Shakespeare Saved My Life

by Laura Bates

  When I was in training with Father Bob, he never took me to B-East. It took me months of working in the SHU before I felt ready to venture onto those ranges. I did try to talk with a few of the inmates on B-East, but communication was all but impossible through those plexiglass partitions, and the inmates were too unfocused to comprehend, or to care about, anything Shakespearean.

  “Did you ever see any human beings?” I asked Newton about his time in B-East.

  “You see a lot of nurses, passing out meds all the time. And what’s worse, you see a lot of extractions. That’s where the strap-down beds were.”

  Strap-down beds were used to subdue unruly prisoners after a cell extraction; their hands and feet were bound to the bed with leather straps. The strap-down bed was located in cell 3. He was upstairs in 11, right above it.

  “It was so infuriating! When you’re bitter, it gives you something to attach that to. So there was no escape from that for me during that period: everywhere you turn it’s all part of your misery.”

  In such relentless misery, it was easy to understand why prisoners did desperate things to try to escape their condition.

  “When you’re at the bottom, and there’s no relief from the torment, you really feel trapped. I like to use the analogy that you’re way out in the middle of the ocean. You’re scared, panicking, desperate to do anything. You try swimming in one direction, you try another direction. You’re just desperate; that’s why you do desperate things and you overlook that it’s gonna make it worse. You see the potential for land, not thinking that it’s more sharks over there.”

  Again, the analogy seemed apt.

  “But, man!” he said again, shaking his head at the thought. “That had to be the most miserable time in my life!”

  “And that was just before—”

  “That’s right,” he said, finishing my sentence. “Just before Shakespeare.”

  CHAPTER 38

  This Prison Don’t Matter

  When the SHU group got back together again after the cancelled session the previous week, even Jones was allowed to participate. Newton led a discussion of Hamlet’s observation that, to those who see it that way, all the world is a prison.

  HAMLET: What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?

  GUILDENSTERN: Prison, my lord!

  HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.

  ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one.

  HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.

  ROSENCRANTZ: We think not so, my lord.

  HAMLET: Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.

  Naturally, the group related to Hamlet’s feeling of imprisonment. It inspired some of them to complain about their conditions, others to discuss their attempts to get out: the appeals they have filed, the DNA evidence or the new witness that will exonerate them for sure.

  “This prison don’t matter,” Newton countered. “It’s not that you’re in prison. I’m sure it doesn’t help matters, but a lot of the guys here were in prison before they came here and they’ll still be in prison when they leave here.”

  Once again, Newton threw out an idea that the group had not grappled with before. And it was an important concept for them.

  “That’s one of the problems I think a lot of people have,” he continued. “They associate their misery to the fact that they’re in prison, and it’s not that. I think a lot of my misery was me hating me, and hating me made me hate everyone else. I felt like such a punk, I felt so weak. I really was a coward. I never stood up for myself. I mean, I stood up for myself as we associate standing up for yourself—fighting and violence. But that’s not standing up for yourself. I mean standing up for myself like thinking for myself. Now, I feel more okay with myself. I’m feeling stronger in my abilities every day, and the world just opens up. You really can do anything, you can shape your life any way you want it to be. Because prison isn’t the great prison. Prison is being entrapped by those self-destructive ways of thinking.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Meeting of the Minds

  For two years now, I had seen that Newton’s insights into prison and prisoners were of great value to the prison population. I started feeling that his insights into Shakespeare could be of value to the academic world as well. I presented several professional papers on our work at national and international conferences. Some of these papers were published in collected volumes on Shakespeare studies. I was starting to earn an international reputation among Shakespeare scholars for this unusual and groundbreaking work. I was pleased that this would help me professionally, of course, but I was also pleased that it would provide a voice for the voiceless prisoners who motivated my work from the beginning.

  I decided to share this work with my PhD dissertation director, Professor David Bevington. I considered him not only a great scholar, but also a great human being. He had traveled to a number of prisons in Chicago and Indiana to observe my work with Shakespeare and inmates, and he conducted guest lectures for my incarcerated students in the Indiana State University Correctional Education Program. When I presented him with the ultimate invitation—to travel three hundred miles to meet with a lifer in supermax—of course, he accepted.

  Newton’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare was becoming contagious throughout the prison population. “You can catch Shakespeare like a bad bug,” one prisoner told me, “and you just can’t shake it.” We received permission from the prison administration to begin circulating a weekly Shakespeare Newsletter, introducing more than two thousand maximum- security prisoners to the plays of Shakespeare. Each week, Newton read a play and wrote an introduction in his inimitable style: “Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!” began his Macbeth introduction. “To the moon, Alice!” was the opening of his Taming of the Shrew introduction. “Boy meets girl” described the basic plot of Othello. In each case, the uneducated incarcerated reader was not intimidated by the idea of looking into Shakespeare. On the contrary, Newton put the reader at ease—and then always threw out those curveballs: his challenging, life-altering questions.

