Brothers and Keepers Read online

  I write because I’m lonely. I write because writing sometimes feels better than silence, better than shedding tears. I write to hear myself think, to remind myself I own a voice with the power to construct a version of what my senses experience. With words I can make something of my world, no matter how private or subjective or useless to anyone else on the planet that making turns out to be. I use words to rattle the bars of my cage. To remind myself the cage is there. Remind myself I don’t like it. It’s in the way. Maybe the steel bars that separate and isolate each of us shouldn’t be there, but they are and they ain’t going nowhere. No matter how hard I wish them away. I write to imagine worlds where the bars don’t necessarily exist. Such places could happen. I write so I don’t forget to dislike the bars and don’t forget not to accept them—the bars forming the cage of self, of being alive and mortal and full of conflicting desires.

  When Nelson Mandela walked out of a South African prison after twenty-seven years of detention, it was instantly clear to me that he’d never been not free. Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Island had been a cruel, crude hoax whose purpose was to convince him and the world he was not free. Incarcerating him was hiding from the truth. In spite of the regime’s power to impose extreme limitations on his civil rights and his physical environment—including maiming or destroying his body—Mr. Mandela’s mind had never been not free. Though a mind may not be able to dismantle stone walls, it can dismantle a state that erects the walls.

  I hope I have managed in Brothers and Keepers to embody two simple truths that the writing taught me: one person cannot free another person; imprisoning others imprisons the self. After barely surviving his first few years of anger and rebelliousness in prison, my brother finally understood that he must stop waiting for someone to hand him freedom. Even if freedom was something someone could grant him, no one with the power to grant it was listening to his demands or pleas. Gradually he discovered he could achieve a measure of freedom through strength of mind and will. Each exchange with guards or other inmates presented an opportunity to maximize personal autonomy and minimize institutional intrusion and surveillance. Not returning an insult in kind, questioning irrational orders, not surrendering customary privileges without protest, refusing to inform on fellow inmates, refusing to act out demeaning stereotypical roles, speaking when silence is expected, being silent when speaking is expected, doing more than an assignment calls for, or doing less—such acts became for Robby a discipline, a systematic resistance to preserve dignity and self-worth. I learned to admire my brother’s courage. Be proud of his small victories against incredible odds.

  I can hear Robby’s voice busting in here. “Hey bro, don’t you dare tell nobody I’m free. I gotta get the hell out of here before this place kills me, man.” A human spirit transcending the bars of a cage is a beautiful idea to imagine. A person locked up in a cage is not such a pretty picture. Nor is the picture of citizens standing aside, pretending not to see a floundering, festering prison system go on about its business of destroying lives. No matter how well my brother functions behind bars, a human zoo remains an abominable concept. Though they punish severely, prisons are not a solution to the problem of crime. At best a distraction from the problem, at worst an evil accomplice. If we accept cages as a fit habitat for more and more of us, we’re placing into someone else’s hands more and more power to incarcerate, power that inevitably shrinks the zone within which each of us is safe from that power’s reach. A society that allows its prison system to slip below the radar of public scrutiny, below humane standards of decency, provides an essential tool for tyrants or tyrannical ideologies to criminally seize control of a state.

  The cages must be dismantled. Walls torn down. A new mass movement for human rights might begin with prison reform. Perhaps we can divert our pursuit of social justice away from punishment for some, redirect it toward entitling everybody to the basic necessities of life.

  Meanwhile, America grows smaller and smaller, erecting more walls to keep out or keep in or keep down what it fears. Isolated by these walls, busy maintaining them, we neglect self-examination. Blame others for causing our immurement by fear. Locked down by the tragic error of imprisoning others to free ourselves, we waste the possibilities of self-liberation each of us contains.

  This preface and edition of Brothers and Keepers are dedicated to freeing the bodies and minds of all my sisters and brothers.

  —John Edgar Wideman

  August 2004

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The style, the voices that speak this book, are an attempt to capture a process that began in earnest about four years ago: my brother and I talking about our lives.

  To learn my brother’s story I visited him in prison and listened to what he had to say. I’d take a few notes—names, dates, sequences of events—then, some time later, after I’d had an opportunity to absorb his words but while they were still fresh in my mind, I would reproduce on paper what I’d heard. Robby would read what I’d written and respond either when I visited him next or by letter. His suggestions and corrections usually concerned factual matters, although his sense of larger issues, of truth and correctness, his feelings for narrative tone and pace, as well as the invaluable quotes from his letters and poems, added immensely to the final result. As a novelist, I have had lots of practice creating written versions of speech, so I felt much more confident about borrowing narrative techniques learned from fiction than employing a tape recorder

  I read many books about prison and prisoners, talked long hours to family members, especially my mother, reviewed court transcripts, newspaper files, and police reports in order to document events and educate myself. I gratefully acknowledge these sources, but also take full responsibility for the final mix of memory, imagination, feeling and fact. Reconstructing the tragic chain of circumstances that caused one young man to die and sent three others to prison for life has been a harrowing experience. In the hope that there is something to learn from this account, something to salvage from the grief and waste, I’ve striven for accuracy and honesty. Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of people mentioned in the text.

