One night last April a black man with a bushy beard, in baggy dark pants and an old army field coat, entered the glitzy Barnes & Noble bookstore in downtown Evanston, a shopping bag in his hand. Within minutes he was ushered from the store by a security guard and arrested for trespassing.

The irony of his dilemma has not escaped local poets. “Barnes & Noble should be ashamed for arresting one poet for the high crime of attempting to attend a poetry reading,” says Darlene Pearlstein, a Chicago poet who’s known Stewart for years. “This was racial harassment. They probably took one look at Joffre and said, ‘This is some homeless guy. We don’t want him in our store.’ I should add that while Joffre was being arrested downstairs, some of the most radical and revolutionary poetry was being read upstairs. It’s too ironic for words.”

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In 1980 he was diagnosed with colon cancer and had half his colon removed at the West Side VA hospital. He periodically returns to that hospital for checkups, but remains remarkably fit, crossing the city each day by bus, train, or foot to attend rallies and readings.

Stewart says nothing like that happened. “I was never passing out anything. I was never rowdy. I never used abusive language. I was not trespassing. I was there to hear poetry. Conklin stopped me and told me I was trespassing. He told me I was someone he had trouble with at that store before. I said that cannot be so. I had never been in this store, nor had I ever met Conklin before. I said my purpose was to hear the poetry. I offered to show him my ID card so he could compare it to this alleged other person. But he did not do that. When he asked a clerk to call the police, I left because I did not want to be arrested. He followed me outside the store. I asked for his name and badge number. He told me his name, and I was writing it down when the police drove up and arrested me.”

The judge returned Stewart to jail and ordered him to undergo psychiatric examination. “The psychiatrist asked me if I believed people were after me, and I said no. Twice they tried to move me to the nut ward in the hospital, but whoever was in charge there refused me.”

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jon Randolph.