Literacy as a tool to combat incarceration

LITERACY AS A TOOL TO COMBAT INCARCERATION

Each mouth can liberate its own story.

One of the adult prisoners at Orleans Justice Center (OJC) whom I'd been helping to prepare to take the HiSet Exam in order to earn his high school equivalency certification handed me an essay entitled "Alone."  It was not a required assignment.  He wrote the piece as a way of dealing with his experience of  trauma.  It was an excellent first draft,  and I urged him to submit it to Peauxdunque Review. The editors loved it, and it will be published in a forthcoming issue.  A gifted writer, the prisoner used  literacy as a tool  to combat the agony of incarceration. He used literacy and creative thought to tell his unique story and  deepen  awareness of why "incarceration" is as much a mental state as a physical one.

Awed by his unbridled honesty, his courage and bravery,  I wrote a kwansaba for him:

ALONE

(a kwansaba for Prisoner # _______)

Alone, when you alone, speak of alone

as spasms of light in black holes.

Or else, alone, you visit unknown dread,

itself alone in a blood black fist

that pounds against even odds of fate.

Did you ponder, alone, how your spirit,

being an egg, alone refuses to crack?

Since unrecorded time,  I suppose, incarcerated people have used literacy to deal with their plight ----confinement, the burdens of anger, guilt, and shame, segregation from people who are nominally "free," obligation to pay for acts that are deemed criminal, and, in the most tragic instances. paying with their lives for acts which it may eventually be proved they did not commit. Their stories liberate us from thinking too narrowly about the nature of incarceration. 

For example, Frederick Douglass's 1845 autobiography and other life histories narrated  by enslaved people; Austin Reed’s “The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, or the Inmate of a Gloomy Prison,” dated 1858; the 1930s prison stories written by Chester Himes;   Richard Wright's Native Son; The Autobiography of Malcolm X; the prison writing of George Jackson (which should be read in concert with Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks);  the poetry Etheridge Knight wrote in prison ----all of these works expand ideas about how incarceration is socially constructed.  Michelle Alexander wrote The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) specifically for "people who care deeply about racial justice but who, for any number of reasons, do not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration" and "for all those trapped within America's latest caste system"(quoted from her Preface).  Her book engenders ideas that pertain to links between the laws and policies which defined American slavery and the current inequities (read inequity as iniquity) that define what we call criminal justice. From the angle of literacy and literary/cultural  history, Patrick Elliot Alexander's From Slave Ship to Supermax: Mass Incarceration, Prisoner Abuse, and the New Neo-Slave Novel (2018) is a superb treatment of imprisoned intellectualism in James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk, women's imprisonment in Toni Morrison's Beloved, the slave ship/supermax configurations of Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, and the humanistic meditation on the carceral aesthetic in Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying.  Indeed, many African American writers have created models of how  literacy might be used  to combat incarceration.

Thus, we might note two points about literacy as a tool or weapon to combat incarceration:

1) It is a tool that enables prisoners to demonstrate their innate intelligence and humanity  and to minimize a few of the inevitable frustrations of being in jail.

2) It is a tool to combat forms of mental incarceration which seem to be rampant in the 21st century.  When we ponder the metaphorical dimensions of  the concept  of "incarceration," we may recognize that all of us are incarcerated by something in everyday life.  Criminal justice is a microcosm of the larger systems of human thought and  existence. If we arrive at such recognition, we may be moved to have compassion for those who made unwise choices and defied the rule of law.  We may be moved to do more than just talk about the material differences of incarceration.  In the name of social justice we may persuade ourselves to invest some of our energy in action rather than speech.

The Gifts of Black Prisoners

Just as DuBois’s The Gifts of Black Folk (1924) is overshadowed by The Souls of Black Folk (1903 ), the long shadows of our classic slave narratives obscure the importance of studying other autobiographical forms in efforts to write more expansive histories of how African Americans have used literacy and literature or black writing in English since the 18^th century.  Accidental “discoveries” of lost materials are special moments in the growth of scholarship, enabling us to enlarge the body of black writing and to conduct archival projects to refocus our perspectives. Julie Bosman’s article Prison Memoir of a Black Man in the 1850s - NYTimes.com  notifies us that a special moment is in the offing.

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s acquisition of Austin Reed’s “The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, or the Inmate of a Gloomy Prison,” dated 1858, is a great find if the memoir is indeed authentic and not a parody written by a white prisoner or white prison guard in the 1850s, by a person who wished to exploit the popularity of slave narratives. We do not need yet another example of bogus black writing.  We are still in a state of uncertainty about whether Hannah Craft’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative is truly what we have been told it is. We do need a 19th century bit of prison writing that is beyond dispute, that can be analyzed in some framework of African American autobiography and set against the literary/non-literary qualities of, let us say, George Jackson's Blood in My Eye and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson and other writings by the imprisoned (e.g. the early poetry of Etheridge Knight).  It is better to err in the direction of extreme skepticism than to be duped.

