Part I: Daddy, I like eating at the joint
by Larry Greco Harris

If you were to judge director Deborah Tobola by appearances, a relatively petite white woman with a low-volume voice sitting in the command seat of a circle of grown men, ex-offenders of multiple races, some with backgrounds from gang-ridden inner cities, you might be tempted to judge her as unqualified for such a leadership position. And you would be wrong.

Let’s scratch a little below the surface and examine some of the earliest seeds planted and events experienced that aimed Deborah toward her current leadership role as founder and artistic director of San Luis Obispo County’s Poetic Justice Project.

As a toddler, Deborah was already in prison with her father. A decorated Korean War Marine veteran, Charles “Chuck” Tobola took a job at the California Men’s Colony while attending Cal Poly on the G.I. bill. He was assigned to the prison’s new West Facility. At the time, prison staff could bring their families to CMC’s cafeteria for good, cheap food. When I was three years old, that’s where I had my first meal out, Deborah says. And I said, Daddy, I like eating at the joint!

Thus began little Deborah’s unlikely road that led her to a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and ultimately back to the same prison she’d visited with her father. Along the way, she developed the leadership skills necessary for contributing to the lives of grown men inside (and now one step outside) the gates of the California state prison system.
Part II: A Father’s Impact

The impact of a father’s absence on a son is one of the primary themes embedded in the musical play, Blue Train, sponsored by the Poetic Justice Project of San Luis Obispo. Deborah Tobola, though obviously never a son, is nevertheless qualified to participate in and even lead this father conversation, not because she had an absent father, but because she had one who was present.

Besides introducing Deborah to the prison environment where he was employed, Charles Tobola served as a task-master, coach and mentor who refused to psychologically box his daughter into some traditional 1950’s role of the little-woman-behind-the-man. He saw her as an intelligent individual in her own right, and he expected her to live up to the innate abilities he obviously saw within her.

I was my father’s eldest daughter. We had a close relationship. We would talk about politics and religion and literature. During these conversations he’d suddenly stop me and say, Don’t express your miserable opinion until you’ve read Sinclair Lewis . . . or Hemingway . . . or Dorothy Parker . . . or e.e. cummings. It was a wonderful mentorship, and I don’t know what I would have done without that in my life.

One can never be certain where we get our personality traits nurture? nature? but Deborah’s father wasn’t going to sit on the sideline and hope for the best. He was raising a thinker, a doer, and as it turned out, a leader. It’s amazing to think how powerful the actions of an adult can be on a kid.

I remember when I was in eighth grade, he was on a business trip to San Francisco. Now, in our family my mom did all the buying of Christmas and birthday presents. But when he came back from that trip, he had a present especially for me. It was a Hermes Rocket portable typewriter. And I just can’t tell you how much that did for me. It was an affirmation from my dad that said Yes, you can be that writer that you want to be.

Along with nurturing her intellectual appetite, Charles Tobola passed along his keen sense of social justice, encouraging his daughter to fight the good fight. “He also taught me not to give up,” Deborah says. “Whoever said it would be easy? Whoever said it would be fair? was his mantra. I took it to heart. I call it persistence.”

After her original introduction to prison as a child, Deborah’s family would travel extensively. She would not re-enter the walls of a prison again until 40 years later. After working as a journalist, she returned to school and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. Around the time she returned to California, the state was spending less on universities and more on prisons. In addition to occasional college English courses, she taught creative writing in the California Correction Institution in Tehachapi and North Kern State Prison in Delano.

In 2000, she took the position of Institution Artist/Facilitator in the Arts in Corrections program at the California Men’s Colony, to the site of her first lunch date with her dad. Charles Tobola died years before his daughter began her life-changing work in the prison. But as far as the evolution of her vision, her mission, her leadership skills and her creation of this emerging Poetic Justice Project, Deborah, along with her entire family agree: Dad would have just loved this!

From Barnacle to Bird

Part I: Following His Own Lead

by Larry Greco HarrDuring the first 12 years of his prison incarceration Guillermo Willie was as indistinguishable from the hardened world he lived in as is a barnacle from its rock.

No one could have guessed then, not even Guillermo himself, that inside his prisoner-hardness pulsed something softer that in time would lift him up, light as a feather, off the rock and over the prison walls to freedom. But the transformation would take nearly a lifetime.

It was supposed to be a one-year sentence; it just stretched out to 38, Guillermo says matter-of-factly, sitting on a log in the woods, his eyes serene, searching a spot in the air above his head where the memory seems to float. As Guillermo speaks, he allows his words to arrive slowly, deliberately, the way an artist working in oils might mimic the movement of water with fluid but measured sweeps of a brush. As a child of loving parents in the Riverside area of Southern California, there were no red flags that said, Watch out, this kid is headed for prison.

