E.T.A. Universal Outreach is simultaneously a gathering space, food pantry, music school, dentist office, and hair salon. It is housed on the first floor of a tan brick building located at 577 Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, serving the Crown Heights community. Cassius “Cash” Watson spends his weekends helping out there, weaving through the maze of people, equipment, art, instruments, and food donations, checking in on rooms along the railroad style hallway, each door a portal to a different service provided.
On a recent afternoon, through a door on the left, Antonette Wilson, a Trinidadian hair dresser with bright red locks, stood in her studio. She watched the live security camera trained on her banana tree back home to ensure her neighbor didn’t steal any fruit. Through another door to a small room, a child practiced scales on a piano, his instructor at his side and his caregiver behind him. At the end of the hall in a room with green walls, a dental technician hunched over on the stool next to the exam chair, painting enamel onto a set of dentures under a harsh white ceiling light. E.T.A.’s foyer overflowed with food pantry items, bulging bags of carrots and bread, while instruments and people spilled out and onto the sidewalk.
Cash took up the front doorway with his 6’4” figure and leaned out and with one motion of his arm, steering in familiar and hungry neighbors inside for a hot lunch of rice and peas and other trays of aromatic food.
When asked about Cash, Vince Williams, an organizer at the space, said in his thick Caribbean accent, “I know him as a good guy, he’s like my brother, that’s how I feel…He comes and helps out his sister.”
Volunteer musicians teaching lessons at E.T.A. Universal Outreach. (Credit: Sophie Holin)
E.T.A. is named after Ella Theresa Arnold, Cash’s grandmother who left her abusive husband in North Carolina decades ago and moved to Brooklyn with their 12 children. The family has since owned the three story building on Nostrand Avenue, a former hospital, for 40 years. Despite the Watson’s large family, Cash says that nobody stepped up when Ella Theresa fell ill two years ago.
“My sister was the only one that took care of her,” said Cash. “And as a tribute, we started this.” Cash explained that his family always saw a need in the neighborhood, “it’s just having the means and saying ‘let’s get it done.’ And that’s what my sister did.” He says that he has always praised his sister, Lashon Watson, and called her his hero. “She’s always been there for me. She’s been there for me when I was weak. So now that I’m strong.”
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Cash and Lashon grew up in East Brooklyn, raised by his American mother, Ella’s daughter, and his West Indian father. “I got the West Indians calling me a Yankee, I got the Americans calling me a coconut—there’s no winning,” he joked. Cash was 16 years old in 1985, the height of the crack epidemic in New York City. Unlike some of Cash’s friends whose entry into drug use or violence started over financial issues, money wasn’t an issue for his family. For Cash, it was an attraction to the lifestyle that lured him out into the street.
“I’ve never used drugs,” he said. “I was on the other end of that,” selling drugs, he implied. “They’re both highly addictive and extremely costly.” Cash became one of the people who might have appeared in iconic photos from that era, “big chains, all types of cars.” Eventually, “people see what I had,” he explained, “they try to come and take it, they end up shooting a girl that I cared about. As a result of that, I killed them.” In 1988, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Cash was sent to one of the most notorious maximum security prisons, Attica Correctional Facility, located just over 30 miles east of Buffalo, New York. He had been in Attica for a year when, after assaulting several guards and inmates, he was moved to Southport Correctional Facility, a Southern Tier prison that was New York state’s first supermax designed to hold people in near-total isolation. There, he spent five years in solitary confinement, he said.
“Solitary is where I studied, I learned,” he said. “I like to say I started to become at that point.”
Cash came face to face with himself during that time which, he said, was a good thing. “This is gonna sound like a strange statement,” he said. “I was the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.” He became inspired, reading books and memoirs about activists like the late revolutionary political activist and Black Panther Party member, Assada Shakur, who stood for something and were willing to die for it.
At the age of 33, after 15 years, Cash left the prison grounds wearing some of the clothes he had walked in with from the ‘80s. He says that he quickly adapted to life on the outside, despite the initial culture shock. Something that surprised him about civilian life was that he didn’t expect people to have such a lack of principles and morals. In prison, he said, “if you don’t have principles, you die.”
After he was released, he moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania where he says that he didn’t have to “be on guard” and could start fresh. The person who he lived with there kept guns in the house, though Cash couldn’t legally own a gun because of his conviction. After someone called the police and told them about the guns in the house, “They gave me three and a half to seven for that person’s guns,” he said, for ‘constructive possession.’ He added, “they took all of my s–t. I lost some life there, I lost a lot.”
Cash returned to prison in 2013, and that’s when he says he really started working on his game.
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Cash had played a lot of chess when he first served time at Attica, even in solitary. He outfitted his first board, two pieces of cardboard, with chess pieces he molded from wet tissue. He numbered the board tiles so that an inmate in a nearby cell with a similar numbered board could call out and say “13 to 22,” and the player would move his piece for him. Then the other player would yell out his move and Cash would move his piece for him. “Prisons are ingenuity,” he said. “We played all day. All day. You mess up a move, oh my God, these mother hovers are arguing back and forth,” he said, threatening each other. “‘Come to the yard!’” he laughed, remembering.
