Doing Time (17 page)

“Yeah, he'll be okay,” I said. I heard an M.O. complain that Chris was cutting in line as he sought to get to the gate and grab the C.O.'s attention among the thrusting hands clutching I.D. cards and raucous ribbing of the pretty Jamaican nurse. I stood up and looked out the window at some trees whose leaves were turning, and it occurred to me I'd been here, doing this, for ten months.

Going back to court later that month, I wound up being shackled to one of the M.O.'s from the upstairs dorm. He kept singing the refrain from a currently popular song: “The girls, the girls they love me, the girls the girls they love me.” I stared out the bus window at morning traffic I used to detest.

Back in the courthouse bullpen, I felt the dread of the appearance pulling my stomach apart. The suit jacket felt like a straitjacket. I'd gotten my vest back from Lemar the night before, working my shift even though I didn't have to the night preceding court. I always did — it kept my mind off of it all. “Are y-y-y-you g-g-going t-to trial?” he asked. “I don't want to,” I'd told him.

I didn't get taken to the courtroom by lunchtime, and lunch was highlighted by my bus partner setting on fire the little Styrofoam cups our tea came in. The black smoke pissed off a few guys, and the mood in the bullpen grew ugly and tense.

My attorney came up just before I was to go down. He told me nothing, really, just shook his head and complained about the unwavering D.A., who “wouldn't play ball,” I felt homesick for the sixth floor, that's how bad it was.

I went down finally to face more screaming, more crying, more nothing. Postponed. I wanted all this to come to an end. Bad.

There was someone new in the bullpen when I got back up there, and he stood looking out of one of the windows to the street below, the sun radiating through his dirty long blond hair and darker beard. He turned around and looked at me as the C.O. shut the gate. “How'd it go?” he said, real polite-like, not bullpen jaded or tough. Two black guys were beating out a rap rhythm on the bench — “You, you got what I needed …” The long-haired freak almost seemed to know me. “Not good,” I told him. His eyes were clear blue like mine.

“What happened?” he asked. He wasn't asking about the preceding courtroom drama, but my crime.

“I got drunk, driving on the wrong side of the road, and this poor kid ran out in front of me …” I said.

“You'll be okay. I can tell you never meant to hurt anybody,” he told me matter-of-factly. We stood quietly while the pounding continued, both now gazing out the window. He lifted his arm and pointed to a mother with a baby carriage, fussing with the infant's little blue hat as they sat in the courthouse square among the park benches and drunks. The rappers came to their chorus and sang, “…say he's just a friend, say he's just a friend …”

I moved off to a corner and took off the suit jacket, spread it out on the dirty bullpen floor and lay down. I'd been up a long, long time, what with working the nighttime suicide shift. I shed my vest and used it as a pillow, and dozed off for what must have been a couple of hours. When I woke up, the C.O. was jangling his keys and opening the gate. It was time for the bus ride back. The long-haired freak was gone. I asked the rappers. “Went back to Brooklyn General.” He'd come from the hospital, evidently. Probably a “bug,”

“What are you, crazy?” Ernesto was playing chess with Lemar. But he was speaking to a guy named Checkers. He was called Checkers because he was always picking up a checker piece off the playing board, putting it in his mouth, and grinning. Now he deviated a little from his regular modus operandi, and had the black queen peeking out from his grin. He could screw with the checker pieces all day, and guys would just replace the piece with whatever was handy, a scrap of paper, a matchbook, or whatever.

“M-m-m-my q-q-q-quwween!” Lemar yelled, furious. His big arms trembled as he stood up and grabbed the slightly built Checkers by the throat real hard, and lifted him up in the air, feet dangling. Left alone, Lemar would kill Checkers. The black queen became a projectile that hit Lemar squarely in the chest and clattered to the floor. Checker's face tried to form a scream but couldn't, and saliva tan down his chin while his face turned beet red. I bumped Lemar real hard with my shoulder and distracted his murderous choking. “C'mon, it's your move — you're holdin' up the game.” He let go, still trembling, and Checkers hit the floor and took off like a cat out of a bathtub, out of the room and up the stairs to the dotm. Most of the time, Checkers never spoke, except for once in a while he'd be clinging to the bars like a koala bear, arms and legs wrapped through and up off the ground, and he'd scream, “Where's Petey?” followed by a Hollywood madhouse laugh. He was on a lot of medication.

