experience. Far from welcoming the returning warrior with grateful arms, student discussion would lead him to believe he was foolish for having not burned his registration card to pass the war in Canada.

Compared to Joe’s recent experience in Vietnam, current causes igniting student emotions seemed trivial and insignificant. Football games, pep rallies and college pranks left him cold. Joe felt disconnected. He was at a different place. Six or seven years older than his classmates, he was light-years ahead of them in experience. He longed for acceptance and belonging, but he felt isolated. Whereas he had the advantage of experience, it was he who felt he had missed out on something, though he could not imagine what that something might be. He longed for mutual experience with his peers upon which to build a relationship.

When spring break rolled around, Joe joined two girls, one particularly attractive coed named Elaine, and two boys, carpooling to Daytona Beach, Florida. During the ride down, Joe explained to the others that he had been in the military, which explained his advanced age. Pressed for stories of military service, Joe spoke of danger, his comfort with firearms. He revealed that, in fact he had a pistol in his duffel bag.

Accommodations were typically scarce and pricey in Florida during Spring Break. All five shared a two bedroom condo on the beach for the week. Tens of thousands of other students from across the country had crowded into Daytona Beach. The plan was to party on the beach day and night, sleeping only when exhausted. Any of their little group might or might not sleep in their condo on any given night. Beds were not assigned.

After a day of beach volleyball, beer, and sand-sprinkled sandwiches, sunbathing, and swapped stories, they built bonfires on the beach to continue the same routine into the night. Joe excused himself, already sporting more sunburn than he really wanted. He retired early to the condo, washed off the sand and flopped onto a bed.

Elaine woke Joe at two o’clock in the morning, shaking him urgently. “Wake up, Joe! Give me your gun! Damn it Joe, two creeps raped and beat me and I’m going to kill them! They just beat the shit out of me and then raped me. They took turns, beating me and raping me! I’m gonna kill them, Joe.”

Elaine’s bloody and bruised face told the story. She had puffy eyes, blood in her hair and a crescent shaped cut in front of her left ear that was still oozing blood. As Joe focused his own blurred vision on her, he thought, “No! I can’t let her have my gun. She’ll just hurt herself more.”

“I’ll go with you. You can’t do this alone. You’ll just get hurt.”

Elaine led him back up the beach about a half-mile, passing revelers in the dunes between the condos. Small groups of students were still around bonfires, though the night had finally turned quiet. Occasional laughter pierced the humid air, but most of the energy was spent for this night. At a dying fire near the dunes with salt grass growing in tufts, two male students were packing their tent into a Volkswagen van, apparently preparing to depart.

“There they are,” said Elaine. “They are the ones.”

Joe walked up to the two, who were not looking particularly confident by this time. He pulled his gun from the waistband of his jeans and said, “That girl you beat and raped had a friend.” He shot them both, picked up the spent cartridges from the sand, took Elaine’s hand cut through the sand dunes to the road.

“There they aren’t. Not any more, Elaine. Let’s get you to a hospital.”
The emergency room staff of the hospital began work on Elaine. Joe sat in a waiting room with a Methodist minister who had brought his wife in to be treated for what seemed to be food poisoning. Killing time, anxious and bored, they explained to one another why they were at the emergency room in the middle of the night. Joe, knowing full well the enormity of his actions, confessed to the minister all that had happened. “I think you need to pray about this,” commented the minister. So, Joe went into the chapel at the hospital and prayed about it. God seemed to say, “Tell the truth.”

Later that day, after taking Elaine back to the condo, Joe was stopped for driving erratically, like dozens of other students, on suspicion of DWI. Joe explained to the officer that the steering on his car was loose and needed to be fixed. They took him into the police station for breath analysis. As they were booking his data, Joe pulled the spent cartridges from his pocket and handed them to the arresting officer, and told them the truth.

Double Life… a few minutes of fuzzy thinking, acting on loyalty and compassion, can ruin your entire life.

Jack (Murph the Surf) Murphy had done time with Joe at Union. Jack told me that Joe was one of the most gentle men in the system. Jack claimed that if Joe had done his crime on Padre Island in Texas rather than on the beach in Florida, he might have been given a public reprimand and a private thank you for rendering swift justice.

THE FLY

By Ike Griffin
Note: Names of individuals and institutions have been changed. Circumstances are real, and are encountered frequently enough to believe they are representative of any number of the incarcerated.

