Caught: My "Brother's" Journey

By Margaret A. White

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This book compares the many life-altering events of an incarcerated African American man and a white American woman. More than just a discussion of their differences and commonalities, it explores the prejudices that continue to plague many areas of life in the US. Touching upon their individual family dynamics, drug usage and its consequences, the judicial system, early US history, and even adding God into the mix, this work covers a gamut of themes and concerns. Although at times it can be challenging to read, it does have the potential to elicit further discussion and, more importantly, bring about self-examination and an awareness that is more in tune with our surrounding communities and cultures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662403699

Book preview

Chapter 1

When it all began, it seemed as if I was sleepwalking, living in a dream, unaware of the reality of addictions at that time in my life that led me like a mouse to Swiss cheese, many entryways, no exits to be seen. Today is January 1, 2019, and I woke up at London Correctional Institution, in London, Ohio, still caught. I walked into the Department of Correction and Rehabilitation’s authority blindly, and I’m surrounded by legal walls that I cannot scale. I knew nothing of the laws or the politics that govern this great nation called the United States of America or its prison system other then what I’d seen on television.

Growing up, I knew how to play! I learned how to play even more in school, along with my ABCs and 123s. Smart kid, so I was told. As I grew older, the games changed, and the playing got rougher. It’s impossible for me to go back into the past to fix things that I’ve broken; yesterday is but a memory. My past actions have closed doors of opportunities in my face and have propelled me deeper into this maze—the world of convicted felons and incarceration.

I’m not sure when the sleepwalking began in my life. I’ve always been a wanderer, but I’m aware of what happened on November 16, 1988, at around 11:30 p.m. I’m responsible for the death of Rebecca, which resulted in my current state of incarceration. Since then, I’ve not stepped foot into the place I call home on earth.

My home was three broken families in one. My father had a wife before my mother and brought three children from that marriage to the table. My mother also had two children before my parents started their relationship. Before my parents married, I was born, then Bridgette, and lastly, Stacey.

Stacey died in her sleep shortly after her birth. The effect that Stacey’s death had on my mother changed her, and it seemed as if she lost sight of me. I was about four. My father’s first wife, Mary, had six more children after their divorce, so I had one father, two mothers, seven brothers, five sisters, and we bounced back and forth between two houses. There was always some kind of drama going on. Playing was my escape.

As a child, I had no idea of who or what I wanted to be when I grew up. I never remember having a dream. I couldn’t see myself do anything but play. At first, playing meant childhood games such as cowboys and Indians, race car tracks, hide-and-seek, jacks, tossing the ball, racing, wrestling, swimming, walking the creek, catching critters, fishing for crawdads and small fish, baseball, football, basketball, plus many more. Once drugs entered the scene, along with the beer and booze, things changed. Drugs had a price, and collecting pop and beer bottles wasn’t enough, so I began to steal. Money wasn’t free. But stealing provided the money needed to buy the weed and beer, so I stole often, and it became the new game.

Stealing and breaking into homes were side effects—a means to feed my growing cravings, not knowing that I was in bondage. The word addiction wasn’t in my vocabulary yet. Children can appear to be so innocent.

In my community, it was easy to temporarily quench the cravings of my growing habits. Nobody told me drugs would take me to a place I didn’t want to go and keep me longer than I wanted to stay. If they did, I wasn’t listening. Everyone drank or got high; this was all I grew to know at the time. Looking back, I can see that my peers, my environment, and my newfound culture were oppressed and oppressive; it seemed like we needed to get drunk or high sometimes to enjoy one another’s company. Alcohol and drugs were everywhere, and it affected almost all of us in some way. Think about it: I was nine years old when I hit my first joint and was introduced to alcohol much younger. Conscious now, having been jolted by cataclysmic events out of the condition of sleepwalking, it’s clear, as I sit here writing, that the foundation of my current position was built upon the facts surrounding it.

I wrote this poem wishing my parents were more open and honest about the world they knew I’d one day face and had prepared me instead of sheltering me:

April 4, 1968. I was inside my mother’s womb that day when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead. Fast forwarding, I’m now inside the belly of incarceration, seeking deliverance, determined not to place my lips to the cup of bitterness and hatred. Eyes open to the contempt of others who don’t share in my current position in life, nor my complexion.

My naivety deceived me. Born at the height of the push for civil rights by this nation and the distancing of itself from the evils displayed on the world stage by the media against people of color, knowing nothing but integrated schools.

