Donnie

(Originally Posted August 6th, 2005)

I am 28 years old with a bachelor's degree in Africology and have attended graduate school. I've taught in my local public school system and for the federal government. I don't have any children (and do not want any) and I don't hang out with or run with the wrong crowd (never did). I am not a fan of the NAACP, believe in W.E.B.'s Talented Tenth, LOVE Marcus Garvey, oppose the current government and social security reform, and wish that the Black Panther Party would come back full strength. I have nappy hair, practice Yoruba (a traditional African religions), consider myself a leader and never a follower, and call myself an African born in America.

And I was in love with a convict.

It started when I was about 17 years old. My cousin was dating this one guy and he had a cousin and they thought that we would be good together. Eventually I met Donnie and that was when we started the downward spiral towards the end of an almost decade long "relationship."

We dated for several months before his first extended leave and everything was so good. But then again, I was just 17. He was attentive and so sweet. He loved pinching my cheeks for some reason, always encouraged me to go to school and was happy that I was going (even though he didn't have such aspirations for himself), and even wrote a song and dedicated it to me (I was seventeen…bullshit like that was allowed). He was also my first…I was being fast and decided that it was time by putting a condom in my cleavage and he certainly caught the hint. After that, I was in love. But, I was in love before that because he was so nice and caring to me and responsive to what I was trying to do and be with him. It was my senior year of high school and I becoming a young adult dealing with adolescent situation while trying to make adult decisions. And one of those adult decisions that I made was to stay with him and support him no matter what he went through.

We planned on going to prom together that year. I was calling him more often than not trying to get our colors coordinated, ticket, limo, and hotel prices figured out. "If Only For One Night" was our Luther inspired theme and we were both expecting it to be special for the both of us because we were so much in "love" (well I was in love…he was in, well something else). I ended up going with a friend of mine who didn't match my dress, was not my idea of a romantic guy, and wasn't as special to me as Donnie was. But, I really had no choice to take this platonic friend out because Donnie was in jail.

He went to jail for selling drugs (of course). I was so devastated, upset, and irritated because of his betrayal to what we had and planned to do. We were supposed to spend the summer together before school started. He was supposed to have helped me move into my dorm room and plan weekend sleepovers. We were supposed to be in love and together, but what I didn't know then was that he loved money and jail more than he loved me.

He would write me these epic jailhouse love letters telling me how much he loved me and missed me and how he couldn't wait to get back home to me. He would scour the dictionary and thesaurus for the best words to tell me: "I ain't doing nothing, decided that I should write you because I'm in jail and have nothing else better to do and I really miss fucking you." But I read it as: "Baby, I'm so sorry that I left you and I still love you. I just did something really stupid and after this time is up, I promise to make it up to you and do what I need to do in order to stay out of jail." Unfortunately, the latter was just wishful thinking.

He eventually came home after three years worth of letters, phone calls, pencil drawings of pictures that I mailed to him, and lovely little messages underneath "THIS LETTER HAS BEEN MAILED FROM THE WISCONSIN PRISON SYSTEM" stamps that said "Postman, please be careful with this letter because it's on its way to an angel." We got back together and he promised me that he wouldn't interfere with me going to school and he wanted me to continue going. He also told me that he was going to fly right and do the righteous thing: stay out of trouble and out of jail. Less than a year later, he was back in jail.

Out of the eleven years I've known Donnie, he has been in jail for at least eight of those years. Each time he sent me the same stupid letters that looked and sounded just like the last 500 that he sent me from jail. "I'm gonna stay out of jail and go to work and school so we can be together and get married," he'd tell me. Promises of a beautiful and plentiful life were always there, but he was never able to follow through.

