It has taken me over ten years to finish this book. I started this book before I went to grad school. Then it became my thesis. When I graduated, I sent invitations to Kakamia and Mac. Both said they were so proud of me. Mac said how he wished he could attend. He made me promise to send pictures. He wanted to see me in a cap and gown, diploma in hand.
After the incident with my notes described in the last chapter, I no longer wrote any thoughts down during prison visits. Whether during interviews or just tasks I said I would do after visiting with a prisoner, I didn’t want to risk my visits in any institution regardless of the written rules.
So instead I employed a pneumonic device to remember items: I would pick out a word to sum up, take the first letter, string the letters together of the items and then make a word or even a sentence out of it, like so:
A C L. All Cats Lie.
During visits I would add to this list in my head, repeating mentally every time I added to it over the six or more hours I was inside the prison. Once I left, I would write quick notes in the car as soon as I exited so I didn’t forget on the short drive back to the hotel. There I would immediately sit and type up the notes in longer form, with everything I could remember about them. If the visit had been an interview, I would send the notes back to the person once I got home, ask them clarifying questions, and try to make sure I had remembered all of the information correctly.
I feel like this convoluted, imperfect process is the nature of storytelling in general, and especially the storytelling involved in bringing voices from behind prison walls. What parts of the story get heard are based on what is most important to the listener, what makes it into the notes, what is remembered, what is repeated back, what is told and retold until it becomes the full and only truth.
This is how we create history. This is how we decide what justice is.
And all of it is mitigated and filtered through structures of power. It is negotiated within the system, limited by it. But the flawed method I developed, one that relies on clandestine memory, is one oppressed peoples have had to employ for centuries in this nation. Enslaved Black people encoded subversive messages of freedom in songs. Black spirituals like “Follow the Drinking Gourd” are actually instructions on how to escape enslavement: continue to follow the North Star, which is part of the constellation the Big Dipper, and they would be heading north, out of slavery.
This is making a way when there is no way—telling stories never meant to be told—just like Mumia Abu-Jamal clandestinely writing his first book on death row and having it smuggled out. It is just like Marilyn Buck and Mutulu Shakur and the others who breached prison walls to rescue Assata Shakur, proving the prophetic words of Assata in her poem “Affirmation”:
And, if i know anything at all,
it’s that a wall is just a wall
and nothing more at all.
It can be broken down.
* * *
So much has changed during that time period in my world—in the world of prisons. Personally, I saw dozens of people released from prison. I saw many more people go into prison in that time period. I saw my comrade put to death by the state of Texas. I saw another comrade come within hours of lethal injection and receive a commutation—because of organizing work. My friend Sean, faced with a prison sentence, took his own life. Another friend attempted to kill himself less than six months out of the gate. My nephew was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Kakamia marked twenty-five years in prison. Sadly, he is still counting. He was transferred to a new facility, formerly a women’s prison turned into an institution housing those the state designates as male. This is part of California’s attempt to reduce the prison overcrowding as ordered by the federal government. Rather than release people, it transferred those previously in the women’s prison to another women’s institution that was slightly less overcrowded than the male facility. Then it moved male prisoners in to the newly vacated prison. A political shell game, played with human lives. “See if you can find the overcrowding, the constitutional violation!” No matter which shell you choose, it seems as though there’s nothing underneath. Unlike a disappearing trick, though, the issue is only masked, not absent. Even if we can’t find it, we know it’s there.
On the larger organizing scale, in 2010, Georgia prisoners staged the largest prison strike in history up to that point. Over ten thousand prisoners refused to leave their cells until demands for decent treatment were met: echoes of Attica. Less than a year later, an even larger hunger strike took place in California prisons, involving twelve thousand people and lasting for over a month. When the strike leaders ended the strike in 2011 after CDCr agreed to some of their demands (which was unprecedented), the leaders said they were prepared to go back on strike. In 2013, they did just that. Over thirty thousand participated in almost every California prison. They will continue to starve themselves, pushing their bodies almost to the point of death until they achieve justice.
These are some of the most courageous organizers I will ever know.
The past ten years has brought so much more work around prison abolition, alternatives to police and prisons. Organizations practicing alternatives here and around the world have blossomed. Anthologies exploring the principles and concepts of abolition have been published. Abolitionist frameworks have been integrated into other organizing, recognizing that calling for anything that expands the carceral system ultimately makes all of us less safe and less free.
People are exploring and experimenting, both in theory and practice, with abolition. They have answered the question Angela Davis poses in her book’s title Are Prisons Obsolete? with a resounding yes. Much more complex is the next question, “So what instead?” As I have explored here in this book, there are no neat and clean answers. And we in this society want them desperately. We have been inculcated with the idea that if there isn’t a clear resolution where everything comes out perfectly, we have failed.
Through that standard, the abolitionist movement has failed. We have not devised a vacu-sealed and packaged commodity called abolition with slick advertisements that will take away our fears, our heartache, and our brokenness in three easy steps.
But what if the standard for success is not a neatly wrapped-up sitcom ending, as we are told by society? What if it is instead about questioning everything we have been told is true and possible? What if it is about exploring what it is that makes us most human, and elevates our humanity to its highest level?
