Stand Tall by Dewey Bozella

Author:Dewey Bozella
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-10-08T04:00:00+00:00

8

HUMANITY CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT HOPE, and there is nothing sadder than watching a man lose both.

In prison, a soul can get scraped away methodically, like a piece of metal sharpened against a concrete cell floor night after night. Other times, it happens in a shocked instant, like a force of nature, the way a tornado strips the bark right off a tree then leaves it standing, leafless and raw. I knew the day I callously stepped over the bleeding body of that inmate who had just been stabbed that my humanity had deserted me. I remember just as vividly the day it returned.

There was a guy on my cellblock who had given up. The guy just stayed in his cell all the time. He never came out to shower or to get some fresh air in the yard. After a while, he began to smell, the stink of sickness and surrender coming off him so bad that people started complaining about having to even walk past his cell. The other inmates shunned him like a leper, and even the COs kept their distance. He was like some pathetic animal that had crawled off to just wait for death to hurry up and come. His cell looked like an overturned Dumpster, filled with trash and God only knows what. One day when I was hurrying past, trying not to breathe, I saw him stir in his cot, and the pity rose up and hit me out of nowhere. The loneliness and cruelty of his situation made me stop in my tracks and call out to him.

“How you doing?” I asked. “Can I talk to you a minute?” He came up to the bars.

“Yo, I don’t want to be rude, but can I ask you something?”

He nodded.

“Why you don’t care for yourself anymore? Why you let yourself go like that? Why you live like this?” I wanted to know.

He opened up his shirt so I could see the purple marks on his skin, telling me without a word that life didn’t mean anything anymore.

Damn, I thought. AIDS. His misery was ten times, a hundred times, my own.

“Well, if I was to do something for you, would you be a man and take care of yourself?” I heard myself cajoling him. He looked wary, not sure what to make of me. We didn’t even know each other’s name.

“No one cares, no one really gives a damn,” he countered.

“If I was to offer you a shower, if I was to clean your cell, would you take care of yourself?” I pressed. He studied me for a moment before deciding.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I got you then. Go get ready.”

I went to the officers on gallery duty, told them about the deal I had struck, and asked them to give the inmate permission to take a shower and me the go-ahead to clean out his cell while he was gone.

“Really?” the sergeant said, surprised by the prospect of such community service. “Why you want to bother with that motherfucker?”

“Yo, man, the man is dying, let me help him out.

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