  VISITS

  When I was a very little child, oh, about six or seven, I had a habit of walking down Walnut and Copeland streets; you know those streets. As I walked I would look at the cars and in my mind I would buy them, but they only cost nickels or dimes. Big ones a dime, little ones a nickel, some that I liked a whole lot would cost a quarter. So as I got older this became a habit. For years I bought cars with the change that was in my pocket, which in those times wasn’t very much.

  Now this was a kind of wish, but more than that it was a way of looking at things—an unrealistic way—it’s like I wanted things to be easy, and misguidedly tried to make everything that way, blinded then to the fact that nothing good or worthwhile comes without serious effort. What I’m trying to say is that while I was walking through life I had a distorted view of how I wanted things to be rather than how they really were or are. Always wanted things to be easy; so instead of dealing with things as they were, I didn’t deal with them at all. I ducked hard things that took effort or work and tried to have fun, make a party, cause that was always easy.

  I heard the news first in a phone call from my mother. My youngest brother, Robby, and two of his friends had killed a man during a holdup. Robby was a fugitive, wanted for armed robbery and murder. The police were hunting him, and his crime had given the cops license to kill. The distance I’d put between my brother’s world and mine suddenly collapsed. The two thousand miles between Laramie, Wyoming, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my years of willed ignorance, of flight and hiding, had not changed a simple truth: I could never run fast enough or far enough. Robby was inside me. Wherever he was, running for his life, he carried part of me with him.

  Nearly three months would pass between the day in November 1975 when I learned of my brother’s crime and the February afternoon he appeared in Laramie. During that period no
one in the family knew Robby’s whereabouts. After the initial reaction of shock and disbelief subsided, people in Pittsburgh had settled into the inevitability of a long, tense wait. Prayers were said. As word passed along the network of family and friends, my people, who had long experience of waiting and praying, braced themselves for the next blow. A special watch was set upon those, like my mother, who would be hardest hit. The best was hoped for, but the worst expected; and no one could claim to know what the best might be. No news was good news. No news meant Robby hadn’t been apprehended, that whatever else he’d lost, he still was free. But knowing nothing had its dark side, created a concern that sometimes caused my mother, in spite of herself, to pray for Robby’s capture. Prison seemed safer than the streets. As long as he was free, there was a chance Robby could hurt someone or be killed. For my mother and the others who loved him, the price of my brother’s freedom was a constant, gnawing fear that anytime the phone rang or a bulletin flashed across the TV screen, the villain, the victim might be Robert Wideman.

  Because I was living in Laramie, Wyoming, I could shake loose from the sense of urgency, of impending disaster dogging my people in Pittsburgh. Never a question of forgetting Robby, more a matter of how I remembered him that distinguished my feelings from theirs. Sudden flashes of fear, rage, and remorse could spoil a class or a party, cause me to retreat into silence, lose whole days to gloominess and distance. But I had the luxury of dealing intermittently with my pain. As winter deepened and snow filled the mountains, I experienced a comforting certainty. The worst wouldn’t happen. Robby wouldn’t be cut down in a wild cops-and-robbers shootout, because I knew he was on his way to find me. Somehow, in spite of everything, we were going to get together. I was waiting for him to arrive. I knew he would. And this certainty guaranteed his safety.

  Perhaps it was wishful thinking, a whistling away of the miles and years of silence between us, but I never doubted a reunion would occur.

  On a Sunday early in February, huge, wet flakes of snow were falling continuously past the windows of the house on Harney Street—the kind of snow not driven by wolf winds howling in from the north, but soft, quiet, relentless snow, spring snow almost benign in the unhurried way it buried the town. The scale of the storm, the immense quantities of snow it dumped minute after minute, forced me to remember that Laramie was just one more skimpy circle of wagons huddling against the wilderness. I had closed the curtains to shut out that snow which seemed as if it might never stop.

  That Sunday I wrote to my brother. Not a letter exactly. I seldom wrote letters and had no intention of sticking what I was scribbling in an envelope. Mailing it was impossible anyway, since I had no idea where my brother might be. Really it was more a conversation than a letter. I needed to talk to someone, and that Sunday Robby seemed the perfect someone.

  So I talked to him about what I’d learned since coming west. Filled him in on the news. Shared everything from the metaphysics of the weather to the frightening circumstances surrounding the premature birth of Jamila, our new daughter. I explained how winter’s outrageous harshness is less difficult to endure than its length. How after a tease of warm, springlike weather in late April the sight of a snowflake in May is enough to make a grown man cry. How Laramie old-timers brag about having seen snow fall every month of the year. How I’d almost killed my whole family on Interstate 80 near the summit of the Laramie range, at the beginning of our annual summer migration east to Maine, when I lost control of the Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser and it did a 360 on the icy road in the middle of June.

