Brothers and Keepers

by John Edgar Wideman

  I’d missed all that; so when I reached the last few miles of Ohio River Boulevard Scott’s shortcut shared with my usual route, the shock of knowing the prison was just minutes away hit me harder than usual. I wasn’t prepared to step through the looking glass.

  Giving up one version of reality for another. That’s what entering the prison was about. Not a dramatic flip-flop of values. That would be too easy. If black became white and good became bad and fast became slow, the players could learn the trick of reversing labels, and soon the upside-down world would seem natural. Prison is more perverse. Inside the walls nothing is certain, nothing can be taken for granted except the arbitrary exercise of absolute power. Rules engraved in stone one day will be superseded the next. What you don’t know can always hurt you. And the prison rules are designed to keep you ignorant, keep you guessing, insure your vulnerability. Think of a fun-house mirror, a floor-to-ceiling sheet of undulating glass. Images ripple across its curved surface constantly changing. Anything caught in the mirror is bloated, distorted. Prison’s like that mirror. Prison rules and regulations, the day-to-day operation of the institution, confront the inmate with an image of himself that is grotesque, absurd. A prisoner who refuses to internalize this image, who insists upon seeing other versions of himself, is in constant danger.

  Somebody with a wry sense of humor had a field day naming the cluster of tiny streets bordering Western Penitentiary. Doerr, Refuge, Ketchum. When I reached the left turn at Doerr that would take me along the south wall of the prison to the parking-lot entrance, I still wasn’t ready to go inside. I kept driving past the prison till the street I was on dead-ended. A U-turn in the lot of a chemical factory pointed me back toward the penitentiary and then for a few long minutes I sat in the car.

  The city had vanished. Western Penitentiary was a million miles away. Taking a new route had been like reneging on my end of a bargain and now I had to pay the penalty. Certain magic words had not been chanted, the stone had not rolled away. I was displaced, out of time. Five days a week going about the business of earning a living, other people drove into the lot where I sat. Punching in and punching out. Doing their time in the shadow of the prison. The forty-foot-high stone walls did not exist for them. Caged men were a figment of someone’s imagination, just as the workers parking in this lot each day were being imagined by me. How could one world reside so placidly next to the other? Men coming and going to their jobs, other men whose job was occupying the locked cells that created the prison. Ordinary men and prisoners, a factory and a penitentiary under the same gray sky. I couldn’t move.

  I heard myself in the factory cafeteria haranguing the workers:

  Do you ever think about it? About that place over there? I mean when you drive by in the morning or when you’re on your way home to your family or whatever? Do you see it? Do you ever wonder what’s happening inside? What kind of men are locked up in there? Why are they inside and you outside? Can you imagine what happens when the lights go out at night? What do the prisoners think of you?

  I’d lose my cool. Start shouting and pointing and get belligerent. People would be scared away. What kind of nut was I? Why was I hassling them? Go bug the prisoners. Preach to them. They’re the bad guys.

  Sitting alone in my mother’s Chevette, the prison a half mile down the road, I turned off the motor so I could hear the factory humming and clanking within its low-slung brick walls behind my back. I was lost. The artificiality of visiting came down on me. I lived far away. Light-years away on a freezing planet, a planet empty except for the single solitary cell I inhabited. Visiting was illusion, deceit. I was separated from my brother by millions of stars. As distant as the employees of Chase Chemical Company who passed him every day on their way to work.

  I focused on the ritual, the succession of things to be done in order to enter the prison. In my mind I passed through the iron gates of the official parking lot, I glanced at the stone walls, the river as I crossed the crowded lot to the visitors’ annex. I climbed the steep concrete stairs. I faced the guard in his cage outside the waiting room, presented my identification, stated my brother’s name and number, my relationship to him, wrote all that down on a sheet of mimeo paper, then found a seat in the dingy room, avoiding the blank faces of other visitors, frustration and anger building as I wait, wait, wait for the magic call that allows me down the steps, across a courtyard, up more steps, through steel doors and iron-barred doors into the lounge where my brother waits.

