James Enoch Banks

I think I love you more than you do.

James Enoch Banks, Enoch to me, grew up in Gary, Indiana, once a major industrial center (the birthplace of United States Steel Corporation) but one of the most blighted areas in the United States when he was growing up. Despite the fact that he grew up in a loving, Christian home and was smart and a good athlete, he saw himself as a “gangsta” and he acted like one.

Enoch joined the Army to avoid a felony charge in Indiana, was stationed at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas, and ended up being convicted in Texas of Aggravated Robbery with a 28-year sentence. He served eight days less than twenty years, most of the time in the Torres Unit* near Hondo.

Enoch continued to act like a gangsta after he was incarcerated. After about four years in prison, the daily brutality in prison began to wear on him, to, of all things, begin to soften his heart. He couldn’t change the brutality encompassing him and he couldn’t escape the pain resulting from the brutality.

Several years later, Enoch received two letters from his nine-year old son—one that said “Daddy, I think I love you more than you do” and the other asking Enoch what he planned to do with the rest of his life.

These letters turned Enoch around. He began to see that he was not the person he believed himself to be, that, in actuality, he was a child of God, created in the image of God. He asked himself how he ended up in prison. As he began to unravel the mess his life had become, he got in touch with the life he could have by treating himself and those around him with respect and dignity. He got in touch with the power of hope.

Enoch became an anomaly in prison, a living witness to what is possible. He developed a course—The Men’s Workshop—that he taught in the common room in his dormitory to his fellow men in white**. More on The Men’s Workshop in a future post. Enoch wrote short powerful essays, which he shared with his fellow men in white and which gained wide readership. Most of those essays, accompanied by prison art, are now online at www.enochsays.com  More on Enoch Says in a future post.

I was given the privilege of having Enoch in my family at the Christian retreat I attended in 2017. He is the man mentioned in my post titled “And what do you think?” and the man identified in “Banana Pudding.” He says he is my blackest nephew and I’m his whitest uncle.

*The Torres Unit is a Texas state prison located near Hondo, Texas.

**In Texas prisons, all inmates wear white.