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CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE
AS THEY MEET FOR HIS APPEAL, the investigator -- Melody Ermachild Chavis -- helps Masters hone an unexpected gift for writing. Much of the book features punchy, often powerful vignettes of prison life. Reconstructed conversations (some no doubt embellished for effect) are laced with jive, profanity and the tough-guy bonding of men with common grievances, fates and wounds.
A TV news tidbit for the rest of us -- the resignation of anti-death penalty Justice Thurgood Marshall -- hits Death Row hard:
"Those of us on the row is washed up now," says one inmate... The tier fell into a troubled silence... The moment had grabbed our attention as if we'd heard a great bomb whistling down on us."
THERE IS A KAFKA-ESQUE PRISON SHRINK in blue suit and red hat who materializes on the "crazy tier," where Masters lands in a stinking cell with a dead rat in the toilet. "Hey, cell fifty-nine," coos the psychiatrist, offering him bounty from pockets stuffed with medication:
"How about this tiny blue one. This is Mellaril. But I also have... let's see, Prolixin and Cogenitin. But these here," he admitted with a doctor's frown, "I'm not so sure of. Most folks prefer these blue Mellaril to the Sinequan."
Masters sends him packing. He can't so easily avoid the raw feeling and craziness all around him. There is Milton, imprisoned mostly in solitary for 11 years. He's angry because the "psych" thinks he's "thirteen sixty-eight," or crazy. "What do you think, are you crazy?" Master asks.
"Hell, nah!" Milton responds. "Man, don't you know that in these last eleven years I have lived like a mad, wounded elephant? I have been shot, shot at, hit with clubs, blackjacked, gassed, choked, Tasered, cut, bruised and stabbed four times!" Payback's coming, he says, revealing why the psych worries over him: Milton gets discharged the next month:
"All they have to do is spring me loose, and boy oh boy, when they do, I made only one promise to myself--not to do anything that nobody hasn't done to me... "Oh yes!" Milton chuckled, slamming his fist harder into his hand. "Oh, yeah. Oh yeah." He went on repeating "Oh yeah!" to the rhythm of his slamming fist.
INVESTIGATOR CHAVIS ENCOURAGES Masters on another path. He begins to take "the many steps from extreme anger to the clarity of my Buddhist practice."
He had lots of anger. Young men like him find a support group behind bars, he says. "The place welcomes a man who is full of rage and violence. He is not abnormal here, not different. Prison life is an extension of his inner life," Jarvis writes.
In a Buddhist journal from Chavis, Masters finds an article by Tibetan lama Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, titled "Life in Relation to Death." Masters sat in a holding booth waiting to hear his death sentence at the time. "I thought, 'Wow! This is right up my alley."
He begins a regular insight meditation practice. Meditation requires diligence and discipline under any circumstances, but his Death Row practice sounds daunting indeed. He describes rising one day at 4:30 a.m. to a quiet prison. He folds a blanket and sits on the concrete floor. A broken window wafts frosty, refreshing air into the cellblock. The prison yard outside seems "so placidly beautiful under the heavy, watchful lightbeams of the gun towers."
He sits for 45 minutes, breathing softly, entering a state of relaxation and awareness. A roar erupts from a nearby cell: "Feed me or come fuck me up!" Another inmate shouts back: "Can't you see people are trying to sleep around here?" "You aren't calling the shots around here, punk," says the first voice. "When they rack these bar gates and all the cells come flying open, we'll see just who the real bitch is, me or you, punk."
So starts a new day.
YET MASTERS CONTINUES TO WAKE EARLY and sit:
"I began to get up early to try to calm my mind so I wouldn't panic. It was as if my whole life was being displayed on a screen during the death penalty case. Things I had never realized about myself and my life... Questions I had never asked my mother---like how long she'd been abused, on the street, an addict---we're being asked now. Through meditation I learned to slow down and take a few deep breaths, to take everything in, not to run from the pain, but to sit with it, confront it, give it the companion it had never had."
Meditation is often misunderstood as escapism. To the contrary, a Buddhist meditation is intended as a lifelong endeavor toward greater awareness of the world around you, deep insight into how people create their own suffering, and compassion for others, as Masters begins to discover:
"I've learned more about the things I don't want to do: cuss out other prisoners or guards, argue for two hours about whether or not the lunch meat is spoiled... Every effort I make to love means I don't have to feel hatred."
He styles himself a 'peace activist,' and tries to open out to the hardened souls of "S.Q." He often doubts he's up to it. Yet in actions small and large, he tries. He risks being knifed by homophobic inmate Crazy Dan, who stalks a flaming gay man who wanders into the wrong yard (or been sent there by malevolent guards). Masters warns the gay man off, though he feels far from triumphant as he wryly notes: "Does this mean that I, the Lone Buddhist Ranger, am expected to try to stop this madness by myself? ... I can't stop it. There are stabbings every day in this place. All I have is my spiritual practice."
Yet from that practice he has stopped one stabbing.
POLITICAL PROGRESSIVES OFTEN become enraptured with high-profile inmates who may be useful in causes. (Masters' stories have been published widely). Such infatuation can be dangerous. Recall Jack Abbott, whose gut-wrenching book on prison life "In the Belly of the Beast" was widely praised. Norman Mailer and others championed his release; Abbott promptly stabbed a restaurant waiter to death.
But Masters seems to have done far more work in awakening from self-delusion, violence and self-hatred. He hopes readers "will see through my writing a human being who made mistakes. Maybe my writing will at least help them see me as someone who felt, loved, and cared, someone who wanted to know for himself who we was."
Masters exhibits the decency and goodness often suffocated by poverty, class inequity and revenge-oriented politics, but which also lie within reach of anyone who finally takes charge of their mind and spirit.
His tale might rightly be used in several causes: prison reform, class injustice, bolstering black families.
Yet "Finding Freedom" also confronts readers with the truly radical Buddhist notion of taking full responsibility for your karma (another misunderstood term--- it doesn't mean preordained fate, but the accumulated result of choices from a person's past, as influenced by how we think and act in the present). The aim is to awaken to moment-to-moment reponsibility for your life, as Masters seems finally to have done.
AS JARVIS' TEACHER Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, writes in an afterword to this inspiring book:
"We must first recognize the source of our pain. Nothing is accomplished by blaming God, or parents, or the police, or outer enemies... To acknowledge our own karma as the cause of our experience empowers us to purify it and transform our future. To understand that we are not unique in our suffering, to look for a way to reduce suffering for ourselves and others, gives birth to authentic compassion, beyond mere pity."
Authentic compassion---now there's a cause to get behind.
You can write Masters at: Jarvis Masters, P.O. Box C-35169, San Quentin, CA 94974.
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