Channeling Mark Twain

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  “Perhaps.”

  I stood up, then sat back down again. I took a deep breath to calm myself.

  “Why did you lock her up like that—for writing a poem? Even if First Amendment rights under the Constitution cannot apply here, there are laws against censorship—”

  “You know,” she interrupted, sitting back, smiling again, “you really are quite the thinker, aren’t you? When you first came up with the idea of a poetry workshop, I wasn’t inclined to approve.”

  She leaned forward a little, emphasizing each word.

  “A cree-ay-tive wri-ting class? For these women?”

  She leaned her hand protectively on a framed photograph as a jet roared over. I started to speak, but she went on, oblivious to me.

  “I decided it was a way to let off steam, harmless: sob stories, poems, Dear Diaries. And this do-gooder college girl sorting them all out, providing a kind of—well, I guess you could say—cozy therapy. Harmless.”

  I felt the anger flickering in my brain, a constellation of quick licking white flames, spreading fast, lighting up branch after branch of a furious nerve tree. I opened my mouth. I was no longer shaking. I had some things to say.

  The warden held up her hand to silence me.

  “I’m aware that you think poetry is so important. I also know that you think the ladies are victims of an unfair system. Isn’t that how you might put it? ‘Victims of an unfair system’?”

  I sat very still, my anger banking, waiting. A series of muffled announcements came over the P.A. system.

  “I know that you bring in serious books of poetry. But besides being a poet and a teacher of poetry, you seem to see yourself as some sort of self-appointed liberation force.”

  She smiled at me again.

  “I am aware, for example, that you bring in that newsletter, On the Barricade, and Hershey bars, and cookies. You bring in other contraband, like spiral notebooks and pens. Controversial political books, like Soul on Ice and Prairie Fire. Anything you can slip into their hands when the C.O. steps away for one minute. You seem to think that our security regulations do not apply to you. You store some of these books and candies up in the Social Services office where you work, isn’t that right? In the file cabinets, in your poetry folders, isn’t that right?”

  I said nothing.

  “I suppose, on one level, it seems innocent enough. A little bit of nonconformity, a little illegal sugar every now and then, and they think they’re getting away with something. It makes them feel better, I suppose, that’s how the thinking would go. But you see…” Another smile, a terrible smile. “That’s not the way it is.”

  She lifted a little glass bell shaped like an angel from her desktop and shook it. There was a barely audible clink. She set it down again carefully.

  “Christmas here at the Women’s House—can you imagine what it’s like? You haven’t had the opportunity to be here at that time.

  Ladies ready to break out, ladies ready to stick their heads in the toilet after a cheery visit from children who can’t remember them anymore. It’s a free-for-all. And all the big companies send holiday guilt donations: clothes, teddy bears, fruit, candies, games. One year some cosmetic company decided to send a little care package: a black satin pouch stuffed with cologne and powder and lipstick. We checked fanatically for possible contraband uses: took out all the metal nail files and the nonshatterproof bottles and the plastic bags. We worked overtime on Christmas Eve and then, finally, Santa Claus was sent off to all the floors to deliver the gifts. We waited. All was calm, and then…”

  She touched the glass bell again.

  “Clink, crack, clink! All over the institution we heard the sound of glass breaking.”

  My mind was churning, but I kept listening. A part of me was fascinated.

  “The cosmetics company had tucked a deodorant with a little glass rollerball into the lip of the pouch and we hadn’t caught it. Within five minutes of distribution, they were armed with glass, had cut their wrists with glass, had swallowed glass.”

  She snapped her fingers. “That fast.

  “Still, your kind of contraband is not so clear-cut, if you’ll excuse the pun. Nobody in their right mind would ever take On the Barricade seriously. We pick it up all the time on raids. The inmates throw it away—we read it at coffee break for laughs.”

  She laughed again, as if to capture the mood of these high-spirited lit crit coffee breaks. Another plane shook the building. I wondered why I heard the planes again, sitting here, when in the poetry workshop they vanished from earshot. I suddenly heard everything acutely—since she’d described the breaking glass, the auditory world seemed turned way up.

