Having Survived Solitary, I Refuse to Conflate the Imaginable With the Possible

In 1998, I was eighteen years old when I shot and killed a man. A year before my trial, I met my newborn child, who now uses they/them pronouns, through a bulletproof glass pane. Their mother sat on a stainless-steel stool, holding them in one of the jail’s visiting booths. To their mother, I projected all the hope that I could muster that I’d win my trial—not because I was innocent but because I was a nineteen-year-old whose choices were to either win at trial or die in prison. As I spoke, I watched my sleeping child. Their mom laughed at me and gently shook them awake. Sleepy eyes opened.

“They’re so bright!” I said, meaning the whites of their eyes. Those eyes followed me all the way back to my cell. I began to think about what those eyes would see in me as they grew older—what they would be taught to see by their school, the media, and our community. A homeless, junior high school dropout. An absent father. A murderer. One day my child would go to school, and someone would ask them what their dad did for a living. My child would either lie and feel ashamed or tell the truth and feel ashamed. I’d had a love-hate relationship with my own father, so I knew my child couldn’t be ashamed of me without also being ashamed of themself. They couldn’t grow to hate me without also growing to hate themself. My kid hadn’t been alive one month, and I felt like I’d already killed them. My heart breaking, I curled up on my bunk. I had to get out of prison.

A year later, an Alameda County judge sentenced me to sixty-seven years to life. Mine was one of many lives the state had condemned to end slowly. Elsewhere, as a deputy sheriff hauled me, hobbled and shackled, from the courtroom, a man named Hugo Pinell was serving his twenty-eighth year in a California state prison. He’d been sentenced to seven years to life in 1971. Sandra Davis-Lawrence was serving her twenty-first year in prison. She’d been sentenced to seven years to life in 1982. Marvin Mutch had been sentenced to seven years to life in 1975 for a crime he hadn’t committed. An author researching a series of murders discovered evidence of Mutch’s innocence and, seven years after my conviction, Mutch presented it to the parole board.

That year, 93 percent of people who went before the board to seek parole from life sentences were denied. Mutch received a parole grant, but of the 7 percent of people granted parole, then governor Arnold Schwarzenegger revoked 85 percent of these grants, including Mutch’s. This is what “tough on crime” meant in California when I was sentenced to sixty-seven years to life. If you’d asked someone at the time whether I, a junior high school dropout with no social net worth, would walk out of prison twenty-one years later, they would’ve said, “Impossible.” They would have been conflating what we can imagine with what is possible. This is one of the many forms the imagination problem takes.

I ran a workshop in 2019 called The Imagination Challenge for educators, activists, and social scientists who wanted to understand the racialized process of mass incarceration. I talked about how the project of colonialism was partly about the systematic elimination of any ideas in conflict with the perpetuation of Western supremacy, historically expressed as Christian supremacy during the Crusades, European supremacy during the colonialization of Asia and Africa, and finally, during the development of American power through plantation slavery, white supremacy. These iterations of socially engineered ideological norms, which collectively constitute white cultural hegemony, reproduced white supremacist structures that form the bedrock of our contemporary world. Our institutions, from public transit to education to everything else we rely on in childhood to provide our ideological norms, are white supremacist. To put it another way, whether you identify as white or Black or Asian or Latinx, you, your parents, and their grandparents have been taught (with varying degrees of success) to perpetuate white supremacy. And then the people you trust most in this world taught you.

A neuroscientist at my workshop identified the crux of the imagination challenge. When we imagine the future, we rely on the centers in the brain related to memory. This suggests that we can’t imagine a world for which we don’t have an experiential basis. Our brains store characteristics like the hue of a black olive, the ridged skin of a pineapple, and the smooth texture of a brown leather belt. Because we’ve experienced these characteristics, we can imagine a ridged black belt even if we’ve never actually seen one. Without that experience, we can’t.

Given the neuroscience, what can we do if all the characteristics we’ve experienced in contemporary society are white supremist characteristics? Can we imagine the unimaginable? In a word, yes.

Standard procedure in my county jail was that when a person received a life sentence, the administration removed that person from their shared cell and isolated them in solitary confinement, known as “the hole.” A sheriff instructed my cellmate to pack my property in a trash bag. He and I were from rival neighborhoods, but the naked oppression of jail had clarified who our allies and enemies were. My cellmate scribbled a note to me that read, “Stay up”—which in our respective neighborhoods meant, You are strong enough to survive—and hid the note, along with three books of stamps he gave me (currency in prison), between pictures of my child’s birth. While he was writing his goodbyes to me, I leaned my head against my cell door in solitary confinement.

