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PREFACE

Since Brothers and Keepers’s original publication in 1984, hundreds of well-meaning strangers, people who know me and my brother only from the pages of a book, have approached me and asked, How’s your brother doing? Here’s a quick update of an impossible answer. Robert Wideman’s health is reasonably good, his spirit is strong, and he persists in believing he’ll soon be released from the penitentiary. Robby remains a determined, thoughtful, amiable, optimistic man, and, like my son Jake, creates inside the walls of prison a life fuller than the lives lots of us manage in the so-called free world. This in spite of the fact he is intensely aware of the limits and dangers imposed by confinement, and regrets each day the mistakes he committed that landed him in jail and cost the life of another human being. My brother speaks to me often about the greatest burden he believes he bears: being a source of immeasurable grief to his family and the family of the man killed in a crime this book describes. Robby has married again. As far as he’s able from behind prison bars, he endeavors to support his former wife and their son, Chance, born February 13, 1990, two days after Nelson Mandela walked out of a South African prison.

Robby’s legal situation requires a slightly longer summary. Four years ago, after a hearing in his courtroom revealed new, compelling evidence that medical malpractice contributed to the victim’s death, Judge James R. McGregor ordered that my brother was entitled to a new trial and immediately eligible for bail. The afternoon of the verdict, while my family gathered in my sister’s home to welcome Robby back after twenty-five years in prison, I stood in the downtown Pittsburgh office of the Allegheny County district attorney Stephen A. Zappala, Jr., and listened as the DA informed my brother’s attorney, Mark Schwartz, that he’d decided not to appeal Judge McGregor’s findings. The DA’s unambiguous statement of his intentions was crucial, since it permitted Robby’s lawyer to begin arranging bail rather than to go down to County Court, where it would have been his duty to be on hand to oppose any state motion challenging Judge McGregor’s order.

I was elated. The possibility that the state would choose to conduct another trial was highly unlikely. A new trial would be expensive, the verdict quite uncertain given the new evidence, and finally, even if the state conducted a trial and won its case, my brother had probably served more time than any guilty verdict would mandate. No new trial meant the state would be forced to let my brother go. The unwieldy scales of justice at last seemed tilting in his favor. Then, without apprising us, DA Zappala changed his mind. In other words, he broke the commitment he’d declared to my brother’s counsel. About a half-hour before County Court closed, he filed a motion to stay Judge McGregor’s order. Unopposed by any legal representative of Robert Wideman, the stay was granted. Subsequently the DA filed an appeal that asked the court, in effect, to reverse Judge McGregor’s decision. That appeal was upheld as it crawled through Pennsylvania’s appellate courts; all challenges to it mounted by Robert Wideman’s defense lawyers were denied, with little or no legal reasoning offered, until it reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where it became the final word. My brother never received the new trial nor the chance for bail he’d been granted, and he continues to serve a life sentence in prison.

I believe that in addition to breaking his word, the DA set in motion a chain of events that resulted in an illegal detainment of my brother. The afternoon following Judge McGregor’s decision, shortly after Robby’s lawyer and I met with the DA, apparently, a call was placed from the DA’s office to the State Correction Institute at Pittsburgh (SCIP), a call requesting that the prison not release Robert Wideman because a motion to stay the judge’s decision was on its way to County Court. It seems to me that the call was inappropriate (an eleventh-hour tampering with understood procedures), unethical (since he’d promised not to appeal, the DA was well aware no counsel would be present at County Court to represent Robert Wideman’s interests), and illegal (at the time of the call, no motion to stay had been filed nor granted, and therefore, by requesting that prison officials detain Robert Wideman, the DA was asking them to violate a standing court order).

According to the Allegheny County sheriff, a very nasty, disruptive standoff occurred at SCIP when prison guards refused to remand Robert Wideman into the custody of sheriff’s deputies who’d been dispatched to the prison to execute Judge McGregor’s court order. For hours my brother was forcibly detained, denied his right to post bond and be freed. This after he’d been ordered earlier that day, when prison officials learned of McGregor’s verdict, to clear out his cell and prepare himself to attend a hearing downtown, where he could post bond and then go home.

To this day I don’t know why the DA said one thing and did another, why he didn’t honor Judge McGregor’s ruling nor respect my brother’s rights. I do know I was impressed by the courage of Judge McGregor, since the DA’s father just happened to be chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and one of the chief justice’s functions is to oversee administrative matters that vitally affect the careers of judges. Perhaps after making his initial decision, the DA was advised that an inexperienced prosecutor couldn’t afford the public embarrassment of losing a high-profile case and a high-profile prisoner at the start of a bitterly contested, who’s-tougher-on-crime election campaign in which he would be fighting to convince voters to ratify his claim to an office he’d gained by political appointment.

Robby was sentenced to prison because he made bad decisions and did bad things. He’s responsible for his actions and must carry forever the awful weight of having participated in a crime that cost a human being’s life. None of this alters the fact that courts and prisons, notorious for their racism, cruelty, and corruption, operate in a fashion that creates as many problems for society as it solves. My brother’s case confirms the general pattern of abuse and discrimination suffered by the poor, especially poor people of color, in the courts. The harshest sanctions are imposed upon them (no inmate in Pennsylvania convicted of a similar offense has served a longer sentence than my brother), and the poor have least access to protections the law provides. I know I may be jeopardizing my brother by accusing a powerful public official of complicity in the worst practices of the legal system. But for a good long while now, Robby and I have agreed that truth, as we understand it, needs telling, is worth telling; truth easy enough for me to risk stating, though not for him, since he’ll always be a kind of hostage as long as he’s in the penitentiary, liable to brutal or subtle retaliation for telling truths that might antagonize or embarrass his captors. Unfortunately, whether Robby keeps his mouth shut or not, prison remains a very unsafe place. During the twenty-nine years he has been incarcerated, few in power have stepped forward to lead any major reforms of the failed institution they serve and that serves them and us.

