What life can be like while serving a life sentence

This Life is a fascinating novel for several reasons, starting with its publishing history. In the book’s Foreword, Zachary Lazar writes that he first met Quntos KunQuest in 2013 at Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison.

Lazar, a professor of English at Tulane University, had come to the prison as a journalist to cover the production of a play the inmates were performing. Quntos was part of the sound crew and wrote some of the play’s music. “He was a rapper, he said, but Angola disapproved of hip-hop, unlike country, gospel, and rock, so he had to find ways to work that didn’t draw much notice.”

Lazar mentioned to Quntos that he was trying to write a novel “about a man serving life at Angola.” Quntos, 20 years into his life sentence, said he’d written a novel like that himself. He said “he would send it to me and I could ‘steal’ from it anything I wanted.” Lazar wasn’t interested in stealing but was interested in read the manuscript—which was 348 pages hand printed in ballpoint pen with cursive for italics. It took at least one false start before the novel found a publisher in Agate.

This Life is a highbred: memoir, poetry, fiction, all written in an English that may take some getting used to. Here on page 1 is Lil Chris considering the correctional officers who are taking him to Angola: “If anything unusual happened, they wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot. That triptriggered sump’n he wa’n’t tryna think about, but he knew: this was his slow descent to the bottom of the barrel.”

The other major character is Rise who’s been inside for a while. Looking at the new arrivals, “within 30 minutes he’ll have assessed every one of them’s makeup. He’ll know who’s dangerous and who’s soft, who’s got sense and who can’t think, who’s playin’ games and who wants to be left alone. And, most importantly, which of these fools he’s willing to allow inside his zone.”

Lil Chris and Rise are both natural born rappers and This Life is studded with, and enriched by, rap poetry. At the climax of the story, they compete in a rap contest.

This could have been a simple memoir of what it’s like to be serving an extended sentence in Angola, which has provoked a number of books, notably Wilbert Rideau’s In the Place of Justice and Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking. Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, is the largest maximum-security prison in the U.S. Covering 18,000 square acres, Angola is larger than Manhattan. It currently houses about 6,000 prisoners. 

In a facility so large with working farms, manufacturing facilities, education center, an inmate-run radio station, TV station, and magazine, one individual prisoner’s daily life inside can be very different from another. Violence exists, but prison tends to be more peaceful than movies and television would have you believe. We watch Lil Chris being institutionalized before he is fit to live relatively peacefully in a dormitory with a job in the library rather than in a two-man cell or in the SHU—the segregated housing unit, what modern prisons call solitary.

In the course of This Life, we watch Lil Chris change from an angry young man into a rap artist who (we can hope) has a future within and perhaps beyond prison. He is guided in this change by Rise who has his own demons and history to live with, but who also has learned exactly how the system works. As one of the old ’victs tells Lil Chris:

“The prison system is a racket. When we go out and commit criminal acts and get caught, we fall into a well-planned net. A trap. From that point forward, it’s we, the offenders, who are usually victimized. They already know that a large percentage of us don’t know the law—let alone our rights. This problem is compounded by the fact that most of us can’t afford competent legal assistance. We’re given a court-appointed lawyer who not only doesn’t have adequate resources, but also can’t properly defend us even if they did have the resources. They’re being called to defend too many clients at one time.”

So not only is This Life an interesting story, a persuasive picture of prison life, a chapbook of rap poetry, it also offers a thought-provoking perspective on the criminal-justice complex. It reads so well, so persuasively one wonders what, if anything, a copy-editor did with the manuscript. Would you touch an exchange like this between Lil Chris and a female CO:

—“How you doin’ Sarge?”

—“Fine. What’s up with you?” she returns.

—I’m straight.” A little too emphatic. Damn! “I mean, I’m cool. Just another day in the joint.” He recovers. “So you chllin’ wit’ us tonight”

—"Yeah,” she smiles. “I’ll be here with you, tonight.”

—Did she just give him a little under-eyed glance? Boy, that’s cold. I know she just didn’t do me that, Lil Chris thinks.

This Life deserves to be read, to be read widely, to be read aloud, to be savored, and to be thought about.