Cuz

by Danielle Allen

  All right. So now you know more about me than anybody other than my husband, my second husband, that is. Our wedding took place barely a month before Michael’s murder.

  But, no, I was not in prison as a convict, and this is thanks to my father, my mother, and my God. Yet even as someone who could come and go, I felt the prison’s mark, its branding fork. I felt it in my soul, even though all I was, there, was a day’s sojourner.

  What exactly did I feel? The women were gloriously flamboyant in their dress. Not me. I’m a bookworm and more or less dress like one. A lot of black, now and then some bright color. But for these prison trips I probably pretty much always wore all black. Black T-shirts, black linen pants. Tennis shoes. You have to do something to lift your spirit up when you go into the prisons. I didn’t do it with clothes. I did it with conversation. I understand the show, the color, the make-up. But I wasn’t there to visit a boyfriend. I was there to visit an Allen. One proud member of a proud family come to see another, both of us trying to pretend we had not been broken. We talked about ideas—about books and people; about freedom and politics.

  To explain why I was there in that prison, I could try to say that Allens have a fierce bond and that we stick by our own. This would be right and wrong at the same time. The right part about that story has to do with our all being sprung from J. P. Allen, north Floridian island fisherman turned Baptist preacher, patriarchal head of a sprawling family, half of it official, half of it enjoyed in secret. For this reason, J. P.’s progeny extended to a cousinage that adds up to an uncountable number. Yet there is surely not a one of us from either the official or the secret branch who does not have in our soul the sights and sounds of tall, bald, lean, and leonine J. P. thundering from a church pulpit in gorgeous gospel

  baritone:

  He’s a battle axe

  In the time of battle

  He’s a battle axe

  In the time of battle

  He’s a shelter

  In the time of storm

  We are fighters, we Allens. And sometimes we fight with each other. That’s where the idea that Allens just stick together breaks down. The whole tribe is full of its broken branches, but for those who haven’t fallen into fights, the bond is adamantine. My father and his sister, Michael’s mother, have had that permanent bond.

  We Allens are also an upright people. The Allens have incredible posture, and this is not an accident. We are free people. We have been free a long time, even if one of our forefathers was also, briefly, enslaved through deceit and trickery.

  When I went to visit my cousin in prison, I did not feel like a free person. The reason for this is very simple. In that prison, even as only a sojourner, I was not a free person.

  Every element of my dress, behavior, affect and time was controlled. Visiting Michael in prison, I learned to say, “Yes, ma’am,” and “Yes, sir,” to people in authority. I still do it, although now as a sort of inside joke to myself, as a favor to the person whom I so address. It’s a favor because I am free, and I don’t have to say that, and so now it is a way of gently ennobling them, rather than of expressing any submission.

  So who am I and why did I help my cousin? I am an Allen. Some branches of the Allens just do help Allens. My father helped his sister Karen, my cousin’s mother. I, my father’s daughter, help Karen’s children, the cousins I grew up with. It is just what we do. They help me, too. They know me. They’ve known me since childhood. They take pleasure in my accomplishments and laugh at my foolishness.

  To help my cousin, among other things, I went to prison, which it turns out, hurt me even more than I had realized, and which fact perhaps explains why other members of our immediate family were not able to make those trips.

  When May rolled round, Michael always sent his mother a Mother’s Day card. During his last few years in prison, he always sent me one, too.

  You try it sometime, going to prison, even just for a day. There are lots of people who need visits but don’t get any.

  19.

  DIZZY

  After Michael got out of the hole in the fall of 2002, he gave his Indiana University college course another try. By six months in, just past spring break season, Michael was making good progress—worrying about his upcoming midterm like any other college student. With regard to jobs inside prison, though, he’d gotten stuck. He had been trying to put himself forward for the better jobs, desk jobs instead of kitchen jobs or physical labor. In quick succession, for reasons he didn’t know, he’d failed to get two jobs that he really wanted. But somehow in the course of those efforts, he learned from a supervisor that he might be eligible for the inmate firefighting crew that Norco sponsored for the California Department of Forestry. The inmates were trained to tackle California’s fearsome wildfires, and joining the fire camp would mean time outside the prison.