Lito was half a mile from the murder scene on the outskirts of Sanderson, Texas when he realized the enormity of what he had done. Chinga tu madre, Cabron! What have you done? Pinche gringa! She shouldn’t have stopped. Why the fuck did she stop?
Born Daniel Quiroz, Jr., the son of Daniel Quiroz, whose father Winslado Quiroz had migrated from Rio Verde, San Luis Potosi, Mexico to Southwest Texas during World War II, when ranchers short of cowboys, hired willing hands on the spot, “si tenian tarjeta, o no!”

Winslado had brought his wife and family with him in 1942 to this rather barren land north of the Rio Bravo and south of the high plains, the llano estacado, shaped by rills and canyons running down to the Rio Grande west of Del Rio, and shaded by very little other than mesquites and an occasional oak mott and willows where a canyon stream flattened out enough to trap permanent water. Winslado found work on a ranch situated on Meyers Canyon north east of Sanderson. They were given a shack down by the horse barn in which to live and raise their family. His wife helped in the big ranch house and the children had the run of the place if they didn’t wander too far.

As Winslado’s hair turned white, he grew a beard under his sad eyes, they began to call him “Old Christmas Winseslaus,” even though he was slight of build and had no stomach at all. He smiled a lot. By now, a row of labor houses had been built and old Winslado and his wife had the most prominent one close to the main ranch house.

Son Daniel played with the pigs and chased the chickens and dreamed of one day having his own ranch. As he grew older, he was assigned chores around the ranch and began to collect an allowance from the rancher, the same as his own son. When he reached sixteen, Daniel moved into the bunk house with other bachelor cowboys and earned a real wage. Though the salary was barely enough to buy clothes, tack, and a few beers with the other cowboys on the weekend, Daniel was a happy cowboy.

A fine hand with the stock, Daniel knew every fence, pasture, gully, and scrub oak mott on the twenty sections that made up the ranch. Daniel eventually met a girl from a neighboring ranch in Sanderson on a Saturday afternoon and married her after receiving assurances from his employer that he could move out of the bunkhouse and claim a recently vacated labor house, complete with indoor plumbing and electricity. It was smaller than his parents’ assigned house, and it was down at the end of the dirt road jutting off to the West from the main corral and stock barn, but it was newer, and it was all theirs to enjoy while they worked for the ranch from sun up to sun down and explored one another into the night. As a result of their exploration, Daniel, Jr. was born within the year. They called him Danielito, or Lito for short.

Lito grew up on the ranch, just like his father before him, except that, unlike his father, his birth was registered and the county truancy officer made regular rounds of the ranches, so Lito had to go to school in town. There they would not allow him to speak Spanish as he had every day of his life on the ranch. At school, Lito was told he had to use English, and even though the white kids, the gringos, didn’t laugh at him, he felt that surely they must think him stupid. He couldn’t carry on a conversation with anyone except in Spanish. In English, half the words came out with a Spanish twist.

At night, Lito would hang his head and explain that he couldn’t seem to learn anything, and even though his parents loved him with all their hearts, they could not help him learn English, because neither of them had bothered to learn English. It was not required working around the ranch.

The ranch owner and his family spoke English, but only to one another. Anytime they addressed the labor, it was in Spanish, even if it was a fractured Spanish. No rancher worthy of the title would admit not speaking Spanish! No matter how poor their communication, if they addressed the help, it was in Spanish, or whatever passed for Spanish on that particular ranch. At least half of the things used in everyday life on the ranch were called a chingadera or “that fuckin’ thing.” Prestame la chingadera, el martillo, Viejo! (Loan me the fuckin’ thing, the hammer, old man!) Traiga la chingadera, eso que usan a cortar los huevos de los becerros. (Bring the fuckin’ thing, that which is used to cut the testicles off the calves.) A big complicated piece of equipment, like a tractor or scraper, was a chingazo! If things went amiss, they were chingado.

Lito, at school, was disciplined again and again for using bad language. His reputation sank lower and lower in the minds of the school faculty and they individually and collectively spent progressively less time trying to teach him. Lito also suffered from his small stature. He was much smaller than the other boys and was not good at athletics.

