WILLIE EARL SCOTT: The Sophisticated Suffrage of The Messianic
In the long history of black people in the world, there have been many who were successful at certain crafts. Most often, many have been robbed of their achievements, unheralded, or stolen before their time. One such person that fits this description is Willie Redd. Named as a child Willie Earl Scott he grew up in what was considered a middle-class family in Birmingham Alabama located in the American South and found himself surrounded by drugs, violence and addiction, himself becoming a shooter who was in and out of institutions before being placed on Alabama's death row at age 19 for the questionable killing of child family associate to effectively end his rambunctious life, only to have the deceased child's mother perform something of an accusatorial recant in a drug-filled rant. Her brother would later go even further in a letter where he apologizes after stating that he knew Willie Earl Scott was innocent following his conviction.
Scott, better known as Willie Redd, a self-taught musician, became a prolific African American writer who wrote a dozen novels under his own name Willie Earl Scott and several pseudonyms in his brief literary career. But because of the controversy surrounding his alleged crimes in the US, it was only when he published with the legendary Editions du Seuil here in Paris that he began to get noticed. On death row since 2002 for the 1999 crime which many now believe he did not commit, he earned stripes in his previous life as a soldier in the southern streets as a member of the notorious bloods gang when it had not yet fully caught on in urban ghettos and even wrote the gang's first---and, to this day, it's only---official document of doings, devoutly known as the bloods bible. This bold act was considered both a stroke of brilliance as well as his undoing in the gang, gaining the teenage Willie Redd Scott both national notoriety and enemies within the gang. Willie Redd was an active blood a grand total of six years, from 1992 to 1997, creating several standalone blood sets and spreading the gang throughout the American South to cities that included Atlanta and New Orleans.
Like several felonious writers published first in Paris, as "Cotton In Harlem" author Chester Himes and the great Jean Genet, Willie Redd turned to his pen to speak his power. In addition to gangsterism and criminology, he had a hook for business and philosophy. In and out of various jails since age twelve, he wrote poetry, music and the first edition of the bloods bible during that time.
While wearing prison whites awaiting trial for a capital crime in 1999, he found his muse when he discovered the writings of the ultra-cool, legendary pimp and raconteur Robert "Iceberg Slim" Beck---with his seminal book “Pimp”---and the semi-autobiographical novel “Whoreson" by the great Donald Goines, who himself was inspired by Iceberg Slim novels while serving time in Indiana's Jackson prison. Willie Redd's first tome hit like a mini earthquake in the Parisian underground. “Heaven and Hell on Earth," by Willie Earl Scott, was released in 2004 by the renowned publisher Editions du Seuil which had little experience in African American works. Scott was given a $1,000 advance with few expectations. The book blew like a literary bomb, pissing off or delighting everyone that eyed its pages.
Its protagonists were American twins Gabriel and Lucifer, biracial, semi-supernatural and polar opposites abandoned at birth but almost destined to shape the polar worlds around them. The book would touch practically every real-life hot button issue to do with religion, race, taboo sex and politics. It expressed essential degrees of humanity and pure power in cities and capitals from that of France to Fiji. It turned over every stone and spilled every societal secret that various sects, gangs, groups, states and governments surely wanted kept hidden. Deliciously bloody and incestuous, "Heaven and Hell on Earth" by Willie Earl Scott was more combustible than Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code."
"Heaven and Hell on Earth" would go on to sell over 200,000 copies in France alone. Clocking in at over a quarter million words, it was bigger than all nine of Iceberg Slim's books combined, and to many in Europe better than anything a Goines or the great Genet had ever written. Still on America's death row, Scott allegedly fought and wrote at a frantic pace from 2005 to 2008, allotted to him in this vale of tears; publishing a dozen paperback originals under pen names in order to beat back bans and boycotts.
Writing like a man staring death in the face, he could turn out a novel in as little as three months or as long as three years. His style is polished, his syntax smooth and often times sexual, though his words generally depended on the language of the locale shot through with urban ebonics and unofficial dialect as well as the refinement of sophisticated societies. His novels are about people of every stripe and walks of life, and almost never wholly fictional.
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Between half and one million of Scott's books have been sold in Europe, though his work did not receive much critical attention until the official and unofficial release of his hip hop album "Caged Bird Sang," banned, rerecorded and rereleased thrice between 2016 and 2019, lastly in coordination with the French debut of the docu-movie "Damu Godda" on Amazon, which is set to make Scott a cultural phenomenon. Unknown to a generation of rap-influenced African Americans across the pond, France has quietly adopted the long-incarcerated writer as part of their cultural heritage. Scott's works reflect the anger and frustration and intelligence and brilliance of a minority and master craftsman both raised and rejected by his own, only to reach new artistic peaks while close to defeat.
Willie Redd's hip-hop as an art form is considered a direct descendant of Willie Earl Scott the writer, both having a major influence on Willie the Business.
The ultimate tragedy of Scott's life and confinement is when he was sentenced to die in November of 2002, under circumstances that many consider suspicious, he loss both his family and a future, potential fortunes as well as a potential family of his own. Some now believe the underage victim in the capital case was killed in 1999 by her mother, whose second child also passed under suspicious circumstance the following year. Close to $50,000 in insurance policies were paid to the mother who would go on and die in an accidental drug overdose in 2004. Scott, who maintain his innocence and never once wavered, remains on death row.
Since long before the founding of the US Republic, a country whose Constitution deemed African Americans as 3/5ths of a person for the purpose of establishing the apportionment of Congressional representation but did not give them any legal or social rights, black males not unlike Scott have been targets due to their race, their gender, their rebellion as well as their intellect. Yet with great articulation the renegade wunderkind known as Willie Redd has fought these whirling battles with his artistry.
Categories: African American, black issues, blues, GOP, history, Music, Obama, police brutality, Politics, racism, Republican
Tags: African American, Willie Redd, Willie Earl Scott, black authors, books, crime, death row, gangsters, Inacell Records, GlobalStorm, justice, Legacy, Alabama, Caged Bird Sang, Heaven and Hell on Earth, Birmingham
None of us ever want to stand as an example of how not to write, want to commit a crime for which there is no forgiveness.