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Chapter 25
My Greatest Achievement
After years in prison and solitary confinement, I’d experienced all the
emotions the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections wanted
from me—anger, bitterness, the thirst to see someone suffer the way I was
suffering, the revenge factor, all that. But I also became something they
didn’t want or expect—self-educated. I could lose myself in a book. Reading
was a bright spot for me. Reading was my salvation. Libraries and
universities and schools from all over Louisiana donated books to Angola and
for once, the willful ignorance of the prison administration paid off for us,
because there were a lot of radical books in the prison library: Books we
wouldn’t have been allowed to get through the mail. Books we never could
have afforded to buy. Books we had never heard of. Herman, King, and I first
gravitated to books and authors that dealt with politics and race—George
Jackson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Eldridge
Cleaver’s
Soul on Ice
, J. A. Rogers’s
From “Superman” to Man
. We read
anything we could find on slavery, communism, socialism, Marxism, anti-
imperialism, the African independence movements, and independence
movements from around the world. I would check off these books on the
library order form and never expect to get them until they came. Leaning
against my wall in the cell, sitting on the floor, on my bed, or at my table, I
read.
The inmate librarians took care of these books. Years later I dropped a
lawsuit because one of the prisoners who worked in the library asked me to. I
was suing the prison for censoring a book about COINTELPRO they
wouldn’t let me get through the mail. The prisoner librarian came to the tier
to talk to me. He said he was worried that if the lawsuit went through the
administration would do an inventory of the prison library and we’d lose a lot
of books. He told me he’d make sure I got a copy of the book I wanted, and
he did.
As I started to read more I began to learn about world and American
history: the 1791 slave rebellion in Haiti led by Toussaint Louverture, the
coal miners’ strikes and labor and union movements across the United States,
President Andrew Jackson’s massacre of Native Americans while they were
being removed from their ancestral lands. I did a lot of soul-searching while
reading. The words of the Vietnamese revolutionary communist leader Ho
Chi Minh resonated with me when I read that he told the invading French
army something like, “We are willing to die ten to one, are you?” That got
me at my core, that willingness to sacrifice.
When I read George Jackson’s
Soledad Brother
, I saw how even though
he was fucked around by the system he never used that as an excuse not to
step up. I was on D tier when I read that book in my cell. “The nature of life,”
he wrote, “struggle, permanent revolution; that is the situation we were born
into. There are other peoples on this earth. In denying their existence and
turning inward in our misery and accepting any form of racism we are taking
on the characteristic of our enemy. We are resigning ourselves to defeat. . . .
History sweeps on, we must not let it escape our influence
this time
!!!!”
Malcolm X taught me how to think of the big picture, to connect the dots.
I requested biographies and autobiographies of women and men even if I
didn’t agree with their politics or principles. Studying them helped me
develop my own values and my own code of conduct. King was also a big
reader; we read a lot of the same books and discussed them. He also loved
fiction and literature and read Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and all J. R. R.
Tolkien’s books many times over. We both read everything written by Louis
L’Amour. I loved philosophy, geography, economics, biology, and other
sciences. I could always find something valuable in whatever I read. I even
appreciated books by religious writers like Mother Teresa, though I was not
religious. She wrote that to be real, a sacrifice must hurt, and empty us. I
could relate to that. She wrote that more than our own weaknesses, we must
believe in love.
My proudest achievement in all my years in solitary was teaching a man how
to read. His name was Charles. We called him Goldy because his mouth was
full of gold teeth. He was a few cells down from me on D tier. I could tell he
couldn’t read but was trying to hide it. I knew the signs because my mom did
the same things to hide the fact she couldn’t read. One day I told him about
my mom, about her accomplishments. I told him she couldn’t read or write
and asked him if he could. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” I said. He
told me he never learned to read because he didn’t go to school. “When I was
coming up we didn’t have nothing,” he said. “We had to go and get it.”
“If you want to learn,” I told him, “I can teach you, but it won’t work
unless you really want to learn.” He told me he wanted to learn. We used a
dictionary. I stood in front of his cell on my hour out and he came to my cell
on his hour and we would go through how to read words using the sound key
at the bottom of every page. The upside-down
e
, I told him, sounds like “eh,”
and I went through all those symbols and sounds with him on each word. In
between our two hours a day I told him to call me if he needed help.
“Anytime you can’t get a word, holler, Goldy, no matter what time. Day or
night if you have a question, just ask me.” In the following months he took
me up on that.
“Fox!” he’d yell, at all hours of the night.
“What?” I answered.
“I can’t say this one,” he yelled.
“Spell it out,” I called back to him.
He called out the letters.
“Look at the key at the bottom of the page,” I yelled back. “What do you
think it is?” And we went back and forth like that until he got it. Sometime
later I’d hear, “Hey, Fox!”
“Yeah, Goldy. What?” I’d say.
“What’s this one?” he’d say.
The first time I heard Goldy read a sentence out of a book I told him how
proud I was of all he’d learned. He thanked me and I told him to thank
himself. “Ninety-nine percent of your success was because you really wanted
to read,” I said. Within a year he was reading at a high school level.
The world was now open to him.
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