FROM NYTIMES
One Man’s Hard Road, From Existing to Living
By DWIGHT GARNER
IN THE PLACE OF JUSTICE
A Story of Punishment and Deliverance
By Wilbert Rideau
Illustrated. $26.95. Alfred A. Knopf.
Wilbert Rideau was in eighth grade when, in the mid-1950s, he committed his first real crime. He robbed a Piggly Wiggly near his home in Lawtell, La. That went pretty well (he took $40, and some costume jewelry to give the girls at his school), so he tried it again. This time he was caught. So begins Mr. Rideau’s sprawling and hard-headed new prison memoir, “In the Place of Justice.”
Freed After 44 Years, A Prison Journalist Looks Back and Ahead (January 17, 2005) Mr. Rideau wasn’t a bad kid. He was ashamed of his petty crimes, and that’s why, he says, he stopped going to school. His father, a brute whose jobs included work in an oil refinery, wasn’t around to look him in the eye. He’d left Mr. Rideau’s mother, a maid, who was forced to go on welfare. The young man’s life went into a tailspin.
A few years later, in 1961, when Mr. Rideau was 19, he robbed a bank, hoping to steal enough money to start his life over in California. He took three bank employees as hostages and put them in a car. When they later tried to escape, he recklessly shot them (two survived) and stabbed one, a woman, to death. Mr. Rideau was black. His hostages were white. When he was arrested and brought to a local prison, a lynch mob of several hundred people awaited his arrival. He was lucky to make it through the night.
When white Louisianans looked at Wilbert Rideau, they saw a beast as much as a man. Such were the racial realities of the South in 1961 that Mr. Rideau’s impressions of whites were nearly as blinkered. The novelist Richard Wright might have been speaking for Mr. Rideau when he wrote in “Native Son” that, for Bigger Thomas, “white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark.”
After a trial in which his defense team did not call a single witness, Mr. Rideau was sent to America’s most notorious prison, Angola, and put on death row. That’s where this memoir, a soul-stirring account of one man’s long road to redemption, begins in earnest. In Angola, Mr. Rideau became a reader, and then a writer. He eventually became the editor of The Angolite, the prison’s magazine. He was the first black editor of a prison magazine in America and also, under some enlightened wardens, the first to edit one that was essentially uncensored.
Under Mr. Rideau, The Angolite ran painstaking exposés: about sexual life at the prison, about poor medical services, about a cruelly malfunctioning electric chair. Mr. Rideau was good at what he did. The Angolite was the first prison publication to be nominated for a National Magazine Award, and he won a George Polk Award, one of the highest honors in American journalism. He became a correspondent for “Fresh Air” on National Public Radio, and was a co-director of a documentary, “The Farm: Angola, USA,” that was nominated for an Academy Award.
Mr. Rideau brings his calmly appraising journalistic eye to this memoir. It is packed with incisive details. He notes that on death row, a prisoner’s last meal is usually ordered for, and eaten by, his friends. “Condemned men,” he writes, “usually lost their appetites.” He writes about the hideous concoction of boiled syrup and feces a prisoner might use to scald another. He describes what it means to be “turned out,” that is, gang-raped and redefined as a woman in the eyes of macho prisoners.
Mr. Rideau spent more than a decade in solitary confinement. “This is not living,” he observes. “This is existing, like a head of cabbage on a garden row.” He notes about prison: “Days inch along like snails, and years zoom past like rockets.” He was able to hang on, despite his remorse about his crime, because “I knew there was more to me than the worst thing I’d done.”
Mr. Rideau commits a fair amount of real journalism in this memoir. That is, he names names — wardens, fellow prisoners, guards — and tells stories as straightforwardly as he can. His account of life in Angola is an important one, especially in light of the dearth of good American prison writing in recent years, a dearth brought on partly by “Son of Sam” laws that prevent convicts from financially benefiting from their crimes.
The journalist and the memoirist in Wilbert Rideau, however, are sometimes at odds with each other. He is so dispassionate that his book never catches fire. It is a vital human document, but a less vital literary one. Jack Henry Abbott, in his 1981 book, “In the Belly of the Beast,” wrote that he wanted to convey the “atmospheric pressure” of being a long-term prisoner in America. Mr. Rideau’s account is a far slower-moving weather system.
The book’s second half is rudderless. While in prison, Mr. Rideau became famous, as one newspaper headline put it, as “The Wordman of Angola.” The longer he remained in prison, however, he also because famous for the sheer, punishing length of his sentence. While many other prisoners who had committed similar crimes were paroled after 10 years, Mr. Rideau spent 44 years in Louisiana’s prisons before his release in 2005. Life magazine referred to him, at one point, as “the Most Rehabilitated Prisoner in America.”
Mr. Rideau had the guts, and the character, to not give up during his long campaign for release. But the accounts of his multiple appeals do not make for provocative reading, and they’re what fill this book after its midpoint. Even a dandy cameo by Johnnie Cochran, who worked briefly on Mr. Rideau’s case, can’t bring this section to life.
Mr. Rideau does finally get out of prison, and there’s some warm humor in his introduction to the modern world. He finds himself speaking back to recorded messages on the telephone and was amazed to see black cashiers at Wal-Mart.
The ending of “In the Place of Justice” is as low-key, but as emotional, as any words I’ve read in a long time. Now that he is finally out of prison, and married to the woman who helped him secure his release, “I wake up in heaven every day,” Mr. Rideau writes, adding, “I rise early because I don’t want to miss a thing.”
