I leaned over his shoulder as Bolton clicked through the photos on the camera’s memory card of evidence. Finally, he stopped on one photo and handed me the camera.
Based on the angle of the photo, my best guess was that Doyle had tattooed the side of his calf. Correction: Doyle had tattooed most of his calf. The tattoo was huge, at least by the standards of a homemade ink job done on the sly. It appeared to be a sun of some kind.
A very red, very painful, very angry-looking sun that burned bright against his pale skin
“That idiot,” I said.
Bolton burst out laughing.
The following week, Doyle was back in Segregation. His attempt at homegrown ink had earned him an additional length of stay in Segregation. By the time I got to the third cell, Doyle was already waiting for me. “Hey, Ms. G.”
“Doyle.” I paused a beat, then: “What the ever-loving hell were you thinking?”
He grinned and ducked his head, his white blonde hair falling into his eyes. “Y’know, Ms. G., I knew there was a reason we didn’t use ink pens back in the house.”
“Uh, yeah. You think?” I gave a quick shake of my head. “Can I get you any books?”
He tilted his head to one side, thinking. “Can you bring me some sexy books? You know, sexy books?”
Ah, yes. The “sexy” books. A frequent request. “Sure thing, Doyle.”
“Thanks, Ms. G.!”
Nora Roberts was about as steamy as our books got, but it didn’t stop inmates from reading them for, ahem, personal reasons. Romance novels were a bustling industry in prison and while the really descriptive books weren’t allowed in, some of the softer romances were.
Whatever. If they wanted to jack off to a romance novel within the privacy of their cell or bunk and away from the library, I wasn’t going to stop them. I became a librarian for many reasons, the main one being giving people access to the books and information they want. If that meant sometimes peddling the prison equivalent of porn, then so be it. Despite my own personal interactions with masturbating inmates, I don’t really have a problem with men jerking off in prison. Just don’t jerk off at me.
Fall had come again, the flourish of reds and golds lining my drive to work every day. I’d officially been at the prison for twenty months. In that time, the library had checked out thousands of books, and I’d cataloged just as many. I’d seen inmates come and go, and come again.
I was now headed back down to Columbus for the next meeting of the prison librarian minds.
This time I was allowed to drive myself in my own car. No big behemoth of a white van that required waking up an hour earlier than normal.
“We won’t reimburse you for gas,” Highland warned me when I first asked if I could be allowed to take my own vehicle down and back and skip the extra step of coming to the prison first.
“That’s fine!” I exclaimed. Between sacrificing the extra hour, or paying for my own gas, I was more than happy to pay for my own gas.
This time around, I felt more comfortable finding my way to Columbus and selecting a seat among the other librarians. I’d been at work for almost two years, I understood how things functioned and operated. I sat in the large meeting room, listened to Grace discuss recent policy changes and once again remind us about the importance of turning our monthly stats report in on time. At the end, I got back in my car and drove home. The whole day felt routine. Boring, even. Sitting in a room listening to someone else drone on for eight hours made me realize how much I missed the constant flow of men in and out of the library, and more than once during the day my mind drifted, wondering how things were going back at the prison.
The following week, Dr. Harald pulled me into his office. “I want you to give a presentation,” he said “about your recent visit down to Columbus. Tell us all about what’s been going on with the library and all of that.”
“Oh, okay, sure.”
“We’ll have Highland and some of the other Admin staff sit in. Oh, and select two inmate workers to join us. You know, one black and one white, so it’s balanced.”
Internally, I cringed. I understood the point he was making but it just felt like tokenism to express it in such, well, black-and-white terms.
“Sure thing.”
That afternoon, I pulled Lincoln and Webb aside. “Would you guys be interested in sitting in on a meeting about library services next week? It’ll be up in Admin, and you’ll be excused from count.”
Lincoln and Webb shared a glance. Whatever passed between them was agreed upon by both, because they each in turn looked at me and nodded. “Sure, Ms. G.”
The day of the meeting, Lincoln was on duty, but Webb wasn’t. Lincoln hung around while the library was closing and while we were waiting for Webb, I wrote up passes for them to have when we arrived at Administration, showing they had permission from a staff member (me) to be up there.
After the library was closed and Webb had arrived, they followed me up the pathway to Administration. When we walked through the door of Admin, we were stopped by the correctional officer.
“Did you let their houses know?” the officer asked, reading the slips of paper that Webb and Lincoln had handed him.
“Uhhhh. . .” in his instructions for the day, for getting Webb and Lincoln permission to be up here, Dr. Harald had not mentioned anything about needing to call their houses. Not for the first time, I was frustrated and flustered by the lack of information provided by my supervisor.
“What are they here for?” he asked.
“The library advisory meeting,” I said.
He continued to look back and forth between the permission slips, as if undecided on whether or not to allow me back there with the two men standing behind me. Captain Freeman poked his head out of his office.
The officer conferred with him, finally Freeman waved us through. “Just call the houses next time so they know their count number will be off.”
