by Ann Walmsley
The
Prison
Book Club
The
Prison
Book Club
Ann Walmsley
A Oneworld Book
First published in Great Britain and the Commonwealth
by Oneworld Publications, 2015
This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications, 2015
Copyright © Ann Walmsley 2015
By Arrangement with Westwood Creative Artists Ltd (2015)
The moral right of Ann Walmsley to be identified as the
Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78074-783-5
ISBN 978-1-78074-784-2 (eBook)
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For Bruce
Never leave prison with a partly-read book.
You will return to complete it.
—popular superstition among prison inmates
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
CAST OF CHARACTERS
1 A Walk in the Cemetery
2 Promises Kept
Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time
3 Are You Normal?
The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
4 The N-Word
The Book of Negroes
5 Red Sky at Morning, Jailers Take Warning
Such a Long Journey
6 Summer Reading
7 The Book Club Alibi
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
8 Frank and Graham’s Book Club
The Cellist of Sarajevo
9 I’m Institutionalized, Bro
War
10 Abuse or Neglect?
The Glass Castle: A Memoir
11 Just Do the Day
The Grapes of Wrath
12 Christmas in Prison
“The Gift of the Magi”
“The Cop and the Anthem”
“Journey of the Magi”
13 A Book Club of Three
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin
Outliers: The Story of Success
14 Island Life
Small Island
15 A Different Kind of Prisoner
Infidel
16 The Wounded
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
17 The Suspects
Ordinary Thunderstorms Six Suspects
18 Good Is More Contagious Than Evil
The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story
19 Reconstructing a Narrative
Alias Grace
20 My Last Book Club
Alias Grace Redux
21 The Exmates
EPILOGUE
READING LIST
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THIS BOOK IS A MEMOIR based on my experiences as a volunteer in two prison book clubs in 2011 and 2012 and does not represent the experiences of other volunteers in Book Clubs for Inmates Inc., or the role that they may play. The names of people incarcerated in the prisons and the names of people who worked in the prisons have been changed to afford them some privacy. Volunteers’ names have also been changed, as have those of the women in my Toronto book club with the exception of Carol’s name and my own. In one or two instances, a descriptive detail about the inmates’ lives has been changed, to afford even greater privacy. There are no composite characters. Most dialogue is based on audio recordings that the men, the prison authorities and others graciously allowed me to make. In a few instances, the timing of events has been compressed and descriptive details reconstructed for ease of reading.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
All names listed below are pseudonyms except those of Carol and Ann.
THE COLLINS BAY BOOK CLUB
-----
The Ambassadors
BEN Serving a four-year sentence for manslaughter, he particularly enjoyed Andrea Levy’s Small Island but says he has no favourite book. “All the books that I’ve read have contributed to who I am today and how I look at life.”
DREAD Serving a sentence for drug-related crimes, he says Margaret
Atwood “transports you like an avatar.” FRANK Serving ten years for aggravated assault and weapons offences, his favourite book is Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood.
GASTON Serving a six-year sentence for a series of bank robberies, his favourite book is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.
GRAHAM Serving seventeen years for drug trafficking and extortion, his favourite book is The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway.
PETER Serving a four-year sentence for armed robbery, the most enduring books for him are The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.
The Other Members
Albert
Grow-Op
Michael
Seamus
Brad
Javier
Olivier
Stan
Colin
Joao
Parvat
Tony
Deshane
Juan
Quincy
Vince
Ford
Lenny
Rick
Winston
George
Marley
Roman
THE BEAVER CREEK BOOK CLUB
-----
The Ambassadors
Graham
Frank
The Other Members
Bookman
Byrne
Dallas
Doc
Earl
Hal
Jason
Jones
Mitchell
Pino
Raymond
Richard
Tom
THE VOLUNTEERS
-----
Ann
Carol
Derek
Edward
Tristan
THE TORONTO WOMEN’S BOOK CLUB
-----
Ann
Betty
Carol
Deborah
Evelyn
Lillian-Rose
Ruth
THE PRISON STAFF
-----
Blair – a chaplain
Clive – a librarian
Donna – an official
Meg – an assistant
Phoebe – an English teacher
Renata – book club leader at a halfway house
The
Prison
Book Club
1
A WALK IN THE CEMETERY
WHEN MY FRIEND Carol Finlay invited me to join a monthly book club that she had started in a men’s prison, everything about it screamed bad idea. The prison book club’s members included drug traffickers, bank robbers and murderers. I admired the work she was doing but I wasn’t sure I could do it. Eight years earlier in England I had survived a violent mugging. Two men had chased me down a dark lane beside my London house near Hampstead Heath, strangled me in a chokehold until I lost consc
iousness and fled with my cellphone.
