The Prison Book Club (3 page)

2

PROMISES KEPT

A
LTHOUGH CAROL AND I had been friends for more than a year, I still didn't know a great deal about what motivated her. When she and Bryan invited my husband and me to visit them at their Amherst Island holiday property, a rural retreat of sheep pastures and hayfields near Kingston, one element of her story emerged. She was a serial entrepreneur. One of her former businesses involved buying and selling primitive Canadian antiques, and the couple's 1830s limestone house was a Noah's Ark of folk art animal sculptures. Rustic life-size representations of a Dalmatian and a plump white sheep stood in the south sunroom, along with a robin and a crow, all hewn from wood and painted. In the library, other birds filled a high shelf, and a tall carved figure of a Mi'kmaq man in full headdress guarded the entrance to the laundry. A stylized black cat with green eyes sat on a dining room windowsill and a small church occupied one alcove.

The church was a clue to her other previous start-up. After working as a high school English teacher, she had followed her mother into the Anglican priesthood in the 1990s and then founded an Anglican Church parish west of Toronto called Church of the Resurrection. “I've always loved to do stuff from scratch,” she told me.

Carol's view was that she might have inherited her combination of entrepreneurial drive and the sense of a calling to help others from her great-great-grandfather Sir George Williams. Williams was a successful businessman in the drapers' trade in Victorian England and was the man who founded the YMCA movement “to save young men from dissipation,” as Carol put it. Williams set an example that appears to have trickled down to generations of Williamses, expressed through a family culture that placed great value on service to others, and a genetic predisposition to starting businesses and being competitive. Carol mentioned that other Williams family descendants included London mayor Boris Johnson and Colin Williams, the highly successful London-based titanium trader. “The spectre of Sir George has always hung over some of us,” Carol said. “It's this thing about carrying his genes. I seem to have it.”

Over dinner, it became apparent why Carol chose books as her vehicle for helping others. She was born in 1945 in Ashburton, England, just an afternoon's hike across moorland from Dartmoor Prison. Ashburton is a town on the edge of Dartmoor, a wilderness of peat bogs and granite tors where ponies and sheep roam freely. Her mother, Patricia Williams, a young British war bride, had moved there with her two oldest children to escape the Blitz. Carol's father, David Wilson Blyth, was an army spotter during the war whose job was to identify targets for bombing sorties. Her mother was passionate about reading. When the six Blyth children were underfoot, their mother would tell them not to go outside and play, but to “go away and read.”

Carol was six when the family finally settled in Canada. “There were long, long summer holidays at lakes where we would just sunbathe and read,” she recalled. Their mother was influential in her children's lives, guiding four of her five daughters, including Carol, into the study of English literature at university, encouraging them to teach. Her brother, like her, became a serial entrepreneur. I sensed that Carol was partly motivated by a need to succeed in a high-performing family and to leave her mark. We talked and laughed long into the evening, with Carol telling stories about her mother and Bryan guffawing heartily. I knew then something about where her courage came from. Now I had to marshal my own.

In the end, the decision to go into the prison was made for me. While turning it over in my mind, I had filled out the Correctional Service Canada (CSC) volunteer application form, just in case, because there was a long lead time for approvals. When the prison system granted my clearance, I felt I had to follow through with it. I have difficulty walking away from sunk costs and I lack a reverse gear. Just go in once, I said to myself. You can handle this.

What I didn't know until my first visit to the prison was that Carol and I would meet the eighteen or so heavily tattooed book club members in a remote building within the prison walls, with no guards present and no visible security cameras. Carol's idea was to put the men at ease. Our only protection would be a chaplain wearing a personal security alarm that would alert guards in the main building on the grounds, some eighty metres away.
Great
.