  The letter rambled on and on for pages. Like good talk, it digressed and recycled itself and switched moods precipitously. Inevitably, one subject was home and family. After all, I was speaking to my brother. Whatever the new news happened to be, there was the old news, the deep roots of shared time and place and blood. When I touched on home, the distance between us melted. I could sense Robby’s presence, just over my shoulder, a sensation so real I was sure I could have reached out and touched him if I had lifted my eyes from the page and swiveled my chair.

  Writing that Sunday, I had no reason to believe my brother was on his way to Laramie. No one had heard from him in months. Yet he was on his way and I knew it. Two men, hundreds of miles apart, communicating through some mysterious process neither understood but both employed for a few minutes one Sunday afternoon as efficiently, effectively as dolphins talking underwater with the beeps and echoes of their sonar. Except that the medium into which we launched our signals was thin air. Thin, high mountain air spangled with wet snowflakes.

  I can’t explain how or why but it happened. Robby was in the study with me. He felt close because he was close, part of him outrunning the stolen car, outrunning the storm dogging him and his partners as they fled from Salt Lake City toward Laramie.

  Reach out and touch. That’s what the old songs could do. I’d begun that Sunday by reading a week-old New York Times. One of the beauties of living in Laramie. No point in frantically striving to keep abreast of the Times. The race was over before the paper arrived in town, Thursday after the Sunday it was published. The Times was stale news, all its urgency vitiated by the fact that I could miss it when it was fresh and the essential outline of my world, my retreat into willed ignorance and a private, leisurely pace would continue unchanged.

  Five minutes of the paper had been enough; then I repacked the sections into their plastic sheath, let its weight pull it off the couch onto the rug. Reach out and touch. Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, the Harmonizing Four, James Cleveland, the Davis Sisters, the Swan Silvertones. I dug out my favorite albums and lined them up against the stereo cabinet. A cut or two from each one would be my Sunday morning service. Deejaying the songs got me off my backside, forced me out of the chair where I’d been sitting staring at the ceiling. With good gospel tunes rocking the house I could open the curtains and face the snow. The sky was blue. Shafts of sunlight filtered through a deluge of white flakes. Snow, sunshine, blue sky, not a ripple of wind deflecting the heavy snow from its straight, downward path. An unlikely conjunction of elements perfectly harmonized. Like the pain and hope, despair and celebration of the black gospel music. Like the tiny body of the baby girl in her isolette, the minuscule, premature, two-pound-fourteen-ounce bundle of bone and sinew and nerve and will that had fought and continued to fight so desperately to live.

  The songs had stirred me, flooded me with memories and sensations to the point of bursting. I had to talk to someone. Not anyone close, not anyone who had been living through what I’d been experiencing the past three years in the West. A stranger’s ear would be better than a friend’s, a stranger who wouldn’t interrupt with questions, with alternate versions of events. I needed to do most of the talking. I wanted a listener, an intimate stranger, and summoned up Robby; and he joined me. I wrote something like a letter to wherever my brother might be, to whomever Robby had become.

  Wrote the letter and of course never sent it, but got an answer anyway in just two days, the following Tuesday toward the end of the afternoon. I can pinpoint the hour because I was fixing a drink. Cocktail time is as much a state of mind as a particular hour, but during the week five o’clock is when I usually pour a stiff drink for myself and one for my lady if she’s in the mood. At five on Tuesday, February 11, Robby phoned from a bowling alley down the street and around the corner to say he was in town.

  Hey, Big Bruh.

  Hey. How you doing? Where the hell are you?

  We’re in town. At some bowling alley. Me and Michael Dukes and Johnny-Boy.

  In Laramie?

  Yeah. Think that’s where we’s at, anyway. In a bowling alley. Them nuts is bowling. Got to get them crazy dudes out here before they tear the man’s place up.

  Well, youall c’mon over here. Which bowling alley is it?

  Just a bowling alley. Got some Chinese restaurant beside it.

  Laramie Lanes. It’s close to here. I can be there in a minute to get you.

  Okay. T
hat’s cool. We be in the car outside. Old raggedy-ass Oldsmobile got Utah plates. Hey, man. Is this gon be alright?

  What do you mean?

  You know. Coming by your house and all. I know you heard about the mess.

  Mom called and told me. I’ve been waiting for you to show up. Something told me you were close. You wait. I’ll be right there.

  *

  In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 15, 1975, approximately three months before arriving in Laramie, my youngest brother Robert (whom I had named), together with Michael Dukes and Cecil Rice, had robbed a fence. A rented truck allegedly loaded with brand-new Sony color TVs was the bait in a scam designed to catch the fence with a drawer full of money. The plan had seemed simple and foolproof. Dishonor among thieves. A closed circle, crooks stealing from crooks, with the law necessarily excluded. Except a man was killed. Dukes blew him away when the man reached for a gun Dukes believed he had concealed inside his jacket.