One Man’s Hard Road, From Existing to Living
By DWIGHT GARNER
IN THE PLACE OF JUSTICE
A Story of Punishment and Deliverance
By Wilbert Rideau
Illustrated. $26.95. Alfred A. Knopf.
Wilbert Rideau was in eighth grade when, in the mid-1950s, he committed his first real crime. He robbed a Piggly Wiggly near his home in Lawtell, La. That went pretty well (he took $40, and some costume jewelry to give the girls at his school), so he tried it again. This time he was caught. So begins Mr. Rideau’s sprawling and hard-headed new prison memoir, “In the Place of Justice.”
Freed After 44 Years, A Prison Journalist Looks Back and Ahead (January 17, 2005) Mr. Rideau wasn’t a bad kid. He was ashamed of his petty crimes, and that’s why, he says, he stopped going to school. His father, a brute whose jobs included work in an oil refinery, wasn’t around to look him in the eye. He’d left Mr. Rideau’s mother, a maid, who was forced to go on welfare. The young man’s life went into a tailspin.
A few years later, in 1961, when Mr. Rideau was 19, he robbed a bank, hoping to steal enough money to start his life over in California. He took three bank employees as hostages and put them in a car. When they later tried to escape, he recklessly shot them (two survived) and stabbed one, a woman, to death. Mr. Rideau was black. His hostages were white. When he was arrested and brought to a local prison, a lynch mob of several hundred people awaited his arrival. He was lucky to make it through the night.
When white Louisianans looked at Wilbert Rideau, they saw a beast as much as a man. Such were the racial realities of the South in 1961 that Mr. Rideau’s impressions of whites were nearly as blinkered. The novelist Richard Wright might have been speaking for Mr. Rideau when he wrote in “Native Son” that, for Bigger Thomas, “white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark.”
After a trial in which his defense team did not call a single witness, Mr. Rideau was sent to America’s most notorious prison, Angola, and put on death row. That’s where this memoir, a soul-stirring account of one man’s long road to redemption, begins in earnest. In Angola, Mr. Rideau became a reader, and then a writer. He eventually became the editor of The Angolite, the prison’s magazine. He was the first black editor of a prison magazine in America and also, under some enlightened wardens, the first to edit one that was essentially uncensored.
Under Mr. Rideau, The Angolite ran painstaking exposés: about sexual life at the prison, about poor medical services, about a cruelly malfunctioning electric chair. Mr. Rideau was good at what he did. The Angolite was the first prison publication to be nominated for a National Magazine Award, and he won a George Polk Award, one of the highest honors in American journalism. He became a correspondent for “Fresh Air” on National Public Radio, and was a co-director of a documentary, “The Farm: Angola, USA,” that was nominated for an Academy Award.
Mr. Rideau brings his calmly appraising journalistic eye to this memoir. It is packed with incisive details. He notes that on death row, a prisoner’s last meal is usually ordered for, and eaten by, his friends. “Condemned men,” he writes, “usually lost their appetites.” He writes about the hideous concoction of boiled syrup and feces a prisoner might use to scald another. He describes what it means to be “turned out,” that is, gang-raped and redefined as a woman in the eyes of macho prisoners.
Mr. Rideau spent more than a decade in solitary confinement. “This is not living,” he observes. “This is existing, like a head of cabbage on a garden row.” He notes about prison: “Days inch along like snails, and years zoom past like rockets.” He was able to hang on, despite his remorse about his crime, because “I knew there was more to me than the worst thing I’d done.”
Mr. Rideau commits a fair amount of real journalism in this memoir. That is, he names names — wardens, fellow prisoners, guards — and tells stories as straightforwardly as he can. His account of life in Angola is an important one, especially in light of the dearth of good American prison writing in recent years, a dearth brought on partly by “Son of Sam” laws that prevent convicts from financially benefiting from their crimes.
The journalist and the memoirist in Wilbert Rideau, however, are sometimes at odds with each other. He is so dispassionate that his book never catches fire. It is a vital human document, but a less vital literary one. Jack Henry Abbott, in his 1981 book, “In the Belly of the Beast,” wrote that he wanted to convey the “atmospheric pressure” of being a long-term prisoner in America. Mr. Rideau’s account is a far slower-moving weather system.
The book’s second half is rudderless. While in prison, Mr. Rideau became famous, as one newspaper headline put it, as “The Wordman of Angola.” The longer he remained in prison, however, he also because famous for the sheer, punishing length of his sentence. While many other prisoners who had committed similar crimes were paroled after 10 years, Mr. Rideau spent 44 years in Louisiana’s prisons before his release in 2005. Life magazine referred to him, at one point, as “the Most Rehabilitated Prisoner in America.”
Mr. Rideau had the guts, and the character, to not give up during his long campaign for release. But the accounts of his multiple appeals do not make for provocative reading, and they’re what fill this book after its midpoint. Even a dandy cameo by Johnnie Cochran, who worked briefly on Mr. Rideau’s case, can’t bring this section to life.
Mr. Rideau does finally get out of prison, and there’s some warm humor in his introduction to the modern world. He finds himself speaking back to recorded messages on the telephone and was amazed to see black cashiers at Wal-Mart.
The ending of “In the Place of Justice” is as low-key, but as emotional, as any words I’ve read in a long time. Now that he is finally out of prison, and married to the woman who helped him secure his release, “I wake up in heaven every day,” Mr. Rideau writes, adding, “I rise early because I don’t want to miss a thing.”
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