Momma must have known! Every doctor’s office, dentist office, and governmental assistance agency we visited recognized us as black. I had not a clue of the dividing lines of the word. I didn’t know the struggle personally, but time has revealed the harsh conflicting reality.

The institutions that label and count the races in this country, Momma must have known. Was it her maternal instinct that sheltered me from the white supremacy? Or was it her hope that Martin’s dream, which seemingly gave new direction to this nation and that the tone of our skin, mattered no longer?

I was unequipped when I faced the adversarial system of criminal justice as a legal adult. In the classrooms I attended, that knowledge of the justice system wasn’t taught. Multiple times I’ve watched and listened to Martin share his dream of equality and unity for humanity as the moral leader of our nation at that moment in history. Searching my mind for the whys and in the eyes of whom? Noticing that the labeling started way before me, and as an American with African ancestors, we’ve always mattered.

Daddy had to know! The darkness surrounding Jim Crow laws and Black Codes, with all the visible hatred pouring out the hearts of those who didn’t share in our blackness. He instructed me around the house, spoke riddles about the ways of life, but I couldn’t understand his language then, and he never took the time to explain.

Left to myself while seeking answers to the many challenges awaiting, I ran headstrong out the door of our home into the hills and valleys that called to me, wanting to fulfill my purpose with no directions. Childishly, I walked into this place through the doors of addiction and crime, addicted to the crack cocaine that was pumped into my neighborhood playground. I caused the death of another person by my bad choices.

As an adult black malefactor, I wasn’t treated with equal dignity in the criminal justice quarter of American life. As a people, we’ve been told slavery is over. Since October 28, 1989, I’ve been a slave as an inmate, a ward of the State. Yeah, that’s what Article 1, Section 6 of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of Ohio calls me for the punishment of my crime. Yes, all lives matter, and I live my life now trying to make sense of the life I destroyed; it mattered also.

In President Barack Obama’s farewell address to the nation, he spoke briefly on the problems of our criminal justice system and the presence of Jim Crow laws still operating today. My question is, should black men and women, caught in discriminating circumstances such as myself, hope we’re not forgotten? That people still care and that help is on the way? As recycled blackness, property of the States of Grade A Stock, warehoused, we matter. We are the sons and daughters, fathers and mothers and grandparents of this one nation under God.

Margaret:

I was born in the 1940s, an only child of middle-income white parents from a very small town in upstate Ohio. When I was three, we moved to Arizona, where I spent the next seventeen years of my life until, after dropping out of college my sophomore year, I began a lifetime of changing jobs and places, always wanting to learn something new. Looking back, I do remember while in fourth or fifth grade visiting with my mother a segregated grammar school for some reason I cannot now recall—although I did think the concept a bit strange since in first grade there was a fellow of African heritage in my class. There were also kids of Mexican descent as well, and thankfully my folks never conveyed to me that it should be considered wrong or even unusual. More vividly in mind remains the Phoenix Indian School where children from reservations were brought to learn white man’s ways. Arizona in those days did separate a lot of folks!

Although far removed from Washington, DC, Selma, and certainly from Cincinnati where Mark was soon to be growing up, I do remember news coverage of Rosa Parks and the bus, the shooting of MLK, and the kids who walked through the taunting lines of people as they entered the now-by-law-proclaimed-no-longer-all-white school. Recalling as I write this how brave they all were, how inwardly strong they were. I find myself tearing up. But when that was actually happening, in Arizona we all rode the same busses and schools were determined by where people lived (segregation by housing), but there was mixing. For example, in the late fifties, when I was in high school, Phoenix High was fully integrated because it covered such a large area. I did not go there but lived in another district that had both white and Mexican American students.

I graduated in 1960 and was in college until 1963, and was there when JFK was assassinated. I remember walking back after class to my dorm, unaware of what had happened in Dallas, and finding the common room filled with fellow students, many of whom were in tears as they intently watched Walter Cronkite on the black-and-white TV, I had to ask what was going on. Although I was raised in a Republican family, political affiliations held no meaning when our nation’s president was shot. It was an almost unbelievable moment, definitely difficult to put into words. Later on, I was watching the live broadcast when Jack Ruby killed Oswald. And I remember watching the funeral parade when JFK’s little son stood at attention, and the riderless horse with boots hung from the saddle slowly marched by. Our country was being shaken. But later on, when MLK was murdered, it just seemed all so distant. Not that I was unfeeling or was lacking in shock that something like that could happen again in the US, but it just did not personally impact me or cause the grief that others were justifiably feeling so deeply. Their Voice had momentarily been silenced. A Voice, as a white person, I had never needed.

