Feature

This article comes by way of Empowerment Avenue, a nonprofit that works to normalize the inclusion of incarcerated writers and artists in mainstream venues by bridging the gap between them as a path to decarceration and public safety. — The Editors

IN A DIMLY lit room, Noah sits hunched over his half-finished masterpiece. The canvas comes alive under his skilled hand, revealing the weathered face of an old field worker — the grandfather of a dear friend. Every stroke tells a tale of resilience, etching lines of wisdom and hardship that speak to a life often overlooked. As the evening unfolds, Noah’s focused concentration becomes a beacon, drawing curious onlookers who gather around to witness the birth of art.

This is how I think of Bonifacio Alcantar-Maldonado, who I know by his prison handle, “Noah.”

Known outside by his childhood nickname “Junior,” Alcantar-Maldonado is incarcerated at the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, Wash., where I am serving a life sentence. His life is now defined by two cruel political realities — heartless immigration policies and harsh criminal laws. His story illustrates the waste of human potential by a politics that promotes fear of those struggling in other countries and at home.

TO CROSS THE border into Lesotho — a landlocked, mountainous country surrounded entirely by South Africa — my friends and I rented a 4x4 and drove up the icy Sani Pass. We switchbacked up one of the most dangerous roads in the world and almost skidded off the cliff.

Slightly shaken but unscathed, we experienced time stretching as we drove through the pastoral city of Mokhotlong, dotted with thatch-roofed mud-and-stone huts. Herds of sheep, in no hurry to make way, blocked the dirt road.

We walked along the deserted street, admiring handicrafts at a rug shop before popping into a grocery store. I was surprised when a Chinese couple greeted us from behind the counter with a warm, “Ni hao.” As my friends and I spoke with them in rudimentary Mandarin (four of us were Chinese American, the fifth was white American), I learned that they had been living in Mokhotlong for many years, raising a family while running the store. We shared a laugh about the unlikelihood of Chinese people finding one another in these hinterlands and, after buying a couple of sodas, went on our way.

Down the road, we discovered another grocery store, staffed by a Chinese couple from a different province in China. What a wild fluke, I thought, that such an isolated town would have two Chinese-owned markets! I soon learned that it wasn’t a fluke at all — Chinese people are present in virtually every nation in Africa, whether as contracted laborers or as informal migrants. Since July 2008, when I visited Lesotho while living in South Africa for two months, the Chinese population in Africa has increased to more than 1 million, including large populations in South Africa, Madagascar, and Zambia but also scattered throughout smaller communities in South Sudan, Togo, and Senegal.

The awe of meeting Chinese people in rural Africa prompted me to examine my family’s migration story and my sense of otherness in the U.S. My parents left Hong Kong to come to the U.S. for college, planting roots here for the freedom and opportunities that didn’t exist back home. Shortly before I was born, they became Christians through a Chinese immigrant church in the Bay Area. When I was 3 years old, we resettled near the University of Iowa, where my dad worked as a cardiologist.

While my parents were members of a small but vibrant Chinese church, by junior high I started attending a large, white, evangelical church where I could fully understand the English language worship service and have peers my age. Bathed in a white-dominant environment both at school and at church, I subconsciously believed that my differences made me inferior and that white male theologians were the arbiters of true Christianity — after all, they were the only people preaching or quoted from the pulpit. This led me to “the misguided belief,” as Grace Ji-Sun Kim writes, “that white knowledge, theology, and spirituality were far greater than anything we had ever possessed.”

MANY CONSIDER LOUISIANA ground zero for the country’s most pressing environmental problems. The risks of living in a state long nicknamed “Sportsman’s Paradise” continue to mount as worsening, climate change-fueled hurricanes threaten its degrading coastlines, which slip away with rising tides. Meanwhile, an ongoing industrial boom endangers the health of residents living along the fence line of some of the major fossil fuel plants that help drive global warming. But for two quite different church communities — one deep in Louisiana’s countryside and the other in the state’s most populous city — the risks present an opportunity to model what’s needed for a resilient and faithful future.

Tucked in the rural remains of Louisiana’s plantation country, just under 500 people, most of them Black, call the small town of Convent, La., home. The 300-year-old community, situated about 50 miles west of New Orleans on I-10, moves with the bend of the winding Mississippi River, which cuts through the entirety of St. James Parish. Convent serves as the parish seat, and many of the families date back generations, descending from people who were enslaved on sugarcane and indigo plantations.