  I saw it all happening, as it had happened many times before. Dreaming the process, the steps one by one, and then I could do it. Turn the key to start the engine. Begin the visit again.

  During the half mile back down Preble Street I thought of death. Entertained the silly idea that what was most frightening about dying was the inability to rehearse it. You only died once, so you couldn’t anticipate what would be required of you. You couldn’t tame death by practicing. You couldn’t ease it step by step from the darkness of the unknown into the light. Visiting prison is like going to a funeral parlor. Both situations demand unnatural responses, impose a peculiar discipline on the visitor. The need to hold on wars with the need to let go, and the visitor is stuck in the middle, doing both, doing neither. You are mourning, bereaved but you pretend the shell in the coffin is somehow connected with the vital, breathing person you once knew. You pretend a life has not been stolen, snatched away forever. You submit to the unnatural setting controlled by faceless intermediaries, even though you understand the setting has been contrived not so much to allay your grief, your sense of loss but to profit from them, mock them, and mock the one you need to see.

  In the half mile back to the prison as the walls loom higher and nearer I asked the question I always must when a visit is imminent: Is Rob still alive? The possibility of sudden, violent death hangs over my brother’s head every minute of every day so when I finally reach the guard’s cage and ask for P3468, my heart stands still and I’m filled with the numbing irony of wishing, of praying that the guard will nod his head and say, Yes, your brother’s still inside.

  After the solid steel door, before the barred, locked gate into the visiting area proper, each visitor must pass through a metal-detecting machine. The reason for such a security measure is clear; the extreme sensitivity of the machine is less easily explained. Unless the point is inflicting humiliation on visitors. Especially women visitors whose underclothes contain metal stays and braces, women who wear intimate jewelry they never remove from their bodies. Grandmothers whose wedding rings are imbedded in the flesh of their fingers. When the machine bleeps, everything it discovers must go. You say it’s a wire in your bra, lady. Well, I’m sorry about that but you gotta take it off. Of course the women have a choice. They can strip off the offending garment or ornament, and don one of the dowdy smocks the state provides for such contingencies. Or they can go back home.

  I dump wallet, watch, change and belt in a plastic tray, kick off my sandals because they have metal buckles, tiptoe barefoot through the needle’s eye without incident. I wonder about my kids’ orthodonture. The next time they come to visit Robby, what will the machine say about the metal braces on their teeth? What will the guards say? Whose responsibility will it be to inspect the kids’ mouths for weapons? Will the boys feel like horses on sale? Have I taught Dan and Jake enough about their history so that they’ll recall auction blocks and professional appraisers of human flesh? And the silver chain Judy has worn since Jamila’s birth? The good-luck charm she believes kept them both alive those terrible weeks in the hospital and hasn’t left her neck since?

  But I’m alone this trip and I pass through. No sweat. Not like the time in an airport during the early seventies when paranoia about skyjacking was rampant and a lone black male, youngish, large, athletically built, casually dressed, “fit” the profile of an air pirate and I was pulled aside for special searching. Who conceived the profile, who determined its accuracy, its scientific, objective utility, who decided it was okay
to body-search an individual who fit the profile, were matters not discussed in public and certainly not with me. Protesting too vehemently either the search or its validity could quickly become a crime in itself. If not an offense serious enough to get you arrested, at least grounds for barring you from your flight. A question as highfalutin as the constitutionality of this hit-and-miss harassment, these kangaroo courts instantly set up in airports across the nation, such a question from a youngish, largish, casually dressed, lone, black male would have closed the case, proven the appropriateness of the profile for netting not only skyjackers but loudmouthed, radical militants.

