Over 70 percent of Americans in prison cannot read above a fourth-grade level.
When inmates are provided literacy help, the rate of recidivism drops to a 16 percent chance of returning to prison—as opposed to a 70 percent chance for those who receive no reading help.
At a meeting with the Community Coalition, I met a formerly incarcerated man, Dorsey Nunn, who ran a San Francisco–based nonprofit called Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. While I was still naïve and idealistic, Dorsey had been working in the nonprofit world for many years and had a broad understanding of the way things really worked. Right away, we hit it off, and I invited Dorsey to visit A New Way of Life. After I led him through the house and he met some of the women, he turned to look at me.
“Sister, do you understand the impact of what you’re doing right here?” he said. “I think a chicken’s gonna fall out of a tree right into your lap.”
I thought, what does he mean a chicken? Is this man crazy?
But he knew exactly what he was talking about. The chicken—the sustenance, the meat—turned out to be a $50,000 fellowship from the California Wellness Foundation. Dorsey had nominated me.
With the fellowship money, I replaced the bunk beds in the house with single beds because bunks were reminiscent of prison. This brought the number of women who could live in the house down from ten to seven, but the funding meant I no longer had to rely on residents’ unpredictable income to cover the bills. Also, from the grant, I drew my first salary: $800 a month.
At Dorsey’s encouragement, I moved out of the house, folding up the cot I’d been sleeping on in the dining room, and rented a matchbox of an apartment down the block. At first, it seemed a waste to have my own apartment when I wasn’t returning there until 9 p.m., up again at the crack of dawn. But I quickly grew to appreciate the quiet of my own space, with no TV, no stereo, no half a dozen people around. I’d never before lived in my own place by myself, and I began to revel in it.
Now that we had the fellowship, I needed to bring A New Way of Life to the next level. I hired a bookkeeper who kept our records and set up payroll—my first time on a payroll. I was fifty years old and it was the first time I was living within the constructs of society and being totally legitimate. While I took pride in this, Mitzi, who earned $500 a month to cook, wanted to remain part of the cash economy. Mitzi was my friend, but I couldn’t jeopardize A New Way of Life by paying her under the table. We parted ways, though we kept in touch, and I visited her in the hospital when she took ill. Several years later she passed away from liver damage. At her funeral, I spoke of what we’d started, and the legacy she left.
In her place, I hired Ruth, a former resident of A New Way of Life and someone I’d known first from the streets, then in prison. Ruth had been volunteering, helping the women who were trying to get housing, and I was proud to make her our first salaried employee. Like everyone who’d come to work with us, her job encompassed doing what needed to get done. She continued working on housing, and she also cooked.
Dorsey flew me to San Francisco to meet his staff at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, and to see the treatment center he helped build, Free at Last. Around the same age, Dorsey and I were both from the streets. He grew up in a poor area of San Mateo County and got involved with drugs as a teenager. At nineteen, he was convicted for a liquor store robbery that ended in the fatal shooting of the store owner. Never alleged to have been the shooter, Dorsey received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. When he first entered prison, he recalled seeing more black men in one space than he’d ever before seen. He also reunited with the kids from his neighborhood he’d played Little League with, and they soon realized their whole team was there in prison—except for the one white kid.
Dorsey could barely read, but in the yard of San Quentin, he was inspired to learn. There, men who’d been in the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panthers held political education courses. “They would read aloud to us,” Dorsey recalled, “and would ask others to get up and read, and we’d all talk about the readings.” He respected these men so much, he set his mind to learning to read. Before long, he was devouring books. He read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Adam Smith’s books on economics and capitalism, biographies of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong.
After reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, he got up in front of the group in the yard and debated it, though he was nervous the others would be mad at his outlier view. “I can’t accept this analysis that justifies rape,” he announced. “I read the book twice, and I’ve come to the conclusion, I disagree.” When he was done, he waited for the fallout, especially from the older prisoners. “Instead,” he recalled, his round face beaming, “I got a hug. And they said I was ready to read to the group.”
After serving twelve years, Dorsey was granted parole in 1981. Before he left San Quentin, the president of the prison branch of the NAACP came to him. “He wanted to extract a promise from me,” Dorsey described. “The promise that I would return to the community an asset, not a liability.” He took this to heart.
In the free world, Dorsey got on the airwaves of KPOO in San Francisco, otherwise known as Poor People’s Radio, an independent station dedicated to giving voice to the disenfranchised. There, he interviewed attorney Ellen Barry, one of the nation’s leading advocates for women prisoners’ rights, and the founder of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children.
“In the interview, Ellen kept saying ‘O-B-G-Y-N,’” Dorsey recalled. “And here I am, thinking I’m a worldly guy and that OBGYN must be a women’s prison gang, but it must be a small-ass gang because I’d never even heard of them. You’ve got to remember that, from nineteen to thirty-one years old, I was in prison. I didn’t have exposure to women. I wasn’t educated about women’s issues.” But Dorsey still made an indelible impression on Ellen Barry, and he went to work for her organization. Eventually, he became its executive director.
Dorsey and I spent long hours talking. “Sister, you’re gonna earn your bones,” he said as he mentored me. We talked about the uphill battle of starting an organization, and the sacrifices that had to be made to sustain it. “Getting funding isn’t the only struggle,” he cautioned. “You also have to prove the reasons your organization needs to exist, and that you, who has little or no professional track record, you are the one to run things. We came to our roles not knowing all the things people learn in prestigious schools. We speak from the world we knew.”
He warned of not getting bogged down in the bureaucracy of your funding streams, and told me that he’d long ago decided his organization would not take any government money. “You have to be mindful about getting co-opted,” he said. “Especially with the trappings government agencies can dangle.” This would be sage advice that I’d be sorely reminded of some years later.
After I returned to L.A., Dorsey and I kept talking. We talked so much, he had to explain to any woman he was seeing who I was and why, no matter what, he’d always stop to take my call.