The hole was constructed as a panopticon—concrete, steel, and plexiglass arranged in two tiers around a central well. A guard tower with tinted windows dominated the inner well. A plexiglass partition separated the inner and outer wells, and the latter was further divided by walls into sections called “pods.” Each pod had eight or so cells per tier along one wall, two octagonal tables in a recreational dayroom, and a central staircase to the catwalk on the second tier. Beside my head against the door, a rectangle window with wire mesh faced the dayroom. I looked out of my only window to the world at a bank of pay phones. Thinking about calling home, I filled my face with stone to block my tears. Only 20 percent of criminal appeals were successful. My case would not be among them. I had promised my family I would come home, but I didn’t know how anymore.

I closed my eyes to escape the seeming truth that I would never get out of prison. But something glimmered in the darkness.

Writing has been my superpower since the fourth grade. For a creative writing assignment, I wrote a story in which what seemed to be a serial killer crept up the stairs while a woman showered (Halloween had recently aired on TV). The big reveal: the “killer” was the woman’s cat. I had expected to provoke trouble with what I thought was inappropriate material; instead, the teacher kept me after class to say, “Emile, this is amazing.” I was a Black boy in an all-white class, and it was the first time someone had ever acknowledged my power. The second acknowledgment of my power came from my father, and it was the only time I remember him saying, “I’m sorry, son.” Putting it kindly, my dad was an unorthodox parent. He was a doctor with three offices in Oakland, so he had the resources to eliminate hardships from our lives. His values and success in life were forged in hardship, however, and he didn’t have the imagination to see how we could be successful, ethical people without hardship. So, he manufactured it.

We shopped at bargain centers for five sets of clothes once a year and wore generic shoes to school, because when my father was a kid, he’d had to make do with three sets of clothes. He made us earn money to cover our summer vacation activities (camp, travel, etc.) by hauling bricks from demolition sites in the Bay Area, and he rarely intervened to resolve conflicts in our lives, believing we had to learn to be men. The first time I complained of bullying at school, my father strapped oversized boxing gloves onto my hands and made me fight my brother, who outclassed me by forty pounds.

When he fell in love with a woman who moved into our home, his parenting style softened—though only for the woman’s son, not for us. The newcomer—I’ll call him James— had it easy; my brothers and I hated him because we felt like our dad treated him better than us. My dad seemed to spend more money on James, who was essentially our stepbrother. But James never had to haul bricks with us, and my father constantly intervened to resolve our stepbrother’s conflicts with us. We resented James and his mother; we constantly complained to each other about them, but we never complained to our father, because his answer to dissent was a bullwhip he’d bought in Texas. Months later, our resentment hit a boiling point on allowance day.

Every Sunday, after we’d completed chores and homework, we would eagerly line up in my dad’s room for allowance. My dad ran a patriarchal household, so he paid us in order of seniority. My oldest brother Eddie received $20; Timi received $10; I received $5. This, of course, didn’t feel great for Timi and me, but we bore it as the divine order handed down from the biblical God to Abraham—until the Sunday when our stepbrother joined us in line. My brothers and I shared confused looks because James didn’t do chores.

My dad handed out the usual $20, $10, and $5. James’s turn came up in line. My father handed him $20. My heart imploded. Timi thinned his lips. Eddie tucked his chin toward his chest, holding his breath. Later, we convened. Someone had to stand up to Dad, and my brothers nominated me, on pain of them kicking my ass if I refused. I wanted to vomit. I couldn’t confront my dad in person.

I wrote a letter. I told him that he hurt us. That he always bragged that he’d face Mike Tyson for us, but he was a liar because he treated his girlfriend’s son better than us. I left the letter on my dad’s nightstand and ran back to my room, where I hid in my closet. Later, when he found me, he was crying. The next day his girlfriend moved back into her own apartment. Up until that letter, bending my father’s will was impossible for me and my brothers because we’d never seen it.

A decade later, as I leaned against the window of my cell in solitary confinement, writing was the only thing I’d seen that could achieve the impossible.

I opened my eyes. I’m going to write my way out of prison.