Every newsletter on MYLIFEplus25 is public and free to everyone, but we ask for your support. Please consider becoming a patron now to help fund our ongoing legal efforts that dare to speak truth to power. This isn't journalism, it's activism! And these efforts are only possible through the support of good people just like you who believe that change is possible.
________________________________________________________________
Last week I began exploring the intricacies of hope. By no means an easy endeavor. I wrote that life has shown me that there are two types.
One which is optimism sustained by your very best efforts; and the other, a drug-like delusion of longing for that which is not, yet being unwilling to sustain the sacrifice or effort required so as to make it so.
I shared experiences from my life, detailing what is was like to find myself in solitary confinement confronted with the realization that my life had been erased, deemed no more by the swift bang of the gavel.
I equated it to a conscious form of death, an active conceptualization that the life before me was not the life I had built, and being unsure what to do about it. And how despite all of that, hope found me, reached out and grabbed ahold of me, so as to present me with the tools that I needed to create and invent an altogether new life for myself.
Hope presented me with a choice: to either linger by the gravesite of what was no more; or find the courage within me to build a new life. It helped me to recognize that I had mourned the life lost long enough, and it was time to turn the page on the book that I had written for myself and begin anew.
Hope had found me crammed into a cubbyhole beneath the concrete slab that was my prison bunk in solitary confinement, where I had taken refuge from the extreme cold one particular winter. It was hope that spoke to me with the most unlikely of poems, written on the most unlikely of places. It was hope that had taught me as a child that the challenge before me was what it had always been, to both accept the circumstances of my life as they were and simultaneously be determined to change them. The dichotomous mindset that had helped me to survive childhood was again going to be necessary to survive the abuses of a corrupt and stagnated justice system.
I further shared how the choice before me had also led to an unlikely friendship with a Buddhist monk, a man who presented me with the necessary tools to reinvent myself into a more resilient, purpose-oriented, empathetic individual that had found true joy through self-sacrifice and service to others. Yet, despite my personal discoveries on the dichotomy of hope I wasn't convinced that I had heard the final word on it, and was eager to know what the experiences of others had been.
Unfortunately, prisons in America are filled with the walking corpses of hopelessness, and drawing experiences and relevant dialogue from them is not always easy. For many the topic is taboo, right up there with confronting prison rape or addiction. Besides, I wasn't looking for the hopeless, I was searching for the hopeful, about as rare as spotting a diamond in a span of gravel, but definitely worth the effort when you do. A necessary endeavor because it occurred to me that perhaps my experience of having been wrongfully convicted and ignored by the justice system had left me irrevocably jaded, therefore making my opinions on the matter potentially tainted.
My search had begun, though it was frequently confronted with one dogmatic definition after another. I wasn't looking for ideology. I wanted personal experiences and insight from the lives lived by the men around me, not revelations from centuries long past. In other words, I wasn't interested in what someone else had written, I was interested in what someone could share with me from their own life. It just didn't seem possible that I was the only one to have ever challenged the weary explanations of biblical hope. And it turned out, I wasn’t.
James Terrel Williams found me, I didn't find him. I had known of him for years, in that I knew that I had seen him in any number of prisons throughout the state, as it is common for us to be shuffled around from one facility to another. He had always greeted me by name as though we knew one another, but for the life of me I struggled to recall when and where. And while I was glad to see a friendly face, I admit that I was put off by the silver cross he wore around his neck. Which in itself deserves a small interlude to explain.
Prison is a place that foments desperation. As I've often described, it's the living, contradictory experience of being dead and buried and conscious of it all at the same time. I've explained it as being trapped just beneath the surface of a putrid pool of fecal matter, with your eyes wide open and your lips firmly affixed to the drinking straw in your mouth that you use to breath. Like I said, you're just below the surface but you can't reach it; there is fresh air up there but you can't taste it, except through the straw that you struggle to breathe through. Some of the inhabitants of the pool have adapted, whether through evolution or its opposite is unclear, but many no longer need the drinking straws to breathe because they now have gills to facilitate such. And there are a few of us who never get the gills, out of personal choice we linger near the surface, eyes on the world, breathing desperately through our drinking straws.
