our relationship shortly after a team of National Lawyers Guild attorneys, led by the indomitable Liz Fink, and including my old partner and friend Dan Meyers, settled a twenty-five-year struggle in the federal courts to get some compensation for the killed and wounded “brothers” who were shot and beaten on that September day in the Attica yard. Tony testified about the wounds and beating he received and was awarded thirty thousand dollars out of the eight-million-dollar fund. Along with what Tony received from the Baldwin book deal and his wrongful conviction case, that money soon evaporated and Tony was again in need of financial help. Why I have continued to help support him remains an unresolved question of this memoir. I can trace my doing so back to Bill Rutherford and my inability to come to his rescue. But there must be something more to it than that.
Tony’s travails have never stopped. He has been arrested for driving while black in Maryland. (Cops stop black drivers constantly, search their cars, and arrest them, for whatever they find.) He has been evicted from a Bay of Biscayne beach in Florida where he had wintered in the open air. He has tried to enter Honduras in his jeep without paying whatever fees, taxes, and bribes the local authorities demanded, prompting me to rescue him after receiving a call from an assistant United States consul assigned to that region. Innumerable times repair shops have called seeking money to fix his jeep. A Pennsylvania cop called to tell me he would have to evict Tony from a Walmart parking lot, where his jeep had been towed after breaking down. Most recently he had been arrested for criminal trespass for shopping while black at an auto parts shop. (Storekeepers are quick to accuse black customers of trying to steal.) Those charges have been dismissed, but Tony spent the night in jail before going to court.
Recently, when Tony visited me in my office, still rail straight and strong at seventy-nine, he gave me his business card listing himself as “Djata Samod, Holistic Healer and Spiritual Advisor.” Perhaps that may be part of the answer: Tony, by his very presence, may have been healing me. I told him he would turn eighty next year and could not continue to live outside forever, especially up here in the North. I suggested he talk to his sister. But Tony said, “I’m a Maynard, and the Maynards come from Nevis, and I will go there and be welcome.” “Good idea,” I said.
Then we entered into one of our few conversations about our lives. Tony said, “My passion before that happened to me was to be an actor. After I was released my passion was to always be free, to live free without any restraints, and that is what I have done.” Then he said, “And your passion has been to set people free. We have both lived our passion.”
Perhaps there was some truth to that. My privileged lifestyle locks me in just as Tony believes that our forty-five-year relationship, with all its twists and turns, places an obligation on me to come to his aid so that he may escape from the reality that living places on all but a privileged few and live out his life just as he wants, complete with the hardships and beauty of forever being a wanderer.
But, despite the brutal winter of 2014–2015, Tony was not ready to retreat to Nevis. Instead he wintered in Florida again and returned to New York in the spring, taking up his old “residence” under the Verrazano Bridge connecting Staten Island to Brooklyn. He had just come from Baltimore, where he had spent a week with his sister, Valerie. Tony told me she had just finished renovating her studio. “It’s magnificent,” he said. “She has five houses. Her artwork is all over the city. You must come down to Baltimore to see her.” I told Tony I would do that, as he left my office after having almost hugged the breath out of me.
Thinking about Tony after he left, my irritation at the role he assigned to me in our mutual lives melted away. His passion about Valarie’s accomplishments was real. And perhaps there was a hidden message there. If he could care about her, he could care about me. Sure, he is vain and self-absorbed. But so are all of us, and the little help I have given him was paltry compared to what my white world had