eddie conway is central to my first memories.used to take me to, when it was open, the baltimore city penitentiary to see eddie conway. i was talking to my dad about this recently. from the time i might have been one or two years old. i mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of eddie conway. that was a huge, huge, huge influence on me, i mean, when you talk about like this notion of, just going back to your question, of violence, knowing that was present. and, you know, i had this conversation with my dad recently. i asked him, i said "well, why , did you take me into a prison? why would you take a three-year-old, four-year-old child into a prison? and my memories of this are mostly of being bored and seeing the gates and, you know, the kinds of things that children will remember. and he said, "i wanted you to see the face of the enemy. i wanted you to see what you were up against." and so, in many ways, everything i've done as a journalist, up until and including this book, really begins like r