Every year, I celebrate March 4th as if it's my birthday, because in some ways, it is my birthday. 21 years ago on March 4th, I walked out of prison for the first time, and walked back into the world as somebody who had earned a lot of new names. Felon, a name I earned when I carjacked a man. Convict, a name I earned over the eight and a half years I spent in prison. Ex-con, the name I earned by walking out of prison, a free man. Shahid, the name I chose because I’d begun to understand that a name can be a future and I wanted to carry one that reminded me that the lives around me mattered.
Thinking of leaving prison always makes me remember all it took to thrive there. Because, quiet as kept, amidst the chaos and violence and sorrow, there is thriving. Sister Sonia Sanchez taught me some of that. Her Under a Soprano Sky was the first book I purchased with my money. And I carried it around with me for years. I’d been introduced to her work when someone slid the Black Poets under my cell and reading her poetry was like listening to Whitney Houston sing I Want to Dance With Somebody, which is to say that it made me feel loved and as if love was a thing necessary for survival, and not the violence I’d always been incapable of conjuring with my fists.
Once, someone mailed me a dozen of her poems, all cut out into pieces to save postage weight. When I opened the envelope, the poems fell as if pieces of a puzzle. And they were. A pathway to hold onto more than anger, and be willing to cut to the quick, through the noise, and see the world both as it is and as it might be.
Years later, once free, she’d visit my hometown and folks organizing the reading where she’d do her thing asked for volunteers to pick her up. Though I’d just gotten out of prison and just gotten my license and there was no GPS, I volunteered. I promptly got us lost. And all I remember her saying was Dear brother, you’ll get us there. And finally I did. Imagine someone who wrote words that saved your life speaking confidence into the disaster that you’d turned a routine trip for the train into.
Freedom Reads is a way for me to pay homage to the generosity I’ve experienced in this world. It’s a way to say I know freedom begins with a book because of how free I felt, even for just a few moments at a time, when someone wrote the words into existence that created space for me. If you agree, please consider donating to Freedom Reads and giving your favorite book written by a woman to a stranger one day this month!