It had taken me months to overcome the trauma, and during my remaining three years in London I was too frightened to walk alone at night, even with my new ear-splitting pocket security alarm and a weapons-grade, thirteen-inch flashlight with an alarm that mimicked a barking Doberman. I wasn’t sure that I could enter the prison without triggering my earlier traumatic response. But then I remembered that in the weeks after the attack in England, and before I was asked to look at a lineup of suspects, I had felt an unexpected maternal impulse as I imagined how distressed my assailants’ mothers must have felt about their errant sons. Something my father once said to me also came to mind: “If you expect the best of people, they will rise to the occasion.” He had been an Ontario Court judge and had seen people at their worst. By the slimmest of margins, my curiosity began to outweigh my apprehension. I couldn’t resist seeing for myself what the convicts would say about the books.
It’s a journey that began in a cemetery.
Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery is popular among walkers for its winding routes past nineteenth-century obelisks and sorrowful statues, overhung by unusual species of trees. Carol was an avid walker, and I had invited her to join me there for a stroll. Before setting off, we stood at my father’s gravesite, taking a moment for reflection. The grave lay beneath a catalpa tree on a grassy path between two rows of monuments. I had spent many happy hours in my childhood climbing a catalpa, so I found the spot easily among the larches and yews, copper beeches and magnolias. The tree’s heart-shaped leaves fanned us and the long bean pods clacked in the wind as we contemplated the slightly sunken rectangle of grass still waiting for its marker. My family had commissioned a sculptor to chisel a bas-relief of a bird rising up from tall grasses on a round disc of black granite. The shafts of the feathers and the midribs in the blades of grass would mirror each other, as would their capillaries: the feather barbs and the leaf veins. All living things pattern themselves on each other and become one. Dad, a naturalist, would have liked that thought.
Turning away, Carol and I adopted an exercise pace and made our way through the headstones to the paved road that snaked through the plots. She was a new friend, but was already unreserved and candid in the way old friends are.
“Did you know that you walk with a forward tilt?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.” Why had no one told me that before? I consciously pressed my shoulders back and my abdomen forward in an attempt to be more vertical.
I looked sideways at her and saw that she stood ramrod straight. Her father had been in the military. Her mother had been a headmistress in a private school. “Plus they were British, so they were frozen in aspic,” I once heard her say. She was ten years older than I was and still beautiful—with lively blue eyes and a wide smile of perfectly straight white teeth. She was dead smart too, and sprinting to make her mark on the world because she had a keen sense of her own mortality.
As we walked past the cemetery office, she asked me if I had any good book suggestions for the book club she had started at Collins Bay Institution. It was a medium-security federal penitentiary for men, in Kingston, two hours east of Toronto. She’d been running it for a year and had exhausted her best picks. Now she was deputizing a book selection committee and wanted me to be on it.
We had already talked several times about her project. It fascinated me that she was so brave and so entrepreneurial at the same time. I knew that she had the men reading good literary fiction and non-fiction and that they met once a month to discuss a chosen book. It was in some ways just like the book club that Carol and I belonged to on the outside, except that we were women and not in jail.
“Why me?” I asked.
“I don’t know. You’re bookish.”
Maybe she sensed I was also in a bit of a rut. A year earlier I had lost my job as the senior writer at an investment management organization. At the time I’d been on a leave of absence to care for my twenty-three-year-old daughter, because her struggle with anorexia had taken a life-threatening turn. A few weeks before I was due to return to work, my department had let one-quarter of its staff go. Somewhat disconcertingly, my supervisor emailed me in advance to ask that I meet her on the HR floor on my scheduled first day back. My husband, who is a lawyer, told me what that meant: I was about to be sacked.
On my first day back, my supervisor said exactly what my husband had predicted she would say (word for word!): “As you know, the department has been going through a reorganization, and I’m so sorry but we’re going to have to let you go.”To ward off an emotional reaction, I had rehearsed a humorous response, but in the end I just sat there trying to look composed.
After that job ended, I had returned to my long-time career as a freelance magazine journalist, while ramping up my assistance to my daughter, who was seeking intensive treatment for her illness, and to my mother, who was dealing with Alzheimer’s. I was in my mid-fifties and suddenly more caregiver than writer. Maybe Carol was on to something. I did need a change.
