Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg

  Time has its own peculiar meaning in prison. All I got is time was an expression Elia, and others, often used. In its everyday prison usage it means, I’m in prison, I’m never too busy. But it is always said with irony, in the sense of having only time and nothing else. Although a person in prison always has countless hours, he has no access to time’s attendant meanings. When it comes to time, most inmates are like the tragic mariner: water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink. There’s endless time but not the nourishing kind, no seasons, no holidays, no cycles. At least, nothing that can be shared with others.

  When snow collects in the yard—it is winter. When your cellmate smells particularly rank—it is summer. But these things don’t imply anything beyond themselves. Snow doesn’t mean sledding with your children, or skiing, or playing football or going to concerts for Christmas. It means snow.

  The closest approximation of seasons in prison are the gambling seasons. When the Super Bowl gambling crunch hits, it is winter; when the NCAA basketball tourney happens, it is spring. These are the Christmas and Easter of prison. Aside from these sad interludes, prison time is neither marked nor shared by a community. It is personal and moves toward one holiday: the end of one’s sentence. Each individual follows his own private eschatological calendar, which has only one holiday, the Last Day, the End of Days.

  This is a very practical matter for those who work in prison. When you leave before a holiday, a well-meaning caseworker instructed me, you don’t say “Merry Christmas” to the inmates. It doesn’t make sense and, as she added, “It’s kind of a slap in the face.” In prison, seasons are best left unmarked and unremarked upon. And indeed it was always poignant to close up shop before a holiday, or even before a weekend. The looks that came my way then were invariably pitiful, sometimes desperately so, and it was in those moments I got a sense of what the library meant to many of the inmates.

  For the next few days, I imposed a no-noise policy. I joined Elia in the stacks. For hours, we’d shelve books wordlessly. I heard the textures of silence, like those in the recorded interview of my grandmother. In the library one could hear the sudden crank and surge of nearby pipes. Digital squeaks. The low thrum, high hiss, of prison air pumping constantly from shafts in the ceiling—and the barely audible voices, occasional quiet shouting, from some far corner of the prison, all of it deposited into the library along with the processed air. These sounds were remarkable because they stream around constantly but are never heard.

  This was the first real silence I’d experienced in the library since the night I showed up late after visiting Deer Island and the Liberty Hotel. And just like that night, the stillness of the library opened up the space in a new way.

  Elia often used the phrase “doing time.” I saw what he meant by it. Time in prison isn’t celebrated, commemorated, or even lived in, but something done with your hands, a repetitive chore, like doing laundry or shelving books. There’s a difference between being in prison and doing time. Elia was, I now saw, making masterful work of that task.

  Every time Elia placed a book on the shelf, he acted in opposition to the order of prison. His labors involved small interpersonal acts he created for himself and which affirmed he wasn’t merely an object with a number attached to it. No: He was the person, the subject, who imposed the order.

  He dusted and arranged each book with deliberation and grace. Aware of his place in an infinite circulation, Elia was not in any rush, not concerned with finishing but only with doing. By dusting, then placing each individual book in its precise spot he was reaching out, anonymously and indirectly, kindly, to a stranger, perhaps even an enemy. He was making it possible for others to find what they were looking for. He was using the library to set things straight. Carton by carton, shelf by shelf, book by book.

  He wasn’t the only one. Everyone who enters a library is in search of something. It was right there, in the stacks, where Elia had made a home, where Jessica had sat for her portrait with a paper flower in her hair, where she’d given her anxious cellmate a comfort ribbon. It was where the young prostitute from Dunkin’ Donuts had sat with her art books. Where Chudney had learned some of his first recipes. Where hundreds of inmates had paused and searched. Sometimes not even certain what they were looking for.

  In the silence of those hours of shelving books I remembered I had also arrived at the library in that way. In search of something, not certain what.

  After nearly two years, I was still trying to figure out the purpose of my job and of the library at large. For this, I needed only take Elia’s example. He wasn’t merely counting down the days with each book. His elegant librarianship, his hands deliberating over each title, the gentle way he dusted and kept notes and piles, the care with which he arranged the shelves, his silence, made me appreciate how order is created: Not through grand schemes—to which I was often drawn—but by small graceful actions, repeated often and refined with time.

  Shortly thereafter, I found myself sitting on a grassy, wild-flower-covered hill on Deer Island, looking out at the Atlantic and eating tuna salad on a sesame bagel. I was serving my suspension without pay, my punishment for assaulting Officer Chuzzlewit. It was spring and almost starting to feel like it. Boston Harbor was fussy and uncooperative. The ocean loomed in the near distance, black and vast.

  I finished my sandwich too quickly. Possibly due to the influence of haunted Deer Island—or possibly a lingering effect of the childhood trauma of trying to lose my Israeli accent by sitting for hours in a windowless room with a speech therapist who forced me to endlessly repeat the word girl, girl, girl—my thoughts turned toward the Apocalypse. I wondered which place would be first submerged by the great imminent deluge: Deer Island or the landfilled South Bay?

