On Our Own
At the time of the joint letter, Heshima was already deep in the underbelly of Pelican Bay. He had been “validated” as a member of the Black Guerrilla Family, a Black collective that Heshima says has been strategically misconstrued as a gang to prevent its true values from being legitimized.
“I was back there in the SHU with them for twenty years and they wasn’t stabbing nobody, or selling drugs, or any of that crap they tried to put out into the public,” Heshima said, his voice still calm and measured. “They were there reading books and articles and teaching the younger brothers.”
Affiliations aside, no one, gang member or otherwise, deserves what the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture called “the severe and often irreparable psychological and physical consequences of solitary confinement.”9 Prisoners in these units were kept in their cells for twenty-three hours a day, only leaving to exercise in isolation in small rooms, divided by concrete walls.
“In the most inhumane conditions that can be produced in an industrialized nation, an indeterminate SHU, a torture unit, these men who had no hope of ever getting out understood something,” Heshima told me. “If we are going to end legal slavery in America, we’d have to liberate ourselves.”
This idea of self-liberation would ultimately lead to Heshima’s blueprint for the Autonomous Infrastructure Mission (AIM), a design for self-supported communities independent of the state. According to its mission statement: “If the institutions which have preserved legal slavery in Amerika continue to be the primary basis of the infrastructure in our communities, the social ills they inevitably produce will continue to perpetuate de facto ‘legal’ dehumanization and exploitation.”
Heshima needed empirical evidence that self-liberation was possible, and he wouldn’t have to wait long, as the same men who had penned the ceasefire letter had already begun developing a plan for freedom.
The four men at the far end, also called the Short Corridor due to its remoteness, were Todd Ashker, Sitawa Jamaa, Arturo Castellanos, and Antonio Guillen. They had been isolated together because the department believed they were high-ranking gang members, with sway over the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Mexican Mafia, and Nuestra Familia, respectively. With little more than a food slot to shout through and cracks in the concrete wall between exercise spaces to relay messages, an unlikely collaboration between the men from rival groups began to form. They redefined their caste, putting themselves in a prisoner “class” rather than in racial enclaves. In 2011 they staged two modest hunger strikes, mostly to test their grit, calculating how much water they needed to keep their hearts working and how much weight they would lose. They spent the next year putting on weight and coordinating with advocacy groups, friends, and family through coded letters and notations in law books to spread the word about the strike. On July 8, 2013, the first day of the strike, 30,000 California prisoners stopped eating.10 The fast lasted fifty-nine days and eventually led to a federal class-action suit that ended indeterminate sentencing in California.11
Back on the phone, a loud noise interrupted the conversation. The guard’s voice, closer this time, muttered something to Heshima, who seemed to be covering the bottom of the handset.
“Hey, I gotta wheel a guy to medical,” he said when he finished with the guard. “Lemme call you right back.”
I was reminded that the liberation Heshima and his fellow hunger strikers earned is limited. When Heshima was released from the SHU back into the general population, he found himself at Kern Valley State Prison, an eleven-hour drive from where he started at Pelican Bay. There he works as a porter, mopping hallways, transporting men to the infirmary, and doing routine maintenance. While it may seem counterintuitive to engage in the system of prison labor rather than resist it, Heshima has been told that refusal to work would land him back in the SHU. Although he acknowledges that the plan he developed in solitary for AIM may not be contingent on his freedom, it is contingent on his ability to communicate with those he’s entrusted with carrying out his mission.
A Labor of Love
Bri Hawkins grew up bouncing around youth homes in the Midwest. Amid a chaotic upbringing, the children who were raised together came to depend primarily on each other. Bri often speaks of those she lived with as her brothers and sisters.
As is common with those placed in group homes—youth in this environment are two and a half times more likely to become involved in the justice system12—Bri and her contemporaries began engaging with what Heshima calls the “underground economy,” a criminalized series of ventures that the unemployed, the uneducated, and the consistently denied participate in for survival.
“If you don’t have a job, or there’s no capital to fund an entrepreneurial enterprise, there’s only one place you can actually make money, and that’s the underground economy,” Heshima explained. “It’s the doorway to a very unique aspect of American culture where the system denies access, pushes people into the underground, then criminalizes that means of survival.”
It was here in the underground that Bri’s radicalization formed. When she was thirteen, she was living in another group home, this one in Chicago. One afternoon a group of kids from the home engaged in a robbery. They dispersed as the police arrived, Bri and her assumed brother Dante dodging into an alley. Dante, a young Black teen who was unarmed, was attempting to scale a fence when a police officer shot him in the back. Bri watched as his lifeless body fell to the ground.
