Solitary

By Albert Woodfox

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION
Named One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2019
Named the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year
Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Publishers Weekly, BookBrowse, and Literary Hub
Winner of the BookBrowse Award for Best Debut of 2019
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

Solitary is the unforgettable life story of a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement?in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell, 23 hours a day, in notorious Angola prison in Louisiana?all for a crime he did not commit. That Albert Woodfox survived was, in itself, a feat of extraordinary endurance against the violence and deprivation he faced daily. That he was able to emerge whole from his odyssey within America’s prison and judicial systems is a triumph of the human spirit, and makes his book a clarion call to reform the inhumanity of solitary confinement in the U.S. and around the world.

Arrested often as a teenager in New Orleans, inspired behind bars in his early twenties to join the Black Panther Party because of its social commitment and code of living, Albert was serving a 50-year sentence in Angola for armed robbery when on April 17, 1972, a white guard was killed. Albert and another member of the Panthers were accused of the crime and immediately put in solitary confinement by the warden. Without a shred of actual evidence against them, their trial was a sham of justice that gave them life sentences in solitary. Decades passed before Albert gained a lawyer of consequence; even so, sixteen more years and multiple appeals were needed before he was finally released in February 2016.

Remarkably self-aware that anger or bitterness would have destroyed him in solitary confinement, sustained by the shared solidarity of two fellow Panthers, Albert turned his anger into activism and resistance. The Angola 3, as they became known, resolved never to be broken by the grinding inhumanity and corruption that effectively held them for decades as political prisoners. He survived to give us Solitary, a chronicle of rare power and humanity that proves the better spirits of our nature can thrive against any odds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781443458368

Albert Woodfox

Albert Woodfox was born in 1947 in New Orleans. A committed activist in prison, he remains so today, speaking to a wide array of audiences, including the Innocence Project, Harvard, Yale, and other universities, the National Lawyers Guild, as well as at Amnesty International events in London, Paris, Denmark, Sweden, and Belgium. He lives in New Orleans.

Reviews for Solitary

[muddyboy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the painful but ultimately inspirational story of a man's fight to overcome the cards he was dealt most of which weren't his fault. He is not a choirboy in his youth but ultimately what lands him in solitary confinement for forty years is a murder in prison that he did not commit. This book is also an indictment of the criminal justice system and the failures of the criminal justice system toward people of color. But to go through all he did and keep his values and mental acuity is a testament to the human spirit.

[msf59 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“Prison is designed to break one’s spirit and destroy one’s resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality—all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are. Our survival depended on understanding what the authorities were attempting to do to us, and sharing that understanding with each other. —Nelson Mandela” “If any white man in the world says ‘Give me liberty, or give me death,’ the entire world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one.”—James Baldwin “When you see organizations like Black Lives Matter under attack for being “racist,” you are seeing the agenda of an unjust economic system at play—a system that seeks to separate groups of people within the majority to benefit the top 1 percent.” Albert Woodfox was released from prison in February 2016. He was in his mid-60s. He spent over 40 years in solitary confinement, trapped in a 9 by 6 cell, for a crime he did not commit. This was in the notorious Angola prison, in Louisiana. This is Albert's story and it is heart-breaking, rage-inducing and in the end triumphant. Instead of becoming a broken man, he became a strong advocate for prison reform, which he continues to do, as he travels the world speaking out. This memoir reminded me of  The Autobiography of Malcolm X, in many ways. It is that powerful, articulate and focused. Our prison system is destroying many lives and needs a complete overhaul. I hope, one day, our leaders will correct this American travesty.

[pivic-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When Albert Woodfox was incarcerated and sentenced to quite a stretch in jail, he didn't know what to think, really; he was a teenager who'd got muddled up in basic criminal teenage stuff.

One of Woodfox's great strengths is his ability to express himself straightforwardly, without mucking up a line. As here:

The first time I was called a nigger by a white person I was around 12. I was waiting with dozens of other kids at the end of the Mardi Gras parade behind the Municipal Auditorium where the people on the floats, who were all white in those days, gave away whatever beads and trinkets they had left. On one of the floats the man tossing the trinkets was holding a real beautiful strand of pearl-colored beads. I thought they’d make a nice gift for my mom on her birthday. I called out to him, “Hey mister, hey mister,” and reached out my hand.

He pointed to me as he held the beads above his head and tossed them toward me. As the beads came close to me I reached up and a white girl standing next to me put her hand up and caught them at the same time I did. I didn’t let go. I gestured to the man on the float and told her, “Hey, he was throwing the beads to me.” I told her I wanted to give them to my mom. She looked at the man on the float who was still pointing at me, then she ripped the beads apart and called me nigger. The pain I felt from that young white girl calling me nigger will be with me forever.

