The Education of Jarvis Masters
A Buddhist Writer on Death Row
By Anna Smith
Jarvis Masters began spraying graffiti about the same time he learned to write his name, and not much more learning filled his childhood after that.
“I was a professional graffiti sprayer,” he jokes when asked about his early life. Recently a woman in Quebec, a stranger to Masters who’d read his book Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row, asked him by letter to serve as godfather to her child. She saw in him what so many see: compassion, strength, self-awareness. He attributes this transformation to his practice of Tibetan Buddhism.
Sent to San Quentin at age eighteen on forty counts of armed robbery and originally slated to serve a fifteen-year sentence, Masters actually began to acquire an education for the first time behind prison walls. His teachers, as he puts it in his memoir, were the “older statesmen of San Quentin,” with “gray hair and beards,” who drank “cold coffee like vintage wine, cigarettes hanging from their lips.”
Impressive to a young man from the violent streets, such stylish survivors of a dangerous and soul-crushing environment passed on political as well as personal education to younger inmates. Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, former Black Panther party member recently released from prison after twenty years for a crime it is now clear he didn’t commit, was among these prison elders and knew Masters in San Quentin. Long-term convicts taught this teenager on the exercise yard about class and race. They made him aware that he was part of the African diaspora. A few spoke Swahili and passed this language of Mother Africa on to one another. A brotherhood of prisoners helped Masters make sense of his life in all its recklessness and rage.
But in 1985 Masters was accused of conspiracy in the murder of a prison guard. Though he was locked in his cell at the time of the attack, he was found guilty of participating by having earlier sharpened a fatal weapon. Anticipating a retrial, Masters’ lawyers have placed a gag order on the details of the case, but a crucial fact is that of those allegedly involved, only Masters, because of his violent past, faces death by lethal injection.
Masters never needed anyone to tell him—in the words of the Buddha—that life is suffering. This is common knowledge to the deprived, to the abused, to those excluded from life’s riches. Ironically, it was in prison that Jarvis Masters first made contact with the spiritual notion of serving as a peace-keeper, of putting the needs of others ahead of one’s own. He learned to transform selfishness into human kindness. “Here, I learn how not to dive deeper into this hellhole. I’ve learned more about the things I don’t want to do: cuss out other prisoners or guards, argue for two hours about whether or not the lunch meat is spoiled. I don’t want to become angry about things like that.”
Many writers have done time, but few, surely, experienced the brutal beginnings of a man like Jarvis Masters. The facts of his life are so familiar to our time as to almost seem clichéd: drug-addicted parents, a childhood spent in and out of institutions, involvement with gangs, crime. But while Masters’ story sounds all too common in many ways, it is extraordinary in at least this one: his capacity for change.
The trial that led him to death row in 1991 has the distinction of being one of the longest in California history. This was the time when Masters began writing more than his name and a few letters. He wrote down his dreams, related stories about his life, so he could “look at them.” Melody Ermachild Chavis, a private investigator working on his case, started exchanging writing with him. Having worked as a P.I. for almost twenty years, she is no idealist. Yet she encouraged him to write, recognizing he had a unique voice.
“Jarvis came from a family of story-tellers,” says Chavis, a published author herself. She visited the scenes of Masters’ early life and met with his family, whom she described as “always articulate, very verbal.” Most of his schooling had taken place in institutions. Chavis states, “He had an amazing ear for dialogue, but no idea what a quotation mark was.” They began the task of filling in the gaps in his writing education. She helped the new author make contact with several other writers with whom he began to correspond.
Masters continued the process of looking within, trying to understand his life, beyond political and historical dimensions, through spiritual insight. It was also Chavis who introduced him to meditation. On her visits they would face each other through the plexiglass, meditating together.
Many may be skeptical about a death row inmate becoming the bright hope of Buddhist, liberal intellectuals. As Douglas Imbrogno writes in a review of Finding Freedom in In These Times, “Too often, political progressives become enraptured with high-profile inmates who seem useful to their causes. Such infatuation can be dangerous.” He reminds us of the case of Jack Abbot, championed by Norman Mailer and others, whose book on prison life, In the Belly of the Beast, was widely praised. Abbot killed a restaurant waiter shortly after he went free. Imbrogno writes further, “But Masters actually seems to have awakened from self-delusion, violence, and self-hatred.” Imbrogno points to the epilogue to Finding Freedom and Masters’ hope that readers “will see through my writing a human being who made mistakes. Maybe my writing will at least help them see me as someone who felt, loved, and cared, someone who wanted to know for himself who he was.”
