Once, on a previous visit, waiting an hour through a lock-in and countdown for you to be released to the visitors’ lounge, I was killing time on the porch of the visitors’ annex, resting my elbows on the stone railing, daydreaming at the river through the iron spears of the fence. An inmate called up to me. “You Faruq’s brother, ain’t you?” The man speaking was tall and broad-shouldered, a few years younger than you. His scarred head was shaved clean. He carried extra weight in soft pads on his hips, his belly, his cheeks. Like a woman, but also like the overweight lions in Highland Park Zoo.
I thought, Yes. Robby Wideman’s my brother. Then I said, “Faruq is my brother,” and expected more from the prisoner, but he’d turned back to the prisoners beside him, smoking, staring at nothing I could see.
A few minutes before, I’d noticed two men jogging along the river. I recognized their bright orange running shorts later as they hustled past me up the steps into the prison. Both greeted me, smiling broadly, the sort of unself-conscious, innocuous smiles worn by Mormon missionaries who periodically appear at our door in Laramie. Young, clean-cut, all-American white faces. I figured they had to be guards out for exercise. A new breed. Keepers staying in shape. Their friendly smiles said we’d be delighted to stay and chat with you awhile if we weren’t needed elsewhere. I thought of the bland, empty stare of the man who had recognized me as Faruq’s brother. Somebody had extinguished the light in his eyes, made him furtive, scared him into erecting a wall around his brown skin, trained him to walk and talk like a zombie. The healthy, clean sweat sheen on the runners’ suntanned brows and lean muscled shoulders made me hate them. I wanted to rush after them. Smash them out of their dream of righteousness.
Up the steps, across the porch, through an outer lobby opening out on both sides to alcoves with benches and vending machines where trustees can visit with their families in a less noisy, less crowded setting than the general visitors’ lounge. A short passageway next, ending at a floor-to-ceiling guards’ cage. To the right of the guards’ enclosure a steel-screened staircase. To the left a narrow corridor lined with lockers leads into the waiting room. I sign us in with the guard in the cage. Give him your name and number. He duly registers the information in his book. He’s the one who initiates your release to the visiting room. He also holds the key to the rest room, keys to the lockers where visitors must store items not permitted inside the prison. It’s a job and the guard treats it like most people treat theirs. Bored, numbed by routine. He wants things to run smoothly, to avoid hassles, and he’s learned the best way to accomplish this is not to concern himself with matters beyond his immediate, assigned tasks. The larger scheme in which he participates is really not his problem. Like most of us he gets paid to do a job and the job’s basically a pain in the ass and the pay is shitty so why ask for more trouble when you’re underpaid for the trouble you got already. He resents having to explain why some people sit for hours and others get shuttled from waiting room to visitors’ room in five minutes. He just relays through a loudspeaker the names and numbers another guard inside the prison phones to him.
P3468, Robert Wideman.
He knows it’s not his fault some visits last three hours and others thirty minutes. Some days are busier than others. For him too. Fridays are bad. Attorneys always a pain. He wears a dull gray uniform and sits in a cage all day and has nobody to talk to except the con runner who lounges beside the cage or squats in the sunshine on the porch, freer than him, he thinks.
The guard in the cage doesn’t run the prison. He just works there. He didn’t rob nobody or stab nobody. He didn’t pack his kids in a station wagon and drag them at dawn to this lousy place, so just have a seat, buddy. When they find Wideman I’ll call you.
Once I counted the walls, the tall windows, estimated the height of the waiting-room ceiling. Eight walls, a ceiling twice as high as an ordinary room, four perverse, fly-speckled, curtainless windows admitting neither light nor air. I couldn’t account for the room’s odd shape and dimensions. Had no idea what its original purpose might have been or if it had been designed with any particular function in mind. The room made me feel like a bug in the bottom of a jar. I remembered all the butterflies, grasshoppers, praying mantises, and beetles I had captured on the hillside below the tracks. At least the insects could see through the glass walls, at least they could flutter or hop or fly, and they always had enough air until I unscrewed the perforated top and dumped them out.
The waiting room was uglier and dirtier the first few years we visited you. The same directive that ordered beautification of the grounds must have included the annex interior in its plan. A paint job—brown woodwork, baby-blue walls; new furniture—chrome tubing with pastel, vinyl cushions; a good hard scrubbing of the rest room to remove most of the graffiti—these rehabilitated what was most immediately insulting about the area where we waited for a phone to ring in the guard’s cage and for him to call the name we wanted to hear over the loudspeaker. But the paint’s peeling again already, flaking from pipes and radiators, drooping in clots from the ceiling. The vinyl cushions are faded, stained. In the Ladies and/or Gents the toilet seats are pocked by cigarette burns, graffiti has blossomed again. Wall art of a different sort decorates the main room. Murals tattoo the walls—a Chinese junk, a ship’s wheel circling a clock. The most ambitious painting is above a bricked-in fireplace. A full-masted sailing ship plowing through marcelled waves. I wonder why it’s only three-quarters complete. Was the artist released, the art program suspended because of lack of funds? Or did prison mayhem cause the picture to be left unfinished? A man beaten or raped or dead or consigned to the hole? A personality change, a soul too crushed even to fantasize anymore a proud clipper ship shouldering its way against sea and wind?