I told Carol right away that, of course, I’d help choose a long list of books for the inmates at Collins Bay. It was an opportunity to help a friend, and my husband and I enjoyed our friendship with her and her husband, Bryan, on many levels, not the least of which was their empathy for our daughter and their efforts to help her find health care resources since we’d moved back from England.
As Carol and I continued along the cemetery paths, we talked about the men’s reading level and the books they had read so far. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt had been the first. I could see how a memoir of a miserable Irish childhood would be perfect for inmates, many of whom likely had experienced hardscrabble upbringings. Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, had been a hit. Carol could barely get a word in edgewise during that book club meeting. And they’d liked Joseph Boyden’s novel Three Day Road, about two Cree hunters who enlist to serve in World War I, and Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father.
I asked her what other sorts of books they enjoyed.
“Well,” said Carol. “The thing is, you really can’t tell what works unless you come into the prison and sit in on one of the book club meetings.” That was when I felt my chest tighten and a hole open up beneath me, like my own ready-made grave right there in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
In my mind, I was back in England in 2002. We had moved to London from Dallas two months earlier for my husband’s work. It was a Saturday evening in early September and I had just dropped off my sixteen-year-old daughter at a birthday party for one of her new school friends in St. John’s Wood. I was driving a Mercedes fleet car supplied by my husband’s employer and was focused on not damaging it. I had grown confident about driving on the left, but still had difficulty parallel parking in Cannon Lane up against the nearly two-metre-high brick garden wall that surrounded our rented property in Hampstead. Our small “maisonette” occupied one wing of a Victorian pile called The Logs. The ’80s pop star Boy George occupied the grand south wing. Fans would write in chalk on the brick of his garden wall, plaintive messages like Looking for love and their telephone number. On our side of the house, very few pedestrians ever wandered down the lane.
That evening, I came at the parking spot the easiest way. I drove up East Heath Road from South End Green, with the darkness of Hampstead Heath on my right, turned left on Squire’s Mount, where cannon barrels were mounted like bollards in the sidewalk, and drove down the walled single-lane chute of Cannon Lane. A jasmine vine spilling over the wall was emitting an exotic, citrusy perfume and as I passed, the scent wafted into the open car window. I inched by the few parked cars in the lane, found the designated parking spot in front of our house, and focused on manoeuvring the car as close to the wall as possible so that other vehicles could squeeze by. Back, forth, back, back, forward a pinch, back again, straighten the steering wheel.
It was only when I stepped out and closed the door that I noticed two tall black men with unusu
ally long coats and tweed flat caps walking toward me. They were staring at me intently. I hesitated for a second and then saw them break into a run—straight toward me. I ran too—as fast as I could with my osteoarthritic left knee— and managed to press the doorbell by the garden door, knowing my husband was in the house on a business call with colleagues in the U.S. and the U.K. Then I felt a hand over my mouth and an arm around my neck, hoisting me into the air.
The feeling of being strangled was not what I expected. Yes, there was the lack of air. But, oddly, no fear. And my lungs weren’t bursting. Not yet. I was hanging by my throat from the crook of one man’s arm, suspended in a chokehold, strangling under my own weight. The other man tried to grab my feet, which I flailed about in an attempt to kick.
I looked up and saw the light still on in my daughter’s bedroom window. I thought of my husband, safely inside, and of my son, safely at university in Canada. You have to survive for your family ghosted in as a thought.
What did they want? They had said nothing. They had just silently set upon me. I had instinctively thrown my purse containing my house keys over the garden wall during the pursuit. In my left hand, my cellphone’s screen and numbers glowed pale green in the darkness. In my right hand, my car key was clenched tight. I opened my hands to present both as offerings. No takers.
If they didn’t want a Mercedes and a cellphone, then they wanted something else. My mind went to other possibilities. Rape. I was perhaps too old: forty-six. Murder. I was only forty-six—too young to die. From where I was struggling, it was about fifteen metres to the densely thicketed and treed border of Hampstead Heath. They would have to cross the two narrow lanes of East Heath Road to get me there. But at that time of the evening, there would be long gaps between passing cars. It was possible to cross and be unseen by anyone.
Then terror set in. I felt panic rising in my chest and my heart slamming against my rib cage. If my throat had been open I would have vomited. My lungs grew hard. I dropped the phone and pulled at the arm around my throat. I kicked, but there was no leverage. My eyes closed and the image of my daughter’s window, and the outline of the fuchsia bush against it, remained imprinted on my eyelids.