f abook which had the ambition to perhaps titillate some readers. But I am spending many hours becausethe full story is the best way that I know to have it seen, and understood, that I had sunk to the verybottom of the American white man's society when-soon now, in prison-I found Allah and the religionof Islam and it completely transformed my life.
Chapter 10 Satan
Shorty didn't know what the word "concurrently" meant.
Somehow, Lansing-to-Boston bus fare had been scraped up by Shorty's old mother. "Son, read meBook of Revelations and pray to God!" she had kept telling Shorty, visiting him, and once me, whilewe awaited our sentencing. Shorty had read the Bible's Revelation pages; he had actually gotten downon his knees, praying like some Negro Baptist deacon.
Then we were looking up at the judge in Middle###### County Court. (Our, I think, fourteen counts ofcrime were committed in that county. ) Shorty's mother was sitting, sobbing with her head bowing upand down to her Jesus,
MBT Shuguli GTX, over near Ella and Reginald. Shorty was the first of us called to stand up.
"Count one, eight to ten years "Count two, eight to ten years"Count three. . ."And, finally, "The sentences to run concurrently."Shorty, sweating so hard that his black face looked as though it had been greased, and notunderstanding the word "concurrently,
MBT Kafala," had counted in his head to probably over a hundred years; hecried out, he began slumping. The bailiffs had to catch and support him.
In eight to ten seconds, Shorty had turned as atheist as I had been to start with.
I got ten years.
The girls got one to five years, in the Women's Reformatory at Framingham, Massachusetts.
This was in February, 1946. I wasn't quite twenty-one. I had not even started shaving.
They took Shorty and me, handcuffed together,
mbt shoes, to the Charlestown State Prison.
I can't remember any of my prison numbers. That seems surprising,
MBT Karibu, even after the dozen years since Ihave been out of prison. Because your number in prison became part of you. You nev