Solitary

“If you can breathe, you can get through anything.”

I lived in Louisiana for seven years. I knew people who would go to Angola for the prison rodeo and craft fair and I could never bring myself to go. After reading Solitary, I now understand the facts to support what I’d always felt in my gut. The land where Angola Prison sits is saturated with the poison of generational curses earned through centuries of violence, torture and exploitation.

It feels cliche to say that this book is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, but it is indeed about just that. The most important parts of this book to me describe the self-discipline and will power involved in maintaining one’s sanity and dignity under the most trying, inhumane circumstances.

The first quarter of the book goes quickly. It was actually fun to hear about what New Orleans life was like for Woodfox in the 1960s. The book slows down immensely during the course of his 44 year sentence to solitary, not so much because of the mundanity of that experience but because of the detailed description of trials and other legal manners. Much of the length of this book is filled with this type of content. It was a bit of a slog to get through, but all I could imagine is that if I was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life in solitary, I’d be replaying the details of my court case over and over in my head, obsessing over every contradiction, too.

When Albert Woodfox was incarcerated and sentenced to quite a stretch in jail, he didn't know what to think, really; he was a teenager who'd got muddled up in basic criminal teenage stuff.

One of Woodfox's great strengths is his ability to express himself straightforwardly, without mucking up a line. As here:

The first time I was called a nigger by a white person I was around 12. I was waiting with dozens of other kids at the end of the Mardi Gras parade behind the Municipal Auditorium where the people on the floats, who were all white in those days, gave away whatever beads and trinkets they had left. On one of the floats the man tossing the trinkets was holding a real beautiful strand of pearl-colored beads. I thought they’d make a nice gift for my mom on her birthday. I called out to him, “Hey mister, hey mister,” and reached out my hand.

He pointed to me as he held the beads above his head and tossed them toward me. As the beads came close to me I reached up and a white girl standing next to me put her hand up and caught them at the same time I did. I didn’t let go. I gestured to the man on the float and told her, “Hey, he was throwing the beads to me.” I told her I wanted to give them to my mom. She looked at the man on the float who was still pointing at me, then she ripped the beads apart and called me nigger. The pain I felt from that young white girl calling me nigger will be with me forever.

Also:

At night, we stood under a streetlight on the corner of Dumaine and Robertson and talked shit for hours, boasting about things we never did, describing girls we never knew.

It's a fair shake to a man who can describe aeons of time in a single line.

I cannot even get into the innards of what happened to Woodfox, but he does a great job at showing what went down in Angola, a big American jail, where he went in the 1960s:

If you were raped at Angola, or what was called “turned out,” your life in prison was virtually over. You became a “gal-boy,” a possession of your rapist. You’d be sold, pimped, used, and abused by your rapist and even some guards. Your only way out was to kill yourself or kill your rapist. If you killed your rapist you’d be free of human bondage within the confines of the prison forever, but in exchange, you’d most likely be convicted of murder, so you’d have to spend the rest of your life at Angola.

Some orderlies, inmate guards, and freeman who worked at RC sold the names of young and weak new arrivals to sexual predators in the prison population. I had to be much more confident than I felt to keep guys from trying stupid shit with me. I couldn’t look weak. I couldn’t show any fear. So I faked it. Luckily, I had a reputation as a fighter who never gave up. There were prisoners at Angola I had known on the street and who knew me or knew of me. Word spreads quickly in prison. Dudes gossiped and talked. Word was if you whip my ass today you have to whip it again tomorrow. You have to beat me every day for the rest of your life if necessary. That helped me a lot.

Just those two paragraphs put the fear of Bog in me.

This is quite the book to go well together with Shane Bauer's excellent exposé of the privately-owned prisons in the USA; that book is named "American Prison".

One of the greatest hardships for me the first few months I was at Angola was getting used to the sameness of every day.

The hardest job I ever had in my life was cutting sugarcane, Angola’s main crop. Cutting cane was so brutal that prisoners would pay somebody to break their hands, legs, or ankles, or they would cut themselves during cane season, to get out of doing it. There were old-timers at Angola who made good money breaking prisoners’ bones so men could get out of work.

And that's just the start.

Woodfox's political being starts becoming awakened due to meeting persons who taught him of The Black Panthers, and what they wanted to teach (and learn). This changed matters inside:

We practiced martial arts together on the tier. We read aloud. We held math classes, spelling classes. We talked about what was going on in the world. Every Friday we passed out a spelling or math test. We encouraged debates and conversation. We told each man he had a say. “Stand up for yourself,” we told them, “for your own self-esteem, for your own dignity.” Even the roughest, most hardened person usually responds when you see the dignity and humanity in him and ask him to see it for himself. “The guards will retaliate,” we said, “but we will always face that together.”

Where the book goes slightly not-good, is where Woodfox goes deeply into his own case; while I see how the details are important to him, I personally feel the book should have been edited tighter; my mind had a hard time staying focused on all of the minutiae, the majority of which I will not be taking with me to my grave. In a larger context, sure, I can see how that all pans out by showing how the government/state/prison/DAs wanted to grind Woodfox down to stop appealing for justice.

