Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon is housed in the same buildings as the former Matteawan State Hospital, an asylum for the criminally insane. The place conjures images of old brick buildings, straitjackets and shrieks, tranquilizers, shock therapy, and confinement in dark holes from which there is little likelihood of return to the ordinary world. It is a crazy man's world.
The accoutrements of insanity are long gone, and Fishkill looks like any other prison. Some of the inmates here, however, leave touched with a certain kind of crazy that the prison can't suppress--Kenyatta's kind of crazy. Though his influence over the prison system remains frustratingly insubstantial, the effect he's had on the lives of individuals--directly and through the telling and retelling of his story--are not. "Among people on the inside who are conscious," says Smith. "Kenyatta is a hero. I am among the people he has taught. He leads through action and life experience."
Former inmate Vernon "Giz" Giscombe was searching for what he wanted to be--when he met Kenyatta. Giscombe had just taken a class in commercial art at the prison, and his teacher had forced him to enter a piece of his work in a prison art contest. "I did," he says, "and the piece was stolen by some officers. I was thrilled, almost as if it had been sold." One day Kenyatta walked by Giscombe's cell, checked out his work, and told him, "You need to stop playing and apply yourself." Every night thereafter, Kenyatta gave Giscombe feedback. He in turn watched Kenyatta's progress on a self-portrait, of his eyes. "One day an officer walked by who hadn't been on the block before," says Giscombe. "When he saw the eyes on the wall, he jumped back. That's how real they looked. I could literally see his hair stand up on end."
"I thought about who he was and what his art meant and somewhere along the line, I just took off in my art. After I learned more about him, it hit me how he'd lost everything but he'd lost nothing. He taught me how to turn the negative into positive. He never told me what to do, only he'd talk about what was going on, in the present. After I got out, I continued working with art and now I'm a teacher at an after-school center. I use art and sports to identify with kids--forty-two of them. Of that total, thirty-two are fatherless--in prison, dead, or strung out on drugs. I use art work with them, in the same way Kenyatta taught me.
"His example always fascinated me inside the walls. I just couldn't keep myself from examining who he was and what he was doing," says Giscombe. "He never lifted weights in the prison yard like a lot of the guys. But I watched him, lift his leg vertical and stretch. And then one of the other guys in the yard told a story about him--some guy who was at Attica with Kenyatta. He told me about how there had been two short poles in the outside prison yard. They had no obvious use and had been there a long time.
"Kenyatta figured out how to do seventy-five exercises with those two poles. He'd go outside and just work on the exercises he made up. Then one day some officers took the poles away. Kenyatta asked why and the guys in the yard speculated it was because he'd found a positive use for them. That story stuck with me, like the story of the eyes. It was another example of making something positive out of what was available. Through his example I've learned how to stand and walk upright, just like I'm teaching the kids. Kenyatta once told me, 'Sit up straight and exercise.' Now I walk upright because of knowing ibn Kenyatta."
His life, and his life sentence
'Sit up straight and exercise'