I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves into the lives of others.
Sherwood Anderson
Unfortunately, prisons in America provide little in the way of a means for positive daily individual accomplishment for prisoners. A man like myself, in order to keep insanity and boredom at bay, needs to accomplish something worthwhile every day.
In 1962, when I joined the US Army, I lied when I indicated on the induction form that I had completed '9 years' of schooling. In reality I did not even graduate from elementary school.
It was only after I came to this prison did I manage to - by hook and by crook - obtain a General Education Development Certificate. I am sharing this bit of information because I want the reader to know that I could barely write a letter, let alone a book, when I entered prison.
With the progression of time I began writing poems, essays and short autobiographical snippets. It did not take long for the daily routine of accomplishment - with the frequent discoveries of myself, and others, past and present - to become addictive. I began reading everything I could get my hands on, from cover to cover, even old newspapers and magazines. In time I decided to get myself published.
I began a brief correspondence with Mr Creed W Pannell, the publisher of the Atlanta News Weekly. He offered me a 250 word weekly column with the freedom to write about any subject I chose. That freedom lasted for nearly a year until I wrote about Clarence Thomas, who was then an unconfirmed United States Supreme Court nominee.
Before writing that essay I had read (in detail) the nominee's paper trail in the prison's law library, which led me to conclude that he was unfit as a replacement for the highly esteemed United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
I got no reader response to any of my columns prior to that article, but that following week ten letters arrived. All were written by African American men and women who expressed outrage that I dared "to write [such] disparaging things about a wonderful Black man from Pin Point, Georgia"!
My column, 'An Inside Look with Brandon Astor Jones', was discontinued immediately. Of course, I take a degree of comfort in knowing that these days most of those letter writers share my opinion of Justice Thomas.
I quickly had begun to enjoy writing a column each week. After not being able to find another column in America, I began perusing foreign publications with a view to finding a new space. All that eventuated was occasional publication in the United Kingdom.
I switched my geographical focus to Australia. Eventually I made contact with a fellow American, who had recently relocated from Wisconsin to Sydney. Mr Allen Myers had just started the Green Left Weekly newspaper, and he offered me a 550 word space each week, which I accepted. Green Left Weekly grew quickly from a fledgling local publication in Sydney to one of the most widely read alternative newspapers in the entire country. It is distributed in each of Australia's states.
For more than eleven years, 47 weeks in the year, my column titled 'looking out' was published. I covered many topics such as racism, sexism, classism, intracultural prejudice, prison, prisoners, crime, capital punishment, spousal abuse, music, history, slavery, local and global politics. Then a new editor came who found me to be too pro-America for his taste. Shortly thereafter 'looking out' was discontinued.
By then my interest in American history had narrowed. The Civil War and those African Americans who had fought and died for the Union (Federal) Navy, long before the Union Army began accepting Black men as soldiers, became my obsession. Sadly, the Civil War as it was fought on America's inland waterways and experienced by Black men and women has rarely been written about. I decided that I would start writing some of this history.
From newspapers I learned of Joseph P Reidy, then the Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. He and his students had spent a decade researching Blacks' involvement in the fighting of America's greatest internal conflict. I wrote to him seeking the specifics on Black sailors in the Union Navy.
Dean Reidy introduced me to several little known Black heroes who fought in the war, but the one who interests me most is a man named Wilson Brown. He was once a slave on a cotton plantation. He was the only man, Black or White, from the State of Mississippi to be awarded the US Navy's Medal of Honor for his heroic service while under heavy enemy fire during the civil war.
I became so taken with Wilson Brown's life I was inspired to write a lengthy essay about him. Two years later that essay had grown into a book written in the form of a roman à clef entitled 'without war'.
The story begins in Wilson Brown's early years on the Miller Plantation as a slave. In that particular 39 chapter draft, the story ended with Brown's heroics during several of the ship-to-ship engagements of the Battle of Mobile Bay.
While reading another newspaper I came across an article about a Quaker professor at the University of Alabama's Tuscaloosa Campus. He had been the driving force behind the movement to encourage Alabama to apologize for the role it played in the perpetuation of slavery. When I read that, I thought to myself that he would be the perfect person to give me his opinion on my book.
I wrote to him and asked if he would read it. He promptly responded indicating that he would be happy to read it and give his opinion. I sent 'without war' to him immediately.
Three weeks later he wrote again saying that the manuscript was good and, because of its educational value, should be put up on the internet. He added that he would be happy to do that for me. I explained to him that the manuscript was incomplete and that I did not want it up on the internet even in the incomplete form because it could be stolen in part or whole. I asked him to return it.
He wrote again and said he would return it but first he wanted to write an essay on its theme: how the violence of war, love and law can produce redemption. Before I answered that letter, another arrived dated June 25 2004. The professor commented that 'without war' reminded him of 'a short story [by Harriet Beecher Stow] called 'Love versus Law'".
He never returned my manuscript despite my repeated letters asking him to do so. Then he stopped communicating completely.
The manuscript now has 50 chapters. As all my writing is given the title of the final words in the last sentence, the new title of 'without war' became 'while the Mississippi and Hudson merge'.
My purpose for having written this essay is two-fold. First, I hope that many readers of these words will write, call or email the professor and ask him to kindly return my work. I choose not to speculate as to why he has not done so. I just want my work back. He can be contacted at the following work email address at the University of Cambridge, UK: abrophy@email.unc.edu.
Second, I trust that after reading this all writers who are in prison will exercise due caution when sending your manuscripts out. No matter how official their titles appear to be, some people on the outside (but not all) will take advantage of you because you are in prison. If you must send your manuscript out try to send it to an organization you can trust, like the PEN American Center's Prison Writing Mentorship Program in New York.
The words that head this essay are true: 'writing... forces us out of ourselves into the lives of others.' In fact, it is clear that those words also apply to the reader.
while the Mississippi and the Hudson merge can be purchased from the publisher iUniverse.
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