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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: October 25, 2004
Latest Update: October 25, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
A Very Personal Sharing of Rudy Alexander, Jr.'s AutobiographyRudolph Alexander's Autobiolgraphy, To Ascend into the Shining World Again. TheroE Enterprises, P.O. Box 266, Weseterville, OH 43086 .© 2001.Rudolph Alexander wrote the book on legal policy and practice relating to social work, the one that I chose for us to use this semester in both law and agencies. He wrote to me to ask if I'd be interested in his other book, an autobiography.Things were happening so fast in the last couple of weeks that I didn't find the time to explain to him how we had had to change plans in midstream to accomodate an enormous increase in students and a much heavier praxis focus. I just said that yes, I was interested, and in the next couple of days his book arrived.
I was miserable that week. Kept having headaches and chills and glaring at Sawsan and Miko when they coughed, even though they assured me it wasn't the flu. Dismayed at the stories piling up in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times that demanded that I put them up for discussioon, and fussing at all the technical delays, I took his book to bed with me. It would be a change, I promised myself, from the elections.
Wow! as Talking Cat sometimes says.There was no table of contents, no footnotes, no index. Chapters, but no chapter titles. Now that's not fair. I depend on those things to speed through a book. We call them advance organizers after David Ausubel. Wow! indeed.
"My younger sister, Cora Lee, screamed as I walked into the living room holding a bloody towel over my left eye. There seemed to be a mass of bodies in my living room. Besides my 15-year-old rother, Willie Lee, and my 10-year-old brother Sylvester, all my sisters were there---my oldest sister Mildred, who was 19, Betty, who was 13, and Cora Lee, who was 12. They, along with momma, were all in the living room watching television. I had not noticed that some of the guys that I worked with had followed me into the living room. Boot was behind me. Other co-workers came too."What happened to you?" my momma asked nervously.
"A guy at work cut me," I responded.
"Wake up Alexander," my momma said. This was the name she called my daddy. A feew years ago, she told me that bshe didn't' like the name Rudolph, suggesting that daddy had named mme and decided when I was born that I would be Rudolph Alexander, Jr."
So there I was with no ritual or warning plopped right in the middle of a whole batch of people whose names and ages mattered to Rudolph Alexander, Jr. OK. I know how to handle this. The cover's got to clue me in. But the back cover is just one huge paragraph, with little negative space for margins. My eyes crossed. On a better night I might have noticed the last few sentences of that vortex of words:
"To Ascend Into the Shining World Again was taken from Dante's Inferno, mirroring Dante's descent into hell and reemergence. Unabridged and coarse, it reflects two books--the story of a juvenile with no criminal history who was illegally thrown into the criminal justice system and the story of his atypical rebound. This book depicts virulent judicial racism, protected legal malpractice, and blatant injustice."I read 50 pages into the book without reaching for a pencil, which most of you will recognize as unusual. I don't know so much about the Dante's inferno part. I was sucked in by the never-ending crises, challenges, assumptions of normality in what was for me a nowhere near normal world. "Where," I kept asking myself, "is this going?" By page 51 I was writing notes for you. It wasn't going anywhere. It was there. In another world. A world in which the presence of a black man could justify reasonable fear on the part of a white man to justify his killing the black man, for no other reason than his unsubstantiated fear.
"I read a story in the newspaper that caught my eye. A white man who managed a downtown motel shot and killed a Negro after a heated argument. The lawyer for the white man claimed that his client killed the man out of a fear of a reasonable man, and therefore, this was justifiable homicide. According to the testimony of the motel manager, the Negro was almost foaming at the mouth and this made him fearful for his life. The lawyer, attempting to discount that racial prejudice on the part of the manager set off the Negro, introduced evidence that the manager permitted an integrated football team from out of town to stay at his motel. Although the Negro was unarmed, the jury acquitted the white man based on fear of a reasonable man.
I suspected that fear of a reasonable man would be my defense when I went to trial because it is what lawyers cite whenever thay plead someone not guilty because fo self-defense." At p. 51.
Some of you are going to think this sounds fantastic. But Rudolph Alexander, Jr. lived just outside Savannah, Georgia. This was the South I had known, if cautiously.
" . . . my paents went to a root doctor on my behalf. The root doctor stated that 1967 was a bad year for me because someone was working roots on me. According to the root doctor, I had been hurt and hospitalized in January, hurt again in August, and in jail now for murder because someone in Savannah had 'fixed' me. The root doctor sold my parents an anecdote that was supposed to take the hex off me and to help me walk away a free person when I went to court. "If I had known my parents were gonna see a root doctor, I would have tried to stop them because I did not believe in that nonsense. But I knew they, being born and raised in the courntry, believed in it. Momma was convinced that soneone had her father 'fixed' by putting something in his liquor. Momma had someone to take her to the root doctor's house to purchase some special water that was supposed to cure him. It did not cure him or make him better."Hey, we called it voodoo in New Orleans, and, yes, I knew people who really practiced it.
I have a lot more to say about all this. But this has to be it for tonight. If this book intrigues you as much as it does me, I'd like to continue with my reactions to it. For those of you who have never crossed the threshold into such a world, this book is strong and holding to its own vision. It's a tiny part of my world into which I haven't peered for many, many years. jeanne
