Portland State Magazine Spring 2014

SPRING 2014 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 11 Alumnus Mitchell Jackson found his voice and a path leading away from drug dealing and prison. MITCHELL JACKSON stands at a podium in front of a group of hardened prisoners who are leaning back in their chairs, arms crossed, jaws stiff. He’s reading from the autobiographical novel he started in prison, The Residue Years , published last year. As Jackson proceeds through the prologue, the inmates lean forward, resting their elbows on their knees, nodding to the prose. Jackson ends: “This place ain’t built for dreams.” His audience applauds. This scene shot at Salem’s Santiam Correctional Institution is from a documentary Jackson took on once his book was complete. The film is also titled The Residue Years . “One guy said to me after a reading, ‘What you wrote is exactly how I feel,’” Jackson says of the scene. “That’s exactly what I wanted.” Jackson, 38, made the film to document his journey from young Portland drug dealer through college and graduate school at Portland State, to published author and college instructor in New York City. As a young black man in 1990s northeast Portland, his start wasn’t unique, but his path has been. “I feel like my book is my salvation,” Jackson says. “I was an average black man”—growing up in a single-parent home amid adults who were in and out of prison, then selling drugs and serving his own time, a fate that disproportionately falls on young black men in America. “But the book makes me more than average.” This year Jackson plans to debut his documentary at film festivals. He’s finishing a collection of short essays exploring the shame of manipulation and deceit, titled Head Down, Palm Up , an expression from his stepfather, who as a pimp, told it to his prostitutes. JACKSON’S LIFE as a writer began at PSU, where he earned a bachelor’s in speech communication in 1999 and a master’s in writing in 2002. His college experience was distinctive: He attended on a scholarship for under-represented minority students, and on the side he was a drug dealer “hustling” crack cocaine. Jackson was 15 years old when he started selling crack. Stick-thin and baby-faced, he had people stealing his drugs before an uncle who had been a big-time dealer in the 1970s and ’80s showed him the ropes, Jackson says. “That’s when things took off.” He hustled through high school. Childhood friends in the documentary say they couldn’t believe that “Square Bear Mitch”—known for his intelligence and love of basketball— was dealing. But a life among drugs was familiar to him: When he was 10 years old his mother started experimenting with crack and became an addict, serving time in prison and rehab. “I justified that by saying at least Mitchell had 10 years with me,” his mother says in the film. Steve Lawrence gave Jackson his first pills to sell. In the documentary, Jackson visits his old friend in prison, where he’s serving 17 years, and Lawrence diagnoses their choices: “You needed a father figure,” he says. Lawrence’s father and grand- father were “pimping and hustling” through his childhood. Jackson’s stepfather was a pimp and did time for robbery. “He was dad,” agrees Jackson. Michael McGregor, PSU English professor who had Jackson in graduate writing classes, says students from less-than-perfect backgrounds bring a diversity of experience and realness to the classroom. “It forces other students to think beyond the smallness of their white, middle-class background, ” McGregor says. “Even struggles of grammar and punctuation are indicative of real- world problems,” McGregor says. While college is valorized as a way out of difficult circum- stances, for Jackson school was a connection outside the underworld in which he remained. “I felt very much like a student,” he adds, “except on days when I took drugs to school.” As a dealer, Jackson was making $4,000 a night—“the kind of money that no degree I was going to earn could make me,” he says. At 19 he had accumulated $20,000 in cash; he consid- ered investing it. “Then I went out and bought a Lexus,” he says. WR I T T E N B Y SARA HOT TMAN P HOTOGRA P HY B Y J OHN R I CARD