But people aren’t the only ones who reside there. Some of the wide swaths of land once used for plantations began to be sold to chemical companies in the mid-to-late 1900s. On the eastern end of Convent, a trio of industrial plants neighbor each other, spewing pollution. The coal export facility, fertilizer manufacturer, and chlorine manufacturer each silently release their own toxic mix of hazards into the air — and Convent residents like Rev. Roderick Williams breathe that air every day.

Williams believes his neighbors have suffered as a result, as cancer has spread throughout his community and others in St. James while chemical plants proliferated. It’s challenging to attribute a single cancer case to environmental pollution, but Louisiana Tumor Registry data shows that at least one census tract in St. James has a significantly higher rate of cancer than much of the state.

Williams’ hometown of Convent and the rest of St. James Parish sit in the heart of Louisiana’s chemical corridor, an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River running from Baton Rouge through New Orleans. The heavily industrialized swath — forged through the most generous property tax exemption program in the nation — has garnered the infamous nickname of “Cancer Alley” due to concerns about the health impact of the more than 200 industrial plants scattered there. A 2021 ProPublica report found that “Cancer Alley” was one of the country’s largest hotspots for toxic air.

FIVE YEARS AGO, Madelynn Meads was pregnant and stuck between worlds.

Her high school in Leander, Texas, was a new school, and it had never been known to have a teen mom. Her church, where she’d been active in the youth group, suddenly couldn’t find a place for her. She didn’t fit in with the youth group anymore, but the church wouldn’t include her in its ministries for moms either. She’d lost the privilege of a relatively carefree youth without gaining the respect and spiritual investment often offered to young adults and new moms. As a pregnant 16-year-old, Meads said it felt as if the consistent message was, “You’re not a real adult or a real mom.”

Meads, like other teen moms, had fallen into a hole in the social fabric. She didn’t have the support available to teenagers carrying the hopes and dreams of their parents, or to new moms carrying the hopes and dreams of the next generation. Instead, she became part of a statistic, one that schools, government, and nonprofits are working to shrink.

In public discourse, teen pregnancy, poverty, and other adversity often go hand in hand — high school dropout rates for teen moms hover around 50 percent, and few go on to complete higher education. But advocates say that has less to do with the additional responsibility of a baby and more to do with the phenomenon Meads experienced at her church. The moms are no longer the kinds of teens targeted for scholarships and other educational opportunities. Traditional school schedules don’t work with baby schedules, and they can’t meet the time demands of most extracurriculars. If they want the kind of jobs that can help them raise their children in financial security, they must make it through a gauntlet of challenges to get there.

School systems sometimes have specialized services for teen parents to help them finish high school, and staff say they also have to help the teens renegotiate their place in family systems and community. For some Christian ministries, these extra challenges are opportunities to show the teens that there’s a secure, unconditional place for them in God’s family, with all the support to go with it.

Meads found those supports with YoungLives, a branch of YoungLife, a global Christian youth ministry. A YoungLives mentor reached out and gave her a place to belong, to be fully mom and fully teenager, both fun-loving and abundantly capable of facing the huge responsibilities that lay ahead. Instead of struggling to belong, she said, the message changed to “Let’s still have fun and let’s love God.”

Meads recently graduated from Texas A&M University and is getting her teaching certificate. During summers, she volunteers with YoungLives to try to give other teen moms the experience that made such a difference for her.

WHEN GRAZIELA MARIANO'S former partner found out that she was in a relationship with someone else, he flew into a rage and attacked her. “We lived together for 13 years. He didn’t accept the breakup,” the 34-year-old Brazilian said. In defending herself, she ended up killing him.

Investigators eventually traced his death back to her. Mariano is waiting for her final sentence behind bars in the eastern city of São João del-Rei. But this jail, run by the Brazilian nonprofit Association for Protection and Assistance of Convicts (APAC), is not an ordinary penitentiary. “Theoretically, we’re in prison. But we’re not handcuffed and there are no weapons,” Mariano said.

