Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

           The problem with lying is that it becomes a seemingly natural habit and you get lost in the habit with the lies bleeding into each other. Lying is a habit with Wilbert Rideau. He was in England recently touting his memoir In the Place of Justice (Random House 2010), and while in tea country, he was interviewed by Helen Brown, a “music critic” with the newspaper The Telegraph. You really wouldn’t expect any “hard-hitting” journalism from a music critic and Ms. Brown didn’t disappoint with her article about Rideau, “A Page In the Life: Wilbert Rideau.” Ms. Brown made it evident she was smitten by the former “famed prison journalist” with the following musical-like description of him: “We are sitting together on a hotel sofa, a stone’s throw from the British Library. As he talks, in a weathered Southern accent that turns ‘first’ into ‘foyst’, he traces appeasing arcs in the space between his carefully manicured hands. I cannot take my eyes off them.”

            That’s what you call a life-changing moment – manicured hands tracing “appeasing arcs.” That’s some deep, deep do-do there!

            But back the purpose of this blog. Rideau told Ms. Brown about conditions on Louisiana’s death row as he found them when he was first put there on April 11, 1962. Reiterating his oft-repeated tale that the only “books” condemned inmates were allowed to have were “Bible and religious literature,” Rideau informed Ms. Brown that in the “early Sixties” he and a fellow condemned inmate named Thomas “Blackjack” Goins were discussing the issue of “slavery,” a subject Rideau said he was ignorant about. To enlighten him, Goins reportedly gave Rideau a copy of Frank Yerby’s Fairoaks and the book opened a whole new educational vista for him. It set him on a journey of self-discovery, rehabilitation, and writing—all of which would ultimately lead to him becoming America’s “most rehabilitated prisoner.”

            But there are two flaws in this wonderful little life diddy. First, Rideau was on death row for only 14 months before his conviction was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 1963 and he was immediately removed from death row and returned to the Calcasieu Parish Jail to await a retrial. And in an October 1990 interview with Details Magazine, Rideau told Peter Wilkerson that it was not until the fifth year of his incarceration (1966, not the “early Sixties) that he took up reading and embarked upon his road to self-discovery.

            Eleven years after the Details interview, Rideau told yet another story. This time the “award-winning convict editor” informed R. Reese Fuller in a The Times of Acadiana interview (Aug. 22, 2001) that his self-discovery journey began with his reading “the Bible,” not Yerby’s Fairoaks.

            Second, there’s the issue of exactly how Rideau got the books to read; “Guards—white guards—smuggled him books on slavery and that perennial inmate favorite, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,” wrote Wilkerson. Reese Fuller put it this way: “In a 1993 Life article title ‘The Most Rehabilitated Prisoner in America,’ Rideau told of sympathetic guards smuggling him books, including Westerns, mysteries, pornographic novels and even a textbook titled Electromagnetism.”

            In his memoir, Rideau wrote: “Angola introduced me to the idea of reading just to kill time. The first book I read was Fairoaks, a historical novel by Frank Yerby that Thomas Goins recommended … this book brought [reality] to life and ignited something in me. I wanted to know more—about slavery, about history, and, ultimately, about everything.”

            So, at the end of the day, we don’t know if Rideau began his self-discovery journey by reading the Bible or Fairoaks. And we don’t know if Yerby’s book was given to him by Goins or those “white guards” who allegedly smuggled him “books on slavery.” In fact, we don’t even know which set of “white guards” supposedly smuggled him books—in the Wilkerson/Fuller interviews, Rideau said it was those “sympathetic” white guards over death row while in his memoir he said it was some “night deputies” at the East Baton Rouge Parish jail who were “Louisiana State University students.” His memoir says nothing about “white guards” smuggling him books on death row.

            Lying is like quicksand—the more you flounder around in it, the more you are sunk by its lies.     

            Wilbert Rideau was an intelligent young man when he arrived on death row in 1962, and during his three brief stays on the Row, he read a significant number of books, and, yes, these books offered a venue of self-education and intellectual development for him. These solitary confinement experiences unquestionably produced a very good writer, but all the Abe Lincoln “reading by the candle light” dramatics is bullshit. As I have said repeatedly on this website, the truth is never enough for Wilbert Rideau—his desire for “greatness” eclipses all else in his world.