A Place to Stand

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  The ground floor housed convicts, and the upper level was a cafeteria. The entrance faced north and a single hallway ran east-west for the entire length of the block, with cells on each wing facing one another. A guard in a cage at a control panel operated the opening and closing of all the cell doors. Behind the guard cage on each side were steel shower stalls. It was devoid of the clamor that pervaded the main-yard blocks. Each cell had a steel slab door with a shatterproof port window, and behind the windows cons faced other cons, using hand gestures to communicate. As I passed each cell I recognized some of the gang bangers, Nut Run prisoners, and Ad Seg lockdowns. Mad Dog Madril led me down the corridor. The guard at the controls punched his panel buttons, and a loud pop sounded, hurting my ears.

  I walked in and the door closed behind me automatically, with another pop that grated on my nerves. I looked out the port window in the door at the faces looking at me. I figured there were about fifty new cells, freshly painted gray, each with a stainless steel toilet and sink, a sheet-steel bunk with angle-iron legs bolted to the concrete, and a single recessed light with protective screen. The one significant addition to the cell was a window. For years, all I had seen were the main-yard walls. Everything stopped there. I stood at the window gazing out at the weight pit and the basketball half court and the convicts moving around the educational barracks and felt like I was the most fortunate guy in the world.

  All I did for the first month was stand at the window, smoking and studying sparrows bathing in the dust. We went out each morning for a couple of hours to exercise. I lounged in the sun, against the wall, my thoughts on poetry. Afterward, we washed up and went upstairs for lunch. Meals were the ordinary institutional grub, no worse or better than boot-camp chow. After lunch it was back down to the cells, where I napped, read, and wrote until shower time and supper. The only interruption to this calm routine were the electronic door latches. They locked and unlocked with a deafening report that ripped through the nerves and made me jump every time. Despite this, I wrote contentedly, trying to describe the rising sun, the sky, the clouds, dirt, weeds, moon, and stars.

  During this time I met a prisoner named Nick, who was in his late forties and wrote for newspapers. He was short, thin, and small-boned, with thick black-framed reading glasses, and he leaned in when listening to someone. He was generally quiet, thinking about what he was writing. At TV time every evening we gathered in the hallway, and he would appear in a silk gentleman’s jacket, smoking a Cuban cigar. When I told him I wanted to be a poet, he gave me Russian novels to read. I especially loved the landscape portraits of Turgenev and Chekhov’s stories. Nick’s success made a huge impression on me. It was clear that even in prison it was possible to be a writer.

  I was still writing Virginia, Norman’s friend in North Carolina. She had sent me history and poetry books. I couldn’t get enough of Mexican history, Aztec poetry, and Mayan religion. The more I read about my ancestors, the more significant I felt. I was making their history mine as well; I began to feel myself fused to thousands of years of culture. It was as if this new knowledge was peeling off layers of wax paper from my eyes. I had a clarity of thought and feeling I’d never experienced.

  I gazed out my window at the swatch of oily grass hugging the base of a telephone pole. I wondered how the grass survived, wondered what it felt when the sun entered its pores and fed it the glowing food that made it grow. I wondered if the grass had a mind, a soul, what it felt about the prison, how it transcended the bitterness of the environment and imbued itself with the sheer joy of living. I closed my eyes and, for hours, focused strictly on the grass at the utility pole base, and I felt my soul grafting with the grass blades. I seemed to be able to feel what it felt: the golden warmth of sun, the dancing breeze waving with light beads in my blood, the earth in my body roots.

  One day, looking up from my journal to stare absentmindedly at the cell wall, I experienced a revelation. In the wall—in the sand and mortar and stones and iron and trowel sweeps—were the life experiences and sweat of my people. It contained a mural of my people’s toil, their aspirations, their pain and workmanship. I imagined my grandfather’s hand smoothing out the concrete. I saw my Uncle Santiago stepping out of his truck, laughing, and I could hear him talking in his good-natured way to his friends.

