Brothers and Keepers

by John Edgar Wideman

  A need to go slowly, to register each detail of violated terrain competes with an urge to get the hell out before some doped-up fool without insurance or a pot to piss in comes barreling out of a side street and totals my new Volvo wagon. Cords at the back of my neck ache. Street names trigger flashbacks. Uncle Ote’s laughing voice, the blue-flowered china bowl in my grandmother’s closet, Aunt Geraldine sneaking me a hot sausage smothered in peppers and onions from DiLeo’s late on Saturday night, hiding in the stiff weeds on the hillside, riding on Big Melvin’s shoulders. Melvin was a giant and twenty years old but played with us kids and was dumber than a stone and died under the wheels of a bread truck because he was too dumb to cross Tioga Street. Fragments. A blues verse fading in and out. Got two minds to leave here. Just one telling me stay.

  The parkway parallels the Monongahela River. Below us, across the water, on the South Side are some of the steel mills that gave Pittsburgh its claim to fame. The smokestacks of Jones & Laughlin and United States Steel. People say better steel is manufactured now across the ocean in Japan and Scandinavia. Better steel produced more efficiently by modern, computerized mills. I don’t doubt it. J & L’s huge blast furnaces appear antique. Old, rusty guts that the ghost of Fred Willis, the junkman, will rip off one night and cart away. From the colonial period onward, steel determined the economic health of Pittsburgh and it continues to color the city’s image of itself. Steeltown, U.S.A. Home of the Iron Dukes and NFL Champion Steelers. Home of Iron City Beer. But for decades Pittsburgh’s steel industry has been suffering from foreign competition. Miles of deserted sheds, part of J & L’s original mill stretch below the highway. Too many layoffs and cutbacks and strikes. Too much greed and too little imagination in the managerial class, too much alienation among workers. Almost any adult male in Pittsburgh, black or white, can tell you a story about how these hulking, rusty skeletons lining the riverfront haunted his working life.

  To get to the North Side of the city from the parkway, I exit at Fort Duquesne Bridge. After the bridge the car winds around Three Rivers Stadium. It’s a dumb way to go but I don’t get lost. Inside the concrete bowl tiers of orange, blue, and gold seats are visible. Danny and Jake always have something to say here. Danny is a diehard Steelers fan and Jake roots for the team closest to home, the Denver Broncos. One brother will remind the other of a play, a game in the series between the two AFC rivals. Then it’s put down and shout down till one silences the other or an adult short-circuits impending mayhem and silences both. I still live and die with the Steelers but I stay out of the bickering, unless they need a fact confirmed, which they need me for less and less each year as their grasp of stats and personalities begins to exceed mine. Even if I’m not consulted (and it hurts a little when I’m not), I welcome the diversion. I listen to them squabble and I pick my way through confusing signs and detours and blind turns that, if I’m lucky, get us off the merry-go-round ramps circling Three Rivers and down onto Ohio River Boulevard.

  Again we parallel a river, this time the brown Ohio. To an outsider Pittsburgh must seem all bridges, tunnels, rivers, and hills. If you’re not climbing into the sky or burrowing into the bowels of the earth, you’re suspended, crossing water or looking down on a hodgepodge scramble of houses strewn up and down the sides of a ravine. You’d wonder how people live clinging to terraced hillsides. Why they trust ancient, doddering bridges to ferry them over the void. Why they truck along at seventy miles an hour on a narrow shelf chiseled in the stone shoulders of a mountain. A funicular railway erected in 1875 inches up Mount Washington, connecting the lower South Side to Duquesne Heights. Pittsburghers call it the Incline. Ride the rickety cars up the mountain’s sheer face for fun now, since tunnels and expressways and bridges have made the Incline’s service obsolete.

  After Fort Duquesne Bridge and the Stadium, we’re on the North Side, an adjoining city called Allegheny until it was incorporated into Pittsburgh proper in 1907. Urban renewal has destroyed nearly all the original residential buildings. We skirt the high rises, low rises, condos, malls, the shopping centers, singles bars, and discos that replaced the stolid, foursquare architecture of Old Allegheny. Twin relics, two ugly, ornate, boxish buildings squat deserted on Ohio River Boulevard. When I see these unusual structures, I know I’ve lucked out, that I’ve negotiated the maze of dead ends, one-ways, and anonymous streets and all that’s left is a straight shot out the boulevard to the prison.