In the 68 facilities that the nonprofit manages across Brazil, APAC implements a model in which inmates run aspects of the prison themselves. They wear their own clothes, make their own food, and oversee security and discipline. Referred to as recuperandos (“recovering persons”), prisoners are called by their name rather than by a number. Mariano, a former trainee nurse, works at night distributing medicine to fellow prisoners.

Camila Kersul, a psychologist who offers support to the more than 400 inmates at APAC in São João del-Rei, said, “APAC is essentially about offering dignity to inmates. The idea is to save the person’s identity to boost their self-esteem.”

Created by a group of Brazilian Catholics in the early 1970s, the acronym originally stood for Amando o Próximo, Amarás a Cristo (“Loving thy neighbor, thou shalt love Christ”). Christianity remains at the heart of the nonprofit’s philosophy. “God is the source of everything,” reads the final guiding principle of APAC’s decalogue. Each section of an APAC prison has a prayer room with Bibles and a cross where inmates are encouraged to renew themselves and take time out for reflection when they feel overwhelmed.

Mariano was delighted to move to the APAC facility eight months ago. She spent more than a year in a traditional prison: “I was pepper-sprayed. Food came with cockroaches. It was chaos, and guards were very cruel.” Not once was she permitted to see her three children, ages 6, 9, and 15. In APAC prisons, family ties are part of a prisoner’s rehabilitation. “Here, I arrived on a Tuesday and on the Sunday, I saw my family,” she said.

WHEN I WAS 8 years old, I fried an egg on the street. Well, I tried to fry an egg on the street. It had been a particularly brutal summer in Florida. On the days when the playground slides were too hot to go down, my mom would say, “It’s hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk!” I kept my eyes glued to that splattered yolk for two hours until a car tire brought the grand breakfast experiment to an end. Frying eggs on sidewalks was how I learned to conceptualize extreme heat.

When it comes to describing climate change urgency in Black communities, Heather McTeer Toney taps into something simple: streetlights. In Before the Streetlights Come On: Black America’s Urgent Call for Climate Solutions, she writes that when she was growing up, kids could play all day outdoors, but they had to be home “before the streetlights came on.” As twilight settled in and streetlights started to flicker, kids would call out, “Hurry up, we ain’t got all day!”

“Right now, that same call to action is carried in the waves of massive hurricanes, on the winds of devastating firestorms, and in the uncharacteristic heat of winter,” McTeer Toney writes. Using a familiar metaphor, she issues a call to action of her own.

Climate change and environmental justice is not foreign to McTeer Toney or the communities she writes about. At age 27, she was the first female and youngest person to serve as mayor of Greenville, Miss., where she was born and raised. As mayor, she brought the city out of debt and established sustainable infrastructure repair. For three years, she led the Environmental Protection Agency for the southeastern United States. While at the global nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, she addressed environmental policy and community organizing within and beyond the U.S. This spring, McTeer Toney became executive director of Beyond Petrochemicals, a campaign to stop the rapid expansion of petrochemical and plastic pollution, particularly in the Ohio River valley and along the Gulf Coast.

McTeer Toney and her family attend Oxford University United Methodist Church in Oxford, Miss. I spoke with her by phone about her work, her book, and the hope her faith demands. — Christina Colón

IN FALL 2014, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra performed Brahms’ Requiem on a Saturday evening two months after the murder of Michael Brown Jr., at a concert hall about 10 miles from Canfield Green, where Brown was killed and his adolescent body left out in the Missouri August sun for four and a half hours.

That summer and fall, people in the city and county of St. Louis lived in the tension of waiting — we were waiting for a grand jury to make a decision. Not a verdict about the officer’s guilt: The grand jury was tasked with deciding whether this murder was even a murder at all — whether anything happened on Aug. 9 that could even be considered maybe a crime. Maybe worth investigating. Or whether it was just a regular day’s work.

As intermission was ending and folks were back in their seats, just as the orchestra was regathered and the conductor was raising his baton, a small group of ticketholders in the audience stood up and sang. In singing, they asked the audience, made up largely of people who could choose whether or not they were impacted by the grand jury’s decision that loomed over the city like the shadow of death, to make a decision of their own. They stood up, one by one, and joined their voices in an old labor song: “Which side are you on, friend, which side are you on?” they sang. “Justice for Mike Brown is justice for us all. Which side are you on, friend, which side are you on?” They hung banners made of bedsheets over the balcony; one that echoed the piece being performed that evening was painted: “Requiem for Mike Brown, 1996-2014.”

