You know the facts: 2.3 million Americans in prison, 80,000 or more in solitary confinement for up to 23½ hours a day. But it’s hard to understand the meaning of these facts without a more direct encounter with the prison system, and with the people who inhabit it. Enter Herman’s House (2012, dir. Angad Bhalla).
For over forty years, Herman Wallace has lived in a 6x9 box at Angola Prison in Louisiana. Since 2003, Herman has been collaborating with artist Jackie Sumell to design and build his dream home. His vision is to run the house as a community center for at-risk youth. The film documents this collaboration and follows Jackie from the gallery to the empty lots of New Orleans, where she hopes to build Herman’s house someday.
Who is Herman Wallace? He is a political prisoner, a brother, a friend, a mentor, and even an artist (although he claims to leave the art to Jackie). We hear Herman’s voice on the telephone, regularly interrupted by a message reminding callers that their conversation may be recorded or monitored. In these conversations, Herman motivates and supports the people he loves, both pushing them to their limits and pulling them out of frustration and despair. He reflects on the way decades of isolation have shaped his body and his mind, and on the vital roots of solidarity in resistance to this isolation.
But we never see Herman in the film, except in crumbling photographs, because Herman is one of America’s disappeared. Sentenced to 25 years for bank robbery in the late ‘60s, Herman experienced a political awakening behind bars. Together with Albert Woodfox and Robert King, Herman started the first prison chapter of the Black Panthers. In response to their political activities, the three men were framed for the murder of a prison guard in 1972. Since then, the Angola 3 have served over a century in solitary confinement.
Robert King’s conviction was overturned in 2001, and he was released on time served. Albert Woodfox’s conviction has been overturned three times, most recently in February 2013, but his release is still being blocked by Louisiana prosecutors. Herman Wallace’s appeal is currently in the 19th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Again, these are the facts -- but what do they mean? We don’t like to think that we have political prisoners in the US. And because they are hidden from view, both literally behind prison walls and figuratively behind the stigma of crime, we can avert our eyes from the politics of punishment and the punishment of political resistance in the US.
But sometimes the system reveals its own logic. In 1975, Ralph Aron, the warden of the first de facto supermax prison at Marion Penitentiary, stated: “The purpose of the Marion control unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in the society at large” (cited in Gómez 2006).
And in a 2008 deposition, the warden of Angola Prison, Burl Cain, claimed that even if Albert Woodfox were found not guilty of killing a prison guard, he would still keep him in isolation because of his "Black Panther revolutionary actions."
I still know he is trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates…I would have me all kinds of problems, more than I could stand.
Statements like these lay bare the logic of a system that targets people who are already marginalized by poverty and racism, and punishes them for their coping mechanisms, their survival strategies, their symptoms and addictions – and also for their political resistance.
Herman’s House engages with these political questions indirectly by focusing on the relationships that some people manage to sustain, both behind the prison walls and across them, to create a meaningful sense of life beyond the systems that isolate us from each other.
The film makes Herman Wallace visible, in spite of the layers of concrete, plexiglass, wire mesh and razor wire that separate him from the rest of the world. Herman becomes visible both in the sound of his voice on the telephone and in the response of people to who listen to him. He becomes visible in the renewed relationship between a mother and a son whom he mentored in prison. His absence becomes visible in the art gallery where his house and his cell are displayed, as counterpoints and as echoes of each other.
And he also becomes visible in in the house itself, both in the hot tub that’s bigger than his current cell and in the small, segmented rooms that resemble prison day areas. As Herman says, “You look at the house, you’re looking at me.” You’re looking at the vision and strength of a man who has survived and resisted forty years of isolation. And you’re looking at the scars that this isolation has left on his mind and his body.
“I’m used to it,” says Herman, “and that’s one of the bad things about it.”
Herman’s House provokes us to ask: What are the conditions that we have grown used to? And how might we learn to resist them?
Over the next few weeks, I will post a series of reflections in response to these questions. I welcome your comments, queries, and critiques.
Recent Comments