The Relation of My Imprisonment
A Fiction by Russell Banks
Dedication
For F. Q. H.
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“Remember death.”
UPON the dawn this drear and soppy month just past, in a year now some twelve years past, it happened that as I began my daily work at the building of coffins, which is my calling, I was prevailed upon by certain superior officers of the town to cease and desist from this work. I had left my young wife’s kitchen and had arrived at my workshop at the side of the house and before the road, where, as had been my procedure since completing the apprenticeship of my youth and embarking singly upon the practice of this my calling, I had commenced to lay out the day’s labor and to organize that labor into precise allotments of time. Thus I was bent over my various plans and figures at my bench, when there appeared at the doorway a friend and neighbor, a man who must be nameless here but who was one of my chief supports in the early days of my tribulation. This man, all breathless and screw-faced with haste and concern, related to me that this very morning, while passing through the marketplace across the common from the courthouse, as he was on his way to cultivate his fields, which lay on the far side of the town from his dwelling place, he had learned that the chief of civil prosecution in the parish had sent an order to the chief of civil prosecution in the town, to the effect that from this date forward all those men and women residents of this town who engage in the manufacture and/or sale of coffins, or of gravestones or of other such markers of graves, or of vestments for the dead, or of floral or other memorializings of the dead, or who in any way embalm, decorate or otherwise handle and prepare the dead for burial, must henceforth cease and desist from their activities. If this order is not immediately obeyed by those residents of this town who heretofore have participated in such activities, they will be arrested and charged with the crime of heresy and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the various laws.
Because my friend loved me, he wished, however, to do more than merely to warn me of my impending arrest and trial and imprisonment. He attempted as well to persuade me to close the doors of my shop immediately and, upon the eventual arrival at my shop by the officers of the chief of civil prosecution in the town, to deny that I was engaged now in any such activity as had become so recently a heretical activity, for, as my friend pointed out to me, I was an esteemed member of the community, welcomed among them for my comportment and orderliness and the consistent charity of my mind, and therefore the officers of the community would be reluctant to scourge me from them. My skills as a maker of coffins, my friend showed me, could easily be applied to the manufacture of items which the community felt it needed, rather than items which it had deemed not only unnecessary but dangerous to the public weal. He then told me of a growing desire among the better-off families for high wooden cabinets with glass doors for the purpose of exhibiting fragile and expensive possessions.
Having delivered himself both of his warning, which I received with gratitude, and his suggestion regarding my future activities, which I received with the thought that my friend was perhaps putting his timorous self in my place (out of his love and fear for me, however, not of love or fear for himself), he began to gather up my drawings and figures and contracts for the several coffins I then had underway, wrinkling and folding them as if to toss them into the fire.
No, I said to him. This seems not to be our only recourse. Let us think a moment and look into our hearts before we decide what is the proper action. How would it seem to others of our persuasion, with regard to the matter of the dead, if their coffin-maker were to run and hide and, if found, lie outright? Come, I said to him, be of good cheer, let us not be so easily daunted, our case, to care for the dead, is good, so good that we will be well rewarded, finally, if we suffer for that cause. If, however, we deny our cause, and others like us, seeing our example, also deny the cause, then we will suffer ten hundred and infinitely more times over for the denial. For if we will not remember the dead, who among the living will remember us when we join the dead ourselves, as all men must? (I Craig., xiv, 12.)
My friend persisted and pleaded with me none the less, until I begged leave finally to closet myself briefly for prayer and guidance in this question and proceeded to close myself into the coffin that my father had employed his brother, the revered master to my apprenticeship many years ago, to build for me. And as so often has occurred in times of woe or quandary, the face of a beloved ancestor, in this case the wise face of my mother’s great aunt, passed before me and gave me these words: Your guide in life can proceed from no other source than the mercy you tender the dead. To suffer for such tenderness is to receive mercy back from the dead when no others will show it to you.
Whereupon I arose from my coffin and confronted my good friend with these words: Leave me, if you wish, and tend your fields, and turn your coffin into a sideboard, if fear is what determines your actions. But as your fellow man who loves you, I am compelled to go on as before. I further stated that since coming to know myself, I had showed myself hearty and courageous in my coffin-making and had made it my business to encourage and teach others the skills and the meanings of the skills I now possessed, and therefore, thought I, if I should now run and make an escape, it would be of a very ill savour in the land. For what would my weak and newly converted brethren think of it? Nothing but that I was not so strong in deed as I had been privately in word. Also I feared that if I should run now when there may well be a warrant out for my arrest, I might by so doing make them afraid to stand forth some time after when but great words only should be spoken to them. And still further, I thought the world thereby would take occasion at my cowardliness, to have thus blasphemed the dead, to have then some ground amongst themselves to suspect the worst of me and my profession.
