by Ann Walmsley
Deborah told us that she had dined with Cesar Chavez, the farm worker who led the boycott of table grapes in 1968 in support of underpaid farm workers in California. Like the Joads, Chavez’s family lost their farm and moved to California in search of work during the Great Depression. We went on like that for a bit, trading information about social upheavals, industrial agriculture, the history of organized labour in the United States and the origins of the Dust Bowl. But then we got down to how distressing and heartbreaking the story was. Carol and Ruth confessed they had cried while reading it.
Like Ben, we agreed that the one uplifting message was Ma Joad’s philosophy of resilience and how it would help anyone, especially someone in prison. Carol found the passage and read it aloud. It was all about toughness born of persevering through hunger and illness and having the goal of just getting through the day, and it was narrated in Ma’s folksy Oklahoma vernacular.
“You don’t look back and you don’t look ahead,” summarized Carol. “You just do the day.”
When we’d talked ourselves out, we drifted out into the evening, where the smell of decaying maple leaves reminded us that winter was approaching. We lingered and gossiped, offered each other rides home, calling goodbye as we parted, laughing and chatting. It was a stark contrast to the prison book club, where the men left in a frantic dash not to be late for Count.
While we were enjoying our pear-and-apple crumble at Lillian-Rose’s, the lockdown and cell search was in full swing at Collins Bay. The guards searched Ben’s cell that day and he had no way of knowing if they had found and read his journal. “I’ll just clean up their muddy boot prints left on my chair and desk and organize back my books and keep on moving,” he wrote in his journal, echoing Ma Joad’s stoic message.
He didn’t elaborate on what a search entailed. But I phoned Vince, and he filled me in. It’s not just rifling through belongings. The first step, he said, is a body search.
I sensed he was holding something back. “You mean a strip search?”
“Yes.” He said the guards order you to remove your clothes, open your mouth and move your tongue around to show that nothing’s inside, then lift each foot to show that nothing is stuck to your soles. Finally they tell you to bend forward. Then you dress and sit in the common area while the guards comb your “house,” jail talk for cell. They check the mattresses and pillows for cuts, examine toiletries, shake out clothes, open and shake books and take pictures off the wall. They pull the refrigerators away from the walls and ensure that the sealing tape on the televisions hasn’t been tampered with. Until each inmate and cell is searched, prisoners remain in their cells twenty-four hours a day.
If the guards suspect that an inmate is concealing weapons or drugs in a body cavity, a doctor may perform a cavity search. It’s hard to imagine hiding weapons in an orifice, but Vince said: “They wrap it in cellophane and shove it up their ——.” He didn’t say the word.
I shuddered at the image, but knew the searches had to be done. Also, I knew that the purging of any weapons from 4 Block would be a big relief for Ben.
The Collins Bay Book Club finally reconvened on the last day of November under grey skies after a night of heavy rain. I met Carol for tea a block west of the prison. She had bought several packages of chocolate chip cookies in a clear plastic wrapper for the men. I told her that Graham had advised us to stop bringing in cookies, and she agreed that it was good advice for future meetings. At prison reception Carol fished them out of her grocery bag for the guard, who inspected them through the plastic, then ran them through the X-ray machine.
As we walked The Strip and turned left to leave the main building for the smaller one where the book club met, I was thinking again about the stabbings, the long walk between the buildings past unfamiliar inmates and the guards’ stab-proof vests. Now I knew why inmates taped magazines to their abdomens as body armor. I should have brought my back issues of The New Yorker. It was my ninth month in the prison book club and I was starting to regress into the post-traumatic anxiety that had followed my mugging in Hampstead.
Carol and I stepped through the doorway onto the narrow sidewalk. I held my satchel close to my body. The high walls flanking the prison walkway reared up like the brick garden walls lining our street in Hampstead. What would happen to the bag, with its precious tape recorder and notebooks, if I were attacked? I tried to calculate whether I’d be able to pitch it over the chain-link fence. My mind shot back to throwing the yellow purse. That first summer in England, I’d bought a bright yellow purse at a little shop in Highgate to replace my old torn brown one. It wasn’t expensive, but it contained our family’s passports and other identity cards, as well as the house keys. When the muggers came at me that day, some autonomic response kicked in: “While you are running, throw your purse over the garden wall.”
It didn’t occur to me that throwing the purse might provoke them. It was an involuntary reflex born of years of recurring dreams about lost purses and luggage. But that was why, when one of my assailants was choking me and the other was trying to grab my legs, they found only my cellphone and the car key. When I regained consciousness and stumbled into the garden yelling for my husband in an unrecognizable voice, I saw the purse on the pebbled walkway that led to the front door. Only then did I fully realize I had thrown it. For a moment, amid the shock of the assault and the joy of being alive, I felt heroic. I had saved our identities. I had saved the family.
On Collins Bay’s narrow sidewalk, three unfamiliar inmates walked toward Carol and me. One was bald and heavy with tattoos climbing up his thick neck and a stoned look in his eyes. I couldn’t look at the others. I just stared ahead, and then we were past them and at the building. Two guards waved to us from their post.
In the meeting room, some of the men had already arrived for book club. These were my inmates and I felt safer among them. They poured cups of coffee from the drip machine in the corner and came to sit in the circle. I watched the cookies disappear in four-biscuit handfuls. No one volunteered any comment about the stabbings or the lockdown and I didn’t feel like asking about it. Instead, I made small talk about how the soil in parts of Oklahoma really is red. I explained to them that I’d lived next door in Texas for four years.
Carol started off the meeting with praise and encouragement for tackling The Grapes of Wrath. She pronounced it “wroth,” the word familiar to her from the King James version of the Old Testament. “It was a tough read. If you finished it, I’m impressed. If you sampled it enough to get a sense of it, I’m also impressed.” Four of the fifteen said they’d finished the book. Then unrelated chatter erupted among a few of the inmates in the corner but Carol put an end to it quickly. “You with us?” she asked, staring at them. The reaction was instantaneous. They fell silent.
Order restored, Carol reminded them that this was the first month her women’s book club had read the same book as the men and that she would read aloud comments from Evelyn, Lillian and the others to start the conversation.
Gaston, his baseball cap on backward over his brush cut, interrupted: “Can I join your book club when I get out?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Carol, forgetting briefly that Lillian-Rose would have freaked out. Carol had no gene for risk aversion. But seeing my raised eyebrows, she corrected herself and said her preferred plan was to set up book clubs for members when they left prison.
I could see the men were curious about the women in our Toronto book group. Ben, his lanky form slung over one of the chairs, ran his hand through his dreads and asked whether “at least” some of them were young.
“Well, Betty’s this young twenty-year-old redhead,” Carol said coyly, shaving forty years off her real age. She read aloud Betty’s comment, which described in anguished terms how trapped the characters were.
“I think she is very intelligent,” said Dread, his dreads stylishly twisted with gold metallic yarn and partly stuffed into an overstretched black tam.
We were at risk o
f the men getting distracted by Carol’s description of Betty, but then Gaston got to the meat of Betty’s observation by disagreeing with her comment. “I don’t think at any point the people in the book actually thought it was hopeless,” he said. “’Cause they were continually going forward.” He said it was evident in how they found a truck and fixed it up for the long drive west to California. The other guys nodded.
Ben agreed. More than anyone in the book club, he had internalized the Joads’ determination. “Keep on movin’ when life gets a bit hard,” he said. He was resigned to a rudimentary determinism and said he wasn’t complaining anymore about being in prison. “I think our life is painted out. In that day you just have to live for that day.” I was amazed at how profoundly it had affected him.
The angle that really caught the men’s attention, though, was Tom’s decision to flout his parole restrictions in order to go west with his family. He wasn’t allowed to leave Oklahoma. Carol asked if he did the right thing.
“Family comes first,” said Deshane.
I looked over at Deshane. He was wearing basketball shoes so shiny they seemed plasticized. By then, he had shared with me that he had OCD and was doing time for manslaughter, aggravated assault and weapons charges. A sort of Cyrano de Bergerac at the prison, he fashioned himself a crafter of what he called “lovey-dovey” poetry for other inmates. “Guys who are not really good at romancing their girls with nice words, I just write something for them and they send it, acting like it’s them, right,” he had told me proudly. He didn’t charge for the service.
Dread disagreed with Deshane, saying that crossing the state line would make Tom a wanted man and would bring heat down on his family. The men told us about the ROPE (Repeat Offender Parole Enforcement) squads in Canada that they said shadow parolees, especially upon first release, ready to haul them in at any sign of a parole violation. “Big jacked-up dudes,” was how Peter described them, his face strangely red. It agitated the guys just to think of these posses. Dread and a few of the others argued about the differences between parole conditions today and in the 1930s. Most decided it was easier in the ’30s. For a while they didn’t need Carol to prompt discussion.
Then Ben wanted to talk about the humanity and goodness of the Joads. He pointed to the final scene of the book where the Joads’ daughter Rose of Sharon, at Ma’s prompting, suckles a starving man who can no longer take in solid food. She had just given birth to a stillborn child and her breasts were full of milk.
The room fell strangely quiet as the men considered the image of a woman breastfeeding a man. Their eyes grew wide. I figured some were just imagining breasts.
“Wow,” said one man.
“She fulfilled her purpose,” said Ben, looking around the room with his gentle downward-sloping eyes.
“No, no, no, hold on, hold on,” said Dread, who, as usual, challenged Ben. “It wasn’t even her idea, and it’s not like she was a pervert. The guy was so sick he couldn’t hold down anything, so the only form of nutriment he could take was baby’s milk.”
Carol pointed out to Ben and Dread that they were actually agreeing with each other, though Dread didn’t look convinced.
Ben’s appreciation of goodness and humanity made me hopeful for him. I had seen it in his journal before the meeting began. He had broken into a shy grin when I opened it, as though he had a secret. There was a card wedged into the crease. His journal page that day described how he had found a birthday card inside one of the books that our women’s book club had donated to the Collins Bay Book Club the previous summer. He saw that the card was addressed to someone named Ann and contained a warm message from a friend. He assumed the “Ann” was me and he wrote in his journal:
[I] started thinking about friends and what real friends are: And that is someone that has no bad judgment about you, you are comfortable around them and speak, act and express yourself freely, then I said Ann is a “great friend.” Thank you.
I let down my guard and we both laughed. It was just what I needed to feel safe inside. And I was glad that he felt encouraged by my friendship.
I came out of my reverie at that point to hear Carol telling the men that she and Ruth had cared so much about the characters, they had cried while reading the book.
“But it’s not even a true story,” said Dread.
“It’s touching, but I wouldn’t cry,” said Ben.
“You cried,” Dread goaded Ben. “You told me you did.” The room erupted in laughter and loud talk.
The men wrote down comments for the women to consider. Peter was the only one to dwell on Steinbeck’s left-wing politics. “I believe the book questioned the morals of a capitalist society and demonstrated how ruthless men in power are willing to be towards the masses,” he wrote carefully in pencil. By that month, Peter had joined his buddy Gaston’s classics reading project and Carol ordered a second set of the Professor Duffy–prescribed books for him.
Before we broke up, Gaston asked, “I have one question in regards to your women book club members. You say they’re all in their twenties, but they seem to have older-generation names. I’m not sure you’re being 100 percent honest.” Carol and I burst into laughter. Busted.
I was once again sleeping over at Carol’s island house so I could return to Collins Bay the following day to chat with Deshane about his poems. Poetry is a great vessel for anger, as Steinbeck had demonstrated in the book, and I wondered whether Deshane’s “lovey-dovey” poems would have a dark underside. By the time Carol and I arrived at the house, the setting sun appeared as a glowing orange slit of light along the horizon beneath a lid of black cloud that covered the entire sky. It felt like the eye of the world closing.