  And now here he was, sitting next to one of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars, about to engage in a unique meeting of the minds. He was bouncing his right leg nervously, and sweat was visibly accumulating on his brow—the nervousness undoubtedly enhanced by the fact that this conversation was being observed by the prison superintendent, the staff videographer, his Shakespeare professor and her husband, and Amy Scott-Douglass, an author of a book on studying Shakespeare in prison. Surrounded by these six people in this cramped space, he had to somehow focus his thoughts on the plays of Shakespeare. Furthermore, we had caught him off guard; he did not know that we were coming.

  “Did Shakespeare write King John after experiencing the death of a child of his own?” That was Newton’s opening question. “Because the grieving over the death of Arthur just seems so real, man.”

  Sitting at opposite ends of the little room, Amy and I exchanged glances and smiled. Newton had just opened with a perceptive insight into one of Shakespeare’s most obscure plays. He was already focused, and from the way he addressed Professor Bevington as “man,” I knew that he was on a roll. I was equally impressed with Bevington, who seemed perfectly at ease with this convicted killer sitting beside him, as they leaned close to each other to look at the Shakespeare book together. Over the next hour, their conversation bounced freely through twelve different plays: King John, Hamlet, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Henry the Fourth, Henry the Fifth, Henry the Sixth, Richard the Second, Richard the Third, Othello, Taming of the Shrew, and, of course, Macbeth.

  “I felt like I could relate to Macbeth,” said Newton, “and I never exonerated him because of the influence of the witches. I mean, we all have influences.”

  Bevington nodded in agreement.

  “But Julius Caesar has one
my favorite freakin’ quotes,” he continued, quoting from memory: ‘So every bondman in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.’ To me, that’s empowering, that we can free ourselves at any time—psychologically, I mean.”

  With his dog-eared and annotated copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare in front him, Newton was able to flip through the two thousand pages and find a particular quote he needed instantly, without even a pause in the conversation.

  “I’m sorry, man,” he interrupted the professor at one point, “but I just love this! I think it’s the bottom line with bad deeds: it always takes more bad deeds to protect the first. And I’ve noticed that’s a theme in a number of plays.” He flipped through the book as he continued, “I don’t think that’s a common insight. I think it’s awesome that Shakespeare had that insight.” He found the quote while talking.

  “‘There is no sure foundation set on blood, no certain life achieved by others’ death,’” he read from King John, act 4, scene 2. Then he slapped the book and added, “Exactly, exactly! That’s our life in here, man!”

  The lively dialogue continued until, eventually, two officers arrived at the door. The superintendent nodded. As the officers began to cuff and shackle Newton, he dutifully turned and offered his hands behind his back—but he was still talking Shakespeare.

  “I think Henry the Fifth is my favorite play,” he said as they began to walk him out. “What a guy! I really want to be like him: strong, confident…honorable.”

  Professor Bevington got up from the table to make room for the officers. As Newton was being cuffed, he shook his head in disbelief at the conversation that had just taken place.

  “Amazing,” he said to me. I nodded. I knew it was unlike any Shakespearean dialogue he’d ever had at the university.

  Newton thanked the professor for his time before being escorted out of the room. As we watched him disappear down the long corridor, walking on a leash between two officers and clutching his Shakespeare book with his hands cuffed behind his back, Professor Bevington turned to me and repeated, “He’s truly amazing.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Dr. Newton

  Soon after his meeting with Professor Bevington, Newton told me that he wanted to enroll in college classes when he was released into the general prison population. Furthermore, and despite the fact that he had not been in school since the fifth grade, he announced with a big grin: “I want to be the first prisoner in the state of Indiana to earn a PhD while incarcerated!”

  That evening, I emailed Bevington the exciting news, and when I saw Newton the next week, I showed him the response that I received.

  “I’m pleased indeed to hear about Newton,” wrote Bevington. “I support the idea of his working toward the PhD. I do believe in him.”

  Newton was beaming.

  “How about that?”

  “That’s cool, man! It’s real cool!” Then he turned to me. “Hey, what about you?” he asked. “Did you ever get that ‘tenancy’ or whatever it is?”

  He meant “tenure,” which would not only earn me a promotion and a salary increase, but it would also mean a permanent position at the university—without which I would find myself instantly unemployed. It is the academic paradox: up or out. At any university, an assistant professor’s first six years must be followed by application for tenure. With tenure comes promotion to the next rank: associate professor. But if the promotion committee feels that tenure has not been earned, through a strong record of teaching, service, and scholarship, that professor cannot be retained.

  “I sure hope so,” Newton said. “You deserve it, man!”

  I didn’t tell him, but my first application for tenure was rejected. Because of my years as a visiting assistant professor, I had been eligible for early tenure. My teaching reviews were good, and I knew that my prison work “counted” as community service, so I submitted the application hoping for the best. Unfortunately, I was lacking in the required number of publications in peer-reviewed academic journals. Admittedly, I had been too busy with my prison work to write them. My colleagues had warned me.

