New York State Literary Center

Where Is Tomorrow Coming From

Monroe County Jail

2008

Dale Davis, Founder and Executive Director of NYSLC, adapted the writing of the incarcerated youth with whom she worked at Monroe County Jail in the summer of 2008 to create Where Is Tomorrow Coming From.

INTRODUCTION TO WHERE IS TOMORROW COMING FROM

I try to expose people to yesterday so they know where tomorrow is coming from.

Gil Scott-Heron

I created Where Is Tomorrow Coming From to build the historical knowledge of incarcerated youth through the introduction of the writing of individuals important to Rochester’s history to enable them to have a dialogue with the writing and think about the relevance of the writing to their lives today. The writing of Frederick Douglass, Mildred Johnson, and Austin Seward was incorporated into the script.

Rochester began as a one-hundred-acre swamp on the Genesee River in 1803. The Monroe County Jail sits on part of that One Hundred Acre Tract, purchased by Colonel Nathaniel Rochester, Colonel William Fitzhugh, and Major Charles Carroll.

Dale Davis

INTRODUCTION TO WHERE IS TOMORROW COMING FROM

As anyone knows, crime is a problem in Rochester. There is no question that crime needs to be punished. However, I am advocating for a much different agenda for young people, like myself, who are incarcerated.

Some believe that those of us incarcerated have no other purpose than to be locked up. I believe we need to get to know ourselves. I believe we need to learn how to read, how to write, and how to think. I believe we need to know our history. I believe we need to learn how to succeed.

Based solely on my experiences in Monroe County Jail, I suggest a simple proposal. There are those of us who are trying to change ourselves. We ask you to recognize this need and offer us programs, like The New York State Literary Center’s Program on Three North, like the Jimmy Santiago Baca Library, Writing, and Publishing Center, and like the performance this evening that can help us succeed and let us show you we are worth a second chance.

Young people in Rochester are branded with a criminal conviction at sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen years of age. More attention is given to the young people as a crime statistic in the news media than to education and the programs that will help with our reintegration into our own community.

We ask you Where Is Tomorrow Coming From. Look, listen, and think, what can I do.

FROM THE SCRIPT, WHERE IS TOMORROW COMING FROM

A dream of a city on the banks of a river,

the 1803 dream.

Dreams of fame, attention, and money are whose dreams,

yours, mine, or are they all of our dreams?

Sam Patch dreamed.

He wanted to be famous.

He wanted attention.

He wanted money.

On September 30,1827 Sam Patch

jumped off the seventy-foot Passaic Falls in New Jersey.

He repeated this jump at least two more times.

The crowds loved him.

In the fall of 1828,

Sam Patch was the first person

to successfully jump into Niagara Falls.

Following Niagara Falls, Sam Patch came to the Roc

to challenge the 99-foot High Falls of the Genesee.

On November 6, 1829 Sam Patch went out onto a rock ledge in the middle of the falls,

threw a pet bear cub over the falls,

and jumped after the bear, successfully.

On Friday, November 13, 1829,

twenty-six years after the purchase of the one-hundred acres,

Sam Patch

increased the height of his jump to 125 feet.

Accounts from the eight thousand people present differ on whether he jumped or fell,

but he never surfaced.

His frozen body was found in the ice in Charlotte early the following spring.

He is buried in Charlotte Cemetery.

Why is a tour boat named after him?

What does it mean?

What are we honoring?

We all have similar dreams,

to be noticed,

and we jump, just like Sam,

we jump into the criminal life.

Why,

it’s the easy way out.

Why wait ten years before there is even a chance for a good job

when it is so easy to buy a gun

and have instant popularity.

What was handed to all of us

who build our lives from the one-hundred-acre tract.

. . . .

Today I had court. I copped out to five years. I was scared.

I have never been upstate.

The judge told me I should be happy that he was only giving me five years, and that he wanted to give me fifteen. This hit me so hard. Being away from home, what will my kids do? So many things are going through my head. I just can’t believe that my record from when I was young was used against me.

Me, I’ve been through many things that most people don’t go through. How would anyone feel finding out the real way his mom died, finding out that she was raped and then got AIDS, and she died. Pops got life in jail.

Was life supposed to happen to me?

When you turn to the streets, it’s hard to turn back. They say I am a danger. They say I should stay caged like an animal. They don’t know what I have been through.

I am seventeen years old, and I was born and raised on the streets of the Roc. I have been here all my life. Here.

Am I the heritage of that dream on the banks of the Genesee?

. . . .

“My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me. My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant--before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child's affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.

“I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night. She died when I was about seven years old, on one of my master's farms, near Lee's Mill. I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew anything about it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.”

Frederick Douglass

. . . .

What is wrong with us? Why do we always sabotage ourselves by coming back to jail over and over again? How come every time I look in the newspaper or ask around, I find out another young person gets enslaved to the system and will never come home, never make anything of himself, or do anything positive. What is wrong with us? Don’t we know the only way to get out of this game is prison or death? And if so, why do we keep playing Russian roulette with our freedom? You see I’m no new mind to the streets. Basically, I’ve been there and done that. I’ve been in and out of the system for felonies since I was thirteen. I’ve almost lost every man I have ever respected to the system. I’ve almost been killed three times in the past year. I’ve known cats personally who get out of jail and go back faithfully. This leaves me with the question, what is wrong with us?

. . . .

“It is 1981. Crime in the black community has run amuck in Rochester. The most recent tragedy is that of the brutal killing of the youth at the War Memorial last Saturday while ten thousand came to enjoy themselves hearing ‘Cool & The Gang.’ It is sad for all parents: the victims and the youth accused of the stabbing. What really provoked the incident is not the main issue, it is the lack of values we have taught out children of the precious gift of life. Taking one’s life in one way or another is wrong and the blame is placed on all of us Blacks, because that is the way society sees us. If one of does something that is out of line, all of us are put in the same category, which we cannot afford this kind of reputation. We all know the race is blamed for incidents such as this and it is an individual not a group of people, but because of the racist element in our country we are blamed.”

Mildred Johnson

. . . .

Could I be dead?

Should I be dead?

Will I die this day

or the next?

I don’t know.

It is a dreadful time for a young man,

watching my back,

hiding out,

even trying to get him before the gets me.

It’s just the life I live.

Thinking and thinking,

this is all I do.

When, when, when will my time come?

I feel it’s near.

I feel the heat.

I’m ready.

No, I’m not. I have too many things to lose,

too many people to see,

so many places to go.

Time goes and time comes.

All I do not is wait and wait and wait,

but I can’t keep still.

I have to move,

knowing my life is on the line,

a thin line it’s close to that time.

It was not supposed to happen like this.

I never wanted trouble in my life.

I just wanted to be me

and be free of all my troubles.

Free, free I will be one day,

but all I can do is wait

and see the time out.

My time is close.

We have kept it real.

This has been our language to make ourselves vocal.

We took you for a ride around history, a ride around the Roc, a ride around Monroe County Jail.

What does it look like?

We have no ending

except to ask you

what you are thinking now.

2019 Dale Davis, The New York State Literary Center