A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison

"Dwayne Betts was incarcerated for 9 years in an unforgiving place?a place in which he also discovered the incredible power of books and reading. He's written his own life-changing book, which may well prevent other young men from making that detour to prison. A searing and ultimately uplifting story." Hill Harper, Best selling author of Letters to a Young Brother and Letters to a Young Sister . "I'm so happy to have been introduced to the miracle that is R. Dwayne Betts' A Question of Freedom . It tells so many important stories: of senseless violence that plagues our streets, the devastating affect our prison system is having on so many young African-American males and the struggles we must all experience before we can find redemption. But perhaps most importantly, it's a story about the power of consciousness. A reminder that no matter how confining our surroundings might seem or how bleak our future might look, as long as we are in touch with our higher selves, we can always tap into both the compassion and the toughness that is in all of our hearts. Betts is a major new voice in hip-hop and I look forward to being inspired by him for years to come." Russell Simmons " A Question of Freedom is a must-read and should be required reading for all those young sons and grandsons and brothers and nephews and uncles who believe this can't happen to them; it can, even if they can't wrap their brains around such a concept." - Baltimore Times R . DWAYNE BETTS is graduate student at Warren Wilson College, where he has been awarded the Holden Fellowship. Shortly after his release from prison, The Washington Post published a feature article about him and a book club he founded for at-risk young men called YoungMenRead. He teaches poetry at several public schools in the D.C. metro area, has had his poetry published in many national literary journals, and contributed an essay to the anthology It's All Love . Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. [ 1 ] Thirty Minutes Sixteen years hadn’t even done a good job on my voice. It cracked in my head as I tried to explain away the police car driving my one hundred and twenty-six pounds to the Fairfax County Jail. Everything near enough for me to touch gleamed with the color of violence: the black of the deputy’s holstered guns, the broken leather of the seat I sat on and the silver of the cuffs that held my hands before me in prayer. When I closed my eyes I thought about the way the gun felt in my palm. I tried to remember what caliber pistol it was, but couldn’t. It was automatic and weighed nothing in my palm, and I couldn’t figure how something that weighed nothing could have me slumped in the back of a car driving me away from my life. My wrists almost slipped through cuffs that held me captive as jailhouse dangers swirled red in my head. I want to tell you that I could talk tough, that I was going over every way I knew to say fuck you. But I wasn’t. There were titles of movies and books on my mind: Shawshank Redemption; American Me; Blood In, Blood Out; Makes Me Wanna Holler; Racehoss; The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Every movie or book I’d ever read about prison bled with violence and I knew the list I was making in my head could go on forever. Stories of robbery, rape, murder, discrimination and what it means to not be able to go home. Sixteen years old and I was headed to a jail cell, adding my name to the toll of black men behind bars. Not even old enough to buy liquor or cigarettes, but I knew I’d be stepping into the county jail in minutes and that my moms was at home somewhere crying. When I tried to part my hands I thought about the violence, about how real it is when a cell door closes behind you at night. I thought about needing a knife, ’cause from what I knew everyone needed a knife. I stared at my shackled feet. I hadn’t seen my Timberlands since the day I was arrested, three months earlier. I was getting ready to learn what it meant to lock your thoughts inside of yourself and survive in a place governed by violence, a place where violence was a cloud of smoke you learned to breathe in or choked on. Sometimes there’s a story that’s been written again and again, sometimes a person finds himself with a story he thinks will be in vogue forever. The story is about redemption, about overcoming. A person finds that story and starts to write it, thinking it will do him some good to tell the world how it really was. That’s not this story. This is about silence, and how in an eight- year period I met over a dozen people named Juvenile or Youngin or Shorty, all nicknames to tell the world that they were in prison as young boys, as children. We wore the names like badges of honor, because in a way, for some of us, it was all we had to guard us against the fear. And we were guilty and I was just like everyone else: I thought about the edge of a knife. My world before incarceration was black and white. Suitland, Maryland, the closest thing to the black belt that I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t just that there were no white people in my community, it was that as a kid we always saw the white people around us as intruders or people looking to have power. Teachers, firefighters, cops or the white folks we saw on buses and trains who we imagined driving into D.C. from their nice neighborhoods to work. One night at a mall in Springfield, Virginia, changed my world. It only took thirty minutes. Brandon and I walked into a mall that literally had more white people in it than I’d ever seen at one time. And we had walked in looking for someone to make a victim. Both of us were in high school. We should have been thinking homework, basketball and pretty girls. Driving to the jail brought the night in Springfield fresh to my memory. Somewhere between pulling out