Transcript
The Heart of a Slave: (The Long Way Home Is The Best Way Home) In life, you have to know what your gift is. My gift is my ability to foresee believability. People tell me that I have a keen eye for what is believable: it is the eye of the common man who has walked with kings. I also have the same eye as a penitentiary organization (gang) leader, although I am not affiliated. (Like St. Paul. I am a deceiver, yet true! 2 Cor. 6:8). My skills are an asset in the entertainment industry, because I am able to identify with and market to their demographic. I also am a high-value asset both to the members of the legal profession as well as to the underworld, because I can keep each of these from being trapped. My quest is to be all things to all people! In order to be a man-of-truth, you have to first understand the lie! I am raw; I am authentic; I am gritty, but transparent at the same time: I am polished, but there is no velvet in me. I have a great deal of street--cred. My story is itself unbelievable: you have to suspend disbelief in order to hear it. My story shatters myths: the myth that rich people don't suffer; the myth that, in the United States of America, we always honor the rule-of-law; the myth that, if you're wealthy, you won't spend a long time in prison. The only myth which my story doesn't shatter is that you don't go messing with a rich-man's wife down in Mississippi. I am a child of the White Southern Aristocracy. In the 1960s and early '70s, I was an Anti-establishment hippie who supported the Civil Rights Movement. However, I grew up at an exclusive country-club. Because of the widespread human-rights abuses in Mississippi, these were the same people I resented; and many people were used and abused by them indeed! I am 58 years old now, and I have spent almost 40 years in the Mississippi prison system for murder. My rage was not against the victim. Like so many of the Civil War era freedom- fighters, my rage was against oppression itself. In the end, I became their slave. I went from living in summer homes in an exclusive Gulf Coast neighborhood called "Langley Point" to the squalid prison conditions in the Mississippi Department of Corrections: from having a nanny who was "The Help" to cleaning the toilets of Black prison officials at Parchman's Guest House, (This irony certainly is not lost on me!) I have a message for young White-boys who are trying to be Black: you can stand-up, too, but still live a good life. I have a message for young Niggaz who long to be white: it is okay for y'all to be content with who you-is. If an entertainment mogul is looking for authenticity and believability, he or she has found them in me! In the Name of the Father and ofthe Son and of the Holy Spirit: John Peyton Alexander, II Soli Dei Gloria March 23,2013