Dear Reader,
Prison teaches you what it means to be alone and what it means to lean on people who care about you. Inside, we built bonds over fleeting moments, breaking bread over meals, turning books we read into opportunities to see each other more clearly. And we stayed inventing a language of hope: calling letters kites, calling studying doing the math, remembering that one day you’d only have one day and a wake up left. When my confession announced me a convict, when the judge pronounced my sentence, I walked into a cell and called myself a writer. Sometimes it’s just a word that you hold onto until it becomes freedom.
One of my favorite words is fabulist, which sounds so much like fable and means a person who composes or relates fables; but, maybe, more accurately for the present fable-less times that we live in, the word also means a liar, especially a person who invents elaborate stories. But there is dishonesty and there is invention. What’s more dishonest than the story that any of us, when we walked into those cells as teenagers were ever destined to be only a thug, a punk, dangerous, callous, violent, a threat in our very heartbeat? Because if it were true, how would we grow more than sorrow and despair in these wastelands we call prisons? I digress. In the dictionary, they’ll give you a sentence to explain what a word means. I love what the Oxford English Dictionary says of a man who is a fabulist: a born fabulist, with an imagination unfettered by the laws of logic and probability. Ask me who I am, and I tell you that, if I’m honest.
Jimmy, one of my colleagues here at Freedom Reads, who has his own story to tell, once said something to me that has become one of the things I carry. Because I already have debts no honest man can pay, I don’t like owing people or being thanked. For anything. But Jimmy tells me accepting thanks is a way to remember you are not invisible in this world, that you are seen. And the giving of thanks is a way of telling another human that you see them. I’ve spent too much of my life ducking thanks, fearing the responsibility that comes with announcing I will not disappear to be safe, to be respected, to be loved.
The last 12 months have been a journey. A geography where everything juxtaposes with everything else. From last March 4th to this March 4th, from doing my solo show, the story of my life, Felon: An American Washi Tale, at Dillwyn Correctional Center to doing it Off-Broadway at New York’s Perelman Art Center, it’s been one that has found me needing people more than I ever have. And I have not thanked anyone enough.
My show, Felon: An American Washi Tale, is about chasing freedom. I tell the stories of my folks, those who I’ve already helped secure their release, and those whose release we’re still fighting to secure. And in the wake of this March 4th, confronting my own terror at saying the improbable again, risking courting the failure that you cannot help but to court when you court forgiveness and mercy, I’m going to say what my man Fats once wrote to me while he was still in prison, before he got his part: I realize, all these years prison ain’t still undefeated, and one of these days we gonna find us some free. And I write that for people who walked the same yards with me and Fats when he had 53 years in a state with no parole, when Star had a football number, when Luke had life. I recall his words days after the parole packets we filed for Divine, Jermaine, lil Ronnie, again failed to secure their freedom. Y’all getting out. My commitment, with this kite, is to hold on to the thought of your freedom whenever depression, stress, anxiety, frustration, the way my mind sometimes turns on itself threatens. That’s the hope that I’m a let buoy me – because one time, some dudes doing life called me and said Shahid, I need your help. And I called others and asked them for help, and what felt impossible wasn’t just possible – but became a reality.
Why do I believe this? A month before I walked into Dillwyn to do my solo show, when I was reeling and down down bad from what happens to you sometimes in this life, Jermaine Bell called me and apologized to me, as if it was his fault that each time I walk into a parole meeting hoping his freedom is on the other end I failed. And I’d been weeping enough those days and these days too for all of us. And he ain’t know how much I needed to hear him tell me these losses weren’t on me. And you know, when we walked into Dillwyn on March 4th, 2024, Luke was with us. Luke, who once told officers if I went to the hole over my desire to read a book, he’d go to the hole too. Ab was doing his bid there, who I’ve known for years. Who I’ve also failed to get out of prison. He has been walking the yard all these years since I left. And he walked with me as we opened Freedom Libraries in each of those cellblocks. We walked around the prison with the warden and staff and the support of an entire prison who, for those moments, organized themselves around the notion that freedom begins with a book.
This year I did my solo show, Felon: An American Washi Tale, before a sold-out audience in New York. It was glorious. It was lovely. It was the way I wish I were able to perform the show in a prison. With lights and a stage and all the pomp and circumstance. But mostly, I wish that the names I called out had been there to see it. All the names. One day they will. Because it is a choice to be lonely, after all. And maybe the singular decision behind the choice to be lonely is to believe that you are alone. I was never alone in prison. Maybe that’s why I remember everyone’s name. Maybe that’s why if we bonded for a minute or hours or for whatever we measure forever as, if we did that, and you ask me to help you, I do my best. I know the act of putting one foot ahead of the next is its own prayer I believe it is. These days I have found the strength to turn a line of a poem into a way to live a life. This is what I believe. I weep because I have finally learned, in this forty-fifth year of my life, that nothing grows without weeping, not even joy.
Again, thanks folks,
Shahid