Robby understood that he was sentenced to die. That all sentences were death sentences. If he didn’t buckle under, the guards would do everything in their power to kill him. If he succumbed to the pressure to surrender dignity, self-respect, control over his own mind and body, then he’d become a beast, and what was good in him would die. The death sentence was unambiguous. The question for him became: How long could he survive in spite of the death sentence? Nothing he did would guarantee his safety. A disturbance in a cell block halfway across the prison could provide an excuse for shooting him and dumping him with the other victims. Anytime he was ordered to go with guards out of sight of other prisoners, his escorts could claim he attacked them, or attempted to escape. Since the flimsiest pretext would make murdering him acceptable, he had no means of protecting himself. Yet to maintain sanity, to minimize their opportunities to destroy him, he had to be constantly vigilant. He had to discipline himself to avoid confrontations, he had to weigh in terms of life and death every decision he made; he had to listen and obey his keepers’ orders, but he also had to determine in certain threatening situations whether it was better to say no and keep himself out of a trap or take his chances that this particular summons was not the one inviting him to his doom. Of course to say no perpetuated his reputation as one who couldn’t be controlled, a bad guy, a guy you never turn your back on, one of the prisoners out to get the guards. That rap made you more dangerous in the keepers’ eyes and therefore increased the likelihood they’d be frightened into striking first. Saying no put you in no less jeopardy than going along with the program. Because the program was contrived to kill you. Directly or indirectly, you knew where you were headed. What you didn’t know was the schedule. Tomorrow. Next week. A month. A minute. When would one of them get itchy, get beyond waiting a second longer? Would there be a plan, a contrived incident, a conspiracy they’d talk about and set up as they drank coffee in the guards’ room or would it be the hair-trigger impulse of one of them who held a grudge, harbored an antipathy so elemental, so irrational that it could express itself only in a burst of pure, unrestrained violence?
If you’re Robby and have the will to survive, these are the possibilities you must constantly entertain. Vigilance is the price of survival. Beneath the vigilance, however, is a gnawing awareness boiling in the pit of your stomach. You can be as vigilant as you’re able, you can keep fighting the good fight to survive, and still your fate is out of your hands. If they decide to come for you in the morning, that’s it. Your ass is grass and those minutes, and hours, days and years you painfully stitched together to put off the final reckoning won’t matter at all. So the choice, difficult beyond words, to say yes or say no is made in light of the knowledge that in the end neither your yes nor your no matters. Your life is not in your hands.
The events, the atmosphere of the summer had brought home to Robby the futility of resistance. Power was absurdly apportioned all on one side. To pretend you could control your own destiny was a joke. You learned to laugh at your puniness, as you laughed at the stink of your farts lighting up your cell. Like you laughed at the seriousness of the masturbation ritual that romanticized, cloaked in darkness and secrecy, the simple, hungry shaking of your penis in your fist. You had no choice, but you always had to decide to go on or stop. It had been a stuttering, stop, start, maybe, fuck it, bitch of a summer, and now, for better or worse, we were starting up something else. Robby backtracks his story from Garth to another beginning, the house on Copeland Street in Shadyside where we lived when he was born.
* * *
I know that had something to do with it. Living in Shadyside with only white people around. You remember how it was. Except for us and them couple other families it was a all-white neighborhood. I got a thing about black. See, black was like the forbidden fruit. Even when we went to Freed’s in Homewood, Geraldine and them never let me go no farther than the end of the block. All them times I stayed over there I didn’t go past Mr. Conrad’s house by the vacant lot or the other corner where Billy Shields and them stayed. Started to wondering what was so different about a black neighborhood. I was just a little kid and I was curious. I really wanted to know why they didn’t want me finding out what was over there. Be playing with the kids next door to Freed, you know, Sonny and Gumpy and them, but all the time I’m wondering what’s round the corner, what’s up the street. Didn’t care if it was bad or good or dangerous or what, I had to find out. If it’s something bad I figured they would have told me, tried to scare me off. But nobody said nothing except, No. Don’t you go no farther than the corner. Then back home in Shadyside nothing but white people so I couldn’t ask nobody what was special about black. Black was a mystery and in my mind I decided I’d find out what it was all about. Didn’t care if it killed me, I was going to find out.
