After traveling six hours, Hashim saw the road sign: Attica Correctional Facility. He knew of the riots there in 1971. It was one of the bloodiest prison confrontations in American history. Thirteen hundred prisoners had rebelled, taken over the prison, and held forty guards hostage. They’d issued a list of demands, which included calls for improvements in living conditions as well as educational and training opportunities. They’d even entered into negotiations with state officials, but negotiations failed and state police and National Guard troops seized the prison. Forty-three individuals, including ten hostages, were killed. It was believed a group of Black Muslims were responsible for the uprising. But the Black Muslims were exonerated when it was revealed they’d succeeded in preventing any revenge attacks against the unpopular corrections officers who’d been contained in what they called the “hostage circle.” They also made them as comfortable as they could under the circumstances. They gave clothing to all the hostages who’d been stripped.

The occurrence at Attica was legend.

The convoy approached the Lock Gates of Attica. The vehicles stopped in front of the huge, thick black metal doors. The agents and National Guardsmen jumped out of the cars and swirled around Hashim as he got out of the Humvee.

Hashim entered inside Attica’s walls via an exterior concrete catwalk.

Bars of cold steel greeted them as the soldiers and guards led Hashim through the internal hall of C Block.

The chains around his feet grated along pockmarked concrete. Bleak thoughts of his father, and the sweet but passive voice of his mother arose as if from the grave. He had been stripped of: stature, power, invincibility, and hope. What took its place was something he’d always dismissed as weakness. Something he now realized was all there was to embrace—the crumbling of hate.

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The small Attica prison visiting room they met in had a chill that seeped from the mortar of its grim stone walls. Hashim was here with two lawyers assigned to defend him. They’d been here a few hours awaiting his arrival. The government wasn’t wasting time. They sat in cheap chairs across a much-abused table—Hashim on one side, the duo on the other.

“Your surrender could work in our favor,” said the man with a smoker’s voice. His name was Carl Robinson.

“First thing we’re asking for are pretrial discovery materials,” the other lawyer, Terrence Keyser, said. He was younger than Robinson, with much more curiosity. “That’s not going to make the prosecution happy, to have to hand over that kind of sensitive information, but it’s the law.”

The men talked of how they figured the prosecution would come at them and how they planned to defend Hashim.

“I have nothing to defend,” Hashim said.

“This is America. We have what we call, ‘The Rule of Law,’” Keyser told him.

“I know what that is. But I will speak for myself.”