In federal prison on a drug conviction, Quentin Carter wrote best-selling novels about Kansas City
Seven other men were in the cell with Quentin Carter, so when he started to work, he put on his headphones. Any other time, their chatter would have been good material for the book, but now it was just a distraction. On a bad day, the headphones helped.
More than a year had passed since Carter was caught with a kilo of crack near 18th Street and Vine. Now he was serving a sentence at a federal prison in Springfield, Missouri. The four double bunks in his cell accommodated eight men. In the center was a steel toilet. When Carter was writing, he sat at a metal desk affixed to the corner of a bunk. It was the type of desk he had in grade school, with a compartment for books, paper and pens.
His cellmates were a rotating cast of characters. One was also from Kansas City, roughly the same age as Carter. Another was a Gangster Disciple from Chicago who walked with a limp. There was a short bald man with skinny legs who called himself a preacher.
Anyone who paid attention could see when Carter was deeply into his story. His face would twitch and spasm with his characters’ emotions. When a hustler with more hormones than common sense was seduced by a woman he shouldn’t have trusted and woke up in the trunk of a burning car, Carter breathed the hazy smoke. If the hero cruising down Prospect met a Latina who liked big cars and dangerous men, Carter was back on the East Side, his new rims flashing in the yellow glow of a streetlamp. He hadn’t been without a woman for this long since he was a kid, and after finishing a particularly steamy sex scene, he would stand up hours later to discover semen drying on the inside of his thigh. When the day was over, 10 pages written longhand meant 24 hours crossed off the calendar.
Carter took his pen and sank into the white space between the blue lines of the legal pad.
It was a warm summer night in June. Keith Banks and his younger brother, Kevin, were cruising the streets in Keith’s silver Lexus coupe. They slowly sipped Hennessy and Coke while listening to Too Short pumping out of the fifteen-inch subwoofers. Keith loved the attention he received, from both men and women, when he flossed through the city on twenty-inch chrome rims. Nothing excited him like attention. It was like his drug, and one of the main reasons that he got into the dope game. Years back when he was just a shorty, Keith used to envy the attention that dope boys got from men and women of all ages. To most it didn’t matter if they were selling poison to their own people. What mattered was what the dope boys could put into empty palms.
He already had a title in mind: Hoodwinked.
Quentin Carter was 14 when he sold his first joint. He was a good student, and his family provided for him. There was no poverty to be beaten back; no dire circumstances forced him to trade against the law. But when he looked at the men in his neighborhood at 68th Street and Olive, he knew that he didn’t have to spend the next six years impressing teachers to get rich.
A partner was waiting. His brother, Chris, two years younger, already knew to stay in bed until he was sure that their mother was asleep before he made a run to the drug house and set himself up with crack and cash for the night. Chris would slip out of bed at one in the morning and be back by six, just in time to get ready for another day in the sixth grade.
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“We wanted to have nice things,” Chris remembers. “We came from a good home — it’d be a lie to blame it on a broken one. We just wanted to provide for ourselves and for our mom the way she worked to provide for us. We wasn’t the type to let mama buy us a car. We wanted to buy mama a car.”
Still, Chris was surprised when Quentin wanted into the game. “He was the responsible one; I was the one who was wild with it. If it would have worked out that it wasn’t in his face all the time, all those distractions, he could have made it other ways. But it’s the company you keep, I guess.”
Their first try at hustling might as well have been by accident. Walking by the banks of the Missouri River, the brothers found a patch of marijuana growing among the weeds. They cut it and took it home.
“It wasn’t good,” Quentin says with a chuckle.
Quentin had heard that you had to cure marijuana, so he got a bottle of Tanqueray and soaked the stuff. “It looked like coffee when that was done,” he says. He had also heard that you needed to dry it out, so he wrapped the wet leaves in aluminum foil and put them in his mother’s clothes dryer. After the cycle was done, they started rolling their find into thin joints, which they sold on the corner for $2 apiece. They spent the money on shoe polish, food and any other little thing that caught their attention at school.
“We kind of felt like we had the upper hand,” Quentin says. “Grown people are buying joints from us. We felt like we was needed. Plus, we had more money.”
