09/26/2026
Quick Story Time
Crazy how life happens. How things come full circle.
As I’ve told y’all, I went to the Feds at 18 and did 8 years. At 19, I was sentenced and sent to my first federal compound.
I was 19, y’all.
Suffice it to say, I’ve grown. Grown so much that the 19 year old version of me would almost be unrecognizable today.
But…
Seeds were planted.
Tonight I attended the Community Unity Street Conference and ran into a brother who was doing a 16-year bid when I met him at 19.
I was the youngest person on the yard at that time so EVERYBODY was an old head to me 😂, but Brother Chris was probably in his early to mid 40s, so he was definitely OG.
And he was one of them older Nation of Islam brothers who did not f**k around.
He worked out. He’d walk around the compound for hours with that plumbing snake across his shoulders. He went to service. He handled his business.
Then he met me and EJ. 🤣
EJ was 20. I was Crip out of South Memphis. He was Blood out of North Memphis.
And we were locked in like brothers from the day we met.
Although we were both known for what we were known for at that time, we were searching.
The penitentiary had become our college. Our University.
I had been introduced to spoken word. EJ was an amazing writer too. We studied everything from religion to psychology. We tested each other. Wrote papers. Debated. Studied.
Eventually, after I left that compound, I would go on to write and teach curriculum on other compounds I ended up at.
But before all of that…
EJ was Muslim, and for Juneteenth 2009, the Muslim car was putting on a program for the compound.
Brother Chris, somewhere in between threatening our lives for playing too damn much 🫡😂, convinced me and EJ to write and perform spoken word about the origins of Crips and Bloods, Black unity, and the forces that turned that unity against itself.
I wrote this piece:
Introduction To My America
By Sage Viewz — 6/4/2009
Desultory days in existence,
Life time filled with resistance,
Crip men, Blood men dying into extinction,
Why are we living another man’s destiny?,
Living a life as a trapped G,
Chasing an equal man like a mutt in heat,
The Earth was created with Thoughts of our essence,
We’re allowed to think and make decisions of substance,
Well I choose to stand above this,
Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream,
I have an image of untold satisfaction,
A joy I see foretold through my actions,
Impulses creating reactions,
And blissful entrapment,
Ready made warriors,
Experienced story dwellers,
O.G was a bad story teller,
So i’ll take over as the street justice narrator,
Addressing issues of irrevocable exceptance,
No need to want to be like Mike,
Be like you and make the world except it,
Make a choice in your life,
What’s this universe without strife,
Developing overstanding through making mistakes is how a man
earns his stripes,
Butting heads shooting an equalizer,
Killing boys who can’t be men with human fertilizer,
But let’s be a real-lifer,
How can we advance in a world where killing parts of yourself is survival?,
Bullet holes promote gang violence,
With mind numbing pain killers being the only approach on kindness,
Guess what I’m deciding,
Blood and Crip make up two parts of a destructive triangle,
But I refuse to fight opposite of a fallen brother,
Ima reach my hand out to him and hopefully we can build each other up with much less trouble,
To you Crip and Blood are just bad verbs,
But I need you to take the meaning of each in my next words,
The origin of a Crip is a boy trying to be a man,
The first Blood was just a younging trying to make a stand,
Together in the beginning we were a force to be
reckoned with,
Black men separated because of foolishness,
I’ma kill the Blood and he gone kill the Crip,
But in the end,
Who’s left to kill the struggles of being a young black man that looks to forever exist……
17 years later, I got to shake Brother Chris’ hand and tell him:
That s**t worked.
All that preaching he probably thought was going in one ear and out the other?
Some of it stayed.
The seeds were planted.
I won’t say I wouldn’t be on the path I’m on today if I had never met him.
But I will say that some of the seeds that man planted in a 19 year old kid inside a federal prison are sprouting today.
And I’m grateful for and honor him and for every person who has and continues planting/watering those seeds in me.
There are a lot of good brothers who made mistakes.
Brother Chris and those other older men weren’t obligated to give a damn about whether I made something of myself or if I lived/died. Especially in a penitentiary. Especially when I was who I was at 19.
But even in the middle of the hell we were living in, this man took time…
after time…
after time…
after time…
after time 😂🤣🤣🤣😒😎
…to pour something into us youngins.
Even when we got on his nerves.
Even when we made him untuck that damn shirt and remind us that Brother Chris lived a different life before plumbing and going to service🤣🤣🤣🤣
Tonight I got to give a man his flowers while he could actually hear me say it.
And that meant something to me.
Sometimes you don’t get to see what grows from the seeds you plant in people.
Keep planting them anyway.
I received a surprise Business Spotlight Honor from the Community Unity Street Conference we were attending last night. Which was dope as hell! But the best part of the evening was being able to tell that brother, in front of community, about the positive influence he had on my life at a time/place that was over flowing with negativity.
