Doing Time

by Bell Gale Chevigny

  Education lowers recidivism more effectively than any other program, and the more education received, the less likely an individual is to be rearrested or reimprisoned. The internal growth made possible by higher education is incalculable; most writers in this collection took advantage of college courses offered behind bars. For this reason, the defeat in 1994 of federal Pell Grants for higher education to prisoners was particularly devastating. One of the thousands of beneficiaries of post-secondary education behind bars, Jon Marc Taylor has been a tireless fighter for the continuation or restoration of such programs.

  Education can make an extraordinary difference in the way one does time. Literate convicts with a trace of conscience are kept very busy, as O’Neill Stough of Arizona attested in two prizewinning pieces. In “Deliberate Indifference” (1994),* Roland, a man with AIDS, surprises the narrator into activism. As Roland is illiterate and timid, his requests for adequate blankets, food, and vitamins are ignored. The narrator writes his complaint for him, and when it fails, organizes assistance from other inmates. Later, writing Roland’s obituary in the form of a grievance lands him in isolation, but brings about reform. Stough’s essay “Cruel and Quite Usual” (1993)* narrates how a cruel guard was exposed in a prison newspaper.

  Women in prison who have gotten together to address their medical needs (including AIDS), parenting, and the needs of their children, sometimes publish the results. Many men and women write about becoming jailhouse lawyers. Victor Hassine used his legal background to bring successful conditions-of-confinement lawsuits against two Pennsylvania prisons. Other writers have described how hosts of educated men and women become teachers of classes in literacy, AIDS, or whatever they can — work even more vital with the deep cuts in education and other programs.

  Poet and teacher Joseph Bruchac analyzes the extraordinary transformative power of creative writing. “A lack of empathy may be one of the characteristics of the man or woman who commits a violent crime against another human being. Having been brutalized themselves as children, they pass on that violence to their victims. But when a person begins to write poetry, to create art, several things may happen. One is a birth of self-respect.. . Another is the ability to empathize.” Many prison writers suggest that coming to feel compassion has saved them from being brutalized; the exploration of the self through writing breaks the hold of the institution and opens the writer to growth (See About the Authors). In “Colorado Kills Creativity” (1994)* J. C. Amberchele recalls “a scared biker handing over a poem about love and loneliness” to a prison magazine (since suspended), “revealing a secret he had guarded most of his life.” Writing “was our first attempt to give something from within rather than to take from others,” he writes, “to act instead of react.”

  While for some creativity makes sense only as a solitary refuge, others work well collectively. In Hettie Jones’s writing workshop at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, women meet for what they sometimes describe as three hours of unlimited freedom. Six of them here offer a “tetrina.” (A tetrina is a variant on the sestina, using four end words instead of six, which are repeated in a specified sequence.) When their work appeared in the book Aliens at the Border, the poets offered the facility’s first poetry reading. Later, a sextet composed of workshop members — Iris Bowen, Kathy Boudin, Judy Clark, Lisa Finkle, Miriam Lopez, and Jan Warren — collaborated to set down what the workshop has meant to them.

  One of the most complex pieces in this volume, “Behind the Mirror’s Face,” by Paul St. John, is at once an attack on prison writing and a superb example of it. The sardonic monologist vents suspicions of the self-serving cynicism and sentimentality at the heart of “creative” ventures in a site of coercion. In his corrosive view, prison magazines are tokens that serve the administration’s agenda, writing teachers have overblown and naive expectations of the power of writing to change author and audience, and inmate authors seize on writing only to deepen their self-deception. His assaults on the abuses of writing reveal his hunger for an honesty and commitment he despairs of finding. Then, feeling reproached by another inmate’s suicide, he exits the scene in a narcotic flight, assigning classic names — Plethora, Hedone, Cacoethes (excess, pleasure, and bad habits) — to the rescuing drug.