I nodded, “No, I get it. Dr. Harald didn’t—”
Freeman nodded. “It’s okay. Go on back.”
I turned to Webb and Lincoln and gestured for them to follow me.
Highland and Dr. Harald were already seated in the room, and we were soon joined by Stephanie, along with two of the women who worked up in Admin, Driver and Madison. Webb and Lincoln took their seats around the table.
“Well,” I said, calling the meeting to order. “I can start with the cataloging project, which is going well. I’ve made a good dent in the books, although there is a long way to go. But I think once the books are all in the system, and the inmates are also in and can be checked out by their ID number, the library will become a lot more efficient.”
Honestly, I don’t know if anyone was even really that interested in listening to me talk about the software I was, for lack of a better word, obsessed with. Since getting it set up a few months ago, I had been breezing past all of my cataloging quotas for the day. Granted, they were self-imposed quotas, but still.
Of course, during this process I had discovered just how disorganized the library really was. So many nonfiction books had been classified as fiction and vice versa. It was frustrating, but explained why I had a hard time finding books I knew we owned.
After I went through the recent stats, average number of books checked out each month, average number of visitors, and that sort of thing, the team turned to Webb and Lincoln.
“What do you think about the library?” Driver asked.
Webb and Lincoln confirmed what I already knew: the library was a favorite location among all of the inmates at the prison. It was one of the few places where they felt they were treated like adults and could just be, without constantly being reminded they were in prison.
If nothing else, my takeaway from the meeting was that I had done good with the little library I was given.
What I left out of my presentation, the key piece of information I was still keeping to myself, was that I was starting to plan my escape.
It was little things,
adding up over the course of twenty months. The dread that came every morning when I woke up and realized I had to go back to the prison. The oppressive feeling that came with a job that required me to sacrifice two major pillars of librarianship: patron privacy and access to information.
I loved working with the men I got to see every single day. I loved helping them find books and discover new authors. They were funny men, who kept me entertained with their banter and I was going to miss that.
But I was tired and burned out from the environment. It was exhausting, mentally and emotionally, to work in a prison every day. Correctional officers get into it understanding what they were signing up for. As a librarian, I didn’t, and while I was grateful for the opportunity I had been given, this was not a long-term career for me.
Stephanie was the only one who knew I was applying for jobs, the only one I trusted to not tell anyone. Some of the worst gossips were among the staff and I didn’t want to give them any ammunition prior to my landing a new position.
The day before my twenty-ninth birthday, I was offered a job at a local career college. I would be their new librarian, overseeing a library that focused on the academic needs of the students. The schedule was four ten-hour days, Monday through Thursday. Not only did I no longer have to work Saturdays, but I’d have Fridays off, too.
I celebrated both the new job and another year around the sun by sitting in a chair and having a scruffy man permanently inject ink into my inner right wrist. Unlike Doyle, I had the advantage of having access to licensed tattoo artists. The words—defy gravity—were a call back to the musical Wicked, based on the book by Gregory Maguire, about the Wicked Witch of the West.
Twenty months ago, I had started my journey as a prison librarian feeling like Dorothy Gale, lost and alone in an unknown and unfamiliar world. But now, sitting in the chair in the tattoo studio, the sound of the gun buzzing in my ears, I knew it was time to grab my broom and soar.
This jailbird was ready to fly the coop.
“Is it true, Ms. G.?” Woodson asked a few days after I’d put in my notice, eyes forlorn. “Are you leaving us?”
Word had gotten around.
“It’s true,” I said. “I found a new job at a college.”
He looked thoughtful. “Before you go . . . would you be willing to write me a letter of recommendation? When I get out, I want to try and find a job at the library and I thought if I had a letter from you . . .”
“Of course!” I said. “I think that’s a great idea.”
Woodson beamed, satisfied. He took the stack of books sitting on the edge of the circulation desk and headed into the book shelves to put them away.
I glanced at the calendar. Seven sleeps left.
My last day of work, I woke up without a voice.
I don’t know what happened, I hadn’t done anything over the past few days to strain it, but I couldn’t talk. If I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t be effective at my job. So much of what I did on a daily basis included instructing inmates. Tuck in your shirt. Sign in. Remove your hat. Not only could I not do my job, because I didn’t have a voice, I couldn’t even call in and explain the situation to Dr. Harald or Highland.
The first shift was a struggle, my voice low and raspy. I did a lot of gesturing with my hands or writing things out on a piece of paper that I would flash at the inmate. Things like Tuck in your shirt. Sign in. Remove your hat. Ms. G might not be able to talk and it might be her last day, but the rules of the library were still going to be enforced.
During the break at count, I went into Dr. Harald’s office and asked if I could finish my last shift early. I felt bad, with Thanksgiving around the corner, I’d already given a shortened notice period and not a full two weeks. But while at the beginning of the day I could kind of speak, by the end of the shift I was completely voiceless.
Dr. Harald nodded and stood up. He put out his hand, which I shook, as he thanked me for a job well done.
