Mandela

As I write this, Nelson Mandela lies in a South African hospital on life support.  Ninety-four with consciousness fading, his last days on earth may be approaching.  While his family battles over his body and his possessions, his country holds its collective breath.  What will happen to South Africa, they wonder, after he’s gone?

“I’m no saint.”  Mandela once remarked to a celebrity journalist fawning over him.  He understood his path.  So often we seek to idolize our heroes.  We make them perfect.  Mandela knew better.  He was a lawyer by training.  Faced with the oppressive Apartheid system, he sought revolution. An active leader in the ANC (African National Congress), he saw military action, bombings, and the like against the minority white government as not just legitimate but necessary.  Simply put, he was no Gandhi.

And, he had blood on his hands.  As corrupt and ruthless as the white Afrikaner government was, the ANC matched them.  Mandela was arrested, convicted and sent to prison.  The government believed by removing him they would silence him.  They were wrong.

A few years ago I read a book built around Mandela’s prison diary.  I was intrigued.  I had started a daily journal three days after my arrest.  I assumed Mandela’s would be different.  I assumed his would be political rhetoric of the first order.  I was wrong.  He diaried the things he saw, and felt, and experienced.  As I read his diary I saw the growth, the transformation of the man in the ordinary (if life in prison can ever be considered ordinary). 

I was no political prisoner, but I wanted to face my incarceration the way he did, with dignity, and courage, and honor, all those concepts that are in such short supply in places such as this.

I remember the day years ago when he walked out of prison.  I watched on TV and was sure South Africa would explode in violence and bloodletting.  There would be vengeance, I believed, retribution for his imprisonment.

I was wrong.  Contrary to what those in power thought, prison hadn’t broken Mandela.  It made him stronger.  And wiser.  I still see him walking out the front gate of the prison, a solitary man, but a man with a calmness because he knew what had to be done.  There was no bloodletting.  There was no call for revenge.  There was Mandela with a message of peaceful transition of power and reconciliation.  And South Africa moved forward, just as Mandela did when he walked out of the prison.

His nation is not perfect. There are problems; the social divide still lingers; corruption in government; crime; and yet, it has moved forward.  It is a nation with a future.

“I’m no saint.”  Perhaps, we are too quick to declare actions and people heroic only to topple them later.  Perhaps, we can learn from Mandela’s experience and the power of human will for transformation, for vision, for mercy.

The 4th

July 4^th, American Independence Day.  It’s a day for most Americans to feel proud.  It’s full of myths of our forefathers and mothers and the sacrifices they made.  From generation to generation we pass down the American experience, that thing we can’t quite put our finger on but we know collectively makes this an exceptional land, a blessed land.  I think about all that sitting in prison.

The 4^th evokes great memories for me.  1987, early in my legal career, barely five and a half years married, we found ourselves in London, England for ten days.  We hadn’t had a honeymoon.  1986 my first semester law school exams were scheduled for five days after our wedding.  We had no money for a trip even if we would have had time.  So, we ended up in a rustic hotel at a Tennessee State Park two hours west of Knoxville.

1987 was our year to see the world.  I hadn’t taken anytime off at the firm up until then.  You just didn’t take vacations in a small trial firm.  She convinced me we needed to get away.  The summer before there was the miscarriage.  We’d drifted apart.  There was the dream house on the horizon, if only, if only our small starter home would sell.

We boarded the jet and headed for London.  And, it was wonderful.  July 4^th was a Sunday.  We still had three days left.  What do you do on the 4^th when you’re in England?  We went to the U.S. Embassy.  And I remember standing on the wide steps of the Embassy, a sculpture of a bald eagle flying, and a passerby snapped our picture.  We were smiling, my arm around her.  And, we were in love.  It was on that trip that our older son was conceived.  We wouldn’t realize it until weeks after our return and the dream house became a reality.  July 4^th in London.

July 4^th, 1997.  She’s eight months pregnant with our second son. We’re staying close to home in case of early labor.  There’s a minor league game that night in Richmond with fireworks afterwards.  We go:  our ten year-old son and a friend, a very pregnant mom to be and me.  It’s sweltering hot during the game.  The sun sets, the game ends, and the fireworks begin.

It’s an incredible display and our son and his friend “ooh” and “ah” through the entire show.  My wife rubs her belly constantly. “I think I’m in labor”, she whispers to me on the drive home.  The explosions caused our baby to roll and spin and kick like a whirling dervish.  It wasn’t labor, but all night we were awake watching as hands and feet stretched and kicked.  It was as if the fireworks told him it’s time, time to get out, to begin life with your family.