In 1981, when I began collaborating with my brother Robert on the project that became Brothers and Keepers, I hoped we both might find an outlet for our despair, anger, and helplessness at the point he commenced a life sentence in prison. I also harbored deeper, unspoken motivations. Perhaps this joint effort might reconnect two brothers who’d somehow become strangers to each another. Deeper still, at the level of dream and magical, wishful thinking, I hoped my brother’s story, if I wrote it well, would bring him home. As I learned more about prisons, a different sort of ambition manifested itself. Maybe my brother’s story, by bearing witness to the prison system’s waste, ineffectiveness, and dangers, might spur some readers to rethink an institution that encourages violence and perpetuates another very old American habit—old as slavery in Europe’s New World colonies—the habit of embodying in some stigmatized, segregated other those incriminating desires, fears, and deficiencies we deny in ourselves.

In the year of this book’s original publication, 1984, about 600,000 Americans occupied the nation’s prisons, jails, detention centers. Today over two million of us are locked down. In the same period of years, America advanced from number three to number one in the per capita rate at which First World countries incarcerate their citizens. The percentage of people of color in the USA’s total inmate population continues to rise daily, from approximately 25 percent in the early eighties to over 50 percent at the present moment. Since my brother’s chance for a new trial was stolen, I’ve watched a boom in prison construction, the growing popularity of brutal high-tech facilities, an intensifying racial and ethnic polarization among inmates, wholesale elimination of rehabilitation and educational programs, awarding of longer sentences, privatization of prisons for profit, post-9/11 federally funded security measures that curtail civil rights and criminalize dissent and difference. Given how fiercely and frequently we confine ourselves, is it any wonder, even without the chilling recent examples of Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, that the world is determined not to cede to America the moral authority to build an empire. And my brother remains in SCIP

A rather sobering context in which to begin writing a preface for Brothers and Keepers. A cold-blooded critic could complain that even in terms of the author’s professed intentions, the book fails on most accounts. To say nothing of the fact that writing any preface provides an occasion for melancholy as much as celebration. Though a preface appears at the beginning of a book, it also signifies the end. A little birth, a small death simultaneously. A project has reached completion. The pleasure of finishing, the privilege of presenting a work to readers, mixes with the pain of severing a vital relationship with the book’s material, losing an ongoing intimacy with the discoveries, challenges, and disappointments endemic to the creative process. I’ve been publishing for over forty years and still get a bad case of postpartum blues each time a piece of mine goes out into the world. Writing a preface to a reissued book that has already endured one career is doubly difficult—like one of your children who becomes an adult, the book will have suffered the wear and tear of predictable ass-kickings any life accumulates. A book’s potential to earn more life, also like your children, brings intimations of mortality. For a next edition, maybe some other writer will have to supply the preface.

Though quite pleased that Brothers and Keepers should be kept in print, and gratified by the thought the book may gain a new audience, I’m reminded of frustrated hopes, bitter ironies. So why present it again to the public? Money? Vanity? Do I still believe in miracles?

About two weeks ago I wrote a draft of a preface that I’ve since scrapped, because it turned out in too many respects to be Brothers and Keepers all over again. The preface described a visit to SCIP detailing the systematic dehumanization prisons are designed to inflict upon prisoners and their visitors. When I reread it, its depressing familiarity hit me. Little about my brother’s situation in SCIP had changed, except that he and his visitors had aged twenty years. We were all veterans, frailer, beaten up. Ironically, while we were growing older, the prison had become younger, more an outpost of the violent teenage streets that produce most of the inmate population. Younger, more dangerous, blacker, more overcrowded, more obsolete— so much so that a new prison was being constructed in a remote rural county far from Pittsburgh (its location a form of political patronage to rural voters), a facility to which Robby lobbies not to be transferred, since traveling there would add another expensive hardship for family and friends who wish to visit.

The worrisome, depressing familiarity of my brother’s plight did not justify the familiarity of my narrative address of it. What was the point of attempting once more to document the aching necessity of visiting. The preface I’d composed was going nowhere. I was upset, upset and even ashamed at the thought readers might believe I was asking them to feel sorry for Robby. Pity him, pity me. I recalled the great African American novelist Richard Wright, who took for his subject the lives of the poor and oppressed. Wright castigated himself, agonized over the possibility that his literary success might have depended on a talent for making bankers’ daughters cry.

This preface may not be the place to attack or defend the practice of writing, nor writing’s utility, nor literature’s relevance or irrelevance, nor literature as a force for achieving social justice, except to note in passing Theodor Adorno’s formulation—is poetry possible after Auschwitz—because Adorno memorably preserves the stark enigma presented by considerations of literature’s significance. More specifically, in this case, as I review my relation to Brothers and Keepers and Brothers and Keepers’s relation to the contemporary world’s rage to subdue and incarcerate, I’m dogged by a nagging sense of dissatisfaction and futility. Whom does the book address. Whose compassion and/or outrage does it seek to engage. Does all writing, lyric or propaganda, amount to crying over spilled milk.

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