Dear Evelyn,

It has, truly, been quite a while since I wrote you. It must have been decades. Coming to America is not like going to heaven; it is like going from purgatory to hell! That is all I have to say of my travelling from Nigeria to America.

I am writing to you today because I found a pen and a paper around the corner. My ‘cellie’ got them for me. I don’t know how. I need not ask because everything you see, hear, eat or do is a privilege inside this ‘Big Boys Club’.

I spent almost a year in America as a free man and then I was thrown into the ‘Big House’. I was accused, they said, of criminal conduct. They said that I stole a white man’s shoes and I got locked up. I didn’t do that. I don’t know how many more years I need to stay here – I have not been tried.

But, don’t worry, I will be home soon. Home in Nigeria – to make up for all the years I haven’t been around. I will stick to your side and make love to you the way I did on our first date together. I miss Rosie. Tell her that the smiles on my lips are still glistening. I will pour all my love on her when I come home. Tell her that I miss her angelic smile too. LOL. Hope she still goes to Amy Park as she used to – or she has outgrown it? (I can’t stop laughing at myself; do you think she will ever outgrow that?).

My only regret is that what I thought was going to be a one year study programme has turned out to be a lifetime jail programme. I have come to a time in my life where nothing else matters, not even who I am…my race, colour, vision and future. I wish I were another type of person from another continent, country, and planet. Maybe, a Martian? It wouldn’t be a bad idea.

You see, I have been in the Room 7, the meditation room, solitary confinement, security room, psyche room…call it anything you like; that place is no joke! I have been going there for years. When I am in there, I talk to no one, see no face, engage in no exercise and don’t change into clean clothes. They believe that Room 7 changes people and makes them behave either abnormally or normally or even see wild visions.

Me? I am a black man from Nigeria, with a tough skin…I ain’t changed a bit! Before I got this paper to write on, I would see the universe falling to her knees, weeping and calling on me to save her. I would see myself clothed in rags, walking around the universe making appeals to try and save my little dazzling angel from fading. I would sing her songs and we would talk of our love and weep together.

Sometimes, I would see birds from my lone cell, chirping wonderful melodies and singing psalms of love and sorrow. My first week at the Big House, they sang me songs of hope and faith. They told me to keep believing that a time would come soon when I would be tried and freed. I would smile and hit my chest and say: “All is well, it will soon be over!” But all of that hope, and the melodies, turned to sorrow.

The House is filled with – in the prisoner’s language – ‘niggers’ and ‘billies’. Billies are the masters, like in the colonial days, and the niggers are logs of wood to be axed anytime. We live in fear in the free world and we live in fear in the ‘House’ too. One is afraid of almost everything. All of the inmates are afraid of Room 7 and the guards. The weaker inmates are afraid of the ‘chairmen’, ‘big daddies’, ‘presidos’ and ‘commandos’.

Dear, I wish I were an ant…a little ant, so that I could crawl out of this place peacefully, without being seen. I wish I were a bee so that I could buzz around and sting the warders, the cops, the judges and the government. I wish I were some sort of a…a part of something big! But, I am a shit! A black shit that is borne out of the filth eaten by other inmates, after many days of starvation. A shit would be wasted and it pains me to know that my light will soon go out and the world will turn a blind eye on me.

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Tell us: What would you do if you were held in jail without a trial?