Mr. Holland’s masterpiece: Resurrecting a life

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

Kindergarten had ended on that November day in 1983, and as soon as Christian Bolden’s mom parked the family car in the driveway of their San Antonio home, her 5-year-old son raced inside to turn on “Looney Tunes.”

His mom hadn’t come inside yet, but Christian will never forget the sound of the screened front door slamming shut. A man pointing a gun to his mother’s head dragged her into the kitchen, where he raped her in front of her child.

Thirty-seven years later, Bolden, now 42 and an associate professor of criminology and justice at Loyola University New Orleans – and with the hindsight of a doctorate in sociology – easily can designate the points of trauma where his young life devolved into adolescent hell and, a short while later, into five years of real hell in Texas prisons for gang-related activity.

The things kids remember: Bolden was shuffled among two elementary schools and two middle schools before ending up at 4,000-student Judson High School. The 1980s were a time when “zero tolerance” was in pedagogical vogue.

“I’m a kid, and I don’t really understand why they don’t understand me,” Bolden said, trying to make sense of his younger self. “They even tried to put me in gifted and talented, but I wasn’t socialized the same way. So, I ended up getting pretty severe sanctions like being put in a room by myself for weeks at a time with no interaction with anybody. And then, you’re getting kicked out of school on a constant basis. That leaves you with nowhere to go but the streets.”

And into the arms of his gang brothers, where he gained a sense of self-worth and belonging. Gang violence exploded in San Antonio in the 1990s.

“I think in 1988 there was one drive-by shooting reported, then it just exploded a few years later to 1,200 or so,” Bolden said.

By the time Bolden went to prison at 17 – you can read the details in his first book, “Out of the Red: My Life of Gangs, Prison and Redemption” – his gang credentials, like a billboard on his forehead, followed him inside the cell doors.

“I lost hope in the very beginning,” Bolden recalled. “I didn’t think I was going to make it. I really didn’t expect to live very long. It was very scary. It was very chaotic. It was very, very violent. But over time, I just gained the resolve that I was going to make it. My hope was trusting God that my life could be something different, that my life could be used for the benefit of others.”

His epiphany arrived like a thunderclap. About halfway through his sentence, after already having resolved spiritually to change his life, Bolden took a course called “Basic Progress.” It was taught by a man named Jay Holland Jr., a man the kids called “Coach,” a man Bolden has tried unsuccessfully to track down through every social media trick he knows in order to tell him he was the person who helped transform his life.

“I’ve looked him up on social media, but there are a lot of people by that name, and it’s not him,” Bolden said. “The program he taught was transformative in mental thinking, and he ended up leading you down a spiritual path. He was a tough-love guy. Faith and hope are the key elements people need.”

One of Holland’s illustrations is seared into Bolden’s memory: Holland drew the picture of a tall mountain, with the prisoners trapped at the foot of the hill – the “bottom of society” – trying to claw their way to the top.

“Because you have this history,” Holland told the inmates, “you can never reach the level of being normal again. Nobody will allow that. Nobody will trust you. Nobody believes in you. So, you only have the choice of staying at the bottom or going to the very top – being so exceptional that people can’t question what you’re doing.”

“From that point on,” Bolden said, “I resolved that I had to be exceptional. I had to do everything I could. And that’s what I did.”

When Bolden last heard the prison doors shut behind him in Huntsville, Texas, he was 22. His mom drove four hours to pick him up at the prison gates. When he bounced around various prisons during his five years of imprisonment, his mother had written him a letter every three days, visited him weekly when he was close by and monthly when he was far off, and later became a champion for the rights of inmates’ families.

“I don’t even know how to explain (that car ride),” Bolden said. “I had come of age in prison. I left (home) as a child, really, and came back as an adult, but I really had to learn how to be an adult in the free world. I just couldn’t believe that I had gone through all this and was finally out.”

The reality of post-prison life stung. Bolden applied for every position he could, “but I couldn’t even get a job at fast-food places” when potential employers discovered his past.

“It was constant rejection, over and over and over again, which is really defeating,” Bolden said.

That prompted him to think of going back to school, where even there, his past often got his applications deep-sixed.

“A lot of schools never acknowledged my application or even wrote me back,” Bolden said. “They put me in some type of limbo.”

Eventually, Bolden qualified for college and then pursued his master’s and doctoral studies in sociology.

“Once I got my Ph.D., then the doors really just started opening,” Bolden said. “I ended up doing some research for the FBI. When they called me and I told them about my history, they said they would call me back, and they did. They were really impressed with what I had done.”

Bolden and his wife, Dr. Rae Taylor, who also teaches at Loyola in the area of domestic violence, are the parents of two children.

“This is a dream. I love my life,” Bolden said. “I could never have imagined that this would be where I am today.”

As he reflects on his “life for others” – a key tenet in the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola – Bolden can’t help but wonder about the shared pain of those he has left behind. He interviewed dozens of former San Antonio gang members for his book, but he knows that so much agony could have been avoided in their lives, and his, if they had not fallen through the cracks of the educational system or had someone who truly believed in him, as Bolden had in Coach Jay Holland Jr.

“I think education is the key,” Bolden said. “The majority of prisoners have seventh- or eighth-grade education, and there are a lot who are functionally illiterate. Then, there’s the stuff that is very traumatic in their lives that needs to be addressed. And then, they need opportunities.”

Jay Holland Jr., wherever he is, pointed Bolden toward the mountaintop. His “Basic Progress” course urged the incarcerated never to stop putting one foot in front of the other. In so many ways, Bolden’s life has become Mr. Holland’s Opus.

pfinney@clarionherald.org