Reflections On My Interview with George Washington
A fierce believer in rehabilitation through education, Fred ran L-Wing's education programs at CMF Vacaville during a revival of interest in the 1980s in reducing recidivism. Most of the inmates in the prison were inner-city Black male high school drop outs facing stiff odds against them. Their prior educational experiences ranged from disappointing to traumatic. Still, Fred persevered, focused on the lever of learning as a transformative intervention.
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December 27, 1984: Instead of my usual path to L-Wing where I taught Freshman Composition once a week, I headed to W-Wing, the prison's isolation unit. George Washington had agreed through Fred to talk about learning to read, but he'd landed in "the hole" after assaulting another inmate. Fred had arranged special permissions for the interview. George had volunteered when no one else would.
Fred met me at W-Wing's gate. We signed in with the sergeant of the lock up and waited in a stark office while guards brought George up in handcuffs. When the guard asked about removing them, Fred intervened diplomatically, producing a liability release form.
"It just means that you're going to take full responsibility for what you do with him," Fred explained to George. "You're not going to blame the Department of Corrections. We're not—I'm not forcing you. If you really should say 'No, I'm not going to get involved,' you can go back to your cell. And I mean that. I want you to be completely free."
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George was born in 1955 in Phoenix, Arizona. Barry Goldwater was an elected member of the city council at the time. In accordance with changes to the state constitution consonant with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Phoenix schools were desegregated the year he was born.
He remembered nothing substantive from those years. But he had a vague memory of going to a preschool or a daycare for a short time. He never went to public school there, he was too young before his family moved, but he didn’t think the schools were any good. He had four older siblings in the Phoenix public schools, and he knew for a fact that none of them could read well.
“None of my brothers can’t read,” he said. “My sister… vaguely. My father, he can read, he does maintenance work, and his hobby is customizing cars. My mother, she can read, she work for Thrifties. They, you know, lived together, you know what I’m saying? You know, they live together today. I never got any confusion from my mother or my father.”
George recalled an experience during his primary grades with significance in the timeline of his personal history as he recounted it to me. I chalked it up as evidence for Fred’s argument about educational trauma. Fred believed reducing recidivism meant reducing educational trauma.
“Sometimes my first grade teacher had me read to the class,” he said. “I remember one time I pushed a boy down, ok, and he hurt his back, and I got suspended for that. I pushed him down because he was laughing at me because I couldn’t read good. I got a whuppin for that from my mother and my father. That’s the only time I ever got a whuppin from them.”
He remembered getting whuppins in school during first grade—“whuppins… or swattins. I don’t know why. I guess I just wanted attention. Then after they found out I wasn’t progressing, they put me in a special trainin’ class. I remember when I was in the second grade, I used to have to go somewhere with my mother to a place where a man used to try to teach me to read.”
George remembered few specific details between grade school and high school. “I wasn’t in no special class in junior high,” he said. “I don’t know how I passed. I just passed. We took tests, and I was making F’s, but they passed me anyway.”
At some point he ducked out of school and returned when he was 15. “That’s when they, see, I was going to the regular classrooms until they found out I wasn’t doin’ nothin’ and, you know, they put me through another test and they put me back in the special trainin’ class. That went on ‘til I just quit.”
George completed his junior year of high school. “After that summer, I never went back to the twelfth grade. I don’t know how I made it that far. They was just, I don’t know, they was just putting me in grades. I wasn’t doing nothing. I seed I wasn’t goin’ no where in it, and plus I had a wife, not a wife but a girlfriend. She was pregnant and I wanted to support the baby so I quit.”
In September, 1983, he reported to the reception center at Chino to be assessed for placement. Before the trouble George had found productive work. He poked around at odd jobs for a time until Laureen, a woman married to his friend, took him to the city’s personnel office and filled out an application for him.
“She work for the city,” he said. “And I got a job trimmin’ trees for the city, tree trimmin’ trees, ok, I had to drive my own truck around, right, but I couldn’t go no where. I couldn’t—I didn’t know the streets. I could be right there at the street and even if I see the sign I still wouldn’t know. You see what I’m saying? I was lost.”