  As I passed through the prison’s metal detector I was recalling my adventure in Denver’s Stapleton airport and remembering another time around the Christmas holidays when my sons were forced to unload their new cowboy pistols from our carry-on bags and stow them in the baggage hold, a precaution I thought was silly, even funny, until I watched a passenger who arrived behind us talk his way onto the plane with a .38 in his briefcase. He was an off-duty cop, like the moonlighting security guards policing the baggage-inspection area. A whispered conversation, a couple hearty laughs and winks among good ole boys, a pat on the shoulder, and this white guy and his pistol were on the plane. Meanwhile my whole family was forced to wait for special cardboard containers that would secure my kids’ toy guns out of reach in the plane’s belly. Yes. I was angry both times. The stifled, gut-deep rage that’s American as apple pie. The black rage that makes you want to strike out and smash somebody’s face because you know they have you by the throat, killing you by inches. You know you’re being singled out, discriminated against simply because the person doing it to you has the power to get away with it and you’re powerless to stop him. Not funny when it happens. But in retrospect what could be more hilarious than a black American outraged because his rights are denied? Where’s he been? Who’s kidding whom? Hasn’t the poor soul heard what Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney announced loud and clear as the law of the land, a law lodged in the heart of the country, a law civil rights legislation has yet to unseat: Blacks “have no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

  Rephrase Justice Taney’s dictum so it reads, “The weak have no rights that the strong are bound to respect.” Its universal applicability, its continuing force as law in the workings of our society becomes clear. Inscribe it in a slightly different form over the entrance to Western Penitentiary—Prisoners have no rights that the keepers are bound to respect—and you’ve generated the motto of the prison. Lots of words and much blood have been spilled attempting to justify, destroy, or sustain democratic institutions in America. An unresolved paradox remains always at the core of the notion of majority rule. Minority rights exist only at the sufferance of the majority, and since the majority is ultimately governed by self-interest, the majority’s self-interest determines any minority’s fate. No rights that they are bound to respect. Certainly not as long as they’re bound to self-interest, to the greatest good for the greatest number. The keepers run prisons with little or no regard for prisoners’ rights because license to exercise absolute power has been granted by those who rule society.

  When a convicted criminal enters prison, he is first stripped of the clothing that connects him to the outside world. Re-dressed in a prison uniform, subjected to prison discipline, the inmate undergoes an abrupt transformation of who and what he is. The prisoner is being integrated into a new world, new terms of existence. Among orthodox Jews, a father may say Kaddish for a living son or daughter who has committed some unforgivable transgression. In this rare circumstance, Kaddish, a prayer of mourning, is also a declaration of death. The child becomes as dead to the father, a nonperson, cut off absolutely from all contact, a shadow the father will not acknowledge, a ghost referred to in the past tense as one who once was. Everyday hundreds of prisoners experience a similar transition into a condition of nonexistence. Strangely, we have yet to name this declaration of civil death, this ritual that absolves us from responsibility for the prisoner’s fate.

  Although society declares to the prisoner you are no longer one of us, you are beyond the pale, the prisoner’s body continues to breathe, his mind nags and races; he must be somewhere, something. He wants to know, as we all need to know: what am I? Into the vacuum society creates when it exiles the prisoner, step the keepers. In theory, their job is to guard incarcerated bodies, but because no one else speaks to the prisoners or for the prisoners, the keepers exercise an incredible power over their charges. Keepers can’t pretend the inmates don’t exist. They must create a landscape, an environment that secures the prisoners placed in their hands. As the keepers decide what time prisoners must awaken, when they may clean themselves, when they may eat, to whom they may speak, how they may wear their hair, which patches of ground they may march across and how long they may take crossing them, as the keepers constrict space and limit freedom, as the inmates are forced to conform to these mandates, an identity is fashioned for the prisoners. Guarding the inmates’ bodies turns out to be a license for defining what a prisoner is. The tasks are complementary, in fact inseparable.

  Prisoners are a unique minority; they exist in a political, ethical limbo vis-à-vis free-world people. Out of sight, out of mind. Prisons segregate absolutely a troublesome minority from the majority. It’s in the self-interest of the majority to suspend all ties to prisoners. A brutal but simple expedient for accomplishing this suspension is to lock up prisoners and charge the prisons with one task: keep these misfits away from us.

  America’s eight hundred prisons contain an “inmate nation” of nearly half a million souls. Time magazine in 1982 estimated that the prison population grows by 170 people each day, that it has doubled since 1970 and would double again by 1988. Approximately one out of six hundred Americans is in prison, a percentage surpassed only in the notoriously oppressive regimes of the Soviet Union and South Africa. Other sources declare that 2.5 million Americans are under some sort of correctional supervision (reform schools, jails, etc.) at a cost to the public of 4.8 billion dollars a year. The nation’s prisons are hopelessly overcrowded. More cells are being constructed daily.

