The Prison Book Club (25 page)

If you are a Jamaican, “you're black, you're violent, you're thieves,” said Dread.

I wanted to ask about racism in the prison, but I didn't have to. Another newcomer from the West Indies raised the issue. “There's a lot of racial stuff day to day within the prison,” he said. “You have less of a chance to do certain things in the situation where you're black. Look at the amount of blacks in CORCAN. It's a small fraction.” I recalled how disappointed Ben was when he didn't get into the welding program in the CORCAN workshop.

“I'm a CORCAN worker,” responded Colin, the new inmate from Manitoba. “Yeah, there is a lot of white people working in CORCAN. There's also six black guys. Over there, unfortunately, they do look for very specific skill sets. But could they hire more black offenders? Yes, I think they could.”

“I've been in prison since 1996,” he went on.
Fifteen years.
Sometime later he told me about his crime: he'd murdered an elderly lady during a robbery of her house. “I've also seen a lot of what everybody's talking about in prison, but not white towards black. Black towards white. When I arrived here at Collins Bay I was put on 4B, and I had black guys calling me: ‘Hey white boy, hey white boy.' So I started repeating it back to them: ‘Hey black boy, hey black boy.'” But Colin soon realized that it was just the black inmates' way of breaking the ice. “Now we'll joke around, throw in a racist comment here or there, but done in a prison-friendly way.”

Derek wrapped it up by thanking the men for being honest and listening to each other. There was no time for Carol and me to linger after book club. She and I were rushing off to a local hall in Kingston where she was hosting her first volunteer-appreciationnight dinner. She wanted to thank the book club leaders for the many hours they had devoted, without pay, to the six Kingston-area federal prisons where she had started book clubs. Sixteen of her volunteers attended, all people who loved books and seemed to have some of Carol's toughness. Among them were a retired head librarian and a lawyer. We laid out poached salmon with mango salsa, chicken wrapped in prosciutto and a special emerald-green cold-pressed olive oil for dipping that Carol had brought back from her recent trip to Italy. Carol was fastidious about even the smallest details, insisting that each fork and knife be paired and wrapped in a paper napkin.

When Carol and I returned to Amherst Island that night, we placed the appreciation-night leftovers in the fridge and retired to our bedrooms. It had been a full day and I needed to get up early to meet some of the Collins Bay Book Club members the next morning.

It was still dark outside when I left Carol's for the prison.There was just a hint of pink at the horizon as I wheeled my luggage across the limestone paving stones and gravel driveway to my car. As I opened the trunk, I had a strong sense that someone was nearby. Carol was still asleep, there were no lights on in the neighbouring farmhouses and it was quiet, yet I had an uncomfortable feeling that I was being watched. I threw my bag into the trunk and darted into the driver's seat, quickly pulling the door closed and locking it. In my nervousness, I backed out of the long drive on an angle and the car's wheels went off the gravel grade briefly. Carol would see the tire marks on the grass when the sun came up.

No one in sight. I began to relax as I put the car into drive for the ten-kilometre trip to the ferry. Then it appeared. About three hundred metres beyond Carol's driveway, where Topsy Farm's summer sheep pastures flanked both sides of the road, an animal that moved like a giant hare bounded over the fence on my right, hopped across the road through the beams of my headlights, then leapt over the opposite fence into the pasture to my left. I slammed on the brakes. The animal circled back, stopped and turned to stare at me, tall rabbity ears pressed together exposing white furry linings. Not a hare. A coyote with a plush grey-brown coat. He looked well fed. “Hi, boy,” I called to him through my now-open window. He stepped closer and stopped, staring, ears still pressed together. Here was the night stalker of Topsy Farm lambs, taking in my scent, my sound. He stood there for five seconds. Then he bounced, still hare-like, in a wide circle around my car, crossing the road behind me, springing into the field to my right, charging parallel to me and then hopping back into the car's headlights. His eyes flashed red in the light as he turned to look at me before he completed his circuit and loped over a rise near the water. I was awed by his playfulness and his beauty. Were they his eyes that had watched me earlier? I smiled the rest of the way to the ferry that would take me to the mainland from Carol's small island.