  It was a silly question. Of course Deer Island would sink first. It sits directly in the harbor. The water level in nearby Hull was already rising. It was only a matter of time. I finished my pickle in two and a half bites. My back twinged. I laid myself out flat, in the yoga pose—or non-pose—known as the Dead Man. It was really the only position I could pull off.

  I thought about the nineteenth-century prison that lay in ruins in the manmade hill upon which I was sitting. And the minimalist librarian job description from that departed era: such provision of light shall be made for all prisoners confined to labor during the day as shall enable them to read for at least one hour each evening. A provision, from the Latin for foresight. Listening to the waves, I thought about Chudney, survived by a five-year-old boy and a newspaper article about his murder. Even at the moment, Elia was in the South Bay prison, shelving books.

  And Mike Pitts who had shown me the mug shot on his ID shortly before he was released, and proudly asked me to compare how much better he looked after years in prison.

  “I’m not that fat dude anymore,” he’d told me, “I’m trim, I filled my head with knowledge in this library, man, and I’m ready to go.”

  But, one sunny day, months after his release, his photo appeared in the Boston Herald, bloated and miserable. The victim of a horribly botched liposuction.

  And the great Coolidge, whose photo appeared in the Boston Globe, standing in Massachusetts Superior Court, wearing a crisp white dress shirt and tie. The article recounted the amazing story of how this man argued his own case, and persuaded two judges to ignore the fact that police found a treasure trove of stolen property from eight locations in his possession: ATM cards, purses, a rotary saw, a computer. A crime spree. According to court records, they also found “books on how to improve your writing.”

  The Globe reporter marveled that a lifelong street criminal had repeatedly bested professional prosecutors by “relying on a state law so obscure that several defense lawyers interviewed were unfamiliar with it.” And just as Coolidge had promised me when we first met, he was planning to one-up Napoleon and take his arguments on the offensive: He was demanding $66,000 from the state, compensation for lost wages and a sum of money large enough to purchase a used SUV. H
e had other cases pending, though, and still faced a twenty-year sentence.

  I thought of my friend Yoni, who discovered that he wanted to be an anthropologist studying hippies. Enrolled in a Ph.D. program, he could now live his dream of roving the remote hills of Arkansas—wearing only a sarong and a cowboy hat—going native with a group of stoned moon-worshippers. All in the name of science.

  And what would my next step be?

  I listened to the choppy sea, the rutted waves Sylvia Plath mournfully watched eat away at this sad little island. I imagined notes falling out of books, and the undelivered, unfinished letter:

  Dear Mother,

  My life is

  I thought about Jessica’s undelivered note. About how she left her son in a church, then met him almost two decades later in a prison. About Chudney’s son trying to stop the waves. Jessica sitting silently, looking out of the window, her hands folded in her lap, watching from way up in the prison tower. Doing what mothers do, what she never could do herself: Watching her son play in the yard. Just watching. How she made herself pretty for the portrait she would never give him. I thought about Elia placing books and books in their proper order.

  Books, it was written on Amato’s immovable sign, are not mailboxes.

  A provision of light.

  I synchronized my breath with the waves. A decision fixed itself to my mind. I had an unfinished piece of business.

  The Diameter of a Sunday

  Marcia Franklin, Chudney’s mother, cried on the phone when we spoke. I’d told her what I had for her. She invited me to her home in Roxbury—where Chudney had been living when he was shot.

  I got an early start that day. It was a Sunday. Our meeting had been planned for the early afternoon to give Marcia time to return from church. Before the meeting, I took a short driving tour of Roxbury. I knew of only a few sites connected to Chudney. The prison, his mother’s house, and the corner store where he was shot. And a few other places he had mentioned. Most of what I knew about Chudney concerned his imagined future, not the streets of his actual life. Driving around his neighborhood I realized how little I knew of his life outside of prison, even though we had spent much time in conversation.

  The site of the shooting was across from Crispus Attucks Place, a small street, more of a glorified parking lot, named for the most famous of the five people killed by English gunfire during the Boston Massacre of 1770. In American mythos, Attucks was “The First to Defy, The First to Die,” the first casualty of the Revolution. A large mural nearby depicted Attucks—an iconic African American—not as the civilian he actually was, but rather eyes ablaze and musket bayonet poised, charging into an apocryphal battle.

  Further down the street, a minute or so away, was 72 Dale Street, where Malcolm X lived as a teenager. And around the corner in the other direction, the home where Martin Luther King Jr. lived during his years as a seminary student at Boston University. These streets were heavy with the ghosts of martyrs.

  While Chudney’s mother prayed in church, I decided to pick my own text for meditation. Mine wasn’t from the Bible but from Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai. I read “Diameter of a Bomb” with all of my writing classes. It was the poem Dumayne had read in memory of Chudney, after his eulogy at the library poetry reading:

  The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters

  and the diameter of its effective

  range—about seven meters.

  And in it four dead and eleven wounded.

  And around them in a greater circle

  of pain and time are scattered

  two hospitals and one cemetery.

  But the young woman who was

  buried where she came from

  over a hundred kilometers away

  enlarges the circle greatly.

  And the lone man who weeps over her death

  in a far corner of a distant country

  includes the whole world in the circle.

