For most people, that had been precisely the problem with the place. Gallo turned serious again and told me that n.o.body on the prison staff respects the archive s.p.a.ce. When people hear of the existence of the archive, he said, "They think this means "garbage dump."" He"d been constantly turning away broken down prison fixtures and appliances.
Sometimes, however, he"d strip a fixture for parts. During his spare time in the archive, Gallo toyed with his "inventions." In a corner of the s.p.a.ce, he"d set up a workshop where he built and tinkered with various devices he didn"t care to discuss. Gallo was one of the more idiosyncratic people I"d met in prison. His hours in the archive ran from 4 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day. A singular shift indeed.
When Gallo had begun his tour, he had asked me, with bald incredulity-bordering on mockery-why I wanted to see the archive. I had no suitable response and relied on Deputy Mullin"s excuse: I was a "history buff." Gallo had narrowed his eyes when I said that. But he executed the boss"s order and showed me room after room of boxes containing incident reports, disciplinary write-ups, medical records, memos, inmate booking papers, and G.o.d only knows what else.
"n.o.body really knows everything that"s in here," he conceded.
He pulled out yellowed doc.u.ments from the ancient prison at Deer Island.
"If you do time, your ugly file stays in here forever," he said, with a grin, "the prison archive doesn"t ever forget."
But does it remember? remember? And, what exactly does it choose to commit to memory? Would it tell a future historian that a man named Messiah once lived in a cell on the third floor? That the inmates named their basketball tournament the Summer Cla.s.sic? Would it record the names of the prison"s most watched TV show or most read book? Would it remember Jessica and her son? And, what exactly does it choose to commit to memory? Would it tell a future historian that a man named Messiah once lived in a cell on the third floor? That the inmates named their basketball tournament the Summer Cla.s.sic? Would it record the names of the prison"s most watched TV show or most read book? Would it remember Jessica and her son?
The twenty-five-minute tour with Gallo had tantalized me. The s.p.a.ce itself-its piles of papers representing decades of tangled history-reminded me of all that I didn"t know and couldn"t know. This itself is part of the wisdom of archives. By creating a finite s.p.a.ce, where some things are included, some omitted, an archive challenges you to examine its dusty s.p.a.ces, but more importantly, to search for what has been entirely left out. After Jessica"s death, I felt an even greater need to preserve, to create a home for those things in danger of slipping into oblivion.
As I stood on the elevator, I made a decision to officially embrace my inner archivist. It would be another use of the library as a s.p.a.ce-to ama.s.s the stuff of memory, artifacts, doc.u.ments, fragments. By some neurotic compulsion I was undertaking this process anyway. I appreciated that Forest had been kind enough to dignify it with a name: a prison archive, a small collection that could fill in some memory gaps left by the official archive on the top floor. And even if I was a weirdo for doing it, I"d still be only the second strangest prison archivist in the building.
A Night Kite As part of my self-appointed job as prison archivist, I decided to pay a visit to Deer Island and take stock of Boston"s ancient prison. Although the facility was out of use, I hoped the structure might reveal something. More than most buildings, a prison is is its architecture, an inst.i.tution whose form is its meaning. its architecture, an inst.i.tution whose form is its meaning.
I knew the basic outlines of its story. In the 1840s, as property values rose in South Boston, the city relocated the prison from Southie to Boston Harbor. There it remained until 1991, a barely functional hulk, the longest continuously used prison facility in the United States. With the notable exception of Sergeant Gallo, and his wistfulness, there was a consensus of disdainful respect for Deer Island. For the prison guards, staff, and inmates, time served in Deer Island was worn as a badge of honor, proof that you were dangerous-nineteenth-century tough-that you had survived the primitive. The island prison was a notorious no-man"s-land, a war of all against all, where electricity and plumbing rarely worked, wildlife roamed the halls, where inmates and guards settled disputes using the law of the jungle. One inmate told me that if you had been in Deer Island, you were "from a different era." On this point, all sides agreed. "Deer Island," went the refrain from both inmates and guards, "now that that was prison." was prison."
Was, it turned out, was the key word. When I arrived at Deer Island I discovered nothing more than a pretty wasteland. There was nothing to see.
