Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down their brutal heirloom. Take him away from his family, whip him until al
4.5 stars
Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down their brutal heirloom. Take him away from his family, whip him until all he remembers is the whip, chain him up so all he knows is chains. A term in an iron sweatbox, cooking his brains in the sun, had a way of bringing a buck around, and so did a dark cell, a room aloft in darkness, outside time.
After the Civil War, when a five-dollar fine for a Jim Crow charge - vagrancy, changing employers without permission, "bumptious contact," what have you - swept black men and women up into the maw of debt labor, the white sons remembered the family lore. Dug pits, forged bars, forbid the nourishing face of the sun.
Despite the narrator's cool detached tone - the books reads, at times, like reportage, and moments of ironic (or grim) humour are sprinkled here and there - author Colson Whitehead is telling a ghost story. A horror story. He rarely goes into grisly detail and he doesn't need to; what is hinted at is horrific enough, and the author's restraint does not minimise the tragedy of the story even one speck.
Drawing on the real-life story of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, Whitehead creates the fictionalised 'Nickel' school. The book goes back and forth in time, and it actually begins with the revelation of an old crime scene: a graveyard full of the bodies of black boys. Thrown into the school for the merest 'crimes' - and in many cases, that amounts only to being poor or being in the wrong place at the wrong time - the boys are subject to an absolute (but mercurially cruel) authority. There is no fairness in the system, and even the boys who eventually leave Nickel are not able to throw off the psychological chains forged during their time there.
The historical part of the story is set during the early 1960s - when the Civil Rights struggle is gaining momentum, and before the assassination of Martin Luther King. Dr. King's words, and excerpts from his some of famous speeches, are a background text to this story, specifically in the way that they inspire hope and strength in the protagonist Elwood. Elwood is smart, quiet and careful. He lives with his grandmother Harriet, he works at Marconi's Tobacco & Cigars in the Frenchtown neighbourhood of Tallahassee, he excels in his school work and he does his best to stay out of trouble. Through no fault of his own (wrong place, wrong time), Elwood becomes an inmate at Nickel. He makes several mistakes that cost him dearly, and all of them relate in some way to his belief that it is worth taking a chance on fairness and justice.
I suppose you could read this book and decide that some progress has been made - there is a parallel storyline in which Elwood survives Nickel and manages to build a successful life for himself in New York City - but the past, all of that damage and all of those ghosts, is irrevocable.
Of course innocent mistakes occur, but the accumulated insults and indignations caused by racial presumptions are destructive in ways that are hard
Of course innocent mistakes occur, but the accumulated insults and indignations caused by racial presumptions are destructive in ways that are hard to measure. Constantly being suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty and even feared is a burden borne by people of colour that can’t be understood or confronted without a deeper conversation about the history of racial injustice.
I’m grasping for words to describe this tremendous book. It is ‘five star’ plus plus plus. I feel changed from having read it. If you can manage to get your hands on a copy (and it is unavailable on Amazon UK at the moment), I wholeheartedly urge you to read it.
In 2016, a documentary called ‘13’ by Ava DuVernay opened my eyes to the ‘industrial prison complex’ in the USA and the way it has served to disproportionately harm the lives of people of colour, particularly African-American men, and by extension their families and communities. (“One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated.”) This book covers similar territory, but it is able to go into more depth - partially because of the format but also because of the author’s formidable knowledge of his subject. Bryan Stevenson - defense attorney, writer and educator - builds an open-and-shut case for the way that mass incarceration both enables and is the incontrovertible proof of systemic racism in 21st century USA. It interleaves the social/political experience with its very personal ramifications.
As a student at Harvard Law School, Stephenson enrolled in an intensive course on race and poverty litigation which required work experience with an organisation doing social justice work. After working for Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, Stephenson was led down a path which resulted in him establishing the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) based in Montgomery, Alabama. Alabama was a fitting location for Stephenson’s project; along with its geographical neighbours Mississippi and Louisiana, there is no state in the USA that can compare with it in terms of a ‘perfect storm’ of poverty, socially entrenched racism and a colour-biased judicial system. (“Only a handful of countries permitted the death penalty for children - and the US was one of them. Alabama had more juveniles sentenced to death per capita than any other state - or any other country in the world.”)
One of Stevenson’s early cases involved a man named Walter McMillian. Walter was on death row for the murder of an 18 year old white girl named Ronda Morrison. (A study conducted for McCleskey v. Kemp determined that an offender was “eleven times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was black”.) When Stevenson began to look into Walter’s case, he discovered that there was no way that Walter could have committed the crime. Not only did he have an airtight alibi, but he had been convicted entirely on the basis of highly dubious testimony. (As an opinionated aside from me: when the facts of Walter’s case are revealed, it is impossible to imagine such a travesty of justice happening to a middle-class white person.)
Stevenson uses Walter’s case to demonstrate just how easily an innocent person can be convicted of a crime if there is the social/political will to do so and a lack of skilled representation on behalf of the defendant. After years of fighting to have the case retried, Stevenson finally wins Walter’s freedom - but there is no emotional or financial compensation for the 6 years he spent in a maximum security prison. As Stevenson says in his closing speech to the court: “It was far too easy to convict this wrongly accused man for murder and send him to death row for something he didn’t do and much too hard to win his freedom after proving his innocence.” One of the ironies of Walter’s case is that it takes place in Monroeville - the home of Harper Lee and the fictionalised setting for To Kill a Mockingbird.
Walter McMillian’s case is just one of the many cases Stevenson touches on in the book, and throughout he uses specific examples to describe how the judicial system can become a brutally effective tool to institutionalise racism. Whether it’s the death penalty, police harassment and brutality, prison conditions, excessive punishment, the treatment of minors or inadequate representation, Stevenson presents a highly persuasive mix of statistics with illustrative cases to show that racial bias is terrifyingly commonplace in the US judicial system.
Some of the incidents in this book were shocking to me. I do not cry easily and there were several real-life stories which made me sob - most memorably the experience of 14 year old Charlie. The inhumanity of the way vulnerable people were treated was astonishing. Stevenson goes into some detail about how prisons are used to ‘contain’ and punish the mentally ill - “over 50% of prison/jail inmates have a diagnosed mental illness.”
I know this sounds like grim reading, and it could be if it weren’t for the fact that Stevenson is a gifted storyteller and a true humanitarian. He manages to humanise these ‘criminals’ in a way that utterly convinces the reader of one of his abiding beliefs: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” In the 30+ years since Stevenson founded the EJI, there have been some positive developments in criminal law. (For instance, life imprisonment without parole sentences can no longer be imposed on children convicted of non-homicide crimes.) Stevenson’s hard-won victories are both cheering and encouraging, and he manages to communicate to the reader the importance of hopefulness when it comes to matters of social justice.
I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t want to kill the broken among us who have killed others. Maybe we would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized. I had a notion that if we acknowledged our brokenness, we could no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable.
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