I gathered my belongings and went around the department, saying my good-byes and wishing everyone well. After I’d seen everyone I needed to see, I made my way out the door and started up the long walk up to the entryway.
The yard was quiet, the inmates and officers back at the house for count. I walked quickly, the air cold with winter on the horizon. When I got up to the entry, I pulled my keys and chits out of my pocket and dropped them into the drawer. Next went the panic button. Finally, I unclipped my badge and dropped it in beside the other items.
“It’s my last day,” I struggled to say into the voice box. “I’m all done.”
The shaded head on the other side of the window silently nodded in response.
I took a step back and waited for the familiar buzzer.
With a deep breath, I pulled open the heavy door and walked through the gate for the last time.
Epilogue
Out of the corner of my eye, a flash of familiarity breezes past the window in my door.
I’ve been at my new position for several months, this time as the sole librarian at a career college also on the west side of Cleveland. I had finally made it to academia. No, it wasn’t as flashy a position as one at Case Western Reserve University or any of the other halls of learning in the area, but it would do for now. The college’s location of North Olmsted, as compared to Grafton, also had the benefit of being surrounded by a shopping mall and restaurants. Lunch breaks were spent running errands and eating way too much Chipotle (I could walk there), and no longer was I chained to my desk and required to call for someone to watch the library when I just needed to go use the restroom.
The habits of prison had been so ingrained that after I’d been there for a week or so, my manager, the campus president, came to me and said, “You know you’re allowed to get up and leave and walk around, right?”
It seems even employees can become institutionalized after a while.
The library in the school was small, really not that much different in size from the prison library, but it was open and airy. The entire back wall was lined with windows, bringing in a day’s worth of natural light. Tables and chairs crowded the blue carpet, a small selection of dark wood bookshelves pressed to the wall.
That was another remarkable difference: the majority of the library’s collection could be found online and students were encouraged to do their research through the digital collection, not the physical collection. A row of computers lined the wall, free for the students to use whenever they wanted.
My desk sat at the front of the room, so no longer was I crushed into the back corner. Granted, this time the windows were clear on the other side of the room but the door had a small window, like a porthole into the hallway. A window through which I just saw someone I thought looked familiar. But there was no way, right? I mean, what were the chances that—
The door popped open. “Ms. G.!”
Welp. That answers that question.
“I thought that was you,” he exclaimed, grinning from ear to ear.
“It’s me!” I was stalling for time because while I recognized his face and distinctly remembered him from the dog program, I could not, for the life of me, remember his name. “So, you go to school here now?”
Bashful, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and nodded. “Yup, yup. I’m doing the computer science program.” When he looked back up at me he was beaming.
“That’s great!” I said, and it was. Gainful employment was a struggle for former inmates, their guilty conviction a black mark against them on applications. The economy was still struggling and jobs were scarce. While it was hard for formerly incarcerated individuals before the Great Recession, it was even more difficult now. When a hiring manager was presented with more applications and resumes then he knew what to do with and only one job to fill, why would he risk it on a man who had been in prison, when there were hundreds of other qualified candidates without that on their background history?
Education was the only other option for a man who didn’t w
ant to make the same mistakes and end up back behind bars. But that came with its own challenges, trying to pay for it being one. Reliable transportation could also be an issue and after a while, school just became another obstacle that suddenly wasn’t worth the energy and time.
After that one visit, I never saw him again. I never even relearned his name. I don’t know what happened to him and could only hope he had found another alternative means of survival.
In February 2016, after my maternal grandmother died, my parents, sister, and I traveled to Houston to clean out her room at the nursing facility that had been her home for the past year or so. Those belongings that remained back at the house she had shared with my late grandfather had been divided up among family members or donated to Goodwill when she first went into the home, all of us knowing she wouldn’t be returning to the house. Here, she kept a few mementos in her room, mostly photographs of her grandchildren spread out across her dresser so she was better able to see us from her hospital bed.
While going through her bedside table I came across a box of older keepsakes including her wedding album and photos from her childhood. Black-and-white vignettes of a little girl and a blushing bride.
Among the photos were newspaper clippings, one dating back to the Tuesday, October 26, 1948 edition of The North Adams Massachusetts Transcript. It was an obituary for a Mrs. Andrew N. Thorington—ah, yes, my great-great-grandmother on my mother’s father’s side reduced to her marital status even in death. Growing up, I had known about Andrew, a Civil War soldier. Through my own personal deep dive into my ancestry over the years, I knew that he had been twenty years older than his wife, Clara L. Cooley, when they had married. This was her obituary.
As my parents and aunt and uncle went through the drawers, I sat on the edge of the now empty bed and read through the obituary. Most of what I already knew about Clara had been pulled years ago when I first fell down the rabbit hole of Ancestry.com. Hours were spent following her trail: she had been a member of the Daughters of Revolution and through her applications I had traced my own history back to New England in the late 1600s. Clara had been an amateur genealogist, which is close to being a librarian, and through her I have four ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War, in addition to her late Civil War veteran husband.
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