Writers register mixed feelings about sustaining family ties. Clay Downing’s “Jailin’Man” (1974)* stops opening letters from home in order to “get busy bein’ where I was, forget where I wasn’t.” Some fear what they may become in prison. In the story “Hey, you, our holes aren’t working” (1979),* Roger Jaco’s narrator says that, despite longing, he is thankful that he may never again see his wife and son: “Who knows what these years of punishment, rejection, and having 40 ccs. of bitterness injected into me daily might do to my loved ones if I were to let it escape from me in large doses. I care too much for them even to contact them.” Sinking deeper into trouble in prison and despairing of winning his appeal, Jesse Lopez, in “Arrival at MacNeil Island” (1978),* begs his wife to find someone else to help raise the kids. Other long-termers describe electing to cut their women loose rather than risk almost inevitable pain later.
Relatives who stay the course and visit win songs of praise. “ Our Skirt” is Kathy Boudin’s subtle evocation of her enduring bond with her mother. The loss of parents is particularly hard to bear behind bars. Even if one is furloughed, like Henry Johnson in “Funeral Parlor,”* grief may be locked away: “the watery eyed women / Soaked his collar in tears,” and “he burned that dead black face deep / Into his memory,” and “tried his best / To shed a tear. He tried real hard, but failed.” In “The Ball Park,” Johnson’s narrator recalls a lost brother while celebrating the liveliness of that man’s son.
More typically single parents than men, women are more preoccupied with sustaining meaningful bonds with their children. (Yet Anthony La Barca Falcone’s poem testifies to one father’s poignant longing.) More often than not, children must travel great distances to see their parents. Prison rules — and arbitrary manipulation of them — can thwart meetings, as in Judee Norton’s story. But some prison administrators are beginning to see the long-term wisdom of teaching inmates parenting skills. At Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, courses on childcare and parenting from a distance help inmates heal themselves and become responsible resources for their children, thus breaking the cycles of abuse and criminal activity. Judith Clark’s ongoing contact with her daughter enhances the growth of each. The struggle of all mothers with the necessity of separating from their children as they mature is in prison particularly acute. In “A Trilogy of Journeys,” Kathy Boudin delineates the peculiar pains and pleasures of an incarcerated mother experiencing her child’s coming of age.
Long-termers sometimes get a chance to work through family regrets. In an essay called “Doing Time” (1995),”‘ J. C. Amberchele says that for some “the shock of prison is so great as to propel them in a new direction.” When his children visit, they bring him news that his father has died years before. He regrets missing his father’s funeral and, more, not having told his reserved parent at least once that he loved him. “But I was also thinking,” he says, that “prison, with its rigid conformity and structured regularity, has taught me that time is cyclical, not linear. I see time now as a great spiral, corkscrewing out of the past and carrying with it all the complex moments of history, and always coming around, coming around. The world, I have realized, allows for second chances, but only if you create them.” As he looks into his son’s face, so like his own and his father’s, he is suddenly able to tell him how much he loves him.
Ancestor
Jimmy Santiago Baca
It was a rime when they were afraid of him.
My father, a bare man, a gypsy, a horse
with broken knees no one would shoot.
Then again, he was like the orange tree,
and young women plucked from him sweet fruit.
To meet him, you must be in the right place,
even his sons and daughter, we wondered
where was Papa now and what was he doing.
He held the mystique of travelers
that pass your backyard and disappear into the trees.
Then, when you follow, you find nothing,
not a stir, not a twig displaced from its bough.
And then he would appear one night.
Half covered in shadows and half in light,
his voice quiet, absorbing our unspoken thoughts.
When his hands lay on the table at breakfast,
they were hands that had not fixed our crumbling home,
hands that had not taken us into them
and the fingers did not gently rub along our lips.
They were hands of a gypsy that filled our home
with love and safety, for a moment;
with all the shambles of boards and empty stomachs,
they filled us because of the love in them.
Beyond the ordinary love, beyond the coordinated life,
beyond the sponging of broken hearts,
came the untimely word, the fallen smile, the quiet tear,
that made us grow quick and romantic.
Papa gave us something: when we paused from work,
my sister fourteen years old working the cotton fields,
my brother and I running tike deer,
we would pause, because we had a papa no one could catch,
who spoke when he spoke and bragged and drank,
he bragged about us: he did not say we were smart,
nor did he say we were srrong and were going to be rich
someday.
