a short tale about a man named john, who had once was a student of mine:
AN ARTIFICIAL CHRISTMAS TREE STOOD...
IN THE CORNER OF THE WAITING ROOM, with a bunched up white towel at its base pretending to be snow. Unmatched sticks of cheap furniture, some wicker, some plastic, were awkwardly arranged around the edges of the room. It could have been the antiseptic lobby of a cheap hotel except for the view through the picture window behind the Christmas tree: the two parallel steel-mesh fences topped with barbed wire and a small slope of sour lawn rising toward blank walls and tan brick buildings.
The barbed wire made it clear that this was a jail.
So did the posted rule against bringing drugs or alcohol on visits; so does the order to place wallets and handbags in a locker in the far corner, along with all cash in excess of $5, any pens, notebooks, tape recorders, books, all hats and overcoats; and so does the stamping of your hand with invisible ink, the emptying of pockets into a plastic tray, the body search, the passage through a metal detector. With the rules of entrance obeyed, I walk down a long, wide ramp into the prison, pause at a sign forbidding weapons beyond that point, and wait for the steel-rimmed glass door to be opened. Up ahead there were more doors, with guards and a couple of prisoners moving languidly along a corridor. The door in front of me pops with a click. I turn to the guard booth and and my pass to a guard, an ultraviolet light certifies the stamp on my hand, and I am then instructed to go to the visitor's lounge. I do what I am told and wait. In the lounge a dozen couples sit facing each other on thick plastic-covered chairs, glancing tensely at the clock, conscious of time. Behind them a wall of picture windows opens upon a vista of grey grass and blank, tan walls. Then suddenly, from another door, John appears. He smiles, gives me a hug, and says, "How are you, professor?"
Two-years had passed since he vanished from my writing class at Interboro Institute in the City of New York. He was convicted of killing the boyfriend of his sister after he had learned that the man had raped her. But if there is any anger in him or a sense of humiliation, neither is visible on the grey morning. He is wearing jeans and a black T-shirt - with his prison number hand-lettered over his heart - and to a visitor who had first met him 3 years before, he looks taller than he once did. He smiles in an ironic way and says, "I wasn't sure you would come."
We walk to the chairs, and John sits with his back to the picture windows. His hair is cropped tight, and his once-clean-shaven face now wears a mustache. "I want to thank you for sending me so many books," he says. "I mean, you didn't have to do that for me."
On the phone, with the great metallic racket of prison in the background, or here in the visiting room, he makes it clear that the doesn't want to talk much about the past. About the rape of his sister and the murder of her boyfriend. Nor does he want to speak at length when, as a raw teenager from a South Bronx ghetto, he learned how to read from the only teacher he ever had, a woman by the name of Bess Tyne, who thought that he had a future beyond police stations and jail. He doesn't want to talk about his flamboyant father whose slithery influence led all the boys in his family into petty crime. He is embarrassed and uncomfortable discussing his lost freedom and how he squandered away his new way of life in one moment of anger. What he wants to talk about is what he is doing now, and what he is doing is time.
History is filled with tales of men who used prison to educate themselves. Cervantes began Don Quixote in a Spanish prison, and Pancho Villa read that book, slowly and painfully, while caged in the Santiago Tlateloco prison in Mexico City more than three-hundred years later. Thousands have discovered that nobody can imprison the mind. In the end, Malcolm X triumphed over the joints of Massachusetts, Solzhenitsyn over Stalin's gulags, and Antonio Gramsci over Mussolini's jails. I don't mean to compare my friend John or the facilities at the Rikers Island Correctional Facility to the gulags; he is not serving his 15 year sentence for his ideas. But he understands the opportunity offered doing time and has chosen to seize the day.
And so John embarked on an astonishing campaign of exuberant and eclectic self-education. Early on he had read Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, "and his writing knocked me out. It was like any good book: He sounded like he was talking directly to me and The Old Man and the Sea gave me a sense of well-being and peace. There were other books too, like George Jackson's prison book, Soledad Brother, which I read after I came in here. He made me understand about the way black men like me end up in prison, but he didn't feel sorry for himself. Which made me continue to want to become a writer. I read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, aware that the grandmother of the French writer was a black woman from Haiti. I identify with that book. And that led me back to you. I want to find out how to really write well. I have a favor to ask."
He pauses for a moment, turns and glances at the window. Fat white snowlakes are now falling from the steel colored sky, out there in the world of highways, diners, car washes, motels, and nightclubs. Another prisoner's name is called, a and an Asian man rises and touches his wife's face. Time is running out.
John asks me the favor. I am happy to comply. A guard calls his name. Our time is up. John rises slowly. He tells me to send his best to his former classmates at Interboro. I say that I will do that. I promise him I will see him on the next visitation day, and that I will give him the favor he has asked of me: I will more than happy to give him the writing lessons he desires of me on each and every visitation day from that day forward.