Prior to the time I started getting loaded, smoking pot, when I was 18, I would go to church with Mom and Dad. I would go on Sunday morning, Sunday night, Tuesday night, Thursday night. I would go to school and never dated. Mom and Dad didn’t allow that.

Dad came from Mexico, and he worked himself from being a janitor to retiring as a draftsman. He learned English. He learned drafting. He had these aspirations for me and for my two other brothers. His daughters were supposed to be housewives, but his sons were going to be a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist.

They didn’t want us to be like him and work as a janitor. So we’d live in one neighborhood and when we were better off, we would move to a so-called better neighborhood. We would go from one house to another one, to another one, to another one.

During those years I learned to make Mom and Dad happy. And what made them happy made me happy. I thought to myself, Mom and Dad are teaching what’s best for me. I never questioned, What do I want? What about Willie? What about this character inside who might need something? That was never a question.

I never wondered about anything like this until I smoked pot. I don’t mean that pot opened my mind. I just liked it. I had this fascination with it. Here I was living this family life, and then it was the late 60s, and you’d hear about it. There were pictures in the newspaper of the officer in Berkeley smoking a marijuana cigarette on the courthouse steps. You’d hear about acid. And I started to wonder. It’s not like someone pulled me there. There was just something inside of me that made me curious.

One day there was a guy who gave me a ride to school, and I heard him telling somebody else that another guy had come into his gas station and offered him a joint, but he didn’t take it. And I told him, Hey, the next time he offers you one, take it and give it to me. The guy said Why? Are you interested? And I said, Yes I am!

Thus, with no more than his own curiosity to herald it, with no one to blame or congratulate but himself, and breaking his parents hearts, Guillermo followed his own lead, took an about-turn, and built a wall around his life.

Part II: Bricking the Walls of His Own Prison

The first walls around Sing-Sing, one of the oldest prisons in America, were originally constructed out of stones from a nearby quarry. Those stones were cut, carried and hefted sturdily into position by the very prisoners who were to be caged there. It could be argued that Guillermo Willie, beginning in the late 1960s, began adopting beliefs and making choices that one-by-one-by-one became the impenetrable building blocks in the high walls of his own thirty-eight year incarceration.

Guillermo sums up how he became a prisoner in two words: I jumped! He went from a young man who minded his parents, attended church and carried an armload of books to and from school every day into a full blown, drug involved drop-out in the space of a few months.

Once I got arrested for drugs the first time, after that I would get arrested, arrested, arrested I don’t know, 15, 20, 30 times. And it was all drug-related or under the influence stuff. But I didn’t care. It became fun.

It also became Guillermo’s routine. He’d get arrested, get put in county jail, get out, go back to doing the same things, sleep at other people’s houses and then get arrested again.

If I couldn’t live anywhere else when I got out, I’d go home. Mom and Dad always accepted me. I’d stay there, but I wasn’t a very good brother to my brothers and my sisters, I wasn’t a good son to Mom and Dad but I didn’t care. I was going to live my own life, and that’s all there was to it.

Guillermo started smoking pot, which opened for him a world of other drugs. And as usual, he didn’t just tippy-toe into the experience he jumped, immersing himself. I actually shot reds (barbiturates) before I even took one as a pill.

“I started running around with this ex-motorcycle club guy. He was older. He worked in a gas station along my walk to school. He was into drugs, and he got me totally into them. But I was game. It was me who asked him one day if he had any pot, and he said to come on by later. And I did.

Guillermo could not see it at the time, but each of these decisions, made one-by-one so clearly and forcefully, were actually quarried bricks that he was using to build the walls between him and his own freedom. Outside observers, reasonable people, might be incredulous about such behavior, asking: How could someone do that to himself?

It is true that many people make bad choices in their young lives, but most often they learn from them and gradually change their trajectory. They will unwisely pick up some of those bad-choice bricks, but eventually one will drop on their toe or hit them in the head, and they wake up to adjust their behavior. So why didn’t Guillermo adjust? Why such determination and consistency in making bad choices? How could anyone turn a bad-enough one-year drug sentence into more than one-third of an entire century in prison?

