Herman Wallace’s Dream House
From 1972 until 2009, Herman Wallace spent the vast majority of his time in solitary confinement at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. Released three days before his death from cancer, he set a record for most time spent in solitary confinement in the United States (unbelievably, his record was recently broken). During his long confinement, Herman, with the help of an artist named Jackie Sumell — who corresponded with him from 2001 through 2009, becoming his close friend — constructed a house in his own memory palace, a dream house, an imaginary house. Herman’s House was shaped in his ongoing correspondence with Sumell, who built a mock-up of the interior of this dream home, as well as an architect’s scale model of the building, which were placed on exhibit at a number of museums in the United States and Europe. In Home in America: On Loss and Retrieval, Thomas Dumm discusses Wallace’s experience of solitary confinement — and his courage and creativity in battling his isolation —which might serve us as an inspiration during the confinement so many millions of us are enduring now, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wallace described in detail various iterations of the house. At least twice he wrote narratives for what was to be a guided tour of virtual versions of the house. To gain a sense of how detailed his understanding of the house was, one can review the following comment he made concerning the first floor of the house after reviewing drafts of some of the CAD mock-ups:
Let me get right to it. 2-car garage — instead of empty boxes you want to hang hose pipe on the wall — 2 spare tires in both sides and the cars should be parked in them. Without the cars no one would figure it’s a garage. — In the pantry, there should be ONIONS, POTATOES, TABASCO, various bottles of WINE. The hobby shop; yes, old typewriters, speakers I see you got a pot of beans under a fire. That is alright. Put a sprinkler in ceiling — you want to bring in refrigerator — what is a kitchen without a refrigerator? Let’s dress the table with a plate of food by each chair — small basket of hot rolls. Put a skillet under a fire making shrimp and oyster gravy. — The conference room is the Bomb. I think we should lay a small notebook in every spot where someone should sit.
The point here is to note less the specific details than the fact of them — though it is interesting that Wallace was insisting on the preparation of traditional south Louisianan cuisine. It is also interesting that there remained enough of a political actor in him that he imagined being able to hold conferences. One wonders, with whom would he confer? Putting this question aside, for Wallace, such detailed interest indicates his familiarity with every room of the house. We can also note this attention to detail in his descriptions that he prepared for the two versions of his audio tour of the house. A condensed version illustrates how he imagined his walk-through of the place. (This version is taken from his April 2003 written tour guide.) He begins with background on himself, beginning with his joining the Black Panthers in 1971, then briefly describes his time in solitary as a consequence of his membership. He mentions the beginning of his relationship with Sumell (though he gets one detail wrong, suggesting it started before his comrade King was released, although her involvement came about as a result of her hearing King speak in San Francisco). Wallace imagines the approach to the house: “The drive connects with flagstone and brick walkway to matching indoor walls and chimney.” The house is built of wood and surrounded with plants because they provide food and oxygen (Wallace once had mentioned that it was impossible to grow anything within the steel and concrete environment that was his cell). The house has a wraparound porch. Viewers enter the first door, and on the right is a salon, the next room is a library, again in a room to the right, and visitors then proceed down a long hallway, passing yet another room on the right, a guest room. At the end of the hall to the right is a garage, but before that there is a pantry with two large storage areas. The back door of the pantry opens out onto a large patio, which is shaded by a very large oak tree (oak to withstand hurricane winds). Adjacent to the pantry is a hobby shop with various tools. To the southwest side of the shop is a spiral staircase leading to the second floor, but the shop also has another door that leads to a kitchen, which has yellow walls and contains a table for four people, sinks, built-in counters and cabinets, several microwave ovens, a double-door refrigerator, tile flooring, and all sorts of cooking implements. A swinging door from the kitchen leads to the dining / conference room, with a polished wooden floor, a wall for video screening, a table that seats sixteen, a wall with room for five large portraits of revolutionary heroes, and three large windows overlooking a flower garden. To the far west side is the living room, with an L-shaped sofa and an entertainment center. An opening leads to the west wing of the house, and the hallway has portraits in honor of prisoners of war and individuals missing in action. There is a bathroom with a shower, and at the end of the hall a guest room. Adjacent to this room, visitors find themselves at the base of a spiral staircase that opens up to a master bedroom, equipped with beautiful African-themed furniture, and a master bath that features a six-by-nine-foot bathtub (the same foot- print as Wallace’s cell in solitary). The bath is accessed privately by way of the master bedroom. There are sliding glass doors that lead to a rooftop garden for flowers and vegetables. The chimney is here as well (as Wallace had tellingly noted twice previously). The chimney actually is an escape route from the bedroom and from the pantry below, leading to a tunnel beneath the patio and under the swimming pool. Wallace is always thinking about escape. He writes, “Beneath the bottom of the pool’s concrete floor is the bunker for safety measures. If attacked, seriously under attack, the house can be set afire to with more than enough time for you and your family to escape un harmed.”
If we trace the path that Wallace asks us to follow, we find ourselves walking through something akin to a labyrinth. The two matching long hallways, the burrow-like rooms, the doors leading to doors, the enclosed spaces throughout the first floor all create a claustrophobic atmosphere, that is, they would do so for someone who had not spent the bulk of his life in solitary confinement. The relatively open second floor can only be reached by a spiral stair- case contained in a corner of the pantry / hobby room. And, perhaps most important, the secret passage to an underground bunker implicitly summarizes the story of a man who is taking every precaution not to be sent back to prison ever again, even as he suspects there will always be forces that would seek him out so as to force such a return, or even worse.
