December 15, 2006, Death row writings: words that give wings, By Linda Sorin, Friendship on Death Row, By Patrice Wynne, Excerpt from Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row, By Jarvis Masters

The Authors’ Sala has earned a well-deserved reputation for presenting outstanding literary programs at its monthly readings. This month’s reading will be a bit of a departure from the usual format but promises to continue the tradition of excellence while presenting a moving, thought-provoking evening. The featured writer will not be reading from his writings—he is serving a life sentence on Death Row in San Quentin Prison. Instead, his words will be read by an illustrious group of San Miguel writers and actors: Michael Sudheer, Victor Sahuatoba (reading in Spanish), Kirsten Dehner, Lynette Seator and Anado McLauchlin.

This event has been organized by well-known local resident Patrice Wynne, a friend of Jarvis Jay Masters. Wynne will share with us how she came to know Masters and will also introduce her friend, Melody Ermachild Chavis, a private investigator who represents Death Row prisoners, including Masters. The readings will likely stimulate thoughts about the death penalty and the power of redemption. Don’t miss this event!

Patrice Wynne

Patrice Wynne was the founder/owner of Gaia Bookstore and Cultural Center in Berkeley, an institution in the San Francisco Bay Area for 20 years. She is currently writing her memoirs, Reborn on Cobblestones, about coming home to herself in San Miguel and the adventures of being an independent bookseller that led her to this place. In addition, she is the owner of San Miguel Designs, specializing in clothing with Day of the Dead motifs, a digital photographer and teacher and designer of home interiors—all of which explains why she has not yet finished her memoirs!

Friendship on Death Row
By Patrice Wynne

It’s a glorious, brilliant, sun-dappled day in the San Francisco Bay Area. I feel a wave of freedom wash over me—intense, dipped in poignancy—as I look across the shimmering water and imagine crossing the San Rafael Bridge. Freedom to move with ease in any direction I choose to go, an amazing freedom I take for granted in every moment. Freedom to drop the roof on my friend’s red Miata convertible so that I can feel the heat of the sun and the breath of the wind on my hair. Freedom to listen to a favorite classical radio station, or jazz, or rock music until I find the perfect melody. In front of me the memory-rich hills of Berkeley where I’ve known liberation, behind me the monstrous walls of San Quentin Prison, where the actions of men are circumscribed down to the nub of a pencil used to write a letter ... or a book. I’m pondering the freedoms I take for granted, having just spent the morning on Death Row visiting my friend Jarvis Masters.

It has taken me 10 years of a writing friendship to find the courage to visit Jarvis in his high-security prison block at San Quentin. I was terrified, afraid I would walk through the doors and collapse, in memory of my brother, Kerry, who died of the AIDS he contracted in prison. I hardly knew this brother, the proverbial black sheep in our family, though we were less than a year apart in age, and I never visited him when he was in prison. I adopted my family’s story of Kerry’s life as a violent man, without questioning the roots of his violence. Thinking of the enormous tragedy of his life, I would often weep inconsolably.

Jarvis and I wrote letters to each other for five years, faithfully, but I was incapable of crossing the threshold into the world of sorrows that prison represented to me. Moving to San Miguel broke the spell of fear that had kept me from deepening our friendship. San Quentin Prison is as disturbing as I imagined, but the time spent with Jarvis has helped me heal those years of a brother’s life abandoned.

Masters, now 44, had been serving time in San Quentin for robberies committed when he was 18 years old when he was convicted of conspiracy in the 1985 killing of a correctional officer, despite the fact that he was in another part of the prison when the guard was killed. Another prisoner was convicted of actually stabbing the guard, and a third man of ordering the killing. Masters was the only one of the three defendants who received the death penalty. The man who testified against him has since recanted his testimony. Jarvis asserts his innocence in his death sentence appeal, now pending before the California Supreme Court.

During his death penalty trial, he happened on the writings of Tibetan Buddhist Lama Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche: “For a long time I was my own stranger,” Masters writes, “but everything I went through in learning how to accept myself brought me to the doorsteps of dharma, the Buddhist path.” In his book, Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row, which is used in the public schools to end youth violence, Masters describes becoming a “peace activist” among the condemned. “Recipe for Prison Pruno” won him a PEN prize in 1992. He writes his books and thousands of letters a year using the ink filler of a ball point pen, the only tool permitted in his tightly circumscribed life.

