by Ann Walmsley
When I pulled up to the prison more than two hours later, my air conditioning blasting, paramedics were loading a stretcher into an ambulance. The staff at reception asked me to stand aside. I could smell their fear. Perspiring corrections officers, some with their stab-proof vests partly askew, stood with spray cans, presumably pepper spray, behind their backs, and batons at the ready. I wondered if they were concealing the spray canisters so that the inmates wouldn’t try to grab them. A line of hulking men with thick tattooed necks and smashed-in noses—men with a brutish appearance I had never seen among members of the book group— filed past the guards from the west wing of the main building.Those were guys from the “pill parade” someone told me, men receiving methadone and insulin from the clinic. And then I realized that the person on the stretcher was a guard. “The whacker,” a staffer told me, was a lifer who had struck the guard from behind. He had used a wooden cribbage board, then stabbed the guard in the neck with a pencil. According to another inmate whom I spoke to much later, it was not a premeditated attack. He claimed a relatively new guard had ill-advisedly walked into an inmate’s cell without backup. He’d seized the inmate’s prized cooking pot—a sort of 1970s-style slow cooker that the authorities were attempting to eliminate throughout the prison. But the inmate was a Muslim and was attached to his pot for preparing halal dishes. And it had all happened on Unit 4, where Dread and Ben had their cells. I felt sorry for everyone. I would not be allowed to enter the prison that day and I had no option but to return to Toronto.
As I drove west along the highway, past the roadside drifts of nodding blue chicory and blousy Queen Anne’s lace, a variation on the old mariners’ saying occurred to me: “Red sky at morning, jailers take warning.”
6
SUMMER READING
I LATER GOT THREE DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES on what happened that day in July when the inmate on Unit 4 attacked the guard. Ben recalled that it was early in the morning, and he’d just stepped out of the shower. Hearing screaming, he looked down from his upper-level range to see a commotion and a melee of guards. “I thought, wow, this is it,” he said. As for Winston, he just smiled slyly at me and said, “Yeah, the guard slipped. Got attacked by a floor. The floors are violent around here.” Winston was serving life for second-degree murder. Dread just changed the subject. What happens in Unit 4 stays in Unit 4. It was only much later that Graham filled me in on how even pepper spray didn’t quell the attacker. It took a female guard who knew the inmate to talk him down so that he would release the fallen guard.
What they did bend my ear about, though, was the lockdown that followed. “During the hottest week known to man,” said Winston. “They didn’t give us no showers. We were trapped in our cells for eight days. I thought, like, I was going to have a heart attack.”
A rare “heat dome” over Southern Ontario had made it suffocatingly hot and humid during those weeks in July, feeling in some cities like fifty degrees Celsius, given the humidity. It was so hot, Ben told me, that he couldn’t lie down on his bed or sit on his chair—the skin contact was too uncomfortable. “It was brutal you know, Miss,” he said, sucking his teeth. “It was just sticky and gross and you’re sweating. You couldn’t even keep your clothes on. And I have no fan and no breeze and nothing cold to drink. My cases of water are at room temperature.”Worse, his window was a few metres from the cafeteria garbage bins, which produced a high stench every two days when the garbage trucks emptied them. One way to get through the heat, said Ben, was knowing that the guy who attacked the guard had it worse in solitary confinement. “The guy who beat up the guard—he’s having a rougher time than me, so I have to just bear with this and push on,” he told me. “That’s where I get lost in my books. I just decide, a hundred pages a day and I’ll be all right.”
August was usually holiday month for the Collins Bay Book Club, but Carol had scheduled a get-together to give the men a chance to talk about their summer reading. At the beginning of the summer, Carol had donated to the prison library some three hundred used books that she’d rounded up from our Toronto book club members and other friends—books intended to be good recreational reading for the hot months. Like any other book club, this was a chance for the members to recommend good books to each other.
I was uncertain how the book club would look in late summer. Graham and Frank had already been transferred to Beaver Creek, a minimum-security prison north of Toronto. With those two important contributors gone, I wondered whether our discussions could possibly be the same. Funny how in five short months I’d grown attached to these guys. I had no idea then how circumstances would bring us back together.
The first group of book club members arrived from their cells with sweat beading on their faces and their arms covered in a sheen of perspiration. Now that they had shed their cool-weather long-sleeved waffle-weave shirts in favour of short-sleeved T-shirts, I could see that some arms were alive with tattooed images of coiling snakes, yowling skulls, spiderwebs and Gothic crosses—some faded and some seemingly fresh. A few of the men squeezed into the chaplain’s offices for relief from the heat before the meeting. The offices were air-conditioned, while the cells and other common spaces like the chapel were not.
When we had all moved to the circle of chairs in the chapel, Carol asked who wanted to start off the meeting with a book recommendation. Ben stepped up first, while some of the others fanned their faces.
“I was reading Six Suspects by Vikas Swarup,” he said. “He’s the author of Slumdog Millionaire, eh? It’s about a murder that takes place and six suspects that they’re trying to investigate and it happens in India. Basically showing that the political system is a bit corrupted from high officials to the slums. It’s hard to get by over there. It’s a really good story.”
