I never knew Chuck Wilson as a free man. I never saw him walk down the street, run from the rain, bundle against the cold, play in the floor with his children or stroke his wife’s arm.
When I was 4, he violently forfeited his rights to those freedoms. In 1968, he returned to the store he and his brother, Eddie, were robbing to shoot the owner to death for shooting Eddie in the hand. It was brotherly love gone absolutely haywire.
They’d gotten away, but Eddie, greedy for what he thought the man had withheld, went back for more. The man, seething at the brash stupidity of two young men violating his life’s work, took aim at Eddie and hit him in the hand.
Chuck went back for his brother, for retribution and for payback. He went back and ended three lives. Back then in Hamilton, that fiasco, Chuck’s subsequent flight to Canada, his surrender to police custody and his early years in prison were the stuff of black folklore befitting a Zora Neale Hurston novel.
Amazingly, during his sentences at Lucasville and the London Correctional Institute, all of his brothers and even his son have done time along side him.
Add it all up, and the tragedy enveloping this family seems surreal, almost nightmarish. (See the family’s story, “Brothers’ Keeper,” on page 21.)
But for a kid on the other side looking in, there was a sexy intrigue to their nightmare.
Knowing Chuck was like watching John Shaft without the popcorn. It was like reading about Billy the Kid minus the glamorization of his violent acts. Chuck was the manifestation of the disintegration of and fledgling attempts at rescucitating a family with the same last name as mine but who couldn’t have been farther away from what I’d always been taught was the definition of family.
That didn’t make my Wilsons any better than their Wilsons — not by a long shot. It just made us different. It made us others.
And that for me — sheltered, spoiled, fragile and precocious — was a good thing. Because Chuck’s sisters, Lena and Malinda, and their six brothers have always been part of my life. They knew about me before I knew about myself.
They are signposts in my childhood. Rudolph would sing “Betcha by Golly, Wow” in his tender tenor falsetto, laughing while Gilbert, Eddie and Romeo imitated their curmudgeonly father, J.E. Or Lena’s irreverent and insane flights of imagination and her sandpaper, Jimmy Durante-like laughter would trip me off.
Collectively, they taught me how to vibe with people different from myself and they reassured my wild imagination, one that others probably will never understand.
So really this week’s cover story has been all our lifetimes in the making. I just was never mature enough to handle the subject matter. There were many times I wanted to write it, but doubted its relevance. Further, until now I never wrote for a publication that allowed such journalism.
A family’s survival is always relevant. But you just don’t mine someone else’s experiences without paying something in return. This was an emotional boomerang for me and the Wilson women I spoke with.
When I saw Chuck’s mug shot morph onto my computer screen, I was overwhelmed by dread. I was near the end of gathering information for the story and was verifying prison records of the Wilson brothers.
I hate the wallop of responsibility that love packs.
I squinted at his now-bloated face to find the man who was a newly converted Black Muslim named El Rashid during the early 1970s of my girlhood. The basketball-sized Afro has faded into a closely shorn head with a receding hairline. The fire in his eyes is extinguished.
His eyes used to glint and his smile bordered on a wise-ass grin that seemed to hide a punchline. Now his expression is one of resolve. Not as in “Oh, well,” but more like, “OK, then.”
It’s a miracle he can hold his head up at all. I mean, what pose do you affect for your mug shot in a state penitentiary where you’ll be spending the rest of your life? What’s that look supposed to be?
Chuck is the last of the Wilson men still locked up. He’s evolved from Black Muslim to born-again Christian. He remarried his once-estranged wife, and he saves the souls of the fellow prisoners who are as broken as he once was.
The punishment of losing years of freedom has been as subtly brutal as a padded hammer. He’s not been able to pay for gasoline at the pump, to order books, clothing or CDs from the Internet or to send an e-mail.
I didn’t get to speak directly to him while writing this week’s cover story. But I reconnected with a family whose pains, personalities and missteps, otherwise a world away from me, helped me remember just how close we once were.
And how close we are once again.
This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2001.