The chess game resumed and soon Lemar was content to lose, moving foolishly as Ernesto proceeded to checkmate him. Ron returned to his cell and put on his headphones to listen to the news. Ernesto scouted the dayroom for more challengers. Everybody was absorbed watching
The Price Is Right
or dozing after meds. I was over there during the day because the regular daytime S.P.A. had court and I had decided I just plain
liked
it over on the M.O. tier better. I'd become state property soon, get transferred into the State Correctional System. I was sentenced, packed, waiting for the call any day. I'd given my vest to Lemar because he would probably go to a hospital for the criminally insane where he might still wear street clothes. I wanted to move on — it felt like I'd been on the sixth floor forever.

Stymie limped in and sat down. “Nineteen thousand five hundred twenty-nine dollars for the Chevy Blazer/' I heard from the TV; I had always wanted a Blazer.

“Who's gonna watch me after you go, Kerry?” The look on Stymie's face was one I'd never seen before. He was dead serious.

Ernesto chimed in. ‘‘Yeah — who's gonna take the night shift, bring us cookies?”

I almost started to cry, but I caught myself. I think it was because, just at that moment, 1 remembered Stymie, one of the first nights 1 was there, saying to me, after listening to me tell the story of the night of my crime, “You the one needs a soo-cide watch on yo' ass.” The words, spoken in that downhome ghetto accent, slashed through me then, and I swore I'd never appear to be anything but …strong.

“Don't worry, gang, they'll find somebody. It ain't like you clowns are
that
crazy,” I said, reached out and grabbed the white knight, stuck it in my mouth, and spit it out at Ernesto.

“That's dis-gusting,” he said with a flourish and a foot-stomp, and we all laughed loud as hell as bells went off, announcing that somebody had won the Blazer.

1994, Mid-State Correctional Facility Marcy, New York

“If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master
—
to do as he is told to do. Learning would
spoil
the best nigger in the world. Now/' said he, “if you teach that nigger [speaking of myself] how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”

—
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
1845

In his classic autobiography, Douglass overhears his master thus instructing his wife. “From that moment,” Douglass says, “I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom,” In a similar way, for the dispossessed young Jimmy Santiago Baca, coming to own language and to inhabit it, was overwhelming and repeatedly empowering as his tumultuous memoir here attests.

In prison, 19 percent of adult males are illiterate, and 40 percent “functionally illiterate” — which means for example that they would be unable to write a business letter — as opposed to the national rate for adult Americans of 4 percent and 21 percent respectively. Learning disability rates, too (11 percent in prison compared to 3 percent in the general population), have contributed to the fact that over 70 percent of prisoners in state facilities have not completed high school. If illiteracy, as some believe, is a major cause of crime, literacy provides a means to see oneself, one's life and condition, and to imagine alternatives.

Education lowers recidivism more effectively than any other program, and the more education received, the less likely an individual is to be rearrested or reimprisoned. The internal growth made possible by higher education is incalculable; most writers in this collection took advantage of college courses offered behind bars. For this reason, the defeat in 1994 of federal Pell Grants for higher education to prisoners was particularly devastating. One of the thousands of beneficiaries of post-secondary education behind bars, Jon Marc Taylor has been a tireless fighter for the continuation or restoration of such programs.

Education can make an extraordinary difference in the way one does time. Literate convicts with a trace of conscience are kept very busy, as O'Neill Stough of Arizona attested in two prizewinning pieces. In “Deliberate Indifference” (1994),* Roland, a man with AIDS, surprises the narrator into activism. As Roland is illiterate and timid, his requests for adequate blankets, food, and vitamins are ignored. The narrator writes his complaint for him, and when it fails, organizes assistance from other inmates. Later, writing Roland's obituary in the form of a grievance lands him in isolation, but brings about reform. Stough's essay “Cruel and Quite Usual” (1993)* narrates how a cruel guard was exposed in a prison newspaper.

