gage Eight THE MICHIGAN DAILY SUNDAY MAGAZINE
February 20, 1977
The
(Continued from Page 3)
boundaries of friendship. The
young woman quickly let Wilson
in on her bewildering desire to
die, and despite Wilson's at-
tempts at assuaging her trou-
bles, she continued to focus her
morbid wish on the newcomer
to Ann Arbor.
"I was trying to help the
young lady with her problems,
which I found myself, through
the years, to be good at," said
Wilson in his soft Kentucky
drawl. "I've helped my wife
with hers, and I've been able to
help people with their problems
Arb
murder:
Why?
. . . because I'm the type of
person who wants to listen."
j'ET, BOUKAI'S problems ul-
timately shifted onto Wilson.
Some fateful weakness in his
character allowed him to believe
everything his friend Boukai
told him-that he could meet
her request and then get away,
with the murder. When his pa-
tience and nerves were defeated,
he says, he pulled the trigger.
And while law enforcement
agencies from several states
pressed their search for the sus-
pect, Wilson and his new-found
Detroit girlfriend, Lea, quietly
fled south on Boukai's Yamaha.
On the way, Wilson pocketed
some cash by picking sweet po-
tatoes-to pay for the cost of a
marriage license. Then, once
again, Wilson claims he acquies-
ced to another woman's wants
and got married. Lea said she
couldn't desert him at that
point. Little did the pair know
they'd soon be parents. Still,
Wilson went on deluding himself
into thinking his life would play
out normally.
"I didn't feel I was on the
run," said Wilson. "Even if they
were looking for me, they didn't
have a motive or anything be-
cause Jeannine kept telling me,
'Don't worry, you'll get away
with it.'
"It got to the point," Wilson
added sullenly, "where I be-
lieved everything she said, I
guess."
cigarette in the air vent under
the window of the interrogation
booth, "if I ever figure it out,
I'll have a best seller on my
hands."
So, there's a prospective book
in Wilson's future, one, he says,
which will refute what he con-
siders to be an unfair image
slapped on him by the local
press.
"I was convicted before I
ever came back to town," Wil-
son remarked bitterly. He es-
pecially grimaces at the ,mem-
ory of a recent photograph of
him being led from a local
courtroom, flanked by police-
men, his hands shackled.
"I just want people to under-
stand that I'm not what the
papers say," said Wilson. "The
papers say Jeannine was such a
goody-goody and then they made
it look like here comes this
Simon Legree along who shoots
her head off . . . it's depress-
ing."
MEANWIIILE, WILSON has
compiled a stack of news
clippings detailing the murder
case-not for posterity, but for
the groundwork for his book.
Yet, the book he's most en-
thusiastic about is the poetry
collection which he's had in the
planning s t a g e s for several
years.
"I'm not getting into happy
though i-tely," said Wilson,
thumbi ° 'hr{-,gh a batch of 80
poems. penned on note paper,
which the guard retrieved on
his request. "I'm writing spir-
itual poems, but I just put my
feelings down on paper. That
can change day to day, minute
to minute.
"I try to find something in
today to give me some happi-
ness," he said, "but it usually
never happens."
His guilt and immediate fu-
ture accepted, Wilson has recon-
ciled himself to the fact that he
can do very little to improve his
grim situation. As a result, he
has begun to nurture a deep
spiritual commitment.
Wilson recalled the night be-
fore he was to step before the
judge to enter his guilty plea.
"I had been staying up all
night, thinking about what I had
to say, praying. But God was
with me. He helped me come
through it easily. And he'll help
me the rest of the way.
"I'm not worrving too much.
Whatever happens is something
I have no control over. God's
running my life now and what-
ever he wants done will be
done."
Nonetheless, Wilson may take
one more crack at controlling
his situation. H i s attorney,
Assistant Public Defender Ron
C a r 1 s o n, indicated that his
client will probably appeal the
sentence of 20-40 years next
month. No doubt, a string of
new chapters will materialize
for Wilson's book before the
ordeal is finally through.
k
AFTER SEVERAL weeks of
eluding authorities, Wilson
finally surrendered in Alabama.
"dyMO "OGEANBut the whole sordid affair still
eludes Wilson.
"Like my psychiatrist tells
me," Wilson said, snuffing out a
Universit o Michigan
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(Contlnued from Page 5)
means of change have been ex-
hausted. "We think the time is
ripe in the country for armed
struggle," she states.
What accounts for the "fail-
ure" of the Bantu schools? Why
have they produced rebellion
rather than docility, confronta-
tion rather than conformity?
"Even an inferior education
has a tendency in the minds of
people to make them want to
assert their freedom," Prof.
Wagaw suggests. As a result,
the South African government
now finds that, "(students) are
in the vanguard of the freedom
struggle."
Seransky gives aonther reason
for the current mood of rebel-
lion: much of the dissent has
sprouted from seeds sown dur-
ing the time of massive black
movements in the U.S. "Books
that were surfacing here in the
late sixties got to South Africa
in the early seventies. Things
like Soul on Ice, The Wretched
of the Earth, were being smug-
gled in and that stuff was filter-
ing down into Soweto. Blacks
saw pictures of what was hap-
pening in American cities, what
blacks were demanding there.
Although books are censored,
that kind of information still
gets t h r o u g h, in uncensored
nwepspares, in rock and soul
music. Once blacks stop accept-
ing the white definition of who
they are, and what they are as
black people, it's the beginning
of the end of apartheid."
IF EDUCATION for blacks is,
as Prof. Wagaw says, "educa-
tion for subservience," then
white education is education for
domination.
"Racism Is assumed-it's a
given," said Kuttner who at-
tended all-white, English lan-
guage schools through primary,
secondary a n d undergraduate
levels.
"There's a consciousness that
everyone around is white--the
teachers are white, the principal
is white-and you're surrounded
by a sea of black faces," he re-
calls. In this setting, "very little
racism needs to be explicitly
stated," he adds, because it is
inherent in the educational sys-
tem itself.
Kuttner also notes that a lot
of tension exists between the
two white language groups in
South Africa, each of which has
separate schools:
"There was as much distrust
between the English and the
Afrikanners as between whites
and blacks. Only the threat of
the b l a c k s keeps them to-
gether."
Although highly critical of the
racism in South African schools,
he doesn't think U.S. education
is fundamentally different. "It's
only a difference of degree"
based on the difference between
the U.S.'s twelve per cent and
South Africa's seventy per cent
black population.
SIKOSE MJI SEES the analogy
of South Africa and the U.S.
as more than a coincidence:
"The U.S. is the main source of
support for the regime at pres-
ent," she said, listing America's
massive investment in South Af-
rican industry as a principal
means of that support.
If, as she contends, the U.S.
helps maintain apartheid, then
it also has the power to end it.
As Mji tours the country, she
urges Americans to work for
this end: "With a new adminis-
tration, the people in this coun-
try can help guide where they
should stand."
Whether or not her plea is
heard, Sikose Mji exemplifies-
as do Seransky and Kuttner-
the failure of the South African
school system in its attempt to
indoctrinate s t u d e n t s in the
ideology of apartheid. And, Mji
proves that, despite an inade-
quate education, a basic social
awareness will compel a person
to break out of the shackles of
onoression.
March 18
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8pm Saturday
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3pm Sunday
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Supplement to The Michigan Daily, Ann Arbor, Michigan