By 1972, I had moved back to Ohio, still not overly concerned or up-to-date about world affairs or the struggle of most nonwhite Americans to be equally accepted and treated. I have to admit, I was blindly naive in most ways.

One job I had in the eighties was in a factory located in a nearby town where I started out first in the factory itself, later moving into the office where I handled inventory, ordering, shipping, payroll, and eventually all the bookkeeping. When I was first hired, an African American woman was also given a job. It’s difficult for me to think of her in those terms because she was just Venita, a fellow worker and work friend. It didn’t matter, or was even thought about, that her skin was darker than mine. Later, two other ladies were hired. One was attending college, and this was her summer employment. She was a person I knew who could do anything. She had a goal and was heading toward it. I am sure, looking back, she had moments of discrimination flung at her, but she was undeterred. However, the other young woman wasn’t the most conscientious person and got fired after only a week. As she walked out the door, she made it very plain she was fired ONLY because she was black. This was untrue but was the first time I had ever heard anyone use race as an excuse to cover one’s own shortcomings. I believe sadly that she unknowingly was sentencing herself to a life of always blaming others and limiting herself from discovering the person God had created her to be. Although some people believe it is so, skin color is not a deal breaker with God. And to many, it is a shocker to realize that he is truly not a respecter of persons in his loving either.

You would think with my upbringing and experiences that I had kept myself free of most racial overtones, simply through unawareness if nothing else. Alas, no. But primarily, as a white woman, any racial upheaval was bound to go unnoticed as long as it simmered elsewhere. The nightly news would bring breaking stories, of course, but they’ve long since been forgotten by me. Insensitive? Not by design, but rather the reality of being white.

No matter how hard one tries, segregating seems to come naturally. We put others and ourselves into classifications, complete with oversized labels. ME and YOU. THEM and US. Doesn’t matter if it’s color, religion, politics, or even sports teams. Everyone does it without thinking. But once a game is over, most people go back to being friends, and the taunting repartee ceases. However, skin color never goes away, and the only thing that will ever remove that as a standard for judging, demeaning, or hating is recognizing one another as fellow journeyers, valued and cherished by the same Creator who gives purpose and hope to us all. It is not ignoring our differences but rather being able to freely talk about them without feeling offended. What is Mark’s truth? What is mine? And how can He who is the Truth reconcile us one to another? Loving one another as he has loved us is of course the only answer. One, I believe that should extend far beyond just black and white but also to those of different faiths, languages, and ethnicities.

Chapter 2

Ihaven’t seen most of my siblings or their children in over twenty-nine years. Alice, my oldest sister, wouldn’t talk to me for over twenty-five years. I’ve tried for years to open up the line of communication, which resulted in a postcard stating, It’s not that I don’t love you, I just have nothing to say right now. In my heart, I know that I’ve disappointed her. She really tried to save me. She came and got me at a time when I was lost in the streets and in trouble with the law at age sixteen, when I thought no one cared. But I ran back to the streets, back to the drugs, back to what I knew. I understand her not believing in me, not wanting to open her heart to me. She doesn’t know the man I am today—one who is healed and free from the addictions that held me.

On August 18, 2015, two days after my sister Kimberly’s birthday, my mother passed away. The last time she visited, she said, Mark Boyd, I could’ve done better by you. I wasn’t there when you needed me. Later that night, as I thought on her words, I began to cry, but I made myself stop. She hoped that I’d be released from prison before she died. I’m still here.

I arrived at Warren Correctional Institution on November 30, 1989. It’s been an education existing in mental warfare constantly, but now believed a necessary interruption. I needed a place to get the poisons and cultural flaws out of my system to start on my road of self-discovery and true purpose. The circumstances surrounding my life, toxin flowing throughout my mind, puppeteering me, caused me to do things criminally, excited, with no thought of the outcome. This interruption saved my life, and for this I say thank you.

We live in a world that challenges our understanding daily. This time of incarceration has been a form of rite of passage from boyhood to manhood, from an ugly place in my life to a place of great expectations. Spiritually and mentally, I am resuscitated. But clearly, I see that there is an issue.

I want my independence back! I’m already free.