If you have the courage to permit your mental faculties to sample what this experience is, you will likewise come to understand the role that religion plays. It offers a brand of hope often times unsubstantiated by one's personal experience that enslaves people to an ideology. It says to you, don't think for yourself, rather, allow me to think for you; and, this ideology or belief structure is what I think for you. And unfortunately, religion in prison is comfort for a troubled conscience and mind, helping you to accept the grim reality of the present moment in exchange for the promise of a future eternity in absolute bliss.
If there is anything more dangerous than this, I don't know what it could be.
Prison chapels are filled with men who believe that if they behave meekly, if they obey and accept their punishments with eager willingness, that if they sing the prescribed songs with an open heart and sincerity that the doors to the prison will open through divine intervention. I don't for a second pretend to know all things about how life or the universe works. And prison chapels are filled with books and personal histories of people saying that this is exactly how it works. What I can say is that this has not been my experience.
Whatever changes in my life that I have wanted to bring about, whether to the internal ego of self or the external circumstances of my shared reality, personal effort and a willingness to fail have always been part of the equation. There are no shortcuts to the work and effort that must go into these changes.
One of the most heartbreaking truths that I have ever had to confront, outside of the personal loss that I have lived, is having to hear from others that my grandmother, the very woman who raised me like a mother, has never ceased in praying for my release for the last seventeen years. She is elderly and her body is failing her, and her sole prayer is to have me home with her before she goes. How many grandmothers and mothers and sisters and wives and daughters have probably prayed fervently for the very same thing for their own loved ones? My grandmother's faith is her comfort, it's something she has carried with her since childhood, and despite the evidence of it’s efficacy she will not change it. And so it is with so many with whom I share this space. We are tormented, not only with our own fractured and failed hopes, but with those of all the loved ones who have ever supported and believed in us.
I am the first to admit that my failures with religions and ideologies are quite possibly more representative of my own inadequacies than any external failure of dogma or doctrine. But, the unfortunate truth of my experience is that religious people in prison are dangerous to be around. I avoid them like dark alleys in questionable neighborhoods, or public toilet seats in subway terminals. Because experience has taught me that if someone is going to steal from me, cheat me, accuse me, talk bad about me, or otherwise try to harm me it's going to be someone who professes a religion and more likely than not either wears a cross around his neck or has one tattooed somewhere on his body. Which brings us back to the instinctual reaction that I had to seeing the silver cross around the neck of James Terrel Williams.
I was polite to him but I wasn't about to concede him any more than the briefest of moments of my time. Because I didn't at that time realize that he possessed something that I needed, and it had nothing to do with signing me up for his doctrine or faith. What James potentially had were some of the missing pieces to the puzzle of hope that I had laboriously been building. And I wouldn't have known that had I allowed my prejudices to prevail.
If you follow my writing then you know that I’ve presented inmates to the world in the past. I see it as an educational opportunity for everyday people to take a peek behind the curtain of mass-incarceration to better know that which they've been taught to fear. Some may see it as a search for humanity in society’s trash heap, but it was in this trash heap where I found myself. And the law of probability says that I am likely not the only one.
The truths of my life are ones that I have purchased through great personal loss and suffering. Because of which, I’m now able to see the grand opportunity that disaster affords us. In that, there comes a time in the midst of battle when you begin to see that you can't be beaten. That regardless of the personal loss the ultimate victory is still yours. And it's at this point when you become fearless, and at this point when you begin to act accordingly to who you are at the most fundamental of levels.
On the day that James approached me his eagerness to talk was enough to intrigue me into giving him my undivided attention. He talked and I listened. And after just a few minutes of listening I knew that it was much more than just coincidence that had brought him into my circle of consciousness.
For days I had been jotting down notes on the treacherously slippery topic of hope. I had plenty of my own discoveries and opinions, but the more I read them back to myself the less convinced I was. Because I feared that my pain was infecting my conclusions. I was healed only to the point of being functional, and it was questionable whether I would ever be fully recovered. And the more I listened to James the more impressed I became with the trajectory of his choices in life. As he offered me up the who, the what, and the when of his entire life I began to realize that his biographical details weren't nearly as important as who he was today.