July 4^th, 2003.  We’re at Hilton Head Island having dinner at the Quarter Deck, the restaurant that sits at the base of the Island’s lighthouse.  The sun is just beginning to set but its rays still glimmer and shine on the waters just off Harbor Town.  We eat and linger at our table waiting for darkness and music and fireworks.  It is a perfect July 4^th evening.  Our younger son sees him first:  It’s Uncle Sam.  There is a tall, grey-haired man walking around dressed as Uncle Sam.  Our son waves at him and the man comes over and says hello.   I learn he’s a retired investment banker.  His yacht – a real yacht, eighty-feet long with two decks – is less than one hundred yards from us.  There are young girls in bikinis on the deck swaying to the music.  My young son sits entranced.  Uncle Sam travels on a yacht with hot girls.  He tells me he began with nothing.  “I just turned seventy-five”, he said.  “Lost my shirt, then started again.  I’m living the American dream.”

The American dream.  I think of Uncle Sam from time to time.  His dream, that you can fail over and over and still come back and make it.  “It’s not what you start with, its what you end with”, he said.

July 4^th, 2010.  I’d been here less than eight months.  My transition from jail to prison hadn’t been easy.  There’d been a year at jail where I’d seen daylight less than seven times.  My life unwound at the jail:  court, sentencing, divorce.  Every week brought some new disaster.  That year paled in comparison to the nearly five months at receiving and my introduction to prison.

Then I ended up here, in low custody, and confronted a new set of issues.   I was surrounded by men who made prison a way of life.  In and out they would come.  Three bids, four bids, they’d always find their way back.  And, I couldn’t comprehend it.  Life, the lives that were connected and interwoven to mine, all separated and moved on.  I found myself alone and empty.  News that would arrive from the outside was always, it seemed, bad.  And there was little, if anything, that I could do to have any control over my life.  Its funny when you get to that point, but words like life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, love, grace, they come into focus. 

July 4^th, 2010, my first 4^th here.  It was hot, very hot and depressing.  My ex had “moved on” and was in a new serious relationship; my older son had graduated college; my younger, a full fledged teenager.  My emotions swung from abject despair to unreasonable hopefulness.  I was like a boxer in the middle rounds who had been pummeled over and over but who was too proud or dumb to admit defeat.  I was staggered and I wrote of desperation and pain.  Independence Day.  Independence from what, I thought. 

Late that afternoon my friend Big S asked me to head outside with him.  Wrapped up in his coat he had four peanut butter jars full of a cloudy, orange liquid.  We sat at a picnic table and he handed me a jar.  “Happy 4^th of July”, he said.  I opened it and caught a whiff of fermented oranges.  “Homemade wine from two building,” he said.

For the next hour we sat in the heat sipping off those four jars of wine.  My head spun a little; I felt light.  With the heat and the alcohol my body, my mind meandered.  “You’ll be alright”, Big S said.  “You’re tougher and more decent than this place.”  I wasn’t sure.  My heart was broken, my life was in shambles, and the odds were stacked against me.  Yet, I believed Big S.  I had to.

Little known fact about the Continental Army:  by 1778 most of the soldiers serving in Mr. Washington’s corps were either convicts, slaves and freed Blacks, or poor itinerant men.  All they had was hope of a better day. 

When Mario Cuomo’s mother arrived at Ellis Island from Greece she underwent questioning.  “Why America?”  “My husband works in New Jersey.  He’s a ditch digger.”  “Money?”  “A few dollars”.  “Why did you come all this way with no money and a husband who barely can make a living digging ditches?” “Because”, she said, “someday this country will give my son a chance to be a Governor.”  How did she know when she didn’t even have children that this country would give her son a chance to be Governor of New York?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Jefferson wrote.  “That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

July 4^th, 2013, those twenty-nine words roll around in my brain as I circle the track.  I’m a few miles into what will be a five mile run.  Words matter.  Ideas matter.  There is something in the human spirit that strives to overcome even when the odds are stacked against you.

You would think prison is the last place anyone would think about Independence Day. You’d be wrong.  “Freedom,” Janis Joplin sang, “is just another word when you got nothin left to lose; nothin ain’t nothin if it ain’t free.”  Funny, but I think Janis was wrong.  When you lose everything all you have left are those vague ideals like freedom and happiness.  And freedom isn’t the ability to buy or do whatever you want.  It’s the power to dream and hope.

July 4^th memories.  You know, they play through my mind’s eye in here but they don’t weigh me down.  As I explained to a young guy in here the other day who is soon to be released, you can overcome, you can come back, you can succeed, even if you’ve been in a place like this.  Paul Simon’s haunting “American Tune” has a powerful verse about life.  It goes, “I don’t know a soul who’s not been shattered or driven to his knees.”  But later he sings, “It’s alright, it’s alright, you can be forever blessed….”

Two distinct images:  the inevitable pain and brokenness we all endure and the hope, the blessing, the freedom.  I don’t know if that’s what Jefferson had in mind when he crafted the words to the Declaration of Independence, but it seems right that life is difficult, and it’s painful, and it’s hard, but you have the freedom to hope and to pursue your dreams. 

July 4^th.  Memories, Dreams. Freedom.