Sadly, but with freshened understanding, my friend clasped me to his bosom and departed for his fields, and I retrieved my wrinkled and folded drawings and figures and continued as before to lay out the day’s work. And at a quarter past ten in the morning, while I was planing a mahogany headboard for the coffin of a young woman living in a village seven miles from ours, three officers of the chief of civil prosecution in our town entered my shop and read to me the orders issued by the chief of civil prosecution in the parish and by that perogative ordered me to cease and desist my activities as a maker of coffins. I carefully restated all the arguments above, and I continued with my planing as before. The officer in charge, a decent man I have known since we were schoolmates together, then placed me under arrest, and after having released me into my own custody on my own recognizance, wrote out a summons, that I was to appear the following morning at the court of the chief of civil prosecution in the town, there to be heard for indictment and if indicted to be remanded to the parish jail to stand trial at some future date for the crime of heresy. He escorted me outside my shop to where my wife anxiously awaited me and closed and sealed the door to my shop and posted the summons thereon. He was a peaceable and methodical man, as were the junior officers with him, and I believe that they persecuted me only with grave reluctance. May they be remembered, therefore, at least for their inclinations to mercy, even if it happened that they were too weak to enact said mercy. (II Vis., xxx, 4.)
Upon the following day, at a quarter of nine in the morning, I presented myself, in the company of my good wife, who had fearfully dispatched our five children to the home of her cousin in an adjacent parish, at the court of the ch
ief of civil prosecution in our town. Here follows the sum of my examination by His Honor Mister Dome.
Dome: What is the work that you practice in the wooden structure attached to your dwelling place and facing the roadway? And how long have you been at that work?
Self: I am a builder of coffins for the express purpose of tendering mercy to the dead. And I have been such since boyhood, when it became imperfectly known to me that any skills I might obtain while among the living would be without meaning unless bent wholly to that purpose.
Dome: You admit, thereby, that you have all your adult life participated in an activity that the larger community has now declared illegal. Do you also admit that you have consistently and diligently enjoined others to do likewise?
Self: Only those others who give evidence of possessing such gifts as I possess and who, with long instruction and example, can acquire the necessary skills for coffin-building. To those who give no evidence of possessing these gifts, and who therefore ought not to be encouraged to acquire these skills, I merely encourage in a general way to know themselves, so that they may pursue a more truly characteristic way of tendering mercy to the dead. For while there are many paths homeward, there is but a single calling. (Trib., vii, 38.)
Dome: Do you admit that you meet together privately for the purposes of giving and receiving instruction?
Self: It has always been customary to do so in this land, and more efficient also.
Dome: You have before me this day confessed to acts which, though in the past have merely been heinous in the eyes of the community, are henceforth regarded as illegal and, therefore, punishable by law. As is my sworn duty, then, unless you first swear before me at this table that all such activities will no longer be tolerated by you or by those under your care, I will be compelled to indict you for persisting in heresy and to remand you to stand trial in the court of the chief of civil prosecution in the parish. Do you so swear?
Self: I cannot of my own will free the dead from the care of the living, any more than I can of my own will free the living from the care of the dead. It is in the nature of things.
At which words His Honor Mister Dome was in a chafe, as it appeared, for he declared that he would snap the neck of these heresies.
Self: It may be so. But I am not able to aid you, for I am already bound over.
Dome: I find against you, Sir. But if you can locate sureties to be now set for you and thus guarantee that you will appear as ordered for trial at the next quarter-sessions, and also that you will cease and desist, pending the findings of said trial, all coffin-making and other such activities as have been declared illegal, I will set you over to return to your home and family until you are called to court.
Self: I understand that any sureties I obtain will be bound against my further coffin-making, and that if I do build a coffin, their bounds will be forfeited. But since I will not leave off the building of coffins, for I believe this is a work that has no hurt in it but is rather more worthy of commendation than blame, then any who will provide sureties for me will soon hate me. I do not believe that I will be able to uncover any friends willing to provide sureties for me who would also be willing to hate me.
Whereat he told me that if my friends would not be so bound, my mittimus must be made and I sent to the jail and there to lie to the quarter-sessions, some nine weeks off.
Thus have I in short declared the manner and occasion of my first being in prison, where I lie even now, calm in the knowledge that to suffer as a result of the errors and weakness of the living is to be all the more prepared for the demands made by the dead. Let the rage and malice of the living be never so great, they can go no further than the dead will permit them. Even when they have done their worst, I will yet love only that greater power over them, the everlasting dead.