Today it serves two functions: the site of the country"s second largest waste-treatment plant, a $6 billion complex, created by emergency federal decree to clean Boston"s contaminated harbor-and an unmarked burial ground for nearly five thousand anonymous people. As a whole, Deer Island is a bulky 210 acres fortified by an elevated seawall built to global warming specifications. A few hills tumble abruptly into a lowland that is dominated by the sewage plant, a sprawling campus with no people, and large, prim, unidentified buildings of indefinite purpose. The air over the island is thick with a sweet putrid aroma, cut by an occasional salty breeze from the east. At the foot of the steep seawall is a modest sand and stone beach that seems to shrink with every black, foamy wave. From here, one stands flush against the vast blue-gray expanse of the Atlantic.
The story of the island"s prison begins with a natural history, a buried record that must be observed today mostly in its absences. The first of which: there are no deer on Deer Island.
It wasn"t always so. In deep history, the island served as a refuge for deer fleeing hungry mainland timberwolves. How they got there is a mystery. A nineteenth-century travel guide surmised that a few courageous deer swam the 325 feet that separated the island from the mainland, a salt.w.a.ter channel known as Shirley Gut. Or perhaps they walked over ice. Free from predators, the deer flourished and grew into a colony, a merry cotton-tailed Eden. By dint of nature, therefore, Deer Island is primarily an asylum.
The island served as a wood commons for the residents of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony. Men would row out to the island, collect wood, and hunt deer. Soon enough, there were no more trees to be had and the deer were hunted into oblivion. Thus began the human saga of the place.
Deer Island marked the area beyond the fringes of the new European inhabitation, the spot just on the other side of the social contract, the devil"s ground on the outer reaches of the City on a Hill-the domain of pirates, vigilantes, hangings, criminals, the stricken, and the dispossessed.
For the Natick tribe, Deer Island was a desperate exile, a seventeenth-century concentration camp. Having made the mistake of converting to Christianity-a.s.suming the status of a "praying tribe"-the Natick were considered traitors by other natives and, at the same time, regarded with deep suspicion by the English. When King Philip"s war broke out in 1675, frantic English colonists interned the Natick, along with other unwanteds, on Deer Island. Roughly five hundred people, men, women, and children, starved and died during the brutal winter.
In the nineteenth century, severely ill Irish immigrants who were discovered homeless in the overcrowded alleys of Boston"s growing ghettos and on Boston Common were quarantined on Deer Island in order to prevent cholera and typhus epidemics. Some were transferred directly from their ships. Many never stepped foot on the mainland and were buried anonymously on the island. Their hope of starting again in America ended right on the cusp of the New World. Deer Island was also the plot where New Englanders with no family were given anonymous burial.
Throughout the nineteenth century Deer Island served as a refuge for the city"s terminally ill, impoverished, abandoned, and insane-especially those of its ethnic minorities. Upon these fields of human suffering the prison sprouted in the 1840s, grew, and decayed deep into the twentieth century.
It was during the nascent years of the Deer Island prison that Hawthorne composed his retrospective sketch of Boston"s first prison: "The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison." Prisons and cemeteries give the lie to utopian dreams. Deer Island was both.
From its earliest days, it was recognized as a beautiful, cursed little plot of earth, nature"s asylum turned into man"s various prisons. This tension between asylum asylum and and prison prison would persist throughout its history. Was this a place dedicated to sheltering its inhabitants from a dangerous world or to protecting the world from its dangerous inhabitants? would persist throughout its history. Was this a place dedicated to sheltering its inhabitants from a dangerous world or to protecting the world from its dangerous inhabitants?
In practice, it was a way station to oblivion, a purgatory for people of no status, no future. Deer Island was like the medieval prisons discovered in ruins of gates, bridges, tollbooths-the in-between s.p.a.ces designed to lead somewhere but which themselves were nowhere at all. For generations, Boston"s outcasts lived in just such a limbo, permitted a grand view of a city in which they were to have no place.
But the view went in both directions. It was in the shadow of this doomed island-and possibly under the gravitational pull of its eternal sadness-that Sylvia Plath grew up on Johnson Avenue in Winthrop, the closest residential neighborhood to the island, where her "landscape was not land but the end of the land-the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic." Her view, her recurring metaphor, was Deer Island. In a poem, "Point Shirley," Plath described the plight of her forlorn neighbor, the prison island, as it was slowly, relentlessly gnawed away by the "sea"s collapse," the "s.l.u.ttish, rutted sea," the "squall waves." Her family home in ruin.
