Shakespeare Saved My Life

by Laura Bates

  When Bentley made the observation about Macbeth’s need for a partner in crime, the others, all serving time for murder convictions, agreed. It is easier to bear the burden of guilt, especially of such a heavy crime, my students said, with an accomplice.

  “I was never a good criminal by myself,” Newton once told me. “I don’t think anybody is.”

  From stealing ice cream to committing murder, Newton never acted alone. This was true from his earliest days. Like many kids do, Newton got involved in criminal activity at the urging of his buddies.

  CHAPTER 15

  Supermax Kid

  When did your criminal career begin?” I asked Newton when he told me that his criminal activities always involved peers.

  “Oh, man,” he replied, trying to recall. “I began troubles really early. I started stealing with a neighborhood kid, I would have to say around age eight. The first thing I remember stealing was money out of my mom’s purse. I went to Kmart and bought Teddy Ruxpin; it had just come out. It was a bear that talked, and I thought that was the coolest thing.”

  “The first thing you stole was a teddy bear?”

  “Yeah. Bought it with the money I stole. I can remember the first thing I stole from a store. It was one of them stores where you can buy little snacks and they had a freezer with ice cream in it. One of them had mentioned, one of my buddies, had to be one of the older ones—”

  “The idea came from someone else?”

  “Definitely from this guy’s suggesting, ‘He ain’t scared, he’ll do it,’ or something like that. I’m bent over like this with ice cream in the waistband. I ran out the store and down the street. I didn’t get away, though. He knew I stole it. I guess I got away without legal consequence, but I couldn’t go back in there. I thought that sucked.”

  “Your motivation was to impress the older kids?”

  “Definitely. ’Cause I remember him suggesting I wasn’t scared and how I felt with that, even though I was scared.”

  “When were you first arrested?”

  “Age ten. Stealing.”

  “What was the impact of the first arrest?”

  “I mean, it made the wrong impression. I had status now. I was like, I been to Juvenile: ‘Give me rank, yeah!’ People looked at me different on the streets, like, ‘Aw, that’s Dink, man, he just got out of Juvenile!’”

  Newton spent most of his childhood, from the ages of ten to seventeen, locked up in a variety of juvenile institutions.

  “It does the wrong thing for a kid,” he continued. “It boosts his ego on the streets. In school, too, it made ’em think you were tougher.”

  “Did you have the opportunity to be rehabilitated?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know. I mean, Juvenile is not like some school or something. It’s nothing. You just sit in this big room and serve your little time, watch TV. Well, the other kids did. I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They always put me in isolation.”

  “Isolation—in a juvenile facility?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me about it,” I asked. What he told me I found hard to believe—that is, until one day I actually saw it for myself.

  “It’s a dark cell. Man, it’s the weirdest thing! It’s a concrete room maybe five feet by five feet, if that, because I remember not being able to stretch out, and I was a small kid anyway. It’s probably about this big.” He reached out with both arms. “You could reach both walls. Solid steel door, pretty thick. There’s nothing in there, just a little bitty small mat on the floor. The mattress fit exactly end to end. It’s just a weird little getup, like a dog thing. It’s like where you would lay a dog down. Like: ‘Go to sleep!’ That kind of thing.”

  “‘Cabined, cribbed, confined’—like Macbeth says he feels. Or, maybe more like a coffin?”

  “Yeah, with a real tall high ceiling. There’s a light at the top, way up there. You couldn’t jump and touch it, might be as high as a basketball net. And they turn it off. When you’re in there it’s off all the time. And there’s a little space under the door, so you’d put your ear down to the door. But they’d be way far away; they wouldn’t be in the dorm area. And you’d be listening, just to hear ’em, just to not feel so alone, I guess. There’s probably only this much space under the door.”

  He held up his hand with an inch of space between his thumb and forefinger.

  “As a matter of fact,” he added, “there’s no ventilation in there. I swear. That is absolutely true.”

