Cuz

by Danielle Allen

  The other change that Karen noticed while Michael was in Centinela (the Spanish word for “sentinel”) was the arrival of tattoos. Not many. To the very end, Michael had nowhere nearly as many tattoos as the other inmates around him. Some had inked every visible inch of skin and, probably, the rest as well, using pieces and parts from ball point pens and portable CD players to set up ad hoc tattoo parlors. But when Michael left for adult prison, Karen had asked for only one thing—that he not get a tattoo. He knew, though, how to forestall her wrath. For his first tattoo, around his wrist, he chose her name, “Karen.”

  “I never asked for anything else,” she recalled. “When I saw my name, I was just furious.”

  But then, she says, she had a realization. “The one thing I realized was that it was his world now. I couldn’t control what was going on. He had to do whatever he had to do to take care of himself.”

  From Centinela, Michael transferred after three years first to Chino’s California Institution for Men and then to the California Rehabilitation Center at Norco. By the time he reached Norco just before 2000, Karen realized that she had seen her boy change from child to man. When he entered Centinela, she remembers, his conversation was full of phrases like “I need” and “Can you send me?” By the turn of the millennium, though, this had shifted.

  Now he asked, “Mommy, how are you doing; are you taking care of yourself?”

  MAP OF PLACES WHERE MICHAEL WAS INCARCERATED

  Although I was eight years older than Michael, by the dawn of the millennium it appeared that he had grown up faster than I. Graduate school prolongs a state of dependence, and I started my first full-time job only in 1998 at the age of twenty-six. By then, Michael had been in prison, surviving even in an adult facility, for several years. When in 1999 Michael and I picked up a relationship that had lapsed when I left for graduate school in England, we found ourselves closer to being peers than we had been as children. The eight years between us had seemingly diminished to only a few. This gave us the chance to become friends on an equal footing and to confide in each other. He was as shaken as I by my parents’ 1999 divorce. The seeming stability of their marriage had been as much of an orienting point for him as it had for me.

  “NORCO, CA STATE PRISON” 2015, PHOTO BY STEPHEN TOURLENTES

  When Michael and I reconnected in the late nineties, he was transitioning through Chino—a notoriously tough prison—and landing in Norco, the final stop on his journey. Sometime after I moved to Chicago in January of 1998 to start teaching at the University of Chicago, Michael and I began talking regularly on the phone. Once he moved to Norco, I began to visit him regularly, every other week in the summer, and once or twice during the Christmas holidays, depending on the visiting schedule. The only seasonal differences I remember in those prison visits had to do with the weather: warm or chilly. I don’t recall any holiday decorations inside the prison, probably for good reason. Christmas ornaments would surely have made excellent weapons. Over my seven or eight years of visiting Michael, the environment in the visiting area was utterly unchanging.

  15.

  NORCO

  Norco’s full name was and is California Rehabilitation Center–Norco, but it’s not clear how much genuine rehabilitation was on offer during the years that Michael was there. It was among the state’s older prisons, having been built in 1928 as the Lake Norconian Club, an actual luxury hotel, on an actual lake. Its focus was supposed to be on drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and during discussions of possible prison closures in 2005, its warden defended it on the basis of the quality of its drug treatment program. But Michael didn’t need that sort of rehabilitation, and the prison didn’t offer much beyond that. There was the obligatory poorly stocked library but few classes or, at least, nothing past the GED level. College and university classes were all scrapped in the 1990s because of budget cuts, and in 1996 the state and federal government ceased providing prisoners access to Pell Grants for correspondence courses. Higher education, once seen as an antidote to recidivism, had been reconceived as a privilege that inmates had not earned.

  There were jobs to be had: kitchen (bad) and working on paperwork for inmate reception and release (better). Michael had a radio in his cell, and he could purchase toiletries and snacks at the prison canteen, with funds from his minimal earnings or money orders sent by family. We all sent money periodically—Karen, my father, my brother, me. Probably other cousins, too. We knew he was often hungry; the meals were bland and insufficient. But whenever he got a money order, he would binge on items from the canteen even though he had actually wanted the funds to pay for a steady supply of extra snacks.

  Theft was a perennial problem in the prison and exacerbated the feast-or-famine habits of poverty. When Michael bought a new round of snacks, like Pop-Tarts or burritos, he was afraid that he would lose them; that they’d be stolen, and then, if he hadn’t already eaten them, that he would just have nothing. So he ate everything all at once when he got it. There was a limit, though, on how often a prisoner could receive a money order or package, so once he’d binged, he had to go hungry for weeks. Once, we worked it out to send him double the money so that he could buy two sets of snacks, hiding one set away to be his permanent backup. The idea was that, if he had the reassurance of a backup supply, it would be easier for him to resist the urge to eat all of his snacks immediately. I’d gotten the idea from some sociological studies of poverty I’d been reading. This worked for a few months. He was able to pace himself. But then he wasn’t, or maybe the backup pack got scented out by another inmate and stolen. I don’t really know what happened to that plan, but in the end the feast-or-famine rhythm won.

