Oprah’s New Book Club Pick Is “That Bird Has My Wings,” by Jarvis Jay Masters
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Oprah just announced that her new Oprah’s Book Club pick is That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row, by Jarvis Jay Masters (Harper One). Masters has been incarcerated in California’s San Quentin State Prison for the past 41 years.
Oprah read the book shortly after it was first published by HarperOne, in 2009, and it left a strong impression: “Years ago, I was given a memoir by Jarvis Jay Masters,” said Oprah. “His story, of a young boy victimized by addiction, poverty, violence, the foster care system, and later the justice system, profoundly touched me then, and still does today.”
HarperOne has reissued the book, which contains a foreword by spiritual teacher Pema Chödrön, who has long championed Masters’s cause.
Masters had this to say about the selection of his book for Oprah’s Book Club:
“I turned 60 this year, having entered San Quentin at age 19. I wrote That Bird Has My Wings while in solitary confinement, isolated and alone,” he says. “My greatest hope at that time was that a few young people would read my story and learn from my mistakes. Thanks to Ms. Winfrey and her book club, my story will be introduced to a national audience. It is my greatest hope still is that lives will be the better for it, and I am forever grateful for the honor and the opportunity that Oprah has afforded me.”
Masters, who is also author of Finding Freedom, was first convicted of armed robbery in 1981 at age 19, crimes he freely admits to. Four years later, prison guard Howell Burchfield was stabbed to death while on night duty at San Quentin. Though Masters was locked in his cell at the time, he was among those convicted of his murder, and he was sentenced to die by lethal injection. He has been on death row ever since, and now awaits word on whether he will be granted a new trial. He has long maintained his innocence, and that claim is supported by others, and by evidence.
But the most remarkable aspect of Masters’s story is how he came to transcend his horrific childhood, which reads like something out of a Dickens tale, as well as incarceration, often served in solitary, to become a devoted Buddhist, a poet, and a memoirist. He still fears how he will die, if his appeal doesn’t go forward, but, he says, he has a “clear conscience” knowing he is innocent of the death of the prison guard. In the preface to his autobiography, Masters writes this:
“In spite of the pain and hurt, and however much I engaged in crazed violence and lashed out at the world for thinking it owed me something, in the center, in my heart, there was always something of a natural goodness. This may have been the place from which my tears poured when I was a young child. In that same place, the violence later grew so much larger than life that I stopped believing in myself. But I finally came into a situation where I dared myself to reclaim that natural goodness. That I reclaimed it on San Quentin’s death row doesn’t change who I am. I have experienced an inner journey that brought me to the life-affirming realization that my violent actions were never a reflection of who I really am.”
Over the next weeks, Oprah will be discussing the book with Oprah’s Book Club followers on the OBC social platforms, culminating with a one-on-one interview with Jarvis Jay Masters from San Quentin. Oprah Daily will be publishing additional content throughout the reading cycle, including an excerpt from That Bird Has My Wings and an original poem by Masters. #ReadWithUS.
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