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NY Times, Mar. 4 2016
Review: Memoirs From Two Eras Testify to Prison’s Corrosive Effect
Books of The Times
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Writing My Wrongs
Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison
By Shaka Senghor
268 pages. Convergent Books. $26.
The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict
By Austin Reed. Edited by Caleb Smith.
Illustrated. 270 pages. Random House. $30.
Two newly published prison memoirs — one contemporary, the other written
in the late 1850s — provide harrowing portraits of life behind bars.
They also speak to the personal consequences of what is today an
epidemic of mass incarceration: America has the largest prison
population in the world, and one in 35 African-American men are in prison.
“The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict” is a memoir by Austin
Reed, a free black man, born in the 1820s in upstate New York,
chronicling his years at the New York House of Refuge, an early juvenile
reformatory, and at the Auburn State Prison. The manuscript was found
several years ago at an estate sale in Rochester, and was later
identified by scholars at Yale working with the university’s Beinecke
Rare Book & Manuscript Library as the first known prison memoir by an
African-American.
Mr. Reed writes in an utterly idiosyncratic pastiche of styles and
genres — part confession, part jeremiad, part lamentation, part
picaresque novel (reminiscent, at times, of Dickens and Defoe). But his
story also reads like a bookend to “Writing My Wrongs,” a gritty,
visceral memoir by Shaka Senghor, a Detroit drug dealer in the 1980s,
who pleaded guilty to second degree murder in 1991 and served 19 years
in prison, seven of them in solitary confinement.
Both men knew a measure of security in their early childhoods, which was
shattered by family upheavals. After his father died, the young Mr. Reed
was indentured, at the age of 8 or 10, to a white farmer, who tied him
up “like a slave” and whipped him, and he soon ended up at the “Refuge,”
where boys were so severely beaten with a cat-o’-nine-tails that their
backs were shredded into coats of “red stripes.”
Mr. Senghor had once dreamed of becoming a doctor, but after his parents
separated and his mother began beating him, he left home and fell in
with crack dealers. After being shot himself, he took to carrying a gun,
and one night, shot and killed a man whom he felt threatened by.
In their books, both Mr. Senghor and Mr. Reed recount the horrors and
humiliations they experienced in unblinking detail, conveying not just
physical abuse (which in Mr. Reed’s case included a form of
waterboarding administered by prison officials) but also the
psychological fallout that left them filled with rage and fear.
What helped sustain both men was writing, which provided a means of
regaining a measure of control over their lives. Writing enabled Mr.
Reed to document his defiance, and to leave future readers a record of
the early days of a prison system that would bridge the era of slavery
and our own age of mass incarceration. His book chronicles his
dehumanizing treatment in two penal institutions in antebellum America
and, at the same time, it looks forward to 20th-century prison writings
like “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and George Jackson’s “Soledad
Brother,” which, in turn, would help inspire Mr. Senghor’s book and the
poet Reginald Dwayne Betts’s fierce 2009 memoir, “A Question of Freedom.”
In Mr. Senghor’s case, writing helped him atone for his wrongs — and the
life he had taken. It also provided a respite from the harsh day-to-day
realities of his cell. “With a pencil and a piece of paper,” he recalls,
“it was almost like I could travel outside of prison and go wherever I
desired. I could stand on the corner in my neighborhood, and no one
could stop me. I could drive down the freeway to see my ex-girlfriend in
Ohio, and the bars and wired fences couldn’t hold me back. Writing was
freedom, so I wrote till my fingers were sore.”
Reading, too, became a refuge: Alex Haley’s “Roots,” Stephen King
novels, Malcolm X’s autobiography, the Bible, the Quran, revolutionary
works by George Jackson and Assata Shakur, and books on African history.
When books arrived from the prison library, he says, it felt as if
“Santa Claus had just come sliding down the chimney,” and he began
taking part in study groups with other prisoners to discuss what they’d
read.
Such literary pursuits belie the brutality of prison life. Mr. Senghor
writes that during his first six weeks at the Wayne County Jail, he
witnessed “everything from rape and robbery to murder,” and that life
behind bars was defined by violence — “oppressed against oppressor,
predator against prey.” Just as Darwinian rules of survival held sway on
the streets during the crack epidemic, so “the law of the jungle”
prevailed in prison.
“If you and another male exchanged glances,” he writes, “you’d better be
up to the challenge, or you would be considered weak. And in our world,
the weak became prey.” Even ball games in the yard could be deadly: “It
was common for inmates to play basketball with a shank in the sole of
their shoes. A hard foul could lead to a stabbing or, worse, a riot.”
Writing and studying provided Mr. Senghor with a refuge from the chaos
of prison and a growing awareness that he wanted to turn his life
around. It was a resolution galvanized by his correspondence with the
godmother of the man he had killed, who told him she forgave him, and by
a letter from his 10-year-old son, Li’l Jay, who had learned that his
father was in prison for murder. “It’s the anger in my heart that hurts
me the most without a dad in the house,” Li’l Jay wrote. “My mama said I
am the man of the house. She tells me I have to take over the anger so I
won’t be in jail.”
Mr. Senghor was released from prison on June 22, 2010, the day after his
38th birthday, and after a series of part-time writing jobs, he started
a mentoring program for at-risk youth. He delivered a TED Talk, and
eventually received fellowships with the M.I.T. Media Lab and the W. K.
Kellogg Foundation.
Mr. Senghor writes about the process of atonement and the possibility of
redemption, and talks of his efforts to work for prison reforms that
might turn a system designed to warehouse into one aimed at
rehabilitation. The ending of Mr. Reed’s story is murkier: He was
released from prison in May 1863, and may have been arrested again.
The story Mr. Reed tells is one of being broken, his youthful hopes of
self-betterment whipped out of him and drowned in the shower baths.
“When I first entered this prison in the days of my boyhood,” he writes,
“the cheerful respects and good manners bloomed and shined in my face
like a midsummer’s day,” but, he goes on, “these hard and cruel hearted
tyrants” have “taken my education, my good reason which God had given
me, all away, and made me to become the harden convict of a gloomy
prison” where “all is dark, cold, chilly, and dismal.”
Though Mr. Reed’s book suggests he found some solace in the act of
writing, it is also a chilling reminder to the reader of the roots of an
American prison system that has grown no more humane and grown so
exponentially that it now houses a startling 2.2 million people, taking
a devastating toll on the country’s poorest and least educated, and
wreaking further desolation on entire families and neighborhoods.
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