  Michael would call at least once a week, sometimes more often, except for when the prison was on lockdown because of outbreaks of violence. Then you might go weeks without hearing from him. I was a good phone partner because I could afford the astronomical collect-call charges from the phone company. Every call began with a reminder, a robotic voice saying, “This is the California Department of Corrections. Will you accept the charges?” And then, every fifteen seconds, as if we could forget, there was another recorded interruption: “This call has originated from a California State Prison.”

  Michael always called because he needed contact, which meant that if he called and you were there you needed to make time. Very often this brought great joy. It was always a relief to hear Michael’s voice again, to hear that (usually) he still sounded more or less like himself, and that life went on. Sometimes, though, it was also hard to need to be available at whatever point Michael got his chance to call.

  My first husband, Bob, then a professor of poetry at the University of Chicago and a lover of boxing, did a lot for Michael, something for which I will always be grateful. He was always ready to step in if I couldn’t do a whole call at the moment the phone rang. If I wasn’t home, Michael would speak to Bob. If Bob wasn’t home, he would speak to my stepson, Isaac, with whom Michael was playing chess by snail mail, one move every few weeks. Like everyone else who knew Michael, Isaac, too, developed a great fondness for him, and Michael loved having someone to teach.

  Michael had a lot of correspondents, actually, and each of us probably had a completely different relationship with him. For my stepson, it was all about chess. For Mother H., the wife of the pastor at one of Michael’s family’s churches, it must have been about God. Once he moved to Norco, Michael converted from Islam back to Christianity and started leading Bible study classes. I think the motivation to convert had mainly to do with where in the prison he thought he was mostly likely to find people with whom to live a more settled, stable life in a world where violence and conflict were otherwise the daily staple. But he wept when Mother H. died, so there was something deeper there, too, something we never discussed.

  With my husband and me, the conversation was generally about school, reflecting the overwhelming philosophy of the extended family. Michael desperately wanted to go to college. He had a lively mind and wanted,
above all, to learn French. My family had lived in France for a year, the year before Michael was born, and we sometimes spoke French at home. Somehow that lodged in him deeply. Learning French was one of his life goals. He tried in high school and tried again in prison.

  I not only respected but revered Michael’s desire to learn. I didn’t care whether it was French, Malayalam, medieval architecture, or the history of the Black Panthers. Getting him into college became my single most intense aspiration. I believe in education. I believed in Michael. To myself I did not formulate my pursuit of this goal in any way clearer or more definite than that. I just know with every fiber of my being that education makes life better. Period. My parents had always told me that when I graduated from high school, I could get a job or go to college. If the latter, they would help me; if the former, I would be on my own. Either way, after I finished studying, they would have nothing else to leave me because they would have already given me everything in giving me an education. (Perhaps this is why I have never left school!) With the same ferocity of purpose, I sought to do the same for my own baby, my little cousin. I suppose it matters, too, that at this point, married to a much older man, who already had two sons, I did not expect to have children of my own.

  LETTER FROM MICHAEL TO ISAAC, THE AUTHOR’S STEPSON

  I started off, of course, in my usual way. I undertook the obligatory research to figure out how getting Michael a college degree might be possible. On November 8, 2001, only eight weeks after September 11, Michael mailed me his application to Indiana University’s Program in General Studies, and I mailed it onward with a check. Allens both, we aimed high. We aimed for the bachelor’s degree in general studies. The day he was admitted to start with the January 2002 sequence of classes was as exhilarating as the day I received my own fat envelope from Princeton thirteen years earlier. World events were at a great distance from Norco. As the rest of the country was pivoting to a war footing, we were getting ready to go to school.

  Michael was interested not only in French but also in philosophy and literature. Each department had appealing introductory classes, but there was a catch. No hardcover books were allowed into the prison. Michael could enroll only in classes for which the textbooks had soft covers. I had to make another round of phone calls. It turned out that, with this filter, French was out as was Introduction to Philosophy. The choices that remained were Intro to Ethics and Intro to Writing and Study of Literature. Michael chose Lit 141 with Professor Donald J. White, an earnest teacher who gave even his incarcerated students extensive and astute feedback. I paid the fees and ordered the books and, for Michael, something new began.

  New Year’s came and so did the Bible, the Odyssey, the Inferno, the Canterbury Tales, and the Persian Letters. But it didn’t go well. Michael had trouble completing the assignments. There were distractions, of course—racial melees, Bible study, work in the office. For whatever reason, Michael couldn’t quite get traction with the reading; he could not secure an oasis for reflection and focus. At some point in the year, Bob and I came to the conclusion that doing college in prison was unlikely to work for Michael. Conversations had started in the family about where Michael should go in four years’ time when he got out. We hadn’t yet learned about the requirement that he parole to the county where he committed his crime, and, in conversations with Karen, Bob and I volunteered to have him come to Chicago to live with us and go to school. Bob was deeply involved, as I mentioned, with the world of boxing, and closely tied to a black gym on the Southside. We had any number of young men passing through our house, seeking help of one kind or another. We’d been fostering one young homeless teenager, and had helped him get to college. We thought we could do the same for Michael.