They learned fast. “We went to the corner and got somebody to make runs for us, and it was on from there,” Chris says. The best way to earn money was to sell large amounts of crack to other dealers who would cut it and sell it again. Suburbanites also made good customers. The Carters could meet a middle-aged white guy in the parking lot of the Independence Apple Market and easily sell him $200 worth of coke for $400. They were careful and mostly avoided the law, except for the time Quentin was caught with two bags of dope in his pocket and spent a few months in juvenile detention. When Quentin was 18 and Chris was 16, they bought their first house on the north side. The plan was to stack their money and move on to other things.
At the height of their dealing, when it was a matter of course to owe someone on the East Coast $70,000 for a drug shipment, and their mother was finding automatic weapons in the house, Chris still saw his brother as an even-tempered man — he’d rather beat someone than shoot him — with one big weakness.
“He was something else with the ladies. He’d disappear on me for a few days and come back with all these new clothes.”
Although he would father four children with four women, Quentin met the woman at a gas station. Danika Acklin was a 23-year-old nursing student four years older than he was. She was there to pick up some food for her mother. He thought she was checking out his shoes.
“I go to school,” she told him. “You ain’t in college?”
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“No,” he said. “Drugs.”
She was turned off by the answer. But before long, she could see that all the girls wanted him and she liked the idea that she could have him.
“He could always tell a good story,” Acklin says. “Any party, they’d be like, ‘Is Q going to be there?’ He had that charisma about him.” A year after they met, they had a daughter.
And by January 2001, Quentin was incarcerated.
In prison, everyone is looking for ways to fill the time. Reading a legal pad scrawled with someone’s first novel was good for an hour or two.
Whatever his cellmates thought of Quentin Carter’s prose style, it wasn’t boring. Sex scenes were graphic and frequent. Within three paragraphs, a character could go from sipping cognac to being shot in the gut. The plot was as familiar to Carter as his memories: Two brothers working their way to the top of Kansas City’s crack business, sidetracked by sex, betrayal and a series of murders that all seemed like revenge for whoever was killed in the previous chapter.
A few days after the manuscript began making the rounds, Carter asked one of his friends what he thought of the story. The man yawned and said, “It makes an excellent sleeping pill.”
Another reader was more encouraging. Carter had a ceramics class with a white-haired convict named Ed. Now in his 50s, Ed had been a crooked cop in Kansas City, Kansas. He spent his days on the bunk in his cell, a tubby bookworm with false teeth. Ed offered to type up the manuscript on one condition: That Carter would try to get it published.
Carter had read books about young black hustlers. He liked the work of Iceberg Slim, who wrote the 1969 autobiographical novel Pimp: The Story of My Life. But Carter was insulted by other crime writers whose characters drove around with 20 kilos of cocaine in their trunks and carried amounts of money that were absurd even for the dope business.
“It just didn’t seem real or authentic to me,” he says. “Maybe they do it that way somewhere else, but not in Kansas City.”
Ed found a way to get Hoodwinked typed, and Carter got it out to publishers.
Two independent publishing houses wanted it. Both specialized in street lit, a paperback genre of dark and profane novels written by African-Americans and set in urban landscapes. Carter accepted an offer from Triple Crown Publications in Columbus, Ohio, because it would publish the book quickly and because he felt a kinship with the company’s founder. The same year Carter was incarcerated, Vickie Stringer launched Triple Crown with her debut novel, Let There Be Reason, about a woman who creates an alter ego to make her own way in the underworld.
Hoodwinked came out in July 2005. In the acknowledgments, Carter thanks the publisher, fallen friends, family and his children’s mothers: Danika, Keosha, Lady and Shawna. The appreciations end with this: “Every story has been told — it’s the way I tell it that keeps the reader turning pages.”
The boast was well-founded. Soon after publication, Hoodwinked topped Essence magazine’s best-seller list, the best-known measure of success for an urban-fiction book. The list uses sales reports from African-American bookstores across North America. He first saw his story on a bookstore shelf when Acklin took a picture of it at the Ward Parkway mall and mailed it to him in prison.
Fan mail started arriving shortly thereafter. Most of Hoodwinked‘s sales were on the coasts, which was obvious by postmarks on the envelopes coming into the Springfield penitentiary. Almost all of Carter’s admirers were women, who sent their pictures (or a bottle of cologne or a new shirt) to comfort him while he served out his sentence. Men wrote, too, without the visual aids, usually to thank him for giving them something to dip into while watching the clock at jobs they hated.