  “But I’m using literature to change people’s lives,” I countered.

  Committees don’t care. They don’t know prison; they know peer-reviewed academic publications—the more footnotes, the better.

  And here’s an irony: as a direct result of my work in prison, I was on probation myself.

  CHAPTER 41

  The Picture

  You’re on the boat again, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “What am I doing?” Newton asks. “How do you always know?”

  “When your mind loses focus, so do your eyes,” I said. “And I know the boat is your liberty, but remember—”

  “Shakespeare is my liberty,” he finished my sentence. “That’s true. And you are my liberty.”

  I didn’t think he meant that in an inappropriate way, but to be sure, I said, “Not me, Shakespeare.”

  “Right, of course, I didn’t mean—”

  “Good.”

  “But hey! You know what? I…”

  “You what?”

  “I, uh, drew a picture the other day. My first drawing in years, man! Just from memory.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “Of you,” he added.

  “That’s bad.”

  “Why? I’m a good artist.”

  It’s true; he is. Another remarkable accomplishment for a man who’s spent most of his life in a box.

  “A waste of your talent,” I said.

  “Says who? Who gets to make that call: the artist, or the subject?”

  “You’re always railing against being treated like a subject, and now you’re turning me into a subject!”

  We both laughed at the irony.

  With some trepidation, I asked, “Well, can I see it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t have it anymore.”

  Oh, great. I started envisioning a porno portrait of his middle-aged Shakespeare professor—sunbathing nude on the deck of a boat, perhaps—circulating among the prisoners in the segregation unit. They’ve been locked away for a long time, but are they really that desperate?

  “I sent it to my mom,” Newton said, much to my surprise—and relief. “I wanted her to meet you.”

  According to prison regulations, volunteers cannot have any outside contact with prisoners’ friends or relatives, but I often wondered what it would be like to sit down and have a chat over a cup of coffee with Mom. What would I learn about life with little Larry? Would she recall happy memories of his first Christmas? Or would she remember him as a holy terror?

  He didn’t shirk responsibility for driving his parents crazy with more than the usual adolescent misbehavior. Still, I knew from his medical records that the abuse had been extreme at times. I even wondered whether his mom might have suffered abuse herself. Certainly, her life has never been easy. Newton was proud of telling me that she took on two jobs when his stepdad became ill and couldn’t work, because she never wanted to go on welfare. I respected her for that. (My mom had worked two jobs too.)

  The following year, at the annual Shakespeare performance at the prison, I would meet Mom in person. Several years younger than me, she was only sixteen when Newton was born—and he was her second child. She struck me as a caring, hardworking woman who had done the best she could as a teenage single mother. Her other two sons, one older than Newton and the other younger, turned out all right. One is a minister and the other is a police officer—at the same university in Muncie where Christopher J. Coyle had been killed.

  An example of Newton’s artwork, a drawing inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

  CHAPTER 42

  “That’s Freedom”

  In the summer of 2006, after more than ten years in isolation, Newton received word that he would finally be released into the general prison population. That was the good news. The bad: “They’ll probably ship me back up to the City,�
� he informed me, “’cause that’s where I come from.”

  “The City” is Michigan City, one of only three maximum-security facilities in the state. It is, unfortunately, at the opposite end of the state. The day before his transfer date, we had one last group session. Later that same evening, I returned to the SHU for a private session with Newton—with the approval of the unit manager and the sergeant on duty. It was Harper, the sergeant Newton had stabbed six years ago.

  “He’s changed a lot,” Harper said to me as his officers went to remove Newton from his cell. “If Shakespeare did that, then I’m impressed.”

  If you’ve read this far into this book, it should be clear to you that my relationship with Newton was never inappropriate in any way, least of all romantic; as I said, I am older than his mother. But like saying farewell to a colleague with whom you’ve worked intensely for years, this farewell was bittersweet: I was happy to see him being released from his cage, sad to think what the loss of him would mean to the Shakespeare program.

  We sat alone in the R&R area, where we’d had so many lively and fruitful group sessions. It was eerily quiet without those voices now. Even the hallway seemed unusually quiet. It’d been three years since we met, but this was the first time we had sat down together alone, not in a group or at a cell door, but just sat together for a normal conversation—normal, that is, if you disregard the fact that one of us was sitting in a box and peering out through a little slot. We talked optimistically about Newton’s future, including his determination to pursue that dream of a college education, even a PhD.

  All too soon, our hour was up and the officers came to take Newton back to his cell. When he reached his hands out through the cuff port for the officers to put on his leash, he had a folded-up piece of paper between his fingers. One of the officers took it and looked it over. Then he handed it to me. I stuffed it in my pocket while I watched Newton being cuffed and chained for the last time.