I don't presume to call myself a biographer, but what I recall from the great biographies that I've read are not the details, more mundane than relevant, but rather their thoughts, their opinions, the challenges overcome and the heartbreaks endured. And the more I write the more I come to find that to successfully bring someone to life on the written page requires a certain willingness to delve into the complex dualities of humanity. It requires balance. Because otherwise it's just not believable.
You can’t help but admire resilience when you come face-to-face with it. Maybe because resilience is at the very bedrock of what humanity is. And there before me was a life that had been beaten down by circumstances, something that was easy to recognize after just a few minutes with James. He reminded me of the Lotus that struggles through all the adversity of the cold darkness to reach the light. And rightly so, it was a comparison that he himself readily agreed with.
I often write about the systemic monsterfication of the prison population, but there before me was the exception to the rule. Almost immediately we discovered the similarities of our circumstances, along with the striking contrast of our perceived realities: he an admitted murderer, a man who did what he did, turned himself in, acknowledged his guilt, and willingly submitted it to his life sentence; and me, a man who has never waivered in proclaiming his innocence.
With candid eagerness James opened up about the beginning salvo to his incarceration. “From the beginning I just accepted that this was my life now,” he said. “And the choices made were all about survival.”
I asked what role hope had played in his decision.
“Hope wasn't part of the equation,” he admitted. “I guess because there were no thoughts about tomorrow or where any of those choices would lead me.”
Most fail to comprehend that stepping into a prison is the reluctant submission to an alternate reality. A truism that James confirmed. “You can't be in here for five minutes without this place forever altering who you are.”
I tended to agree. Trauma is nothing more than a convoluted detail of life. Whether we choose to judge our present realities as good or bad seems like more of a personal choice than some irrevocable fact.
“I simply looked at my surroundings and realized that this is my life now,” he said. “And it was at this time when I was introduced to the ideology of White Supremacy.”
I wasn't surprised by his admission. The harsh and often cruel realities of incarceration actually encourage ideologies of racial superiority. It's one of those things that the tax payers pay for that turns into a secondary consequence that bleeds into society. So I asked him about his racial beliefs before prison.
“Honestly, I wasn't a racist,” he replied. A statement that I challenged, him being from Alabama, a state severely scarred by racism, poverty and social strife. But he remained firm. “It just wasn't a thing [racism]. I grew up in the country, it was very rural, and we all worked together and race wasn't a big deal in my family. Until, you know, I was in the city or at school and suddenly it was very real.”
As is often the case prison tries to pigeonhole us into one group or another, and more often than not it succeeds. Because if there is one thing that prisoners fear, it's being alone. Another reality that James agreed with.
“I was schooled by the old guys,” he admitted, “who told me who I should and shouldn't socialize with. And I listened. But eventually I taught myself that there was another way to do time.”
I asked what it was that made him stop and reëvaluate. He explained that there were a variety of factors to include even how the prison environment was changing. “Eventually I just came to realize that this wasn't me, and suddenly my values and morals began to surface. I began to remember that I had always believed in diversity.”
James chose a different path for himself, one guided by his faith in Christ. I asked him whether his choice to walk away from some to join the path of others and created enemies for him.
“Actually, it wasn't as big an issue as I thought it would be,” he said. “And once the decision was made there were quite a few people who stood up to support me. I just never looked back.”
I had to admit it was hard to be impartial with James. The more we talked the more relatable he became. He was a rare specimen of convict who had walked the battlefield of incarceration both in and out of the trenches. He understood the racial challenges placed upon us when we step into this world and yet, was able to overcome those challenges. I was eager to get into his thoughts on hope, but first it was important to know whether he believed that society had benefited from his incarceration.
He considered the question for several moments, then said, “Look, I'm not a monster. Yes, I made a mistake. I took a life, and from the very beginning I've always acknowledged that what I did was wrong.” But this wasn't an answer to the question, which I brought to his attention, and he agreed, then added, “There is no apparent benefit in the fiscal sense. But I did take a life and I do owe a debt for that. And hopefully there is some peace of mind to be had from the victims knowing that I'm being punished. But overall prison just turns people into monsters, because it's a systematic form of torture, and in the majority of instances people aren’t being returned to society as functioning citizens.