  “Do you think,” she asked, “that I don’t know what’s going on? I did find out, eventually, that you were actually teaching the women something about the subject. How to write. And Aliganth has stood up for you—she says you work hard as a teacher. Of course, I also have a pair of ‘eyes and ears’ in that class—or hadn’t you guessed?”

  Of all the things she might have said, this I was not prepared for. A spy? An informer? “Eyes and ears” for the warden in our midst? But who? I saw each face: Baby Ain’t, Gene/Jean, Darlene, Akilah, Sallie, Polly Lyle, Billie Dee, Roxanne, Never…But I could not imagine—rather, it hurt too much to imagine—who it might be. The compliment from Aliganth vanished in the wake of this revelation.

  I noticed her smiling at what must have been an indescribable expression on my face as I went down the list. There was a soft knock at the door and a C.O. from the Watch Commander’s office entered, carrying a stainless steel coffeepot with a white china mug next to it on a tray. She set the tray down in front of the warden and then exited, with a quick sidewise glance at me.

  “Coffee?” The warden poured and drank.

  “No,” I said. “No thanks.” I was still running through the names and faces.

  “But it’s not your class that went so very wrong,” she continued, setting the coffee mug primly on the tray. “It was this decision on your part to advise Lily Baye—not a student of yours and not a Social Services client—to violate security, to defy authority. To incite other inmates to do the same.”

  “I did not advise anyone to—”

  “You told Lily Baye to make sure everyone heard her poem—is that not true?”

  I tried to remember what I’d said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess that’s true. But whatever she shared with the other women was hardly insurrectionary. I remember that the poem was about her daughter, her daughter’s death.”

  “And quite a few other things. Miss Mattox, here we have an inmate who writes down on paper that she intends to murder the superintendent and the deputy warden in order to break out of prison. She receives praise for this from a teacher in our institution classrooms. The teacher further encourages her to copy these threats of violence and spread them throughout the facility.”

  “But I didn’t do that. What I said was—”

  “What you’ve done is tantamount, in some ways, to inciting a riot. In a sense, you’re guiltier than she is, since you were in a position of responsibility.”

  I started to argue with her, then stopped myself.

  “They were dancing in the halls to it. ‘One for the warden, two for the dep!’—like that.”

  I pictured the inmates jiving up and down the corridors, snapping their fingers. I had to suppress a nearly hysterical laugh. I coughed into my hand.

  The warden rolled back in her chair suddenly and pulled open a desk drawer, fished something out, then slammed it shut.

  “You feel so sorry for Lily, don’t you? I mean, seeing her up there in the Bing, crying? And you want to help her, I know.”

  She slid a manila folder across the desk to me and flipped it open. I glimpsed her second finger, left hand: a stiff tan prosthetic digit with a clear-polished nail. There was a story that circulated about this finger—that years earlier a very young C.O. Ross, on duty in the kitchen, had tried to show a
n inmate how to chop marrow bones for stew. She’d gone so far as to graciously offer her own finger as an example.

  Then I looked at the contents of the folder: an 8×10 black-and-white photograph of a dead two-year-old girl. Her tiny naked body was a storm of bruises and welts, from the great blood rip of the scalp sheared away from her small cornrowed skull to her battered legs, bird-thin. At the top of the photo was stamped in red indelible ink MANHATTAN COUNTY CORONER’S OFFICE. I recognized the child’s expression, a miniature of Lily Baye’s, the lips upturned in a smile that was in fact a grimace of disbelief. I turned my head away.

  “Why are you showing me this? I know how Lily’s daughter died. She told me.”

  “Like you, I’m aware of Baye’s testimony. Please look here.”

  She pulled a second photograph from beneath the first, this one taken of the child’s body lying on its face. Tiny bruised buttocks and spine, the arms and legs, like Lily’s in the Bing, thrown out to the sides.

