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Publications Travel Series Brothers Lost Love Letters from Mama
AIM Communications |
A new book by Ken AnderbergHere is a sample chapter from the book: Chapter I - Snake Makes His Way
Ray stared at the sign. Bullet holes punctured the center, rust clung to the edges. He had not seen such a sign in seven years. Speed limit 55, it read, black on white. Florida State Highway 71 stretched in either direction, the town of Marianna to the south. His former prison home was now two miles to his north. From among the needle palms and saw palmettos lining the road, he watched as a beat-up red Ford 150 rumbled through the intersection at Jackson County road 162, his planned path to escape.
Just then, a private plane passed overhead. The plane's altitude dropped as it approached the municipal airport half a mile to the north. Ray ducked involuntarily. “Praise to Allah,” he muttered as he rushed from his hiding place to find similar cover across the intersection. “I've got to avoid that airport area. Too many cops there, probably looking for me.” In the distance, he could hear the faint sound of sirens.
His dark green prison uniform was drenched from the sweltering Florida panhandle sun. It clung to his tight 5-foot-8 frame. His dark-brown eyes squinted through the waves of heat shimmering off the asphalt road. Only two hours ago, he managed to escape the Marianna federal correctional facility. “At least now I have a chance to be free,” he thought to himself. He wasn't quite sure, though, what freedom really was. In his lifetime, he had never known any freedom.
Ray had never been in the town of Marianna, as the prison was five miles outside the city limits. Other inmates told him about the nothing-special town with its own place in history. With slightly more than 6,000 people and the county seat of Jackson County, Marianna sits about halfway between Panama City and Pensacola. The town was the site of the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal, an African-American man accused of rape and murder. The national publicity generated by the lynching and resulting riot helped to inspire national anti-lynching laws.
To the prisoners of Marianna, mostly black and Hispanic, such history meant little. There was no freedom for them, now or probably in their lifetimes. Their lives were defined by the bars, the walls, the brutality of the guards, the brutality of their fellow inmates. This was the life Ray was running from, toward what he hoped would be the first personal freedom he had ever experienced.
It was a Sunday in the middle of July. He heard that until recently residents within Marianna's city limits were not able to purchase alcoholic beverages on Sunday - another Southern town still frozen in the Blue Laws daze. Outside the city limits, you still could not buy a beer on Sunday. Since his conversion to Islam, though, having a beer was not of interest. Getting to Mexico was.
“I need to get out of these greens,” he muttered to himself as he worked his way through the panhandle underbrush. As he exited the thick undergrowth, a dilapidated wooden house appeared through the trees. Its gutters were dangling on one side. Loose slats jutted out from the walls. Outside, the day's laundry flapped in the humid breeze.
Soon, only his eyes gave away his prison history, his prison garb exchanged for faded jeans and a plaid cotton shirt. He kept the long sleeves of the shirt covering the full length of his arms, so as to hide the tattoos. On his left forearm, there was a rose with “Mother” printed over it. On the right arm, above the elbow, was a swastika.
In 2001, there were more than 100,000 inmates in the Florida prison system, including Raymond “Snake” Ansara. Many of them were assigned to work - on farms and gardens managed by the department, construction or repair of correctional facilities, preparing and serving meals, maintaining prison grounds, or working in sanitation and recycling programs.
Snake was assigned to work on the farm, mostly raising vegetables, sometimes shoveling manure. It was a minimum-security function that allowed him outside access and light supervision. He put in an average of seven hours a day, 35 hours a week and was paid 27 cents an hour. The type of work an inmate does is determined by his educational background, technical skills or work experience. So Ray, without even a high school diploma, was assigned manual farm labor.
For Ray, prison was a fight for survival. It had also become something of a home. Weaker inmates often were used and abused by the stronger population. Those weaker prisoners sometimes were expected to pay for protection from other inmates. Or they joined prison gangs to be safe. Snake had been incarcerated since he was 15, 16 long years ago, so he pretty much knew the ropes - mind your own business, protect yourself at all times, and follow the prison, and inmate, rules.
This was the life he had known since he stole his first car as a juvenile. Then, he was sent to Thornton Academy, a juvenile offender facility outside Sarasota, Fla. His third auto theft landed him at Marianna for a 10-year stretch.
He just couldn't make it that long. With his new-found religion, seven years of study in the prison library and a deep distrust of the U.S. government, he planned his escape for a year. And he had help.
Ray wasn't “born” to be a criminal. His early life, however, predetermined that he would not lead a normal or happy life. Born to a U.S. Marine officer and a young Italian-American mother, he was separated from her at three years old after his father died in Vietnam. He couldn't remember his mother. A year after his father's death, he was told years later, the courts took custody of Ray and his two older brothers away from their mother. His brothers were adopted by two different California couples. He was taken in by a middle-aged pair from New England. They could not handle his manic mood swings.
Never able to function at school or behave at home, he was constantly in neighborhood fights, or caught stealing from local stores. Reform school did him no good and, finally, his bad disposition led him to stealing his first car. That crime landed him at the juvenile offenders facility. There, he earned his nickname by capturing a large black snake barehanded.
