Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given - Duane Dog Chapman [17]
That story reminded me of my good friend Whitaker, who was my cellmate back at Huntsville prison, where I had been sentenced to serve five years for first-degree murder, a crime I didn’t commit, though I had some involvement.
I got to Huntsville in 1977, when it was still a segregated prison. The prison population was predominately black. The two-story cell block had white inmates on one side and the blacks on the other. They painted the white section a pale lime green. It was dreary and dull, the kind of color you found inside an old hospital.
It took me a while to get into a groove in prison. I was a cocky twenty-four-year-old biker who thought he had all the answers. Everything I did, I did the hard way. I had no idea what the easy way meant. Six months into my sentence I still hadn’t learned how to pick my battles. What seemed like minor disagreements were of major importance in the joint, because that’s all you have on the inside—right and wrong. A few days after a scuffle I had with the Muslims, they sent a guy named Whitaker after me. I felt confident going up against him because we were about the same size. We stared each other down. I always talked all kinds of bull before my fights to try and psych out my opponents. To my surprise, Whitaker was aware of my game. Before I could throw my first punch, he landed a few on me, but I never went down. I’ve taken a lot of punches, but I’ve never felt anything like Whitaker’s. He was the strongest man to ever hit me. The few punches I landed on him had no effect on the guy. Whitaker kicked my ass that day. Because I never backed down, I earned the respect of the other inmates, and Whitaker and I emerged as friends. I was so impressed with his technique I asked him to teach me how to fight like him so I could become a better fighter.
Not long after Whitaker and I got into our fight, Huntsville was desegregated. It was the last Texas penitentiary to be integrated. Feds surrounded the prison with guns and said, “Integrate them today.” The warden looked over to see the white prisoners standing to one side and the blacks on the other. Nobody was moving. I was the first to proudly walk across the yard to stand tall with my black brothers.
A giant and very dark-skinned inmate looked at me and said, “You’re on our side of town now, Doggie.”
“No matter what side of town I’m on, I’m still the Dog,” I barked back.
Just then I noticed a guy I called Cadbury standing right beside me. He had walked across the line too.
“I’m his sidekick,” Cadbury said.
Pretty soon twenty-five white guys had crossed over. The warden looked at one of the feds and said, “We’ll integrate by morning.”
Remember, this was 1970s America. The rest of the country had already pretty much desegregated. As a half-breed, I never wanted anyone to judge me on the color of my skin. I was proud of my heritage and figured the brothers in prison were too. Sure, we used the “N” word in the joint, but it wasn’t a derogatory term, at least not the way I heard it being used. It was just the way the black inmates talked to one another. In a way, from the moment I crossed the segregation line I believed I had become a brother too. The more I hung out with them, the more I started to use the same language they did because I wanted to fit in and be like them. The men I served time with never once told me I was out of line or about to get my ass kicked for using the “N” word or any other slang term I picked up along the way. I didn’t realize the “N” word was bad or insulting. Never. Did that make me ignorant? I suppose it did, yet, in retrospect, perhaps in an innocent way. I just didn’t know any different and no one ever told me otherwise.
On the night the prison integrated, one of the black inmates asked me why I came over to their side. I didn’t know the answer. I just