Blog

During the fall of 2021, I drove down a stretch of highway headed towards MCI-Norfolk, a prison in Massachusetts made famous in part by the years that Malcolm X and other prisoners incarcerated there did their thing on a debate team that battled the likes of Harvard and other elite institutions. I was headed there with my Freedom Reads’ team to open our first Freedom Library. It’s a wondrous thing to do something for the first time, and on that morning, having ridden for two hours in the passenger seat, an open laptop as I wrote about the late Michael K Williams, I struggled with the juxtaposition I’ve lived with since handcuffs first graced my wrists: the possibility and potential of Black men and all the public ways we often die too soon. Williams once told me that his dream was to build a center where young folks who were like he once was, desiring more than the violence and poverty around them, could actively envision better tomorrows and learn dance and acting and what it means to be safe. That is part of my dream for the Freedom Library.

Everyone who has ever been given a state number has a story of a cell door closing. And too often the stories that make it out from behind those closed cell doors are of sorrow. The sorrow of so many become the substance of films and of folklore, of the narratives of men like Malcolm X or Nathan McCall or Petey Greene or Merle Haggard or a half‑a‑dozen men in Bruce Springsteen songs. So many of us with debts no honest man can pay. I think of Susan Burton or Angela Davis or the many women I’ve met as I’ve walked back into prisons, their names less well known, but their struggles no less visceral. And yet, the thing less known than all those stories is how often an open book leads to shifting someone’s life—even for simply the span of time it takes to get from that first page to the last.

Once, I wrote that I met my fathers again. It’s the kind of thing that feels particular to men of my age, who grew up in the wake of the crack epidemic. Some say war on drugs, and I understand this - but it was crack cocaine that left the fathers of my youth’s eyes vacant, from a high of money or the ache of not having it. Inside, I met so many of us, barely older than me or much older, lost inside prisons from all the attendant ways that accumulating weight left us lost: murder, robbery, drug dealing. And inside, when we were sober, no longer fighting over blocks, turning to whatever gave us hope, sometimes, I swear, we saw more possible in each other than Galileo saw in the night sky.

On May 15, the team was in New Jersey at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women for a celebratory day talking about books. The team spread out across the women’s facility – some working with the judges for the Inside Literary Prize, the first major book prize in the United States selected solely by people in prison; some opening more than a dozen Freedom Libraries for those Inside; and, the rest of us helping me prepare to give a poetry reading from my latest poetry collection, Doggerel. We brought the women gifts: the Freedom Edition, a specially published paperback created in partnership with W.W. Norton. See, most prisons do not allow hardback books to enter for safety reasons. The Freedom Edition is a statement of support from my publisher and everyone who donates money that ensures those Inside can read Doggerel at the same time as the rest of us. And quiet as kept, my reading at Edna Mahan was so much joy.

At the end of James Wright’s poem, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” as he writes about noticing the bronze butterfly, a leaf in green shadow, as he writes about the cowbells, and sunlight between two pines, the golden stones that were once horse droppings, as he writes about the chicken hawk, I’m always utterly gobsmacked by his conclusion: I have wasted my life. And it’s such a startling end to the poem that it’s haunted me for a decade. I’m forty-four years old and watched my first sunrise less than a month ago, and now I am no more than a few hours away from when I was lying in a hammock at someone’s farm, staring at a duck with her ducklings that barely rise above the growing grass, and again I am weeping, and exhausted, and willing to admit that I have not wasted my life.

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.

This month, as a team, we returned to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit the Legacy Sites. And on this return, we were bringing our new expanded team. We had folks with us who’d not been permitted to go because of probation issues last year and folks who weren’t on our team then. We had family members with us. And we understood that returning to Montgomery, to the site of so many historic struggles for civil rights, was going to be about the hard work of always rejoicing, even when confronted with sorrow.

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.

I remember my first holiday meal in prison. I’d just turned eighteen-years-old a few weeks before, my second of eight birthdays Inside. I was at Southampton Correctional Center in Capron, Virginia. There are still a lot of folks I remember who would have been in the chow hall that day, some I still talk to. Fats, Star, Divine, Smoke. That dinner, they served Cornish hens. I didn’t know what that was then but knew it was delicious. Later found out these hens are juvenile chickens particularly tender for eating.

Without me knowing it, prison became the center of my life. I have thought about what a prison cell does to a man for more consecutive days than I have contemplated what it means to be a good man, let alone a father. Sometimes, I imagine that prison has become more than a metaphor, but the literal antecedent to every move I make. It’s a lonely place.

I’ve learned that some of us, with these two ears of ours, though parallel and balanced, still hear like owls – with a particular precision. Owls have ears that almost function as longitude and latitude. At forty miles per hour and over three feet of freshly fallen snow, an owl can swoop down and locate the heart pulse of a mole twelve inches buried in white. I am humbled by that necessary focus. And though my brain is scattered as some memories might be, my receptors are finely tuned to decipher, and sometimes only this, complicated text into the reasons I am not loved.

This is what David Foster Wallace says – the only choice we get is what we worship. And for many years, I have worshipped a Janus-Faced G-d. The G-d of Silence and the G-d of Discontent. I've probably worshipped other g-ds as well, maybe we all have. But these days I think a lot about silence and discontent. It's wild, too, in a way, as someone recently said to me, Dwayne, I'm surprised you complain about anything, look at how charmed your life is.