Letter to an inmate


LETTER TO AN INMATE IN NEW ORLEANS



                                                                                                                                                August 18, 2018

Dear Mr.___________,



                The older I become, the more receptive I am to believing that life is a matter of simplexity:  complex questions that beget simple answers or responses.  I accept the limits of our human minds.  I reject, however, the notion that our human will should become, to quote Langston Hughes, a raisin in the sun.  We are not immune to periods of depression.  We can't avoid them.  We can defeat extreme depression through prayers to a Supreme Being and by discovering and exercising our talents, by rejecting platitudes about hope and dreams and taking actions that enable us to overcome the absurdity of life!



                You ask what you are "going to do with a GED at the age of seventy five (75)?"  You will write! You will do what George Jackson (September 23, 1941-August 21, 1971) did in creating Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970) and Blood in My Eye (1972), books that situate his revolutionary life in a history of American literature.  Your life will only be a void if you make it one.  Oh, hell no!  You will write.



Sincerely,



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

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