NEW
Library Project
Volume 1, Number 2 - Fall 2002
Finding
Release Through Reading
Interview with Milton
Whitlock
Milton
Whitlock grew up in Atlantic City, in a family of fourteen children. When
he dropped out of school in ninth grade, he was reading at only a
third-grade level. He first grasped the multiplication tables while
serving time for burglary in a juvenile detention center. Later there were
drugs, additional crimes, more time in jail—a total of 30 years. In
1999, while in a recovery program at the Trenton Rescue Mission, Whitlock
reluctantly joined a People and Stories group facilitated by Patricia
Andres.
“What
I remember most vividly about Milton’s participation,” says Andres,
“was his response to the moment in Alice Walker’s story, ‘Beauty:
When the Other Dancer Is the Self,’ when her daughter, turning
Walker’s deepest wound into her most precious gift, says, ‘Mommy,
there’s a world in your eye.’ I asked the group what she meant. Milton
looked directly at me and said, ‘When you look in my eyes, you can see
my past, you can see my pain, you can see my joy. You can see who I
am.’”
Now
Whitlock works full-time at Trenton’s Albert M. (Bo) Robinson Education
and Training Center, in a program for men released from prison. He is
working on his certification for drug and alcohol counseling.
What
do you remember about school?
I have always been interested in learning stuff, but it was always hard
for me. My fourth-grade teacher, Miss Cole, was the one who really gave me
the understanding of how to read. If you read a sentence, and you could
not pronounce a word, she would say, “Put a word there that you think
should go there.” That helped me a lot. She also taught us how to use
the dictionary.
Tell
me about your experience in People and Stories.
More than the experience of expressing what I felt about the stories, it
helped my reading comprehension. Even when I’m reading alone, in my
mind, I will discuss the story with myself. It gave me a chance to talk
about what I was hearing in the stories. I would sometimes make comments
that I didn’t really believe were true, just to spark other people and
see what they would think.
As
you read, you have to find areas in the story you can quote and make your
points form that. I’d go back and pick out those parts that would hit me
really strongly.
You
once led a People and Stories session. What was that like?
I couldn’t do all the talking. I needed to find a way to ask the type of
questions to get guys to talk about the story [“Abalone Abalone
Abalone,” by Toshio Mori]. I wanted to talk about the abalone shells,
how the guy had a collection of them, how he took care of them, and turn
it into a real-life situation: What would the guys want to leave their own
children if they were no longer here?
Which
story touched you most?
I remember reading a story about a little girl who had a really bad scar
on her face [Walker’s “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self”].
It showed the young girl who learned to overcome the adversity of having
her face disfigured. I wound up doing the things I did because I
couldn’t look inside of myself and find my personal beauty. In recovery,
a lot is based on the fact that people cannot find good things about
themselves. They need to medicate themselves in order to feel good. One
thing I work on today is just giving myself love.