  Many writers in this book have been thrust into segregation (the “hole,” the “box,” the Special Housing Unit) or transferred because of their writing. Many have had their books and papers confiscated. Michael Saucier’s “Black Flag to the Rescue” here presents an unusual, comic — but true — writerly predicament. Incensed by reading this poem in the prison newspaper, the warden challenged Saucier to show him the roach casings he had found in his battery-operated typewriter. Saucier complied, to the warden’s chagrin.

  Coming into Language

  Jimmy Santiago Baca

  On weekend graveyard shifts at St. Joseph’s Hospital I worked the emergency room, mopping up pools of blood and carting plastic bags stuffed with arms, legs, and hands to the outdoor incinerator. I enjoyed the quiet, away from the screams of shotgunned, knifed, and mangled kids writhing on gurneys outside the operating rooms. Ambulance sirens shrieked and squad car lights reddened the cool nights, flashing against the hospital walls: gray — red, gray — red. On slow nights I would lock the door of the administration office, search the reference library for a book on female anatomy and, with my feet propped on the desk, leaf through the illustrations, smoking my cigarette. I was seventeen.

  One night my eye was caught by a familiar-looking word on the spine of a book. The title was 450 Years of Chicano History in Pictures. On the cover were black-and-white photos: Padre Hidalgo exhorting Mexican peasants to revolt against the Spanish dictators; Anglo vigilantes hanging two Mexicans from a tree; a young Mexican woman with rifle and ammunition belts crisscrossing her breast; Cesar Chavez and field workers marching for fair wages; Chicano railroad workers laying creosote ties; Chicanas laboring at machines in textile factories; Chicanas picketing and hoisting boycott signs.

  From the time I was seven, teachers had been punishing me for not knowing my lessons by making me stick my nose in a circle chalked on the blackboard. Ashamed of not understanding and fearful of asking questions, I dropped out of school in the ninth grade. At seventeen I still didn’t know how to read, but those pictures confirmed my identity. I stole the book that night, stashing it for safety under the slop sink until I got off work. Back at my boardinghouse, I showed the book to friends. All of us were amazed; this book told us we were alive. We, too, had defended ourselves with our fists against hostile Anglos, gasping for breath in fights with the policemen who outnumbered us. The book reflected back to us our struggle in a way that made us proud.

  Most of my life I felt like a target in the crosshairs of a hunter’s rifle. When strangers and outsiders questioned me I felt the hang-rope tighten around my neck and the trapdoor creak beneath my feet. There was nothing so humiliating as being unable to express myself, and my inarticulateness increased my sense of jeopardy. Behind a mask of humility, I seethed with mute rebellion.

  Before I was eighteen, I was arrested on suspicion of murder after refusing to explain a deep cut on my forearm. With shocking speed I found myself handcuffed to a chain gang of inmates and bused to a holding facility to await trial. There I met men, prisoners, who read aloud to each other the works of Neruda, Paz, Sabines, Nemerov, and Hemingway. Never had I felt such freedom as in that dormitory. Listening to the words of these writers, I felt that invisible threat from without lessen — my sense of teetering on a rotting plank over swamp water where famished alligators clapped their horny snouts for my blood. While I listened to the words of the poets, the alligators slumbered powerless in their lairs. The language of poetry was the magic that could liberate me from myself, transform me into another person, transport me to places far away.

  And when they closed the books, these Chicanos, and went into their own Chicano language, they made barrio life come alive for me in the fullness of its vitality.
I began to learn my own language, the bilingual words and phrases explaining to me my place in the universe.

  Months later I was released, as I had suspected [ would be. I had been guilty of nothing but shattering (Ik* windshield of my girlfriend’s car in a fit of rage.

  Two years passed, f was twenty now, and behind bars again. The federal marshals had failed to provide convincing evidence to extradite me to Arizona on a drug charge, but still I was being held. They had ninety clays to prove I was guilty. The only evidence against rue was that my girlfriend had been at the scene of the crime with my driver’s license in her purse. They had to come up with something else. But there was nothing else. Eventually they negotiated a deal with the actual drug dealer, who took the stand against me. When the judge hit me with a million dollar bail, I emptied my pockets on his hooking desk: twenty six cents.