I was able to meet individually with each of the book club ambassadors that day: Dread, Ben and Gaston and, for the first time, Peter. I felt certain that, once again, I would hear even more interesting observations from the men during our private conversations than I had in the larger book group.

When Dread and I sat down, he complained to me that he got less time to speak during book club and that Derek and Carol didn't coax him on as they did with the others. “I notice these things,” he said. “I'm a very analytical person.”

So I told him I wanted to know everything he had to say about the book. I found out how he admired Gilbert for respecting Hortense and not forcing himself on her the minute she arrived in London, how if it weren't for Hortense's money, Gilbert wouldn't even be in England postwar and so
he
wasn't
her
“meal ticket,” as someone else in the book club had said, how he believed Queenie had a good heart for taking care of Bernard's aging father, Arthur, and how Gilbert wasn't dumb. “Gilbert tried to get a good job, but no matter what he did, he ended up being a driver,” said Dread. We talked about all the evidence that supported his observations. One thing was certain: Dread knew that book inside out.

When Dread had to leave and Gaston walked into the room, I still couldn't figure out what was different in his appearance. Something made him look more put together. “Sorry if I'm talking a little funny at the moment,” he said. “I've got my new teeth in there.” That was it. Where two teeth had been missing, he now had a full smile. Also his nose infection had healed, so it was no longer pink and swollen.

His journal revealed that he had hoped
Small Island
would change his thoughts on some of the Jamaicans he encountered in the prison. Before reading the book he ranked them as “ignorant.” I suspected his views did not change, especially after some of the Jamaicans in the book club meeting accused CORCAN of deliberately depriving black offenders of opportunity. “There's nothing racist about CORCAN,” Gaston told me. “I've worked there for a year and a half. They hire these guys, give them a chance, and they come in with their pants hanging down to here, they don't tie up their shoes and they don't want to get dirty. Some have never worked in their lives.”

Discipline was big for Gaston, and no more so than in his daily prayer. Over and over again in his journal he talked about the discipline of getting down on his knees. Now he wanted to tell me about an entrepreneurial idea he had to take the pain out of kneeling for prayer. “What I came up with was the Personal Praying Pad,” he said. Inspired in part by seeing Muslims praying on their carpets, he had designed a prototype praying cushion for Christians, with a slot in it for reading materials and even a carrying handle. He had conducted market research to find the most appealing colours and words for the design, asking respondents, “If one word could represent God to you, what would it be?” I suggested that his invention might qualify for CBC TV's new reality TV show,
Redemption
, in which recently released offenders with entrepreneurial ideas took part in job skills competitions. The final contender would win a hundred thousand dollars in seed money to launch his start-up.

But why was prayer so important to him, I wanted to know. “I'm nothing like what I used to be, and I know that's directly through prayer,” he told me. “I was extremely self-centred, egotistic, selfish, ignorant, a womanizer, alcoholic, drug addict, money-hungry, greedy.” The words came pouring out of him in a wave of self-loathing about the man he had been eleven years earlier. “If you woulda known me before, you wouldn't believe it. I mean I was in the gutter. The worst of the worst. Shelters, homeless, nothing. No food. No one would even look at me because I burned so many bridges, lied, stole, cheated. I was a piece of garbage. I would think, Do I kill myself today or do I try one more time?”

In one serious suicide attempt back then, he walked onto train tracks and waited. A policeman yelled at him to get off, but he wouldn't move. Backup arrived just as the train was approaching and the police pepper-sprayed him to force him out of the train's path. That time, he spent three days in a mental health unit. “I always had a good heart,” he said, softening. “I was brought up well. But unfortunately drugs and alcohol encase it in cement.”

“You had a lot of self-loathing,” I said sympathetically. I was familiar with the concept because my daughter's anorexia involved bouts of very low self-esteem.

