When working in inmate education,
the moment one waits for is the “light bulb moment,” when the inmates' eyes
light up when they finally GET IT. When they actually read and understand what
the U.S. War of Independence, or the Civil War, was all about, or how close the
world came to falling under Nazi domination in World War II, or that there is a
bigger world beyond their experience waiting for them.
Robert Vick is one of those
inmates who come to mind when I think of the “light bulb moment.” A short,
muscular, black inmate, Robert attended the Sage Colleges inmate education
program at Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility, on whose lands President Grant’s
cottage, where he penned his memoirs and passed away, sits.
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| Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility, Moreau, NY. |
Robert was taking classes in
composition, science, and African history. His academic skills were weak, but
he was a strong reader. We spent time discussing history, the news, and Islam,
which had recently become a new interest. He was polite, soft-spoken,
respectful, and seemed to be well-liked by the other inmates. Robert, who was
in a minimum-security work camp, spoke anxiously of going home on furlough — a
rare privilege.
One afternoon, as the inmates
slowly shuffled into class, Luis, one of the students, unceremoniously dumped a
collection of textbooks on my desk.
“Here,” Luis declared.
“What are these?” I asked.
Luis, a skinny young man of few
words, offered “Vick’s books.”
“Where is he?”
“Dead.”
I was stunned. Nearly speechless,
I was barely able to stammer out, “Wha . . . what happened?”
“Justice,” Luis spat out. It was
the great karmic vulture that circled over everyone in the joint.
According to the New York State
Department of Corrections, on September 7, 1993, Robert Vick, a minimum-security inmate, was reported deceased. Vick, who was doing time on a
manslaughter charge, was said to have been murdered — perhaps in payment for his
past crimes. I do not know what Robert did or the victim he buried. I only knew
him as an earnest young man trying to leave his past behind him and become a
better person.
As I drove home later that day, a
flock of geese flying south in a V formation followed my car for a short time
before veering off — very much in the same way Robert’s life followed mine for
a short time before veering off. I wondered if this was his way of saying goodbye.
The hard fact of life learned in
prison is that good intentions count for little. Those whose lives carry the
momentum of a lifetime of bad decisions are like the Titanic racing towards an iceberg, going too fast to change course
even though you see the danger looming right before you. No matter what you do,
your ship keeps heading towards the iceberg. That was my “light bulb moment.”
I still think about Robert Vick and
how his death sums up the great human tragedy of the cycle of poverty, crime,
and incarceration (see “Ode to an Inmate”). Sometimes, as sociologist Jay MacLeod
asserts in the title of his classic study of inner-city youth aspirations,
there just Ain’t No Makin’ It.
One of Robert’s textbooks, Introduction to African Civilizations,
by John G. Jackson, still sits on my bookshelf some twenty years after his death.
Whenever I pick it up, I wonder what he was thinking as I read the same words
he once read, holding the same pages he once held, and feeling the same sun on
my back that once burned the skin of our ancestors on the dusty plains of
ancient Africa so very long ago.