  “See this large discolored area? The coroner told the D.A., who tells me, that this is a contusion caused by a blow, or a series of blows, to the head and neck. I asked for these at the time of Lily Baye’s request for a furlough. The coroner, the medical examiner, you see, examined this discoloration and the others here at the child’s autopsy. He maintains that they could not have been caused by a fall, even through a floor. He thinks that they are the result of blows from a blunt instrument, a heavy boot heel, or, say, a walking stick.”

  She made her hand into a battering wedge and struck a rounded glass paperweight.

  “Crunch,” she said. “Crunch, crunch!”

  I looked at her, shocked, but she was not laughing.

  “Are you telling me,” I said, “that the old woman that Lily left her baby with did this?”

  She shook her head.

  “The D.A. feels that this evidence indicates that the child received this treatment from an adult who had some strength—a man.”

  She indicated the photos again.

  “Look.”

  A magnifying glass blazed in her hand. It glided across the first photograph, and the frail arms and legs leaped wildly as the lens slid over them. Then a patch of skin stood proffered, like the enlarged surface of a jewel. I could see the faintest brushing of hairs on the forearm, then three circular puckered wounds.

  The warden held the glass over one of the wounds.

  “Blisters? Or cigarette burns? What do you think, Miss Mattox?”

  “Oh God.”

  I pushed the lens violently aside. They were cigarette burns, clearly recognizable, undeniable. The lens slid upward, magnifying the child’s open left eye, which stared back, huge and expectant.

  I sat there for a while. Then I recovered my powers of speech.

  “An adult male with strength—who lived in Lily’s house? So you mean her husband?”

  The warden lowered her head, then peered up at me and shook it to and fro.

  “Pimp, Miss Mattox. Lily’s pimp. She’s been with him for years. He went out the back door that night. Do you suppose that he’d be eager to be caught with a dying kid—and child molestation, years of it, already on his record?”

  She held the magnifying glass up to the light, waving it back and forth as if drying it, then put it away in a drawer.

  “Lily is refusing to turn state’s evidence against him, though the D A.’s office has been leaning on her. These whores are very, very attached to their pimps, did you know that, Miss Mattox? Can’t wait to get back to them and go on being mistreated. You’ve seen those roosters out there waiting on the bridge?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I have.”

  I heard, far away, another plane. It seemed to hover overhead, drowning out the sound of the warden’s words, though another part of my mind still heard her talking.

  “The D.A.’s office feels that it would have been hard for someone of Lily’s size to…break through the floor. Somebody jammed the baby down through the broken boards to make it look like an accident.”

  At last the plane disappeared and another sound took its place—the sound of a barely distinguishable voice, a child’s voice, crying out from under the surface, under the substructure of a house.

  “Then why,” I asked, “would Lily want to go to her baby’s funeral?”

  “Funeral? I called the church and they are not holding a service. They will just say a few words over the body of this unfortunate child—over the little coffin—and then into the ground she goes. People want to forget these things, don’t they? You want to know what I think about Lily? I think that Lily had in mind to walk. She and this pimp go way back. She is more loyal to him than to her baby. She is more loyal to him than to herself. You didn’t pick up on that, did you, Miss Mattox?”

  “But why couldn’t…Could it be that she wants to get out in order to kill him? The pimp? For what he…what he has done?”

  “Ten years the same pimp. She wears a ring he gave her on her left hand. He keeps her in heroin. Did you see the tracks on her arms? What do you think the answer might be? You have to look closely at the arms. See how many years of collapsed veins, punched veins—all there in the tracks. There’s the love story. In the tracks.”

  She pulled the folder of photos back to her. She seemed relaxed suddenly. She held her false finger daintily aside, a teacup effect, the thumb and third finger held pincerlike.

  A deep female voice thundered over the P.A.

  “Count unverified. C.O.s, check your populations.”

  Superintendent Ross nodded at me over her coffee cup.