When the county Truant Officer quit insisting that he go to school, Lito gave it up as a bad cause. He had never thought of it much before, but he began to think of gringos as the “others,” and the “others” always seemed to be comfortably standing where he wanted to be and where he couldn’t seem to reach because he did not know the rules nor have the tools to get there. His dad’s dreams of one day owning his own ranch began to haunt him. Late at night, his father had talked of having the fortune of owning his own little ranchito “de nada mas unas hectarias.” Though it had never been promised, Daniel dreamed that one day, the ranch owner would help him own something of his own after two generations of service to the ranch. That dream died when Daniel was killed in an accident while working on a windmill on the far side of the ranch. For whatever cause, he fell from the top and broke his neck. He had been dead for more than a day when the other cowboys found him.

Lito began cow-boying in earnest. He could ride well and handle a rope with the same dexterity he could drive staples into a fencepost or stretch sagging wire with a come-a-long, una chingadera.

Lito moved into the bunkhouse to become one of the ranch’s cowboys. During most of the year he shared the bunkhouse with only one other young Mexican, but during Spring roundup, the bunkhouse would fill every one of the ten beds. He saved enough to buy an old Chevy with slick tires and lots of miles, but it had a good body and no rust. Suffering from a poor self image, Lito began to take on a macho swagger, and bought some aviator glasses so people could not see his eyes. The other cowboys began to call him Mosca, Fly. The big mirrored aviator glasses on his small head really did make him look like a fly.

One Saturday night, after having spent the entire afternoon and evening in a local Sanderson saloon drinking beer with off-work cowboys and talking about how suppressed the Chicanos were by the Gringos, Fly headed home to the ranch. Beyond the edge of town, one of his smooth tires blew out, and of course, he had no spare, and no jack to lift the car even if he had a spare. He hoped some sympathetic soul would come by to help him, but none stopped. About midnight, an elderly grandmother was headed home after babysitting with her grandchildren, and stopped to offer aid. She loaned him her jack, and her spare tire, with the promise the spare tire would be returned the next day, Sunday, but only in the afternoon, because she always went to church Sunday mornings.

As Lito, the Fly, jacked up the car and changed the tire, he was having trouble focusing his attention on the job. He kept asking himself why it had to be an old white-haired Gringa who came to his aid? She represented the oppressor of his people. Perhaps twenty or thirty cars that passed that night, and she was the only one to come to his aide. She was the only one who recognized his plight and trusted him to take her good tire out of her own trunk on a promise that is would be returned. It wasn’t right.

After he lowered the car and removed the jack, he bashed her head in with the jack handle, put the jack into his trunk with the blown out tire, and left the scene.

Chinga tu madre, Cabron! What have you done? Pinche gringa! She shouldn’t have stopped. Why the fuck did she stop?


FERGUSON UNIT, TDCJ
1986

Lito, Fly, Quiroz stepped up to the microphone at the closing of the Kairos weekend and delivered a profound, if brief, report as to his thoughts of the weekend he had just experienced.

”Forgive my Englich, I no speak so good. They call me Fly because I so small and nobody see my eyes. Nobody know what I think. I wear this glasses so nobody see me. I take them off now for you. You good people an I want you see me. Tank you!”

At monthly reunions of the Kairos community at Ferguson, Fly would always find a chair next to mine. We didn’t talk much because his English was even more limited than my Spanish, but when there was time to tell our stories, we did find that we could communicate he told me the story and of his family history, but not his crime, not the one that brought him to Ferguson.

Our team of volunteers scheduled a two day retreat for the community every six months. These retreats are very intense, as we all comfortable with one another and for two full days, we eat, laugh and tell our stories. On this particular retreat, Fly followed me around like a dog that has miss-behaved and wants to make up. I could not turn around suddenly lest I run over him.

Following lunch one day, I sought a quiet place behind some filing cabinets and stretched out on my back for a short rest. After a bit, I felt a head lay down touching my head, crown to crown. I knew it was Fly, but nothing was said for several minutes. Fly spoke, “Ike, you the first gringo I trust.”
Gracias, mi hijito.

Fly told me of the night he crushed the skull of the kindly old woman who stopped to help, his deep regret, the guilt he carried for his role in class warfare. By confessing to me, he confessed to all gringos everywhere. By laying crown to crown, no shades were required, I could not see his face as he confessed, weeping as he did so.

Gracias, mi hijito.