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“Hey, Quentin, you got all the girls. Why don’t you give somebody some?” one inmate would yell. “You think you somebody? You ain’t nobody — you still in jail,” another reminded him. “That book ain’t never going to leave the shelf,” one predicted.
By the end of 2005, Carter had written four more novels.
Earlier this year, Carter saw a BET discussion about his livelihood. He watched a group of well-educated literary experts clucking their tongues over the way street lit, with its lurid pages of sex and ambition, was choking real artists out of the industry.
“It was all about how us uneducated authors clog up the system for everybody somehow and don’t take it seriously,” Carter says.
“I think sometimes educated people feel somewhat threatened by it,” Acklin adds. “But they need to realize that if there’s a hundred people in a room, not many are going to have the degrees they have. They need to get over it.”
The discussion Acklin and Carter saw was just one exchange in a long argument about the merits of street lit — a debate that has grown along with book sales. Notable volleys include a January 2006 New York Times op-ed by African-American fiction writer Nick Chiles, titled “Their Eyes Were Reading Smut” and a 2008 essay in The Root, in which Baruch College journalism professor Bridgett Davis demanded a reorganization of the market to clearly define “black literary writers.”
“I was ashamed and mortified to see my books sitting on the same shelves as these titles,” Chiles wrote. “As someone who makes a living as a writer, I felt I had no way to compete with these purveyors of crassness.”
But some academics argue that to dismiss these books because of their subject matter is to disregard more than 400 years of African-American fiction.
Maryemma Graham, a professor of English at the University of Kansas, has almost completed The History of African-American Literature, due out from Cambridge University Press sometime in the next eight months.
“You can link this writing back to several traditions, and it goes all the way back to the slave era because it’s the literature of incarceration,” Graham says. “You think about slavery, people being imprisoned and people writing their stories of the hard life experience that is enslavement, and it’s a direct answer now from the young black men who are imprisoned and who are writing about their experience.”
Graham cites the influence of Chester Himes. Born in Jefferson City in 1909 to schoolteacher parents, Himes was a good student who left school to hustle. Sentenced to 20 years in prison for his part in an armed robbery, he started writing. Himes’ mysteries were so popular that at least two biographies have explored the social statements he made in stories centered on violent offenders.
Triple Crown’s Vickie Stringer (who did not reply to The Pitch‘s interview requests) has built her company on stories about similar criminals. By most accounts, she began by selling her self-published book from the trunk of her car. When she had attracted a stable of writers she thought she could sell, she named her company after her old street crew. Now, Triple Crown books regularly top the Essence best-seller list. The low-overhead operation results in poorly constructed books with spotty editing. (Noland Road is spelled “Nolyn” at least once in Hoodwinked, and there are plenty of words with missing letters.) But it returns high profits. Carter wouldn’t say how much he was paid for his novels, but interviews with other Triple Crown writers have revealed figures from $30,000 to $50,000 per book.
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Big publishing houses want their cut of the urban market, too, even if they don’t want to admit it. Most have separate imprints (such as HarperCollins’ Amistad label) targeted to the street lit audience. Every so often, as with Sistah Souljah’s best-seller The Coldest Winter Ever, a street lit book is so well-written and popular that a major publishing house buys the rights to redistribute it.
“These books do play to stereotypes,” Graham says. “The men always need to prove their manhood, and their relationships with women are abusive. Violence drives the plot. But at the same time, I think once you’re writing a book in prison, you’re countering the stereotype by the very fact that you’re already defying it. That’s the way you transform your life. They’re not telling kids ‘be like me.’ They’re telling them not to be this way.”
In any case, people want to read these books.
“These novels have always been popular,” says Kaite Stover, the readers’ adviser and head of circulation at the Kansas City Public Library “Street lit as a genre is probably about as popular to its readers as Harry Potter is with kids and Twilight is with teens. If we get a copy and put it on the shelf, it’s checked out within 30 minutes.”
At the moment, readers on the waiting list will have to wait an estimated 51 days for a copy of In Cahootz: Sequel to Hoodwinked. Assuming that whoever has checked it out returns it.
“Everyone complains to me about the library,” Carter says. “I’m like, go buy it.”
No one can accuse Carter of trying to drive up sales by exaggerating his outlaw past. Missouri court records document how the future best-selling author was handcuffed facedown on the curb near 18th and Vine during a campaign stop by George W. Bush in 2000.