Carol turned to Gaston and asked him whether he had a summer read to recommend.
Gaston said he’d read Of Mice and Men over the summer because he knew the book club was scheduled to read another Steinbeck novel in the fall, The Grapes of Wrath. I remembered that Lawrence Hill had also recommended Steinbeck to Gaston when he signed his book. “It’s a good short book, easy to read,” he said. “This story is back in Southern times in the 1940s or ’50s. If you’re easily offended by the racism in those times, I wouldn’t recommend reading it, because of the slang they use, but it’s an interesting story.” He had also read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels that summer. “It’s the book that Aminata was reading in The Book of Negroes. I just wanted to see what she was reading. It’s almost like a fairy tale with giants and midgets.” I loved how his curiosity guided his book selections. It was how I often chose my own reading material.
“Gulliver’s Travels is a hard read,” said Carol.
“Yeah, I had to stop figuring out the purpose of it,” he admitted. “I was overthinking it.”
Dread, who was wearing his wool tam over his dreads despite the heat, gave Stieg Larsson’s bestselling mystery novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a rave review. “It’s extremely entertaining,” he said. “The entire story is extremely twisted and well thought out.”
“Lisbeth’s a wonderful character,” said Derek, referring to the girl of the book’s title.
And Winston recommended both of the books he had read: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and the novel The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway. “I liked The Cellist,” he said. “It had four or five perspectives on the war in Sarajevo and the way the author wrote it was a little different from anything I’d ever read before, following different people simultaneously.”The name on Winston’s name tag had changed from the previous month, when he’d used his middle name, Dorian. I was getting used to that in the prison. Some men identified by their last name and prison number, which was standard prison protocol. Others used first names, middle names, aliases, prison nicknames or other monikers. The most accurate identifier was their tattoos.
Stan said he’d read Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, and ranked it as “more twisted than the movi
e.”
No one had come to the meeting expecting to pitch books to their peers, and none of them had been compelled to select books from the donated summer reading material. They could have slacked off and watched TV all summer or fallen back on pulpier books. But it seemed that the hunger for good reading material was growing.
At the end of the meeting, several of the men streamed by to shake hands with me and say goodbye until next month. As I said goodbye to Dread, I extended my hand for what I assumed would be a conventional handshake, but he deked his hand sideways and gave me an elaborate “brother handshake” instead. He smiled broadly as he did so, making me feel I had entered some inner circle of acceptance. Before he left, we made plans to talk at the prison the following day.
On the ferry ride back to Amherst Island after the book club discussion, Carol, Derek and I found seats together on the upper deck, where a warm, dry wind was blowing. Carol applied some lipstick without looking in a mirror, a skill that I watched with admiration. She was wearing a scarf to protect her hair from the sun, “so it doesn’t turn brassy,” she informed me. I pulled at a strand of my own hair and saw that the colour had indeed bleached out over the summer. It wasn’t something that mattered to me much, though. All I cared about at that moment, after that day’s session in the stale air of the prison, was spending a moment with my head thrown back, eyes closed, enjoying the breeze on my face and being on the water, feeling gratitude that I was free to step outside the prison walls.
Carol opened her purse a few minutes later and pulled out a letter that had been mailed to her via the Collins Bay chaplain. It was from Graham writing from Beaver Creek, where he and Frank were now serving the next stage of their sentence. She read the letter aloud to us. Graham wrote that there was no book group at the prison and could Carol please help him start one. She looked up, her eyes shining. I whooped for joy. Derek and I high-fived. Here were men who were becoming hooked, not on drugs, but on books. It was the first concrete triumph for Carol’s project.
Derek waved goodbye to us as he drove his car off the ferry and turned east to his island house, while Carol and I drove our cars off the ramp and turned west to her house. Once settled at her place, she proposed a swim. We grabbed towels and bathing suits and walked across the sheep pasture to the island’s westernmost tip. Rams with enormous ankle-grazing testicles led the way along the sheep path. That night I celebrated Carol’s birthday with her, giving her a Guinness ginger bundt cake and one of my favourite novels: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, a series of funny vignettes about an inquisitive six-year-old girl and her crusty grandmother and their family summers on a remote island in the Finnish archipelago. It was a perfect book for summer and I had given it to some of my most cherished friends.
Carol talked about the frantic feeling that she sensed was building in the men because of the difficulties of prison life. One inmate for whom she had found legal representation had been caught with pineapple juice, she told me, which meant that he was suspected of fermenting it in a plastic bag to produce hooch. She seemed to be frustrated that just as she was helping him finally get a fair shake, he was busy screwing it up.
The island fauna, too, were under stress following the unusually wet spring and the summer heat. As I fell asleep I heard coyotes howling and a lone lamb baa-ing. One animal penned in, the others desperate to get at it. The next morning, on my drive to the ferry, I passed, quite close, two young foxes with white-tipped tails, black stockings and amber eyes, lounging by a stream bed. They should have run off. But they just sat there staring at me, perhaps dazed by the already oppressive morning heat.