Our group occupies half the seats along one wall of the waiting room. The kids clearly don’t belong here. Summer color glows in their faces. They are bright, alert kids somebody scrubs and cares about and dresses neatly. Both my boys sport shiny, digital watches on their wrists. But whose kids belong here? Who fits the image this room imposes on anybody who must use it? You said the prisoners complained about the state of the visitors’ facilities and were granted, after much bullshit and red tape, the privilege of sprucing them up. But when it came down to supplies or time to work on the project, the administration backed off. Yes, you can fix up the place. No, we won’t provide decent materials or time to do it. Typical rat-ass harassment. Giving with one hand, taking away with the other. If the waiting room’s less squalid than it was three years ago, it’s still far short of decent and it’s turning nasty again. The room thus becomes one more proof of the convicts’ inability to do anything right. We said you fellows could fix it up and look what a crummy job you did. We gave you a chance and you fucked up again. Like you fuck up probation and fuck up parole. Like you fucked up when you were in the street. And that’s why you’re here. That’s why keepers are set over you.
I can hear the bickering, the frustration, the messages encoded in the tacky walls. It’s a buzzing in my ears that never goes away inside the prison. Like the flies in the rest room waiting for the kids to start trooping in. Like the guard waiting to run his hand down in my mother’s purse. Like the machine waiting to peek under everybody’s clothes. Like all the locks and steel doors and bars we must pass through when they finally announce your number and name.
I drew the room once but I can’t find the sketch. The picture was to serve as a jog for my memory. Documentation of the systematic abuse visitors must undergo from start to finish when they enter a prison. I knew that one day I’d write about visiting you and I’d need a careful blueprint of physical details, the things that bear so heavily on the soul. But it’s not the number of doors or their thickness or composition or the specific route from the visitors’ annex to the prison, not the clangorous steps and drafty, dank passageways and nightmare-size locks and keys, or the number of guards frisking me with their eyes or the crash of steel on steel ringing in my ears. It’s
the idea, the image of myself these things conspire to produce and plant in my head. That image, that idea is what defines the special power of the prison over those who enter it.
The process of implanting the idea is too efficient to be accidental. The visitor is forced to become an inmate. Subjected to the same sorts of humiliation and depersonalization. Made to feel powerless, intimidated by the might of the state. Visitors are treated like both children and ancient, incorrigible sinners. We experience a crash course that teaches us in a dramatic, unforgettable fashion just how low a prisoner is in the institution’s estimation. We also learn how rapidly we can descend to the same depth. Our pretensions to dignity, to difference are quickly dispelled. We are on the keepers’ turf. We must play their game, their way. We sit where they tell us to sit. Surrender the personal possessions they order us to surrender. Wait as long as it pleases them to keep us waiting in the dismal anteroom. We come (and are grateful for the summons) whenever we are called. We allow them to pass us through six-inch steel doors and don’t protest when the doors slam shut behind us. We suffer the keepers’ prying eyes, prying machines, prying hands. We let them lock us in without any guarantee the doors will open when we wish to leave. We are in fact their prisoners until they release us.
That was the idea. To transform the visitor into something he despised and feared. A prisoner. Until I understood what was being done, the first few moments at the threshold of the visiting lounge always confused me. There was an instant of pure hatred. Hatred lashing out at what I’d been forced to become, at them, even at you. The humiliation I’d undergone for the sake of seeing you poisoned the air, made me rigid, angry. I felt guilty for feeling put upon, guilty for allowing the small stuff to get inside me, guilty for turning on you.
That to get over first. And it’s no simple matter in a noisy room crowded with strangers, in the short space of an hour or so, after a separation of months or years, to convince you and convince myself that yes, yes, we are people and yes, we have something to say to each other, something that will rise above the shouting, the fear, the chaos around us. Something that, though whispered, can be heard. Can connect us again.
You seem taller than you are. Long hands and feet where Mom used to say all your food went because you ate like a horse and stayed skinny. Long legs and arms. In prison your shoulders have thickened. Your arms are tautly muscled from the thousand push-ups each day in your cell. Like Dave and Daddy and Grandpa you’re losing your hair. The early thirties, but already your hair thinning, receding from your forehead. On top, toward the back, a circle of bare skull sneaks through if you don’t comb your naps just right. Dave calls that balding patch we all sport our toilet seat. Other than that inherited sparse spot you’re doing much better than I am in the keeping-your-hair department. More than most women, when you comb it out. When you plait it into braids and decorate each one with a colored rubber band, it gives you a modified dreadlocks look that emphasizes your high forehead and long, gaunt cheekbones. Bob Marley, or Stevie Wonder on his Talking Book album, or Albrecht Dürer’s marcelled Christ. Faruq, the Muslim name you’ve chosen, is perfectly suited to your eyes. Burning. The terrible Turk declaring holy war on the infidels.