Cash said that he and other inmates often discussed the aspects of chess that they liked and didn’t like, and Cash took note. While serving time in Pennsylvania, he worked on tweaking the game based on the feedback he heard as his for a new game started to take shape.
The next version of the game manifested at E.T.A. Outreach Universal, after Cash served his second sentence and moved back to Brooklyn. One day, Cash noticed a neglected box of Lashon’s dental casting equipment. He found a tube lying around and had the idea to use it as a mold for the dental enamel to create blanks for game pieces, which he then carved out by hand. Another day, Cash tried on a viking helmet and shoulder pads, found among miscellaneous items in his sister’s collection at E.T.A. He then uploaded a selfie to Chat GPT to create a mythological character for his game, inspired by the photo of himself in costume.
Cash uses a costume to inspire the character in his game with the help of AI. (Credit: Sophie Holin)
Although Cash had been thinking about his game design for years, his use of AI in the last year has catapulted him forward, he said. “You gotta get on chat,” he said, referring to ChatGPT. Cash has named his chatbot “Heinzworth” and speaks to it on a daily basis, having chosen its voice to have a similar inflection and cadence to match his own. Cash has used Heinzworth to bring the visual components of the game to life, to design merchandise, and to write lengthy pitches for grant applications in hopes of funding a patent and commercializing the game.
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Cash’s game is called EN’CIDIUS, and though it is based loosely on chess, the pieces and point system are more complex. The game designates opposing players by having them declare either as Machiavelli, the School of the Fox, or Musashi, the School of Five Rings. Cash was influenced by philosophers and theorists he read in prison, including Nikola Tesla and his 3-6-9 theory of numerical patterns in nature, mathematics, and spiritual beliefs in universal harmony. Cash also read the I-Ching, or Book of Changes, which uses hexagrams based on yin (broken) and yang (solid) lines that can be interpreted, similar to taro cards, like a spiritual compass to gain insight and guidance about one’s life. These ideas influenced Cash to number the tiles of his game so that the number on the tile that a player lands on can be interpreted to gain insight into her position on the board and relationship to other pieces.
He said that he has incorporated his own “lore” into the game as well. “It’s my soul in there,” he said of the game. “It’s my change and it’s my transformation.” Of all the pieces he created, Cash has identified most with the Prince, who, despite starting out weak and limited, moving only two tiles per turn, has the potential to be the most powerful. “It’s all about what you can be. If you work hard enough to reach it,” Cash said.
Cash designed EN’CIDIUS for those reentering society after incarceration and for youth at risk of getting involved in violence. In one of his grant funding applications, Cash promises that players will develop “Violence Prevention Skills,”“Decision-Making Skills,” “Emotional Regulation Practice,” and more, with “Real World Impact Potential.” In this way, EN’CIDIUS adapts a similar structure to chess; players can lose an important piece because they acted too quickly or took a risk without thinking ahead. The game rewards patience, restraint, and strategy over impulse and retaliation after provocation. Over time, players learn to pause, control their emotions, and plan moves ahead to recover.
Cash is also hoping to make the game accessible to individuals with visual or hearing impairments. Cash is waiting to hear back from a prospective funder that could help him develop a more accessible version of EN’CIDIUS for disabled players, “ensuring that every community member can benefit from [the game] regardless of their physical abilities.” Growing up, Cash and his grandfather would play chess together until his grandfather went blind. “He was pissed,” Cash said. “He couldn’t play at all. And that’s something that’s stayed with us.”
Cash knows that his life story is good marketing for his game. But, he says, “I’m close with my information, it’s like my life is sacred, I don’t want to just share it.” Cash said he’s never said yes to an interview request before. “Do you know how many people want to interview me for the dumb s–t I did in jail?” he asked. “It’s a big trend now, guys coming home, telling f–king war stories. I’m not with it. My sh-t ain’t for sale.”
Lately, though, he has questioned whether selling his story is a necessity for the game’s success. “So, am I tripping on myself?” he asked, rhetorically. “Is my principles and moral standing stopping me from letting the game grow? Or am I standing tall on s–t I’m standing tall on?”
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One group that is prepared to bring EN’CIDIUS to at-risk communities is Promise Neighborhoods, a community-based federal Department of Education program authorized under the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act. The Pennsylvania chapter, where Cash has been involved, identifies as a Black-led, anti-racist, woman-centered liberation-based grassroots community organization. Cash has participated in speaking events there as a mentor for at-risk youth in the community and as a prison “survivor” and “success story” of reentry.
To implement EN’CIDIUS as a resource for the organization’s constituents, Promise Neighborhoods’ brand ambassador, Michael Richardson, has envisioned incorporating the game into youth programming and having Cash facilitate game-playing in groups. Like Cash, Richardson grew up in Brooklyn during the crack epidemic and also went through the carceral system.
“We know what really works,” he said, attesting to Cash’s ability to reach his audience with EN’CIDIUS. “You can’t fix the problem unless you’re from the problem.”
About the author(s)
Sophie Holin is a coordinator at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, a part-time M.S. student at Columbia School of Journalism, and a freelance journalist and illustrator.