Freedom

Do you know the name of those little white birds? You know, the ones who follow around cows, some of them even brave enough to sit atop a cow’s back. I wonder how long this relationship has lasted. And in how many different fields. 

Across the world, there must be millions of birds who eat the droppings of millions of cows. I wonder if these birds and these cows somehow communicate.

These thoughts came on the hallowed grounds of Angola prison. Past the rows of hundred-year-old cypress trees, beyond fields of soybeans, and far beyond row upon row of dry corn plants. In these corn fields, the bastard kin of these white birds scavenged kernels missed by the machines. 

How does God decide which birds eat corn and which birds eat shit?

Inside the walls of this 18,000 acre prison, you might never know the horror of years gone by. You might see the chickens and the ducks by the pond just outside Death Row. And were it not for the signs, you might think this was just another day, out in the country, with an old man in overalls catching crawfish.

The fourth wall of this prison is water, where alligators live, always hungry and ready to eat anybody who tries to escape. 

Men have died on these grounds. Men have been beaten and whipped. Forced to work to make other people rich. 

And yet, I have met men who know what it means to create, who know what it means to put their souls into their creations. Take wood. Take paint. Take metals and bend this. Some men, they even take and raise dogs for those who most need a dog’s love. And the luckiest ones, they get to be there to guide the dying through their last breath.

In the evening before sunset, big white clouds surprise me as much as the men I met and came to love over the last three years. Sometimes, in some ways, I think these men are freer than most people I meet on the street.

I wonder about those who do not move beyond their camp. I wonder if they consider the white birds. I wonder what they think about when we leave. 

I wonder who I might be had I spent the last twenty years of my life unable to leave this place.