Freedom and Fools
Picture Janis Joplin, on stage, in sapphire-tinted glasses, wearing whatever necklaces she wants to wear: big faux-silver peace signs hung on leather cord, and strands of iridescent glass. For breakfast, she breaks kaleidoscopes, chews and swallows their sharp innards like psychedelic cornflakes. Not really. But you know she crunched and graveled her lyrics, and her chords and shards of truth were as rough and sweet as pine bark and honey.
In other words, she was free.
Free to sing and style as she wanted.
Free to smile that fantastic disarming squinty smile.
I love seeing the smiles of free people.
Emmanuel Jal's, a shiny rippled smile more chiseled than a horse's muscles. Jal is the former South Sudanese child soldier, who escaped his hell and who went on to perform at Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday concert in Johannesburg. Jal is the Bob Marley of rapping, always making slum children--and big players--George Clooney, Richard Branson, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Alicia Keyes--smile when he sings his anthem, We Want Peace.
Two Virginia Tech students, ten years ago, who were driving too fast on my curvy country road, who came over the hill, swerved in the rain to avoid hitting a dog, which was actually an already-dead skunk, careened into my cherry tree, overturned their car, tromped through my muddy pasture and sat on my sofa while we waited together for the ambulance. They were in shock, needing a few stitches, but no bones broken. They were free, and smiling so big. The young man said, as the medics led them out, "Wow. I just want to thank you for giving us water and all, and listen, we're really sorry we brought all this mud into your house, and blood, too, but lady, if it had to happen, this was a really cool house to have a wreck in front of."
A 9-year-old girl I know named Sophie Lynn, not much bigger than a wren, who makes her own Help Save the Next Girl tshirts, who uses heavy stock paper and needle and thread to make string art hearts, crooked and perfect, who holds them up to explain what love is, who lives up a crazy unpaved road at the top of a ragged green mountain and who is not afraid of heights or edges or public speaking or injustice because she knows how to negotiate up and down hills. All the time, she smiles like a natural superhero.
Animals smile.
They've got their particular freedoms and pleasures, too.
Ostriches have a load to smile about. They lay the largest eggs on earth. They are brilliant swimmers. They sprint on the African savannah at 45 mph--that'll make you feel the wind in your plumes--and if they are threatened, if a predator dares attack, one square kick can kill a lion, slam, faster than a dentist.
Domestic cats are wise to all the reasons Buddhas smile. They have bragging rights, if they needed to brag; beatific reasons to smile. They slide their cool third eyelids like independent trombones. They are the masters of purring; they see in the dark; and their bodies are so flexuous, they can survive falls of 32 stories--that's 320 meters. Their nine lives accrue: they get nine lives a day, and they bank what they don't use.
Goats! A goat must smile just for the chance to BE a goat. They love trampolines, they don't get concussions, they eat the news(papers), and they recognize each other's bleats. Their babies are called kids, but look at any goat, and you'll know goats never grow up.
Sloths! Don't think they've got no reason to smile. They had ancestors 10,000 years ago the size of elephants. They are better than humans at the breaststroke, and love to cross rivers. They sleep in a perfect ball shape, AND, they can give birth safely while hanging by two claws from a limb upside down. That's some freedom. Birthing centers? Don't need one. I'm fine up here, hanging out, delivering.
And chimpanzees. They make sloths look like, well, sloths, because chimps have espresso in their veins. They are liquid trapeze artists in the highest branches. They use tools, they love computers, and they cuddle stuffed animals. Just as your children do.
Janis, one thing you sang that I can't reconcile: that bit about freedom being just another word for nothing left to lose.
I do get it, especially the idea of not clinging. Extraneous is extraneous, and bling is ultimately whimsical, and what shape you sleep in or how you hang when you give birth are finally only curiosities to be enjoyed like the passing shapes of pretty clouds.
I love that Emmanuel Jal shrugs off the misguided offers from music industry groupies who want to curry favor with the Big Star that Jal is and who don't know what Jal has transcended and how the heart of his smile, like the heart of his music, is Faith and Justice: "No hoes, no bitches, no bling/ I don't need none o'dem things/ I don't need none o'dem things/ Representing the King of Kings."
Janis Joplin would love Emmanuel Jal, his gorgeous asceticism, his non-profit called Lose to Win, his politics of being free not just from obesity and processed non-nourishing food but also from the grimy requirements of a diseased ego.
I do like the idea of freedom being just another word for losing what you never needed.
But Janis, hear me out.
There is occasionally a fool who smiles as if he has achieved something as big as freedom.
Let's check on him.
On Friday afternoon, not with hand-wringing partisan glee, but instead with solemn, measured reason, I am hoping to hear three words spoken by the venerable Judge in Fairfax who presided over Jesse Matthew's 2005 abduction, rape, and (unbelievably brutal) attempted murder of RG, the young student who was attacked and dragged into the woods, bloodied and beaten one night when she was carrying groceries home to her apartment. I am hoping to hear the Judge declare: life in prison.
I'm also hoping to hear, because I pray for Jesse Matthew's redemption but can not believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, in his remediation: without the possibility of parole.
I'm hoping his defense in Charlottesville will fathom the foolishness, the garishness of NOT then responsively offering prosecutors a plea deal, in reference to Jesse's NEXT legal cauldrons, where this time, in the boil of evidence, he'll face the death penalty.
There's one sorrowful near-certainty about Jesse.
Alive or dead, I can not see that Jesse Matthew will be growing any wings.
I am aware that one of Jesse's ex-girlfriends has written the Fairfax Judge and alleged that, as a child, Jesse Matthew was raped by at least three people.
His mother has also written, to plead lenience, since she believes Jesse "has always shown respect to everyone around him."
I am saddened to hear of his alleged injuries, sad for his mother, and more sad to hear of his capability, his choice, to show respect so often, since the corollary is that disrespect--or worse--would also have been his choice.
I'm most sorry that his rapists, if they existed in Jesse Matthew's past, were not prosecuted to the full extent of the law, each of them. They should have been.
Because rape injures.
And murder kills.
Every time.
So, given that the freedoms to love clouds and cooking, friendships and fried green tomatoes, beers and bakeries and big pizzas and blasting music may all be gone, all of them gone, gone permanently, with the mournful fog of Wallens Ridge or Red Onion Supermax Prison providing the only color of all your remaining days, and God knows those days will be miles long, what in the hell could you be smiling about, Jesse Matthew?
I brought this agitation to Morgan Harrington's mother, Gil.
"What COULD he be smiling at?," I sought, showing her this close-up of Jesse, arriving in chains for one of his motions hearings earlier this year. "Already, he has no freedom. And after the prosecution of his other horrifying murder cases, he will HAVE no freedom," I protested.
"He could be smiling," Gil reasoned, calmly, in the deliberate way she creates solutions, and achieves insights, "because he sees us as the fools."
"Us?," I gasped.
"Smiling," Gil continued, "because of the ones we don't know about."
Jane Lillian Vance
Vice President, Help Save the Next Girl, and
Morgan Harrington's professor in the last Spring of her life