[Ppnews] Robert King Wilkerson - Sweet freedom for man found innocent after 30 years

[Political Prisoner News]

Sweet freedom for man found innocent after 30 years

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/02/11/11candyman.html

Robert King Wilkerson cooks up a new life as a candy maker

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, February 11, 2007

Robert King Wilkerson eases out of bed. He pulls 
on a black shirt, a watch cap and sandals, and 
shuffles into the tiny kitchen of his East Austin duplex.

The shirt covers his tattoos, most self-inscribed 
decades ago using pencil lead. A long dagger 
extends down his left forearm; a spider rests on 
his left hand. The tops of his fingers say 
"L-O-V-E" and, below that, "H-A-T-E." The 
initials of a long-ago girlfriend grace his right forearm.

While he was in prison, Robert King Wilkerson 
made his pralines in cans over flaming circles of 
toilet paper like this one. Making a single batch 
took 30 of the doughnut-shaped toilet paper 
rolls. Wilkerson was freed in 2001 after 
promising not to sue for false imprisonment.

He assembles his ingredients: butter, milk, 
sugar, baking soda, vanilla and salt. He pulls a pot off a high shelf.

"I was arrested in 1961 for armed robbery," he 
begins. "Did I do it? Nah, not that one. But I 
wasn't ready to pay no poetic justice. Gee whiz, 
I was just a young man. I'd only been out of the reformatory for a year.

"I got sentenced to 10 years," he says. "That was the first time."

He moved to Austin last year after being chased 
out of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, and some 
friends here offered to help out.

The duplex is more studio than apartment. 
Wilkerson makes the bed next to the dining room 
table every morning. Paper clutter is placed into 
tidy piles set at right angles.

The room is filled with panther statues. There is 
a large wooden one on the floor, the old base of 
a hip 1970s coffee table. Jungle cats stalk across the TV and a shelf.

Photographs, lined neatly on shelves or tables 
and stuck to the refrigerator, depict Black Panthers of the human variety.

Here is Wilkerson next to Geronimo Pratt, a 
Panther organizer who spent 27 years in prison.

Here is Wilkerson standing between two new 
members of the party last year. Their faces are 
fierce, masked by dark Malcolm X glasses. Their fists are raised.

Wilkerson is the one in the middle, smiling.

Pralines surpass their ingredients. Combine 
sugar, butter and milk the wrong way, and you get 
a sticky mess. But in skilled hands, they produce 
a magical confection: buttery but not sickly 
rich, and sweet with a whiff of burned sugar.

Without measuring, Wilkerson pours the assembled 
ingredients into a soupy khaki-colored mixture. 
He places the pot on the stove and begins to stir.

"I was 22 when I got out of prison," he says. "I got married, had a son."

He boxed. "My first fight, I came out looking 
good. But after two rounds, he went to work on 
me. My arms got tired; my legs got tired. He was 
beatin' on somebody who wasn't fighting back."

He retired after a few more fights and took odd 
jobs. In 1970, he was busted for armed robbery again.

"I didn't do it," he insists. "But I know who 
did." The jury sentenced him to 35 years.

 From his fifth-floor cell in the New Orleans 
parish prison, Wilkerson could hear the guards' television set.

"One day I heard the announcer creep into a 
program on the air," he says. "He said there was 
a shootout downtown with what they called 'militants.' "

Among those involved was Donald Guyton, who'd 
grown up with Wilkerson in the Algiers 
neighborhood of New Orleans and had become 
involved with the Panthers. Taken to the same 
parish prison as Wilkerson, Guyton says, he 
started introducing other prisoners to the 
organization. They protested living conditions 
and agitated against prisoner-on-prisoner violence.

"Our message was, just because you're 
incarcerated doesn't mean you have to give up your humanity," he says.

For Wilkerson, the Panthers were as much a 
translation service as anything: "I couldn't 
articulate what I was feeling" ­ a pressurized 
mixture of anger and hopelessness. "It wasn't 
until the Black Panthers stated it that I understood it."

After a short escape, he was sent to Angola 
Prison, where he was placed in solitary 
confinement. He still managed to carry the Black 
Panthers' message, and while he was there, he was 
active in helping file lawsuits and leading 
political discussions for the Panthers' only prison chapter.