Locals know Collins Bay as “the Red Roof Inn,” a play on the name of the discount North American hotel chain. The red metal roof and Gothic turrets are the prison's most distinguishing features. Built of local limestone in the 1930s, it's a grey castle fronting a vast square of limestone rampart, with red-capped guard towers at each corner. In my childhood, when my mother drove me past it for my annual eye exam in Kingston, from our home in Prince Edward County, I would ask her if that was Disneyland and whether it had a drawbridge and moat.

So it was strange to finally approach this building as an adult, in October 2010 for my first visit to Carol's prison book club. A warm Indian summer breeze was blowing the tall grasses of the surrounding meadows, and red-winged blackbirds called out from the marshy lowlands that stretched down to the St. Lawrence River where it meets Lake Ontario. The prison farm was barely visible at the rear. Just two months earlier, cattle trucks had removed three hundred Holstein cows from the farm buildings, as the federal government ended the forty-eight-year-old dairy operation that had provided milk to local prisons and farm skills to inmates. I was surprised to see how the city had filled in across from the prison since my childhood. There were car dealerships with metallic pennant streamers and rundown malls with pawnshops selling paintball guns in the shape of AK-47s.

That day I had followed Carol's instructions to downplay my curves and eliminate showy jewellery. I was wearing a breast-flattening sports bra, a turtleneck, a buttoned-up stiff tweed jacket and pants. I'd left my emerald engagement ring in the city, and wore only a gold wedding band and simple pearl stud earrings. I was also wearing my nerves. My hand shook as I signed the official guest logbook at reception. Through the one-way glass to my left I could see the outlines of heads, where guards operated the mechanized gates into the core of the prison.

From that moment on I remember only brief impressions. I was fearful to the point of shock. My peripheral vision closed down and I felt like I was looking through a zoom lens, catching only concentrated bursts of images. After the double set of metal doors at the entrance slammed in sequence behind me, I remember being hit by the smell—an unpleasant yeasty odour that I couldn't quite identify, as though decades of hardship, hate and regret had condensed on the walls. I recall walking down the main hallway with Carol and her co-facilitator Edward, a retired English professor with an upper-class English accent. A prison chaplain, Blair, was escorting us because the book group met in the prison chapel. Blair was explaining something about the building. I remember passing the health clinic with its posters about HIV and hepatitis. Then we passed lots of men in white waffle-weave long-sleeve shirts or blue T-shirts and jeans, some pushing carts or carrying mops, and I recall thinking, gosh, they have a lot of staff here.

The chaplain was saying something about the “telephone pole” design of the prison—a main corridor known as “The Strip” with cell units branching off on both sides. He led us along a sidewalk to a secondary building inside the walls of the prison that looked like a parish hall. And then somehow I was sitting on a wooden chair, waiting for the inmates to arrive, wondering whether to peel off my name tag, which announced to them all that I was ANN.

The men who walked in the door were dressed in white and blue like the ones I had seen walking freely on The Strip—the guys I had thought were cleaning staff. I was confused. Those were the inmates? Why were they walking around freely like that? Where were the guards and why was the chaplain, the only one wearing a security alarm, leaving the room briefly? And why did Carol look so relaxed? Then one man came toward me with his arm extended and a large smile. “Hello, welcome,” he said. I stood up and grasped his hand and thanked him. Then many of the others followed suit, gracious and non-threatening. For some reason, the black men gravitated toward one side of the circle and the white men sat in chairs closer to me.

Carol introduced me as the head of the prison book club's Book Selection Committee, saying that I was an award-winning magazine journalist who had majored in English literature at university. I was just sitting in to get a better sense of which books might appeal to them. After that she led them in a discussion of Dave Eggers's wonderful non-fiction book
Zeitoun
, about a Syrian-born landlord and house painter in post-Katrina New Orleans who is swept up by Homeland Security after disobeying orders to evacuate the flooded city. It's a book I had read and loved, but I have no recollection of what the men said about the protagonist's good and bad choices or anything else for that matter. Instead I was rehearsing in my mind the self-defence manoeuvres that I had learned in London. I was sure we were about to be taken hostage. It was the first time I had been so close to criminals since the police lineup in London.

