Be it handball, cards, or dominoes, “keeping tally” is one of those everyday prison parlance references you’ll hear spoken aloud anytime somebody needs to keep score—it’s as common as “top of the morning.” During a recent evening trek across the expanse of the big yard as I traveled back to the cell following the close of the weekly creative arts gathering I facilitate at Valley State Prison, I couldn’t help but reflect upon the degrees of separation between the many tentacles by which the arts and humanities were shaping my human aquarium thanks to the Andrew Mellon Foundation. I was keeping tally.
When we pass around to our Barz Behind Bars (B3) Creative Writing Spoken Word Performance Art Workshop cohorts the curated packet of writing prompts that bundle Sojourner Truth’s 1851 Ohio Women’s Convention speech “Ain’t I a Woman?,” Fannie Lou Hamer’s 1964 “Mississippi Freedom Party speech at the DNC,” Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “To Prisoners,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2020 House of Representatives floor speech “I Am Also Someone’s Daughter” and Elizabeth Alexander’s essay “The Trayvon Generation,” an instrumental version of Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” album always fills that room with sound.
Elizabeth’s influence on carceral life has become especially evident on-the-ground since she began steering the foundation’s resources toward programs that confront the drivers of mass incarceration and restore equity of access to the arts and humanities for justice-impacted populations like mine. We group these contributions to the canon of marginalized experience in order to inject empathy into a room hijacked by a very specific form of toxic masculinity, ego fragility and moral indifference. Unabashedly, we play the mother card – because it works.
Consider this as much a thank you letter to Mellon as an essay.
One at a time, five of our facilitators stand up, step into the circle and perform Gwendolyn’s piece, followed by a series of poetic variations of the speeches by Sojourn, Fannie and AOC as well as the article by Elizabeth. We invent no copy; rather, we confine ourselves to the four corners of the speech or essay as authored and remix it to present a non-rhyming poem that reinterprets the larger work for our younger peers. For many of the BIPOC youth offenders in the room this is the first time they’ve seen non-rhyming spoken word poetry performed live in prison—or anywhere.
We then open a discussion that deconstructs the packet, looks at the lives of these women and pivots into a deeper examination of how poetry might become a tool by which to interrogate history, question politics and confront power using music. It’s an important demonstration of how critical reading and creative rewriting can onboard community engagement and prompt a nuanced interest in history through the lens of social justice.
I usually deliver Gwendolyn’s piece myself because I’m just greedy like that. It’s one of the all-time dopest assemblages of cinematic and visceral imagery about our confined circumstance that any spoken word purist could ever hope to harness in order to introduce legit non-rhyming poetry to a room filled with young off-the-porch hoodstars who have been indoctrinated by popular soundscapes dominated by confining last word anchors that always rhyme. Harvard’s Elisa New did it justice in her Poetry Foundation-funded Poetry In America series.
This time I decided to let my peers inhabit that work and opted instead to offer my strip-mined take on Elizabeth’s essay owing to how she wrote as a mom as much as she did an academic by calling out to the young BIPOC souls assembled in the room in a way not dissimilar to Gwendolyn’s call to prisoners. Our workshop participants are the Trayvon Generation. Her essay’s word play was daring somebody to flip it into a throat-grab.
The more I began to surf EBSCO using my Dell laptop to hunt for insights into who this woman was beyond the poet that killed it at Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration, the more I came to revere the awesome totality of just how thoroughly her unseen hand was using a massive philanthropy to position a series of concentric circles of agency: rare instruments, scarce resources and people-powered modalities, all within the reach of an otherwise contemporary version of a forgotten generation reminiscent of those left bastardized by the Reagan era.
If prison is a crime scene then label me a CSI because the more I looked for it, the more I started finding evidence of Mellon in everything that made life matter around here. Repeatedly, I discovered the fingerprints belonging to a Princeton mother from Chicago doing everything she can to distribute the tools needed to inspire and capture those “creative emergences” born of a “changing same.”
Mellon’s Imagining Freedom delivered Reginald ‘call-me-Dwayne’ Betts into our prison along with the many rich but otherwise marginalized testimonies living within the eighteen Freedom Libraries that now statue the entryway of every dayroom our 3,500 captive residents pass through. Those books have absolutely reset my community’s language and become the very DNA of our workshop’s curriculum now deployed by the nonprofit Ben Free Project at eleven prisons pushing against our state’s 38% rate of functional illiteracy that has left behind nearly 40,000 of California’s imprisoned adults who sit on the shelf without a high school diploma or GED.
3,500 different flowers—our sisters—rooted and caged in a dark garden across the street at Central California Women’s Facility are about to receive the same gift when Dwayne lands there in September. If only our respective roots could extend beneath the roadway that separates us, we might creatively commune as a collective. One can always imagine such a freedom.
Randall Horton, the two-time American Book Award-winning poet and Freedom Reads Literary Ambassador now tethered to our workshop as a mentor hovers over our community like a protective dragon breathing his Radical Reversal fire upon the dead weight of limited possibility. His is a guiding talon that carves into the concrete a path that points towards those sorts of workshop verticals that harness technology and pray for the publishing, anthology, podcast and documentary filmmaking rope ladders that might climb our testimonies over the wall and house them throughout society as a series of digital humanities installations and university archives.
Randall’s wingspan envelopes us vis-à-vis Dwayne, vis-à-vis Mellon.
Dwayne, Randall and many others like Mitch Jackson and John L. Lennon who have stood for count speak to us through PEN America’s “The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting A Writer’s Life In Prison” writing guide, edited by Caits Meissner and made available to our community free of charge thanks to support from Mellon. So too has Mellon made PEN’s printed annual Prison Writing Awards Anthology available to our people, allowing us a portal through which to speak to one another about this thing called prison and the many things it takes by moving our testimonies over, under and through the many liberty-killing barriers erected to keep us in the margin. Between the Freedom Library and PEN’s offerings, Mellon has handed more than 90,000 of us in California a lasting mental diet that shames the dated, sterile and culturally irrelevant material that gets chosen for us by distant gargoyles officed within the state’s capital who’ve never included stakeholders in conversations about what passes for literature idling on our facility library shelves.