The day it happened, Carter was supposed to be finishing last-minute business before he and Acklin left for a vacation in Jamaica. While he was handling his obligations, Acklin planned to take her grandmother on an errand to City Hall, then to get a manicure and a pedicure.
Carter arrived at his connection’s house that morning, planning only to drop off $30,000. He hadn’t intended to pick up any drugs, but Carter’s connection wanted him to take a kilo of crack. “I didn’t want it, but it’s like, ‘Take the key, man, take the key.’ So it was like, fuck it, I’ll take it.”
As he was driving back to his apartment, his mother called to warn him about the Bush rally. Lots of Secret Service men would be just outside his doorstep. Kansas City, Missouri, police officers, too. Throngs of Republicans were waiting for the nominee when Carter arrived. He went to his apartment to cut the drugs, then went back to his car with a newly mixed kilo.
Before he could drive away, an old customer spotted him and ran over. Carter knew that he shouldn’t have done it, but he made the sale.
“I remember seeing somebody, looked like a janitor, in the doorway of a building watching us,” Carter says. “I can’t know for sure, but I think he saw it and he signaled the cops or the Secret Service or whoever that something was going down.”
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Carter waved off the client and drove away. The police stopped him before he had driven a block.
“They said I failed to signal, but that was just an excuse,” Carter says.
Carter lay belly-down in the gutter of 18th Street with his hands cuffed behind his back while the cops finished searching his car. He rested his forehead against the concrete and thought about how perfectly finished he was. George Bush was well into his speech, and the crowd was cheering.
When the time came, he went to prison without complaint.
Chris Carter didn’t visit for a while. “When you first go in, you need to get settled and you don’t want to see nobody those first months. He manned up to it. He never showed weakness. He took full responsibility and he wasn’t a rat. Once you step in what he was stepping into, you have to know what the situation is and you have to prepare yourself for it. It’s terrible. He could have been killed, we thought. But I guess he made it work out for him.”
In June 2008, the Missouri Department of Corrections released Carter to a transitional house in Kansas City. By December, he was on his own, except for trips to the probation officer. To make sure Carter doesn’t take any drugs, a patch on his upper-right arm gets tested every week. It’s so sensitive, he doesn’t want anyone to touch him if there’s a chance that person has smoked any weed in the last month.
Meeting the terms of his release also means keeping a job. Every morning at 6:55, he checks in to work at Cook’s Ham, Inc., a processing plant downtown. There, he spends eight hours a day in a refrigerated room. Along with their disposable aprons, rubber boots and helmets, the men wear two pairs of cotton gloves under a pair of dishwasher gloves to keep their hands from freezing. At a rate of 33 hams per minute, raw meat moves on a conveyor belt where needles inject it with honey and salt and inflate it like a basketball. Carter and two co-workers then hook each ham on limbs stretching out of steel trees hanging from the ceiling.
He doesn’t need the job for the money. While he was in prison, royalty checks piled up in a savings account.
“There are some people who think I got back into it because they see me driving in a new car. They’re like, ‘You just got out. You ain’t supposed to have no money!'” Carter says. “Getting out of prison and not having to ask anyone for anything, knowing you can take care of your kids … . That’s a good feeling.”
Every night, Carter jots down notes for what could be his next book, but now that he’s a free man, he has bigger concerns. Foremost is making up for lost time with his kids and learning to be in a relationship with Acklin, who finally became his fiancée this year. Then there’s the question of what he’ll do with his life besides writing. Because he isn’t sharing a room with seven convicts and looking for a mental escape, he’s finding it harder to sit still for hours at a desk.
Chris has been drawing up plans for the brothers to start their own real-estate company, buying foreclosed houses and flipping them. “We going to take the stairs from here,” Chris says. “Take it slow, no more elevator rides for us. As long as we keep it legal and no backsliding, it’s going to be good. It’s been bad, so it’s got to be good from here. We got a blessing now. We got something to work with legitimate now. Anything else would be an excuse.”
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Meanwhile, there’s always someone hoping that Quentin Carter will read his work.
“Guys from the neighborhood never picked up a book before, and they read his book,” Chris says. “And then once they’re through that, they find out they like it, and you see them reading other books.”
Now they’re trying to write their own.
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