The answer, according to Guillermo, might lie not so much in those bricks chosen, but more in themortar that he used to bind those bricks into the rock walls that became the backdrop for the tough barnacle he was becoming. And what exactly was this mortar he used to bind these bricks? quite likely it was the beliefs Guillermo held in his mind.

by Larry Greco Harr

Leonard Flippen, like all convicts, was assigned a prison number that will follow him and follow his name for the rest of his life. However, quite another number with an entirely different purpose was bestowed upon Leonard long before his involvement in a long string of gang and drug related crimes. It was the number 4, written. Leonard David Flippen IV was born on June 3rd, 1961.

I’m a military brat, Leonard says in the crisp, forceful and articulate language that usually accompanies a position of authority, I was extremely lucky in that area. I lived a very sheltered life up until the age of eleven. My family traveled, so I was exposed to other cultures, and I learned to adapt to them very well.

When Leonard speaks of his military father, he speaks of a man who would probably have raised his only son with an iron authority inside a framework of tradition.

My father was a strict disciplinarian. He was mean. Now deep down inside he was a good person, but on the outside he was a terrifying individual. I think that’s where a lot of my authoritarian stuff comes from.

It is unclear what path a young African American boy being raised in a multicultural environment overseas in a two-parent family might choose. But one would assume that his first career choice would not be drug-running pimp.

My parents divorced when we were in Germany. My mother left, and she moved my three sisters and me to Atlanta, Georgia she moved us to the projects of Atlanta, Georgia. So here’s this eleven year old kid with this cultured life who suddenly finds himself in the hood inside a house full of women with no father.

As was his skill, Leonard adapted to his new environment. But without a dad, and with the dominant male figures in the Atlanta Projects engaged in the business of big city poverty, Leonard very quickly turned to a life of crime.

That’s when my criminal tendencies started. I can remember aspiring to be a pimp. I was going to be that pimp, and I was going to be a hustler. That’s what the men there did, and that’s what I was going to do.

So with the bravado of focused intention that Leonard still displays today, that is exactly what he did at least until his mother, fearing for his life, sent him to live in sunny California. At her request, Leonard packed up his name with its now hollow number (hollow because it no longer spoke of bloodlines or traditions or paternal guidance), and he moved himself to California.

There, ready to be a man but with no model of fatherhood to guide him, Leonard David Flippen IV would instead be scooped up by a brotherhood of Crips, crime and crack cocaine.

….this true story to be continued….

Part I: The Landscape of the Body

by Larry Greco Harris

Take any man who has lived past the age of 30. Strip him naked in the dark. Then with a small, intense flashlight, take a photographic journey up, down and across every square inch of the structure and skin of that man’s body. Hover over each aberration in that landscape, each added mark, each discoloration, distortion, wrinkle and tattoo. These are the doors that, when opened, tell the tale of a man’s life.

If the man is an ex-convict, a felon, there is some likelihood that he will point to a tattoo as the most significant of those markings. If not that, he may lift to the light some battle wound as a badge earned in a hard life where enemies were met and threats were addressed. Such markings, though meaningful, are not unusual.

What is unusual is one vicious little scar sunk into the body of William Lamar Brown a mark inflicted not by an enemy, and not by himself. For William, it is a deep wound that tells a story of a deep regret and also of love.

It all starts with William Brown being a great speller and ends with a vicious bite.

At a young age I was what you would call bright. I’d win spelling bee championships a lot. And if I didn’t win (usually because I would get too cocky), it would crush me.

William probably felt crushed when he didn’t win because he cared a lot about what his family expected from him. Though he knows they were supporting his efforts, he sometimes felt the pressure of their expectations.

My family was really on me to do well in school because they saw my potential. My mom had four kids. They were all succeeding in school, but with B’s and C’s. Only one sister and I were bringing in A’s. There wasn’t any difference in her love for any of us, but she would hold up my report card to them and say, “You see William’s A’s? That’s what I want you all to bring in.”

Far from being jealous, everyone in William’s family would cheer him on with statements like: Look at you, William, straight A’s again! A’s in seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade! Come on, William, you’re doing it! Just three more grades to go! The expectations they were putting on me made me worry that I couldn’t live up to them. It was a lot of pressure.

For a kid growing up in a gang-ridden section of Los Angeles, Straight-A William sure seemed to be the one boy who was on the right track to a successful life. But it didn’t turn out that way. Maybe it was that pressure of family expectations, maybe it was his youthful lack of defenses against the seductions of gang life, maybe it was just a teenager’s need for a manly quest.

Whatever the reason, by the time William enter tenth grade, the school books began to sit unopened in the corner of the room. In their place appeared the converse sneakers, the jackets, beanies and handkerchiefs of a gangbanging street kid. And it was also at this time that Kimberly Brown, William’s sister, sunk her teeth into William’s body and would not let go.

. . . this true story to be continued . . .