Awe

One reason for giving the talk that day was my interest in restorative justice. My deeper reason for going was being moved to awe in reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Those two books archive the big idea of U.S. history: the subjugation of people of color by a succession of social systems, from the genocide of Indigenous people to slavery to mass incarceration. The awe I felt reading those books opened my mind to wonder about the everyday horrors of the U.S. caste system: about the chokehold a friend, now a professor at Stanford, had been subjected to as a teen when stopped by the police; about how an Indigenous friend was asked to leave a pharmacy when getting medicine for her parents; about how a Mexican American student of mine called his grandparents each night about the latest movements of ICE; about seeing a prizewinning honors student at Berkeley, who grew up unhoused, pick at his food suspiciously because of a lifetime of chronic hunger. Awestruck by these books, I was drawn inside San Quentin.

On the day of the visit, a handful of other RJ volunteers and I made our way to the dusty waiting room near the first security gate. Waiting amid wives and mothers and friends and children of the prisoners inside, we took in an art exhibit created by the prisoners—drawings, woodcuts, and paintings of flowers, sunsets, bay views, and faces of family members. It was my first encounter that day with how prisoners seek in so many ways to surface what is good in who they are—allowing goodness its own speech

, as Toni Morrison put it. At the second security gate, we showed our IDs to guards standing in a plexiglass booth. Once approved, we passed through massive doors, the echoing clank of the locks astonishing in their sound of finality.

Inside San Quentin we were escorted into the prison chapel, where I grabbed a seat in the pews amid 180 men in blue. The chapel walls were bright, reflecting a pure white light glancing through the fog off the bay. The men in blue were almost all men of color, something rapper Tupac Shakur anticipated in his song “Changes” from 1998, as harshening drug laws filled U.S. prisons:

It ain’t a secret, don’t conceal the fact

The penitentiary is packed, and it’s filled with blacks.

The morning began with ceremonies from different religions: Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Jewish. A prisoner named Grey Eagle performed on a wooden flute a sacred song from his Native American tribe, the reedy, rising notes taking our shared awareness out beyond the windows of the chapel. The morning culminated in a haka war dance led by a prisoner named Upu, 280 pounds of muscle and a force on his prison softball team. Polynesian haka dances symbolize the shimmering energy of Hine-raumati, the wife of the Polynesian sun god. She herself is an image seen in the vibrating heat that rises from the ground on hot days. This dance involves squatting with bulging biceps, fierce shouts, and threat faces of widened eyes, open mouths, and tongue displays. Upu led six enormous Polynesian islanders in the dance, shaking the room with their stomps and calls. The prisoners in the pews a few feet away watched with widened eyes and slightly open mouths.

When we mingled with the men in blue at break time, they shared pictures of their artwork. They unfolded and read carefully crafted letters to a grandmother or father. They spoke of victims and of mothers mourning lost lives. Those on the outside living privileged lives, like me, have stories that follow a coherent pattern, like the jacket copy for a novel. The stories the men in blue tell are elliptical and metaphorical, like poems—words reaching to translate chaotic, violent forces—and move with the punctate cadences of rap and the elongated tones of a sermon narrating redemption. The stories begin with youthful transgressions that I would have been locked up for were it not for the color of my skin—using drugs, selling them, shoplifting, trespassing, driving recklessly. And then fate-changing violence.

Here is my memory of one:

I grew up in a whorehouse. My dad was gone before I was born. My mom was hooked on crack cocaine. She was pimped out by my stepdad. My living room was always full of people partying. I started doing knuckleheaded things when I was ten—drugs, break-ins, carjackings. My stepdad gave me a gun when I was twelve. He tried to pimp out my sister. We got into a fight in our living room. I killed him.

And . . .

One day, two guys from a gang came to my cousin’s house, looking for him. He wasn’t there, so they shot his mom. She was sitting in her La-Z-Boy watching TV in front of her two-year-old son. My friends gave me a gun and said I had to get revenge. I tracked these guys down after school and shot two of them. But I got the wrong guys.