“That’s kind of what sparked my radicalization,” Bri said. “It was definitely a transformative incident in my life.”
After Dante’s death, Bri started engaging in community protests surrounding police homicide and police brutality. She stood with the families of Mike Brown and George Floyd and connected with groups like Families United, a nonprofit that travels the country providing support to families and survivors of police violence. She also connected with various prison abolition groups. (The parallels between police brutality and the dehumanization of Black Americans via incarceration provide much crossover for orgs in this space.) Bri began following social media accounts such as the one operated by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a prisoner-led organization that fights for humane conditions and the preservation of human rights in carceral settings. In addition to organizing inside—providing law books and courses to prisoners across the US— Jailhouse Lawyers Speak has a prolific outreach program, and back in 2019, its Facebook page featured information about Heshima’s blueprint for self-liberation that linked out to a website. As she read the details of Amend the 13th and the Autonomous Infrastructure Mission, Bri’s eyes began to widen.
“I was sitting at these protests watching the same attempts of things trying to be done in the community to effect change and knowing that a piece was missing,” Bri said. “This was the missing piece.”
Bri used the website’s contact form to request more information and connected with Adam Brashere, the national coordinator for AIM.
“Some activists are lip service: they print flyers, but they do little work,” Adam said. “The more time I spent with Bri, I saw she was sincere and that she had a way of sharing our mission with the people in a way they could understand.”
For Bri to start an AIM chapter in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she had established residency, she needed to be walked through the platform: an aggregation of eight distinct community programs designed to eliminate dependency on mainstream power structures.
The Sustainable Agricultural Commune provides access to healthy foods and restores urban ecologies.
The Closed-Circuit Economic Initiative creates collective ownership of businesses and promotes economic circulation within the bounds of the autonomous community.
The Youth Community Action Program and the New Afrikan Math and Science Centers Initiative focus on developing the next generation, educating them on their cultural history and how to further the AIM when their time comes to lead.
The Emergency Response Network provides training and guidelines for responding to community crises, whether a natural disaster or a domestic disturbance.
The Community Safe-Zones Initiative preserves a sense of security for youth, women, and elders, providing shelter and necessities.
The integrity of these zones is protected by the Secure Communities Mandate, which trains community members to serve as a defense force.
The Strategic Release Initiative calls for decarceration, specifically the release of influential elders within the Black liberation ecosystem.
All of these work in conjunction with the Amend the 13th: Abolish “Legal” Slavery in Amerika Movement, a coalition-based national campaign to remove the slavery provision from the 13th Amendment and repeal all civil death laws. The AIM is where oppressed people, enslaved under the 13th Amendment, would find refuge upon release from bondage.
“Amend the 13th is saying you cannot begin to end the institutions upon which legal slavery rests in this country without first abolishing its existence in law,” Adam explained to me. “AIM is saying there is another way of life—that we can police and defend ourselves, that we can educate and feed ourselves—and in so that new way of life you no longer risk falling prey to the trap of the underground.”
While Adam trained Bri on the elements of AIM, she began a dialogue with Heshima directly about history, context, and a deep love of “the people,” those suffering under, and sometimes participating in, oppressive power structures. They spoke every day, and from their collective love blossomed a deep love for each other. They became engaged in March 2023.
“Our bond is something like no other,” Bri said. “We bonded through our love for the people and the struggle that we both willingly fight in every day.”
What was it exactly, I wanted to know, that Bri fell in love with? Was it Heshima’s tall and toned body? His subtle smile—the kind where only one side rises—of a clever man who’s found self-liberation in an environment of deprivation? Was it the brain she picked for inspiration and a deeper understanding of the intricate plan for communal liberation?
“It’s his heart,” Bri said. “With all the sacrifices he’s made and everything he’s done for the people . . . he’s just a remarkable man.”
Like Father, Like Son
Heshima, as previously indicated, is well-read and has developed many aspects of the AIM based on critical analyses of writers like Frantz Fanon, the Black Panther Party’s Fred Hampton, and George Jackson.
“If I picked up George’s torch from where it was laying in his blood and I carried it to 2023—with all the technological advances we’ve had since then—it would look like AIM,” he once told me.
But perhaps his greatest inspiration came from someone closer to home: his father.
In fact, Dudley Denham could have been synonymous with “home” for Heshima. The family moved around a lot when Dudley served in the air force, and Heshima’s mother died by suicide when he was still a baby, likely suffering from postpartum depression at a time when such a thing was misunderstood. Although Dudley remarried eventually, he was the only constant parental figure and role model in Heshima’s life.