The men seemed equally baffled by my choice to drive such a distance to risk sitting in a room with them, given that I wasn't proselytizing religion and I wasn't being paid. After the meeting, a man with dreads and reflector sunglasses, flanked by two other black inmates, approached me and asked, “Miss, why would a nice person like you want to spend time with bad guys like us?”

That's a very good question, I thought. But I said, “I'd like to help find you some good books.”

Another inmate, who I learned later had killed a man and felt profound regret about it, also approached. “I was thinking you look like that movie star,” he said. “What's her name? I know, Nicole Kidman. You must get that a lot.”

I felt a chill. “Actually, no one's ever said that before,” I said, mentioning that she was much taller. Perhaps it was my curly hair that struck him as similar. It was exactly the kind of attention I did not want.

On my drive back to Toronto I asked myself what I had learned in that meeting that would provide new insight into my book recommendations for the men. Almost nothing, because I was so pathetically scared. I could see that they liked non-fiction, and that Carol challenged them to put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist and question characters' choices. But I would need to attend several monthly meetings if I really wanted to understand their reading level, their reaction to different types of fiction and non-fiction and what kinds of narrative engaged them. I thought back to the book list that my colleagues on the selection committee and I had composed two months earlier without ever having entered a prison. It included Margaret Atwood's novel
Alias Grace
;
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon;
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
, Alexandra Fuller's memoir about her wild Rhodesian childhood (a kind of African
The Glass Castle
); and
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
by Roddy Doyle. They were all books I had read and enjoyed. With the immediate threat of being inside the prison behind me, I was now feeling a familiar tug: curiosity. What would it be like to hear the men talk about Roddy Doyle's Paula Spencer—the abused alcoholic woman that he so brilliantly conjured up, and Charlo, her abuser? Would literature change the men's lives in any way?

But curiosity about the unknown is so often paired with fear of the unknown. And I needed to consider what it would take for me to return on a regular basis and get to know the men. It wasn't just my own safety I was worried about, but that of my family.

I drove past the highway sign marking the exit to Prince Edward County—the beautiful peninsula of farms and sand dunes on Lake Ontario where I had grown up, partway between Kingston and Toronto. It had been a happy childhood. An image of my father came to mind. In 2000, to mark the millennium, he and I took a father-daughter driving trip in California. At one stop he approached some menacing-looking men to ask for directions. I tried to dissuade him, but it was then that he reassured me, “If you expect the best of people, they will rise to the occasion.”

Fear is judgment. I knew that. It is at the heart of some of the worst social injustices. If the men were bringing their best selves to a book club and trying to live a different life for a couple of hours, I should honour that effort, just as Carol was doing. And then it just came down to a decision not to spend my life living in fear and to adopt some of Carol's bravery. I thought if Carol could walk through the doors of Collins Bay, so could I. Sometimes we borrow our courage from others.

At the same time, I thought about that other well of courage I could draw upon: my creative drive. I was a relentless diarist and note-taker. If I could write about Carol's idea to run a book club in a prison and depict the men's reactions to the books' themes of loss, anger, courage and redemption, I might gradually forget my fear. I approached the prison officials with a request for broader access in 2011 and 2012 to write a book about the prison book club. And then I made plans to return to the book club meetings to observe from the point of view of book selection and to bring a writer's perspective to the book discussions that Carol was leading.

It was March 2011 when I returned to Collins Bay, and some things had changed in the book club. The old meeting space was being torn down and the club was now convening near the northeast perimeter guard tower in a nondescript building whose corridors smelled strangely of smoke. Later I learned that the smoke emanated from the aboriginal programs wing, where First Nations inmates were permitted to burn sweetgrass and sage in traditional smudging ceremonies designed to cleanse away negative thoughts or feelings. Smoke in a prison? I couldn't quite fathom how the guards handled the fire needed to light the grass, but it was a progressive policy.