I AM MAROON

A prisoner testifies.

Award-winning journalist D’Almeida met Russell Shoatz (1943-2021) in 2013 at a state penitentiary in Pennsylvania, where he was an inmate. The purpose of her visit: to audition to be his biographer, to turn his disorganized 280-page memoir into a salable book, and, his supporters hoped, to free him from decades in solitary confinement. They worked together for nine years, and she completed the manuscript shortly before his death. The result is a brisk first-person narrative that reveals a life steeped in violence. Suffering what he called “quiet neglect” as a child, Shoatz hated school, where teachers bullied and demeaned him. Gang culture became his world, and by the time he was a teenager, he was “like someone trapped inside a revolving door,” repeatedly in and out of prison, “each time a little more hardened than before.” Energized by seeing Malcolm X at a Nation of Islam rally in 1963, he became a political activist, first joining the Black Unity Council in Philadelphia and soon the Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army. Militant, with arsenals of weapons, he was intent on “dismantling a system of white oppression and winning freedom for Black people in America.” Involvement in a raid, however, changed his life forever. Accused of killing a Philadelphia park guard, he was captured after two years underground and sentenced to life imprisonment. Two daring escapes from prison earned him the nickname Maroon, an epithet for a runaway slave, of which he was proud. Describing himself as “a politically motivated individual, who had been officially affiliated with a group that had declared itself at war with the US government,” Maroon continued bearing witness to injustice and racism in his writings from prison. Tense, fast-paced chapters ably capture his fire and anger.

A raw, unvarnished memoir.