Doing Time (4 page)

Established white poets are also woven into the literary culture of our lockups; dead white men (and a few women, notably Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath) are revitalized by writers who draw on their energy to their own emergencies. Chuck Culhane says he read Whitman and Ginsberg in that spirit, and it shows in the voices of “After Almost Twenty Years” (see Time and Its Terms). I thought I recognized Dylan Thomas's compound words in Jon Schillaci's “For Sam Manzie”(see The World), and Wallace Stevens's juggling of lush illusions in M. A. Jones's “To Those Still Waiting” (see Getting Out), and the authors owned up to their devotion. Vladimir Mayakovsky's line breaks, rhythms, and direct address are revived in Judith Clark's homage to him (see Family), as are — more surprisingly — Robert Browning's dramatic monologues in Henry Johnson's “First Day on the Job” (see Race, Chance, Change). Regionalism is strongly valued, and folk traditions — of the backwoods, the Deep South, and the inner city — are kept alive.

Existentialism, surrealism, and the absurd leave their mark on PEN fiction, most explicitly in stories like J. R. Grindlay's “Myths of Darkness” (Time). But, because lockup life itself is so often surreal or absurd, these features also shape realistic stories like Judee Norton's “Norton #59900” (Family) and Richard Stratton's “Skyline Turkey” (Work). Robert Rutan's resonant simplicity also harks back to Hemingway (Getting Out), Ralph Ellison's mordant wordplay resounds in Anthony Ross's story (Death Row), and Joseph Sissler (Players, Games) evokes Thomas Pynchon's layered realities.

In style and substance, prison nonfiction covers a wide gamut: from personal memoir, like Jimmy Santiago Baca's (Reading and Writing), to naturalist essay, like Kenneth Lamberton's Thoreauvian observations of the habits of barn swallows and bugs in the yards of Arizona lockups.* (Many fine pieces by PEN prison writers cannot be included, but, unwilling to sacrifice insights gathered, I refer to these pieces — signaling them by an *— here and throughout.) Some of our best nonfiction writers have met the proliferating crises of prison life — like riots, rape, gangs, AIDS, and psychotropic drugs — by documenting them in the manner of testimonial writers writing under duress everywhere; some use interviews in their exposes. Many describe constructive programs in literacy, for example, or propose detailed reforms. Some write polemics about the death penalty or clemency; others about college education and parole (Jon Marc Taylor in Reading and Writing and Diane Hamill Metzger and Larry Bratt in Time and Its Terms). The urgencies of life behind bars drive some to do research in the library.

Others turn to the outside world and offer topical (and often perishable) bulletins from dangerous fronts and sordid undergrounds few of us know. An escaped prisoner hiding among the homeless in New York's Penn Station, John Springs III, seized the opportunity to study their habits and became their advocate.* Some have told subversive truths about our wars, Vietnam and its counterpart and successor, the war on drugs; see Robert Moriarty's dispatch on drug pilots in The World* Others have followed the course of the drug culture as it shaped their experiences. Though they present divergent realities, we have come to rely on many prison nonfiction writers to bear witness without flinching.

The anthology is divided into thematic sections, largely dictated by the concerns of our best writers over the years. These experiential categories evoke the many aspects of doing time and cover the life-span of imprisonment, from its multiple beginnings to its several ends. They are: entry; coming to terms with expanded and emptied time; deadening routines and ways they are ruptured; work; education, from literacy to creative writing; games (con games, hustles, sports) and their players; race relations; interactions, past and present, with family; the recall and evocation of the outside world; ways of getting out; and death row. While perhaps a third of manuscripts received treat experiences outside prison (represented here in Family and The World), this anthology reflects the findings of contest jurors: that some of the most powerful work reveals what no other writers can offer — the unknown life of this nation hidden in our midst.

Writing forces me to remain conscious of the suffering around me and to resist getting numb to it, I write to keep my heart open, to keep pumping fresh red blood.