  One night in my third month in the county jail, I was mopping the floor in front of the booking desk. Some detectives had kneed an old drunk and handcuffed him to the booking bars. His shrill screams raked my nerves like a hacksaw on bone, the desperate protest of his dignity against their inhumanity. But the detectives just laughed as he tried to rise and kicked him to his knees. When ibey went to the bathroom to pee and the desk attendant walked to the file cabinet to pull the arrest record, I shot my arm through the bars, grabbed one of the attendant’s university textbooks, and tucked it in my overalls. It was the only way I had of protesting.

  It was late when I returned to my cell. Under my blanket I switched on a pen flashlight and opened the thick book at random, scanning the pages. I could hear the jailer making his rounds on the other tiers. The jangle of his keys and the sharp click of his boot heels intensified my solitude. Slowly I enunciated the words … p-o-n-d, ri-pple. It scared me that I had been reduced to this to find comfort. I always had thought reading a waste of time, that nothing could be gained by it. Only by action, by moving out into the world and confronting and challenging the obstacles, could one learn anything worth knowing.

  Even as I tried to convince myself that I was merely curious, I became so absorbed in how the sounds created music in me and happiness, I forgot where I was. Memories began to quiver in me, glowing with a strange but familiar intimacy in which I found refuge. For a while, a deep sadness overcame me, as if I had chanced on a long-lost friend and mourned the years of separation. But soon the heartache of having missed so much of life, that had numbed me since I was a child, gave way, as if a grave illness lifted itself from me and I was cured, innocently believing in the beauty of life again. I stum-blingly repeated the author’s name as I fell asleep, saying it over and over in the dark: Words-worth, Words-worth.

  Before long my sister came to visit me, and I joked about taking her to a place called Xanadu and getting her a blind date with this vato* named Coleridge who lived on the seacoast and was malias* on morphine. When I asked her to make a trip into enemy territory to buy me a grammar book, she said she couldn’t. Bookstores intimidated her, because she, too, could neither read nor write.

  Days later, with a stub pencil I whittled sharp with my teeth, I propped a Red Chief notebook on my knees and wrote my first words. From that moment, a hunger for poetry possessed me.

  Until then, I had felt as if I had been born into a raging ocean where I swam relentlessly, flailing my arms in hope of rescue, of reaching a shoreline I never sighted. Never solid ground beneath me, never a resting place. I had lived with only the desperate hope to stay afloat; that and nothing more.

  † In Chicano dialect: dude. (JSB)

  † In Chicano dialect: strung out. (JSB)

  But when at last I wrote my first words on the page, I fch an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale. As more and more words emerged, I could finally rest: I had a place to stand for the first time in my life. The isJand grew, with each page, into a continent inhabited by people I knew and mapped with the life I lived.

  I wrote about it all — about people I had loved or hated, about the brutalities and ecstasies of my life. And, for the first rime, the child in me who had witnessed and endured unspeakable terrors cried out not just in impotent despair, but with the power of language. Suddenly, through language, through writing, my grief and my joy could be shared with anyone who would listen. And I could do this all alone; I could do it anywhere. I was no longer a captive of demons eating away at me, no longer a victim of other people’s mockery and loathing, that had made me clench my fist white with rage and grit my teeth to silence. Words now pleaded back with the bleak lucidity of hurt. They were wrong, those others, and now I could say it.

  Through language I was free. I could respond, escape, indulge; embrace or reject earth or the cosmos. I was launched on an endless journey without boundaries or rules, in which I could salvage the floating fragments of my past, or be born anew in the spontaneous ignition of understanding some heretofore concealed aspect of myself. Each word steamed with the hot lava juices of my primordial making, and I crawled out of stanzas dripping with birth-blood, reborn and freed from the chaos of my life. The child in the dark room of my heart, who had never been able to find or reach the light switch, flicked it on now; and I found in the room a stranger, myself, who had waited so many years to speak again. My words struck in me lightning crackles of elation and thunderhead storms of grief.