Absent Dwayne’s microlibrary, there is no Black literature here – no Ibram X. Kendi, no Jason Reynolds, no John Murillo – and nobody is recreating any of Titus Kaphar’s paintings on any murals either.
A few of us who initially struggled to stay afloat in our Research Methods college course owe our ability to have kept our honors society GPAs above water to a quiet but razor sharp brother who transferred here after having participated in California State University, Los Angeles’ Mellon-funded bachelor’s degree program while housed at Lancaster State Prison and tutored a group of us on the strength. The benefits of these enabling gifts don’t die in the room – they migrate with the humans traveling through the carceral state who aggregate these teachable moment life lesson insights to others. Its pollination.
Countless journal essays, research papers and histories published in periodicals funded by Mellon or authored by Mellon fellows who owe their scholarship capacity to a Mellon grant live within the EBSCO enclave for us to access and become nourished by. My guy Adamu made a documentary film while serving a life sentence at San Quentin that won the San Francisco International Film Festival made possible by his Mellon fellowship at Stanford. The spider web of varying intersections would get pretty crazy if I had to try and diagram them all.
How do you say “thank you” to the far-off stranger setting bottles of hope assail in your direction?
Ours is an obligation that seeks to use these gifts to honor the very real and immovable duty to nurture empathy among those who have been tattooed by naysayers as the “dangerous few” and thus deemed as irredeemable as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, her husband and others said we were when “super predator” was the more sexy way to smut all of us up as being unworthy of that village Hillary said it took to raise us. We lean into that action work while surviving the very cauldron of dehumanization that seeks to impose civil death upon those of us still in the midst of our becoming. Programmatics alone don’t change circumstances – people do. A library is merely wood formed as paper shelved in wood until we form a community around it and breathe life into each and every iteration of those twenty-six letters.
No matter how many of us walk the beach hoping our footsteps mark the sand for others to imprint upon, there is always a carceral tide ready to wash away the evidence of our travel.
We can’t just read, listen to poems, consume films and remain the stiff-armed, unheard from and esoteric subject matter of the carceral studies discipline without becoming an active participant in those discussions. We have to transcend and convey in a meaningful way, even if we haven’t earned a seat next to the paragons who gatekeep such spaces. As much as this is a human zoo to be sure, we are not animals who lack the ability to speak, nor must we settle for being muzzled until we parole and get into grad school before we qualify to participate in conversations about our lived experience. We must craft, record, preserve and display our ethnographs—now—in order to become witnesses who write, speak, paint and perform our historical record.
War and prison made Etheridge—but Gwendolyn made Etheridge matter. Without her descending hand in ’68 there might not have been a Pulitzer in ’73.
In so many words, A. Van Jordan said poets write the history books. Nobody here would dare claim to be worthy of a Gwendolyn co-sign or a Norton blessing – we’re not asking for a literary gimmie here. That said, there is however, an activation void persisting in the chasm between those who hold the enabling power of distribution and those of us swimming motherless in the womb of a beast that never intends for us to be born again. A most definitive carceral rhyme book of verses is crouched in the corner of every prison’s dojo awaiting discovery by a literary archeologist who likely won’t ever come looking for it. Ours is a buried treasure begging to be unearthed and rocked live and out loud in unapologetic living color.
Civil death will lurk like a buzzard until somebody murders the scarecrow.
Most importantly, stakeholders engaging with free world persons in conversations about possibility and centering those exchanges in places our community can consume them is an active step that can frame us as being worthy of that engagement in the eyes, minds and hearts of our youngest residents. Therein lies the imprinting power – it’s an enabling construct of us becoming the very freedom we imagine, though too few have thought experimented what that sort of normalization might look like if scaled.
We have.
Kendrick warns us to “Sit down. Be humble.” We ask that those of you who make a living writing, speaking and teaching about us to perhaps consider “looking down” for a moment. You might notice that while you were talking about, over and past us, you were doing so without us. Sooner or later, if those who aren’t truly justice-impacted and never stood for count don’t enable our participation, they become part of the dead weight problem that stands between us and the full-throated normalization of our participatory agency. We aren’t formerly incarcerated – we’re currently confined. We require a special sort of jet fuel to fly through rare air.
Does anybody really believe there are no redeeming exemplars of art trapped in the captive bodies standing in the shadow of a gun tower? Does anybody think that those of us who have been ripped from the soil and born convicted have nothing to offer humanity except the number they swapped out for our names and used to securitize and commodify our value on Wall Street? Does anybody who understands the power of art really think that we don’t?
Wherever you are when this reaches you Elizabeth, please know that some of us are quietly building a future we readily imagine using the many gifts you have already sent our way. Yours is a uniquely humane concern for those of us not of your family, but orphaned and re-mothered by the surrogacy of your “very keen eye” just the same. We see you. We thank you. We cherish these gifts and promise to take care of the rudder of our tiny boat – we’re attaching sails! Books. Music. Art. Poetry. Journalism. It’s all historical record. We’re authoring it, one bar, verse and article at a time.
One day we hope to get to write a chapter with you.
For those who still can’t imagine the freedom we’re talking about, please check the byline playing tag with 2.2M readers standing on the Vanguard digital sandbar.
That’s us whispering through the void a collective silent scream: “we are alive and looking back at you.”
To discover more about the Mellon Foundation’s Imagining Freedom initiative, visit www.mellon.org
