Darryl and I would ride buses across Philly searching for places like home. Like the corner of Frankstown and Bruston in Homewood. A poolroom, barbershop, rib joint, record store strip with bloods in peacock colors strolling up and down and hanging out on the corner. After a number of long, unsuccessful expeditions (how could you ask directions? Who in the island of University would know what you were asking, let alone be able to tell you how to get there?), we found South Street. Just over the bridge, walking distance if you weren’t in a hurry, but as far from school, as close to home as we could get. Another country.
Coming home from the university, from people and situations that continually set me against them and against myself, I was a dangerous person. If I wanted to stay in one piece and stay in school, I was forced to pull my punches. To maintain any semblance of dignity and confidence I had to learn to construct a shell around myself. Be cool. Work on appearing dignified, confident. Fool people with appearances, surfaces, live my real life underground in a region where no one could touch me. The trouble with this survival mechanism was the time and energy expended on upkeep of the shell. The brighter, harder, more convincing and impenetrable the shell became, the more I lost touch with the inner sanctuary where I was supposed to be hiding. It was no more accessible to me than it was to the people I intended to keep out. Inside was a breeding ground for rage, hate, dreams of vengeance.
Nothing original in my tactics. I’d adopted the strategy of slaves, the oppressed, the powerless. I thought I was running but I was fashioning a cage. Working hand in hand with my enemies. Knowledge of my racial past, of the worldwide struggle of people of color against the domination of Europeans would have been invaluable. History could have been a tool, a support in the day-to-day confrontations I experienced in the alien university environment. History could have taught me I was not alone, my situation was not unique. Believing I was alone made me dangerous, to myself and others.
College was a time of precipitous ups and downs. I was losing contact with the truth of my own feelings. Not trusting, not confiding in anyone else, learning to mistrust and deny my own responses left me no solid ground, nowhere to turn. I was an expert at going with the flow, protecting myself by taking on the emotional or intellectual coloring of whatever circumstance I found myself in. All of this would have been bad enough if I’d simply been camouflaging my feelings. Yet it was far worse. I had no feelings apart from the series of roles and masquerades I found myself playing. And my greatest concern at the time had nothing to do with reestablishing an authentic core. What I feared most and spent most of my energy avoiding, was being unmasked.
Away from school I worked hard at being the same old home boy everybody remembered, not because I identified with that mask but because I didn’t want youall to discover I was a traitor. Even at home a part of me stood outside, watching me perform. Even within the family. The watching part was unnamable. I hated it and depended on it. It was fear and cunning and anger and alienation; it was chaos, a yawning emptiness at the center of my being.
Once, in Wyoming, I saw a gut-shot antelope. A bullet had dropped the animal abruptly to its knees. It waggled to its feet again, tipsy, dazed. Then it seemed to hear death, like a prairie fire crackling through the sagebrush at its heels. The antelope bolted, a flat-out, bounding sprint, trailing guts like streamers from its low-slung potbelly. I was running that hard, that fast, but without the antelope’s blessed ignorance. I knew I was coming apart.
I could get ugly, vicious with people real quick. They’d think they knew the person they were dealing with, then I’d turn on them. Get drunk or fed up or just perverse for perversity’s sake. Exercise the dark side of my power. Become a stranger, a different person. I’d scare people, hurt them. What I did to others, I was doing to myself. I wasn’t sure I cried real tears, bled real blood. Didn’t know whose eyes stared back at me from the mirror. Problem is, I’m not talking about ancient history. I’ve changed. We’ve all changed. A lot’s happened in the last twenty years. But what I was, I still am. You have to know this. My motives remain suspect. A potential for treachery remains deep inside the core. I can blend with my surroundings, become invisible. An opaque curtain slides down between me and others, between the part of me that judges and weighs and is accountable for my actions and that part that acts. Then, as always, I’m capable of profound irresponsibility. No way of being accountable because there’s no one, no place to turn to.