  When I had been in the county jail longer than anyone else, I was made a trustee. One morning, after a fistfight, I went to the unlocked and unoccupied office used for lawyer-client meetings, to think. The bare white room with its fluorescent tube lighting seemed to expose and illuminate my dark and worthless life. When I had fought before, I never gave it a thought. Now, for the first time, I had something to lose — my chance to read, to write; a way to live with dignity and meaning, that had opened for me when I stole that scuffed, secondhand book about the Romantic poets.

  “I will never do any work in this prison system as long as I am not allowed to get my G.E.D.” That’s what I told the reclassification panel. The captain flicked off the tape recorder. He looked at me hard and said, “You’ll never walk outta here alive. Oh, you’ll work, put a copper penny on that, you’ll work.”

  After that interview I was confined to deadlock maximum security in a subterranean dungeon, with ground-level chicken-wired windows painted gray. Twenty-three hours a day I was in that cell. I kept sane by borrowing books from the other cons on the tier. Then, just before Christmas, I received a letter from Harry, a charity house Samaritan who doled out hot soup to the homeless in Phoenix. He had picked my name from a list of cons who had no one to write to them. I wrote back asking for a grammar book, and a week later received one of Mary Baker Eddy’s treatises on salvation and redemption, with Spanish and English on opposing pages. Pacing my cell all day and most of each night, I grappled with grammar until I was able to write a long true-romance confession for a con to send to his pen pal. He paid me with a pack of smokes. Soon I had a thriving barter business, exchanging my poems and letters for novels, commissary pencils, and writing tablets.

  One day I tore two flaps from the cardboard box that held all my belongings and punctured holes along the edge of each flap and along the border of a ream of state-issue paper. After I had aligned them to form a spine, I threaded the holes with a shoestring, and sketched on the cover a hummingbird fluttering above a rose. This was my first journal.

  Whole afternoons I wrote, unconscious of passing time or whether it was day or night. Sunbursts exploded from the lead tip of my pencil, words that grafted me into awareness of who I was; peeled back to a burning core of bleak terror, an embryo floating in the image of water, I cracked out of the shell wide-eyed and insane. Trees grew out of the palms of my hands, the threatening otherness of life dissolved, and I became one with the air and sky, the dirt and the iron and concrete. There was no longer any distinction between the other and I. Language made bridges of fire between me and everything 1 saw. I entered into the blade of grass, the basketball, the con’s eye and child’
s soul.

  At night I flew. I conversed with floating heads in my cell, and visited strange houses where lonely women brewed tea and rocked in wicker rocking chairs listening to sad Joni Mitchell songs.

  Before long I was frayed like rope carrying too much weight, that suddenly snaps. I quit talking. Bars, walls, steel bunk and floor bristled with millions of poem-making sparks. My face was no longer familiar to me. The only reality was the swirling cornucopia of images in my mind, the voices in the air. Midair a cactus blossom would appear, a snake-flame in blinding dance around it, stunning me like a guard’s fist striking my neck from behind.

  The prison administrators tried several tactics to get me to work. For six months, after the next monthly prison board review, they sent cons to my cell to hassle me. When the guard would open my cell door to let one of them in, I’d leap out and fight him — and get sent to thirty-day isolation. I did a lot of isolation time. But I honed my image-making talents in that sensory-deprived solitude. Finally they moved me to death row, and after that to “nut-run,” the tier that housed the mentally disturbed.

  As the months passed, I became more and more sluggish. My eyelids were heavy, I could no longer write or read. I slept all the time.

  One day a guard took me out to the exercise field. For the first time in years I felt grass and earth under my feet. It was spring. The sun warmed my face as I sat on the bleachers watching the cons box and run, hit the handball, lift weights. Some of them stopped to ask how I was, but I found it impossible to utter a syllable. My tongue would not move, saliva drooled from the corners of my mouth. I had been so heavily medicated I could not summon the slightest gestures. Yet inside me a small voice cried out, I am fine! I am hurt now but I will come back! I’m fine!