  *

  Western Penitentiary sprouts like a giant wart from the bare, flat stretches of concrete surrounding it. The prison should be dark and forbidding, but either its stone walls have been sandblasted or they’ve somehow escaped the decades of industrial soot raining from the sky.

  Western is a direct descendant of the world’s first penitentiary, Philadelphia’s Quaker-inspired Walnut Street Jail, chartered in 1773. The good intentions built into the Walnut Street Jail—the attempt to substitute an enforced regime of solitary confinement, labor, and moral rehabilitation, for the whipping post, pillory, fines, and executions of the British penal code—did not exempt that humane experiment from the ills that beset all societies of caged men. Walnut Street Jail became a cesspool, overcrowded, impossible to maintain, wracked by violence, disease, and corruption. By the second decade of the nineteenth century it was clear that the reforms instituted in the jail had not procured the results its zealous supporters had envisioned, and two new prisons, one for the east, one for the western half of the state, were mandated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. From the ashes of the Walnut Street experiment rose the first Western penitentiary. The architect, a William Strickland known for revivals of classic Greek models and his engineering skill, created a classic of a different sort on a plain just west of Allegheny City. With massive, forbidding bulwarks, crenellated parapets, watchtowers buttressing the corners of the walls, his notion of a prison recapitulated the forms of medieval fear and paranoia.

  The immediate successor of Strickland’s Norman castle was constructed sporadically over a period of seventeen years. This new Western, grandson of the world’s first penitentiary, received its first contingent of prisoners in 1886, and predictably black men made up a disproportionate percentage of these pioneers, who were marched in singing. Today, nearly a hundred years later, having survived floods, riots, scandals, fires, and blue-ribboned panels of inquiry, Western remains in working order.

  Approaching the prison from Ohio River Boulevard, you can see coils of barbed wire and armed guards atop the ramparts. The steepled towers that, like dunce caps, once graced its forty-foot walls have been lopped off. There’s a visitors’ parking lot below the wall facing the boulevard. I ignore it and pull into the fenced lot beside the river, the one marked Official Business Only. I save everybody a quarter-mile walk by parking in the inner lot. Whether it’s summer or winter, that last quarter mile can be brutal. Sun blazing down on your head or icy wind off the river, or snow or rain or damp fog creeping off the water, and nothing but one high, gritty wall that you don’t want to hug no matter how much protection it might afford. I drive through the tall gate into the official business lot because even if the weather’s summery pleasant, I want to start the visit with a small victory, be one up on the keepers. Because that’s the name of the game and chances are I won’t score again. I’ll be playing on their turf, with their ball and their rules, which are nothing if not one-sided, capricious, cruel, and corrupting. What’s written says one thing. But that’s not really the way things are. Always a catch. Always an angle so the published rules don’t literally apply. What counts are the unwritten rules. The now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t-sleight-of-hand rules whose function is to humiliate visitors and preserve the absolute, arbitrary power of the keepers.

  Onto whose lot we trespass. Pulling as close to the visitors’ building as possible. Not too close because the guard on duty in the kiosk adjacent to the stairs of the visitors’ annex might feel compelled to turn us back if we break into the narrow compass of his alertness. Close
but far enough away so he’d have to poke out his head and shout to get our attention.

  I find a space and the kids scoot out of their seats. Tish’s girls are with us so we used the way back of the station wagon. For safety the rear hatch unlocks only from outside, so I insert the key and lift the lid and Danny and Jake and Tameka scramble out to join the others.

  “We’re in a parking lot, so watch for cars!” I shout after them as they race down the broad center lane of the parking area. What else can I say? Cramped in the car for the past half hour, they’re doing now what they need to do. Long-legged, snake-hipped, brown children. They had tried to walk in an orderly fashion, smallest one grabbing largest one’s hand, lock step, slowly, circumspectly, progressing in that fashion for approximately three steps before one tore away and another followed and they’re all skipping and scampering now, polished by the sun. Nobody sprints toward the prison full tilt, they know better than that, but they get loose, flinging limbs and noise every which way. They crunch over a patch of gravel. Shorts and T-shirts make their bodies appear vulnerable, older and younger at the same time. Their high-pitched cries bounce off the looming wall. I keep my eyes on them as I lock the car. No real danger here but lessons, lessons everywhere, all the time. Every step and the way you take it here on enemy ground is a lesson.

