This month the team opened Libraries in Missouri and I read from Doggerel in the women’s prison. Our newest team member, James Davis III, took his first trip in 30 years, to return to a prison after being locked up in one for almost that long. I left Missouri so early in the morning that even the earliest dragon birds were still asleep. The night was still run by raccoons and opossums, the creatures that I've learned to love while riding on my 3am treks. I was at the airport, and it felt like I had walked into a scene from Percy Jackson, because everything was open. Starbucks was open, another coffee shop was open, and a bar was open. That's where I had breakfast. I walked to the bar starving in a way that only a man who has just left a prison knows and I wanted potatoes. “These mornings are familiar,” I say to no one, thinking of all my recent mornings in airports. “I once had a rule, I only drink when I’m awake,” the person beside me said. When I mentioned my poem, Whiskey for Breakfast, the bartender, this dark-haired woman, who stared just about as far as my mom, said, “Now you must read for your breakfast.” She didn't expect me to, but I sang: my liver, awash in all but the dregs of a charred out cask….
I read the rest of the poem, and then I started talking about Freedom Reads and the more than two dozen Freedom Libraries we’d opened across the two Missouri prisons. And the man beside who only drank when his eyes were open said that he had been arrested, and locked up for three years in the prison where we’d just opened Freedom Libraries.
Freedom Reads is closing in on the end of our fifth year of existence. We have gone from an idea to a team that has traveled the country, went into over 50 prisons and will have opened more than 600 Freedom Libraries by the end of this year. We have laughed, we have wept, we have wondered where the next piece of funding will come from. But we have never wondered if we would show up. That is what we do.
As we go into the giving season, and are in our End of Year Campaign, I would be remiss at doing my job if I didn't ask people to support us and give. So I’m asking you again to give. But also, I’d like to ask you to consider purchasing John J Lennon’s new book, The Tragedy of True Crime. He's a friend of Freedom Reads, an excellent writer. He's serving 28 years to life in Sing Sing. His book is phenomenal. But also what he's done with his art and his life after the tragic murder that led to his incarceration is really dope. He donated $10,000 to Freedom Reads – $10,000 to bring Freedom Libraries inside for more people like him and me and the many members of our team who did their time inside and now show up to give to others. I ask that you donate and ask a friend to do the same.
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO