The Prison Book Club

by Ann Walmsley

  “How about Arrow?” asked Carol. “What did everyone think of her?”

  Bookman, the inmate librarian, said, “Arrow realized that even the people up on the hill are stuck in her situation. A mirror image.”

  “I like that comparison,” said Phoebe, whose sentences ended with the tonal uptick characteristic of some Canadian accents. “Arrow is constantly comparing herself to the people on the hills and trying to differentiate between the people defending the city and the people attacking the city. And more often than not, some of the characters come to realize that they’re a hell of a lot more similar to each other than they would like to think.”

  This had to resonate with the men around the table: how war must blur the true goodness or evil of those who must survive in it and how prison does the same. Some of the men thought Arrow was a coward for her ultimate sacrifice at the end of the book. Some of them thought it was an act of goodness. It struck me that in that prison meeting room, each individual around the table had the capacity to recognize goodness. Whatever part of them had been bad was not apparent in our brief time together. It was not until later that that part was revealed to me, when I learned about some of their crimes.

  Bookman wanted to explore the theme of sacrifice. “Each of the characters sacrificed something,” he said. “Kenan, the one with the family, sacrificed his safety every couple of days to get water for his family and others. Arrow sacrificed her life to avoid being someone she didn’t want to become.”

  “So do you think that’s part of the theme of humanity,” Carol ventured again, trying to resurrect her point, “that when we are truly human, we put ourselves out for the other?”

  Frank responded: “I thought at the end Arrow just got tired of everything. She had all these options and she said, what for? Goodbye. That’s the sense I got.”

  Then Donna pointed to the clock and the guys realized they had to rush to Count, so Graham took the floor. “The next meeting will be the second Wednesday of the month,” he said, his voice easily heard over the after-meeting chatter. The book club members grabbed their copies of Jeannette Walls’s memoir, The Glass Castle. They were all in a hurry, but still stopped to shake our hands and thank us on the way out. Carol told them that she was sorry she wouldn’t be able to personally attend the Beaver Creek Book Club each month, given how interesting their comments had been.

  Frank and Graham’s first book club meeting had been a big success. Frank had found strong contributors and Graham had ensured that everyone who wanted to speak got heard. It was easy to imagine him using those same skills in a meeting of his street crew before his incarceration, or in a legitimate business meeting that might take place post-incarceration.

  Frank and Graham asked us to stay until they got back from Count. When they returned, slightly breathless, Graham said “the guys” were asking him if it would be possible to get together in smaller groups first to discuss some of the issues, before meeting in the larger combined group. The book group was a hit! We congratulated them. As we and the other facilitators left the building, Frank shyly gave me a sheaf of typed papers—his journal about his reading in prison. He preferred to type rather than to write in the journal I’d given him.

  On the drive back to the city in Carol’s car, she and I talked about Frank’s progress in his real estate correspondence course, Carol’s longing for greater closeness with her siblings, what we had cooked for Thanksgiving and why there were lifers in a minimum-security prison. Roughly a quarter of the inmates at Beaver Creek were serving life sentences and, after a long time behind bars meeting milestones in their correctional programs, they each had earned the right to be there, even if they might spend years in minimum. I asked her why she thought the book club members resisted broadening the discussion to humanity and kindness in their own lives. Had Donna’s presence made them guarded? Was it like Sarajevo and they had to self-preserve in hostile circumstances?

  It would take them a while to trust, she said. She had seen it with every book club.

  I reflected silently on whether some of the men had difficulty talking about kindness in the context of awareness of their own past crimes, when kindness had failed them. I opened a Google screen on my iPhone, then closed it, then opened it again. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know what each inmate had done. I keyed in Doc’s name. There was a hit. A man who shared the same name, a family physician. I slipped the phone back into my purse.

  Carol was getting tired, so I took the wheel. Rain was sheeting down and it was dark. I had to focus on the driving. Not being familiar with her car’s dashboard, and being fatally inattentive to gas gauges generally, I paid no attention to the fuel level. Just ten blocks shy of my house, at a busy city intersection, we ran out of gas. Carol insisted that I leave her there because roadside assistance was on the way and it was a safe area. I did so reluctantly, but felt guilty abandoning her. In my taxi ride home, I felt like Dragan early in the novel, looking out for himself.

  9

  I’M INSTITUTIONALIZED, BRO

  BACK AT COLLINS BAY, the temperatures were dipping to five degrees Celsius overnight by early October and Ben was keeping the window of his cell closed. “Right now I am wrapped in three blankets and a sheet when I go to bed,” he told his journal.

  The previous month had brought plenty of ups and downs for Ben. When I read his journal, it progressed like a novel—full of cliffhangers and hopes. It made me want to read on, to find out what would happen next. “I been trying to get into the welding program and I just received a slip for an interview,” he wrote one day in September. “This would be a positive step for me because it would be a trade I could do when I get out, and move on with my life.” Twelve days later, this simple entry: “I found out yesterday that I didn’t get in.” He expressed no anger even though it was his last chance to get a trade before leaving Collins Bay. He was used to not getting a break.

  That night he dreamt about being dependent. “I’m so used to doing things myself that the thought of depending on someone or others frightens me,” he confided to his journal. “At times I worry how I’m going to adjust when I get out. Yeah, I got my diploma, but I don’t want to be stuck in a basic 9–5 job paying me minimum wage.” He hadn’t given up hope, though. Within a few days, he was musing about jobs in the renewable-energy sector and his support for the party in the upcoming provincial election that was promising those jobs. And by the end of that month’s writing, he had decided to pursue a job in trucking.

  Meanwhile his mind was on men who had some of the toughest jobs going: soldiers. For book club that month we were reading Sebastian Junger’s War, an account of the journalist’s fifteen months embedded with a U.S. Army platoon on the front lines in eastern Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. Like Ben, some of the soldiers in War had difficulty imagining a return to normal life. He reflected:

  The book makes me feel like I’m in the action on the Korengal Valley with the platoon. As I hear the story of the soldiers and how the war has psychologically caused them trauma, I lay on my bed thinking *as much as we try or at least as much as I* try to suppress the fact that I’m institutionalized, I know I am. You don’t spend 4 yrs. in one place and it doesn’t affect you.

  It was a Saturday morning as he wrote that, with its curious asterisks. Weekends were very different on the range from weekdays. “The feeling is a peaceful one because you don’t have many inmates getting up in the morning on weekends. That is one of the unwritten prison rules: all is quiet until noon, and then the jungle is awakened.”

  When we met in mid-October, with a strong turnout of sixteen inmates, the men in the book club were disappointed to learn that Carol couldn’t attend. Derek would be facilitating the meeting in her place. I didn’t think much of it at the time. In fact, I could see why having a guy at the helm for a discussion about what it’s like to be a front-line soldier would be good. As a Mennonite, Derek grew up in a tradition of pacifism and non-violence. But as a professional radio broadcaster, he
could be agnostic on the subject of combat.

  “The Second Platoon of Battle Company, 173rd Airborne,” he said as we all got comfortable in our seats. “The Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, which is, as those of you who’ve read the book know, a valley near the Pakistani border about six miles long. One of the deadliest places on earth. It’s a funnel of money and troops for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The U.S. Army put these platoons—three of them—on a hilltop, without women, without hot food, without running water, without communication with the outside world or any kind of entertainment for over a year. It’s quite a story. So I had a lot of thoughts about it and I’m sure you did too.” Without women. He didn’t say that as though women were army kit. He was reflecting the author’s comment that these front-line units had no women soldiers at that time.

  I looked over at Derek. He’d delivered a suspenseful introduction, but I knew that he was sleep-deprived and his eyes sagged in a way I’d never seen before. Without his energy to direct the discussion we could lose control of the meeting.

  And then things took a turn for the worse. “War is not like a page-turner,” Dread announced, his knit Rasta tam exposing more of his dreadlocks than at previous meetings.

  Grow-Op agreed. “I only made it to the third chapter.” Book club meetings that started this way usually petered out pretty fast.

  But then Lenny, one of several new black inmates who turned up that day, gave the group something to discuss. “For the most part in war you’re sitting around,” he said. “You’re hating on each other. And there’s very few actual moments of real war. And then it sucks. You’re not thinking about ‘O Canada,’” he said, singing the title of the Canadian anthem. “That’s not what it is. It’s like ‘oh shit’ in a moment in time.” He was able to capture in fresh words how Junger portrayed the platoon’s long lulls and sudden firefights— trumping the language of the old adage about war being “months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” He understood like a book reviewer, but spoke like a rapper.

  “War is bad but it’s not all bad,” said Derek. “At one point in the book, I made a note, ‘Why do men fight?’ It does give them meaning and purpose and a sense of bonding with their brothers. They were protecting their tribe, their group, their gang, whatever you want to call it.”

  “It gives you insight into how loyal the soldiers are to each other, like how they risk their life to save somebody without any qualms,” said Dread.

  Junger’s research on the military group dynamic is fascinating. In the book he cites a mid-1950s study in which paratroopers who were part of a tightly knit group were shown to experience less anxiety jumping out of an airplane than those who were only loosely connected. The bonded soldiers worried more about living up to the expectations of their peers than about their own safety.

  “I compared it with being in prison,” said Gaston, his brush cut almost bristling. “Because, again, you’re isolated from women, they didn’t have their families around. Nothing. And when there was no fighting, they didn’t all get along. They were at each other. Which is similar to prison.” However, he expressed regret that inmates did not bond in the same way as the soldiers. “There’s so much bullshit around these places instead of convicts coming together.”

  Peter, Gaston’s recent recruit, offered his own reflections on that point. “You know as convicts, we don’t really need a reminder of what we can be reduced to, because we’re in here, obviously. We’re supposed to be civilized and advanced, and yet we still can be reduced back to that.” “That” being the actions that landed them in prison.

  The discussion was providing clues to how hostile the prison could be outside of our protected little book club. It was so abstract, it didn’t make me nervous. On the contrary, I was impressed with how the men mapped the book against their own lives and how they had an impulse to seek improvements in prison culture.

  Then, when there was a brief lull, I raised the topic of fear. “I was really interested in what Junger had to say about how the heartbeat rises during fear, how it obscures your judgment and ability to react,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “You think of your own person,” agreed Ben. “Gunfire goes off and you freeze and the body reacts after.” I certainly remembered that my brain overrode my fear response in those first few seconds of the mugging.

  “There’s supposed to be no fear,” said Dread, who I’d noticed over the months often challenged Ben, his unit mate. Dread seemed to see Ben as teacher’s pet. “I’ve seen guys who sacrifice their own life for the other guys in the group. Everybody has that in them. You don’t have to be an animal to have that—just the love for your battalion members.”

  That’s when Derek pointed out that Junger talks about courage being love. We sat there trying to wrap our heads around the idea. Dread said it was like running out into the road to save your child. And I reflected on Junger’s point that the loyalty and bonding among the platoon was also what made the loss of a fellow soldier so psychologically traumatic. It created cohesion in the field for the military, but devastated the individual soldier in the long term. Some of the men in the prison, who had been in gangs, wore tattoos of fellow gang members who’d been gunned down. It was the same sort of thing.

  Javier picked up on Derek’s point. His ambered voice conveyed authority, and the others often fell quiet when he talked, perhaps because they liked the sound of it. Sometimes when the men took turns reading aloud passages from an upcoming book, they asked Javier to read more than one. “To me it seems a lot of these guys join up the army for a sense of security because when they first go to the army they’re nothing,” he ventured. “They’re scared, and then they get teased, and then they get beat up and then they develop this killer, you know, instinct, right? They don’t even know why they’re going to war—they’re just going there to fulfill some sense of family, some sense of security and when they get there they transform.”

  “What’s interesting to me,” said Derek, “is when it comes time at the end and their tour is up, most of these guys don’t want to leave.”

  Ben jumped in, saying, “Because they have no reason to. They got immune to it.”

  “They got immune to it?” asked Derek.

  “Yeah,” continued Ben. “Just like you could be in here. Institutionalized. As in, like, ‘Yo, I don’t wanna leave.’ Because you can’t be somewhere four or five years and say you’re not institutionalized. Just like how they are in the war. They’re only there for fifteen months and they don’t even wanna leave. Just because of going back to a normal settin’ of life.” Ben had been reflecting on this theme in his journal. Now he was trying it out with the guys.

  “That’s what the author says,” continued Javier. “Like guys who’ve been in prison for so long, the only thing they have left is prison.They have nothing else to look forward to on the street.This is where they’re shinin’. This is where most of their goals are.”

  Not everyone bought into Ben and Javier’s hypothesis.

  “I think I disagree with that,” said a man named Quincy, looking directly at Ben, his voice rising, his limbs tightening as though readying for a physical fight. He was an average-sized inmate in his twenties who seemed to be anchoring a contingent of the new black attendees.

  Then everyone began talking at the same time and Derek had trouble restoring order. “Hang on,” he said. But they ignored him.

  Carol, I thought. Where are you?

  Eventually a nasal voice rose above the others. It was Lenny. He shored up Ben and the “institutionalized” side of the argument, then added: “If you go to the hole and stuff like that in terms of relatin’ to prison, you go back to a baser humanity. And there’s less anxiety because you’re not held to a certain standard, you know what I mean.” Was he saying that it was a relief to go to the hole, to segregation, because once you were there, expectations of you were lower? “The only thing that’s expected of you in war,” he went on, “is to take care of your friends and kill, ri
ght. I could imagine that providing some kind of security, not security but, um … ” I assumed he was looking for a word like belonging.

  But Derek filled in a different word. “Or is it excitement?” he asked. War, according to Junger is “insanely” thrilling.

  “Yeah, that too, right,” said Lenny. “I mean how many of us could say we’d been in a fight and not felt some kind of excitement in it? Like even when it’s done, after you win, that’s exciting and that can be addicting in itself. And this is on another level, right?” He looked around the room for confirmation.

  But Quincy wanted to draw the discussion back to institutionalization. “Just a question,” he said, swivelling in his chair to speak to Ben again. “What do you consider ‘institutionalized’?” Then looking to Ben’s supporters: “What do you guys consider ‘institutionalized’?”

  “I mean, you can’t function outside,” said Javier. “When you step outside, you can’t function.”

  Quincy ignored him. “How long have you been in?” he asked, looking again at Ben in a manner that was challenging and unfriendly.

  “I’ve been in ’bout four years, right.”

  “Are you saying you’re institutionalized?” echoed Dread, always willing to gang up on Ben.

  “Hell yeah,” said Ben. “Because I’m getting up every time the same morning and—”

  “That’s just a set routine,” said Quincy, responding before Ben had even completed his sentence.

  “But mentally it bothers me,” said Ben. “I could say that, ‘Yo, I’m here and I’m only in this place right now for the time being.’ But just that routine that I go by, day by day. I’m institutionalized, bro. I’m not going to deny it. I am. Because if I go to the caf and don’t see my coffee in the mornin’ I’m probably like, ‘Yo, what the hell’s going on?’ I’m gonna freak out.”