Contemporary literary and cultural studies often play deadly games with African American intellectual property, and I think it is prudent for the Project on the History of Black Writing to issue a caution regarding what Bosman described as “the first recovered memoir written in prison by an African-American.” Thus, I sent the following e-mail to Professor Caleb Smith:

From:	Jerry Ward (jerry.ward31@hotmail.com)
Sent:	Thu 12/12/13 1:56 PM
To:	caleb.smith@yale.edu (caleb.smith@yale.edu)

Dear Professor Smith:

As a member of the Project on the History of Black Writing advisory board, I was pleased to read in today's New York Times that you will prepare Austin Reed's manuscript for publication. This project extends, and perhaps deepens, your previous studies of incarceration. I am confident you will provide judicious contextualization for our analysis and interpretation of the memoir. Those of us who have special interest in African American literacy and literature welcome the challenge of dealing with the literary and non-literary aspects of "recovered" works. This example of 19th century prison writing raises questions about autobiography in general and African American autobiography in particular and about how the genre functions in a multi-layered national literature.

I do hope that Christine McKay and others used the most exacting scientific principles in establishing the authenticity of the memoir for the Beinecke. What we do not need is to discover, after publication, that the memoir is a devastatingly clever imitation of 19th century black writing. Use of the most rigorous standards of authentication and bibliographic or textual scholarship must provide the evidence that inspires confidence.

Please accept my thanks for your helping us to create more precise literary histories of African American writing.

Sincerely yours,

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Distinguished Overseas Professor
Central China Normal University (Wuhan)

Professor Smith graciously answered within a few hours, assuring me that  “The Reed manuscript really is a haunting text. We have worked very hard to piece together the facts of Reed's life and the circumstances of his writing. I expect that the publication will be just the beginning of a long conversation.” (Email from Smith to Ward, December 12, 2013)  We should anticipate that the “long conversation” will give birth to a rich discourse about genres, the possibility of deconstructing incarceration as enslavement in American historical contexts, canons, and the aims of scholarship inside and beyond the fragile boundaries of American higher education. We may, despite ourselves, be once more enlightened by the gifts of black prisoners and by the assertions of Americans who do not know the kinship they share with the imprisoned.

A Bit of Evidence (May 10, 2018 Exchange)

Enlightenment is good, but direct action is better, especially if the incarcerated person is 65 years old.

GP to JWW

Dear Mister Ward

                I gave as much as I had, trying to get ready for the Hiset Exam.

But I know my limatations.  My failure done'nt come from you as a teacher.

But from me being an over age student.

I thank you for everything that you have given me.

I have always said that I came here with nothing; But I leave with so much.

GP

JWW to GP

Dear Mr. P_______:

I refuse to accept your decision to abandon preparing for the HiSet Exam on the grounds that you are an

"over age" student,  Had our great, great grandparents said "We are too old to year for freedom," it is likely that you and I would be enslaved males on a plantation of somewhere.  I refuse to condone your failing yourself.  I do not deem your excuse regarding age to be either necessary or sufficient.  While your rate of learning differs from the rates of others in our group, you do still have the capacity and capability of learning.

If you are determined to not take the HiSet Exam, I may not be able to persuade you to change your mind.  I do demand, however, that you use the intelligence given to you by your parents and your ancestors.  I am willing to compromise.  I am willing to work with you on improving your reading and writing skills, to help you do something positive with your accumulated experiences.  I am willing to help you to become a more competent writer and a more astute reader.  You can remain within the group and focus only on the writing and reading portion of the HiSet Exam book.  Your ability to express your ideas is too important to waste.

I expect you to continue participating in our sessions.

Sincerely yours,

JWW

Let Us Now Volunteer

In our nation many people and organizations try to promote literacy, because they rightly argue that being more than functionally literate may reduce the likelihood of a person being entrapped by some vicious designs that are systemic in the American system of criminal justice.  Such intervention can benefit those who are targets of  a less than blind system . It is essential to promote literacy among the young, to supplement the work that often is not done in many of  our public and charter schools. There are no guarantees, however; there are only possibilities.  In the case of people who are already entrapped and incarcerated, we can volunteer to work in jails and prisons, to use our literacy to help them and their families to become more empowered and more knowledgeable about navigating the terrain of incarceration .  Our volunteering to work in sites of incarceration is a moral use of time, and so too is working with those who do need help to re-enter society  and to resist the temptations of recidivism. We do well to help the incarcerated to maintain faith in themselves.

There are risks, psychological risks, which we must be clear about when we volunteer to help with improving literacy inside and outside of prisons.  The more those of us who believe ourselves to be free understand about metaphorical incarceration, the better.  We can probably use that understanding to think critically about what literacy is in contemporary  American society, what are its limits, how it can be misused, and then move with our eyes and minds wide open as we make ourselves advocates and agents of literacy. Literacy as a tool to combat incarceration is also a tool for enhancing our own humanity and developing a deeper respect for  the humanity of others.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            November 19, 2018