Plath wrote "Point Shirley" in 1959, the same year she and Ted Hughes had visited her father"s grave in Winthrop. Her father"s sudden death, when she was eight years old, had been the central trauma of her life; she hadn"t dared visit his grave until then. At the cemetery she had "felt cheated," she wrote in her journal. The tombstones were ugly, the graves too close together, "as if the dead were sleeping head to head in a poorhouse." She had been desperate to "dig him up. To prove he existed and really was dead." With her usual grotesque curiosity she wondered, "how far gone would he be?"
Plath had been so distraught that day, she and Hughes had to walk around town for hours as she struggled to regain her bearings. This effort ended at the gate of Deer Island, where a prison guard turned the poets away.
Four years later Plath ga.s.sed herself in her kitchen, the doors between her and her children sealed like the "planked-up windows" of her family"s former kitchen in Winthrop, as described in "Point Shirley." The place where her grandmother used to "set / her wheat loaves / and apple cakes to cool."
In the early 1990s, the Deer Island prison was evacuated. A giant barrier was placed around the abandoned facility. The prison structure became the last to be quarantined, the last asylum-seeker, the final prisoner on the island. A team of exterminators finished off the ma.s.sive rodent population that remained. The winter winds, gusting from the ocean, whipped right through its empty galleries. And then it was demolished. Its brick and steel ruins sh.o.r.ed up into a ma.s.sive heap, mixed with earth. The prison was also the last to receive an anonymous burial on Deer Island. Today, this steep man-made hill serves as the mainland"s barrier, just barely, from the waste-treatment plant. The old prison is now nothing but a burial mound-in the technical, archaeological sense of this word: a tumulus, a tell tell.
This is one way to remember a prison.
The Liberty Hotel, across town, is another. Opened in 2007 with the ultra-now slogan, "Be Captivated," this four-star luxury hotel wears its sordid history with sordid elegance. From 1851 to 1991, the building served as the Charles Street Jail, a lock-up facility that housed detainees before they were sentenced to Deer Island or shipped off to another prison. The structure"s "colorful past" and "commanding" architecture are selling points that the hotel"s PR people have carefully crafted to suit current upper-middle-cla.s.s taste for supposed local authenticity, the kind that prizes overpriced real estate with "exposed brick."
This is history as high kitsch, reflected proudly in the selfconsciously urbane nomenclature of the hotel, from the name Liberty itself, to the hotel"s four-star restaurant, Clink, and c.o.c.ktail bar, Alibi-in which vestiges of original prison cells remain-and in luxurious extras such as the Key, a c.o.c.ktail option so good that it merited its very own press release.
For the record, the Key, a $500 menu offering, gives the hotel"s "refined" clientele the chance to "take romance from the bar directly to the bedroom" with such "romance-inducing amenities" as: Candlelit room, mood music setBooty Parlor Intimacy Kit (2 condoms, vibrating couples ring, ma.s.sage oil and lubricant)Silk blindersChipotle chocolate barMoulton Brown toothbrush kitsLate 1 p.m. checkout This is exactly the kind of "cla.s.sy" service that the pimps who patronized the prison library might have designed. Just as imprisoned criminals and the petty n.o.bility shared castles in the fifteenth century, the nouveau riche of the Liberty share a s.p.a.ce and a history with the city"s most wretched. Eagerly, in fact: the better to make cla.s.s distinction itself a high-end luxury item, to advertise their membership in a certain cla.s.s (the stridently sophisticated) but also to clearly distance themselves from a cla.s.s of which they are most decidedly not not a part (the criminal undercla.s.s). To the patrons of the Liberty Hotel, the wood-paneled Clink is just a place to get a four-mushroom salade. a part (the criminal undercla.s.s). To the patrons of the Liberty Hotel, the wood-paneled Clink is just a place to get a four-mushroom salade.
And to complete their all-inclusive experience, the Liberty offers n.o.blesse oblige: a spokesperson for the hotel insisted that it would be "a tragic shame" to tear down a historic building, that they had a "responsibility to honor its history," and even noted that reusing a building was a "green solution."
If a building dedicated to misery, filth, and human failure remains in use long enough it can-and must!-be elevated to the status of quaintly historic, and if the structure is "commanding" enough, it is automatically beautiful. It"s as easy as hiring boutique architecture and PR firms.
Refashioning suffering, violence, and heartbreak into high-end capitalist kitsch: this too is a way to remember a prison.
