Prologue
Prologue
by Gregory
Koger
“We only become what
we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others
have made of us”
-Jean-Paul Sartre,
from the Preface to The
Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
“What the
bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all , is its own
grave-diggers.”
-Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, The
Communist Manifesto
I never knew my mother or father, I was given up for adoption as a
baby. According to paperwork filed by one of my lawyers, my adoptive
parents were “special education students of dull normal
intelligence.” I was born in Chicago and grew up just outside of
Chicago, near O’Hare International Airport. The roar of jet engines
would frequently rattle the house as planes came in to land.
My adoptive father worked for the Post
Office, sorting mail and such on the night shift, then later working
as a clerk at a window on the day shift helping people with their
mail. I remember him attending union meetings when I was a small boy.
He also worked a second job, delivering newspapers in the early
morning hours to homes and apartments, and on the weekends delivering
big bundles of newspapers to stores. His father had come to Chicago
from Tennessee and worked as a garbage-man for Waste Management. My
adoptive mother initially worked as a salesperson at a small garden
center owned by her parents, but later was on unemployment for a time
and then worked as a waitress at a Ponderosa Steakhouse. She also
worked a second job in the early morning hours, delivering newspapers
to offices, businesses, hotels, and apartments around O’Hare. Her
father was a small farmer in Cook County before the area became
urbanized, and he later owned and ran the small garden center with
his wife.
I was sent to a fundamentalist
Christian school for most of my childhood, from the age of three. By
all accounts I was a pretty intelligent boy. Much of my intellectual
capacity and potential, though, was unfortunately hampered by the
fundamentalist (mis-) educational indoctrination and environment.
Many hours were wasted being forced to memorize Bible verses and sit
through mythological stories, fables, and fire-and-brimstone
apocalypse tales designed to frighten children into submission to
self-proclaimed “authorities”. Most of the school textbooks
were from the infamous Bob Jones University. One incident was
particularly indicative of the situation: When I was about ten years
old, I was assigned to write a report on sharks, and I dutifully
researched science publications to prepare it. As I started to read
the report in class, and began to describe that sharks were ancient
creatures that had evolved several hundred million years ago, I was
sharply interrupted by the Pastor “teaching” the class and
berated with a tirade about how the Earth was created 6,000 years ago
and that evolution was an evil, satanic theory made-up by “The
Devil.” And so forth. Another particularly telling incident was
the time that I organized a petition to remove an assistant teacher
that was widely hated by the class. I was quickly summoned to the
principals office and informed that we children had no voice in our
own education and that such democratic challenges to “authority”
would be swiftly and severely crushed and punished. God doesn’t want
children to think for themselves, of course, and doing so is a
“sin.” Later I would consciously choose to partake of the
fruit of The Serpent…
Many days I was forced to get out of
bed in the middle of the night to go work with my adoptive parents.
Child labor is unfortunately still a reality in America, as well as
an even more dire reality around the world. I used to try to make an
adventure of it, running around in the dark in the middle of the
night, through peoples yards or down the hallways of business
offices, hotels, and apartments, seeing the underside of the daytime
economy. The contrived “fun” usually wore off rather
quickly, though. For those whose only conception of newspaper
delivery is the romanticized myth of a little boy riding a bicycle
along sunny streets of perfectly manicured lawns in a cookie-cutter
subdivision, let me assure you that the reality of newspaper delivery
in a major metropolitan center is quite a bit less sunny and
romantic.
You have to wake up at around one A.M.
and travel to an industrial warehouse to await the delivery of the
papers. Once the papers arrive from the printers, you have to carry
heavy bundles of papers over to a table and assemble the sections by
hand. Then you have to roll up the completed paper and stuff it into
a plastic bag. Repeat this procedure several hundred times and stack
all the papers into a big cart. After you finish rolling up all of
the papers, you have to then push the heavy cartload(s) outside to
load all of the papers into your vehicle. This entails cramming the
entire back of the vehicle totally full of papers, all the way up to
the roof. And you have to do this outside in the pouring rain or
blasting snow of the brutal Chicago winter. I then had to climb on
top of all of the papers and ride in the back of the vehicle, in the
tiny space between the papers and the roof. I usually tried to burrow
down underneath some of the papers for warmth, as you have to drive
around with both of the front windows open to throw the newspapers
out into the yards or driveways of the subscribers. Some have to be
taken out in person to the doorstep or porch, or inside apartment
buildings, offices, and hotels. Watch out for the times when a
newspaper flies out of the plastic bag and scatters all across the
yard while its pouring rain, because then you have to run out into
the storm and collect all of the damp pages.