His conversion had come soon after that, when passersby found him in a ditch, left for dead, with two broken ankles and cracked ribs. It was around the same time that he'd lost his two teeth. Someone smashed him in the face with a golf club. He'd been “ripping off bikers” and screwing around with the girlfriends of guys he thought might be connected to the Mob, he told me. Someone took him to a church called Word of Life near Niagara Falls and he heard what he thought was the voice of God. “I fell on my knees, started crying out of control and started speaking in tongues. The next week I got baptized in a tank in front of the congregation.”

Religion also became a bond for Gaston and the woman who would become his new wife. He met her just at the point where she had been excommunicated by her family's Anabaptist Christian congregation for conceiving a child out of wedlock. Together, they found a new church.

Being “godly” is why he avoided arguing in the book club meeting on
Small Island
, even though what the men said about racism ticked him off. Quite apart from his feelings about what some of the men had said about CORCAN, he told me he once saw a gang of eight or nine black offenders swarm and beat up an older inmate. The
Small Island
discussion really had brought some of the racial divides in the prison to the surface. He took a deep breath, looked down and then looked at me with renewed calm. “What I've learned is I'm supposed to love my enemies and clothe them and feed them and forgive them.

“I'd like to hear more about your thoughts on my praying pad,” he said as we shook hands and parted.

“Of course,” I said.

Ben poked his head around the corner. Here was a man who seemed the opposite of the black inmates that Gaston was describing. In his free time he had been reading
Things I've Been Silent About
, the memoir by the Iranian-born author of
Reading Lolita in Tehran
, Azar Nafisi. His journal notes showed that he was moved by her pain when her father was imprisoned—a chastening moment in the book for him. And he mentioned a book that she referenced, “
Jane Eyre
or something,” he said. “She's more on the feminist.” Maybe he meant “more
of
a feminist” or “more on the feminist
side
,” but I loved his way of expressing it.

I thought of it as more about class than feminism, except for one or two defiant speeches by Jane. “
Jane Eyre
,” I said. “It's a novel set in the Victorian period in England. Jane is an orphan who ended up in the house of a man as governess to his children. And he became attracted to her.” Ben emitted a soft laugh, the kind of sound that indicates that the storyteller has held the listener in a momentary trance. How quickly that alchemy happens. We are hard-wired to have stories told to us orally.

“But I wouldn't want to ruin it for you, Ben,” I said. “It's one of the great works of literature that you might enjoy reading.”

My last visitor of the day was Peter. We had a good debate about how Andrea Levy structured the book. I said that dropping in Bernard's large section at the end of the book threw me off. I wasn't prepared to start caring about another main protagonist. And I was itching for a chronological story. But Peter didn't mind the things that bothered me. “Through the book club that's one of the things I'm learning to appreciate,” he said, “the jumping back and forth in time, instead of a chronological story.”

I invited him to talk about why he was in Collins Bay, if he didn't mind telling me.

“I don't mind at all,” he said. “I'm in here for a robbery.” It was his local convenience store, where he bought his cigarettes every week. “I don't actually remember the robbery because I got hit with a bat. He busted my head open and broke my arm. But I had this little tiny penknife, right, so I guess I stabbed him in the leg. I remember afterwards going to hop a fence and I couldn't because my arm hurt.”

Peter had a history of drug use, with some binges that cost up to thirty thousand dollars a go, and he believed those binges had permanently impacted his brain. “I'm talking about actual thought processes, the way you perceive things,” he said. He told me the redness in his face that I'd noticed back in November was psoriasis.

I presented him with a journal to record his impressions of the books he was reading with the book group and with Professor Duffy. He made his first entry a day later, on January 27, and expressed his concerns about how much to share with me. “Do I trust her? More importantly, do I need to in order to give what she asks.… Evidently, with pencil to paper and little inhibition the answer is yes. I am curious and as I said eager, to see where this may lead.” He ended it with his signature.