Prisons make fine ruins. Churches, civic s.p.a.ces, theaters, all achieve a certain grandeur in their afterlives. But can they be said to have arrived at their purpose purpose as a ruin? The telos of a prison, however, is precisely that, ruin and decrepitude. As it ages and the condition of a prison worsens, as the place falls into severe disrepair, overcrowding, and neglect-as prisons always do-the more truly prison-like it becomes. As the structural facades of reform and hospital efficiency peel, leak, rust, and rot away, a truer prison emerges. And when it arrives at the moment of actual ruin, it has ripened to its potential, the perfect prison: a dump. Perhaps it is more precise to say that ruins make fine prisons. as a ruin? The telos of a prison, however, is precisely that, ruin and decrepitude. As it ages and the condition of a prison worsens, as the place falls into severe disrepair, overcrowding, and neglect-as prisons always do-the more truly prison-like it becomes. As the structural facades of reform and hospital efficiency peel, leak, rust, and rot away, a truer prison emerges. And when it arrives at the moment of actual ruin, it has ripened to its potential, the perfect prison: a dump. Perhaps it is more precise to say that ruins make fine prisons.
Or, as Bruce Wood, the project manager for the Deer Island prison demolition had told the Boston Globe Boston Globe in the final days of the facility"s life, "It smells pretty bad in there, and it"s dirty and grungy. It"s a dungeon." in the final days of the facility"s life, "It smells pretty bad in there, and it"s dirty and grungy. It"s a dungeon."
There was a time when people weren"t shy about the relationship between rubbish and prison. First-century Romans built a prison underground, directly over the city"s central sewer pipe. When a prisoner died, or was killed, the keepers simply unlatched a trap door and dropped the body into the sewer. Was it an accident that Deer Island was a site well-suited for both a prison and a waste-treatment plant? Was it a coincidence that the location of the current prison, South Bay-where I worked-was a garbage dump and incinerator site before it was a prison? The staff were certainly aware of the prison"s relationship to garbage: to this day, they refuse to drink the tap water.
Despite this relationship to decay and refuse, the prison edifice itself is fundamentally designed to last. In any given society, prisons are some of the most solidly built structures. At archaeological sites they are sometimes the only extant structure, or the best preserved. In this sense, prisons possess the curse of self-memorial. Like the Greek myth of tragic t.i.thonus, they are their own memorial, destined to live forever and to decay forever.
But ambiguity is born of long life. Archaeologists are occasionally unsure whether an unidentified solidly built ancient structure is a prison or whether it is a treasury building. The polar ends of a society"s a.s.sets-its wealth and its criminals-are guarded with equal vehemence. Both are of supreme concern and utmost value. Ultimately they are indistinguishable.
The other archaeological confusion of prison is with tombs. A ruin of a prison may just as easily be identified as a tomb. This ambiguity, too, is not a coincidence. It points to something beyond the structural similarity of prisons and tombs. A spiritual kinship. One of the legal foundations of incarceration is the theory of "civil death"-that a citizen convicted of a felony is considered dead as far as his full membership in society is concerned. His right to vote, to make contracts, for example, is dormant.
But even before civil death, before there was such a thing as a secular prison cell, the penitential cell was the place offending monks were sent for correction. In some instances, monks, n.o.blewomen, or criminals seeking asylum from harsh corporeal punishment were voluntarily locked away in monasteries, then given a funeral ceremony. This wasn"t mere rhetoric. These cells were living tombs from which these prisoners were never again to emerge. And they were to serve as a prototype for the modern prison cell.
Which is all to say that the dead body of a prison-even when it can be identified as such-doesn"t yield many clear answers and only deepens the basic contradictions of its existence. The contemporary debate about prisons-whether their function is "retributive" or "restorative," designed for punishment or reform-is not current, but ancient, and not a debate but a riddle. Prison holds its contradictions in its body. Its dead cells, its inarticulate but well-wrought ruins tell opposing stories: a punishment and an asylum, home to both saints and criminals, a tollbooth to nowhere, a treasury and a sewer, a living tomb.
Almost nothing remains of Deer Island"s sad human history. Aside from the few relics on display in the officers" current union clubhouse, the single remnant of the old prison is the Victorian guard booth at the front gate-the spot where a prison guard had turned Plath and Hughes away in 1959. The same guard booth that Esther, Plath"s alter ego in The Bell Jar The Bell Jar, had imagined as a cheerful "little home." In the book, Esther fantasizes that the prison guard who emerges from this unexpectedly domestic hut is the man she ought to have married. She visualizes an alternate existence living happily with this man, raising children with him.