  “The count’s off. We know what that means, don’t we? You and I are prisoners now too. Can’t go home till we find out who’s missing.”

  I nodded back. I had nothing to say.

  “Let me ask you something, Miss Mattox,” she said. “Whom do you believe now?”

  Years later, far in the future, I would recollect that look: grave, keen, but somehow invested in my reaction. As if she wanted me to cry, wanted me to break down in front of her and grieve. There was the death of the baby, impossible to find language for—and then (“Wail, for the world’s wrong!” ) the death of each woman who (in fear or ignorance or desperate poverty) let a pimp turn her out, break her spirit, break her will, take away her human integrity, making her into a craven liar, street-life, piece of ass, punching bag, a pimp-wife. A pimp-wife’s child would suffer, the child of a beaten-down whore would be destroyed. The woman whose man held her by the hair and beat her as she asked for more, and the woman who held her baby fiercely to her heart, were opposed in their blood, alien to each other—yet one by nature. And the one-by-nature part made me sick to my soul. If it were true. Naïve as they come—but that wasn’t it. I would never, could never, find a way to accept that this too was part of what women were.

  I felt like someone who’d been arrested while high—who did not entirely understand the charge, the crime, but who was guilty, entirely guilty. Like a thumbprint, a mug shot, I was on record. I was a whore too. And all this, I saw now, for an idea of Justice, sold to whoever bid. Her name used like a public urinal by every ready opportunist and cynic, in and out of court, in government chambers—Justice in the judge’s chambers, in the back alley, Justice invoked by torturers and hustlers. Invoked by me.

  There was a loud blast of static, followed by an announcement:

  “Report 104 sentenced, 256 detention, 23 adolescent. Count verified.”

  Superintendent Ross smiled at me again, but her smile had hardened. Her desk intercom buzzed. She sighed and stood up. The shift was changing, she was expected to hold inspection of the officers who’d just come on duty for the graveyard shift.

  I stood up too. I gripped the desk in front of me, dizzy. I felt I had to say something now.

  “Lily is locked up because of me, and I’d like to take responsibility, however I can, so that she can be released.”

  “Miss Mattox. You are irrelevant at this point. Lily Baye will be released from lock w
hen the Board determines that she is no longer a threat to internal security.”

  She paused. “Soon. I can tell you that. And now I’m going to give you a punishment. I’m going to let you keep teaching here at the Women’s House.”

  She glanced ruefully at me, then turned to go.

  “I’d like to quit,” I said.

  “Nevertheless,” she said. “I think you’ll continue here with us.”

  She was at the door. I followed her and touched her arm, tentatively.

  “Eyes and ears,” I said.

  She stared at me.

  “You said that you have someone who is your eyes and ears in the poetry workshop. I was just wondering if you would tell me who it is.”

  Superintendent Ross started to brush past me, then turned around almost coquettishly, touching her false finger to her lips.

  “No, I’m afraid that you’ll have to figure that out for yourself. You’ll have to use your own powers of observation. Eyes and ears wouldn’t hurt a poet, would they, Miss Mattox?”

  That evening I waited a long time for the bus back to Manhattan. I sat on a bench outside the Reception Center and counted the planes: fifteen went over while I sat. I thought about the passengers seated in the airborne cylinders, the stewardesses already moving up and down the carpeted aisles, the jingling drink cart rolling out high above me. Then, later, a movie screen enlarging with light, a roaring lion’s head, a spotlit colossus.

  There was one pimp left, standing in a shadowy corner of the building, chain-smoking, though there were no more whores left to pick up. He was like the last sentinel, I thought, of an occupying army. He was here to stay, he’d be back—they’d all be back, standing watch on the bridge, the next day, and the next.

  The pimp and I boarded the empty bus together and sat far apart. He got off across the bridge and I rode back alone through Queens and into Manhattan. No one else got on, no one else witnessed it: the huge lit-up famous skyline I so loved—(F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world”—unfurling like a banner as the bus crossed the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.