  *

  Mom and Judy walk side by side, a black woman and a white woman, the white one tanned darker than the black. They add their two cents’ worth of admonitions to the kids. Walk, don’t run. Get Jamila’s hand. Be careful. Slow down, youall. I fall in behind them. Far enough away to be alone. To be separate from the women and separate from the children. I need to say to whoever’s watching—guards, prisoners invisible behind the barred three-story windows partitioning the walls, These are my people. They’re with me. I’m responsible. I need to say that, to hang back and preside, to stroll, almost saunter, aware of the weight, the necessity of vigilance because here I am, on alien turf, a black man, and I’m in charge. For a moment at least these women, these children have me to turn to. And I’m one hundred percent behind them, prepared to make anyone who threatens them answer to me. And that posture, that prerogative remains rare for a black man in American society. Rare today, over 120 years after slavery and second-class citizenship have been abolished by law. The guards know that. The prisoners know. It’s for their benefit as well as my own and my family’s that I must carry myself in a certain way, make certain rules clear even though we are entering a hostile world, even though the bars exist to cut off the possibility of the prisoners seeing themselves as I must see myself, striding free, in charge of women and children, across the official lot.

  Grass grows in the margin between the spiked fence paralleling the river and the asphalt lot. Grass clipped harshly, uniformly as the bristle heads of convicts in old movies about prison. Plots of manicured green define a path leading to steps we must climb to enter the visitors’ building. Prisoner trustees in ill-fitting blue uniforms—loose tunics, baggy, string-tied trousers a shade darker—putter at various make-work jobs near the visitors’ entrance. Another prisoner, farther away, near the river edge of the parking lot sidles into a slate-gray Mercedes sedan. A pudgy, bull-necked white guy. When he plops into the driver’s seat the car shudders. First thing he does is lower the driver’s side window and hang out his ham arm. Then full throttle he races the Mercedes engine, obviously relishing the roar, as pleased with himself as he’d been when the precise, solid slam of the door sealed him in. If the driver is hot shit, big shot for a few seconds behind the wheel, he’ll pay for the privilege soon enough when he adds the Mercedes to the row of Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles, and Buicks he must scrub and spit shine for the bosses.

  Another prisoner leans on a push broom. The asphalt walks are spotless, but every minute or so he advances the broom another foot, punching its bristles into the gray surface as if his job is not to keep the path clean but punish it for unmentionable crimes against humanity. Others sweep, rake, and supervise. Two or three trustees have no apparent duties. They are at their ease, talking and smoking. A lethargy, a stilted slow-motion heaviness stylizes their gestures. It’s as if they inhabit a different element, as if their bodies are enfolded in a dreamy ether or trapped at the bottom of the sea. I watch the prisoners watch the kids mount the steps. No outward signs betray what the men are thinking but I can feel them appraising, measuring. Through the prisoners’ eyes I see the kids as sexual objects. Clean, sleek bodies. Young, smooth, and supple. The coltish legs and high, muscley butts of my nieces. The boys’ long legs and slim hips. They are handsome children, a provocative banner waved in front of men who must make do with their own bodies or the bodies of other men. From the vantage point of the blue-uniformed trustees on the ground, the double staircase and the landing above are a stage free-world people must ascend. An auction block, an inspection stand where the prisoners can sample with their hungry eyes the meat moving in and out of prison.

  But I don’t have their eyes. Perhaps what they see when the kids climb the steps are their own lost children, their sons and daughters, their younger brothers and sisters left behind in the treacherous streets. Not even inside the walls yet and I can sense the paranoia, the curtain of mistrust and suspicion settling over my eyes. Except for the car jockey and a runner outside the guards’ kiosk, all the trustees in the yard are black, black men like me, like you. In spite of knowing better, I can’t shake the feeling that these men are different. Not just different. Bad. People who are dangerous. I can identify with them only to the extent that I own up to the evil in myself. Yeah. If I was shut away from the company of women, I’d get freaky. Little kids, alley cats, anything got legs and something between them start to looking good to me. Yeah. It’s a free show when wives and mamas tippy-tap up them steps. And I’d be right there leaning on my broom taking it all in. I don’t want to feel angry or hostile toward the prisoners but I close up the space between myself and my two women, glad they’re both looking good and glad they’re both wearing slacks.

