For years, I let the mistake on Wikipedia remain, the one that says my birthday is February 1st. I’ve grown obsessed with dates and remember reading The Big Sea and the Arnold Rampersand biography of Langston Hughes. Remember the ways that Black history month was both how I connected with history and how I connected myself to history. And I enjoyed the moments I shared with Hughes. Maybe I’ve just wanted to be like my mother, who wrote the first poem I ever read. Her birthday is on February 18th, which is the same day as Toni Morrison’s birthday. And when I learned Toni Morrison’s birthday, while in prison, one of the things that I thought deeply about was the ways in which it is easy to forget that Black history is what happens in your home. And that this, too, is American history.
Freedom Reads, at our best, is everything that those of us who’ve known the inside of a cell understand is necessary to breathe. One of the hardest things that I’ve dealt with, a thing that everybody who has served time in prison maybe has dealt with, is what it means to let the people you care about down. I ask myself what I’ve dealt with in this world. And I think maybe what I’ve not admitted to dealing with is all of the ways that suffering will make you slant the truth. It happens because who wants to be the bad guy? And literature, at its best, reminds us that human potentiality necessarily includes it all. Paradise, my favorite Morrison novel, begins “They shot the white girl first.” I had to read the novel twice to realize it was asking me to contemplate how sometimes your righteousness becomes a bludgeon you smash against another’s head. Had to read it twice to understand it as a caution and a promise. Being somebody of worth is mostly understanding that you can easily ruin your history and those around you.
But what of it? We walk into prisons and commune with people who find freedom between the pages of a book, who experience nature, sometimes for the first time in decades, by touching the handcrafted wooden bookcases that we build less than five miles away from the museum that honors the man who invented the cotton gin, the technology of the north that kept slavery going. And we are also just a few miles from the old Winchester gun factory, where a tool of death became a bridge to the middle class. Everywhere around us are choices that have propelled ruin, and fueled hope. And we always get to decide with which history we want to be hewn.
People, myself included, like to tell me what Freedom Reads is, and the telling, mine included, always misses the point. What we do is build a raft, a dinghy, a vessel with which we might juxtapose all our losses and sorrows and heartache with our joys, or the hope of joys. We create an opportunity for us to create our own vision of today, tomorrow, and whatever passes as history.
My mom is my hero, is the point. The truth is, when I said freedom begins with a book, I was talking about Illusions, that long-ago novel that introduced me to Cessnas and the wild belief that you can imagine something and it becomes real. A friend of mine, Christopher Tunstall, asked me once, and it might have been in February, if he would get out of prison. He was serving life. I said, if you get a GED. I was 20. What did I know? We almost fought that day. But we didn’t. And in subsequent days, we’d almost scuffle with others, as he stepped up to defend me when I was in need. I’m glad we chose to make nonviolence a part of our history. Glad because it allowed me to see my mother that weekend, who I’d not seen in months. Glad to because it meant that in the cell we shared, I kept cracking open those paralegal books. Years later, I got him out on parole. And now that’s evidence, for me, that freedom does begin with a book, evidence that whatever Richard Bach wanted me to believe when he wrote those tales was true enough.
Freedom Reads has always been more than I ever expected it to be. And we can keep making it all true enough, a Freedom Library at a time, this month and every other month. But we need your support. If it helps, call your donation reparations we’re all paying to our tender hearts, the ones that have been broken when we lacked the thing we needed, because it was in some book, just out of reach.