— Susan Rosenberg, Federal Correctional Institution Danbury Danbury, Connecticut

Many prisoners write as if their lives depend on it. Quite often they do. Reading this material makes one reflect on the rich affinities between
doing time
and
doing writing. Do time or be done by it:
This is the overt text of some of the pieces, the subtext of all. The act of writing gives us all the feeling of doing, not being done, but writers behind bars find the obstacles greater and the stakes higher.
Do your own time,
convicts say. Meaning,
Mind your own business,
but also signifying
Don't make anyone else do it
and
Or someone will make you do theirs.
Doing time can mean enduring with dignity, respect for others, and some measure of independence; at best it means growth and transcendence. Doing writing exponentially heightens one's power to pursue these goals. The collection illuminates two routes to transcendence — rising above and going through. Yet all routes lead the writer to intolerable choices, or double-binds.

Long-termers with an enduring commitment to writing sometimes figuratively break out of penal institutions by rising above, by positioning themselves outside as analysts and critics. Some, like Victor Hassine and Easy Waters, become time-professionals — chroniclers. Incarcerated since he was sixteen, Waters has become a proficient and incisive historian, writing essays on the links between slavery and incarceration and the unfolding of the prison-industrial complex. In verse Waters traces the voyage of convicts up the Hudson in 1825 to build Sing Sing (Work). Others, as we have seen, diagnose the current crisis. In the process, some gain the strength to withstand the almost inevitable ensuing punishment. After publishing in the
Washington Post,
Larry Bratt, for example, began to research a piece on Maryland's first execution in thirty-three years. For canvassing guards, many of whom opposed the death penalty, the administration segregated him, but in court he won the right to continue research. Many writers with convictions, drawn into muckraking and thrown into the hole, find themselves in First Amendment battles, sinners become First Amendment saints.
To save one's integrity is to risk one's hide:
This is the chronicler's double-bind.

While jailhouse chroniclers risk censure to map the outer reality of prison, other writers face subtler dangers to chart the inner experience. Rather than transcend their environment by anatomizing it, they sound its depth to gain some measure of control, keep body and mind intact, and even nurture the soul. Their work enacts and describes these ventures and also leads to hazardous choices.

The climate of pervasive menace makes physical survival the first burden of doing time. With a series of minute adjustments the psyche perfects its equivalent of the body's animal vigilance, producing a cool, latently aggressive stance. This stance is
attitude
— the immemorial resource of the slave, of anyone whose dignity is threatened by wanton power. If nothing else, attitude confers some measure of independence and self-respect. It is Nietzsche, highly prized behind the wall, who gives these survival artists their ambiguous shibboleth: “What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.” Plots of countless prison stories take form around the ambiguity; in some the toughening disciplines preserve, in others, they kill. Although violence between women is rarer, they, too, adopt defiant postures, often at high psychic cost, as Judee Norton shows in “Norton #59900” (Family). As rigid as a shield, attitude flattens feeling.
Bodily survival jeopardizes the psychological.

Another burden of doing time then is mental survival — preserving sanity. Convict authors scrounge for sanity under maddening circumstances. Humor, nature, work — resources that pull the desperate back from the edge — are compromised behind bars. Prison writers attest to a lot of shallow joking — about violence, for example— to block the terror of taking seriously their vulnerability. Laughter can also be restorative, a straw for drowning reason. The range of the best prison humor is narrow, from absurd to savagely ironic to gallows (see Michael Saucier's “Black Flag to the Rescue” [Reading and Writing], William Orlando's story [Initiations], and Jarvis Masters's poem [Death Row]).

Nature is the more valued for its scarcity. Contraband cats are cherished; in one story a kitten killed by a malicious guard is brutally avenged. Tributes to birds nesting in penitentiary beams or swooping into yards testify both to human hunger for transcendence and its cruel starvation (see “After Almost Twenty Years” in Time and Daniel Roseboom's piece in Routines and Ruptures). Work, the sovereign remedy for the faltering mind, helps many to develop competencies that serve other inmates. Far too often, however, it is debased and fraught with danger, as in Saucier's “Cut Partner” and “Gun Guard” (Work).

