Review by New York Times Review
During A spell of extreme cold in early February, haunting footage of inmates banging on the windows of their cells at a federal jail in Brooklyn went viral. The men were hard to see - a flurry of brown fists glimpsed through slits - but the sound reverberated throughout the street. It was a shocking sound, the percussion of hundreds of dangerously neglected prisoners freezing in a building that had gone unheated for over a week. The video was also a jarring reminder that much of the time most of us have no idea what happens to people when they are locked away. It was an odd thing to witness in a place like Brooklyn, where there is certainly plenty of strife but markers of black prosperity abound. The video was another reminder that the roller coaster transition from the Obama to the post-Obama era has revealed an extraordinary complexity and self-contradiction at the heart of the contemporary black experience in America. The country has never been more cognizant of its brutal past, or more resolved to a better, more inclusive future - and yet its stubborn capacity for recidivism is impossible to ignore. The paradox of life in a society in which a not-insignificant number of the traditional lower caste can be fully integrated into the highest social and political strata at the very same time that many of their less fortunate peers remain profoundly excluded from the mainstream highlights, among many other things, the need for as wide as possible a variety of chroniclers of this fractured reality. And so at a moment when the Obamas themselves command tens of millions of dollars to tell their stories of shattered ceilings, we are also witnessing what may shape into a golden age of lower- and working-class black male accounts of punishment and crime - and sometimes transcendence, too. Literary writers like Mitchell S. Jackson and Reginald Dwayne Betts have taken us into jail with them and back out - in Betts's case, into the Ivy League - revealing in the process just how fine and traversable the line between languishing and flourishing can be. They have forced us to consider the possibility of redemption and to reckon with the staggering quantity of talent and potential we otherwise consent to throw away. Now a heart-rending new memoir enters this conversation and raises urgent questions of its own. Albert "Shaka Cinque" Woodfox was released from Angola prison in Louisiana in February 2016, after having served more than 40 years in solitary confinement, where he was locked down for 23 hours a day in a 6-by-9-foot cell. "Solitary" is Woodfox's pointillist account of an already boxedin childhood and adolescence in the streets of New Orleans - by his own admission, an existence marked by ignorance and devoted to petty and increasingly serious crime - and the near entirety of an intellectually and spiritually expansive adulthood spent in one of the most brutal prisons in the country (and therefore the world). Studies have shown that even 15 days in solitary confinement can cause irreparable harm. North of four decades amounts to the longest term an American prisoner has ever served in such conditions. Over the course of 400 painstaking pages, Woodfox attempts to make sense of his life, and his remarkable ability not just to endure but eventually to thrive. It is not a literary work, and this may actually be its strength, allowing the sheer force and enormity of the experience to shine through. Born in 1947 to a loving but illiterate and impoverished mother, who at times resorted to prostitution to make ends meet, and an absent father, Woodfox admits that his mother's wretched position obliterated any authority in his eyes. "By age 13," he writes, "I wasn't obedient to my mom anymore. She would tell me to be home at a certain time and I wouldn't be home at that time." Instead, he and his friends formed a gang called the 6th Ward High Steppers and began to steal and flee from the police, who would beat them when they could. "The guilt of innocence" is the term he applies to this early phase: "We never thought we were committing crimes," he writes. "We thought we were outsmarting the world." Woodfox grew into something like a professional prisoner. By the age of 18, he'd fallen into what would become his metier when, realizing his girlfriend's brother had stolen the car that he was driving, he led "a sheriff's squad car on a 17-mile high speed chase." After Woodfox was apprehended and beaten by the police (this is an alarmingly constant theme), a judge gave him a choice: He could do four years at a city jail or two years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola - a former plantation that was still run like one. Black and white prisoners were segregated and forced to labor for virtually no pay. "African-American prisoners did 99 percent of the fieldwork by hand," he writes. "White guards on horseback rode up and down the lines of working prisoners, holding shotguns across their laps." One black inmate testified that when he stabbed another prisoner in a fight a white guard rode the wounded man around the grounds until he died. Surviving such hell was a mark of distinction in the neighborhood Woodfox then called home. When men returned from Angola, they were accorded genuine respect. "I thought it would be an honor to go there," he confesses. From this decisive moment onward, the book becomes a dizzying catalog of horrors, the most harrowing of which is not mere violence - stabbings and even gassings were so common as to be almost banal - but the omnipresent threat of male rape. "Master/slave" relations among prisoners were not only condoned but encouraged by the guards. Such tacit acceptance of sexual predation as the simple cost of doing business in the carceral state is one of the most damning moral stains on the American conscience and Woodfox makes this excruciatingly clear. Another, and this is the inescapable lesson of the book, is the terrible reality that the use of long-term solitary confinement is not just an enhanced form of punishment - it is torture through and through. In his 20s, Woodfox was in and out of prison for several more years of ever deeper involvement with drugs and crime, culminating, at one point, in a brazen escape from a courthouse elevator full of prisoners and a sheriff's deputy. Recaptured in New York, he was placed in temporary detention in the Manhattan jail known as the Tombs - a turn of events, ironically, that proves to be his life-defining break even as it ensures he will spend many more decades behind bars. Before being sent back to Louisiana, he meets members of the Black Panthers who instill his life with purpose, introducing him to the concept of political struggle. Thinking of himself as a political prisoner provides Woodfox with the template both to assume responsibility for and to disavow the criminal he has been while allowing him to develop an analysis of the ways in which his race and class have consistently precluded the possibility of receiving just treatment for his acts. His life becomes meaningful to himself - and profoundly so - only once he is able to locate it within a larger fight. (He begins to see his mother's problems differently, too.) "It was as if a light went on in a room inside me that I hadn't known existed," he writes. This shift in perspective will be what preserves