  A careful reading of the literature of corrections reveals that the custodial function of prisons is paramount in the public eye. A recidivism rate of over 70 percent is stale news, but prison breaks make the front pages. Wardens and guards are fired for allowing their charges to escape. One escapee can make a whole prison system look bad, while the death of one or five or twenty inmates in a bloody riot protesting prison conditions is treated as an acceptable cost in maintaining institutional discipline and security. Whatever else prisons might or might not accomplish (moral rehabilitation, vocational training, education, punishment, deterrence) seldom arouses public concern so long as prisons keep the bad guys away. The length of prison sentences in most states has been steadily increasing in the past five years. In New Jersey, for instance, the average prison sentence grew by 40 percent between 1978 and 1982. Society’s prescription for handling those adjudged criminals is becoming less and less ambiguous. Lock em up and throw away the key. Separation must be absolute. We don’t care how you do it. The point is, we want these dangerous ones out of our hair and as long as you keep them out we won’t bother you. The moral and ethical principles that bind society don’t count inside prison. You, the custodians, formulate whatever rules, whatever system you require to keep the prisoners in captivity. You must stand between them and us. You are not a connection between the free world and the prison world but a chasm, a wall, a two-sided, unbreakable mirror. When we look at you we see ourselves. We see order and justice. Your uniforms, your rules reflect humane discipline. We see our faces, a necessarily severe aspect of our nature in the stern mask above your martial attire. When prisoners gaze into the reverse side of the mirror they should see the deformed aberrations they’ve become. Keepers are set in place to reflect and sustain this duality. In between the bright mirrors stretches an abyss.

>   My papers are in order, I’ve survived the gaundet of minor annoyances and humiliations, so I’m allowed into the lounge where inmates and their visitors meet at Western Penitentiary. I have a minute or two before Robby pops in from his side of the mirror. He must undergo a strip search, bend over and spread the cheeks of his ass, before he enters and again when he leaves. The room is longish, rectangular, sleaze yellow. Vending machines line one wall. At the far end of the room, three small desk-height tables reserved for lawyers and their clients. A double row of benches and chairs set back to back extends through the center of the room, forming two aisles. Another row of seats runs the length of the third wall. A guard sitting behind a high, narrow, rostrum-like desk presides over the visitors’ entrance to the lounge. Next to him an enclosed, inmate-supervised play corner for kids.

  I take it all in too quickly, automatically. Like gulping a dose of nasty medicine to kill the taste. The room’s so familiar it recedes immediately into the background. I remind myself, force myself to notice details. Is there anything different about the physical setting, have new signs been posted, has the furniture been rearranged, can I detect any mood, any threat in a quick survey of the room and its occupants? It’s dangerous inside the prison walls to lose your edge, your precise awareness of what’s happening, what’s at stake. Awareness, consciousness, no matter how painful, are the only tools you have to work with. Your only advantage in the game the keepers have designed so they always win.

  Robby hugs me, we clasp hands. My arm goes round his body and I hug him back. Our eyes meet. What won’t be said, can’t be said no matter how long we talk, how much I write, hovers in his eyes and mine. We know where we are, what’s happening, how soon this tiny opening allowing us to touch will be slammed shut. All that in our eyes, and I can’t take seeing it any longer than he can. The glance we exchange is swift, is full of fire, of unsayable rage and pain. Neither of us can hold it more than a split second. He sees in me what I see in him. The knowledge that this place is bad, worse than bad. That the terms under which we are meeting stink. That living under certain conditions is less than no life at all, and what we have to do, ought to do, is make our stand here, together. That dying with your hands on an enemy’s throat is better than living under his boot. Just a flash. The simplest, purest solution asserting itself. I recognize what Rob is thinking. I know he knows what’s rushing through my mind. Fight. Forget the games, the death by inches buying time. Fight till they kill us or let us go. If we die fighting, it will be a good day to die. The right day. The right way.