  The iron that made the bars came from a mill in Silver City; the workers who had built the mill came from little villages on the plains. The dirt that mixed with the cement, before it was scooped up and trucked and delivered to make this wall, had been prairie soil where families camped and a woman had lain and gave birth to a child. In my mind’s eye, a bonfire raged and people ate deer meat. People had slept on this dirt, tilled it for their crops and gardens, built their adobe homes with it. It had given them shelter, kept out the howling winds, the rain, and the snow. I could smell the promise of the cornfields and see water from the Rio Grande irrigating the chile plants. Children played in the alfalfa. From all directions, people arrived to celebrate a birth, mourn a death, erect a hay shelter, round up stray livestock. Vaqueros slept in their bags on the ground, under the stars and the moon and the clouds, and from the darkness of the wall came light, and knowledge of how people lived in the way of the sun, rising with it, depending on it for their crops and for the health of their souls and hearts.

  I too was flourishing, my body physically affected by my words. When I put paper and pencil down after a day of writing and lay back on my cot and closed my eyes, a sudden eruption of energy sizzled at my tailbone and went up my backbone like scalding water on a hot frying pan. It burned a fuse line up to the base of my skull and catapulted me forth through the top of my head and out of my body. Incredible as it sounds, I would find myself floating above my cot in my cell, looking down at my body lying peacefully below me. I did this deep meditation every day for months. It was the start of my out-of-body travels. A physical substance—call it soul or spirit—left my body, intact with sensibilities to feel, see, and hear. I visited Theresa’s house. I’d sit in the rocking chair and watch her for hours, then go visit my brother and sister in her trailer. I could do whatever I chose, appearing anywhere, anytime. While these out-of-body flights were pleasant for me, I would always return to the cell, trying to make sense of the experience. I pulled my flights back because I had no way of understanding them. I feared that if I continued to leave my body I might not be able to return to it.

  Language was opening me up in ways I couldn’t explain and I assumed it was part of the apprenticeship of a poet. I culled poetry from odors, sounds, faces, and ordinary events occurring around me. Breezes bulged me as if I were cloth; sounds nicked their marks on my nerves; objects made impressions on my sight as if in clay. There, in the soft lightning of language, life centered and ground itself in me and I was flowing with the grain of the universe. Language placed my life experiences in a new context, freeing me for the moment to become with air as air, with clouds as clouds, from which new associations arose to engage me in present life in a more purposeful way.

  To keep from isolating myself too much, I went outside to break away from my out-of-body travels. I welcomed the hot soothing sun on my face. I took off my shirt and lay on the ground. I was almost asleep, half in dream, half awake, when I heard my name called. I opened my eyes. At first I didn’t recognize the convict in white khakis in the minimum-security area. He was standing against the fence, something we maximum-security cons couldn’t do. When my eyes cleared, I saw Rick, dressed in sharply pressed white denims, carrying schoolbooks.

  We looked at each other. I thought of Lonnie, my old girlfriend, and Carey. I’d heard she was a heroin addict, but I hadn’t seen or heard anything recently about how Carey was doing. Rick looked like a college fullback, clean-shaven, sporting a crew cut, beaming with health, bulked up from lifting weights. When we first came to prison, who could have guessed I was going to become a poet? And my journey here had all started because Rick sold heroin to the narc that night. I knew from the way Rick was
looking at me that he was thinking about what had happened to me. Maybe not that I was a poet, but I was sure that he’d heard how I had refused to work and spent my time on administrative lockup. On the surface, it appeared he had fared better than I. But I knew he’d snitched on us, and cowardice is hard to live with. I didn’t envy him a bit. The day he signed papers agreeing to be a witness for the state, he signed away his dignity. And that was why, even though he appeared to be doing better and looked much better, it was he who looked away, who couldn’t keep his eyes on mine, who moved away from the fence.