George lost his job trimming trees, but he stumbled onto a government funded program for Blacks to learn to weld. “It was for Blacks. It was a special…aw, I forget what they called it. They don’t have it no more. They pay you to go to school. I went through all the trainin’ but I couldn’t pass the test because I couldn’t read it.”
George felt that if he’d gotten a welder’s license he might have bypassed prison. “If I had gotten my license, I probably would have been a lot happier. But I didn’t pass. I just went and found a job where they just accepted you the way you was. It was just a job weldin’ pipes and stuff on cars. It lasted about six months ‘til the guy had to close his shop.”
George had fathered eight children that he knew of. He didn’t know anything about them.
His reception at Chino ended with his initial placement at Folsom, one of two California prisons reserved for murderers, where he stayed for a year. For reasons unclear to me, he was transferred to Vacaville where he spent a few spans of time in the hole in W-Wing by the time I met with him.
“I know… I thought about everything,” he told me near the end of our talk. “I’m in this prison because I don’t know how to read. The first thing… I didn’t want nobody else to know about it, right? Anywhere. Ok. I tried to hide that, and it’s hard to hide, and it caused me to start drinkin’ to hide it, to hide the truth—from myself. I was drivin’ myself. And, uh…
“I just started getting violent. But I been a violent person all my life. Drinkin’ just makes it worse. I’m an alcoholic. Goes back to school, goes back to drunk drivin’, goes back to a whole lot of stuff. Goes back to hurtin’ my best friend—that’s why I’m in here. Goes back to hurtin’ another guy in here, and that’s why I’m in here [in the hole].”
George Washington argued that almost all of the inmates he knew couldn’t read or write. He also argued that life on the street was hard without literacy.
“I can’t read the help wanted ads,” he said. “I can’t do a job application. I had to cheat to get a driver’s license, send in somebody to take the test and then switch to take the picture. I couldn’t even have a bank book. I go into a bank with a lot of money, I hand it to a guy and trust him? I’m not gonna do that. When you can’t read, there’s a lot of things you have to trust. And I don’t trust people.”
George had words of advice for other inmates. “If you don’t learn to read, then it’s as simple as that, half of ‘em at least is coming back—for robbery, for burglary, sellin’ weed, whatever. If you can’t read and write and make it out on the streets you gonna do wrong. You gonna go out there and sell cocaine and sell some, uh, and make them women sell they pussies you see what I’m sayin’—you gonna do something. I ain’t gonna go out there and starve.”
Over the years I’ve returned to the transcript of George’s interview several times trying to understand. I’d love to have the tape, but I was on a mission and did other interviews like this one. I reused the tapes after transcribing them.
Why did I set out on this quest to interview him and all the others? What did I hope to learn? Why did I struggle to get through the red tape that existed to keep George down in a hole? Why did I spend a whole day transcribing his tape on my typewriter? Why have I kept it in deep storage in my garage all these 42 years? ‘I got a tree trimmin’ job for the city, trimmin’ trees,’ has played in my mind like a line from a Bob Dylan song.
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For George, school was a weigh station on the highway to prison, all but guaranteeing predefined outcomes from predictable inputs. Resources get to students already positioned to have, not to students destined to have not, white, black, or brown. Cultural materials such as high language and literacy practices are rationed.
School could be a place for emancipation and full participation in our democracy. The mission could be to lay the foundation for self-actualization, critical thinking, and ethical reasoning for all—no child left behind—and to change the trajectory for the undereducated whom President-elect Trump loves so dearly.
Elizabeth Hinton, a professor of history and law at Yale, published America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s (2021), concluded her book with two dire facts. “The federal government spent about $2.7 billion on employment programs for low-income youth in 2020, while investing… $6.1 billion on grants and assistance to law enforcement” (p. 307). Then she pointed to the shrinking funding for Head Start, “the most visible remnant of the War on Poverty and a program that helps poorest children prepare for school” (p. 307)