One time, it was later, I was close to starting high school, I overheard Mommy and Geraldine and Sissy talking in Freed’s kitchen. They was talking about us moving from Shadyside back to Homewood. The biggest thing they was worried about was me. How would it be for me being in Homewood and going to Westinghouse? I could tell they was scared. Specially Mom. You know how she is. She didn’t want to move. Homewood scared her. Not so much the place but how I’d act if I got out there in the middle of it. She already knew I was wild, hard to handle. There’d be too much mess for me to get into in Homewood. She could see trouble coming.
And she was right. Me and trouble hooked up. See, it was a question of being somebody. Being my own person. Like youns had sports and good grades sewed up. Wasn’t nothing I could do in school or sports that youns hadn’t done already. People said, Here comes another Wideman. He’s gon be a good student like his brothers and sister. That’s the way it was spozed to be. I was another Wideman, the last one, the baby, and everybody knew how I was spozed to act. But something inside me said no. Didn’t want to be like the rest of youns. Me, I had to be a rebel. Had to get out from under youns’ good grades and do. Way back then I decided I wanted to be a star. I wanted to make it big. My way. I wanted the glamour. I wanted to sit high up.
Figured out school and sports wasn’t the way. I got to thinking my brothers and sister was squares. Loved youall but wasn’t no room left for me. Had to figure out a new territory. I had to be a rebel.
Along about junior high I discovered Garfield. I started hanging out up on Garfield Hill. You know, partying and stuff in Garfield cause that’s where the niggers was. Garfield was black, and I finally found what I’d been looking for. That place they was trying to hide from me. It was heaven. You know. Hanging out with the fellows. Drinking wine and trying anything else we could get our hands on. And the ladies. Always a party on the weekends. Had me plenty sweet little soft-leg Garfield ladies. Niggers run my butt off that hill more than a couple times behind messing with somebody’s piece but I’d be back next weekend. Cause I’d found heaven. Looking back now, wasn’t much to Garfield. Just a rinky-dink ghetto up on a hill, but it was the street. I’d found my place.
Having a little bit of a taste behind me I couldn’t wait to get to Homewood. In a way I got mad with Mommy and the rest of them. Seemed to me like they was trying to hold me back from a good time. Seemed like they just didn’t want me to have no fun. That’s when I decided I’d go on about my own business. Do it my way. Cause I wasn’t getting no slack at home. They still expected me to be like my sister and brothers. They didn’t know I thought youns was squares. Yeah. I knew I was hipper and groovier than youns ever thought of being. Streetwise, into something. Had my own territory and I was bad. I was a rebel. Wasn’t following in nobody’s footsteps but my own. And I was a hip cookie, you better believe it. Wasn’t a hipper thing out there than your brother, Rob. I couldn’t wait for them to turn me loose in Homewood.
Me being the youngest and all, the baby in the family, people always said, ain’t he cute. That Robby gon be a ladykiller. Been hearing that mess since day one so ain’t no surprise I started to believing it. Youns had me pegged as a lady’
s man so that’s what I was. The girls be talking the same trash everybody else did. Ain’t he cute. Be petting me and spoiling me like I’m still the baby of the family and I sure ain’t gon tell them stop. Thought I was cute as the girls be telling me. Thought sure enough, I’m gon be a star. I loved to get up and show my behind. Must have been good at it too cause the teacher used to call me up in front of the class to perform. The kids’d get real quiet. That’s probably why the teacher got me up. Keep the class quiet while she nods off. Cause they’d listen to me. Sure nuff pay attention.