Fast forward to 2004. Donnie, per the usual, was in jail AGAIN for selling dope AGAIN and decided to drop me a few lines. It was the same bullshit that he wrote me ten years prior about how much he loved me and missed me and wanted a chance to be with me again because he has yet to come across a woman of my stature. He even tried to play the emotions card and said that he wanted to keep a promise that he made to my Daddy (who passed away several years ago) by not hurting me and making sure that I was happy.
This cat here. I guess that was some of my fault for allowing him back into my life after he did his first three-year stint in the Dodge Correctional Institution. Maybe it was because I wanted to marry the man that I first had sex with and wanted a family and a marriage with him. Or maybe it was because I was young, stupid, and sprung a little bit from what he did to me sexually (that man's tongue…well that's another story). While he was up north this last time, this fool even gave me an ultimatum. HA! An ultimatum? From jail? Where you have no freedom, no say so in when you get to take a shower or a shit, and have your letters screened before they leave the building or hit your hand? He had balls, I tell you.

What possesses a man who has no freedom to give me the ultimatum to love him and want him after breaking my heart so many times? What gives him the audacity to even think about picking up his pen that he purchased with his canteen that someone else has control over to write to me to tell me that it will be over between us and that he wouldn't write me back if he didn't get a card from me recognizing his birthday? Or, how about the time he told me (once again, from a jail cell) that he was trying to get me pregnant on purpose when he knew that children were not in my plans when I was going to school? Donnie, you normally forgot my birthday, I never got a card from you, and I never even gave you an ultimatum between me and selling dope. Now that I think about it, maybe I should have.

So now, he's out of jail. He came to see me a few weeks and nothing has changed. Donnie's 28 now, has enough kids to start a peewee football team, and still looks the same. He's getting ready to go to Minneapolis to get some gold fronts and probably a couple of pounds because he won't stop selling drugs. Donnie has no intentions of doing the right, positive, legal thing. But, the question is why?

Did we as society allow him to believe that all he could do after he got out of jail was to go back and sell drugs again? Collectively, society knows that once you go to jail for a felony, business are very seldom eager to hire you. Whenever we look at television, we always see drug dealers who end up getting killed, killing someone, or going to jail for life over something stupid. Rarely do we see them coming out of jail, going to school, and making a better life for themselves. Well, at least not African born in America (ABIA) males.

For African born in America males, the life of a drug dealer is glorified and exaggerated. Watch BET for 10 minutes and you will see cats selling on the block since five o'clock selling anything for a profit, or a rerun of Nino "I am not my brother's keeper" Brown in New Jack City. I have never seen a video that glorifies an ABIA male being a doctor, an accountant, or even a construction worker. Not that he has to be any of those things, but he could at least to try to be someone who prefers to pay taxes instead of allowing my taxes to pay for his cot and jailhouse steak sandwiches. But, because of society and the prevalence of thug life, maybe we as society are making him be a drug dealer. Or maybe, he can stop being so lazy and take matters into his own hands.

True, society can be a major influence in a person's life. Society shows us how we are "supposed" to act, live, eat, and so on. But, we fail to realize that society is just a guideline, a foundation to build one's individualized life plan upon. That is where many of us go wrong. Instead of looking at society and figuring out what is really right and positive for our lives, many of us do things because society says so. Many are followers instead of leaders; and unfortunately many ABIA men are subjects to King Society.

Donnie always had a choice when he got out of jail to go to school, get a job and work his way up, or even start his own business. Instead of thinking about how to make life better for himself, about how to stay free, about how to be a father to his kids…he decided to go the easy route for fast money, fast cars, fast ho's because that is what society said he should be doing. Not once did he think about what Donnie really wanted or what his kids really needed, it seems as if he only thought about what society told him he needed.

We always have a choice to make in life. The crossroads of life are there to make one stop and decide about which route to travel in order to make life better. Since society is fast, many of us decide to take the quickest route. We do so when we drive somewhere and unfortunately we take this impatient attitude towards life as well. And that's what Donnie decided to do: fast and fleeting instead of slow and everlasting.

The one and last time we saw each other since he got out of jail, he was trying to fuck. He wasn't concerned about how I was doing or what I had been up to; he was just trying to get some pussy. Apparently, nothing has changed. I don't know what he's doing now. Probably what he said he was…going to sell some dope and try to be a mouth double for Lil' Jon. Well, it's good to see he's at least consistent with the wrong turns that he makes.