A year later, a prisoner was killed, and 
Wilkerson and another man were blamed. During the 
trial, both were shackled, and, after courtroom 
outbursts by the other inmate, their mouths were duct-taped shut.

The Louisiana Supreme Court reversed that 
conviction, based in part on the duct tape. In 
the 1975 retrial, Wilkerson's co-defendant said 
he alone stabbed the man, but it didn't matter. 
Wilkerson was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

90 percent innovation

The mixture on the stove begins to froth, like a 
giant cappuccino. Wilkerson stirs with a 
long-handled wooden paddle, pulling it through 
the pot in lazy circles. The praline thickens. 
The trick is to let the liquid burn enough for 
flavor but not too much, ruining the batch altogether.

"This candy's funny," he says. "It depends on the 
weather. If it's sunshiny, it's nice. If it's too humid, it's not."

Wilkerson was raised in New Orleans by his 
grandmother. Although he'd always had a sweet 
tooth, he learned to make candy in prison. His 
first time behind bars, he watched an inmate 
conjure sweets out of milk from the prison's cows 
and sugar from the cane cut by inmates working on the farm.

In solitary a decade later, Wilkerson began 
experimenting in his cell. He collected butter 
and sugar packets at breakfast; sometimes, other 
inmates or even guards saved ingredients for him 
in exchange for a future taste. At first he tried 
using a "stinger," a homemade heating element 
created from a piece of metal and wires.

Later, he learned that if he rolled toilet paper 
into a coil and then tucked the edges back on 
themselves into a tissue doughnut, he had a sort 
of homemade Sterno that burned hot enough to 
caramelize the sugar. He twisted a towel around 
the can into a handle so he didn't burn his hand. 
He stirred the mixture with a ruler he stripped of paint.

A single batch ­ a couple of pounds ­ burned 
about 30 rolls of toilet paper. He cooked it on 
the toilet seat because it was easy to clean and 
because the entire operation could be swept into 
the toilet if an unfriendly guard wandered by.

He figured out he could peel the top off a Coke 
can to create a tiny pot. When that boiled over, 
he stacked more cans on top, creating a tall cooking tube.

When the candy was ready, he poured the caramel 
into a tray made from a manila folder covered in 
onionskin paper. As that cooled, he poured 
another layer on top and mixed them together with 
pecans, sometimes sneaked in by the guards.

"You got to have cooperation from the people 
who's working," he says. "It's the unity of 
opposites. The officer, you know, he has rules he 
has to go by. But he's got to work for 16 hours, 
too, so he wants to make things easy. And the 
brass walks the same road. So the officer allows 
you to do your little thing, as long as it doesn't infringe on his job.

"I'd usually start on a Friday night and finish 
on a Sunday," he says. "You got to have patience."

Slow and steady

The praline mixture has thickened. Wilkerson 
scrapes the caramel residue off the bottom of the 
pot. The smell of cooking sugar and heated milk pours from the stove.

He spreads pecans over a baking tray. Moving 
fast, he pours the mixture on top of the pecans. 
It spreads slowly, like cake batter.

How does a man pass 29 years in a 6-foot-by-9-foot concrete box?

"I was in prison," Wilkerson says, "but prison wasn't in me."

He did push-ups, jumping jacks, kick-outs, side 
kicks and stomach crunches in the narrow spaces 
of his cell. He paced. He read. He wrote. He 
studied the law. Eventually, what he learned helped him gain a new trial.

"It was a little crack in the door I was trying to creep through," he says.

The witness who'd implicated Wilkerson in the 
prison slaying recanted, saying he didn't see 
Wilkerson stab anyone. The crack widened.

Courts batted his case back and forth, granting 
him new trials and taking them away, declaring 
him innocent and re-proclaiming his guilt. 
Big-name lawyers took up his cause without pay, 
eager to fight what appeared more and more to be a political imprisonment.

He and two other Panther inmates, Albert Woodfox 
and Herman Wallace, who spent the 1970s, '80s and 
'90s in a single room for 23 hours a day, came to 
be known as the Angola Three.

