"In this riveting account of his long and painful search for place, Evans Hopkins has deftly captured the tragedy of a manchild's boundless potential sidelined by the hatred of an unwelcoming world. It is an anguished, triumphant tale that is at once specific to him, yet sadly familiar to black men everywhere. A must read."
--Nathan McCall, author of Makes Me Wanna Holler
In Life After Life tells the story of his many lives. Born during the Jim Crow era in a second-rate, segregated hospital, he received a second-rate education in the segregated primary schools in Danville, Virginia, a town that proudly proclaimed itself the "Last Capitol of the Confederacy.” With parents who stressed the value of education, as a teenager he was in the forefront of desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, he fell in love with the traditionally white man’s game of tennis, modeling himself after his idol, the legendary Arthur Ashe, only to be swept off the courts by the Black Panther Party at the age of sixteen.
Just out of high school, Hopkins moved to Panther headquarters in Oakland, California, where he spent two years writing for the Party newspaper, covering the trial of the San Quentin Six, working with Party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, and taking part in their move into politics when Seale ran for mayor of Oakland. He became historian for the group, documenting the years when altercations with authorities resulted in the deaths of numerous Panthers. And he was witness to the internal strife within the Party that led to the group’s decline and his own decision to leave in the fall of 1974.
When he returned to Danville, Hopkins was a different man, disillusioned and filled with rage and a legacy of militancy. He was, in his own words, “the quintessential angry young black man.” Convicted of armed robbery and given a life sentence, Hopkins would spend twenty of the next twenty-two years in the prisons of Virginia.
Inside, fighting despair and isolation and dreaming of escape, Hopkins sought salvation in the written word, writing in his cell in the early morning hours to escape the noise of the prison. Focusing on issues of social and criminal injustice, Hopkins would eventually reach a national audience when his inside account of an execution, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia’s Chair” was published in The Washington Post. He would go on to become one of the most widely-published prisoners in the country, eventually publishing in the revered New Yorker magazine.
Paroled in 1997, Hopkins returned home, a free man at last, but facing the overwhelming challenges of caring for his aging parents and daily life in a world that was new after so many years of incarceration.
Praise for Life After Life:
"Evans D. Hopkins reminds us of what happens to a dream deferred in this powerful story of a youth almost destroyed by his anger at a society that at best ignores a black man and at worst finds new ways to lynch him. What makes this book remarkable is the journey to redemption, the story of how the lost youth finds himself in the silence of a prison cell and continues to grow as a human today. We should all rejoice!"
--Patrice Gaines, author of Laughing in the Dark
"Life After Life is the story of the search for identity, one man's struggle to create a more just world, the descent into inexplicable rebellion and crime, and the ways in which prison can set a person free. This is a beautiful, heartbreaking, and, in the end, inspiring book."
--Marita Golden, author of Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey Through the Color Complex
"LIFE AFTER LIFE is a low-keyed but compelling account of the Black Panther Party’s impact, both positive and negative, on a young, southern, black man’s journey to completeness in racist America. Evans D. Hopkins has bared his soul to help us understand why thousands like him took up the extreme challenge, and are better for it."
--the late David DuBois, CEO of the W.E.B DuBois Foundation
"Life After Life is a wonderful autobiography and a touching and enlightening story. Evans Hopkins' writing is vivid and compelling, specifically the passages about his attempted escapes, the atrocities of prison, and his discovery of the love he has for humanity even though it is often unlovable. His honesty about his own culpability rings through clearly and courageously."
--Sandra Brown
Kirkus Reviews says of Life After Life:
"Debut memoir by and African-American whose youthful dedication to antiracist activism degenerated into criminal behavior and led to jail.
"Hopkins literally wrote his way out of the Virginia State Penitentiary with articles for the
Washington Post, the
New Yorker, and other publications. He makes it clear that his activism did not arise from direct personal experience of oppression; among the black families in the factory town of Danville, Va., his was middle-class and comfortable. Nonetheless, as his penetrating recollections reveal, racism had a cumulative effect as the civil rights movement ratcheted up... His confrontations with prejudice were oblique but infuriating, as when he realized that whites often addressed him and his father as if they were the same age. In his early teens, Hopkins became involved with the Black Panther Party.
"Unfulfilled and infected with rage, he was later talked into committing an armed robbery--and got caught. No one was killed or even injured, but the jury gave him a life sentence. In prison... he adopted writing as his 'escape' methodology... Freed 17 years later, Hopkins found that 'love for a world of reader I continued to believe in' had finally conquered his rage.
"Soul-baring revelations acknowledge racism’s impact, but make no excuses for the author’s mistakes."
Booklist says of
Life After Life:
"Straining against his middle-class background and his growing outrage over racial injustice, Hopkins became involved with the Black Panthers at an early age. His writing talent earned him high visibility as he traveled to Oakland in the 1960s and began writing for the Panther newspaper. But he becomes disillusioned by firsthand experience and stories of cruelty and mistreatment as well as drug abuse by leaders. Back home in Virginia, he fathers a son and drifts into a life of crime, committing armed robberies that eventually earn him a life sentence. In prison, he hones his writing skills as a means of self-expression, mounting a crusade against the death penalty and wrongful convictions. After serving 16 years, he is paroled and must cope with the loss of his son while he was imprisoned and the challenges of making a new life for himself as a writer. This fascinating memoir of prison issues and personal redemption is reminiscent of
Makes Me Want to Holler (1994), by Nathan McCall, whom Hopkins knew in prison."
--Vanessa Bush, copyright © American Library Association
(Agent Gail Ross/Gail Ross Literary Agency)
The Beginning of Chapter One
The Roots of Rage
The A&P in Danville, Virginia, has a special significance in my memory. It was the only place my mother would only shop. The other food stores in Danville during the early ‘Sixties had found ways to let it be known that “Negro business” was unwanted--and as genteel colored folk, we tried never to go where we weren’t wanted. At the age of six, I wasn’t aware of this discrimination. I simply loved going to the store with Mama, to this public gathering place where there were white people shopping along with us--and, of course, wearing all the white aprons.
Here every week I was able to help Mama pull household necessities from the shelves, her meager-budget list dictating the various missions between the aisles she would send her smart little boy on--smart enough to snatch Sugar Pops and pancake mix and Log Cabin Syrup in a single foray away from her basket. My reward would be her smile, and the supreme gift of a quarter, to purchase a comic book on my own, at the check-out lanes manned with some of the white people segregated Southern culture had taught me to at once revere, envy and fear. Rushing out to my father’s ’55 Chevy, I would wait alone in the car and read the treasure I had garnered from the store: mainly copies of Classics Illustrated--my earliest introduction to literature.
The A&P parking lot was beside the old city jail, and I would spend long minutes that seemed to be hours with my face close to the windshield, looking up at the 100-year-old building’s faded grayish-white facade. I would see the men inside with their arms sticking out through rusted iron bars, watch them waving or screaming or flinging notes to girlfriends or family members standing at the fence along the edge of the lot.
The jail took on a more frightening aura when I turned nine. It was then that police locked away hundreds of demonstrators during the Civil Right marches of 1963, where firemen had opened up on the crowds with fire hoses, when deputized garbage men had attacked them with billy clubs, and where police dogs were set upon those who came to the courts building to protest the mass jailings.
My family was embroiled in the midst of this struggle, and the image of the jail became embedded in my young mind, a fearsome symbol of the consequences of social change. But, as an imaginative a child as I was, I could never have foreseen that one day I would be looking out upon that A&P parking lot from the inside of that old jail, awaiting trial for bank robbery.