At bedtime, Carol turned the thermostat down to fifteen degrees Celsius while I watched with dismay. This was probably a sleep strategy because, on previous visits, I had heard her up at night. I found an extra blanket made from the still-musky wool of the sheep from Topsy Farm next door and crawled under the covers with one of Bryan’s many books on Churchill.
Long before the sun rose, I awoke shivering. As I walked to the car to catch the pre-dawn ferry, a coyote yipped in the field sometimes occupied by the Topsy sheep and their look-alike protectors, the white Pyrenees dogs. The sun rose as an orange wildfire, so that the hay wagons, bales, tractor and barn on the eastern rise appeared as black silhouettes. It had been a wet year on Amherst Island— nothing Dust Bowl about it.
At Collins Bay, two inmates joined the chaplain and me as we walked down The Strip: Joao, the blue-eyed boyish chapel cleaner and occasional book club member, and another guy, who wasn’t in the book club. When we got to the narrow sidewalk, the men fell in behind us. The other guy was bigger than Joao and began insulting him, signing off with a smack to the back of his head as he split off to the workshop. Joao said nothing and the chaplain hadn’t noticed, but it was my first concrete glimpse of bullying in prison, and evidence that the walkway could be lawless territory.
Deshane was waiting for me. As he handed me his journal, a sheaf of drafts fell out and he rushed to stuff them back in because he said he didn’t want me to see rough work. One draft was a “Godly” poem for the chaplain, he said, but he let me hear two lines, which I admired. The couplet tapped into Delta blues and gospel, but its rhythm was all rap. He ended it with an admonition to let go of the past and let the devil keep “bouncin’.”
I opened the journal. The first poem was called “Only You.” He read it aloud to me, again in a rap rhythm, speeding over some words and landing hard at the end of each line, imagining that if love was “a crime,” he would be doing “time” like C-Murder.
“C-Murder?”
“Yeah. The dude that got life. Got a life sentence.”
Deshane was surprised that I didn’t recognize the dude. C-Murder was an American rapper, convicted for fatally shooting a sixteen-year-old fan at a Louisiana nightclub. Unbelievably, the musician had managed to release an album while serving life at Angola, Louisiana’s maximu
m-security prison farm, famed for its inmate rodeo. A life sentence was not a metaphor that most poets would employ to describe loving someone forever. I wondered how this image might strike the girlfriend receiving the poem.
“I didn’t know I had it in me till I got arrested,” Deshane said, referring to his writing ability.
I offered to get him some books of poetry, but he was quick to tell me that he wasn’t interested in “old school” stuff. “I like poems that are more affectionate, about feelings, about pain,” he said. “Do you ever go to Hallmark and they have a card for each thought? That’s what I like.”
It seemed safe to ask a guy who liked Hallmark cards more about the crime he had committed.
“I was defending myself—I got stabbed,” he said. “But they said I used too much force. It was a handgun. The person got shot.” Tom Joad said virtually the same thing. Deshane said that he had been at Collins Bay for five years and in lower security for a year, “but then they sent me back here, over some, say, ‘security incidents’—and a butter knife was sharpened.”
A butter knife was sharpened. The person got shot. Always the passive voice. A number of the men used it when describing their crimes, as though they had been mere agents of some force beyond their control. I liked them better when they owned up to what they had done and expressed regret. But I understood the instinct to self-protect.
From the corridor, the chaplain called, “Count.” I quickly asked Deshane to write a poem about The Grapes of Wrath for next time and read him a sentence from the novel to show him how Steinbeck used rhythm to evoke powerful feelings. The line talked about tear-gassing the hungry rioters in California. When I looked up, there was an odd expression on Deshane’s face. It was later that I found out that a police canine unit had captured him by tear-gassing him out of his hiding spot under a porch, after a police dog and pepper spray failed to dislodge him.