He said we were good. He held us up to the world for it to see,
three children that were good, who understood love in a quiet
way,
who owned nothing but callused hands and true freedom,
and that is how he made us: he offered us to the wind,
to the mountains, to the skies of autumn and spring.
He said, “Here are my children! Care for them!”
And he left again, going somewhere like a child
with a warrior’s heart, nothing could stop him.
My grandmother would look at him for a long time,
and then she would say nothing.
She chose to remain silent, praying each night,
guiding down like a root in the heart of earth,
clutching sunlight and rains to her ancient breast.
And I am the blossom of many nights.
A threefold blossom: my sister is as she is,
my brother is as he is, and I am as I am.
Through sacred ceremony of living, daily living,
arose three distinct hopes, three loves,
out of the long felt nights and days of yesterday.
1977, Arizona State Prison-Florence
Florence, Arizona
Uncle Adam
Diane Hamill Metzger
Uncle Adam
Had a brogue
And a doberman,
Hated being called Unk,
And made terrible scrambled eggs.
Sent me a ticket
Every Easter at spring break
To visit him in Coral Gables
Because I made him feel young.
Took me to restaurants,
The stock-exchange,
The not-for-public beach,
and slipped me fifty dollars
At the departure gate.
I was adolescent,
Never knowing what moved him
Or why he liked me.
Can’t tell him now
That I never meant to be a brat,
or blame it on my youth,
Which like his brogue
And his life
Went away.
1985, State Correctional Institute-Muncy
Muncy, Pennsylvania
The Red Dress
Barbara Saunders
Tiny white five-petaled flowers
embroidered along
a portrait-collar neckline.
Short bodice
full skirt, puffed sleeves.
Blood red dress
on a fragile blond child.
Her hair hangs to her waist
Toni doll whose hair only comes
to her shoulders.
The doll is straight and tall
and proper and hard edged
invulnerable, always smiling
and only closing her eyes
when someone puts her down.
She has a red dress too
identical to mine.
No one touches her
no one takes her red dress off.
She stands by my bed
Her eyes never close.
1996, Eddie Warrior Correctional Center
Taft, Oklahoma
Ignorance Is No Excuse
for the Law
Alejo Dao’ud Rodriguez
From the cell ten ft. across from mine,
he told how he used to play chicken for money.
He played in bars where no other kid his age
was allowed to go, but he went
and the scars of cigar burns between his knuckles
testified that he won more money than he lost.
“Ever smeiled burning skin?” he would ask. “It’s enough to make you sick.”
And his stories were never tired
and I was never tired of hearing them.
After all, living on death row
it’s only fitting to allow a man
to tell the story
that wasn’t allowed by law
to be told in court.
Where the formalities were too complex
for that sixteen-year-old boy to comprehend,
and it seems the law really didn’t understand him either,
but one thing was for sure
he wasn’t going to cry,
his father taught him that.
His mother cried for him though,
cried all the tears that were held back
watching him grow, watching his father
make a man out of him
a man, before the child was able to be a boy.
“Mom never really understood” he told me,
“You know, male bonding, the rites of passage,
to become a real man.”
And every part of that real man’s bleeding heart
was on death row — spilling its guts,
but still holding on to proud memories
of how he threw up on his first beer.
He was nine, and it was his father who made him drink it.
“That’ll make a man out of you, boy.”
And how, when he was seven, his father
made him stay and fight,
“Or you’ll get a whuppin’ when you get home,” Dad said.
It didn’t matter that the other kid
was twice his age and size.
“You never run from a fight, boy.”
And when he got home
he still got a whuppin’ anyway,
because he lost.
But by the time he was fourteen, grown men
were self-conscious being in his presence.
“I don’t want to make it sound as though
the old man was a Drill Sergeant,”
he told me. “We used to do regular
father-and-son shit too.”
Took him to baseball games
and got him his first mini bike
and they used to go camping a lot too.
“But why did Dad always forget his sleeping bag?”
he would ask, “and why did he have to share mine?”
