I tell people: several days after the Freedom Reads team opened three Freedom Libraries at Otisville Correctional Facility in late August, I was still unable to let go of how much of a wonder it was.
Every time we open a Library, I think of what it means to have walked out of a prison. And what it means to have done so without a heart overcome with heaviness. Imagine walking into a prison with burdens and leaving believing that there is something possible in this world.
Every drive to a prison costs something. I knew that I’d asked my friends and colleagues, some of whom were entering a prison for the first time, to endure challenging moments or to be reminded of worse. Prisons are filled with trauma. And yet, prisons are filled with people wanting more from this world than suffering. And that’s why we were going inside.
And when we go inside, we know that we are visiting men and women who are dealing with a multitude of things: their sorrows, their cares, time, and when they’re lucky, some joys that we might not imagine exist there. We walk into prisons hoping to add a thousand stories to that joy.
So we brought books and cherry shelves to a New York prison. A guy said to us, as he opened the boxes: “y’all have Standing At the Scratch Line, I’ve read that. Y’all have good books in here.” Another said: “I stayed back just to get a first glimpse.” I overheard a correctional officer, talking about the Freedom Library he’d help affix to the floor, say to a colleague: "my G-d the wood is beautiful." What does it mean to bring something beautiful into a prison?
After that, we went to the prison’s gym where I would take a stage and perform the first full run of FELON: An American Washi Tale for men inside, riffing in poetry and story about what it means to transform from a convict in the hole to a father explaining what it means to have been in that hole.
And what’s powerful is this email we got from Corey Arthur, one of the men incarcerated at Otisville who consistently has something thoughtful to say to the writers there. He has skills as a writer, and he isn’t cutting anyone slack. Freedom Reads is about a lot of things. But at the bottom, it is about this interaction with Corey, which references the show – a near 90 minute run of me revealing bits of this story that the men inside understand, with the men a part of the same audience that included the warden, the commissioner, the deputy commissioner, other wardens, and captains and correctional officers, all sharing the same moments and sometimes the same laughter or astonishment.
It was a good day. And these good days remind us of how important the financial support we receive to make this happen is. Freedom begins with a book.