I try harder these days. Love, marriage, children, a degree of success in the world, leisure to reconsider, to reason with myself, to read and write have increased my insight and altered my perspective. But words like “insight” and “altered perspective” are bullshit. They don’t tell you what you need to know. Am I willing to go all the way? Be with you? Share the weight? Go down with you wherever you have to go? No way to know beforehand. Words can’t do that. Words may help me find you. Then we’ll have to see. . . .
You’ve seen Jamila almost yearly. Since she was a baby she’s accompanied us on our visits to the prison. One of the family. I date your time in prison by her age. She used to cry coming and going. Now she asks questions, the hard kind I can’t answer. The kinds of questions few in this society bother to pose about the meaning, the intent, the utility of locking people behind bars.
How long will Robby be in cage?
In a book about the evolution of imprisonment during the Middle Ages I discovered the word “jail” does in fact derive from “cage.” Prisons in medieval England were basically custodial cages where convicted felons awaited punishment or the accused were held till traveling magistrates arrived to pass judgment. At specified towns or villages within the circuit of his jurisdiction a justice would sit (old French assise, hence the modern “assizes”), and prisoners would be transported from gaol to have their fate determined. Jamila knew what she was talking about We said “jail” and she heard “cage,” heard steel doors clanking, iron locks rattling, remembered animals penned in the zoo. Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, reveal the history buried in sounds. They haven’t forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words—rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition—children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.
Maybe Jamila’s a yardstick for you too. Years registering in terms of pounds and inches. The changes in her body are the reality of time passing, the reality less observable in your outward appearance. People ask, How’s Robby? and I don’t know what to answer. If I say he’s okay, people take that to mean he’s the same. He’s still the person we knew when he was free. I don’t want to give anyone that impression of you. I know you’re changing, growing as fast as Jamila. No one does time outside of time.
A narrow sense of time as a material entity, as a commodity like money that can be spent, earned, lost, owed, or stolen is at the bottom of the twisted logic of incarceration. When a person is convicted of a crime, the state dispossesses that criminal of a given number of days, months, years. Time pays for crime. By surrendering a certain portion of his allotment of time on earth the malefactor pays his debt to society.
But how does anyone do time outside of time? Since a person can’t be removed from time unless you kill him, what prison does to its inmates is make time as miserable, as unpleasant, as possible. Prison time must be hard time, a metaphorical death, a sustained, twilight condition of death-in-life. The prisoner’s life is violently interrupted, enclosed within a parenthesis. The point is to create the fiction that he doesn’t exist. Prison is an experience of death by inches, minutes, hours, days.
Yet the little death of a prison sentence doesn’t quite kill the prisoner, because prisons, in spite of their ability to make the inmate’s life unbearable, can’t kill time. Incarceration as punishment alw
ays achieves less and more than its intent. No matter how drastically you deprive a prisoner of the benefits of society, abridge his civil and legal rights, unman and torture him, unless you take his life, you can’t take away his time. Many inmates die violently in prisons, almost all suffer in ways beyond an outsider’s comprehension, but life goes on and since it does, miracles occur. Bodies languish, spirits are broken, yet in some rare cases the prison cell becomes the monk’s cell, exile a spiritual retreat, isolation the blessed solitude necessary for self-examination, self-discipline.
In spite of all the measures Western society employs to secularize time, time transcends the conventional social order. Prisoners can be snatched from that order but not from time. Time imprisons us all. When the prisoner returns to society after serving his time, in an important sense he’s never been away. Prisoners cannot step into the same river twice—prison may have rendered them unfit to live in free society, prison may have radically altered the prisoner’s sense of self, his relation to his family and friends—but the river never goes away; it breaches the walls, washes them, washes us. We only pretend the prisoner has gone away.
