by Ann Walmsley
Derek, who was leading the discussion that day, kicked it off by saying that it took him a long time to like the protagonist.
Graham agreed. “The writing style drove me absolutely crazy. If I saw the word ‘and’ one more time, I was going to go totally insane.” It was true that large parts of Christopher’s narrative were told in a breathless “And I said … and he said … and I said,” but it was damned believable.
Carol always sympathized with readers’ frustrations. “Well, the first time I read it I really liked it,” she said. “But the second time, it drove me bonkers, and perhaps it was all the ‘ands.’” She went on to give the men a brief primer on autism, including that those on the autism spectrum could be very quick to anger and had enormous difficulties with social interaction.
“I liked the part where he hit the cop,” said Frank, which got a hearty laugh from everyone. The scene comes early in the novel, when the police pepper Christopher with questions about why he was found holding the dead dog. The boy went into sensory overload from the interrogation and lay on the ground groaning. As a rule, he didn’t like being touched, so when a policeman took hold of his arm to lift him to his feet, Christopher hit him.
It’s a tribute to Haddon that, just as we’re laughing at that situation, Christopher’s next line in the novel tells the reader that the book will not be funny.
It was Derek who advanced the idea that we could all in some way identify with Christopher. Not that any of us is autistic, he said, but, “We’re all in some way standing on the outside of the circle or the periphery of life.”
“Oh yeah,” said Ben, wearing a toque despite the warm May day. “Especially being in here, I guess we can all get to where he’s at sometimes.”
Graham picked up on Ben’s point and said that just as Christopher was living in his own little world, the men in the prison live in their own little world “separate from everybody else.” He said that whenever he had to leave Collins Bay for a supervised hospital or court appointment, he felt uncomfortable. “Suddenly you’re in the midst of things, and then when you come back you’re almost exhausted. I am anyway. I go to sleep for the day.”
Carol reiterated that we are all on the margins in some way. She told the men about her visit to Jean Vanier’s community in France, and about one developmentally delayed resident who approached her and asked, “Are you normal?”
Carol’s story inspired Frank to describe the Exceptional Person Olympiad that the prison sponsors each summer, bringing in people with intellectual disabilities to have two days of games and sports with the inmates. “One of them gave me a hug!” he said. Several of the other men had positive things to say about those two days. One large man with a sleepy voice said, “You’re in an institution. You’re surrounded by hate. You’re surrounded by opinions. Everybody in prison has an opinion. At the Olympiad you’re with people who don’t. They’re very loving, very outgoing, very easy to be around.”
Graham had one more gloss to add on the subject of autism in the novel. He suggested to the others that maybe autism was a metaphor for a failure of communication between all the members of the family and the chaos and suffering that ensued from that breakdown. With that comment he came closest to Mark Haddon’s own declaration about the book—that it was really about everyone.
With all the empathy being expressed, Seamus, who worked as a chapel cleaner, volunteered that he’d been put in a special needs class in school, with kids who were “drooling and stuff.” Seamus said he was diagnosed with ADD and was less proficient than the other students at school work.
“You look pretty calm now,” kidded Graham.
“Were you a troublemaker?” Derek asked Seamus.
“No. They just put me in a special needs class my whole life,” he said. His candour was touching. By then I was starting to understand how even we volunteers were outsiders. While Seamus was an outsider at school and Graham felt like an outsider when on hospital leave, as volunteers we were outsiders in the prison.
What I failed to understand when I proposed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was how uncomfortable most inmates are with the idea of other inmates who have certain neuro-developmental disorders or mental illness. “Bugs” is prison slang for the mentally ill, and bugs are generally avoided in the yard because they are perceived as unpredictable. The book club members could sympathize with the kind of extreme neurological disorder that afflicted Walker or with the kids in the Exceptional Person Olympiad, but not with mental illness.
Graham highlighted this in a brief essay on mental illness in prisons that he had written, which he shared with Carol and me in the wake of our book club discussions. “Imagine living in a world where a variety of mental illnesses were rampant and patients received little or no treatment,” reads the opening line. “Now imagine that you weren’t allowed to leave this world for any reason. Imagine that violence was common and the population extremely unpredictable. Such a world exists right here in Canada and I live in it every single day.”
The essay went on to describe an inmate who drinks his own urine, one who snorts coffee grounds, others who don’t shower or who hear voices. He cited the suicide rate among federally incarcerated inmates in the country as 84 per 100,000, versus the rate of 11.3 for all citizens. I thought I’d check his data since it wasn’t footnoted and found that he was correct: the figures aligned with those in the Annual Report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator covering 2009–2010.
Graham was quickly becoming one of the most interesting members of the book club.
Within a few days I was back at Collins Bay to accompany Carol for a meeting with four of the inmates: the men she wanted to deputize as ambassadors. The speed and urgency with which she acted to “fix” the book club was like that of a chief executive officer conscious of the need to improve next quarter’s results. I concluded that there were no back burners on Carol’s stove.