Woodfox is really paying back to reading, what reading did for him:

Reading was a bright spot for me. Reading was my salvation. Libraries and universities and schools from all over Louisiana donated books to Angola and for once, the willful ignorance of the prison administration paid off for us, because there were a lot of radical books in the prison library: Books we wouldn’t have been allowed to get through the mail. Books we never could have afforded to buy. Books we had never heard of. Herman, King, and I first gravitated to books and authors that dealt with politics and race—George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, J. A. Rogers’s From ‘Superman’ to Man. We read anything we could find on slavery, communism, socialism, Marxism, anti-imperialism, the African independence movements, and independence movements from around the world.

There's so much good in this book. I hope it gets spread everywhere.

When Albert Woodfox was incarcerated and sentenced to quite a stretch in jail, he didn't know what to think, really; he was a teenager who'd got muddled up in basic criminal teenage stuff.

One of Woodfox's great strengths is his ability to express himself straightforwardly, without mucking up a line. As here:

The first time I was called a nigger by a white person I was around 12. I was waiting with dozens of other kids at the end of the Mardi Gras parade behind the Municipal Auditorium where the people on the floats, who were all white in those days, gave away whatever beads and trinkets they had left. On one of the floats the man tossing the trinkets was holding a real beautiful strand of pearl-colored beads. I thought they’d make a nice gift for my mom on her birthday. I called out to him, “Hey mister, hey mister,” and reached out my hand.

He pointed to me as he held the beads above his head and tossed them toward me. As the beads came close to me I reached up and a white girl standing next to me put her hand up and caught them at the same time I did. I didn’t let go. I gestured to the man on the float and told her, “Hey, he was throwing the beads to me.” I told her I wanted to give them to my mom. She looked at the man on the float who was still pointing at me, then she ripped the beads apart and called me nigger. The pain I felt from that young white girl calling me nigger will be with me forever.

Also:

At night, we stood under a streetlight on the corner of Dumaine and Robertson and talked shit for hours, boasting about things we never did, describing girls we never knew.

It's a fair shake to a man who can describe aeons of time in a single line.

I cannot even get into the innards of what happened to Woodfox, but he does a great job at showing what went down in Angola, a big American jail, where he went in the 1960s:

If you were raped at Angola, or what was called “turned out,” your life in prison was virtually over. You became a “gal-boy,” a possession of your rapist. You’d be sold, pimped, used, and abused by your rapist and even some guards. Your only way out was to kill yourself or kill your rapist. If you killed your rapist you’d be free of human bondage within the confines of the prison forever, but in exchange, you’d most likely be convicted of murder, so you’d have to spend the rest of your life at Angola.

Some orderlies, inmate guards, and freeman who worked at RC sold the names of young and weak new arrivals to sexual predators in the prison population. I had to be much more confident than I felt to keep guys from trying stupid shit with me. I couldn’t look weak. I couldn’t show any fear. So I faked it. Luckily, I had a reputation as a fighter who never gave up. There were prisoners at Angola I had known on the street and who knew me or knew of me. Word spreads quickly in prison. Dudes gossiped and talked. Word was if you whip my ass today you have to whip it again tomorrow. You have to beat me every day for the rest of your life if necessary. That helped me a lot.

Just those two paragraphs put the fear of Bog in me.

This is quite the book to go well together with Shane Bauer's excellent exposé of the privately-owned prisons in the USA; that book is named "American Prison".

One of the greatest hardships for me the first few months I was at Angola was getting used to the sameness of every day.

The hardest job I ever had in my life was cutting sugarcane, Angola’s main crop. Cutting cane was so brutal that prisoners would pay somebody to break their hands, legs, or ankles, or they would cut themselves during cane season, to get out of doing it. There were old-timers at Angola who made good money breaking prisoners’ bones so men could get out of work.

And that's just the start.

Woodfox's political being starts becoming awakened due to meeting persons who taught him of The Black Panthers, and what they wanted to teach (and learn). This changed matters inside:

We practiced martial arts together on the tier. We read aloud. We held math classes, spelling classes. We talked about what was going on in the world. Every Friday we passed out a spelling or math test. We encouraged debates and conversation. We told each man he had a say. “Stand up for yourself,” we told them, “for your own self-esteem, for your own dignity.” Even the roughest, most hardened person usually responds when you see the dignity and humanity in him and ask him to see it for himself. “The guards will retaliate,” we said, “but we will always face that together.”

Where the book goes slightly not-good, is where Woodfox goes deeply into his own case; while I see how the details are important to him, I personally feel the book should have been edited tighter; my mind had a hard time staying focused on all of the minutiae, the majority of which I will not be taking with me to my grave. In a larger context, sure, I can see how that all pans out by showing how the government/state/prison/DAs wanted to grind Woodfox down to stop appealing for justice.

Woodfox is really paying back to reading, what reading did for him:

Reading was a bright spot for me. Reading was my salvation. Libraries and universities and schools from all over Louisiana donated books to Angola and for once, the willful ignorance of the prison administration paid off for us, because there were a lot of radical books in the prison library: Books we wouldn’t have been allowed to get through the mail. Books we never could have afforded to buy. Books we had never heard of. Herman, King, and I first gravitated to books and authors that dealt with politics and race—George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, J. A. Rogers’s From ‘Superman’ to Man. We read anything we could find on slavery, communism, socialism, Marxism, anti-imperialism, the African independence movements, and independence movements from around the world.