We embrace awkwardly. He then turns and nods politely to the guard and flashes a final goodbye grin my way. "Thank you, Professor," he says, and returns to to the world of rules, to sleep another night where the snow never falls...
...And back to the place from where he would eventually write a book, which is due to be published within a year...
The barbed wire made it clear that this was a jail.
So did the posted rule against bringing drugs or alcohol on visits; so does the order to place wallets and handbags in a locker in the far corner, along with all cash in excess of $5, any pens, notebooks, tape recorders, books, all hats and overcoats; and so does the stamping of your hand with invisible ink, the emptying of pockets into a plastic tray, the body search, the passage through a metal detector. With the rules of entrance obeyed, I walk down a long, wide ramp into the prison, pause at a sign forbidding weapons beyond that point, and wait for the steel-rimmed glass door to be opened. Up ahead there were more doors, with guards and a couple of prisoners moving languidly along a corridor. The door in front of me pops with a click. I turn to the guard booth and and my pass to a guard, an ultraviolet light certifies the stamp on my hand, and I am then instructed to go to the visitor's lounge. I do what I am told and wait. In the lounge a dozen couples sit facing each other on thick plastic-covered chairs, glancing tensely at the clock, conscious of time. Behind them a wall of picture windows opens upon a vista of grey grass and blank, tan walls. Then suddenly, from another door, John appears. He smiles, gives me a hug, and says, "How are you, professor?"
Two-years had passed since he vanished from my writing class at Interboro Institute in the City of New York. He was convicted of killing the boyfriend of his sister after he had learned that the man had raped her. But if there is any anger in him or a sense of humiliation, neither is visible on the grey morning. He is wearing jeans and a black T-shirt - with his prison number hand-lettered over his heart - and to a visitor who had first met him 3 years before, he looks taller than he once did. He smiles in an ironic way and says, "I wasn't sure you would come."
We walk to the chairs, and John sits with his back to the picture windows. His hair is cropped tight, and his once-clean-shaven face now wears a mustache. "I want to thank you for sending me so many books," he says. "I mean, you didn't have to do that for me."
On the phone, with the great metallic racket of prison in the background, or here in the visiting room, he makes it clear that the doesn't want to talk much about the past. About the rape of his sister and the murder of her boyfriend. Nor does he want to speak at length when, as a raw teenager from a South Bronx ghetto, he learned how to read from the only teacher he ever had, a woman by the name of Bess Tyne, who thought that he had a future beyond police stations and jail. He doesn't want to talk about his flamboyant father whose slithery influence led all the boys in his family into petty crime. He is embarrassed and uncomfortable discussing his lost freedom and how he squandered away his new way of life in one moment of anger. What he wants to talk about is what he is doing now, and what he is doing is time.
History is filled with tales of men who used prison to educate themselves. Cervantes began Don Quixote in a Spanish prison, and Pancho Villa read that book, slowly and painfully, while caged in the Santiago Tlateloco prison in Mexico City more than three-hundred years later. Thousands have discovered that nobody can imprison the mind. In the end, Malcolm X triumphed over the joints of Massachusetts, Solzhenitsyn over Stalin's gulags, and Antonio Gramsci over Mussolini's jails. I don't mean to compare my friend John or the facilities at the Rikers Island Correctional Facility to the gulags; he is not serving his 15 year sentence for his ideas. But he understands the opportunity offered doing time and has chosen to seize the day.
And so John embarked on an astonishing campaign of exuberant and eclectic self-education. Early on he had read Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, "and his writing knocked me out. It was like any good book: He sounded like he was talking directly to me and The Old Man and the Sea gave me a sense of well-being and peace. There were other books too, like George Jackson's prison book, Soledad Brother, which I read after I came in here. He made me understand about the way black men like me end up in prison, but he didn't feel sorry for himself. Which made me continue to want to become a writer. I read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, aware that the grandmother of the French writer was a black woman from Haiti. I identify with that book. And that led me back to you. I want to find out how to really write well. I have a favor to ask."
He pauses for a moment, turns and glances at the window. Fat white snowlakes are now falling from the steel colored sky, out there in the world of highways, diners, car washes, motels, and nightclubs. Another prisoner's name is called, a and an Asian man rises and touches his wife's face. Time is running out.
John asks me the favor. I am happy to comply. A guard calls his name. Our time is up. John rises slowly. He tells me to send his best to his former classmates at Interboro. I say that I will do that. I promise him I will see him on the next visitation day, and that I will give him the favor he has asked of me: I will more than happy to give him the writing lessons he desires of me on each and every visitation day from that day forward.
We embrace awkwardly. He then turns and nods politely to the guard and flashes a final goodbye grin my way. "Thank you, Professor," he says, and returns to to the world of rules, to sleep another night where the snow never falls...
...And back to the place from where he would eventually write a book, which is due to be published within a year...
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