I spent 20 years incarcerated in Louisiana, and I’ve come to appreciate how ubiquitous birds are behind bars. 

As PJP contributor Alex Friedmann wrote about birds earlier this year: They’re a powerful symbol of freedom. I used to tell my friends that the birds — who constantly covered our recreation yards and used the weight piles as their personal restroom facilities — were the real “jailbirds.” 

All of the birds — sparrows, starlings, grackles, buzzards, crows and ravens — were a blessing. Some came and sat with me if I was very still. Others spoke and sang while I listened. One winter day, I was feeding the flock in the yard with my hoodie on, and the birds encircled me. Later, my friend Robert — a good Catholic — said, “You looked like St. Francis feeding the birds.” I took it as a great compliment. 

Despite the fact that the birds could go anywhere else to flock and feed, they always came to us. They ate the things that we would not: the cooked rice in the so-called  jambalaya, the concoction that was called bread pudding, and even diced and boiled peas, carrots and corn.

My maternal grandparents instilled in me a love for birds when I was a young boy, and it stayed with me throughout my time in prison. The birds delivered a lesson in patience every time they waited for us to be released to chow. Even though they had no idea when we were coming, they knew that we were going to feed them. They demonstrated a familiar hierarchy when the larger birds used their size to intimidate the smaller ones, taking away as much of the food as possible. 

One day, I learned a lesson about hope. After watching the birds jostle for space on the chain-link fence, I realized that I would not be stuck on the bottom wire of life forever.

The birds also allowed me to process grief, and remorse, in a different way. When I was inside, I read Stephen King’s “The Dark Half,” a 1989 horror novel in which enormous flocks of sparrows act as “psychopomps,” or spirits that escort newly deceased souls from Earth to the afterlife. 

I came to understand the jailbirds around me as spiritual as well. It was like they were there to guide those of us who were “civilly deceased” to the “afterlife,” or the life outside of prison.  

When my best friend, John Farmer — or Farmer John, as we all liked to call him —  died of a diabetic coma just 177 days before his release, I imagined that sparrows carried him to a better, eternal life. John was also an avid supporter of the flocks, and we watched them together for 15 years.

Today, the birds remind me of where I came from, and I think about them often. I think about how others still feed them as they sit and sing their songs of freedom. Here in Idaho, there are different kinds of birds, like the ducks and geese that gather along the river near my home. This week, I am putting a hummingbird feeder outside my bedroom window. 

I am settling into a new life, but after only two years of freedom, the memories of the bad times still haunt me. When they do, I remember my friends still there, and the birds who always came to visit when no one else would.