"THE WORLD WAS NOW OPEN TO HIM"

Albert Woodfox writes about his prison experience.

Take note of the last sentence

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My proudest achievement in all my years in solitary was teaching a man how to read. His name was Charles. We called him Goldy because his mouth was full of gold teeth. He was a few cells down from me on D tier. I could tell he couldn’t read but was trying to hide it. I knew the signs because my mom did the same things to hide the fact she couldn’t read. One day I told him about my mom, about her accomplishments. I told him she couldn’t read or write and asked him if he could. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” I said. He told me he never learned to read because he didn’t go to school. “When I was coming up we didn’t have nothing,” he said. “We had to go and get it.”

“If you want to learn,” I told him, “I can teach you, but it won’t work unless you really want to learn.” He told me he wanted to learn. We used a dictionary. I stood in front of his cell on my hour out and he came to my cell on his hour and we would go through how to read words using the sound key at the bottom of every page. The upside-down e, I told him, sounds like “eh,” and I went through all those symbols and sounds with him on each word. In between our two hours a day I told him to call me if he needed help. “Anytime you can’t get a word, holler, Goldy, no matter what time. Day or night if you have a question, just ask me.” In the following months he took me up on that.

“Fox!” he’d yell, at all hours of the night.

“What?” I answered.

“I can’t say this one,” he yelled.

“Spell it out,” I called back to him.

He called out the letters.

“Look at the key at the bottom of the page,” I yelled back. “What do you think it is?” And we went back and forth like that until he got it. Sometime later I’d hear, “Hey, Fox!”

“Yeah, Goldy. What?” I’d say.

“What’s this one?” he’d say.

The first time I heard Goldy read a sentence out of a book I told him how proud I was of all he’d learned. He thanked me and I told him to thank himself. “Ninety-nine percent of your success was because you really wanted to read,” I said. Within a year he was reading at a high school level.

THE WORLD WAS NOW OPEN TO HIM

Solitary by Albert Woodfox