Ben Cleeton

Visual Storytelling

“I will not go back to Wood Ave. I will not go back to Wood Ave. I will not go back to Wood Ave,” Morrice Harper wrote three times in his ASAT (Alcohol Substance Abuse Training) case plan for relapse triggers. “Wood Ave in Syracuse was my downfall, I grew up there,” he said. Despite his fervor, fate had something else planned. Upon release from Groveland Correctional Facility Morrice moved back to Wood Ave. “It’s funny because now I live on Wood Ave in a whole new city.”

Morrice was born in Syracuse to Olynthia Ann Harper. “I tattooed my mother’s name on my neck. I don’t even remember my mother, but I know if I have a little girl she gonna look just like her.” Olynthia gave her son the nickname “Mann” because of the scowl he had as a baby. The name stuck—to family he is “Mann.”

Olynthia disappeared after dropping Morrice and his sister off at a friend’s house in 1985. Morrice was 18-months-old. Her case remains unsolved. Mann was taken up by a series of strong women—his great grandmother Olivia Hunter, his grandmother Louise “Nanny” Solomon, his aunt Elizabeth Hunter, and finally his sister Walika McArthur. “The women in this family made me tough,” he said. Mann bounced around households—after one loved one passed he moved onto living with the next.

Morrice grew up on “Benz Block,” consisting of three streets, Borden, Beard, and Wood Ave, on Syracuse’s South Side where he built a reputation selling drugs. After getting kicked out of Walika’s house for being a poor example to his nieces he opened up a “lab” or drug house on the same block. Morrice earned a new nickname—known in the streets as “Moschino” or “Schino” for short after the luxury Italian fashion line referenced by The Notorious B.I.G. in the song Hypnotize: “I put hoes in NY onto DKNY. Miami, D.C. prefer Versace. All the Philly hoes go with Moschino.”

Schino’s time on the streets was short lived: “I wasn’t even thinking about being shot, stabbed, pistol-whipped. Shit, after being shot I was back on the block the next day.” A series of drug-related arrests starting at age seventeen meant being in and out of prison and lastly, a nine-year sentence for a gang-assault charge that left one person dead.

A study by the U.S. Department of Justice on recidivism finds that five in six state prisoners were arrested at least once during a nine-year period following release (Bureau of Justice Statistics) Morrice is committed to being the 17% that are not. “I’m not going to make a conscious decision that’s going to land me in prison this time. I know I’m belligerent, I know I’m compulsive, but I’ve learned to work on it. I use Oriana, Walika, Ma’Khi, and Jasana as motivation.” Morrice recognized the hardship of incarceration on his family when his niece, Oriana Kyles, wrote a poem about him titled “Miss it (Locked Down).”

Recognizing the selfishness of his actions, he decided not only to change for himself but also for his loved ones. “You see your younger generation, your family kids, grow up their pictures. I just care now. Before I didn’t. I’d rather struggle out here if I got to struggle. In there you become a dependent, a dependent on those that care for you. You on everyone else’s time. You not on your own time. I’m just lucky that my people love me in that they ain’t shut me out. I have a chance to be a man. I haven’t been my whole life.”

The day Morrice was released from Groveland Correctional Facility Oriana drove him eleven hours through the night from Syracuse to her mother’s house on Wood Ave in Kannapolis, North Carolina. Family gathered to celebrate his homecoming: “I was happy to have family I hadn’t seen in forever come see me, but I don’t ever want them to come celebrate my return home again. I’m not worried—I’ve got a village with me.”