Also:

At night, we stood under a streetlight on the corner of Dumaine and Robertson and talked shit for hours, boasting about things we never did, describing girls we never knew.

It's a fair shake to a man who can describe aeons of time in a single line.

I cannot even get into the innards of what happened to Woodfox, but he does a great job at showing what went down in Angola, a big American jail, where he went in the 1960s:

If you were raped at Angola, or what was called “turned out,” your life in prison was virtually over. You became a “gal-boy,” a possession of your rapist. You’d be sold, pimped, used, and abused by your rapist and even some guards. Your only way out was to kill yourself or kill your rapist. If you killed your rapist you’d be free of human bondage within the confines of the prison forever, but in exchange, you’d most likely be convicted of murder, so you’d have to spend the rest of your life at Angola.

Some orderlies, inmate guards, and freeman who worked at RC sold the names of young and weak new arrivals to sexual predators in the prison population. I had to be much more confident than I felt to keep guys from trying stupid shit with me. I couldn’t look weak. I couldn’t show any fear. So I faked it. Luckily, I had a reputation as a fighter who never gave up. There were prisoners at Angola I had known on the street and who knew me or knew of me. Word spreads quickly in prison. Dudes gossiped and talked. Word was if you whip my ass today you have to whip it again tomorrow. You have to beat me every day for the rest of your life if necessary. That helped me a lot.

Just those two paragraphs put the fear of Bog in me.

This is quite the book to go well together with Shane Bauer's excellent exposé of the privately-owned prisons in the USA; that book is named "American Prison".

One of the greatest hardships for me the first few months I was at Angola was getting used to the sameness of every day.

The hardest job I ever had in my life was cutting sugarcane, Angola’s main crop. Cutting cane was so brutal that prisoners would pay somebody to break their hands, legs, or ankles, or they would cut themselves during cane season, to get out of doing it. There were old-timers at Angola who made good money breaking prisoners’ bones so men could get out of work.

And that's just the start.

Woodfox's political being starts becoming awakened due to meeting persons who taught him of The Black Panthers, and what they wanted to teach (and learn). This changed matters inside:

We practiced martial arts together on the tier. We read aloud. We held math classes, spelling classes. We talked about what was going on in the world. Every Friday we passed out a spelling or math test. We encouraged debates and conversation. We told each man he had a say. “Stand up for yourself,” we told them, “for your own self-esteem, for your own dignity.” Even the roughest, most hardened person usually responds when you see the dignity and humanity in him and ask him to see it for himself. “The guards will retaliate,” we said, “but we will always face that together.”

Where the book goes slightly not-good, is where Woodfox goes deeply into his own case; while I see how the details are important to him, I personally feel the book should have been edited tighter; my mind had a hard time staying focused on all of the minutiae, the majority of which I will not be taking with me to my grave. In a larger context, sure, I can see how that all pans out by showing how the government/state/prison/DAs wanted to grind Woodfox down to stop appealing for justice.

Woodfox is really paying back to reading, what reading did for him:

Reading was a bright spot for me. Reading was my salvation. Libraries and universities and schools from all over Louisiana donated books to Angola and for once, the willful ignorance of the prison administration paid off for us, because there were a lot of radical books in the prison library: Books we wouldn’t have been allowed to get through the mail. Books we never could have afforded to buy. Books we had never heard of. Herman, King, and I first gravitated to books and authors that dealt with politics and race—George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, J. A. Rogers’s From ‘Superman’ to Man. We read anything we could find on slavery, communism, socialism, Marxism, anti-imperialism, the African independence movements, and independence movements from around the world.

There's so much good in this book. I hope it gets spread everywhere.

[philipjhunt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I rank it alongside "No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison" as a commentary on the corruptible nature of power. The carelessness with which political powers, bureaucratic systems, profit-making enterprises and racist belief inflict egregious and enduring violence beggars belief. The profound lack of humanity spills off every page of this thick book. The book's very endlessness evokes the unrelenting nature of the violence endured by so many in the Louisiana prison system. And, lest we think the American South is an exception, also the hope-destroying violence of Manus Prison and Australia's treatment of boat people and others in detention.

[drfuriosa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was a tough, really brutal, read. It's difficult swallow decades of miscarried justice and incomprehensible to think about remaing unbroken by it. Albert Woodfox carries us through his entire life to show how he got to this point. I am not big into autobiographies or memoirs, and I felt at points that some of the conventions of the genre held Woodfox back from keeping the story moving. I think it's worth the read, though I had several editing suggestions in mind as I read.