"Even if he was guilty," says George Kendall, a 
New York attorney who has sued Louisiana alleging 
cruel and unusual punishment on Wilkerson's 
behalf, "it doesn't justify" half a lifetime in solitary.

After much technical legal wrangling, prosecutors 
offered a deal: If Wilkerson would not sue them 
for a wrongful conviction, he could go free. He 
walked out of Angola on Feb. 8, 2001.

"Why did it take so long?" he says. "Why did it 
even happen? When they say the wheels of justice 
turn slow, that's crap. I believe justice delayed 
is justice denied. But I also believe justice 
delayed is terrorism. If you're not dying 
imminently, you're dying incrementally."

He pauses, takes a breath. "So, you ask me, 'Why did it take so long?' "

A slow smile. "I'd have to say, I guess the wheels of justice turn slow."

Just right, for now

"Some people, when they cook the candy, it'll 
come out a little sugary," Wilkerson says. "But 
to keep it creamy and less sugary, I do something different."

After pouring the now taffy-thick mixture over 
the pecans, he begins pushing the edges toward 
the middle, folding it back on itself, whipping 
air into the praline before it hardens completely.

When it is the consistency of a soft wax, he 
pulls a sharp paring knife across the surface, 
cutting it into roughly square chunks. Not quite 
caramel, not yet crunchy, it melts gently in the mouth, like maple sugar.

"When I was in prison making candy, guys would 
say, 'You could make a lot of money out there ­ 
if you ever get out.' " In the past couple of 
years, Wilkerson has sold his candies over the 
Internet, calling them Freelines. At $3 a bag, 
he's not challenging Hershey's. But most months, 
the sales cover his living costs: $350 rent, a 
few bucks more for food and utilities.

When he's not melting sugar, he speaks at 
rallies. He addressed a Black Panther reunion. 
He's traveled to more than a dozen countries to 
speak against injustice. He tries to keep the 
story of the Angola Three's two imprisoned members from fading away.

Sixty-four years old and free for the past five, 
Wilkerson's only real asset is his story. "All I 
do is talk," he says. "Just talk."

Ann Harkness, a local activist who has sponsored 
Wilkerson at several events, says she sometimes 
has to keep the question-and-answer sessions from 
turning into a freak show, like midway crowds 
staring at a man on a bed of nails: "You know, 
'Come see the man who spent 30 years in solitary.' "

But Guyton, who is now known as Malik Rahim, 
suspects that people are drawn to Wilkerson not 
for what he endured but for how he emerged.

"For a person to go through 29 years in one of 
the most brutal prisons in America and still 
maintain his sanity and humanity, that's what 
makes people want to listen to Robert."

Being known as an American political prisoner has 
its perks. He is feted and toasted by the network 
of radicals permanently outraged by the 
Establishment. Here's a picture of him with 
socialist historian and author Howard Zinn; 
here's another with U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters of California.

"It's a circle I got introduced to I never 
thought I would," he says. "Not that I wanted to."

In November, heiress and arts patron Ann Getty 
invited him to her San Francisco mansion. A 
living political art installation, he arrived 
each morning at 8:30, made pralines in her 
restaurant-size kitchen all day and left at 4. At 
the end of the two weeks, she presented him with 
a new industrial-size stove. It would take up 
almost his entire living room/bedroom, though, so it has stayed in California.

"A lot of these white activists don't 
understand," Harkness says. "He lives hand-to-mouth."

Walking out of Angola, Wilkerson says, "was like 
getting out of a graveyard. It's white on the 
outside and filled with rotting bones on the inside."

As a brush with death sharpens life, a lifetime 
of confinement can broaden the vision, and 
Wilkerson is reluctant to commit to anything.

"I started seeing the whole world as my stage," 
he says. "Not just New Orleans or Austin." Those 
places, he adds, "are just points of embarkation."

The pralines, too: "If I had something else to 
do, I'd probably do it." Someday, maybe, he'd like to open a restaurant.

But at the moment, he feels comfortable here. The 
small rooms and the predictable pace are 
familiar. The pralines, sweet and undemanding, are cooling on the counter.

"Maybe I did have a plan for when I got out," he says. "And maybe this is it."

edexheimer at statesman.com; 445-1774


The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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