Last Christmas, my brother and I gave my dad, a retired journalist, a subscription to a website that sends you a writing prompt about your life once a week for a full year.
Dad was keeping up with it diligently until he was diagnosed with cancer a few months into the COVID-19 crisis. He will be heading into the hospital for a stem cell transplant soon, so I decided that I will read what he wrote earlier this year as my companion text to this class.
Here's an excerpt I read this week about being in jail in St. Louis in the 1960s:
Another occasional highlight was the bookmobile, a small bookshelf on wheels that a trustee rolled around to the tiers every week or so. I was one of the only people in our tier who took out books; maybe “took in” would be more accurate. It’s where I became acquainted with some poets, especially Byron, whose poems I still love. I also got a couple novels – one of the Fenimore Cooper books and others, the names of which I can’t recall. The fact that I took books from the library earned me the nickname “The Professor” from a couple inmates.
I also got a copy of the “Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. I read most of it but didn’t care for it — except the end. I memorized my own bastardized version of the “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win.”
When asked about the book by some and I recited the above quote as the book’s principal message, several guys started calling me “a Communist,” and not in a derogatory way. It would just be thrown into a conversation: “Cosby’s a communist.”
...
I got out of jail on Aug. 1, 1966, my 18th birthday. The day started with me being told to wrap up my bunk and junk in the sheet from my bed. "Bunk and junk" was what you called your belongings.
I was led from the jail to the courts building through an underground hallway linking the two. I was escorted by Edward Tripp, who at that time was some type of minor official charged with moving prisoners to court.
As we walked, he found it surprising that I was even in jail given that I was a first-time offender. He said had my father shown up at my initial court date and proved he couldn’t afford a lawyer, that the judge likely would have released me on my own recognizance under my dad’s supervision. Unfortunately, I believe that my father knew very little as to how things operated, much like me, and felt that a lawyer would be needed to get me out and he didn’t have the money to hire one.
Tripp also said it was unlikely that I would go to prison but that I should be respectful and straightforward with the judge.
...
“Put your clothes back in the bag, son, and get out of here.” For some reason, I remember those words exactly. So I clutched that bag to my chest and one of the jailers escorted me out of an entrance to Market Street.
I’m not being overdramatic when I say I took a deep breath and damned if it wasn’t cooler and sweeter than I could remember. I just started walking north to Olive Street and hung a hard left, heading west, following the street car tracks. I had no money and couldn’t get on the street car.
I remember walking faster and faster, holding my brown paper bag, breathing so deeply because it really was different air out there. I continued walking, faster and faster, until I hit Sarah Street and saw my dad.
He just looked at me and shook his head, as if to say, “It’s about time” and “where the hell have you been.”
Anyway, that was my birthday and I was free.
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