Oprah’s Book Club Author Jarvis Jay Masters on How Writing Has Given Him Freedom and Power
I remember that hot summer day, when I sat under the dim fluorescent light in my 9x4 cell, and wrote a draft of what would become my first published story, “Scars.”
I had to muster up the inner courage to write that essay, because it was about being out on the condemned exercise yard in San Quentin’s isolation confinement unit and seeing the knotted burns and snakelike whip marks on the bare backs and arms of the men lifting weights.
In prison, nobody talked about their scars. Our scars were our own personal and private remnants and reminders of years and years of childhood abuse, often perpetrated by those the State had appointed to protect and care for us.
Nobody wrote about the painful backstories that gave rise to the scars, either, which is why it had taken more than a bit of convincing for me to try to submit my account for publication. In my mind’s eye, sharing our collective secrets was equivalent to sentencing myself to death all over again. But I later found the opposite was true. Writing “Scars” gave me a life. My story spoke for all of us on the yard, and for those of us outside it who have endured similar struggles.
Years after I published “Scars” in 1991 in Wingspan magazine, a friend said, “Man, trip off this, I kind of always knew about this abuse thing, because I was doing it to my own kids. Maybe even worse. The daddy I had was the same daddy my kids had. After your article got published, I mailed it to my sons, and then we were able to talk about our scars together.”
Putting the truth on paper made me realize that as powerless as I'd felt, I had a voice, that I had the ability to effect the kind of openness my friend experienced with his sons. When own what happened to us—when we own our suffering—it becomes ours to keep and to learn to come to terms with. And, more than that, writing revived something in me: for the first time in forever I felt yes, I, Jarvis Masters, matter.
It was at the start of my writing journey, along with my spiritual practice, that gave me both the space and the guardrails to find my power. While I might be confined physically to this shoebox-cell, I can own my voice and raise it not in anger or rage, but to be of benefit to others, especially to those troubled teens who are on that dangerous pipeline from the cradle to prison, the odyssey I was on that landed me in San Quentin.
Of all that I've lost in my years behind bars writing and the power it affords is something no one can take from me. Along with meditation, through writing I've discovered an awakening sense of freedom, a life. And I know that even after I'm gone, my words will survive.
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