The event that drove Masters’ transformation into warp speed came in 1989 when he happened upon an interview in a Buddhist journal with a highly respected Tibetan lama entitled “Life in Relation to Death.” The lama, His Eminence Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche (abbot of two monasteries in Tibet), after escaping from his homeland and devoting years of his life to relocation work in India, had founded a Buddhist center in Northern California. Masters wrote to the Buddhist center, Rigdzin Ling, which resulted in a correspondence with Lisa Leghorn, a senior student then serving as administrator of the organization. Masters asked questions about Buddhism which Leghorn passed on to Rinpoche (an honorific title meaning “precious jewel.”)
This same year Masters’ first essay, “Scars,” was published and then reprinted in twelve journals. In this piece, collected among others in Finding Freedom, he makes the connection between the scars he sees on prisoners’ bodies on the exercise yard and the fact that most of these men were abused as kids. “I noticed the amazing similarity of the whiplike scars on their bare skin, shining with sweat from pumping iron in the hot sun.”
“The histories of all of us in San Quentin were so similar it was as if we had the same parents,” he writes further. “Most prisoners who were abused as children were taken from their natural parents at a very early age and placed in foster homes, youth homes, or juvenile halls for protection, where they acquired even more scars. Later in their lives prisons provided the same kind of painful refuge.” Recounting a talk with a fellow prisoner who acknowledged prison as a perverse sort of refuge, Masters notes: “Secretly, we like it here. This place welcomes a man who is full of rage and violence. He is not abnormal here, not different. Prison life is an extension of his inner life.”
What makes Masters unusual is his willingness to grapple with such painful complexities. He writes: “My stepfather tried to teach me how to hate as a child. He said it was for my own protection. He used to lock me between his legs and slap me on the head and face until rage filled my body. He’d say, ‘Get mad … fight, son … fight,’ and I would. Afterward, I’d be in pain, though more saddened for him.”
Through all of his coming to terms with violence in his present and past, Masters’ practice of Tibetan Buddhism has grown. Chagdud Rinpoche himself has come three times to San Quentin to give him teachings. “When I first saw Rinpoche through the glass in the visiting room booth, I thought, ‘Oh shit, I’m messing around with a real lama. … I’ve been reading about lamas for the last three years and now I have a real one in front of me.’” Masters continued, “I fell in love with him for the same reasons everybody else does. His life history was my key. He had been a rebellious kid. … He had a certain shrewdness. Compassionate ferociousness. He was a lama who ate beef jerky, got upset, and had jewels of compassion in him.”
Masters follows the examples of this revered teacher as well as that of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn in attempting to bring peace to the chaotic prison atmosphere. After protecting a gay convict who is in danger of his life on a notoriously homophobic exercise yard, Masters wonders if he alone in this environment of confrontation and rage must somehow care for every one of its perpetrators and victims. From Chagdud Rinpoche, Masters has taken Buddhist vows of refuge—the constantly renewed promise to rely on the Buddha, the teachings of the Buddha, and those other practitioners who follow the spiritual path, as well as to never harm another being. He aspires to uphold the vow of a bodhisattva—to reach enlightenment and help all beings to become free from suffering.
Situated in the most restricted part of death row, Masters can meet with visitors only on the other side of a glass barrier, talking by telephone. Severely restricted prisoners like these stay in their cells for all but a few hours of yard time every week. They have no choice about when they eat or shower, what the temperature is, or when the lights go on or off. They aren’t allowed to make any telephone calls, listen to tapes, or have typewriters. Masters may use only the ink cartridge of a ball point pen for his writing, the plastic outer sheath classified as a potential weapon.
Today Jarvis Masters’ lawyers have finally completed the lengthy process of preparing for and filing an appeal. He awaits his fate, meditating and writing his next book. Now Finding Freedom is in its fourth printing—that’s more than 25,000 copies. His readers—prisoners, prison workers and prisoners’ families, social workers and counselors, at risk youth, professors and students of criminal justice, and people seeking guidance on the spiritual path—have responded to the warmth and wit in his voice. He corresponds widely—but this correspondence is more than his way of staying connected to the world and sane. People rely on him, tell him about their lives, ask him how they might find a spiritual teacher. He tries to help them, as best as he can.
Anna Smith is a writer living in Trinity County, California. She can be reached at redlasso@yahoo.com. If you would like to know more about Jarvis Masters or how to help him, visit www.freejarvis.org.
February/March 2006
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