BOOK REVIEW: The Last, Lost Samurai
I Am Maroon: The True Story of an American Political Prisoner.
Russell “Maroon” Shoatz with Kanya D’Almeida.
New York: Bold Type Books, 372 pp. $32.50.
Reviewed by Todd Steven Burroughs
Russell “Maroon” Shoatz (1943-2021), perhaps the epitome of the Black American thug-turned-true-believer revolutionary, had great reason to believe his story belonged to Hollywood. Freed from prison only on his near deathbed, he thrived in a 20th-century survival-of-the-fittest world where, on the run after breaking out of prison the first time, he once killed and ate a turtle raw to survive and his comrades kept bullets inside candy pieces for the second time. His tale does seem like a combo of World War II prison break books, not surprisingly a favorite genre of his, and Oceans 11. But take the exciting bits out, and this autobiography is actually about isolation. He spends much of his prison tenure there, and he fights for his decolonized worldview in an atmosphere in which those ideas get increasingly isolated as the soldier grows old.
This book—Shoatz’s second, but this time co-written from Shoatz’s original narrative with great beauty and care by journalist and award-winning fiction writer Kanya D’Almeida—puts in a posthumous blender the autobiographies of still-fighting Angela Davis and Frank Wilderson III, the latter a member of the African National Congress’ paramilitary unit. Liberally added are the ideas of Black Power ancestors George Jackson, the imprisoned revolutionary theorist, and novelist Sam Greenlee, whose satire The Spook Who Sat By The Door historically rhymes with this song. (It’s easy to forget watching the 1973 film version of Spook that Greenlee was pulling from very current events. The film feels much less satirical after absorbing this tale.) Shoatz’s path swaps the terms and tools of a West Philly’s young thug’s life—Old Head, gang code, Corner Boys, Whackers, The Moon Gang, balled fists, bats, guns—for a middle-aged revolutionary’s tools: prison breaks; Honor Blocks, guns, prison code, safe houses, survival jackets. “This was the war of the flea,” he explains. “Our goal was to drive the dog of empire to madness with our incessant, invisible presence. Soon it wouldn’t even know where we were biting, it would just burn all over with itching.”
To understand Shoatz—a street soldier who lived in “a time before fear,” who attempted four times to bust out of the joint, succeeding twice before being re-captured—it’s important to remember that many young future Civil Rights Movement activists were electrified by a 1956 Jet magazine photo of the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till. But what moves Shoatz, falling deeper and deeper into the Zeitgeist, is the photo of Jonathan Jackson, killed in 1970 while attempting to take hostages to bargain for the freedom of his brother George. “Before I could even pick up the paper to read the whole story, I began to cry….seeing him as a martyr was a new sensation.” Shoatz was driven by such energies his whole life, and neither age nor Islam changed that.
As a revolutionary who sees himself as a guerilla, Shoatz constantly seems to be walking through shattered glass of one type or another. Although it would be wrong to say he is comfortable doing so, war does seem to fit him like the combat fatigues he proudly wears in his mind. Shoatz is so honest about his views, struggles and mistakes (particularly his many with women), he seems to advocate becoming the anti-hero of his own story. But along the way, what makes him fascinating is that he keeps explaining how he did his clandestine work—how to make tools when you have none, how to use resources and connections to get (briefly) free, and, particularly and especially, how easy it is to deal with people who were used to herding large amounts of Black, docile sheep. The idea that a Black man could think like a military master and survivalist was still new to those who purposely forgot Nat Turner. Convicted in 1972 of the murder of Philadelphia Police Sergeant Frank Von Colln, Shoatz gets transferred repeatedly while undergoing decades of every torture that the white and male police, FBI agents and prison authorities can think of, in between prison rebellions and political education sessions small and large. And when he does get free twice, snafus must snafu, and so, hours or days later, he is back in his never-accepting state of being surrounded.
Shoatz is in the company of many Black radicals in one important aspect: he claims the tradition first and learns about it as he goes along. That leaves him as vulnerable as his antecedents and almost always dooms the thinker-doer into being snagged by the Dollar Eagle’s large and brutal mousetrap. A historical problem with (young) 20th-century revolutionaries is that—at least portrayed in their own literature and the larger popular culture—they sometimes seem to think of themselves as smarter and more committed than the organized, militarized oppressor. Again and again, revolutionary forces find out that the reactionary forces are not the live-action equivalent of a Bugs Bunny adversary. When Bugs asides to the theater-and-then-later-home-television audience, “Of course, you realize this means war,” a move done many times by many radicals in real life, particularly in 20th-century America, all in power believe that non-looney tune they hear and see and cease laughing.
As America continues its long wait for its radicals to die off, there are unpopular realities to confront in the flickering world of the remaining Black (and Native American) political prisoners and their aging supporters. Shoatz’s particular movement, like many, did not seize enough time; hence, the compassionate release after showing “regret for being a participant in a cycle of violence and loss and pain,” according to Kempis “Ghani” Songster, a formerly incarcerated protégé of Shoatz’s, writing in the book’s Afterword. “It was a soul-stirring, tear-jerking plea to the people, not to the court.” That statement from a septuagenarian Shoatz, delivered through the late-life prism of advanced colon cancer and the demonstrated inability of the state of Pennsylvania to take care of him properly, worked.
It’s great to know that the Black radical autobiographical tradition continues as Black America prepares for the Kamala Harris era. There will never be enough product, and subsequent analysis of such, of those of African descent who, with weapons of all types in hand, took the most radical freedom dreams into the streets. But there be patterns with the dragons: like the first-issue, first-page, first-person narration of the lead character in Milestone Comics’ Hardware superhero comic, Shoatz slowly realizes he confused being out of a cage with freedom. His hospice death, less than two months after his release, is the very definition of pyrrhic victory, updated now with a martyred tome of ghost words. The failure that D’Almedia bravely admits to—to finish in front of age and illness, to miss the imagined Hollywood window—was and is part of a painful process, a harsh reality that soldier Shoatz had to admit, either inside and outside the wall: that both allies and enemies are capable of learning and improving in ways good and sinister.
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Todd Steven Burroughs, Ph.D., a writer and public historian based in Newark, N.J., is a biographer of who used to be known as Pennsylvania’s *other* Black political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal. He is the author of “The Invisible Shadow And The High-Top Fade: The Mortal Cells of America’s Political Prisoners, Freedom’s Untouchables,” a 2022 book-length essay.