  “Were you placed in that dark cell each time you went to Juvenile?”

  “Yeah, that’s where you start at, you do a little while in there when you first come in. At least, I did.” He laughs. “Man, that was insane! How barbaric was that? That’s where everything comes out. That’s where you’re tore up and going through everything. You’re all by yourself, in the dark, crying. It was brutal, I think, for a kid. Man, it was brutal!”

  “How long are you there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe forty-eight hours.”

  “Were you ever let out?”

  “There’s a certain excitement about it: the air is different, everything is different. I don’t know how often it is, but they come and get you to pee.”

  “Like a dog.”

  “Exactly. Like a dog, exactly.”

  “Water?”

  “No, you can only get a drink when you pee.”

  “Were you there in summer?”

  “I’ve been all times of year.”

  “Was it hot?”

  “Yeah, stuffy. I remember the mattress being all sticky.”

  “Hot, no air, no water…”

  “You’re right,” he said. “You wouldn’t do that to a dog.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The Closet

  Hey, guess what?” This time when I arrived at Newton’s cell, I had some exciting news. “I’m going to Muncie! How cool is that?”

  “It’s real cool, man! What—what are you going to do there?” He sounded worried for a moment, then realized. “Must be going to Ball State, huh?”

  “Yep, for a conference. To talk about—well, to talk about this, actually.”

  “The program? Wow: full circle! It’s a small world, man.”

  I would find out just how small when a senior professor at the university approached me after my glowing report of Newton and his Shakespearean accomplishments to tell me that she recalled vividly the campus reaction to a murder of one of their students—the murder for which Newton was convicted.

  ***

  What other husband but my Allan would drive across the state to enter a closet? He had been supportive of, and involved in, my prison work all along. He attended some of the group sessions, he met Newton at his cell, he listened patiently each week to my reports of what I’d learned about life in solitary confinement. So when I said I wanted to find Newton’s juvenile supermax, he was on board. This was our second trip across Indiana to Muncie in two weeks. During the conference weekend, armed with Newton’s maps drawn from memory, we had located what we thought was the building—but couldn’t get in. The thrift shop now occupying the former detention center (which had previously been a Catholic school) had been closed. When we arrived during the second trip, it was open.

  We entered through the parking lot, as Newton said he did. We climbed up the short flight of stairs to a receiving area.

  “Name!” the officer would have said to the ten-year-old Newton.

  “May I help you?” the kindly gray-haired woman asked us.

  “We’d just like to, uh…look around,” I replied. What was I supposed to say: “I’m looking for the isolation cell where the county turned its abused children into hard-core killers”?

  The detailed accuracy of Newton’s pencil sketch, drawn from twenty-year-old memories, was impressive. Those events were indelibly stamped in his consciousness. Following his map, we entered the large, open auditorium that apparently served as the juveniles’ day room, with a
raised stage platform where the guards sat. On this day, instead of seats, the room was filled with rows upon rows of secondhand clothing: dresses, slacks, coats, hats. My husband started shopping for a leather belt, looking for a bargain.

  Nervously, I ventured into the room across the hall, the former classroom that served as the dormitory for the children. It looked like just another room filled with secondhand dishes, pots, and pans. I walked up and down the aisles, but there was no sign of Newton’s cell. I was beginning to feel disappointed. Maybe we had the wrong location; maybe we’d driven all this way for a thrift shop! I walked to the back of the room, turned a corner, and found it: the dark cell! Clearly, its original purpose had been as a storage closet, so there would have been no need for windows or ventilation. The thrift shop used it to store, ironically, used children’s toys. I found a beat-up little teddy bear, propped him up against the brick wall, and took his picture. He looked, I don’t know, scared.

  I stood outside of the cell, examining its proximity to the rest of the room. There was a wall of windows that might have provided a glimmer of light in the crack under the solid steel door. But during the day, this room would’ve been empty. Children and officers would’ve been in the dayroom across the hall—too far away to hear any cries from the child locked in the storage closet.