“We’re estranged from education, technology, general trades and labor, not to mention our families. And PTSD is a reality, too, it really is. Because the realities of prison don't permit us to express a normal spectrum of emotions outside of maybe anger, without it being seen as a weakness.”
Of course, you might be asking yourself what any of this had to do with hope. I had the same question, but I can assure you that the relevancy reveals itself. Here was a man who had found reasons to change, adapt, and altogether overcome and reject the proposed end-product that the Department of Corrections had in mind for him. From the beginning a man who had harbored no illusions about what was to be of his life, and despite all of that had found a way to resist the protocol. And I was inclined to believe that hope had something to do with this.
I finally asked what role hope had played in the choices and changes he had made.
“For the first ten years,” he admitted, “there was no hope. My thought process at the time didn't entertain the notion of hope. I was focused on survival, and when all you're doing is surviving there is no tomorrow.”
So the prospect of tomorrow is required for hope? I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “But it's not only that. A lot of people avoid hope out of fear. Because hope requires effort. It's a recognition of not being where you would like–physically, mentally, or spiritually. And a willingness to hope is a recognition of the need to change.”
And tomorrow then becomes the what for behind the change?
He agreed that it was, but insisted that there was more to it than just having tomorrow in your sights. “Hope is not just wishing for something. It's making yourself responsible and taking action towards the manifestation of the future you seek. Hope is the essence of all this, and it's most definitely not a spectator’s sport. You have to be a part of it. You have to manifest it.”
I agreed, but I also wanted to hear him talk about the downside of hope. And, ever the optimist, he wouldn't. “There is no downside to hope,” he insisted.
We talked about this further. I shared some of my own experiences and disappointments in life, all of which were irrevocably intertwined with hope, or at least my conception of what I perceived hoped to be. But the more we spoke about our respective experiences, the more I came to see that my disappointments with hope had more to do with my misguided expectations than any failing on the part of hope.
I wanted to see hope as the end all solution to life's challenges, when in reality hope is the spark that lights the fire of our creative potential and willingness to expend the necessary efforts to bring about a desired outcome. A spark on its own is not going to save someone exposed to freezing water or winter elements from hypothermia. A spark is also not going to fill a hungry child’s belly, or stop an abusive parent from harming him. Just as hope is not going to stop the factory of misery that is mass- incarceration, nor is it going to make a judge adhere to the law or place justice above personal ambition and self-preservation. But, hope can carry us the short distance through life's darkest of moments to the platform of a decision: will I step beyond and over my fear of failure so as to act and bring about the necessary changes that I seek?
I was beginning to think that perhaps this was the whole point of hope. In that, it brings us to the crossing point where opportunity and decision meet.
“Hope tells me,” James began, “that I refuse to buy into the lie, or even allow them to dictate me. Because I'm not a cog in a wheel, and I'm not a number. Yes, I am here in prison. But everything I do dictates who I am. Me, not them. And who I am is a good person in a bad environment, and that's because of hope.”
I understood. And his experience was not so different from my own, and probably not so different from many of yours. But I knew there was more and it wasn't long before that more revealed herself.
A rare show of emotion appeared on James’ face when he started to talk about the physical manifestation that hope had brought into his life over a decade ago. A man written off by his family, no contact with the outside world, meets a pen pal through a friend, and suddenly hope had a new name, and her name was Nancy.
James wears many hats and one of those is that of a painter and artist. He opened up about the first painting he had ever painted for someone outside of prison, how it was for Nancy, and how uncertain he had felt about how it would be received. It was apparent that he needed to talk about Nancy, and I was eager to listen because it was clear to me that she was the key to some of the changes that he had manifested in his life through courage and great personal effort. So I asked how much of his personal change could be attributed to her.
“It's hard to know where to begin,” he admitted. “She was someone who was not afraid to take a chance on getting to know someone like me. She's super-educated, intellectual, diverse and culturally sound in so many ways. From the very beginning she challenged me on so many levels. She's a citizen of the world and she alone introduced me to the seven wonders of the world.”
It was obvious that her presence in his life had opened his eyes to new possibilities and horizons for his life. “She would always tell me,” he said, “that it's not how you start out that's important, it's how you end up that matters.”