He still remembered how the snake managed to turn its head around just enough to sink its fangs into his thumb. His bravado at leaping at the seven-foot snake and grabbing it behind its head, had been quickly turned to pain from the bite. But the blood oozing from his knuckle only heightened his excitement. From then on, he was considered something of a crazy man by his jail mates.
After he was released from Thornton, Ray made several good-faith efforts to land a job. But his past would haunt him. His long hair, tattoos and rough demeanor didn't help his cause. Neither did his incarceration or lack of job skills. No one would hire him - not McDonald's or Pizza Hut or Kmart.
Finally, he reverted to form, breaking into a a number of cars in a Tampa parking garage, taking electronics and personal items to sell on the street. An undercover cop arrested him when he tried to sell the goods. He subsequently was sentenced to three years in Hillsborough County lockup.
Shortly after he was released, he jacked a Toyota, hoping to strip it down and sell the parts. The first person he approached with his haul, however, turned out to be another undercover cop. Luck, it seemed, was always against him. He was sentenced to Marianna - where he found religion, and a mentor who would be instrumental in his prison escape and eventual overseas journey.
Befriended by Jamil Mahmood Muhammad in Marianna, Ray learned to embrace the religion of his new friend He saw in it a peaceful release for his troubled mind. Converting to Islam was easy for Ray. Jamil told him to be a Muslim he only needed full conviction and strong belief that Islam is the true religion of God. From there, all he needed to do was pronounce the “Shahada,” the first and most important of the five pillars of Islam.
“All of one’s sins are forgiven,” Jamil told him before he pronounced his Shahada, “and one starts a new life of piety and righteousness.” Attempts to radicalize Ray would come later.
For a year, Jamil schooled his friend in the readings of the Quran, Islamic prayers and how to live his life according to the Prophet Muhammad. Ray studied the five pillars - the Salat, or five daily prayers; Sawm, or fasting; Zakat, the practice of charitable giving; and the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. Ray changed his name, unofficially, to Karim Bashir Zakaria. Then, Jamil was released, promising to help his disciple find his way to a new life when he, too, was freed from the stone walls and barbed wire.
His escape from Marianna was surprisingly easy. He and five other inmates were working the corn field, collecting the ripened ears and loading them into bins. The corn was then dumped into the guard's truck. The truck was parked under a 30-foot-tall live oak. Under its shade, the lone guard, Jake, was watching their detail. As usual after lunch, Jake was asleep. He had just consumed a ham hoagie and some sweetened tea he had stashed in a small cooler. Ray simply walked away from the corn field, through the adjacent woods and onto Highway 71.
As he walked down the side of State Road 162, Snake managed to hitch a ride with two black farmers in the back of a rusting pickup. The flatbed truck bounced down the rutted country road. Ray could hear the blacks arguing in hushed tones about whether they should have picked him up, and what would they do if he turned dangerous. “You know,” the driver said, “those prisoners back there at Marianna bust out sometimes. I heard of them being caught right alongside this road.”
”We'll just let him off down the road a bit, maybe at the truck stop outside Dothan,” his friend responded.
The driver was maybe 60, Ray thought. The road jarred him again off the metal truck floor. Dirt flew up his nostrils and whipped out the open bed. The driver could have been younger but a hard life in Southern farm country had creased his face and gnarled his hands. His companion was much younger, maybe mid-20s, and sported a scraggly beard.
Both wore faded coverall jeans, baseball caps and muddy work boots. “NY” was sewn into the driver's hat. Ray guessed the old man had never been close to New York City or the Yankees. The younger man's hat simply said “Titan Snuf” in big red letters on the front.
Ray tried to sleep but the uneven road and his own anxiety kept him alert. Finally, the truck turned off at a rest stop on Highway 231.
“We're gonna take a side road up ahead and this might be the best place to leave you,” the driver said. Snake thanked the two men and sought refuge in the nearby men's room. He had to reach Dothan, Ala., another 25 miles up the road. There, he was to reconnect with Jamil at one of the few mosques in this part of the country.
Jamil warned him about keeping his religion to himself if he ever escaped or was released. The American South was not known for its tolerance of Muslims, even before the al-Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “The rednecks down here would just as soon shoot you as look at you,” Jamil warned. As the sun began setting, Ray found a place behind a rusted-out and abandoned Plymouth where he could say his evening prayers without being seen.
There were at least eight trucks parked at the rest stop. Ray began asking drivers for a ride; he needed to avoid being exposed to patrols on the heavily traveled highway, so hitchhiking was not an alternative. Finally, on the fifth try, a guy named Curtis pulling a Roadway Express 18-wheeler told him to get on board.
Heavy set and balding, Curtis didn't ask a lot of questions on the 30-minute ride to Dothan. But he sure did talk a blue streak. Snake tried to keep his lies to a minimum and to keep the chatter about Curtis, not him. He was too close to a safe haven to have this redneck know his background. |