  Finally, I stepped inside, stretching out my arms to reach the walls on either side. I looked up and saw the remnants of a light fixture about as high as, yes, a basketball net. I looked down and saw the concrete pavement under the doorway scratched by what I imagined to be desperate little hands. It gave me a chill just looking at it, imagining the child who might’ve made those marks, imagining that it might’ve been Newton.

  “Hey, look!”

  My thoughts were interrupted by my husband entering the room, waving a brown leather belt in his hand. “Found what I was looking for.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Me too.”

  CHAPTER 17

  My Secret Life

  I never told my parents about my prison work, even though I think they would have approved. Helping others was one of the values I learned from them. But I kept it as my “secret life” to avoid burdening them with worries about my safety. Those kinds of stressors had a serious impact on my mother’s medical condition. After all of her wartime struggles, she was handed another burden later in life: she struggled for nearly twenty years with Parkinson’s disease. In her condition, emotional equilibrium was essential, so prison was not the only thing I kept from her and my father. They did not know whenever I was ill, did not know when I had surgery, did not even know when I got married. (No one did; Allan and I eloped.)

  Even if I didn’t share some of these significant events in my life with them, I was close to both of my parents. I called them every day, and Allan and I traveled two hundred miles to visit them every month until they both died. I tried to support them emotionally and financially. My mother suffered a stroke just weeks after I started working at Indiana State University, and my meager part-time salary went entirely to covering her medical expenses. As my workload and salary increased, so did the medical bills, which my sister and I shared. The stressors about reaching that tenured position were directly related to my need to be able to support my parents.

  As they aged, I was saddened to see how their world diminished. After experiencing several bad falls on the sidewalk, my mother stopped going for the neighborhood walks she used to enjoy. When I received my PhD, I couldn’t convince her to come to my graduation in a wheelchair. My father’s world revolved entirely around caring for her. When she died, he moved into a small condominium and spent the next twelve years in one lonely little room surrounded by his books in boxes that he didn’t even bother to unpack. The man who had once been moved by the view from the Alps now didn’t even open the curtains to look out of the window.

  “Everyone just puts themselves into so many prisons,” Newton had said, and it so aptly applied to my aging parents. I worried that it would apply to me as well.

  As an infant, I had nearly drowned in the bathtub, and all of my life, I avoided learning how to swim. As a youth, I sat on the shore when my friends swam at the beach during high school vacations. As an adult, I sat on the shore when Allan took our grandkids tubing behind a rental boat in the summer. Would I let childhood phobias become crippling paranoias? Literally or metaphorically, how long would I continue to miss out on my day at the beach because of my fear of boats?

  CHAPTER 18

  Tough Freedoms

  Before I started the program, I handed each prisoner a survey. To get to know the prisoners better, and to help determine which ones would be invited to join the program, I asked them to answer some questions about their educational background and prior experience with Shakespeare, if any.

  On his survey, Newton had written:

  The last grade that I completed was…well, I am not sure. Technically, the record should reflect that I completed the eighth grade. That is, however, a bit deceiving. I did not complete the curriculum of a class since grade five. At that point, I entered institution after institution and home after home. I do not recall spending even one month in any class since grade five. As I would leave an institution, they would just place me in a grade. So I never really graduated from grade school. I remember being in middle school and looking at the material like Homer Simpson: duh! I was out within the week.

  High school was the same way. By age fifteen, I spent the days just walking from one end of town to the other in order to pass the day and eating from large banquets of trash behind Kmart, and at night I would sleep under the overpass at the edge of town. Literally! To this day, the sound of a semitrailer takes me back to the interruption of sleep. I just smile, because memories of any sort are my only freedoms, and even tough “freedoms” beat captivity! That is pretty much the extent of my experience with conventional education. I came to prison at age seventeen. I never studied Shakespeare in school. He was just a one-named figure from history to me, like Moses or Hitler. I had no idea that he wrote.