Taking note of other people snatches many from despair. Prison writing presents such a wealth of idiosyncratic characters that the cultivation of personality comes to seem a fundamental survival skill. Despised and scorned by the world and their keepers, prison personalities are registered, celebrated, and preserved by self-made griots, their literary cellies and work partners. These scribes in turn take heart from their models.

Camaraderie arises in the most unlikely situations, even between kept and keeper (who, some note, do time as well). In Scott A. Antworth's understated story “The Tower Pig” (Routines), a prisoner and a despised officer effect a subtle rapprochement. Relationships between convicts and guards — who often share class and ethnic background with prisoners — are by no means predictable.

The richest stay against madness — genuine friendship — is also the most perilous. The universal riddle of intimacy is magnified in prison:
Letting down one's guard to trust is risking betrayal, grief, rage, more madness.
As Diane Hamill Metzger puts it, “Staff and prisoners play a lot of phony games with one another” when in reality neither trusts the other.” Prisoners' alliances are undermined by contention for scarce rewards: “We must compete for our very lives.”Yet up and down the tiers, friendship flickers like the mirrors, called “eyes,” held periscopically outside bars to enable sight down the tier. Some relationships, as in William Aberg's “Siempre” (Initiations) flower though voice contact only.

In several stories, the most vulnerable console one another, the mad relieve the mad (“Myths of Darkness” in Time, “Skyline Turkey”in Work). In Robert Kelsey
³
s story, “Suicide!” (Work), the protagonist Kerry, tormented by guilt for his drunk-driving homicide, works as a suicide-watch. By drawing out Kerry's humor and his compassion, his real value in the world, the damaged restore his balance.

It is the concern of a young black in particular that steadies Kerry, a white man. In prison accounts of friendship, a surprising number cross racial lines. African-Americans now make up 51 percent of the prison population. This skewed demographic picture, coupled with the explosive growth of racial gangs, intensifies the race hatred of many inmates. Firmly in the majority, blacks can exercise a reign of terror — and whites can hone their hatred. Or these and other groups can make common cause, as prison prose shows they sometimes do — in daily life and in riot situations (see “Eleven Days Under Siege” in Race). Moral survival is thus a third burden of doing time, All prisoners face ceaseless moral pressure that is unknown — or duckable — on the outside. This ranges from routine decisions — like whom to play ball with — to whether or not to ignore a monstrous wrong. In this context, stories of interracial friendships are especially poignant. (See stories by Charles Norman, Susan Rosenberg, and Michael Wayne Hunter in Race.)

Cultivating such prison relationships reflects and can further moral growth. Other writers do time by working through outside relationships, real or fictionalized — with family members and others (offensive or offended) in the past. By taking responsibility for repairing family ties or addressing the painful past., they write their way toward emotional survival and self-rehabilitation. No easy task, and prison lore warns against it:
Clinging to the past is risking failure to survive in the present.
Family ties can provoke crippling guilt, grief, anxiety, or jealousy. Many cannot drop the defensive mask when relatives visit and find it less wrenching to sever ties. Men write of turning their women loose rather than face the painful erosion of bonds.

But other men and many women take on the risk of engaging past abuse and of seeking family reconciliation. Three-quarters of women in prison are mothers and usually the primary care-givers. As a group particularly committed to the family structure, they suffer acutely from separation from those who depend on them, especially children; some write of their families “doing hard time.” At Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the existence of a nursery and a children's center signals the administration's belief that strong ties to family help rehabilitate women and that learning to parent a child helps a woman care for herself. Coupled with opportunities to explore feelings and intentions, such programs help prisoners grow emotionally. This aim animates the writing workshop at Bedford Hills, as participants describe it in “Tetrina” and “Sestina” (Reading and Writing). Emboldened in the workshop to face and untangle her past, and strengthened by her ongoing relationship with her daughter, Judith Clark traces in “To Vladimir Mayakovsky” (Family) her progress toward complex reconciliation.