I first “met” Jarvis through my friend, the author Melody Ermachild Chavis, when I owned my independent bookstore, Gaia, in Berkeley. I had just hosted Melody for her book publication party, when she called to ask whether I would host another book party for her friend, Jarvis. Reading Jarvis’s writings, and overcome by the humility, the humor and the wisdom of this extraordinary man thriving under extraordinary circumstances, I knew that I would put all the resources I could into promoting his brave book’s first public reading. Geronimo Pratt, who had just been pardoned and released from prison, was to read Jarvis’s writings, along with distinguished black writers like Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker, and several young black men from Berkeley High. The reading was held in a large Presbyterian church in Oakland, and the audience listened in silent awe as the words of Jarvis rang through the chapel in his absence.

On my last visit to see Jarvis we spoke of his forthcoming book. I asked if he had a title yet and he told me this story: One day in the prison yard another inmate was preparing to throw a ball at a bird that had landed in the yard. “Anyone wanna bet I can kill that bird?” the man said. “You can´t do that,” yelled Jarvis, putting out his arm to prevent the killing. “That bird has my wings.” The symbolism of that statement, now his new book title, is not lost on me. Standing outside San Quentin I sometimes feel that my life on the outside is like that bird, whose wings allow for the flights Jarvis is incapable of taking. Join us as we celebrate Jarvis Jay Master’s determination to tell the truth of his life, an incarcerated writer whose limited freedom presents unimaginable circumstances for writing books—and still he prevails. Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row will be available for sale.

A growing international movement is seeking to overturn Masters’s wrongful conviction. For more information about his life, visit the website created by the Committee to Free Jarvis Masters: www.freejarvis.com

Melody Ermachild Chavis, special visiting guest author

Melody Ermachild Chavis has been a private investigator for over 20 years, defending people who are facing capital punishment. She worked on Jarvis Masters’s trial and appeal and is the author of the Introduction to his book Finding Freedom. She lives in Berkeley, California, where she is staff investigator at University of California Boalt School of Law’s death penalty clinic. She is the author of a memoir, Altars in the Street (Bell Tower, Random House), and a biography, Meena, Heroine of Afghanistan (St. Martin’s Press).

Jarvis Jay Masters

Jarvis Jay Masters is an African American Buddhist writer living on San Quentin’s Death Row. Thousands of people have read his widely published stories and essays and found inspiration from his eloquent and highly praised book, Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row. Finding Freedom has been praised by many Buddhist teachers and is being used in classrooms as a teaching tool to show children in the inner cities an alternative to violence.

Pema Chödrön is one of America’s best-known Buddhist teachers and is a personal teacher of Masters. This is what she writes about him: “Jarvis is an easy man to respect and an easy man to love. What I learn from him all the time is what it really means to keep one’s vows of not harming and of helping other people in whatever ways one can. I always think, ‘If Jarvis can do it in those most challenging and difficult situations, I can do it too.’ It is a continual aspiration from my heart that Jarvis Masters not be killed and that I have the pleasure of knowing him as a free man; a free man who I know will benefit all the people he encounters.”

I remember the first time I really noticed the scars on the bodies of my fellow prisoners. I was outside on a maximum-custody exercise yard. I stood along the fence, praising the air the yard gave my lungs that my prison cell didn’t.

I wasn’t in a rush to pick up a basketball or do anything. I just stood in my own silence.

I looked at the other prisoners, playing basketball or handball, showering, talking to one another. I saw the inmates I felt closest to, John, Pete, and David, lifting weights. I noticed the amazing similarity of the whiplike scars on their bare skin, shining with sweat from pumping iron in the hot sun.

A deep sadness came over me as I watched these powerful men lift hundreds of pounds of weights over their heads. I looked around the yard and made the gruesome discovery that everyone else had the same deep gashes—behind their legs, on their backs, all over their ribs—evidence of the violence in our lives.

The San Miguel Author’s Sala presents author readings and workshops for writers and aspiring writers. For up-to-date information on upcoming events, visit www.sanmiguelauthors.com