Her idea was that the ambassadors would pre-read books to be sure they were right for the guys, encourage others to read and recruit new members when old members left. They would shepherd the other men.
“Who have you chosen?” I asked her, when she picked me up at the Kingston train station.
“Graham, Frank, Dread and Ben,” she said. No surprises there. They always finished the book. They always had something to say.
When we met with the men, they were pleased to be asked to help, but candid about the problems with the book club. Graham and Frank complained about some members not reading the book. How many times had I heard that complaint in my women’s book groups when we were all young mothers juggling work and child rearing?
Carol wanted to know why some took a book but then didn’t show up. Some of it was logistics, according to the guys. The men had to have a pass prepared the day before in order to attend the meeting. Since the book club meetings were held in the chapel, it was up to the chaplains to issue the passes. Then the day of, it was up to the guards to use the PA system to call pass holders to the meeting. Frank pointed out that the guards usually called out “Chapel” not “Book Club,” because technically that was the inmates’ destination. Whether the guards were being literal or ribbing inmates for being religious, some guys who didn’t want to ruin their reps as hard-asses wouldn’t respond to the call. Others just might not clue in that the call was for book club.
“Make sure the chaplain calls every block,” suggested Graham.
“Also some books are harder,” said Dread. “And men get distracted watching TV, working out or sleeping and don’t want to show up to book club looking like a fool with the book unread.”
How about the guys who showed up without their books, Carol wanted to know. Did they sell them for drugs?
“That would be some very cheap drugs,” said Dread, laughing hysterically.
Carol showed them a mock-up of the certificate that would go in their files for acting as ambassadors.
“I think ours should be backdated,” neg
otiated Dread, implying that he’d been acting as an unofficial ambassador for months.
While it was the chaplain who had made it possible for Carol to launch the book club, the meeting with the ambassadors reminded her that the book club’s home in the chapel was a mixed blessing. Religion and books sometimes didn’t mix. She was feeling similar unease about her partnership with Prison Fellowship Canada, which for the previous few months had carried out her book orders and shipping to the prisons, as well as extending to Carol their standard book discount. An old friend, who was her contact at Prison Fellowship, was being noncommittal about ongoing funding. Carol told me she sensed that the organization was not willing to help buy books beyond the book club’s start-up period. She said that Prison Fellowship had also expressed a desire for more influence in her selection of volunteers, in keeping with its mandate. In particular, Carol told me, it wanted assurances that the book club volunteers were people of faith. Carol insisted that this was a secular book club and that she wanted volunteers whose passion was books. Impatient as always, she accelerated the process of registering Book Clubs for Inmates Inc. as a non-profit corporation, the first step in registering as a charity and tapping alternate sources of funding. Another organization was not going to call the shots.
Carol was at the wheel again that day, driving us back to Toronto. She looked exhausted and I wondered if I should offer to drive. I knew she suffered from sleep interruptions and I had heard her up at night during one sleepover at Amherst Island. She wore earplugs to bed in the spring to avoid being woken early by the birds’ dawn chorus. But as we talked, I learned it was something else that had caused her to lose sleep the previous night. It was lambing season, and Carol’s neighbours at Topsy Farm on the island had phoned her in the middle of the night to ask if she would help rescue newborn lambs. During one of the dampest springs on record, many lambs were hypothermic after gushing out of their mothers’ wombs into fields pocked with near-freezing puddles of water. Working together with her neighbours, Carol had wrapped the lambs in towels and brought them into the farm kitchen to warm them with her body heat. Gradually they began to shiver, open their eyes and bleat, their umbilical cords lolling against their bellies. She felt maternal and literally pastoral all at once.
Now Carol had flocks inside and outside the prison. And both flocks had guards. Topsy Farm’s most popular photograph of their sheep is one in which all the animals are facing the photographer. It’s only when you gaze at it for several seconds that you realize that posing among the white-faced sheep, and almost identical in colouring and size, are white Pyrenees guard dogs.
4
THE N-WORD
CAROL’S EFFORTS TO MAKE the Collins Bay Book Club feel more like a book club on the outside had already moved into its next phase: inviting prominent authors to visit and answer the men’s questions about the books. The first writer she targeted was Lawrence Hill, whose breakout 2007 historical novel, The Book of Negroes, had won a 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and had become an international literary hit. The book’s title refers to a real historical document, a ledger that recorded the passage of slaves transported to Nova Scotia in return for their loyalty to Britain during the American Revolutionary War. Hill brings the slave narrative to life through his protagonist: a stoic West African woman who preserves her dignity despite her deprivations—a situation with which men in prison could identify. And Lawrence Hill was particularly well positioned to have additional street cred with many of the men in the prison book club. Born of a black father and a white mother, he was a role model as a successful black man.
