This is what they cannot tell you to expect: that you’ll return. No, that’s not true. They predict that you will return in handcuffs. Never as it happened on March 4, 2024. That morning, I returned as a poet who would perform for them as if the men inside were a Broadway audience; I returned as someone who’d served time with them, as a lawyer who’d been trained in the cells they knew too well.
I cannot write any of this without weeping. I walked into prison on March 4, 2024 with Kevin Williams, who was sentenced to Life + 33 years. I walked into prison with Marcus Bullock, who was sentenced to 8 years at 15-years-old. The three of us know what it means to wake up for chow call or count time in a Virginia prison.
For seventy-two minutes, I did the best I could to tell a story of how freedom just might begin with a book.
And during the Q&A, a remarkable thing happened. A young man said that in 2008, when he was in the same R cells, the same solitary confinement cells they tossed me into as a sixteen year old, that someone slid my book under his cell door and it was the first he'd read cover to cover.
Someone said to me, as half the people in the prison called me Shahid and the other half called me Dwayne, a friend said: Dwayne, don't take this the wrong way, but you're in your element, which is a way of saying that as much as some people imagine I am celebrated in the world, when I walk into a prison with men who do not know my name, I know that they will know that story and that the story is what will matter because it is the story that is not singular and that ties us to a thing that hums in the air when we walk and that sometimes threatens to suffocate us but more than we know lets us soar.
Case in point, I was in a city that I’m learning to know more by its prisons than its streets. And I am there to sing this song of mine that I’d just sung in a prison. And on that night I am before hundreds of people and I am free and have not braved a single metal detector to sing my song. And still, I am reminded of prison.
A young woman approaches me after I leave the stage. And her smile makes me want to be that happy in the world. I look behind me because of all the things that people do after listening to me read, break out from ear to ear isn’t on the list – or rarely is. But she does. And she tells me a story of a day I walked into a women’s prison just outside of the city that she calls home. I laughed that day, in the face of all the suffering and sorrow because sometimes you should laugh. And I had books. And she remembered the Freedom Library, and we smiled as if we were kin, because that’s what literature might do.
Maybe Camus was right and “the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” Walking back into the place that almost killed me on the day I was supposed to walk away from it all on the same day 19 years ago is the most absolutely free thing I’ve ever done.