Plath"s Esther entertained other notions, as well. On the subway, she had told a stranger that she was on her way to visit her father, an inmate at Deer Islandeven though her father, like Plath"s, had been long dead. Perhaps this wasn"t a lie but more of a fiction, a private truth. To Esther/Plath, perhaps it was plausible, even darkly comforting, to picture her father living as a ghost prisoner on the island. No wonder Plath described Esther playing a suicidal game in the waves. To her, Deer Island was a no-man"s-land between the living and the dead.
Prison still inhabits this realm. Jessica wasn"t the only ghost I"d encountered in prison. When the Boston Globe Boston Globe published its year-end list of homicides, I recognized seven names. I was only a degree or two removed from many of the others. Before I"d worked in prison, I hadn"t known a single person from that grim annual catalog-nor had I known so many people who died of drug overdoses. But in prison I came into daily contact with a secret subset of the population: the marked. Those for whom prison was the last stop before the grave. published its year-end list of homicides, I recognized seven names. I was only a degree or two removed from many of the others. Before I"d worked in prison, I hadn"t known a single person from that grim annual catalog-nor had I known so many people who died of drug overdoses. But in prison I came into daily contact with a secret subset of the population: the marked. Those for whom prison was the last stop before the grave.
After spending a day inspecting prison ruins, I finally arrived at the living, breathing version of the thing. It was late, past eleven at night, a strange time to show up. But I figured that the place never closes and I had a key, so why not? I was in search of a certain book and the prison had the only library open to me at that hour.
The guard at the front gate is typically a personable fellow. A man who"s "good with the public," in the parlance of prison administrators. He"s also one of the only guards who carries a gun (no weapons are permitted in the prison itself). Grimes, the student of Zen Buddhism who kept an ancient wisdom tract at his guard post, handled the noisy day traffic of the prison. The night guard, however, embodied a different ethos, the att.i.tude of the prison after dark. As Plath wrote, in "Night Shift," "Tending, without stop, the blunt / indefatigable fact."
For the blunt, indefatigable fact of tending the prison at night, Sully had his own approach. He was a humorist. Always had a "new one" for me. But when I arrived that night, Sully wasn"t smiling.
"D"ya hear what happened?" he whispered as I approached.
This is not the greeting one wants from a prison guard.
"No. What happened?" I said.
"Someone was stabbed."
"Oh my G.o.d-who?"
"A famous actress. Reese...something."
"Witherspoon?"
"No," he said, "with a knife."
A big twisted grin lit the guard"s face. A wicked little laugh wheezed and rattled in his throat.
"Howd"ya like that one?" said Sully, giving me a firm slap on the back. "No: with a knife!" with a knife!"
After repeating the punchline a few more times, and laughing again with each retelling, he was through with me. I was permitted to enter.
The creepiness of prison at night was not diminished for being predictable. The halls were startlingly still, the yard thick in dysmorphic moon figures. Air shafts conveyed disquieting m.u.f.fled squawks. But I"d antic.i.p.ated something even more sinister and, after a few moments" adjustment, was actually somewhat relieved. When I arrived at my post in the 3-Building, the library, I flipped the light switch-the switch whereby I dispatched my minimal legal duty, in the suggestive words of the nineteenth-century prison by-laws: such provision of light shall be made for all prisoners confined to labor during the day as shall enable them to read for at least one hour each evening such provision of light shall be made for all prisoners confined to labor during the day as shall enable them to read for at least one hour each evening. The s.p.a.ce was washed out in gray fluorescent shadows, quiet and uncanny. A library never feels empty, even when you want it to be. A few startled mice took cover. At that moment, I was content to share the s.p.a.ce with them, deeply relieved they were not people.
I walked through the labyrinth of bookshelves, through Biography, Geography, Politics, History, Fiction. And, finally, arrived at my destination: Poetry.
Having spent a day exploring the dreary emptiness of Deer Island and the even drearier busyness of the Liberty Hotel I was grateful for this flesh-and-blood s.p.a.ce. The old prisons didn"t have libraries.
