By Ivan Kilgore

The one perk prison affords is the opportunity to catch up on centuries of literature. The degree of consciousness, the discovery of concepts centuries old, the development of ideas, and so much more I have grown to realize are enhanced by simply opening a book. The pages of my latest read, I find copper in tone, brittle, and with the smell of an old cedar chest. It takes close to two decades for the pages of a book to become like this. I know this because I have an old, worn-out Webster dictionary and thesaurus I’ve been thumbing through for over 15 years. They were new when the Alameda County Jail Librarian gave them to me. Since then I have become somewhat of a walking dictionary, having picked up a few words with each read over the years. There have been more than I can count on a vast range of subjects from history to science. It seems I have read it all. Imagine how advanced I would have been having I discovered the joy and benefits of reading at a young age. Unfortunately, it took me having to come to prison to make this discovery. 

Every now and then I stumble across a new discovery, a new author whose style of writing gets me all worked up with passion as I thumb the art. With this book it wasn’t so much the author’s words that captivated me and had me reaching for my dictionary, it was the newly discovered maximums of an era of African American folklore celebrated and almost forgotten. Proverbs such as “…the higher the monkey climbs the tree, the mo’ he shows his ass” and “living high on the hog.” Referencing the character’s arrogance in such a way really brought them home, really got me homesick. 

And the storyline! Wow! I can see why this author made such a splash during the 1930s writing such blasphemy, which takes form in the character of one Janie Crawford; a redbone, silky haired, a dreamy-eyed child who evolves her selfhood through two marriages, and expecting better treatment than she gets until she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who engages her heart and spirit in an equal measure giving her the chance to enjoy life without being one man’s mule or another’s adornment. He awakens in her the adventurer, and the heart of a gunslinger yet maintains her class and servitude as a southern belle. 

And to find this book on the shelf in a prison library is truly a rare discovery. This magnet of African American literature, this novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, whose fictional and factual account of black heritage parallels the likes of Wright, Baldwin, Hughes, and the lot whose shadow prevailed her. Yet she remains an unrevealed treasure in the history of black revolutionaries whose penmanship I can only strive to topple. Indeed, Zora Neale Hurston’s book Their Eyes Were Watching God has carried me away from the gates and cold feel of these prison walls. One can only anticipate to read and learn more about her.