When you appear, I’m glad the kids are along. Happy that Judy insisted upon bringing them the first time we visited. You scoop them all into your long arms. All five squeezed in one hungry embrace. They squirm but endure the hug for your sake, then for their own as you press them to your need, to your strength, to each other. I’m grateful for the kids, cling to them as tightly as you do. Those are my children, your sister’s children. We’ve brought the best of us into this godforsaken place. As you touch them, pick them up, and hug each one separately, the air is easier to breathe. You are their uncle, you are loving them, and for the moment that’s all they need to know. Loving them because they’re here, and loving the ones not here through them. That’s all they need. All they ask. Jamila, the youngest, who’s been here at least once every year of her life, hops up and down and squeals for another turn in your arms. Monique towers a foot above the others, a teenager suddenly remembering to be shy, awkward when you gather her last to your chest.
Look at my big girl. Look at her.
You grasp both Monique’s shoulders and lean her back arm’s length so you can get a good look too.
Ain’t she growing. Look at this big thing. My little sweetheart’s getting grown.
Her feet’s bigger than Gammy’s.
Hush up, Tameka.
Monique glowers at her younger sister. You better shut up, girl. A look full of the anger she can’t quite summon up for you even though you’re the one teasing and laughing louder than anybody. She turns back to you and a smile cracks the death-threat mask she’d flashed at her sister.
A bear hug and nuzzle for Judy. The same thing for Mom. Then we smack together, chest to chest. Hard the first time like testing shoulder pads before a football game. We grip each other’s forearms.
We’ve made it. The visit’s beginning. The room roars behind our backs.
OUR TIME
You remember what we were saying about young black men in the street-world life. And trying to understand why the “square world” becomes completely unattractive to them. It has to do with the fact that their world is the GHETTO and in that world all the glamour, all the praise and attention is given to the slick guy, the gangster especially, the ones that get over in the “life.” And it’s because we can’t help but feel some satisfaction seeing a brother, a black man, get over on these people, on their system without playing by their rules. No matter how much we have incorporated these rules as our own, we know that they were forced on us by people who did not have our best interests at heart. So this hip guy, this gangster or player or whatever label you give these brothers that we like to shun because of the poison that they spread, we, black people, still look at them with some sense of pride and admiration, our children openly, us adults somewhere deep inside. We know they represent rebellion—what little is left in us. Well, having lived in the “life,” it becomes very hard—almost impossible—to find any contentment in joining the status quo. Too hard to go back to being nobody in a world that hates you. Even if I had struck it rich in the life, I would have managed to throw it down the fast lane. Or have lost it on a revolutionary whim. Hopefully the latter.
I have always burned up in my fervent passions of desire and want. My senses at times tingle and itch with my romantic, idealistic outlook on life, which has always made me keep my distance from reality, reality that was a constant insult to my world, to my dream of happiness and peace, to my people-for-people kind of world, my easy-cars-for-a-nickel-or-a-dime sorta world. And these driving passions, this sensitivity to the love and good in people, also turned on me because I used it to play on people and their feelings. These aspirations of love and desire turned on me when I wasn’t able to live up to this sweet-self morality, so I began to self-destruct, burning up in my sensitivity, losing directum, because nowhere could I find this world of truth and love and harmony.
In the real world, the world left for me, it was unacceptable to be “good,” it was square to be smart in school, it was jive to show respect to people outside the street world, it was cool to be cold to your woman and the people that loved you. The things we liked we called “bad.” “Man, that was a bad girl.” The world of the angry black kid growing up in the sixties was a world in which to be in was to be out—out of touch with the square world and all of its rules on what’s right and wrong. The thing was to make your own rules, do your own thing, but make sure it’s contrary to what society says or is.
I SHALL ALWAYS PRAY
I
Garth looked bad. Real bad. Ichabod Crane anyway, but now he was a skeleton. Lying there in the bed with his bones poking through his skin, it made you want to cry. Garth’s barely able to talk, his smooth, medium-brown skin yellow as pee. Ichabod legs and long hands and long feet, Garth could make you laugh just walking down th
e street. On the set you’d see him coming a far way off. Three-quarters leg so you knew it had to be Garth the way he was split up higher in the crotch than anybody else. Wilt the Stilt with a lean bird body perched on top his high waist. Size-fifteen shoes. Hands could palm a basketball easy as holding a pool cue. Fingers long enough to wrap round a basketball, but Garth couldn’t play a lick. Never could get all that lankiness together on the court. You’d look at him sometimes as he was trucking down Homewood Avenue and think that nigger ain’t walking, he’s trying to remember how to walk. Awkward as a pigeon on roller skates. Knobby joints out of whack, arms and legs flailing, going their separate ways, his body jerking to keep them from going too far. Moving down the street like that wouldn’t work, didn’t make sense if you stood back and watched, if you pretended you hadn’t seen Garth get where he was going a million times before. Nothing funny now, though. White hospital sheets pulled to his chest. Garth’s head always looked small as a tennis ball way up there on his shoulders. Now it’s a yellow, shrunken skull.
Brothers and Keepers Page 8