I turned to the Sylvia Plath section. In light of what happened to Jessica, I was seriously considering suspending it indefinitely. From my perspective, the shelf had served a simple practical function, making a popular writer more accessible. More access, more access- More access, more access- this is the credo of a library. But maybe I was doing a disservice, contributing to the death-cult in elevating Plath to a special shelf. Perhaps as a prison librarian, who served a vulnerable population, I had a responsibility to not only connect people to books but also to protect them from some as well. this is the credo of a library. But maybe I was doing a disservice, contributing to the death-cult in elevating Plath to a special shelf. Perhaps as a prison librarian, who served a vulnerable population, I had a responsibility to not only connect people to books but also to protect them from some as well.
The idea bothered me: Who was I to decide what books another person should read? Censorship was not my job. And yet, how could I sleep at night knowing that I had a special section for Ariel Ariel, with these lines from the poem "Cut," "What a thrill- / My thumb instead of an onion. / The top quite gone / Except for a sort of a hinge / Of Skin.../ I am ill. / I have taken a pill to kill / The thin / Papery feeling." From "Edge": "The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment." Ariel Ariel would never arouse the suspicions of myopic prison censors, who reserved the right to remove books of incitement and violence. But just because would never arouse the suspicions of myopic prison censors, who reserved the right to remove books of incitement and violence. But just because Ariel Ariel was art didn"t make it less dangerous-in fact, it made it potentially far more so. I had women in my library who were borderline cases, cutters, suicide junkies, who might turn to Plath as an oracle of self-annihilation. Maybe I had a responsibility to shield them from this poem. Or perhaps reading the poem could help them in some way. Maybe I should teach the poem. Or maybe it wasn"t my business, either way. None of this was obvious to me. was art didn"t make it less dangerous-in fact, it made it potentially far more so. I had women in my library who were borderline cases, cutters, suicide junkies, who might turn to Plath as an oracle of self-annihilation. Maybe I had a responsibility to shield them from this poem. Or perhaps reading the poem could help them in some way. Maybe I should teach the poem. Or maybe it wasn"t my business, either way. None of this was obvious to me.
But I decided to put the questions off until work hours. I was off-duty, after all; the s.p.a.ce was officially closed. At that moment, I was in the library as a visitor, a reader. I was there to seek, not give, direction.
I flipped through a Plath biography, hoping to learn something about her experience of the 1938 hurricane-alluded to in "Point Shirley"-when the Deer Island prison was still the view from her window. Sylvia and her parents had weathered the storm in the family home. The windows of her father"s library had shattered. Entire homes had landed in the sea. Boats had floated to the other side of town. A shark lay in her grandmother"s garden, as though it had simply sprouted there during the night.
As I closed the book, I was reminded why I had dragged myself out to the prison at this hour, to encounter a real library and not an online approximation. The book I was reading, like so many in the library, had a note left in it, a kite-a message for me, if I chose to see it that way. The moment I read it, I knew this doc.u.ment also had a place in my slowly growing prison archive. I folded it up and placed it on my archive shelf, next to the old government reports on prisons and newspaper articles about Deer Island, the nineteenth-century New England travelogues, the glossy brochure and press releases from the Liberty Hotel, random lists, a 1903 congressional report on prison archives, the ever-growing library of kites, the letter addressed to the Messiah, some information on contraband from my orientation cla.s.s. The handmade wordfind game called "Things Found in Prison."
The note that came to me that night was an abandoned letter, a fragment from one of the prison library"s tragic Plaths: Dear Mother, My life is Nothing more. An anonymous, half-finished sentence with no object and no conclusion. A life life indefinite, unarticulated, open-ended. An unfinished, unsent letter. An infinity of white s.p.a.ce. This too is a way to remember a prison. indefinite, unarticulated, open-ended. An unfinished, unsent letter. An infinity of white s.p.a.ce. This too is a way to remember a prison.
DELIVERED
Part II
CHAPTER 3
Dandelion Polenta
Tousled and disheartened, tired as a fossil, the Messiah shuffled into the prison library at 3:26 p.m. on a partly cloudy Wednesday afternoon. Few noted his presence. Sitting behind the counter, Dice called out, "Hey, Messiah, how"s it going, brother?" But the poor guy didn"t seem to hear. Dice turned to me, shrugged, and resumed reading the paper. When the man reached the counter, he clutched it like a lifesaver, and rewarded himself with a quick, standing thirty-second nap. The Messiah, a.k.a. Chuck, an inmate in the 3-1 unit, was a dud. In retrospect, though, he was right about the one thing he told me before he shoved off back into the void.
"See that guy over there," he said, leaning on the counter. "You"re gonna want to know that guy. C.C. Too Sweet."