Without a doubt James commited a horrific crime to come to prison. That will never change or be other than what it is. But despite that, his manifestation of hope is a woman who dared to see the good in him. “She told me,” he said, “you deserve a second chance.”
Do you deserve a second chance? I asked.
He nodded his head that he did, then added, “she has introduced me to so many things, but literature especially. There are just so many things that I would never have read had it not been for her. She’s my true north on the compass of my life. She brought me out of my comfort zone and gave me hope. In a way, she's my lifejacket, the person who is always telling me that I'm not going to drown.”
It was time to turn our conversation from Nancy to purpose because I had heard from others about his brazen efforts to educate himself, despite the correctional department’s policies that deny funding for educational advancement or opportunity to inmates with more than ten years remaining on their sentences.
James admitted that it had been a struggle but he simply never allowed himself to be deterred by the doors to education that were repeatedly slammed in his face. He tirelessly wrote requests to administrators for admittance into higher education opportunities.
“I finally insisted enough,” he said, “that it eventually came down to me making a deal with the administration. They agreed to allow me to take college courses so long as I got straight A's. A deal that I readily accepted.”
And the outcome is without a doubt an impressive one. James now has an Associates of Arts and a Bachelors of Arts and Science, and he’s presently working on his Masters in Christian Education from the International Christian College Seminary.
Few have the courage to reinvent themselves entirely. I can attest that there is rarely a time when James doesn't have a textbook in his hands. There is likewise rarely a time and when I don't see him seated at a table studying, reading, or mentoring others in biblical studies or some other curriculm. His day-to-day life is an expression of who he says he is, and that's a rare thing in a place like this. To talk with him is to share his space and witness his inner light, and on a more personal note getting to know him has reminded me of words by Martin Luther that I had almost forgotten:
This life, therefore, is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing; not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished but is going on. This is not the end but it's the road, all does not yet gleam in glory but all is being purified.
I have to admit that within me there is a growing rejection against all things religious. What I feel is an instinctive repulsion towards all those who follow without first stopping to question and think. My experiences are such that I equate religion to hypocrisy, and yet I'm drawn like a moth to the flame of the words and life expression of the carpenter from Nazareth. In his reported actions and teachings there is great authenticity, bold courage, and flawless love. As Paulo Coehlo has described him, “a true warrior of light.” But, for me, the religious manifestations of those teachings are spoiled goods. Yet, I can't help but think that the world could benefit from more men like James Terrel Williams. And I hope he gets paroled.
One last time I asked whether he thought there was any downside to hope, and again he repeated that there was not. An opinion that he is free to have even in here. My own opinion, however, is that there is duality and danger to all things, especially when our hopes are pinned to the whims of another. But, I also agree that our fears of failure, rejection, or being hurt should never stop us.
Many a prisoner has watched as the slow, monotonous tik-toc of time washes away the family, the friendships, the dreams, and even the memories of a life lived. Out of sight and out of mind, and the world tends to forget about us. Often times it’s a process that leads to our undoing. We sometimes try to make sense of it all, or even justify it by saying things like, “I did wrong and now I have to be punished.” Nevertheless we keep moving, heads down, shoulders slouched, still trying to make sense of it all. Where does this road take us? some will inevitably ask. We don't know, others will say. Maybe death, one says. Maybe redemption, says another. Hopefully someplace where we can forget, says the last.
Maybe James is right and there is no downside to hope, or maybe it's just a question of semantics and perception: Hope is good because it carries us onward through the dark moments of life; and, hope is bad because it can lead us over the cliff of disappointment and desperation. Whatever it is maybe we can all acknowledge that at some point in our lives, in the darkness of our personal tragedies, hope reached out and saved us. So it was with me, so it was with James, and quite possibly, so it was with you.
________________________________________________________________
Thanks for subscribing to MYLIFEplus25 by Mario Chavez. All posts are public, so feel free to share it.
________________________________________________________________
To help support even more please take a moment to subscribe to my podcast on one of the following channels:
Apple Podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mylifeplus25/id1562605207
Google Podcasts:
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy81NThjMWE5MC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==
Spotify:
And follow me on Twitter here: Follow @lifeplus25
Follow me on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/MYLIFEplus25-106918954788500
Look out for next week’s publication.