These protesters brought this question — this disruption — into a space that could’ve kept it to business as usual. They sang the two refrains in repetition, almost like a Taizé chant, for several minutes, then they left the hall together, chanting a chant that at the time was still brand-new to most Americans: Black Lives Matter.

The disrupters left to a mix of silence and applause from the audience and the musicians. The concert continued, but the question hung in the air. It’s the same question that hangs in the air of many of Jesus’ disciple-calling stories, and it’s certainly the question that pervades Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ good news.

MY DAD HAD a very mixed relationship with America. Based in his experience of and feelings concerning white supremacy in America, I was never sure he loved America and knew with certainty that he hesitated to call it “home.” America was never holy ground for him.

On Jan. 6, 2021, while I was watching the Capitol insurrection on TV, he died in his hospice bed. My screen view of the Capitol mob’s recitation of “hang Mike Pence,” in rhythmic incantation to bring forth the blood-boiling hate, was reminiscent of the ritualistic lynching of thousands from 1870 to 1940, particularly and almost exclusively African Americans.

I also had a screen view of my dad. Given the threat posed by COVID-19 exposure upon his chemotherapy-treated and compromised immune system, we were not able to visit him as we would have liked. My sister had installed a camera system to get a visual. I noticed that he was not moving. I earnestly studied his lack of motion and noticed that his mouth was wide open. This was the death posture. I instantly knew he was gone.

Trying to come to grips with the death of my father, while staring with glazed-over eyes at the Capitol riot, I said to myself: “The insurrection took my dad out of here. He had enough of white supremacy in America.” During the chaos of the insurgency, my dad became an ancestor. In the stark reality of his death, I realized he had been in search of holy ground for a long time.

EVER SINCE I was little, my imagination has been shaped by superhero worlds, lore, and comic and animated adaptations. And while more “realistic” adaptations are the trend on the big screen, what enthralled me about characters such as Batman wasn’t that I thought he could be real; I was tuned instead to the ethos behind the caped crusader.

Superhero stories often seem limitless. At their best, they stretch the imagination to ask what type of world we want to exist and what it would take to get us there, while acknowledging hardships along the way.

Recently, I began a rewatch of the DC Animated Universe: TV shows, feature films, and shorts that aired mainly from 1992 to 2006. These shows were the first to capture my attention and shape my imagination. Batman: The Animated Series was my first love, with Kevin Conroy’s Batman and Mark Hamill’s Joker seared into my consciousness. As I watched, I made a particular note about the moral imagination of these shows: Superheroes in these shows don’t just refuse to kill — a theme recurring across superhero worlds — they refuse to even let anyone die.

Take Season 1, Episode 11 (S1 E11) of Superman: The Animated Series: Lex Luthor’s weapons factory is about to explode, with spilled molten metal splashing about. Lana Lang is hanging by a thread above certain death; so is Lex Luthor, who unintentionally caused this mess in his attempt to kill Superman. But then, at the last moment, Superman bursts forth from under the molten waves, crashing out of the top of the factory just before it explodes, with Lana in one arm and the villain in the other.

It’s a scene that strains credulity. There’s an improbability of timing, a lack of “logic” in doubling back for the person trying to kill you, and the storyteller’s refusal to explain how Superman managed to save the villain. But what’s key here is the insistence, and flaunting, that Superman would save the villain. It doesn’t need an explanation; it’s assumed.

For a while, I was paying attention to how the writers made this subtext believable. Superman saves some villains in hopes they can be rehabilitated, others because they are being used by larger, more villainous characters. Why? The simple answer is that these were shows for families and children. The same reason the comic book’s “League of Assassins” became the TV show’s “Society of Shadows” and villains set out to “destroy” rather than “kill” heroes.

But this death-resisting subtext becomes dialogue in S2 E9 of Superman: The Animated Series when some kids plead with Metallo, a villain disguised as a hero, to save Lois Lane from an exploding volcano. “Superman wouldn’t let anyone die, no matter how bad they were,” the kids protest. “I’m not Superman,” Metallo retorts.