  We hadn’t shared this with him yet. Then, in late September 2002, we stopped hearing from him. This is a routine feature of corresponding with an inmate, and there’s little you can do. If the inmate has died, you’ll learn about it. Otherwise, it’s very hard to extract information from the prison itself. It’s radio silence until the inmate gets an opportunity to get a message out, officially or unofficially.

  In early November, we learned why we hadn’t heard from Michael. Another “racial melee” had broken out at Norco, and Michael had been sent to the nearby Chino prison pending the completion of an investigation into his alleged participation in the incident. Norco didn’t have facilities for “Administrative Segregation” or, in more ordinary parlance, solitary confinement, hence the transfer to Chino. After a month in “the hole,” as inmates called it, without his property, including his address book, and without even paper and pencil, he was found not guilty and was finally able to write.

  “CHINO, CA STATE PRISON” 2015, PHOTO BY STEPHEN TOURLENTES

  The relevant evidence for finding him not guilty had been gathered right at the beginning of the process: “Several of us were randomly picked because no participants could be identified. I had an old abrasion under my eye from playing basketball. The nurse confirmed the abrasion was sealed and was presently healing, meaning the scar was older than one hour.” Yet still he was in the hole for a month.

  Inmate family chat sites yield the following sort of advice for when your “man is in the hole”:

  YOU MIGHT WANT TO SEND HIM STAMPS, ENVELOPES AND PAPER AND ALSO ANY ADDRESSES THAT HE MAY NOT BE ABLE TO REMEMBER BY HEART BECAUSE HE WONT HAVE ANY OF THAT WITH HIM-GOOD LUCK AND HANG IN THERE!

  Large-scale race fights in the prison would put the prison on lockdown multiple times of year. They could result in one or another racial group being punished with a restriction of visits. Michael once confided to me that he had a “melee” partner, a Latino inmate with whom, when fights broke out, he in essence danced so that they could make it look as if they were fighting each other. The “melees” could involve all three major racial groups in the prison simultaneously—white, black, and Latino—or only two of those groups. Any number of things might trigger a melee—from a crosswise word or look, to a killing on the outside that needed to be revenged on the inside. The political dynamics of prisons are complex.

  Sometime during his time in “the hole” in Chino, he did get a letter from my father, Uncle William, sharing the news of the proposal for him to move to Chicago to live with Bob and me. Michael wrote us a long letter in response:

  I received a letter from Uncle William and he told me that he had spoken with you. As you know, probably, I was unable to complete the course. I cannot fully blame my most recent situation [the administrative segregation]. Prior to the incident, I was doubting myself. I became unsure of myself and was scared that I would fail. Not just myself but my family who is putting a lot of love, trust, and faith in me. Faith which I sometimes lack in myself. During the time I was isolated, I recognize that I was wallowing in self-pity. For no apparent reason except that it distracted me from giving thought to what’s outside these walls. Though my need, desire, and wanting to come home is overwhelming, I am half afraid that I will not succeed. I overestimated myself and was disappointed with the results I was getting from my class. . . . I had thought that I was prepared but that was another overestimation. . . . But in all honesty, I was never prepared (mentally or emotionally) for what you did for me. Three years ago I had given up on taking college courses and settled with the idea that I would have to wait until I came home. Now Uncle William tells me that you and Bob would like for me to stay with you and start a new life going to college. For several days I was speechless. I was only able to write Uncle William due to the necessity of my situation. Outside of that I was paralyzed with happiness. I was confused because I didn’t understand it. I didn’t do anything to deserve such a generous gesture of love. And it is for this reason I am confident and content in my ability to make something of myself. No matter the circumstances, I can do it. It’s simple. I have to do it. . . . I would like to repeat the Lit 141 class again. I have all the books and I know that I am ready. I’ve learned much over the past year, and I know I can apply it correctly. Be
fore I send this letter, I want to ask if you have finished writing your book, Talking to Strangers. I hope you have been able to further your writing. . . . Love always, Michael.

  Bob and I did not see ourselves as doing something worthy of this degree of gratitude. I was crushed that Michael could not imagine taking an invitation such as the one we were making for granted. Still, I was glad that he wanted to come, and I was glad not just for his sake. Michael and I were on our way to becoming writing partners. I would tell him about my efforts with my academic books. I would test out arguments on him.

  Did he know, I would ask, that Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, who had tried to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, had sewn her own dress for the first day of school? Onto the bottom section of her full-skirted dress, she had sewn a band of black-and-white checked fabric. Her dress, I said, was a flag flown for her own vision of integration. How brutally she was received by the segregationist crowds when she walked alone to school that day. Her family, which didn’t have a phone, had not gotten the message that the kids were to assemble early that morning and make the way to school as a group, escorted by ministers and police. Turned away from the school, by the National Guard, Elizabeth walked, shoulders bowed, seeking safety, and, in the trauma, slipped into a silence that lasted for days. Flying her flag for integration, she had been ready to make a sacrifice—to submit herself to the barrage—for a higher purpose, but this country took too much.