When Preston Downs, Jr., alias Prez, slides down the emergency chute
onto the frozen tarmac at the Montreal airport, little does he know
that returning home to Washington D.C. or to his adopted city,
Chicago, would now be impossible. Events had sped by after a dust-up
with the Chicago police. With a new name and papers, he finds himself
in a foreign city where people speak French and life is douce
compared to the one he fled. Son of a World War II vet, Prez grows up
in the 50s in D.C., a segregated Southern city, and learns early that
black lives don't much matter. As a leader in the streets, his
journey from boyhood to manhood means acquiring fighting skills to
lead and unify long before losing his virginity. Smart and skeptical,
but with a code of ethics, he, like every black kid, wants to be
Malcolm, Martin or at least a "soul brother," which
inspires fear among the powers that be. Spotted while an A student at
Howard University in 1964, Prez is invited to do an interdisciplinary
course with field work on Civil Rights in Chicago, a city as divided
as Gettysburg was a hundred years earlier. Faced with police-state
conditions, dubious armed gangs, spies and provocateurs, Prez and the
young women and men he works with are propelled into a head-on fight
with police. James Baldwin wrote that the blues began "on the
auction block," others say it started with their kidnapping from
Africa. Prez was born in exile, with the blues. Only someone who has
lived through that period can write an enthralling and passionate
story like Exile Blues. Gary Freeman has done so with insight
and sensitivity.