We visit you in prison. Here we come. The whole family. Judy, Dan, Jake, Jamila. Our nuclear unit and Mom and whoever else we can fit into the Volvo station wagon. We try to arrive at the prison as early as possible, but with five in our crew competing for time and space in Mom’s tiny bathroom in the house on Tokay, and slow-as-molasses nieces Monique and Tameka to pick up in East Liberty after we’re all ready, we’re lucky if we set off before noon. But here we come. Getting ready as we’d get ready for any family outing. Baths, teeth brushed, feeding, coaxing, the moment somewhere at the height of the bustle, frustration, and confusion when I say to myself, Shit. Is it worth all this hassle? Let’s just call it off. Let’s muzzle these little beasts and go back to bed and forget the whole thing. But we persevere. We’re on our way.
Jamila is the youngest visitor. Five and a half years old, my only daughter, your niece, approximately three feet tall, at the time of this visit, this visit which can stand for all visits. She has very large eyes. Mom’s eyes, you christened them in Laramie; she is petite but built strong, taut like her mother. It’s summer so her skin is tanned a golden-toned beige. As a consequence of prematurity and having her head shaved so feeding tubes could be inserted in the veins crisscrossing her skull, for a long while Jamila was bald. Now her hair is coming in nicely, tending to blond at the wispy edges where it curls loose from whatever style her mother chooses to bind it in. She is a beautiful child, I think. She moves with an athletic grace and economy. Jamila chatters incessantly and makes friends easily. A blithe, fey quality attracts people to her. Already she’s aware of the seductive power of her enormous, curly eyelashes, the deep, brown pools of her eyes. She’s remarkably sophisticated in conversation, in her capacity to listen and concentrate on what other people are saying. She grasps abstract ideas quickly, intuitively. Her early flirtation with death has without a doubt stamped her personality. She’s curious about graveyards. Keeps track of them when we make trips. When we go to the beach, Mom, there’s three. Like her brother, Jake, whom she resembles in skin tone and features, she possesses the gift of feeling. One of her good friends, Vass, resides in the Laramie cemetery. Jamila picked up this buddy by reading his name on a large headstone visible from the road and greets him cheerily whenever we drive past the clutter of tombstones abutting the fence on Fifteenth Street.
Jamila, tell me about going to see Robby. What do you remember about going to visit him?
Usually when we go there, when we go there . . . the visiting place . . . he eats an apple. And he wears braids. Or sometimes he would . . . got that? . . . get Doritos instead.
Yes, I got that, smartass. I’ll write it down. You just try to remember what you think when we visit.
Looks like Stevie Wonder.
What else?
I remember him being sort of happy . . . happy to see us.
Why sort of?
Well, because he was sort of happy to see us and not happy he was in jail.
Anything else?
I think about him getting out of cage.
Should they let him out?
Yes. Because he wants to see people and be around other people and have life outside of him and jail.
Do you remember anything he said?
It’s nice to see you. I remember Robby saying that. And the activity place. Crayons and stuff. Telling the names of characters up on the wall.
Do you talk to people about Robby?
No. It’s sort of like a secret. It’s a secret because other people . . . why would they be interested in it, because they don’t see him and they don’t know him and it’s not none of their business.
Would you talk to anyone about him?
Maybe one of my special friends like Jens. He would know what I’m talking about. Even though he’s the youngest of all of us in Open School. I know Jens would understand more than anybody else because he would understand more. Like if I told Claire she would just say, Oh. She wouldn’t know what I was talking about, but Jens he would tell me a different story and I would know he would understand.
Anything else you can remember?
One time when we went there and we were finding out we couldn’t see him that day, I heard him call and say come back another time.
Why’s he in jail?
So that he doesn’t go out and do the same thing again. They’re keeping him there till they think that he won’t do the same thing again.