a pistol that fit nicely in the palm of my hand, tapping lightly on the window of a forest green Grand Prix and waking the sleeping middle- aged white man with the muzzle of the burner, I committed six felonies. It was February of 1996 and I was a high school junior. I’d never held a gun before and was an honor student who could almost remember every time the police had spoken to me, but I knew none of that mattered as my face pressed against the window of the cruiser. I wore a sweater of swirling greens and oranges woven and layered as collage; a cheap imitation Gucci that I had buried long ago in my closet. I remember when my moms bought it. I begged for the sweater, thinking if it fooled me it would fool my friends. I was dead wrong. The first time I wore it to school six people joned on me, cut me up so bad that I dumped it under a rack of old clothes and books. It happened a year before I got locked up, when I was in tenth grade and impressing the finest girl in my chemistry class ruled every other ambition. The sweater resurfaced when I needed court clothes. My mother told me that I needed something nice to wear to court. The judges were always white. There may have been black judges but I never saw or stood before one the entire time I trekked back and forth to court. The juvenile judge who watched me stand uncomfortable in the sweater I ended up wearing to the jail didn’t care how I looked. He stared at the charges before me and agreed with the prosecutor to pass me over to adult court before I could speak. It was all policy, a formality that my lawyer knew about. He told me, “Don’t worry. This was a formality I knew was coming. The law says that certain charges are automatically certifiable, and carjacking is one of them, but in Circuit Court the judge will have more discretion.” What he was really saying was that nothing I wore mattered. Clothes could hide me no more than days of smoking weed made people think I was built for running the streets. The law said the gun, the carjacking, the robbery all made it an argument we couldn’t win. Three things that meant my past didn’t matter and certification as an adult was automatic. It’s like the car, the cuffs, the shackles and even the drive were as good as guaranteed when I pulled a pistol on that sleeping white man. All I had with me was my body and a black trash bag that an officer took from me as they led me to a bench in a corner. On my lips and in my head was the start of a new language defined by the way words changed meanings, all because I’d decided to make a man a victim. New words like inmate, state number and juvenile certification had crept into my vocabulary. An inmate is what I’d become as soon as the deputies picked me up from the juvenile detention center. It meant I was in the custody of the Fairfax County Jail, and the most important thing anyone needed to know about me was my state number. It was a five- digit number I soon learned meant more than my name. It said I was who I said I was whenever I walked around the jail with the band they attached to my arm. At Landmark we weren’t inmates, we were juvenile offenders, which was a nice way of saying black boy in jail from what I saw, because that’s all we were at Landmark. Landmark Detention Center was a juvenile facility that housed boys and girls. Mostly the kids were in there for fighting or truancy or selling drugs. There was one white boy in there with us; everyone else was black. Four small units that were as secure as any prison. Everything was electronic and you could only move when told to. But you got to go to school, had to go to school, and the uniform was sweatpants and a T- shirt. That meant if you tried hard enough you could have imagined yourself at an extended camp. Unless of course you were me, given a single cell in the corner and a note on your door that said no roommate because you were waiting to be transferred to the jail. It didn’t take long for me to move from inside the squad car to inside the jail. Voices jumped around me in a chaos that belongs to jails and prisons. The same officers who’d driven me to the jail were with me. “You know this jail isn’t like the place we’re taking you from. All you kids in there running around trying to be tough. Well, you’re going where they say the tough guys are.” The officer wanted to scare me. He was standing as I sat, looking down and probably imagining a scene from the nightly news of a gun- toting young black man gone crazy. He probably thought about the victim and what they say on TV about black boys who pull guns on people. Fear was a commodity everyone traded in. In three months I’d learned that everyone from lawyers to the judges to the other kids around me thought their power rested in getting someone to fear you. After the arrest warrant had been signed there was only fear and violence. But there had been fear and violence in my life before. Fights in the streets when my arms stopped working after taking too many jabs, or afternoons I spent running from fights. It all caught up with me when I started believing that fear and violence were the things power was made of, and I wanted to touch it if only for a moment. Thirty minutes changed my life. It took less than thirty minutes for me to find the sleeping man in his car, and it took less than thirty minutes for me to get to the jail. When I walked in, the rank smell of the place hit my nostrils like the fat end of a bat. It made me feel like a man who’d spent a week sleeping in his own piss and shit, breathing it until shit was the only important thing left in the world. Outside the sun lit up the sky but in there it was past dark. A toothless man in the holding cell across from where I stood drooled and yelled at the bars before him. I was embarrassed. It had taken thirty minutes for me to commit the crime that made me a statistic. Statistic —another ... Read more