If that is the case, then the abolitionist movement continues to fulfill its purpose, because even asking the question, “How would we live without prisons?” demands that we step outside of this society and stretch our imaginations to the limit. And this is where all social advancement has come from. If we cannot imagine a different way of existing, then we cannot create real change.
“I think hard times are coming,” writer Ursula K Le Guin said during a 2014 National Book Awards speech, “when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom.”
As a writer, I absolutely believe in the importance of those who can reframe issues through literary means, asking questions anew. And I also absolutely believe we need those organizers and changemakers who are doing the work on the ground to pull the literary into everyday reality.
For the past ten years, abolitionists have been exploring many concrete models of alternatives, a handful of which are explored in this book. There are countless others. But I think even more far-reaching is the concept of principles that abolitionists have been exploring: what sorts of ideals do we want to build our societies on? What sort of visions do we want to base new, just worlds upon?
As Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes in her essay “Freedom Seeds,” abolition then becomes about realizing that the concept is not just about destroying prisons or eliminating police—not at its core. Those are tactics to get to the central purpose of abolition, which it to re-engage and recenter our humanity, each and every single one of us on this planet. Abolition is not about destroying but about building community, nurturing connection, and growing freedom seeds.
What if abolition isn’t a shattering thing, not a crashing thing, not a wrecking ball event? What if abolition is something that sprouts out of the wet places in our eyes, the broken places in our skin, the waiting places in our palms, the tremble holding in my mouth when I turn to you?
What if abolition is something that grows?
* * *
The biggest loss for this book in the past ten years was Jimmy McElroy’s passing in 2011. He was sixty-six years old. I did not expect Mac to die. Next to the sadness came a consuming guilt. Mac would never get to hold this book like he wanted. He said many times he couldn’t wait to show it off to folks on the inside: the book his niece wrote about him. Time passes so differently on the outside. Ten years is a breath. I walked away from the book. I told myself I was taking a break. Life conspired to fill in all the cracks of my time. I kept telling myself I would get back to it.
Then it was too late for Mac.
I told everyone, including myself, that the book took so long because I did not have time to work on it; I was so busy with other projects. True. But the real reason I did not carve out time to work on it was because I was afraid.
I originally planned to write a feature story on Mac, place it in a magazine, and move on. Then he asked me to write his biography one visit. Truthfully, I had already been thinking of it. But in looking in his eyes and saying yes, a tidal wave of uncertainty hit me. How would I be able to tell this story and be true to Mac, to history, to my politics?
Then there were years of interviewing and research. No writing. I need more information, I said. I have to finish gathering that before I can start. The impetus for me to actually start writing was going back to school for my MFA in Creative Writing. The genesis of this book was my thesis.
As I finally began to write, I realized I could not write a traditional biography. As I have said, I believe objectivity to be a fallacy. But I had no distance from this. Kakamia and I had already claimed each other as family. Mac became family throughout this process. I knew I could not even pretend at impartiality.
And so instead I decided to strive for responsibility and accountability: to Mac, to Kakamia, to myself, and more importantly, to the ideas underlying all of our lives. I want to be accountable to the unanswered—sometimes even unasked—questions that demarcate the boundaries of our worlds: the hidden (and very clear) prisons each of us lives in every day. I strove to challenge readers, but more importantly myself, to envision communities based on healing and transformation, not punishment and brutality.
Writing this book stretched the limits of my comfort zone so far that I could not even recognize the original shape. I knew I had to include my story in this book for it to feel true. I had to speak publicly about scars I have worked to hide. If I was laying Kakamia and Mac bare, it seemed only fair.
So I pulled at threads and saw my abortion tied to solitary confinement. I yanked harder and saw my assault intertwined with tough-on-crime legislation. I also saw the pain of my violation inextricably linked to my brother’s own redemption. I saw (with the help of a supportive community that challenges and pushes me) that if I could find forgiveness, find hope, for the men in this book and for the hundreds of prisoners I have worked with, then I had to think about Dovid’s redemption, something I had not considered up to that point. I had to think about forgiveness for him. Not blanket and blind forgiveness, but forgiveness with memory—forgiveness with accountability. And not for him, but for myself. I dropped so much anger and hurt. I had held it so long that I had forgotten it was not a part of me. I was able to walk forward leading with my strengths and not my pain.
I had to come to a place where I can leave things messy. I could not clean up the narrative around my relationship, neatly labeling Dovid the villain and myself the victim. I could not drop the contradictions of what Kakamia has done, and who he is now. I could not write Mac clean, nor could I write him hopeless. I could not and cannot give easy and definitive answers to the question, “When people do fucked up things to each other, then what?”
That’s something we all have to answer together, as communities. As a nation. As a world.
This book is not the book that works to answer the question posed in the beginning, “Sometimes people do bad things, and then what?” There are many other brilliant minds crafting those answers collectively, on and off the page.
I hope, instead, that this book can serve as a bridge to get us to the place where we can even ask that question, because we can begin to see those people who do harm—sometimes immense brutal and irreparable harm to individuals and communities—as human. Flawed, damaged, and culpable, but still human.
The pieces of the larger whole I hope to bring are the stories of angels with dirty faces. The capriciousness of fate. The idea that every person has the capacity to salvage their tattered humanity, even in the moment before they take their last breath.
I want to remind people to say a prayer for all the children who couldn’t run as fast as we could.