The entire delivery process usually
takes several hours. You generally start around one or two A.M. and
the papers have to be delivered by about six or seven A.M. I also
worked with them delivering the large, heavy bundles of newspapers to
stores on weekends. This entails assembling the sections of the paper
and stacking them up into a pile about 18 inches or so high. Then you
have to carry them over to a machine that pulls a plastic strap
around the bundle, heat-seals it, and cuts the strap. Try not to get
you fingers smashed under the strap. After you make all of the
bundles, you carry all of them to your vehicle and fill it up. Them
you drive around to the stores and carry the big bundles inside.
Anyone who has ever handled an individual Sunday edition of the
Chicago Tribune
will have an idea of how heavy even a single one in a bag is, much
less a big bundle of them. Watch out for the strap breaking while
you’re carrying it, because then the papers will spill out and
scatter all over the place, especially if its windy - and this is the
“windy city.” So I spent many mornings as a boy working,
delivering newspapers. My adoptive parents tried not to make me work
with them all the time during the school week, but even school days I
was greeted many nights by my adoptive father turning on my bedroom
light and pulling my blankets off of me as I protested that I didn’t
want to go work with him but wanted to continue sleeping in my warm
bed. But work I had to, on and off, less frequently from the age of
about seven, and much more frequently as I got older and became ten,
eleven, twelve, thirteen years old.
We did get to go on vacations
sometimes, traveling to different states. And I had toys, and books.
They let me go to the library frequently to get a lot of books. And I
was sent to play some sports, and to take Tae Kwon Do, and other
activities at the Park District. So things were by no means all bad,
and many other people have far worse experiences than I had, but the
negative aspects of my life took their toll on me. I was beaten with
leather belts, ofttimes
daily, and verbally and emotionally berated. And my
adoptive parents seldom ever talked to me or interacted with me,
except when we had to work together. When I was about seven years
old, they told me I was adopted, and I took this quite badly. My
whole life prior to that was a lie, and I cried and cried for my
“real mommy.” After that, sometimes they would tell me that
they “paid a lot of money for” me, paid a lot of money to
adopt me; paid a lot of money to buy me is how I interpreted it. I
felt like a slave, taken from my mother, bought and paid for, forced
to work, beaten with leather belts. I always wanted to leave, run
away. But I suppose much of the bad treatment I received from my
adoptive parents can be attributed to their educational disabilities,
the fact that they had to work multiple jobs basically all of their
waking hours with minimal sleep just to survive, and the nature of
fundamentalist Christianity. Beyond that, and underlying all of those
factors, is the foundation of capitalism-imperialism.
One of the best things that happened
was that my adoptive father bought me a computer in the late 1980’s,
and I loved it. I wanted to become a computer programmer, work with
computers, study computer science. Then when I was about thirteen, my
adoptive grandfather bought me a better IBM computer, which had a
modem, that allowed me to connect to cyberspace and opened whole new
worlds of possibility. But as is often the case, reality trumped
possibility.
As I became a teenager, our family and
financial situation grew increasingly worse. My adoptive father had
health problems, had to have surgery, and had to go on disability
from the Post Office. My adoptive mother, who has epilepsy, began to
have seizures while she was driving and got into a couple car
accidents. She wasn’t seriously injured, but due to the seizures she
had her drivers license revoked. I had severe stomach pains, which
the doctors always attributed to stress, and I had to drop out of
school and get counseling for depression. Due to my family’s health
and financial problems, the mortgage on our house was foreclosed and
we ended up homeless. My adoptive parents moved in with my adoptive
father’s parents, and I was sent to go live with my adoptive father’s
sister and her family in the suburbs farther north of Chicago.
I started to go back to school at the
public high school in the area where my adoptive aunt lived. I had a
lot of problems at the school because I wore hip-hop style clothing
and listened to rap, and a lot of the people in that area were
racist, ignorant, and bigoted. I was called a “nigger lover”
and “white nigger,” etc. simply because of their racist
mind-set - and clearly it wasn’t the kids fault, because they were
only children. The adults and the ruling class in that area
indoctrinated them with racism, reinforced by the
capitalist-imperialist superstructure. I was automatically classified
as a “gang member,” simply because of my clothing and music
preferences. I was sleeping on the floor at my adoptive aunt’s house
and had only a few articles of clothing. I suppose I wore one
particular t-shirt rather frequently, a Snoop Dogg t-shirt, and
people started calling me “Snoop” because of that. I got
shuffled around between living with my adoptive aunt, adoptive
paternal and adoptive maternal grandparents. I had to drive over an
hour commute each direction to go to school when I stayed with my
adoptive grandparents. My adoptive parents had started a new job,
driving a delivery van to deliver packages and flowers and such, and
I worked with them doing that. I had my own car to drive to school
and to work with them. I barely ate and had basically only the
clothes on my back, and slept on the floors or couch at my adoptive
relatives houses. I never had any money, and whatever little money I
did come across had to pay for gas to drive to school and work. In
addition to working with my adoptive parents doing deliveries, I also
worked at a flea market on weekends with a friend of our family that
was living and working in America from Ireland, selling little
trinkets and things.