his sanity when he and three other black inmates at Angola are framed for the murder of a 23-year-old white guard. "I turned my cell into a university, a hall of debate, a law school," he writes of the years of solitary confinement (and debilitating bouts of claustrophobia) that swiftly followed. In addition, he forges life-defining friendships with two other falsely accused men also being held in solitary. (Woodfox's description of the lengths these men go to in order to know and care for one another in the near complete absence of physical contact or even face-to-face communication amounts to some of the most touching writing on platonic male friendship I have ever encountered.) Together they begin to organize the other prisoners around them and teach themselves the law. Hunger strike by hunger strike, petition by petition, lawsuit by lawsuit, they attempt - and sometimes, though often at tremendous personal cost, are able - to force the prison to reform. "We must imagine Sisyphus happy," Camus famously wrote, and such a prompt is the ennobling virtue at the core of "Solitary." It lifts the book above mere advocacy or even memoir and places it in the realm of stoic philosophy. Crucially, Woodfox is not a bitter man. He refuses to see himself as a victim. Ultimately, this allergy to self-pity allows him to grapple with the consequences and consolations of whatever agency - and dignity - can exist in even the most abhorrent and restricted circumstances. THOMAS CHATTERTON williams is a national fellow at New America and a contributing writer at The Times Magazine. His next book, "Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race," will be published in October.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Woodfox's shocking memoir of his years in prison, mostly under solitary confinement, is a testament to the human spirit and a scathing indictment of the justice system. Growing up in New Orleans during Jim Crow, Woodfox helps his family by committing petty crimes, eventually growing a long rap sheet. During one of his prison stints, he learns about the Black Panthers and is inspired to change his ways. He befriends Panthers Herman Wallace and Robert King, and the three work to organize other prisoners to fight against their inhumane treatment. These actions lead to several false charges, culminating in the framing for the murder of a correctional officer in 1972 and Woodfox's subsequent decades-long solitary confinement. Woodfox's story reads like a prison diary and is unrelenting in its portrait of the day-to-day humiliations and racism experienced by Black prisoners. His fight to clear his name of the murder conviction shows the lengths that the state would go to keep him incarcerated. Woodfox's difficult story is a call to action for justice-system reform.--Kathy Sexton Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this devastating, superb memoir, Woodfox reflects on his decades inside the Louisiana prison system. He recounts that, as a "badass" black youth in 1960s New Orleans bouncing in and out of jail, he encountered the Black Panther Party and "a light went on in a room inside me that I hadn't known existed." His subsequent efforts to organize protests against the dehumanizing treatment of prisoners in the notorious Angola state penitentiary got him framed for the murder of a white correctional officer in 1972. Woodfox spent the next four decades in solitary confinement, struggling to stay sane by educating himself; helping others; and cultivating deep friendships with two other wrongfully convicted Panthers, Herman Wallace and Robert King. In 2016, he made a no-contest plea and was freed. The book is a stunning indictment of a judicial system "not concerned with innocence or justice," and a crushing account of the inhumanity of solitary confinement. This breathtaking, brutal, and intelligent book will move and inspire readers. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Born in segregated New Orleans in 1947 and raised in the black neighborhood Treme, Woodfox offers an autobiography that is more than his life story. Moving from petty thievery to armed robbery that, at 18, sent him to Louisiana's infamous maximum security prison at Angola, Woodfox had a stint in New York's Manhattan House of Detention called "the Tombs." There he met members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense who increased his understanding of institutionalized racism. Woodfox returned to Angola after being wrongly convicted of the murder of a prison guard, for which he was locked down 23 hours a day in a six-by-nine-foot cell for 44 years. How he survived, indeed how he became a better human being amid beatings, isolation, and persecution carry his narrative. More than his telling self-realization and detailing conditions of life behind bars, Woodfox reaches back to the mold of George Jackson's now classic Soledad Brother (1970) to produce a powerful manifesto for reform of the racist, unjust, and inhumane prison-industrial complex. VERDICT A worthy read for anyone interested in the struggle to ensure humanity exists behind bars in America.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A man who spent four decades in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit tells his shocking story.Born in 1947 in the "Negro" wing of a New Orleans hospital, Woodfox helped his family eke out survival through petty crimes. Though he showed academic potential, he left high school before graduation, spending his time on streets patrolled by mostly white police officers, who "came through our neighborhood picking up black men for standing on the corner, charging them with loitering or vagrancy, looking to meet their quota of arrests. Once in custody, who knows what charges would be put on those men." Arrested at 18, the author entered Angola penitentiary, where his defiance and his affiliation with a nonviolent chapter of the Black Panther Party led to racist, sadistic guards targeting him. When a white prison guard was mysteriously murdered while on duty, prison officials framed Woodfox for the killing despite his detailed presentation of evidence that another inmate had committed the crime. The bulk of the book chronicles the author's solitary confinement over the next 40 years. In many cases, inmates subjected to these brutal conditions slowly lose their sanity and sometimes commit suicide. Woodfox explains how he overcame those odds despite relentless despair. Through a series of unusual occurrences, public-interest lawyers and other prison reformers learned about his treatment. The activists began building a two-pronged case, advocating for a declaration of innocence regarding the murder and seeking an end to Woodfox's solitary confinement. Though the author is obviously not an impartial source, that understandable bias mingles throughout the narrative with fierce intelligence and the author's touching loyalty to fellow prisoners also being brutalized. Nearly every page of the book is depressing because of the inhumane treatment of the prisoners, which often surpasses comprehension. But it's an important story for these times, and readers will cheer the author's eventual re-entry into society.An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that it never could happen in real life. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
