This is what I know about sadness: it frightens people. One day, you wake up and your world feels filled with the second O of sorrow. This is what my friend Sean Thomas Dougherty might say. He is a white man, who works the night shift and writes beautiful poems about being alive in this cruel world. He once wrote a poem about Biggie Smalls that made me believe he was from my neighborhood. And no matter how sad his songs have been, they make me believe there is a world just past suffering. And when I read him, even when he is suffering between those lines, I imagine the writing has given him some of that place that is more heaven than purgatory.
So much of prison is purgatory. Is suffering. Is believing you deserve the worst of it. Maybe that’s why we hide the bits of joy that we experience there. But my time in prison was more than grieving all I’d lost by what I’d allowed myself to become.
And maybe I’m sad because so much of what I have become can be traced to four walls that exerted so much pressure on me. And I know I am more ragged stone than diamond. I once read though that stones, some, are harder to break than a diamond. Jade for instance.
While I’ve often been more jaded than joyful, I do think that I have also been more jade than diamond. Because I have sorrow now, public sorrow, people keep imagining that I am disappearing. But I lived free in prison and returned to try to be a salve to the sorrow of others. And will return again. Because I walked into prison more fragile than a lie and emerged a friend and a poet and a man with a name for every part of my identity I needed to learn to love: Shahid, Young Music, Shy, Jojo Santana, the Rugged Child and others, Eddie Kane, D, Reggie, Reginald, and the names the woman who loves me calls me.
This is all I mean to say: in prison, we have always been more than our sorrow. And our sorrow sometimes has become a sort of portal. It’s like my Elder Afaa had told me of Black men, sometimes suffering is, where pain is the gateway/ toJerusalems, Bodhi trees, places for meditation and howling,/ keeping the weeping heads of gods in their eyes.
And if he is right, with all the weeping I do, the g-ds must love me. And if g-d loves me, he loves everyone I love in prison, as I know that’s where I first learned to utter my own name.
And maybe I have hidden my joy from you - but even Inside it was there, like that time Scoobie made a birthday card for me on my 21st birthday. Everyone signed it and a CO brought it to me. And I knew I was loved. And there was joy in that. And it does not matter that I kept it in my heart alone.
Those days were far harder than these. And maybe the second O of sorrow is the only O in joy.