I did make a few friends in the area,
and sometimes slept on the floor at their houses or in my car. Many
times we were stopped and harassed by the police. One particular
night, we had stopped at a gas station that was closed to use a
pay-phone, and some police rode up and started harassing us. They
made us all get out of the truck and searched us, searched the
vehicle, and detained us for a while there. They tried to fabricate a
story that we were trying to rob the gas station, and used the
pretext of a supposedly broken video camera. But someone at the
police office called the owner of the gas station and they informed
the police that the video camera had been previously broken for some
time, so the story they were trying to fabricate disintegrated and
they had to let us go. Other times, property owners in the area would
call the police to try to chase us out of their neighborhood simply
because we were a small group of “lower-class” teenagers.
One night we were at a park, and the property owners called the
police to come harass us and chase us away, and I got arrested for
possessing a handgun. I was sixteen years old. I spent a few nights
in the county’s juvenile “detention facility,” and was
released on house arrest and a year of probation. All of this,
combined with the family and financial situation just pushed me
further and further to the streets, and eventually I did get involved
with a street organization (AKA “gang”) to survive
financially. I got involved in some minor drug deals, stealing from
stores, scams and hustles. I spent most nights sleeping on someone’s
floor or in my car, sometimes in a motel. I barely ever ate. I got a
job at a fast-food taco restaurant, doing dishes and cleaning up and
food preparation, but I only worked there for a couple weeks because
I had warrants for my arrest.
All of this culminated one evening in
December 1995, when I was seventeen years old. I went with a “gang”
associate to a bar/bowling alley/arcade to meet some girls we knew
and get some money from them. Soon after we went inside, a group of
guys from a rival gang began eying us and trying to start problems.
Eventually, two of the guys from the rival group came up to me as I
was standing by a small set of stairs, thew some gang signs, and
tried to get me to come outside. I considered it for a moment, but
one of the girls grabbed my arm and basically told me to leave it
alone, so I let it go as the other group went outside. I had a
sawed-off shotgun stuck down my pants, as I was used to the realities
of trying to survive on the streets, so I knew if any trouble jumped
off I’d be able to defend myself. We stayed inside for about 15 more
minutes as someone used the phone, then we decided to leave. As we
went out of the front door, we encountered the group from the rival
gang, who had been waiting in ambush of me. We warily tried to walk
past the group, but the main ringleader from the rival group that
threatened me inside began to threaten to kill me. Some words were
exchanged between him and one of the guys who was leaving at the same
time as I was, telling him to stop threatening us and not to pull
anything, because he had his hand in his pocket while he was making
the death threats. Some of the comments were “gang-related.” But the main ringleader once again began to threaten to kill me as he
also began to pull his hand out of his pocket. Prior to this, he had
his hand in his pocket the entire time. I felt he was going to pull a
weapon, so I shot him one time in the arm in self-defense, with a
few of the pellets also hitting his chest. As he fell to the ground,
everyone scattered away into the night.
About a week later, I was staying at
an apartment in Zion, IL, in an area described in a police report as
“Murder Alley.” All of a sudden, an armed gang of
undercover police disguised as construction workers burst through the
door, invading the apartment with guns pointed, screaming for
everyone to get down on the floor. I was handcuffed and arrested,
taken to a police station, and charged with Attempted Murder,
Aggravated Battery with a Firearm, and Armed Violence - all three
charges for a single shot to the arm of someone repeatedly
threatening and waiting in ambush of me. The next morning I was taken
to a courtroom and brought before a judge who set my bond at two
million dollars. The political predators in the ruling class wanted
to make sure that I wouldn’t be going anywhere for a long time.
Little did they know what they were really creating…
Update - 1/15/2008: I wrote this a few years back while I was in prison. A few days ago while I was out doing deliveries, I had a delivery a couple blocks away from the apartment I was staying in when I was arrested. I took a photo of the building:
