Brooklyn, 1982. In kindergarten, I began to draw. I used a dirty, no-name-brand black crayon to scribble a big round circle on top of a crooked stick figure cross. It was misshapen and awkward—a depiction of how I felt about myself. Like the dirty, broken, black crayon, I was the one nobody wanted.
I was raised by my great grandma and mother. Back then, I felt more "in the way" than useful. Mama was always at work or just out. Grandma was up in her years. She didn't have the energy to chase after me.
I played tag with other kids at an old-abandoned public school. Besides being condemned, it was crammed with crackheads engaged in all sorts of criminal activity.
I watched the fiends smoke the waxy white rocks. The piss and spit coated walls became my first public art gallery. I wrote as big as my child arms could stretch: "COREY DEVON ARTHUR."
"Get your little nasty ass black hands off me and go wash up." That's what Mama and Grandma used to shout at me. Unfortunately, the white soap wasn’t strong enough to cleanse my childhood. Nor did the soap ever make the pictures I drew on paper, clean enough to hang on the refrigerator, like I seen white parents do on TV.
There weren't any men around to show me how to be a boy. It wasn't until I started socializing with other boys at school that I realize I was peeing like a girl. The other boys teased me to no end.
"Stop playing with your wee wee," my grandma told me. “That’s not what good boys do.”
I felt embarrassed and ashamed because I didn't know how to tell Mama and Grandma that touching myself felt good. I hid when I wanted to feel good, and I never felt like a good boy.
The hood in the 90s was full of older males who sold crack. They hung around the abandoned school and showed me how to draw myself into a street savage. They became my role models, and I continued to sketch self-portraits with the only crayon I had.
My artistic mind went to work. The white kids drew comics with their brand-new, colorful Crayola crayons. I drew crime with broken, black nubs. I blended the darks of my identity in drug dens with other dangerous dark places. I drew the gutter and the alley. I drew myself as a drug dealer. I drew the fist I used to fight, the crack I came to sell, the guns I used to frighten, and the dick I used to fuck. I kept the dirty, broken, black crayon at my fingertips because I loved to draw.
Later, I would draw my graffiti on the street corners of Brooklyn. I called my pieces Wounded because the critics of society said I was sick. "You were born nothing but a no-good nigga." That’s what Ms. Smalls, my eighth-grade guidance counselor told me. She caught me spray painting my name on the side of the school instead of sitting in science class.
Society has a place where they fix broken bottom niggers like the one I drew myself to be. It’s called Rikers Island. At 16, I got busted for selling crack. At Rikers, they animalized me inside cold cages and taught my demons how to come out and cut each other up. Then they locked me in the box (solitary confinement) for becoming what they socialized me to be.
I drew myself going Koo Koo. "SNAP!" That’s the sound I heard the second my mind broke. The sensory and social deprivation left nothing else for the demon to feed on except my mind and heart. My own demon would have consumed every morsel of my humanity, had I not redrawn myself as a 15-year-old white girl named Anne Frank.
Despite Anne being 15 and me being 16, we were just two teenagers being oppressed and killed slowly. During my two years at Rikers, I was able to reimagine enough of Anne Frank's dairy to save what I could of my diminishing humanity. I didn't want to lose my sanity in solitude, so I slipped some of it in between the pages of her dairy. While there I saw Anne suffering in a way that showed me how to survive and fend off the savage I was becoming. Anne found a way to color kindness within the cruelty that kept us confined. Anne kept me alive. Unfortunately, Anne couldn't save me on the day it counted the most.
A year after my release, at 19 years old, I participated in a robbery with two other men that resulted in the death of my former 9th grade English teacher. I didn't draw the gun. I didn’t fire the shot, but his blood is still on my hands.
I went into Rikers a broken street thug, and I left an angry monster.
In the winter of 1998, at 20, I shuffled into Attica Correctional Facility chained and shackled with guns pointed at my head. The prison guard at Reception said, "I was born and bred to break niggas like you."
The prison guards saw I wasn't shook, so we began to shake. The snuffs, stomps, and slaps didn't stop, until the officers were sufficiently satisfied that my slumped body resembled that of a slave. The assaults lasted six seconds, six minutes, or six hours. Either way, it always felt like it went on forever. When a beat down occurred, the sense of time shifted with the breaking and dislocating of my bones. I drew myself in a still-life pose so they would stop stomping me out. I sucked in my breath so I wouldn’t scream. I allowed myself to exhale when I was sure (by silence) they had stopped.
That’s when I slipped into a place where tortured artists like me learn to draw sick shit. We call our style, Surviving in the System. I immediately sharpened my crayon into a shank, securing contraband in my rectum, and engaging in a string of cuttings and stabbings that shaped the scars on the only canvas I had left: my flesh.
Most folks saw a 20-something broken, Black crayon who had drawn his own savagery. Two women saw something else.
After 25 years inside, I wrote and published an essay about the Covid crisis in my prison. For the first time, I wasn’t just a dirty, broken, black crayon. I was Corey Devon Arthur, the writer and artist. Emily Nonko, a professional journalist and founder of Empowerment Avenue, saw the writer. Emily recruited me to squeeze on free society by writing about life in the joint.
Alli Langer, the dopest white girl on earth (DWGOE), found me through Emily. Alli’s a podcast producer, activist, and all-around pro. Alli loves to say "fuck” but assured me that fucking is something we would never do. I told her I've been handling my own dirty, black crayon long enough to please myself (despite my grandma’s scorn). Alli's my homegirl.
Alli uses her superpowers to get at the bag. Being a beautiful, nosey, persistent task master is how she penetrated my truth with her Jedi mind fuck tricks. She took me to a place of vulnerability that no one has ever taken me to before. The DWGOE shared her pain with me so we could heal together.
She stared at me the entire time, while I told her what happened the night my 9th grade English teacher was murdered. Together, she and I sketched out the worse thing I had ever done. It was the hardest thing I wrote. That was the first and only time I have ever been truly penetrated by a woman. She slid inside me slowly and deeply. She showed me how beauty could be drawn by a dirty, black, broken crayon.
It’s likely I’ll never receive the forgiveness I crave. I know how people see me. But I’m hungry to make meaning out of destruction. It's been two years since I began writing with Alli. Since then, I've been published over a dozen times. I have redrawn myself as an artist, a feminist, and an activist for restorative justice. I launched a one-man art exhibit in a gallery in Brooklyn. Hundreds of people, including my mom and some formerly incarcerated people, crowded into the room to see my work, read my stories, and meet the people who believe in me.
Unlike the abandoned school I played in as a kid, the gallery walls are clean, respected spaces of positivity. I didn't just use my dirty, broken, black crayon to draw the people who inspired me, I redrew myself.