Every Man Has Stories: Tracing The Genealogy of the “Criminal”
In Anthony’s correspondence with the author, no answer is given to what made him end up in a federal prison, just stories that complicate every imprisoned person's life.
We go to The Boston Globe for this week's long read by Evan Allen, read the whole article “Under the Wheel.” We include key excerpts below to convince you it’s worth your time.
“At Ten Years Old I Understood My Mother To Be My Salvation.”
He thinks he was maybe 15 years old. He remembers that it was cold outside where he had been wandering, and dark in the dusty hallway of his mother’s apartment.
He tried to be quiet. But his mother appeared from a doorway, startled and angry, and ordered him back out. They had been fighting. He can’t remember why anymore; they were always fighting. All he wanted was to sleep, to get warm, and she was blocking his way. But he wasn’t leaving. Not tonight.
He raised the .22 Ruger and pointed it at his mother’s face.
The gun was light and warm in his hands. He remembers thinking his mother’s face looked beautiful.
A long moment, the bottom of an exhale, silence, the barrel of the weapon like the bow of a ship plunging forward into uncharted waters.
“You gonna shoot your mother?” he remembers she asked him icily.
She stared back at him. He remembers the smell of the gun, metal and burnt gunpowder. A car went by on the street outside. He kept the gun trained on her face.
“Get ya ass in the house,” she told him at last. He lowered the gun. He remembers she walked back into her bedroom and shut the door.
Some time passed, not much. He couldn’t sleep. He went to her door and tried the knob but it was locked. He remembers that he pressed his ear to the wood and heard her sobbing. He remembers that he backed up shaking, slid down against the wall, and sobbed, too.
Anthony Pledger buried that memory. He never spoke of it and tried not to think of it. But it didn’t disappear because nothing disappears.
He locked it in the darkest part of himself, where it haunted him. After that night, he believed, he was condemned. From that point forward, he was merciless. In his own words, he became Death.
Now, two decades later, it was morning in the gloom of his federal prison cell, and he was writing, his pen a searchlight seeking the origin of the violence that lived inside him, putting everything down in a letter to me.
Underscored
It was the act of drawing the gun and pointing it at his mother that he believes damned him. Anthony’s life was full of violence on either side of this moment, and yet, it was this action, in which no one was physically injured, that was, he said, the worst thing he’d ever done.
Afterward, he wrote to me, he entered a kind of exile, in which he could never be loved, and all he could do was inflict pain. He had no choice, he said: He owed it to his mother.
His friends nicknamed him Tony Starks, a play on the Iron Man character’s name, because they said he was not a man but metal. He carried a gun in his hand even in his own home. He got a .45 pistol tattooed on his forearm, and when he looked at it, its dark lines on his warm skin, he felt the contradiction of his existence.
“My mind is death,” he wrote. “My flesh and bones is the vessel — the iron, the gun — the instrument of death.”
When it seemed that death had finally come for him at 26, and he was shot in the neck as he sat in a parked car, what he felt was not fear or anger or surprise, but relief. Death, to him, was life, and he had yearned for it.
Bottom Line
I wrote to Anthony to tell him what his mother said and ask him what it meant, but he didn’t write back. It was the only letter I ever wrote him that he didn’t answer.
I thought about Anthony’s silence. Silence, the mirror of speech, the things we can’t say more powerful than the things we can. I thought of the way Cleopatra told me she loved him, like she had been waiting to say it, maybe for a long time.
And I thought about what Anthony wrote to me when I pressed him for more about his mother’s violence toward him.
“What did my mother’s tough love look like? I would have to say like a storm; a hurricane to be more exact. Or even a tornado,” he wrote. “It could be horrific. Sometimes it looked still and like neglect, but now I know it was neither. It’s love working on love so that it can express itself correctly. It’s love purifying itself.”
I don’t know whose version of that night is the truth. I don’t think the literal truth matters. Anthony is telling one story and Cleopatra is telling another. They are stories about silence, about the things they can’t say.
Cleopatra saw her son that night as a child, exploding with fury, running in fear, in need of protection. She kept his secret, she told no one. Her silence was love.
Anthony saw himself as a young man seizing power, acting deliberately and coldly, and in doing so losing what little humanity he had left. His grief and regret — his sobbing in the hallway — went unheard. So he found another way to speak it to his mother. “My mother mean the world to me, but yet I pointed my pistol at her,” he had written to me. “So when I aimed it again, and again, and again, I did it because I felt like I owed it to her.”
It was strange, and it was terrifying, but it was also love. The Ruger .22 was light and warm and fast in his teenage hands.
Read the whole article here.
Resources: State policy changes. News. Bureau of Prisons updates. State court changes. Prison holistic self care and protection. Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook.
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