Margaret:

In early 2000, I met Mr. Springer for the first time. I was a temporary hire at WCI, assigned to a unit where he, though from another unit, worked as an aide for the nurses and staff working there. The man I met is the person his sister has never been privileged to know. This interruption of life not only saved his but also provided him the time to embrace a life not limited by the confines of bars and walls. According to the law, he has no hope for years (even if parole is granted) of walking away from his physical confines, and that is both disheartening and makes no logical sense. Our legal system, being mostly retributive—and thus by its very nature both inflexible and unforgiving—is not able to adjust for those who no longer pose a threat to themselves or others. It will take a miracle for his situation to change. But miracles can happen.

I can understand Mark’s sister’s honest expression of loving and yet not being able to talk. Her memory of Mark as a little boy had been replaced with the one who had taken a life. I am sorry, as of this writing, that Alice has not yet had the opportunity to get to know the man that Mark has become—the man I met at WCI and continue to know throughout our correspondence.

As more of my memories surface, I recall in Arizona when I was about eleven or so, I overheard an adult discussion about a black couple that had purchased a house down the street from them and how now they had to sell before the values would drop. I do not know if this was a reciprocal reality—that if I had moved into a completely black neighborhood, the inhabitants would feel the need to move. However, I do remember a few years back in Cincinnati, while driving down a street, I noticed two young African American boys around ten or twelve walking along the sidewalk. As I looked, one of them slowly raised his hand and pointed his fingers at me, pulling an imaginary trigger. Yes, that gave me chills. You are not wanted here! That cry is and has been heard so often that even the memory of its sound passes from generation to generation. Sadly, in so many cases, and in so many places, without any effort or forethought, silent and verbal expressions of distrust, fear, and hatred echo back and forth between us. Indeed, we have constructed our own cells with bars made to keep others out.

Chapter 3

Fighting for my life, I’ve come to know that the criminal justice system plays too! Coldly, it plays by rules that its officers, judges, and attorneys interpret to fit their objective and subjective thinking, both at the same time. They take away legislative intent of laws and make the law say and mean what they want, to accomplish their tasks. Winning means more to some officers than justice. Trophies and promotions are received as symbols of achievement at the expense of the constitutional rights of the accused. They protect themselves by procedural defaults, which are purposely put in place knowing that, when understanding of what just took place is figured out, it’s too late to do anything about it. Their peers protect them.

I was twenty years old when I became a ward of the State. A215-162. Reduced to a piece of property. My identity was stripped to a number that I now need in order to communicate with anyone outside these double razor wire fences. Inside which, if a person shows any sign of weakness, their manhood could be called into question. Prison is like a dead-end intersection from the multiple highways of life, where the criminal justice system dumps what they consider to be worthless or recyclable male and female convicts with life rage who have in one way or another violated the accepted codes of society and have gotten caught.

From the moment I walked into this jungle, my first rule was survival. Aggression became my new game. Coming in the door of this new world, every one of us was given the same clothing and locked in identical cells. And to survive this reality, we all make decisions creating who we’d be from the moment we step into general population, for better or worse. Some, in order to survive, allow others to label them and live up to the labels, hoping their loved ones, if they have any that care, never find out how low into this pit their fear has taken them. I’ve heard it said, Prison is the devil’s playpen. I’ve watched men stripped of their identity become diabolical, and the least you can do is choose your own character whether predator or prey, punching bag or fighter.

Surrounded by chaos, with precious glimpses of humanity, facts can blind the truth from being seen if the truth is not sought after with steadfastness. Now prison is the settlement where I work, eat, and sleep, day in and day out. I educate myself by choice, not wanting to be a part of penitentiary living anymore. Looking back through the messiness of alcohol, pills, opium, hash, huffing paint, powder cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana, and all the crimes, my life was a cesspool, my thought process contaminated. It seemed like my very core was manufactured from and by brokenness. Foolishly thinking upon entering this world with no fear, I chose to be a fighter.

I read a quote one day by Assata Shakur. It said, People can get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more you tolerate it and your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.

A slave? A servant? Submit and surrender my will to whom?

I also read in the scriptures: For though I be free from all men [women], yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more. I Cor 9:19 (KJV)

Please take heed! This desired non-duplicable, splintered, vapor of my life—spirit, soul, and body—whose voice you hear today, blames no one for my actions and seeks forgiveness from, and wholeness for, all whom I have hurt. People do what their circumstances dictate, until they decide not to. Change can take