My initial encounter with Ms. Brooks occurred year two of an eight-year bid in a medium/max facility at Roxbury Correctional Center, Housing Unit III, C-Tier, Cell 17 in Hagerstown, Maryland, by way of a library cart. Up until this juncture in the stagnant day-to-day life of incarceration, I mostly read books like Convicted in the Womb by Carl Upchurch and Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall, memoirs that spoke to my “state” within the state of corrections, as well as the “state” I longed to leave behind. When the trustee rolled the cart in front of my cell during institutional lockdown—meaning, a dude got his skull cracked open with a SecureView RCA 13-inch television screen ordered through prison commissary and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital—I peeped Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks leaning against John Grisham’s A Time to Kill. I was intrigued, because I had not read many Black women authors up to this point—to be fair, I hadn’t read much of anybody, man or woman. However, I will confess at one time the only thing I did read was numerical ink printed on dead presidents. But the four walls of concrete that became prison demanded I read book after book to combat the isolation, the loneliness, the guilt of having invested so much in dead presidents, which equated to a life wasted.
Street Address
City, State, Zip
Phone Number
Your Custom Text Here
Prose
“Dead Weight reveals things to us — things like us — in ways we’ve never seen”
-Ed Pavlić , author of Another Kind of Madness: A Novel
