Publisher's Synopsis
Growing up in the most dangerous streets in "Killer Cali" in L.A., Watts, and Compton--as gang members we claim these neighborhoods and protect them with our lives. Just stopping at a red light, turning the corner, you better have your head on a swivel or you will come up missing--shot to death. Lots of human blood has been spilled and washed into the city sewer as if nothing even happened. About 99% of that lifeless blood has resulted in those persons being 10 Toez Up--"dead." Getting high or drunk everyday makes us live life on the edge... then we wake up the next morning to do it all over again. For these deadly streets to claim so many lives, and for me to be able to tell my story, I'm fortunate and grateful to still be--"10 Toez Down."
- Albert "Ru-Al" Jones
Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy has taught America how to attend to the whole lives of our men and women on Death Row. 10 Toez Down is a memoir of street life in L.A., written from the Death Row in California's San Quentin Prison by a man, Albert "Ru-al" Jones, who has been on the Row since 1997.
Jones is a proud member of the Blood street gang and a devout Christian. In prison he has completed his High School degree and nearly completed a college degree. He is the author of "Our Last Meals?: San Quentin Death Row Cook Book" and of "I'm in God's Confinement", which tells of his life of Christian faith in prison.
10 Toez Down, the second book of a trilogy, spares no details of his life as a "gangsta" out on the streets with stories of drugs, sex and violence as well as the brotherhood among the Bloods and his intimate relationships with his family and his girlfriend. It is the first book that Jones wrote, while only a few years on the Row, and the writing is fresh, urgent and vivid. We get a full portrait of life as a gangbanger in the 80s and 90s including, for example, a High School party where a friend of Jones named Andre makes his debut as a DJ. That friend later named himself Dr. Dre.
Towards the end, the book grows more reflective as Jones attends to the voices of the women in his life, particularly his pastor, Mother Reynolds, his girlfriend Judy and his mother who observes of him "I say this much, you're playing with death." (p. 338). The book concludes with a section, written in 2018, that is more thoughtful and sorrowful. Along with listing the angels in his life and his "homies" who have died he writes "1993 is the last time I earned a stripe on a Crip, but after being on death row I have found a new enemy-that's the devil. He had a stranglehold on my life, and so many others, and I'm done working for him." (p. 367)
The first book of the trilogy, Put on the Shelf to Die, tells of his childhood up until the time he is recruited by the Bloods, and then jumps ahead to the time he is arrested for murder, tried by a nearly all white jury, sent to San Quentin's Death Row and then settles into life there. The final book, Behind These Walls, tells of his years in and out of various California jails and prisons through his late teens and twenties and the ways he negotiates all the challenges and the sub-cultures he faces.
-Reverend Christopher Martin