  And I won’t speak at all about the crying of orphans

  that reaches to the seat of God

  and from there onward, making

  the circle without end and without God.

  The poet’s method of cold, numerical measurement is an appropriate way to begin dealing with the horror of sudden violent death. It gives the mind something concrete, objective, to grasp when trying to contemplate the enormity of murder. But as the poet concludes, taken far enough the dimensions of these measurements become too vast, too mysterious, for either human or divine calculus.

  As I drove around Roxbury, I used my odometer to take some preliminary measurements of my own. Chudney was shot a quarter of a mile from where he lived with his mother, where he had once seen a deer run through the middle of the city; a rough mile from the market where he bought ingredients for his banana pudding; three and a half miles from the nearest market that sells fresh rosemary; less than two miles from where he had been imprisoned; probably about a mile and a half from where he was born and a mile or so less than that from where he had gone to school. He died one mile from the Greater Love Tabernacle Church, where his mother was praying for his soul. And about a mile from Roxbury Community College, where he was applying to begin his new career with a certificate course in Food and Beverage Preparation. His sister lived roughly twenty miles away in the quiet suburb of Wellesley; about seventy miles away, in a Connecticut town, lived his five-year-old son, who—according to the Boston Globe article about Chudney’s murder—had asked his mother “why God called him.”

  How far did this circle of loss extend? I certainly didn’t know. Ultimately, as the poet said, it was a “circle without end,” fundamentally a mystery.

  As I drove up Chudney’s street, I looked down at the sheets of folded printing paper sitting on my empty passenger seat. These were Chudney’s writings: now in the form of a kite. A small letter, written and then left behind in a hidden corner of the library. The kind of thing I was trained to discard. But I was very pleased with this breach of my job description. I had intercepted so many misguided notes, witnessed so many unfinished, unsent, impossible letters—here was one good one, as complete as it would ever get, that I might see properly delivered. It was a small thing, but at least it would arrive. For Chudney’s family, and especially for his son, a modest provision of a few words for the coming eternity of silence.

  Books are not mailboxes—yes they are. It was a bit of graffiti I had often imagined scrawling in the margin of Amato’s sign.

  My trip to visit Marcia was unusual for a variety of reasons. First, I was a youngish white guy, well-dressed (in honor of Marcia), in the heart of the hood driving a (borrowed) Saab with Cambridge parking stickers. Any illusion that this was a neutral event was banished when I parked the car and walked up to Marcia’s apartment building: People literally stopped what they were doing to stare at me. Some with contempt, most with curiosity.

  Old men repaired a rusty car. Young men in hoodies, bedecked in clanging jewelry and sneakers whose gleaming white stood in stark relief to the garbage-lined street, sat on stoops and strutted for each other in front of the boarded-up and graffitied liquor store on the corner. All watched me as I walked up to the building.

  But what made my visit even stranger was that I was a prison worker making a house call to the family of a former inmate. This didn’t happen every day.

  Marcia buzzed me into the building and welcomed me with a big smile. She wore sweatpants tucked into her socks and a billowy extra-large T-shirt with a picture of her slain son, RIP and his birth and death dates printed on it. There are shops in town that specialize in the paraphernalia of street-corner martyrdom. In the picture, Chudney’s arms are fully extended out at his sides, his palms facing up in a jaunty “bring it on” sort of pose. His head was slightly cocked and he wore the face of tough-guy indifference.

  For me, it was a jarring way to encounter Chudney for the first time in his regular clothes, not in his prison uniform. He looked different. Healthier.

  Marcia’s ap
artment was small and neat, shades drawn, dim lighting. Framed and unframed family photos and religious quotations adorned the walls. Nearby loomed a small, square mirror with a prowling black panther painted on it. A murky fish tank gurgled and hummed in the background. The TV, tuned to BET, remained on. Later, when Marcia and I went into another room to retrieve old photos, I noticed another TV that she’d left on. She lived alone in an apartment full of the commotion of television voices. Perhaps this helped her alleviate loneliness.

  She sat in an easy chair; I took a spot on the couch across from her. She turned down the volume on the TV. Hip-hop music videos, specters of scantily clad women fawning over cocky young men continued to flicker next to us as we talked.

  I took out Chudney’s writings, the kite he’d left in the library. She read it for a long time. As tears filled her eyes, Marcia gently folded up her son’s words and placed them on the coffee table.

  “I’m gonna have this laminated,” she said.

  She told me that her son’s murder was ordained from on high. “The Scripture tells us that we don’t know the hour and we don’t know the place,” she told me. “And that’s exactly how it was with Chudney.”

  I told her that I believed a little haiku-like piece that Chudney had written was in fact a religious poem. She picked it up, looked it again, and read it aloud slowly.

  plane flying high in the sky,

  me standing alone,

  sunday morning in the yard.

  “Why do you think it’s religious?” she asked.

  I told her that I had assigned the class to write this little three-line poem and to give them a leg up, had furnished them with the last line. The line I suggested, which I had scrawled on the board, was monday morning in the yard, meaning the prison yard. I’d picked “Monday morning” because of that moment’s proverbial connotation of working week dread. Monday morning is also a frenetic time in prison, when inmates are released from extended weekend lockdowns.