As the ferry pulled away from Amherst Island, I looked back at the nodding shoreline willows and thought about the island’s absurdly abundant and bold animal life, reflecting on why it was so important to me. My parents had raised my three brothers and me to be keen observers of the natural world, believing that a close connection to nature would help us put the human experience into perspective. They imbued us with a sense of wonder and curiosity, teaching us where and when to look for marsh marigolds, gentians, Dutchman’s breeches and lady’s slipper in the wild and how to identify birds by their song alone.
What was it about nature that I now found so pleasantly distracting and reassuring as I interacted with men in prison? Its umbilical cord back to my safe childhood, I suppose, and its predictability. Each spring, blossoms unfurled in the same order: snowdrops and crocuses first, followed by carpets of indigocoloured scilla and on and on through forsythia and magnolia. I was awed each year when plants emerged from the ground knowing how to assemble themselves into their predetermined shapes, each so distinct from the next. The progression of bird migrations was equally reliable, as was the birdsong that tinted the air as purple finches and others passed through.
But even non-naturalists couldn’t help but encounter wildlife on the low-lying twenty-kilometre speck of land that was Amherst Island. Animals had taken over there, thanks in part to its position on an avian migration route. The lounging foxes were just the latest. And I’d even seen my first whippoorwill—a rarely viewed, seemingly neckless bird sitting nonchalantly on the edge of the gravel road one evening soon after sunset, its large doe eyes gleaming red in my car headlights. I was so grateful to Carol for sharing her island paradise with me and I resolved to share my enthusiasm for nature with the men whenever possible.
The drive from the ferry to the prison was quick that day, just fifteen minutes. After all the failed attempts in June and July, I was finally going to sit down with Ben for my first one-on-one to get to know him better. We found seats in the chapel storage room. A fan whirred in the far corner to help move the air and the window was open in an attempt to capture a breeze.The air remained stubbornly close, though. Through the windows, we could hear the sharp chirp of sparrows over a lower chorus of crickets, then suddenly a loud burst of men shouting. I jumped. Ben looked unfazed.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Those are the guys in segregation. Calling from their windows.”
“Who are they calling to?”
“Other guys are walking by right now, probably going to work at CORCAN and they’ll shout to anyone they know is in the hole.”
So that was segregation, a.k.a the hole: solitary confinement. The seg cells were housed in one of the old wings branching off from The Strip. Inmates wind up there either by requesting it for their own protection, or when the warden deems they’re jeopardizing the security of the penitentiary or the safety of others. In Canada’s federal prisons at that time, fewer than 20 percent of those in solitary were voluntary admissions. While there, they spent twenty-three hours a day in their cells, with one hour out for exercise. Some men from our book club ended up there from time to time.
We walked to the storage room window and listened to the exchange for a minute. “You fucker” was all I could hear clearly. It died out quickly. The passing inmates had to report to their prison jobs. Ben and I settled back into our chairs.
He spent some time giving me a few glimpses into his early life. He’d been born in Canada, but went back to Jamaica with his mother for his early schooling. “Education is like number one there,” he told me. “You’re nobody if you don’t have an education. They’re so competitive there: spelling bees, math bees. We used to go around in school and sing our times tables.” His aunt was the principal of the school so there was no slacking off. He remembers having access to books in the house: geography books, dictionaries and Ebony magazine.
When he returned to Canada for grade seven, the school authorities placed him in grade six, not recognizing the test he had passed in Jamaica enabling him to skip a grade. “It was discouraging, Miss. And what I was learning in Canada wasn’t of any substance. They’re teaching you home ec. or some ridiculous stuff—life skills that are not intellectually stimulating. Or they have the whole class playing recorders. I got distracted.”
In high school, he read books only if required for an assignm
ent, finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate. His friends in grade nine started smoking weed and experimenting with LSD. “I could get a little bit of weed here and there and kids started buying it off us at lunchtime. You see the money coming in. It’s pulling. I got to grade ten and dropped out due to circumstances.”
I asked him which of the books we’d read in the book club had been his favourite. “I don’t know if I have a favourite,” he said. “Each time I do a reading, it opens a window in me. Each book is a humbling situation and allows me to be more clear and detailed in my life. All the books that I’ve read have contributed to who I am today and how I look at life.” His answer was so complex and fascinating that my question sounded simplistic by comparison. As I had for Graham and Frank, I gave him a journal to track his reflections on books and prison. He was pleased to be asked. We shook hands and said goodbye. He made his first journal entry later that day.
Dread, who’d been waiting in the chapel while I talked with Ben, walked into the room with a gait so loose-limbed I thought his thigh bones might detach from his hips. Prison hadn’t etched worry lines in his face, and Canada had barely dented his strong Jamaican accent, even though he had left his home country at the age of eleven. Too impatient to read in Jamaica, he spent his youth there riding his bike, hunting doves with a slingshot, fishing for perch and snapper and watching TV. As an adult now stuck in the confines of a prison, he expressed that kinetic energy in competitive chess games with other inmates and an irrepressible flow of ideas for business schemes. It seemed natural to ask him, therefore, if he had had a job before coming to prison.