AT the very commencement of my imprisonment it was one of the chiefest pleasures of my days to converse at intermittent times in his rounds with my jailor, whose father had been a higgler from my own town and who often had spoken fondly of my own father to this said man when he was himself a child. It was his recognition of my surname, therefore, that brought him to present himself to me early on my first morning in confinement there. Thus my jailor seemed from the outset to rest in a certain sympathy toward me, for he could not understand how I was a dangerous man that had to be locked away from the company of my fellows, like some beast whose uncontrollable lust it was to tear at living flesh. Nor could it be shown to him that I had destroyed or stolen private or public property or that I had made any claims or abridgements against the lawful liberties of other men.
Yet despite this wondering of why it was that I had been imprisoned, my jailor all the same could not understand why I did not leave off my activities as a maker of coffins and apply my skills instead to some task that the majority of my fellow men wished to see promoted, such as the building of glass-fronted cabinets (he cited the same fashion among the newly wealthy as had my friend earlier, prior to my arrest).
But I have met my calling and the meaning it lends to my formlessness more sweetly here in this cell than in the world outside, I told him. To show it my back and numbly acquiesce to the demands of the majority of the living would sour the very air that fills my body.
Could you not do more good if you were set at liberty than you can while locked here in a cage? my jailor inquired. He was a decent fellow, and I did believe and believe especially now, many years after his passing away from me, that he was concerned that the most good be done. And what in particular offended him about my confinement was that it seemed to do no one any good. He was thus a man whose compassion was essentially an act of logic, and his view of mean and cruel men was that they were merely illogical. We could not agree on this, for my own view has been that such men are mean and cruel because they will not perform the rites and other acts of worship which would purge them of their meanness and cruelty, which purgation would thereby permit them to enact goodness in the world. Mercy, I explained to my jailor, is a quality of feeling toward others that must be obtained at some source outside the human heart. My brethren and I believe that it can only be obtained by devoting oneself fully to the worship and further contemplation of the power of the dead. For a man cannot see or hear or touch the world born and dying daily around him until he has first seen, heard and touched the infinite. (Wal., v, 41.)
When I had lain in prison for along about twelve weeks, and not during that time knowing what they intended to do with me, upon the fifteenth of May there came to me a Mister Jones, clerk of the court, having been sent by the several justices of the parish to admonish me and demand of me submission to their regulation of my activities and the curtailment of any future making of coffins or of teaching others to do likewise or of recommending such activities and the wisdom and sweetness thereof to any others, especially to the youth. But since I knew that my case had not yet been publicly tried and that I was merely under indictment and had not yet confessed to any act of heresy but had merely argued as to the legitimacy and Tightness of my calling, I knew the admonitions and demands put to me by Mister Jones were but part of a strategem designed to control me without having as well to defend in public the court’s interest in breaking the neck of the people’s growing love for the dead and their gradual awakening to acts of worship and contemplation of the dead. For, as all men knew, there was in those years a new spirit moving over the land which was compelling the people toward a deeper delight in life that was by necessity and grace derived from their growing knowledge and experience of the dead. The finite is but the flesh of the infinite, and the living the breath of the dead. (Flor., ii, 14.) Here is how Mister Jones, clerk of the court, made his conversation with me:
When he was come into my chamber, which I had in various ways and through the aid of my young wife made as comfortable and cheerful as such a stony place could be made, he called heartily out to me, Neighbor! How do you do, neighbor?
I thank you, Sir, said I. Very well, blessed be the d
ead. Said he, scratching at his nose, Well, Sir, I have come to tell you that it is desired that you would submit yourself unto the laws of the land, or else at the next quarter-sessions it will go far worse with you, even to be banished and sent away from out of the nation or else even worse than that.
I said with all seriousness, looking briefly onto the face of my jailor for confirmation, that I did desire only to demean myself in the world, as becometh a man and a worshipper of the dead. Whatever denied me that benefit could not be pursued, I explained.
Still he scratched his nose, as if there were situated there some devious growth or some question that by a steady scratching would get answered. You must leave off these unholy and illegal practices which you have long been wont to participate in and endorse among others, for the statute is now set up against them, and here am I now, sent by the justices to tell you that they do intend to prosecute the law against you if you will not submit.
Sir, I said modestly but with natural authority and a reasonable man’s knowledge of procedure and law, Sir, I conceive that the laws by which I am imprisoned at this time, the laws of indictment, do not reach or condemn either me or the practices of tendering mercy in various accepted, codified manners to the dead. I have come forward and made myself known unto the world, and now you and your justices must do the same. The dead will decide who is in the right.
I believe that the clerk of the court was a weak and easily frightened man, for at this he turned and stalked furiously from my presence. My jailor was at first moved to laughter, but after a moment, when he saw that mirth had not been my intent, he sombered and declared his affection for my methods, though he said he was repelled by my cause. This did not dismay or discourage me, for I had long ago undergone the type of self-scrutiny that weds method to cause, and therefore I knew my jailor’s lack of affection for my cause was only due to his ignorance of it, whereas his appreciation of what he called my methods could only be due to a clear readiness for conversion.
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