Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg

  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 and 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?

  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 spaces 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 “sluttish, 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 gassed 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 massive 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 shored up into a massive 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.

  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-class 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 cocktail bar, Alibi—in which vestiges of original prison cells remain—and in luxurious extras such as the Key, a cocktail 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 set

  Booty Parlor Intimacy Kit (2 condoms, vibrating couples ring, massage oil and lubricant)

  Silk blinders

  Chipotle chocolate bar

  Moulton Brown toothbrush kits

  Late 1 p.m. checkout

  This is exactly the kind of “classy” service that the pimps who patronized the prison library might have designed. Just as imprisoned criminals and the petty nobility shared castles in the fifteenth century, the nouveau riche of the Liberty share a space and a history with the city’s most wretched. Eagerly, in fact: the better to make class distinction itself a high-end luxury item, to advertise their membership in a certain class (the stridently sophisticated) but also to clearly distance themselves from a class of which they are most decidedly not a part (the criminal underclass). 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 noblesse 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 spaces, theaters, all achieve a certain grandeur in their afterlives. But can they be said to have arrived at their 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 façades 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 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 relationshi
p 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 Tithonus, 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 assets—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, noblewomen, 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, 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 Island–even 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 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 attitude 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 God—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!”

  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 muffled squawks. But I’d anticipated 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. The space 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 space 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 space. 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— 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, 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 would never arouse the suspicions of myopic prison censors, who reserved the
right to remove books of incitement and violence. But just because 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.

  But I decided to put the questions off until work hours. I was off-duty, after all; the space 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 document 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 class. The handmade wordfind game called “Things Found in Prison.”