Performing always come natural to me. Wasn’t nervous or nothing. Just get up and do my thing. They liked for me to do impressions. I could mimic anybody. You remember how I’d do that silly stuff around the house. Anybody I’d see on TV or hear on a record I could mimic to a T. Bob Hope, Nixon, Smokey Robinson, Ed Sullivan. White or black. I could talk just like them or sing a song just like they did. The class yell out a famous name and I’d do the one they wanted to hear. If things had gone another way I’ve always believed I could have made it big in show business. If you could keep them little frisky kids in Liberty School quiet you could handle any audience. Always could sing and do impressions. You remember Mom asking me to do them for you when you came home from college.
I still be performing. Read poetry in the hole. The other fellows get real quiet and listen. Sing down in there too. Nothing else to do, so we entertain each other. They always asking me to sing or read. “Hey, Wideman. C’mon man and do something.” Then it gets quiet while they waiting for me to start. Quiet and it’s already dark. You in your own cell and can’t see nobody else. Barely enough light to read by. The other fellows can hear you but it’s just you and them walls so it feels like being alone much as it feels like you’re singing or reading to somebody else.
Yeah. I read my own poems sometimes. Other times I just start in on whatever book I happen to be reading. One the books you sent me, maybe. Fellows like my poems. They say I write about the things they be thinking. Say it’s like listening to their own self thinking. That’s cause we all down there together. What else you gonna do but think of the people on the outside. Your woman. Your kids or folks, if you got any. Just the same old sad shit we all be thinking all the time. That’s what I write and the fellows like to hear it.
Funny how things go around like that. Go round and round and keep coming back to the same place. Teacher used to get me up to pacify the class and I’m doing the same thing in prison. You said your teachers called on you to tell stories, didn’t they? Yeah. It’s funny how much we’re alike. In spite of everything I always believed that. Inside. The feeling side. I always believed we was the most alike out of all the kids. I see stuff in your books. The kinds of things I be thinking or feeling.
Your teachers got you up, too. To tell stories. That’s funny, ain’t it.
* * *
I listen to my brother Robby. He unravels my voice. I sit with him in the darkness of the Behavioral Adjustment Unit. My imagination creates something like a giant seashell, enfolding, enclosing us. Its inner surface is velvet-soft and black. A curving mirror doubling the darkness. Poems are Jean Toomer’s petals of dusk, petals of dawn. I want to stop. Savor the sweet, solitary pleasure, the time stolen from time in the hole. But the image I’m creating is a trick of the glass. The mirror that would swallow Robby and then chime to me: You’re the fairest of them all. The voice I hear issues from a crack in the glass. I’m two or three steps ahead of my brother, making fiction out of his words. Somebody needs to snatch me by the neck and say, Stop. Stop and listen, listen to him.
The Behavioral Adjustment Unit is, as one guard put it, “a maximum-security prison within a maximum-security prison.” The “Restricted Housing Unit” or “hole” or “Home Block” is a squat, two-story cement building containing thirty-five six-byeight-foot cells. The governor of Pennsylvania closed the area in 1972 because of “inhumane conditions,” but within a year the hole was reopened. For at least twenty-three hours a day the prisoners are confined to their cells. An hour of outdoor exercise is permitted only on days the guards choose to supervise it. Two meals are served three hours apart, then nothing except coffee and bread for the next twenty-one. The regulation that limits the time an inmate can serve in the BAU for a single offense is routinely sidestepped by the keepers. “Administrative custody” is a provision allowing officials to cage men in the BAU indefinitely. Hunger strikes are one means the prisoners have employed to protest the harsh conditions of the penal unit. Hearings prompted by the strikes have produced no major changes in the way the hole operates. Law, due process, the rights of the prisoners are irrelevant to the functioning of this prison within a prison. Robby was sentenced to six months in the BAU because a guard suspected he was involved in an attempted escape. The fact that a hearing, held six months later, established Robby’s innocence, was small consolation since he’d already served his time in the hole.
Robby tells me about the other side of being the youngest: Okay, you’re everybody’s pet and that’s boss, but on the other hand you sometimes feel you’re the least important. Always last. Always bringing up the rear. You learn to do stuff on your own because the older kids are always busy, off doing their things, and you’re too young, left behind because you don’t fit, or just because they forget you’re back here, at the end, bringing up the rear. But when orders are given out, you sure get your share. “John’s coming home this weekend. Clean up your room.” Robby remembers being forced to get a haircut on the occasion of one of my visits. Honor thy brother. Get your hair cut, your room rid up, and put on clean clothes. He’ll be here with his family and I don’t want the house looking like a pigpen.
