Piecework

“I love reading about Mao,” he says. “Especially about the Long March and what they went through. I mean, they came into a village one time and all the trees were white, and Mao wanted to know what happened, and they told him the people were so hungry they ate the bark right off the trees! What they went through. I mean, that was adversity. This …”

He waves a hand airily around the visiting room but never finishes the sentence; he certainly feels that the Indiana Youth Center can’t be compared to the Long March. I don’t have to ask him about Arthur Ashe. For weeks Tyson and I have been talking by telephone, and he has spoken several times about Ashe’s book.

“I never knew him,” Tyson said one night. “I never liked him. He was a tennis player, know what I mean? And he looked like a black bourgeois, someone I couldn’t have nothin’ to do with. Just looking at him I said, ’Yaaagh, he’s weak.’ That was my way of thinking back then.” A pause. “But then Spike Lee sent me his book, and I started reading it, and in there I read this: ’AIDS isn’t the heaviest burden I have had to bear …being black is the greatest burden I’ve had to bear.…Race has always been my biggest burden.…Even now it continues to feel like an extra weight tied around me.’ It was like wham! An extra weight tied around me! I mean, wow, that really got me, and I kept reading, excited on every page.”

On the telephone, with the great metallic racket of prison in the background, or here in the visiting room of the Indiana Youth Center, Tyson makes it clear that he doesn’t want to talk much about the past. He doesn’t encourage sentimental evocations of the days when, as a raw teenager from a reform school, he learned his trade from the old trainer Cus D’Amato in the gym above the police station in Catskill, New York. He doesn’t want to talk about his relationship with Don King, the flamboyant promoter whose slithery influence many blamed for Tyson’s decline as a fighter and calamitous fall from grace. He is uncomfortable and embarrassed discussing his lost friends and squandered millions. He has no interest in retailing the details of the case, like another Lenny Bruce, endlessly rehashing what happened on July 19, 1991, in room 606 of the Canterbury Hotel or the astonishingly feeble defense offered by his high-priced lawyers or his chances for a new trial. He wants to talk about what he is doing now, and what he is doing is time.

History is filled with tales of men who used prison to educate themselves. Cervantes began Don Quixote in a Spanish prison, and Pancho Villa read that book, slowly and painfully, while caged in the Santiago Tlatelolco prison in Mexico City more than three hundred years later. In this dreadful century, thousands have discovered that nobody can imprison the mind. In the end, Solzhenitsyn triumphed over Stalin’s gulags, Antonio Gramsci over Mussolini’s jails, Malcolm X over the joints of Massachusetts. From Primo Levi to Václav Havel, books, the mind, the imagination, have offered consolation, insight, even hope to men cast into dungeons. I don’t mean to compare Mike Tyson to such men or the Indiana Youth Center to the gulags; Tyson is not serving his six-year sentence for his ideas. But he understands the opportunity offered by doing time and has chosen to seize the day.

“Sometime in that first month here,” he said one night, “I met an old con, and.he pointed at all the guys playing ball or exercising, and he said to me, ‘You see them guys? If that’s all they do when they’re in here, they’ll go out and mess up and come right back.’ He said to me, ‘You want to make this worth something? Go to the library. Read books. Work your mind. Start with the Constitution.’ And I knew he was right.”

And so Tyson embarked on an astonishing campaign of exuberant and eclectic self-education. Early on he read George Jackson’s prison classic, Soledad Brother, “and the guy knocked me out. It was like any good book: The guy sounded like he was talking directly to me. I could hear him, I can hear him now. He made me understand a lot about the way black men end up in prison, but he didn’t feel sorry for himself. That’s what I liked. I got so caught up with this guy, he became a part of my life.”

Tyson has been reading black history too. He is fascinated by the revolution in Haiti in the early nineteenth century, “the only really successful slave revolt, because blacks took power” He can quote from John Quincy Adams’s defense of the slaves who mutinied on the Spanish ship Amistad in 1839 off the coast of Cuba and sailed for fifty-five days all the way to New York. “They landed in Long Island,” he says. “Imagine! Long Island.”