When everybody’s finally ready and in, I back the Volvo station wagon down the steep, cobblestone street to the intersection of Tokay and Seagirt. There I can turn around, ease the wagon’s rear end into Seagirt, point us toward Bennett Street, and we’re on our way. Backing down Tokay can be a real trick at busy traffic times of day. It’s a chore anytime, fighting the high, broken curb, the blind corners where cars from Seagirt and Bricelyn pop into Tokay. Cars come at you shuddering down the hill, cars behind your back gun their engines for a running start up Tokay. In Homewood you still get points for laying rubber, for flying full blast down the precipitous, potholed slopes of streets like Tokay and Seagirt. People enjoy tearing up big, shiny cars. But early in the morning, at the hour we shoot for when we visit you in prison, the streets are relatively quiet.
Down Tokay, left on Bennett, seven blocks over to Braddock till it crosses Penn Avenue, and Homewood’s behind us. That quick. That little snatch of Bennett, then Braddock till it crosses Penn carry us past the heart of the ghetto. Or where the heart once was. Since 1860 black people have lived in a pocket of streets, dirt paths before they were paved, between Homewood Avenue and Dunfermline Street. Kelly, Hamilton, Tioga, Cassina, Susquehanna, Finance—Braddock Avenue touches them all before passing under a concrete bridge that launches trains into the sky of Homewood. The railroad tracks linking this bridge on Braddock with the one over Homewood Avenue separate Homewood from the once predominantly white neighborhoods along its southern edge. When we lived on Finance Street those tracks marked one border of my world. Across Finance the pavement ended. A steep, weed-covered embankment rose to the railroad tracks. Before you were born, my sleep was couched in the rhythm of trains. Some nights I’d lie awake waiting for the crash of steel wheels, for the iron fist to grab me and shake me, for the long, echoing silence afterward to carry me away. Homewood was a valley between the thunder of the tracks and the quiet hills to the east, hills like Bruston, up whose flanks narrow streets meandered or, like Tokay, shot straight to the sky.
Homewood’s always been the wrong side of the tracks from the perspective of its white neighbors south of Penn Avenue. On the wrong side of the tracks—under the tracks, if the truth be told—in a deep hollow between Penn and the abrupt rise of Bruston Hill. When we leave for the prison the five minutes we spend negotiating an edge of this valley seem to take forever. Traffic lights on every corner attempt to slow down people for whom driving is not so much a means
of moving from one place to another as a display of aggression, fearlessness, and style. When you drive an automobile in Homewood you commit yourself to a serious game of chicken. On narrow, two-way streets like Finance you automatically whip down the center, claiming it, daring anyone to buck your play. Inside your car with WAMO cooking on the radio, you are lord and master and anyplace your tires kiss becomes your domain. Jesus have mercy on the chump who doesn’t get out your way.
The trip to visit you in prison begins with me behind the wheel, backing down Tokay then trying to run a string of green lights to get us quickly out of Homewood. No matter how skillfully I cheat on yellow, one or two red lights catch us and that’s part of the reason it seems to take so long to cover a short distance. But being stalled by a red light does not slow us down as much as the weight of the Homewood streets in my imagination. The streets had been my stomping ground, my briar patch. The place I’d fled from with all my might, the place always snatching me back.
Memories of the streets are dense, impacted. Threads of guilt bind each tapestry of associations. Guilt bright red as the black blood sealed beneath Homewood’s sidewalks. Someone had stripped Homewood bare, mounted it, and ridden it till it collapsed and lay dying, sprawled beneath the rider, who still spurred it and bounced up and down and screamed, Giddyup. I knew someone had done that to Homewood, to its people, to me. The evidence plain as day through the windshield of my car: an atrocious crime had been committed and I had witnessed it, continued to witness it during those short visits home each summer or for the Christmas holidays, yet I did nothing about what I saw. Not the crime, not the damage that had been wrought. I knew too much but most of the time counted myself lucky because I had escaped and wasn’t required to act on what I knew. Today, this morning on the way to visit you in Western Penitentiary, the rape of Homewood was being consummated, was flourishing in broad daylight, and nobody, including me, was uttering a mumbling word.
Brothers and Keepers Page 6