Women in prison who have gotten together to address their medical needs (including AIDS), parenting, and the needs of their children, sometimes publish the results. Many men and women write about becoming jailhouse lawyers. Victor Hassine used his legal background to bring successful conditions-of-confinement lawsuits against two Pennsylvania prisons. Other writers have described how hosts of educated men and women become teachers of classes in literacy, AIDS, or whatever they can — work even more vital with the deep cuts in education and other programs.

Poet and teacher Joseph Bruchac analyzes the extraordinary transformative power of creative writing. “A lack of empathy may be one of the characteristics of the man or woman who commits a violent crime against another human being. Having been brutalized themselves as children, they pass on that violence to their victims. But when a person begins to write poetry, to create art, several things may happen. One is a birth of self-respect.. . Another is the ability to empathize.” Many prison writers suggest that coming to feel compassion has saved them from being brutalized; the exploration of the self through writing breaks the hold of the institution and opens the writer to growth (See About the Authors). In “Colorado Kills Creativity” (1994)* J. C. Amberchele recalls “a scared biker handing over a poem about love and loneliness” to a prison magazine (since suspended), “revealing a secret he had guarded most of his life.” Writing “was our first attempt to give something from within rather than to take from others,” he writes, “to act instead of react.”

While for some creativity makes sense only as a solitary refuge, others work well collectively. In Hettie Jones's writing workshop at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, women meet for what they sometimes describe as three hours of unlimited freedom. Six of them here offer a “tetrina.” (A tetrina is a variant on the sestina, using four end words instead of six, which are repeated in a specified sequence.) When their work appeared in the book
Aliens at the Border,
the poets offered the facility's first poetry reading. Later, a sextet composed of workshop members — Iris Bowen, Kathy Boudin, Judy Clark, Lisa Finkle, Miriam Lopez, and Jan Warren — collaborated to set down what the workshop has meant to them.

One of the most complex pieces in this volume, “Behind the Mirror's Face,” by Paul St. John, is at once an attack on prison writing and a superb example of it. The sardonic monologist vents suspicions of the self-serving cynicism and sentimentality at the heart of “creative” ventures in a site of coercion. In his corrosive view, prison magazines are tokens that serve the administration's agenda, writing teachers have overblown and naive expectations of the power of writing to change author and audience, and inmate authors seize on writing only to deepen their self-deception. His assaults on the abuses of writing reveal his hunger for an honesty and commitment he despairs of finding. Then, feeling reproached by another inmate's suicide, he exits the scene in a narcotic flight, assigning classic names — Plethora, Hedone, Cacoethes (excess, pleasure, and bad habits) — to the rescuing drug.

Many writers in this book have been thrust into segregation (the “hole,” the “box,” the Special Housing Unit) or transferred because of their writing. Many have had their books and papers confiscated. Michael Saucier's “Black Flag to the Rescue” here presents an unusual, comic — but true — writerly predicament. Incensed by reading this poem in the prison newspaper, the warden challenged Saucier to show him the roach casings he had found in his battery-operated typewriter. Saucier complied, to the warden's chagrin.

On weekend graveyard shifts at St. Joseph's Hospital I worked the emergency room, mopping up pools of blood and carting plastic bags stuffed with arms, legs, and hands to the outdoor incinerator. I enjoyed the quiet, away from the screams of shotgunned, knifed, and mangled kids writhing on gurneys outside the operating rooms. Ambulance sirens shrieked and squad car lights reddened the cool nights, flashing against the hospital walls: gray — red, gray — red. On slow nights I would lock the door of the administration office, search the reference library for a book on female anatomy and, with my feet propped on the desk, leaf through the illustrations, smoking my cigarette. I was seventeen.

One night my eye was caught by a familiar-looking word on the spine of a book. The title was
450 Years of Chicano History in Pictures.
On the cover were black-and-white photos: Padre Hidalgo exhorting Mexican peasants to revolt against the Spanish dictators; Anglo vigilantes hanging two Mexicans from a tree; a young Mexican woman with rifle and ammunition belts crisscrossing her breast; Cesar Chavez and field workers marching for fair wages; Chicano railroad workers laying creosote ties; Chicanas laboring at machines in textile factories; Chicanas picketing and hoisting boycott signs.