I already did know a bit about this man, though only from afar. I saw how he rolled. He"d let the rabble shove in first: the users, g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers, thieves, pushers, and bustas. These were not his people. Only then would he make his entrance. He"d glide into the library at a peripatetic pace, conducting an animated conversation with a young inmate or two. Disciples. Or he"d come in alone, his mind working through its own dialogue. You could see it in his face.
When he arrived at the front counter, he"d ask Dice, or Fat Kat, or me, to see a road atlas. It seemed odd, and somehow subversive, to hand out maps in a prison. None of these men was going anywhere. For them, there was only point A.
But C.C. had his reasons. Maps were crucial visual aids to the stories he told. C.C. favored the omniscient perspective. He liked to set his scene on a large scale, to claim large tracts of territory, to pinpoint the exact spot where his life intersected with the great big world.
"Right here," he once told me, pointing to Pennsylvania Avenue on a map of Washington, D.C. "That belonged to me. That"s where you"d find Too Sweet, man. Right next to the White House. I ran the Black House."
When he saw a crowd gather for him, he"d take a little step back to give himself s.p.a.ce to emote. He"d pause a moment to allow his audience to situate themselves. Then he"d smile.
"There"s two things you need to know about C.C. Too Sweet," he"d begin, "he"s iniquitous iniquitous and he"s and he"s ubiquitous." ubiquitous."
Too Sweet had a million of these.
"Anyone here know what "pimp" stands for?"
n.o.body knew.
"Part pope, part chimp."
C.C. always put a special Southern emphasis on that word, pimp pimp, like the way an Evangelical preacher says Jesus-Geeee-zus. C.C. said pee-yimp. I couldn"t substantiate his claim to be a "famous pee pee-yimp, known around the nation," but he seemed fairly well known within the prison. He was a pal of Fat Kat, which meant that he was in deep. Prison elite.
A light-skinned black man of Cape Verdean descent, midthirties, slightly red-toned hair, balding and squat, with bricklayer forearms, Too Sweet was most proud of his "teddy bear" eyes, greenish yellow, small, perfectly round, and close set. His head seemed a bit too small for his body. On one forearm, a giant Playboy bunny tattoo encroached awkwardly on a tattoo of a th.o.r.n.y rose. It was as if he hadn"t taken the ten seconds necessary to consider its placement. On his other arm, the name C.C. floated in pristine isolation-no other tats to cloud or complicate these letters.
You have to wonder about a person who etches his own name into his body. Usually one tattoos the name of the person one loves beyond all others. Or of one"s G.o.d. Was this true also for those who tattoo their own name? Or perhaps they"re simply uncreative. C.C. was certainly not in this latter category.
When he wasn"t performing, C.C. kept apart from the crowd. Sometimes he appeared dejected, slumped in his seat like a ruined millionaire. But most of the time, there was something active brewing. I"d see him studying a map alone, lost in thought. Devising an escape, it seemed. And this wasn"t so far from the truth. To C.C., maps were not a way of plotting a future route as much as returning to the past, to the lost places of his life-the list of which was ever mounting. He was a man whose life had been shaped primarily by streets, intersections, alleys, and highways. All of which had led him here. So he gravitated toward a book that laid these streets out before him once again, clean and blank and open to his interpretations. This was all he needed to begin his journey back.
It was in the midst of listening to one of these stories that I had asked him to join my creative writing course.
The Penguin Joint I was in a recruiting phase for the cla.s.s. Though pimps and hustlers were a natural-and, in the library, a most readily available-group from which to draw, I found students in all corners. C.C. was enlisted from the front. But I came across others in the back, on the periphery.
The back room, Coolidge"s former office, had been liberated. It was now open to the general inmate public (though I did keep a few legal volumes there in his honor.) We occasionally used the room to screen movies-National Geographic nature films, PBS doc.u.mentaries, and a.s.sorted features. The women favored The Color Purple The Color Purple or or Beloved. Roots Beloved. Roots was a favorite among men and women alike. was a favorite among men and women alike.
But the most popular genre among the male inmates was nature doc.u.mentaries about carnivorous animals. The men loved watching films with t.i.tles like Cheetahs on the Prowl Cheetahs on the Prowl or or Snake Safari Snake Safari. When they grew bored of these, they"d play a film about tornadoes. But they preferred for the mayhem to have a face, and so predator flicks it was.