I have to laugh at the image of myself as somebody to get a haircut for. Robby must have been fit to be tied.
* * *
Yeah, I was hot. I mean, you was doing well and all that, but shit, you were my brother. And it was my head. What’s my head got to do with you? But you know how Mommy is. Ain’t no talking to her when her mind gets set. Anything I tried to say was “talking back,” so I just went ahead to the man and got my ears lowered.
I was trying to be a rebel but back then the most important thing still was what the grown-ups thought about me. How they felt meant everything. Everything. Me and Tish and Dave were the ones at home then. You was gone and Gene was gone so it was the three of us fighting for attention. And we fought. Every crumb, everytime something got cut up or parceled out or it was Christmas or Easter, we so busy checking out what the other one got wasn’t hardly no time to enjoy our own. Like a dogfight or cat fight all the time. And being the youngest I’m steady losing ground most the time. Seemed like to me, Tish and Dave the ones everybody talked about. Seemed like my time would never come. That ain’t the way it really was, I know. I had my share cause I was the baby and ain’t he cute and lots of times I know I got away with outrageous stuff or got my way cause I could play that baby mess to the hilt. Still it seemed like Dave and Tish was the ones really mattered. Mommy and Daddy and Sis and Geral and Big Otie and Ernie always slipping some change in their pockets or taking them to the store or letting them stay over all night in Homewood. I was a jealous little rascal. Sometimes I thought everybody thought I was just a spoiled brat. I’d say damn all youall. I’d think, Go on and love those square turkeys, but one day I’ll be the one coming back with a suitcase full of money and a Cadillac. Go on and love them good grades. Robby gon do it his own way.
See, in my mind I was Superfly. I’d drive up slow to the curb. My hog be half a block long and these fine foxes in the back. Everybody looking when I ease out the door clean and mean. Got a check in my pocket to give to Mom. Buy her a new house with everything in it new. Pay her back for the hard times. I could see that happening as real as I can see your face right now. Wasn’t no way it wasn’t gon happen. Rob was gon make it big. I’d be at the door, smiling with the check in my hand and Mommy’d be so happy she’d be crying.
Well, it’s a different
story ain’t it. Turned out different from how I used to think it would. The worst thing I did, the thing I feel most guilty behind is stealing Mom’s life. It’s like I stole her youth. Can’t nothing change that. I can’t give back what’s gone. Robbing white people didn’t cause me to lose no sleep back then. Couldn’t feel but so bad about that. How you gon feel sorry when society’s so corrupt, when everybody got their hand out or got their hand in somebody else’s pocket and ain’t no rules nobody listens to if they can get away with breaking them? How you gon apply the rules? It was dog eat dog out there, so how was I spozed to feel sorry if I was doing what everybody else doing. I just got caught is all. I’m sorry about that, and damned sorry that guy Stavros got killed, but as far as what I did, as far as robbing white people, ain’t no way I was gon torture myself over that one.
I tried to write Mom a letter. Not too long ago. Should say I did write the letter and put it in a envelope and sent it cause that’s what I did, but I be crying so much trying to write it I don’t know what wound up in that letter. I wanted Mom to know I knew what I’d done. In a way I wanted to say I was sorry for spoiling her life. After all she did for me I turned around and made her life miserable. That’s the wrongest thing I’ve done and I wanted to say I was sorry but I kept seeing her face while I was writing the letter. I’d see her face and it would get older while I was looking. She’d get this old woman’s face all lined and wrinkled and tired about the eyes. Wasn’t nothing I could do but watch. Cause I’d done it and knew I done it and all the letters in the world ain’t gon change her face. I sit and think about stuff like that all the time. It’s better now. I think about other things too. You know like trying to figure what’s really right and wrong, but there be days the guilt don’t never go away.
Brothers and Keepers Page 12