Word Powers

I had an interesting conversation with another tutor this week. His name is Powers. He’s a 38 year old black man from Brooklyn who’s been locked up almost twenty years with ten more to go. He murdered a man in Northern Virginia. He makes no bones about what he did. He killed the guy. He’ll do his sentence. Murder one. Thirty years for mandatory parole.



Powers and I are both tutors in the same class. When I first met him I was extremely intimidated by him. He speaks very seldom and usually has a serious expression. I, quite frankly, in my bias saw him as a very angry black man. I concluded he hated whites.


I’ve gotten to know Powers in the past two months. He’s a student in my creative writing class. He’s extremely bright, well read and has a wickedly precise sense of humor. In short, every pre-conceived notion I had about him has been turned on its head.


In writing class the other day I was discussing our assigned reading: Joseph Conrad’s “The Lagoon”. My beginning writing class has 19 participants, all black. The guys were very quiet as I asked them about Conrad’s themes and character descriptions.


“So you hated the story,” I said. Powers spoke up. He pointed out Conrad’s eurocentric writing style and how the lengthy short story drug on. “OK”, I said. I then told a new story about two brothers working for the largest drug dealer in Miami. One brother catches a look at the drug boss’s girl and decides he has to have her. He and his brother grab the girl. The boss finds out and he and a group of armed thugs chase the brothers and girl all over South Beach.


The one brother decides to make a stand while the other, with the girl, gets away. All we hear is the brother screaming through a hail of gunfire.


Later, we see the other brother hiding out in a dump of an apartment. The girl lies on a bed beside him taking her last breaths. The brother has lost everything.


The guys sat transfixed as I spun this story of covetousness, disloyalty and lust. I then said “That’s Conrad’s story. I just put it in a modern context”.


Powers spoke to me after class. He told me all the guys like the stories I tell. I’ve known for a good while that I can tell a story and, candidly, I have 51 years of them. Plus, I’m not one to hold back. I put the good, bad, and ugly of my life out there, whether it be the failure of my marriage, my arrest or my views on things.


Powers told me he respected me. “You’ve kept your head up in spite of all the bullshit.” He added a distinct “but”. And that was when I learned his “philosophy” on a number of issues.


Take his view on selfless, unconditional love. “There’s a reason they put Jesus on the cross. He was selfless. You give it all, no conditions, you’re gonna get screwed.” He explained this to me so I’d understand my giving everything up to my wife and kids was, well, “plain stupid”. He said “people always say they admire selfless people. There’s a reason you see it so seldom. It’s because people are self-centered. They play each other. Honestly look how your wife played you. You did the ‘right thing’, the ‘noble thing’ and got kicked in the ass.”


“You’re probably right,” I told him. “But, I’d do it again, no matter what the result.” Powers smiled and said “that’s what I like about you, eternal optimist.”


He told me he became a Muslim after concluding “Christians profess belief in a God who has one simple rule: love and forgive each other.” He had me there. I look at all the men I serve time with. I look at my own circumstances, the family and friends who cut me loose, abandoned and betrayed me, the folks who are so bitter and angry and I have to conclude most us don’t have a clue what it means to be a Christian.


“But, people can change, “I told him. Fact is, I like the person I’ve become. I’m a lot wiser, more humble, more compassionate, more forgiving, than I ever was before my arrest. If you would have told me ten years ago I’d be not just content, but happy, tutoring men to earn their GED’s, I’d have laughed at you.


“Yeah a lot of people let me down. I’m hurt. But I can accept it, still love them, and move on day by day.”


We talked about respect being an overused word in prison. How one of the failures of the “system” in sending so many people to prison is that you now have thousands of young guys doing short bids; two, three, maybe four years at a time. Prison becomes “just a place to go”. Those guys by and large lack respect for anybody or anything. The vast majority of problems in low custody facilities such as this are from these “short time” guys. Act like they do here at a higher security level and you’ll find yourself beaten to a bloody pulp or shanked.


The strange thing about my talk with Powers is though we are from entirely different worlds and I disagree with him on much of what he says, I find him to be a decent guy. He clearly is a man of character and substance.


He killed a man. He is serving his sentence. Yet, he has developed into a complex man. He is a man I respect. I can see beyond his crime committed almost twenty years ago. I consider Powers my friend. I need to tell him he was wrong. Sometimes you can put prejudice and bias aside and see the real person.