  It’s crazy. It’s typical of the frame of mind visiting prison forces on me. I have trouble granting the prisoners a life independent of mine, I impose my terms on them, yet I want to meet their eyes. Plunge into the depths of their eyes to learn what’s hidden there, what reservoirs of patience and pain they draw from, what sustains them in this impossible place. I want to learn from their eyes, identify with their plight, but I don’t want anyone to forget I’m an outsider, that these cages and walls are not my home. I want to greet the prisoners civilly as I would if we passed each other outside, on Homewood Avenue. But locks, bars, and uniforms frustrate the simplest attempts at communication; the circumstances under which we meet inform me unambiguously that I am not on Homewood Avenue, not speaking to a fellow citizen. Whether or not I acknowledge that fact I’m ensnared by it. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. I’m not wearing funny blue clothes. I walked into this zoo because I chose to; I can return home and play with these children, make love to my woman. These privileges, which in my day-to-day blindness I often don’t even count as privileges, are as embarrassing to me, as galling in this prison context as the inmates’ state of drastic deprivation must be to them. Without speaking a word, without having ever seen each other before, we know too much about each other. Our rawest, most intimate secrets are exposed, there’s no room for small talk. We can’t take our time and proceed in the gradual give-and-take, willed unveiling natural to human interaction. This place where we meet one another is called the slammer and sure as shit it slams us together.

  People don’t so much meet as explode in each other’s faces. I say “Hi” to a tall guy who looks like somebody I might have played ball with once. He wasn’t anybody I knew but he could have been. One ballplayer knows every other ballplayer anyway, so I said “Hi.” Got back no hint of recognition. Nothing saying yes or no or maybe in his black face. The basketball courts where I sweated and he sweated, the close scores, the impossible shots, the chances to fly, t
o be perfect a second or two, to rise above the hard ground and float so time stands still and you make just the right move before your sneakers touch down again. None of that. No past or future we might have shared. Nothing at all. A dull, hooded “Hey, man” in reply and I backed off quickly.

  Are the steps up to the porch landing iron or wood or concrete? I can’t recall. I’ll check next time. I feel them now, narrow, metal, curving like a ship’s spiral ladder. My feet ring against latticed rungs. I can peer through the winding staircase to the ground. People can look up between the rungs at me. The first violation of privacy. Arranged so that the prisoners are party to it. One privilege conferred on the trustees is this opportunity to greet free-world people first. Form a casual gaundet of eyes outsiders must endure. Behind the prisoners’ eyes may be nothing more than curiosity, perhaps even gratitude toward anybody willing to share a few hours with a man inside. Envy. Concern. Indifference. Any or all of these; but my ignorance, the insecurity bred by the towering walls incite me to resent the eyes.

  I don’t enjoy being seen entering or leaving the prison. Enormous stores of willpower must be expended pretending it doesn’t exist. For the hour or so of the visit I want to forget what surrounds us, want to free myself and free you from the oppressive reality of walls, bars, and guards. And other prisoners. I resent them. And need them. Without them it wouldn’t be a prison. In the back of my mind I rely on the other prisoners to verify the mistake committed in your case. Some of these guys are bad, very bad. They must be. That’s why prisons exist. That’s why you shouldn’t be here. You’re not like these others. You’re my brother, you’re like me. Different.

  A brother behind bars, my own flesh and blood, raised in the same houses by the same mother and father; a brother confined in prison has to be a mistake, a malfunctioning of the system. Any other explanation is too incriminating. The fact that a few twists and turns of fate could land you here with the bad guys becomes a stark message about my own vulnerability. It could easily be me behind bars instead of you. But that wouldn’t make sense because I’m not bad like the bad guys for whom prisons are built. The evil in others defines your goodness, frees me. If it’s luck or circumstance, some arbitrary decision that determines who winds up behind prison bars, then good and evil are superfluous. Nobody’s safe. Except the keepers, the ones empowered to say You go to the right. You go to the left. And they’re only safe as long as they’re keepers. If prisons don’t segregate good from evil, then what we’ve created are zoos for human beings. And we’ve given license to the keepers to stock the cages.