His hands, the only visible part of him
through the porthole of the cell door,
where they serve our food,
would pound the air and move with his words
as though they were the ones doing the talking,
but the scars of melted skin made it look like
his knuckles were crying
every time the talking stopped.
Then he would excuse himself,
because he had to finish cleaning his cell.
A ritual he performed meticulously three times a day,
as though it were an act of repentance.
“Nobody ever taught me how to pray,” he said.
“One time I got on my knees and just sat there,
but I didn’t know what else to do.
I never seen them do anything else
in the movies.”
So finally, when they did come for him,
he just asked the preacher to just clean him
afterward, in case he shit on himself.
But he assured the preacher that
“I’m gonna try my best to hold it all right.”
And then trying his best to wipe his eyes
in handcuffs, he walked out of his cell
seeming to be more afraid of having to leave
the cell than facing death.
Back then I never really understood
his last words to me when he said,
“I died when I was born.
” But now, I’m next.
1997, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
Ossining, New York
Our Skirt
Kathy Boudin
You were forty-five and I was fourteen
when you gave me the skirt.
“It’s from Paris!” you said
as if that would impress me
who at best had mixed feelings
about skirts.
But I was drawn by that summer cotton
with splashes of black and white — like paint
dabbed by an eager artist.
I borrowed your skirt
and it moved like waves
as I danced at a ninth-grade party.
Wearing it date after date
including my first dinner with a college man.
I never was much for buying new clothes,
once I liked something it stayed with me for years.
I remember the day I tried
ironing your skirt,
so wide it seemed to go on and on
like a western sky.
Then I smelled the burning
and, crushed, saw that I had left a red-brown scorch
on that painting.
But you, Mother, you understood
because ironing was not your thing either.
And over the years your skirt became my skirt
until I left it and other parts of home with you.
Now you are eighty and I almost fifty.
We sit across from each other
in the prison visiting room.
Your soft gray-thin hair twirls into style.
I follow the lines on your face, paths lit by your eyes
until my gaze comes to rest
on the black and white,
on the years
that our skirt has endured.
1995, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility
Bedford Hills, New York
The Ball Park
Henry Johnson
Sometimes you get the kind of day
you deserve: lots of sunshine, wind,
blue sky stretched tight as a military sheet.
Flushed, I jump up and down in the bleachers,
cheering my eight-year-old nephew
around the bases. I am proud, so I lead
the shouting, beer sloshing over the rim
of my cup like stream water out of a helmet.
What more could anyone want than
what’s right: the smell of cooked onions, franks,
knishes sold hot from the stand on wheels
just outside the ball park? Luigi owned it —
old tyrant — and we had to stand in line like
I did when 1 was six, the carnival lighting up
the city. At twelve, my brother had the touch,
could tag a bull’s-eye with one eye closed.
Some nights he’d dump the pretty woman
above the tank of water so often, the carnies
would b
lackball him from the games. Back home,
he’d lie awake staring at the ceiling,
smoke curling blue in the moonlight
from the window. One night in July,
sure that I was asleep, he sneaked out
by the fire escape, a red ski mask
stuffed deep into the pocket of his black
bomber jacket. Close behind, I saw him
slip through their defenses
like a commando, do a bellycrawl
over to the Ferris wheel, the tent
leading into the freak show
where we slipped under the flap to see
the dog-faced boy, the bearded lady.
Slipping in and out of shadow, he splashed gasoline
over everything, tossed a match, and the flames
chewed up the night the way they would years later
in the jungles of Vietnam. Back in our room,
he smiled, and we watched the place
burn to the ground.
Later my brother joined the marines, but
all the government shipped back was a sealed casket,
a letter from the President, a medal. I thought
I saw him in midtown Manhattan, yelling, jostling
passersby, his frightening dreadlocks
hanging to his waist. How often does hope
hit you like a sniper’s bullet right between
the eyes? I ran after him yelling his name,
but the crowd swallowed him up
like a swamp bog. I double-timed it out of there
on a train back to Brooklyn,
Sometimes the eyes can play tricks on you,
like when you’ve been out in the bush
for days without water, or here
in the scorching heat of the ball park,
my voice shooting up the scale by octaves, and my
nephew — little trooper — sliding home, kicking a red cloud
of dust over home plate, excitement in his eyes exploding.
1988, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
Ossining, New York
Doing Time Page 28