Status Updates From Redemption: The Last Testam...

On June 25, 2006, Shirley Neal and I traveled to South Africa to fulfill his first request. His ashes were released in a lake at Thokoza Park, located in Soweto, South Africa.

During my last hours with Stan, he made two requests of me: he asked that I scatter his ashes in South Africa and that I continue his work to steer marginalized youth away from involvement with gangs, drugs, and incarceration.

People who claim racism is nonexistent here, or anywhere in the United States, are in denial, or they live above the poverty radar. Racism is not an excuse, it's an obstructive reality.

"Son," I told him, "just because we exist around madness does not mean we have to function like mad dogs."

I am not the violent genetic misfit incapable of change that the courts, society, media, law enforcement, and prison administration believe I am. None of these people really know me. They only know of me.

Peace and blessings to you, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. I'm grateful and proud to have met you.

Winnie responded hotly, in her lilting accented English, "The death penalty should be terminated across the board, wherever it exists!"

The more I read, the more I discovered the contradictions in myself and in the world I thought I knew.

I never knew Raymond's ambitions, but in our small world, ambitions were rare, and mostly fantasy.

My life's soundtrack was P-Funk, music that was notable for the funkadelic phase of musical madness, drugs, sex, and urban violence. Popular funk artists like Bootsy Collins, the Ohio Players, Rick James, The Bar-Kays, and the greatest of all funksters, Parliament, reigned supreme in South Central Los Angeles.

My path was a path of ignorance. I learned nothing, gained nothing, and had nothing of worth to offer anyone. I was trying to counsel teenagers not much younger than I was, in age, in mentality, or behavior. I was no more prepared to be a counselor than I was to be president of the United States.

It didn't matter that I was unreachable, unsalvageable, and unethical, there was still something inside me that wanted better for them than I had for myself.

Lying in the casket, with no expression, was my best friend, my partner in violence, my Crip enforcer, the deadliest of his kind, and there was nothing I could do about it. Our madness finally had a recognizable face, and it was the death of my closest homebody.

I started saving money to buy a car so I wouldn't have to steal one all the time.

Nevertheless, force and violence were a theme of our lives. The more we fought, the more we had to fight, a continuing escalation of violence.

We stood facing one another while his homeboy stood to the side, watching us. "Are you Tookie?" asked the fellow. I said, "Yes, I'm Tookie. Why?" I figured if they were here to fight, there was no need to be sociable.

I wanted to live a full life, but I was presented with a meaningless future with no dreams, no tangible hopes.