There’s a classic image of a kneeling, chained African slave, famous since the eighteenth century, when it was conceived as Abolitionist propaganda to adorn Wedgwood china. Am I not a man and a brother? This question asked by the kneeling slave is worked into a circular design under his figure, a rope of words including no answer to his question. Every time I recall this image, I find myself reviewing the lessons of the last two hundred years of history and hear their response to the African: Man? Maybe. Brother? No.
Writing Brothers and Keepers raised and lowered my expectations of nonfiction. It was my first nonfiction book, so I had to figure out how to discipline myself within different constraints from those imposed by the space of fiction. In stories I made up, a large part of the fun derived from playing fast and loose with the so-called facts of my life. Brothers and Keepers demanded an unremitting focus on those facts. Issues of intimate disclosure arose relentlessly. Though all narratives create lives for others and ultimately invent a life for the writer Brothers and Keeper’s’s special mode of storytelling forced me to be accountable to readers and myself for certain kinds of information I didn’t make up, couldn’t alter or ignore. I was answerable to the story. The story confronted me with its intimidating, legitimate otherness, a resistance and weight that caused me continuously to question any point of view I could fashion to represent that otherness. Was Brothers and Keepers my story or not my story. Did I belong to it as much as it belonged to me. Who’s in charge here. And, after all, doesn’t the play of serious fiction raise similar issues. Such collisions continue to keep me guessing. Keep me writing.
Writing can be a means of knowing and being in the world. That kind of writing requires self-examination, self-awareness, consciousness of the process of writing and reading. I could not write my brother’s story without writing mine. I couldn’t write objectively about the prison system from outside without becoming complicit with its primal Manichaean division of the world into inside and outside, evil and good, those categories that its stone walls and iron bars claim to separate. For better or worse, I carry around a prison inside myself. I’m connected as intimately to its walls and bars as I am to my brother. Prisons, like the rich man’s mansion on the hill or the hovels circled in the shadow of the hill or the wars waged by my country in the Middle East, constitute a version of reality, a presence and power I’m ascribing to, assenting to, vote for, accept—whether I acknowledge my complicity or not—as effortlessly and directly as I breathe the air that sustains my life. Neither writing a book nor reading one grants a free pass from this encompassing reality. Reading and writing may seem to offer temporary immunity from the consequences of a way of life that permits them, but the privilege to step aside and enjoy the opportunity to consume a book, a candy bar, a movie, a Mercedes, or to enjoy leisure time or obtain a formal education—all of these “freedoms” are purchased by vast injustices visited upon others. The tears Richard Wright worried about, or tears shed over my brother, over the plight of millions of others trapped by poverty, oppression, injustice, superstition, disease, are selfish tears, self-pitying, self-indulgent, wasted unless we open our eyes wide after shedding tears and watch where they land, ask who pays for them, whose suffering is alleviated, who’s responsible to do whatever needs doing to stop more tears falling. Prisons identify a no man’s land that separates and also connects us, miring us all in the same unforgiving mess. Prisons are everybody’s problem. Hurt everybody.
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