Border Clashes: Roxie & Maurice & Jamal

By Joe Abram

Jackson, Michigan, 1987, and the place is Jackson Prison, then the largest walled prison in the world. Destiny brings two people, Roxie McFadden and Maurice Wilkerson, together from different American subcultures with lethal results. The Michigan State Police have completed their investigation and we know what happened and ostensibly who is to blame. The Michigan Department of Corrections assigns a Warden from another prison to conduct an administrative investigation on how such a tragedy could happen. After his administrative investigation is done and submitted, the Warden is plagued by the question of why Maurice did what he did. To find the answer the Warden meets with Maurice Wilkerson and another prisoner, Jamal-X, and in the process discovers that Maurice may have been a convenient scapegoat for all their sins. You decide! This is a non-fiction short story (8,870 words) about violence, sex, and deadly race relations in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joe Abram
• Release date: May 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310458798

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Border Clashes: Roxie & Maurice & Jamal

by

Joe Abram

Border Clashes: Roxie & Maurice & Jamal

By Joe Abram

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Joseph Abramajtys

Border Clashes: Roxie & Maurice & Jamal

The way in which I have come to the conclusion that human nature is lovable – the way I have learned something of its deep pathos, its sublime mysteries – has been by living a great deal among people more or less commonplace and vulgar.

George Eliot

Adam Bede

Roxie

No girl grows up telling her mama that she wants to be a prison guard, but that’s where Roxie McFadden found herself after twelve years with a dead-beat husband, an exhausted marriage, and Robbie, a twelve-year old son she would never give up. Her husband was considerably older, rattled by insecurity and a hostage to his emotions; Roxie had only enough energy, desire, and willingness to raise one child. Their marriage was a mistake made to escape a brittle father and abusive brothers in a house where anger was like oxygen.

Roxie had a vision of a future but until now no plan on how to achieve it, so her vision continually brightened and faded, coalesced and evaporated. Perhaps that was due to the uncertain life she lived as a captive of a social class labelled the ‘working poor’: too many addresses; to many part-time jobs. Though there never was time to fall in love with any one place or job, she always liked something about each so that when she inevitably left there always followed an acute sting of loss and small period of grief. Like major blows, constant small losses and pains form psychic callouses that muddle your thinking and erode your trust in the future. Still, what were her alternatives? Like so many women in her circumstances she wanted stability instead of a life buffeted by the random consequences of decisions made by semi-literate men. She desired stability but knew to get it required yet another change, this time a big one, and Roxie was determined that for once she would be in control.

Michigan politicians decided they could build their way out of a crime wave and so the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) was erecting and opening prisons with alacrity to win politicians the hearts and votes of a citizenry scared shitless by Detroit crime: white people in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula envisioned clouds of blacks rising locust-like from Detroit -- a city located almost as close to Manhattan as to the UP -- crossing the Mackinaw Bridge and commencing to rape and pillage and demand chitterlings. Courts