The following article first appeared in the British publication ‘the Friend’ (October 6, 2006). It is reprinted here with the publisher’s and author’s permission.
“...brave and dignified man” by Dr Jill Segger
In her celebrated essay of 1929, Virginia Woolf set the industry standard. Today,
A Room of One’s Own is seen as an essential requirement of the writer’s craft.
Brandon Astor Jones is a sixty-three-year-old African-American who produces a steady stream of well-informed essays and articles from a very small room indeed. Airless and permanently noisy, his workplace is a cell on Death Row in the state of Georgia where he has been incarcerated for twenty-seven years.
I am a freelance journalist and the conditions under which I practice my trade could not be more different. I work in peaceful surroundings; there is technology on my desk which makes research and communication a matter of a few mouse clicks and I am at liberty to go where I will in pursuit of information.
I have corresponded with Brandon for many years and have come to value him deeply as an opinionated, occasionally prickly, always thoughtful and unfailingly compassionate friend. Through editing a collection of his work and sharing ideas and inspirations with a writing mind constantly struggling against constraint and poverty of resource, I have also learned how easy it is to be diminished by mistaking blessings for rights.
Brandon’s writing has its roots- as all good writing must- in the author’s own experience. Born before the Civil Rights Movement began to have any impact on American society, Brandon grew up subject to prejudice and humiliation. His family life was unhappy and he ran away from home as a very young boy. It was inevitable that a child living by his wits would fall under malign influences. The one significant act of kindness that he remembers and records from those difficult years came from a prostitute who gave him shelter and tried to help him as a mother might guide a son.
Brandon has never denied his errors or sought to exculpate himself from the felony for which he was sentenced.
Here, I believe it necessary to place on record the fact that his was not the finger on the trigger when a store attendant was shot dead during the robbery for which he was sentenced. However, Georgia’s state laws make an accomplice subject to the same penalty as that given to the murderer.
The young man who was involved in that crime has long since been reborn as a morally mature person passionately opposed to the injustices of racism, child abuse and misogyny. These are the recurrent themes of his work and are examined in writing which is sometimes difficult, angry and shocking, and at other times tender and full of sorrow. Above all, it is honest writing that exposes an America George Bush prefers to ignore.
Brandon Astor Jones is a remarkable man. For over a quarter of a century he has borne an existence most of us would find unimaginable yet he has retained a great generosity of spirit.
He has paid his debt to society and a humane system would release him to act as the citizen of integrity he has learned to be. That will not happen. The appeal process is exhausted and his future is short.
In the time remaining to him, Brandon yearns for contact with people who will read his writing and engage in correspondence with him on that writing. Friends outside the prison maintain a
website where his work may be read.
Brandon will never be able to walk cheerfully over the world, but it is open to us whose lives have been more fortunate to answer that of God* in this brave and dignified man.
* [Editor’s comment: This phrase is a concept that is at the heart of Quaker thinking. George Fox, founder of the Quakers, exhorted his followers to “walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every person.”]
Composition date: October 10, 2006
The Momma Series. Series #15., #15.