  After just a few months, he had grown comfortable with the language. He likened it to solving math puzzles, something he enjoyed and was very good at.

  “If I say sooth, I must report they were as cannons overcharged.” I read the line spoken by the soldier describing Macbeth and Banquo’s actions in battle.

  “‘To tell the truth, it was a bit much,’” Newton translated.

  He was also engaging in some pretty sophisticated analysis, picking up on details overlooked by scholars or by traditional students who cannot afford to spend days scrutinizing a short, seemingly unimportant passage like this one. And Newton’s interpretation suggests that the passage contains a key to understanding Macbeth’s character and the changes that his military experience have brought.

  “See, they notice it,” he pointed out. “The others notice it. So even though Macbeth’s a killer, this is extreme behavior for him. He’s a soldier, but before he was just killing the enemy; now, he’s freakin’ disemboweling them. Before, he might not have been able to stomach the idea of killing the king, but now he’s okay with it. He sleeps fine with it.”

  “Nature versus nurture. That’s a common argument.”

  “Is that still an argument?” he asks. “I mean, don’t we know, really?”

  “Which one is it?”

  “Nurture, man!”

  Like Macbeth, Newton himself was shaped by his environment. Nurture was the dominant force, as became increasingly clear to me as he continued.

  ***

  “I’ll tell you how I lived,” said Newton. “By the time I’m a teenager, I’m just a bum. All I had was two pair of jeans and one was my girlfriend’s. I get drunk every day. I go round up five bucks and buy a bottle of Wild Irish Rose and a bottle of Thunderbird. And, aw man, that stuff’s like liquid crack! I’m drinking that every day, every day. I’m turning into a legitimate wino, and I’m still a kid. Then I started drinking whiskey, and it’s not even
popular among my age group in my neighborhood. You think it’s more for hillbilly guys, but I’m starting to drink whatever I can get, I don’t care. I robbed a liquor store one time, I never told you? My buddy got shot. I’m in this store, and I’m stealing the liquor—not the money, the liquor.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to take the money so you could buy more?”

  “Oh, it makes perfect sense, but no, none of that. I wasn’t thinking straight at that time.” He pointed to a line on his juvenile record. “Like, see this charge? Strong-arm robbery. Let me tell you what happened: I’m drinking forties”—that is, forty-ounce beers—“and I’ll dump the Jim Beam into that and drink it like that. I’m out here on Madison Street, where the kids cruise—they got their cars, sitting on their cars with their music—it’s the strip in Muncie. We don’t got no cars, we’re bums, so we walk back and forth up there.

  “This night, I was really blasted, really stupid drunk. I’m throwing my bottles into the street and it’s a busy street, you know, I’m crazy. And I’m a celebrity up on Madison, so I’m living my status up a little bit, you know, and this lady who I knew when I was a kid, well, a younger kid, she’s all excited like, ‘I know him, man!’ So I go over, start messing with her car, I’m looking through her CDs, and that’s all I remember. Now I’m blasted so it’s possible that it’s different. She calls the police and says that I took ’em from her and started stomping on them. That’s a Class A felony: strong-arm robbery. You take it physically, which usually entails you beating somebody, but I didn’t do anything like that. But hey, I must’ve done something wrong ’cause as soon as I leave Madison, I see the cop cars flying down and I take off. They start chasing me, I’m running, and I hit this little bitty fence, little low fence like what you have around a shrub, and I go flying, one of my shoes goes flying, I don’t know if I ever found my shoe. But there’s a bunch of cops there now, so I just lay there flat, on the wet grass, I remember the wet grass on my face, and I see the lights shining. But I get away. I creep into this dude’s house. Now I’m drinking with them. He’s going to get into this fight, and me, I tell the idiot, ‘Hell yeah, let’s go, I got your back!’ And as soon as we step outside, the cops swarm: ‘Larry, get over here!’”