My first day at Freedom Reads, I teared up upon walking through the front door. Greeting me in the middle of the open space, beckoning me to fully step into the wooden warmth decorating the walls and floor was the free-floating Freedom Library, filled to the brim with books familiar and new. I had never been in such close proximity to something so beautiful that I could actually touch. The hundreds of books that sat upon those curving shelves left me speechless, and the bookworm in me who grew up with limited access to books felt genuinely giddy at seeing so many books I could pick out at any time and read.
I felt out of my element, wanting to cry in front of strangers – now my comrades and coworkers – at seeing a Freedom Library. Today, I see my reaction as a natural response to the generative, life-affirming possibility that the Freedom Library symbolizes.
I remember having a conversation once with Dwayne where he asked a question I think about every single day: How do you properly convey what a brand new book means for someone doing 20 years in prison? That question has sat with me since starting here a year ago, and our recent trip to open Freedom Libraries at the California Institution for Men (CIM) challenged me to take that question even further and ask: what do books mean for a soul doing life in prison?
Prisons are worlds unto themselves, and I felt this palpably at CIM. Upon walking into the open yard of the prison, I tried to reconcile the image of a normal field with a track encircling it, the old gravel basketball courts, and even the unassuming groundhog poking its head out of the ground, with the barbed wired and boxy watchtowers encasing us. One of the first people I spoke with that day was Samuel, a kind Samoan man who openly shared part of his story with us. Together we bore the heat of the California sun as a prison code forced everyone wearing the uniform that marked them as prisoners, as ‘other,’ to sit on the ground and not move. So we did what we felt was right and sat down too, in solidarity. The gravel and heat of the ground dug into the palms of my skin as I leaned back on my hands and listened to Samuel share that he was, in fact, on death row along with several others at the facility, with more serving life sentences without parole.
That hurt my heart to hear. I struggled to conceive that someone I was speaking to may never see life beyond prison walls again. My assumption that people would be out eventually, shattered. I grieved beyond the idea of anyone spending the rest of their life in prison. I also despaired about what kind of hope Freedom Reads could offer to someone who may be behind prison walls for the rest of their life.
Yet, cellblock after cellblock, I met with the most grateful, excitable Freedom Library Patrons I’d ever met, with an unbounded joy for reading – to mentally escape, for self-improvement, for feeling seen and heard as more than a prisoner or someone who committed a crime.
I spoke with June about her joy at finally having an opportunity to read Haruki Murakami’s work, of which she’d heard so much about, her love for slice-of-life vignettes, and her enthusiasm for being able to revisit Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God through the Freedom Library; I spoke with Matthew about Elena Ferrante, John Rawls, Cormac McCarthy, and about his pup from the dog training program that lit up his world; I spoke about (and admittedly, preached) Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth to Earl; and I shared countless other sacred moments and life stories about regret, forgiveness, and hope – all because of the books these Freedom Libraries held.
When people think of the Freedom Library, they often think of the beautiful woodwork and the brand new books that line the bookcases. And yes, that’s what initially caused me to almost cry on my first day at Freedom Reads one year ago. Now, though, I cry with joy at all the times I’ve seen and experienced the library and the books housed within serve as a conduit for amazing conversations that give people Inside, and outside, prison walls priceless memories and hope.
So to Matthew, Samuel, June, Javi, Earl, Earnest, Lawrence, and so many others that I met at CIM over the course of three life-changing days, who talked with me about the bookends of life and everything in between:
Thank you for affirming what I know intimately to be true: Freedom begins with a book.