A BREED APART

Biting autobiography of a young black man who despised his middle-class upbringing and turned to crime in a futile effort to break free, but ultimately came to terms with his self-destructive behavior.

At age three, the author had already set a pattern that would haunt his life: “I refused to follow rules; it had to be my way or no way.” His father was a well-paid executive, and the family lived in a tony Chicago suburb, but Woods was confrontational and defensive. His memoir stingingly conveys the grief and madness he felt as a black child in an all-white environment. As his horizon began to encompass a broader black experience, his parents were unyielding; he was put into a foster home, then a mental institution when he could no longer be controlled. Admittedly lazy, Woods started to look for fast money, and by the time he was a sophomore in high school, he was committing armed crimes. “On the day of my high school graduation, I was planning a bank robbery,” he writes. The outlaw life appealed, but Woods was green and stupid; he ended up in various jails, where all he learned was how to be a more effective criminal. Yet he also sensed something that set him apart from his cellmates: they were desperate; he was an adventurer. During his second prison stretch, Woods’s thoughts turned to the nature of black crime, the intents and purposes of prisons and the criminal-justice system. Jail was simply a breeding ground to sharpen the lawless mindset, he realized, and he had managed to turn off his conscience. He decided to turn it back on, but what flicks that switch of conscience, Woods reports, is elusive. He doesn’t necessarily see much hope for black men in a society of institutionalized racism.

A cautionary tale with a happy ending that is far from the norm; only societal overhaul, Woods suggests, can effect mass rehabilitation.