-
Writing with the Condemned: On Editing and Publishing the Work of Steve Champion
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
74 Writing with the Condemned On Editing and Publishing the Work of Steve Champion tom Kerr Crouched between the wall phone and floor-as-desk so he could hold the phone with one hand and turn pages with the other, Steve Champion read poem after poem to me as I captured them on a digital recorder three thousand miles away. He was out of solitary confinement in the Adjustment Center at San Quentin and able to use the phone only because he was in the Orange County Jail awaiting a court appearance in Los Angeles. Steve’s baritone voice shifted as he began each poem, moving from fluid conversational ease to dramatic incantation and rhythmic song. Here is one of his poems: tRaNSPoRteD to aNotheR tIme I’m seated on the auction block of the courtroom. Curious spectators wait to witness a legal lynching. The court stenographer chronicles every spoken word— History would not forget this day. Waist chains gird my wrists and waist, leg shackles fasten to my ankles. I’m transported to another time, When men hunted men, cruelly enslaving them, not as prisoners of war, but for profit. I am a commodity, reduced to invisibility, and batteries of psychologists and psychiatrists are paid thousands of dollars not to testify about my humanity, but about my saneness, my fitness to be tried, to be executed. Every morning the sun rises I chant an African battle hymn; Every evening the sun sets I chant a freedom song. I am stronger today than I was yesterday, but not as strong as I will be tomorrow. Victory is mine. writing with the condemned 75 County Jail buses are vessels hostaging black, brown, and white bodies. I am transported to another time, where slave ships have morphed into slave buses, where the slave fort is a new prison fort, where whips, ropes, and chains—utilized to punish, brutalize and control— are updated to tasers, pepper sprays, and stun guns, And manned by men and women who wear green, the color of money, the color of greed. I am transported to another time, when I’m poked and prodded, flanked by armed guards, misdirected and directed to kneel, to be still. As the shackles come unclamped, I am not free to walk out of a prison, but into a cage, another fort, where I sleep until I am transported to the plantation— again. In the background, and especially between poems, I heard the noise of the jail—distant cries, guards shouting, doors slamming—yet Steve was crouching by the phone in the dayroom alone, a “high security” prisoner held apart from everyone else. In the six years I have known California death row prisoner Steve Champion , he has often explained how important it is for him through correspondence to cultivate and maintain a social world beyond prison. He reminded me in a letterof the existential and practical significance of written communication for him: As a prisoner I am deprived of a connection to the social world except through communication with people in society and, to an extent, studying and so forth. Without that I would be in a bubble and cut off. Let me give you the latest example. My eldest brother, Lewis, was my only brother out of three who I could count on financially. He died of a stroke in April. By the time I received the letter (you know how slow the mail runs here) informing me of the tragedy, he was dead and buried. I couldn’t even write anything for his memorial ’cause it was too late. [44.222.212.138] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:20 GMT) 76 tom kerr That is why being informed as much as I can, especially when entrusting someone with my work, is important. Steve’s work is his poetry, essays, and books—all of which might be regarded as Steve’s correspondence with a world, a society, more precisely, that has condemned him. Certainly, all expressive writing produced with the aim of publication, fiction and nonfiction, is to some degree epistolary , a call for response and recognition, a means of reconciling one’s own thoughts and actions with those of fellow human beings. Steve’s writing is no different. The context, however, sets his writing life apart from most writing lives. It is not only that he writes in a cell, under brutally depressing and alienating circumstances, subject to censorship and retaliation at every turn, surrounded by people who care...