  Seeing Rick brought back all the reasons we were in prison and made me reflect on the changes in me. I started having a series of strange visions that ended in something resembling a nervous breakdown. I had been hearing voices for quite some time. However, one morning when I lined up as usual for breakfast behind the cons upstairs—which I had done a hundred times—the cons began to age visibly, as if I were holding a remote control and had pressed FAST FORWARD. Their hair grayed, their features wrinkled, they hobbled forward in an old man’s stooped shuffle, and then their clothes began to shred. Ragged strands clung to their emaciated limbs, and then their flesh fell off and I stared at a line of skeletons, collapsing into a heap of dusty ash. I left the line of skeletons and headed toward the coffee machines. All around me the kitchen crumbled and flames smoldered and I stepped through the debris and filled my cup with coffee and walked to where the tables were and sat down. I couldn’t hold the cup. I tried to lift it to my lips but my hand shook uncontrollably. I tried both hands around it, but my head shook. I put the cup down and with my right hand I tried to hold my neck from behind and push my head down and hold the cup with my left and draw it up. But this failed too. I stood and walked out of the kitchen, certain I was having a nervous breakdown. I brooded for weeks without uttering a word, staring off into space and seeing waves of molecular light beads tidal-waving on the air. I saw with my eyes what you see with microscopes. I responded to everything with a gloomy stare, walking past, paying no attention at all.

  During the next few months I tried to curtail my out-of-body traveling and to exercise more. I tried to focus more on practical writing exercises. Every morning I tried to sketch out the rising sun, to write down and describe the landscape’s changing hues and shades and contrasts, how plants turned from blue to yellow in the dawning light. It was intended to improve my writing skills. I closed my eyes to nap but couldn’t sleep. In the darkness of my alert mind, a white ivory horn curled from a wide base upward to a narrow tip. I was at the very top, the size of a small pinkie finger, and I slid down the horn, round and round to the bottom.

  A few weeks later, upstairs in the cafeteria, I took a tray and followed the serving line. My head was always down, so when someone whistled, I don’t know why, I assumed he was whistling at me, and with my tray half filled with food, I flung it at the con I suspected of whistling.

  He looked at me angrily. “I wasn’t whistling at you.”

  “I don’t care. Don’t whistle when I’m around.”

  It was totally out of character, but it happened, and no convict lets disrespect go unchallenged. When I finished my oatmeal, I went outside, and three of the kitchen servers were waiting for me. I had on my roomy blue prison coat with deep pockets, and I figured as I stood before them on the landing that they thought I had a shank in my pocket. It was a showdown. I stared at them and they stared at me. None of us moved. Suddenly, staring at them, I saw past their faces, past their flesh, into their hearts; I saw them as infants, their parents addicted to drugs, screaming and drinking. I wanted to tell them something of what I just saw of their childhood, but instead I walked down the stairwell and into my cell. After this incident, my nervous breakdown seemed to end as abruptly as it had started. The whole episode left me feeling timid and vulnerable.

  At the end of December we were moved back to CB1, as they had fixed all the damage. Despite all the internal disruptions I had gone through, I felt good. I was becoming a better poet. I boxed my denim shirts and pants, underwear and socks, books and letters and stationery supplies. I was emotional. Leaving a cell was for me like leaving a house I grew up in and loved. My cell brimmed with my constant emotional transformations, insights into my experience that ignited in my breast and allowed me to experience emotions of joy and rage that had always struck fear in my heart. I hated the prison system and witnessed gruesome crimes against human beings, but I sometimes found myself as tonished by the endurance of some cons, and my heart was gladdened by the humor they used to poke fun at adversity.

  After packing, I waited on my bunk, thinking of my cell as a womb from which I was repeatedly born into a person with greater and deeper convictions. I reflected on the challenges in understanding certain poets, on how I loved Neruda’s work more and more, and Whitman’s expansive celebrations of the common person. Russian writers wrote under oppression and gave me hope. My cell was my monastic refuge. Instead of closing in on me, shutting me off from life, and cannibalizing me, my cell was the place where I experienced the most abject grief, in which I yearned to the point of screaming for physical freedom. Through the barred cell window I saw lightning and thunder and rain and wind and sun and stars and moon that mercifully offered me reprieve from my loneliness. There I dreamed and kept intact my desires for love and family and freedom.