There's so much good in this book. I hope it gets spread everywhere.

When Albert Woodfox was incarcerated and sentenced to quite a stretch in jail, he didn't know what to think, really; he was a teenager who'd got muddled up in basic criminal teenage stuff.

One of Woodfox's great strengths is his ability to express himself straightforwardly, without mucking up a line. As here:

The first time I was called a nigger by a white person I was around 12. I was waiting with dozens of other kids at the end of the Mardi Gras parade behind the Municipal Auditorium where the people on the floats, who were all white in those days, gave away whatever beads and trinkets they had left. On one of the floats the man tossing the trinkets was holding a real beautiful strand of pearl-colored beads. I thought they’d make a nice gift for my mom on her birthday. I called out to him, “Hey mister, hey mister,” and reached out my hand.

He pointed to me as he held the beads above his head and tossed them toward me. As the beads came close to me I reached up and a white girl standing next to me put her hand up and caught them at the same time I did. I didn’t let go. I gestured to the man on the float and told her, “Hey, he was throwing the beads to me.” I told her I wanted to give them to my mom. She looked at the man on the float who was still pointing at me, then she ripped the beads apart and called me nigger. The pain I felt from that young white girl calling me nigger will be with me forever.

Also:

At night, we stood under a streetlight on the corner of Dumaine and Robertson and talked shit for hours, boasting about things we never did, describing girls we never knew.

It's a fair shake to a man who can describe aeons of time in a single line.

I cannot even get into the innards of what happened to Woodfox, but he does a great job at showing what went down in Angola, a big American jail, where he went in the 1960s:

If you were raped at Angola, or what was called “turned out,” your life in prison was virtually over. You became a “gal-boy,” a possession of your rapist. You’d be sold, pimped, used, and abused by your rapist and even some guards. Your only way out was to kill yourself or kill your rapist. If you killed your rapist you’d be free of human bondage within the confines of the prison forever, but in exchange, you’d most likely be convicted of murder, so you’d have to spend the rest of your life at Angola.

Some orderlies, inmate guards, and freeman who worked at RC sold the names of young and weak new arrivals to sexual predators in the prison population. I had to be much more confident than I felt to keep guys from trying stupid shit with me. I couldn’t look weak. I couldn’t show any fear. So I faked it. Luckily, I had a reputation as a fighter who never gave up. There were prisoners at Angola I had known on the street and who knew me or knew of me. Word spreads quickly in prison. Dudes gossiped and talked. Word was if you whip my ass today you have to whip it again tomorrow. You have to beat me every day for the rest of your life if necessary. That helped me a lot.

Just those two paragraphs put the fear of Bog in me.

This is quite the book to go well together with Shane Bauer's excellent exposé of the privately-owned prisons in the USA; that book is named "American Prison".

One of the greatest hardships for me the first few months I was at Angola was getting used to the sameness of every day.

The hardest job I ever had in my life was cutting sugarcane, Angola’s main crop. Cutting cane was so brutal that prisoners would pay somebody to break their hands, legs, or ankles, or they would cut themselves during cane season, to get out of doing it. There were old-timers at Angola who made good money breaking prisoners’ bones so men could get out of work.

And that's just the start.

Woodfox's political being starts becoming awakened due to meeting persons who taught him of The Black Panthers, and what they wanted to teach (and learn). This changed matters inside:

We practiced martial arts together on the tier. We read aloud. We held math classes, spelling classes. We talked about what was going on in the world. Every Friday we passed out a spelling or math test. We encouraged debates and conversation. We told each man he had a say. “Stand up for yourself,” we told them, “for your own self-esteem, for your own dignity.” Even the roughest, most hardened person usually responds when you see the dignity and humanity in him and ask him to see it for himself. “The guards will retaliate,” we said, “but we will always face that together.”

Where the book goes slightly not-good, is where Woodfox goes deeply into his own case; while I see how the details are important to him, I personally feel the book should have been edited tighter; my mind had a hard time staying focused on all of the minutiae, the majority of which I will not be taking with me to my grave. In a larger context, sure, I can see how that all pans out by showing how the government/state/prison/DAs wanted to grind Woodfox down to stop appealing for justice.

Woodfox is really paying back to reading, what reading did for him:

Reading was a bright spot for me. Reading was my salvation. Libraries and universities and schools from all over Louisiana donated books to Angola and for once, the willful ignorance of the prison administration paid off for us, because there were a lot of radical books in the prison library: Books we wouldn’t have been allowed to get through the mail. Books we never could have afforded to buy. Books we had never heard of. Herman, King, and I first gravitated to books and authors that dealt with politics and race—George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, J. A. Rogers’s From ‘Superman’ to Man. We read anything we could find on slavery, communism, socialism, Marxism, anti-imperialism, the African independence movements, and independence movements from around the world.

There's so much good in this book. I hope it gets spread everywhere.