After Carol’s first call and email inviting him to attend, Hill declined because of a busy writing schedule and the three-hour drive to the prison. She contacted him several more times and asked in a variety of pleading ways without success. Finally, as he tells it, she invited him out for coffee, where he showed up intending to say no, but found he was no match for Carol’s persistence.
That was in 2010, before I joined the book group. Frank, Ben and Dread were among the members in attendance at that first meeting with the author. “It was the most intimate, detailed, focused, sustained conversation about the book that I’d had with any group, period,” Hill later told me. “And that includes PhD students and graduate seminars and everything. So they were really amazing.” The experience was so rewarding that he told Carol he would be happy to return.
And so on my fifth meeting of the Collins Bay Book Club, in the early summer of 2011, Lawrence Hill was back to talk to the inmates. He was wearing a blue plaid shirt and a shiny jacket that was a marked contrast to the plain-colour prison blues and whites that the book club members were wearing. One of Hill’s previous books documents his journey as a light-skinned black man straddling two identities. And that day the men saw a man with a close-trimmed Afro that could pass for just very curly hair and a man whose skin tone was ambiguous.
I was captivated by the protagonist of Hill’s book,Aminata Diallo, who is kidnapped, at age eleven, by slavers from her native West Africa in the 1700s and sold to a South Carolina indigo plantation. Before boarding the slave ship, she is forced to walk in a coffle to the ocean, during which time she experiences her first menstrual period. She survives the horrific conditions of the slave ship and years of plantation labour, while enduring what surely must have been the most agonizing aspect of her bondage: having her two children taken from her. Even though it was the voice of a young female narrator, it could have been the voice of some of the black inmates’ female ancestors. Aminata’s journey takes her to Nova Scotia after her name is entered in the ledger that comes to be known as the Book of Negroes. The actual historical ledger now sits in the National Archives at Kew in London. But Nova Scotia is not where the story ends.
The book club ambassadors had done a good job advertising the author visit and some thirty men showed up for the meeting on that hot June day. It was the largest turnout I had ever seen— double our usual numbers. Most of the new faces were black and many of the new arms were heavily tattooed. We scrambled to set up extra chairs for the attendees.
Ben kicked off the conversation by commenting, “You always cultivate this grace in all your books, I noticed.” Ben had been present at Hill’s 2010 prison visit, when they had first discussed the book, and since then he had read another of Hill’s works, the author’s debut novel, Some Great Thing.
The author’s eyes opened wide and he smiled at Ben. He talked about imbuing his characters with admirable qualities like courage because he liked to ask himself whether he would have that courage under those circumstances. “It’s the same thing with grace,” said Hill. “I mean there’s something to be said for people who keep their dignity, even when all hell is breaking out around them and they’re enduring really horrible things and they keep their dignity and don’t forget that they’re just as human as everybody else.” He was answering Ben’s question but he appeared to be slipping in a stealth message to every one of the guys in the room: that he admired their courage and their humanity in how they were enduring prison. I felt the power of his words. And his comments affected the men too. A muscle twitched in Graham’s cheek and Ben smiled his slow smile. Many of the others sat rapt.
Juan, an inmate who was vocal about his writing ambitions, wanted to talk about the writing process for such a long book. He was wearing a yellow White Sox cap, sunglasses and, hanging on his chest, a huge wooden cross. He asked his question in a staccato delivery, at high volume.
Hill told Juan that he generally started in the middle of the book and waited for something interesting to come to him. “You have to have a lot of faith,” Hill said. “I’m not a religious person, personally, but I guess I have my own sort of faith—a non-religious spirituality that you have something beautiful to say, something worthwhile to say and I think every person has something worthwhile about them, something inherently dignified about them and you want to reach down and find that piece of beauty inside yourself and bring it out. And y
ou don’t necessarily even know what’s down there. So writing is about pulling out secrets inside your own soul and spilling them out onto the page. It’s kind of like mining. You don’t know what you’re going to pull up.” Perhaps he had observed Juan’s cross and mentioned religion as a means of finding common ground. But the subtext of his statement crept up on all of us—that even guys in prison have something beautiful inside worth mining.
“Do you decide the characters first?” asked a burly inmate with a sun and moon tattoo on his arm. His name tag read STAN.
“I think of a person in a difficult situation,” Hill responded. “Story happens when a character’s under pressure and we, the readers, are watching them cope. In this case I talk about a girl stolen from a village in Africa. What if this were my own daughter? I think of this novel as a road trip. She’s on the move her whole life. I think about the longing she might have.” The answer seemed to resonate for the men whose own lives had been stolen and whose own journeys were still uncertain. One of the guys nudged the man next to him and nodded.
Dread, who had been reading Hill’s autobiography, Black Berry, Sweet Juice, about his childhood in a predominantly white suburb of Toronto, said, “You really opened up my mind to the experiences you had as a child. Like you’re so divided—you’re not really accepted by the black people and the white people saw you as a black person.”