  But the moving box was troublesome—packed boxes had haunted me since childhood. Everywhere I went, I arrived and left with a box; it reminded me that I had no place in this world, that no one wanted me. It seemed there was always a box nearby, ready to be filled with my clothes and shoes. No matter how I tried to get rid of them, they were always with me, in view, never thrown away, the one concrete object I could count on to be there, when everyone had abandoned me. In the orphanage, boxes were stowed in the attic; so many sad kids came and went down the hallways with boxes in their arms. At the detention center in Albuquerque, each kid was given a box to be filled with clothing and set square under the bunk with all his photos and letters and court documents. In the county jail, prisoners who were sentenced carried their box with them out of the jail and went into prison carrying it.

  The box reminded me how paltry my life was. Guys my age on the outside had jobs, girls, careers, futures, communities, children. I had well-thumbed and dog-eared journals. Being a con gave me an identity, a purpose, a reason to wake up. It was good to struggle, and I carried on with vigor, eager to challenge the enemy. But the boxes still gave me a feeling of failure. I stared at them with a nauseating anxiety, recalling the ride from Estancia to the orphanage, when I had been taken away from Grandpa and Grandma. Or at my Aunt Charlotte’s when I ran away to her, hoping to have a normal life, and came home to find boxes in the truck bed and Aunt Charlotte saying they were taking me back to the detention center.

  In this cell, meditative hours spent in solitary writing and reading broke old molds, leaving me distraught and empty and forcing me further out on the edge for answers to my questions and pain. Psychic wounds don’t come in the form of knives, blades, guns, clubs; they arrive in the form of boxes—boxes in trucks, under beds, in my apartment when I could no longer pay the rent and had to move. Still, I was comforted by the thought that I was bigger than my box. I was what mattered, not the box. I lived out of a box, not in one. I was a witness, not a victim. I was a witness for those who for one reason or another would never have a place of their own, would never have the opportunity to make their lives stable enough because resources weren’t available or because they just could not get it together. My job was to witness and record the “it” of their lives, to celebrate those who don’t have a place in this world to stand and call home. For those people, my journals, poems, and writings are home. My pen and heart chronicle their hopes, doubts, regrets, loves, despairs, and dreams. I do this partly out of selfishness, because it helps to heal my own impermanence, my own despair. My role as witness is to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless, of which I am one.r />
  I stood at the window one last time and gazed out on the weight pit, the half court, the place where I usually rested and remembered something the curandero from my childhood village had told me so many years ago. His sacred name was Piriwheendela, which means he was born with everything backwards. They said his heart was on the right side, not the left, that night was day to him, that he walked with eyes closed. He was one of my Grandma Baca’s friends. He was old and stooped over and walked with a red-and-yellow sacred cane. He loved to sip wine from a tin cup he carried in his sheepskin jacket pocket. Mumbling sacred phrases to himself, talking to spirits constantly, he would sit on the porch and listen to men and women sing corridos and play the violin and accordion. One day when I was racing through Grandma’s kitchen after my brother, he stopped me by gripping my arm firmly and told me to close my eyes.

  “Run your finger down the cane,” his ancient voice instructed.

  I slowly felt down the cane, over the gridwork of carved images, and then stopped my finger. I opened my eyes. It was the sun image.

  He looked kindly into my eyes. “Ah. The sun will guide you in a special way. It will bless you with its power of vision.”

  I had no idea he meant it would be in a cell, where light that feeds the heart and soul is needed so much and where for the last few months, I had been gathering it like bundles of wheat in my arms and milling it into journal entries and poetry.

  THIRTEEN

  As soon as I walked back into CB1, I shrank back from the noise. Convicts were everywhere, three tiers high on each side, in a crazy-chain reaction of showers steaming, numbers screamed over speakers, TVs and stereos blaring. After getting my cell in order and cleaning it, I stood at the bars on Baker Run (second tier). The same cells retained the same faces, and there were more new convicts just starting their sentences, coming in on the landing with rolled-up mattresses and starched prison blues.