  Only “Level 1” inmates, however, could be assigned to fire camp. These were inmates without a “violent” code in their file, and Michael was not one of these. He’d been coded “violent” when he first went to prison because of the nature of his offense. But an attentive supervisor helped him realize that, on account of his youthfulness upon arrest and his behavior since he had been in prison, he ought to be eligible to get the “violent” code removed. And so it transpired that in May of 2003, at his annual review, Michael was downgraded. His spirit leapt. For the first time in a long time, he had something to look forward to.

  Days later, Michael got to go outside. He got assigned to fire camp on May 19, 2003, his first day outside of prison or a prison transport vehicle in almost eight years. The training involved learning to hike in and out of canyons, how to cut “firelines,” the breaks in fuel sources that are supposed to stop a greedy fire in its tracks. He learned how to use shovels and rakes for this work, and learned crew roles like captain, swamper, and dragspoon. He recorded those first four days.

  5-19-03

  Day 1–I felt real dizzy. I’ve always thought I would be acutely aware of everything on that first day. I felt myself panic. For an instant I even wanted to run back inside. The free air had me coughing alot. Going up the mountain I saw the sky was noticeably different from in prison. Even though it has been the same sky since the beginning of time. I really started to take a lot in going down the mountain. Yellow small flowers lined the trail. There were purple ones as well.

  5-20-03

  Day 2–I noticed the trees this time. I saw them on day 1 but this morning they seemed to speak to me “look at me.” My mouth actually watered in desire never to leave the trees’ side. When I got up the mountain I noticed people were around. I was in awe observing life outside of prison. I pictured people going to work, school, or even shopping. It made me groan inside.

  5-21-03

  Day 3–I saw people horse riding. Other guys were laughing because the ladies were overweight and they mocked feeling sorry for the horse. I felt sick because these guys were making jokes as if they were better than them. I thought at least they can do what they want when they want.

  5-22-03

  Day 4–I was irritated and partly distracted as a result of eating prunes earlier this morning. I won’t do that again. On the way back I found myself feeling depressed. Even as I write I feel my eyes teary. It is a blessing to be able to leave and come back. But, it hurts to leave knowing I’ll come back.

  During this stretch of time, something else big happened. Michael fell in love. I remember a phone call. I can’t remember precisely when it was. But I remember his words, “I’ve met someone, Danielle. She’s beautiful.” I remember my sense of utter confusion. “Met someone? How? Where?” I couldn’t compute how Michael could have met a woman. Was it a guard he’d met? There were women guards in the visiting room whom I’d gotten to know over my visits. But in some sort of fumbling way, we came to understand each other. Michael had fallen in love with a fellow inmate, a man named Isaiah with implants or hormone-induced breasts who dressed and lived as Bree. She was, he said, unquestionably the
most beautiful woman in the prison.

  He hadn’t told his mother, but he told me, and he wanted me to promise to say nothing. He knew his mother would be upset and he feared she would judge him. He hoped I wouldn’t.

  I didn’t judge him. I suppose there was a twinge of surprise, but I didn’t really reflect on the specifics of the relationship. I loved my lesbian aunt, Big Ros, and her partner had done my hair throughout my middle school years. I was used to going with the flow of people’s sexual identities. Nor did I ask about what Bree had done to land in Norco. Michael and I never spoke about what any of his fellow inmates had done to land in prison and this case was no exception. I didn’t learn until after Michael’s death what Bree was in for. I just accepted that Michael had found someone inside who seemed to mean something to him and make him happy and I was glad. I didn’t address any of my reflections to any sort of imagined future. I reacted only to the present, and Michael’s voice on the phone was content in a way that I had never heard. I wanted him to have that.

  Like freedom, desire was dizzying to Michael. A month later, Michael sent me a piece of writing unlike anything else he ever sent me. “The world has change and brothas far from the same,” he rapped and continued:

  Am I losing my mind

  No; I think I found it

  Realizing greatness in one’s self is very astounding

  and truth be told, I recognize a King

  cause when I look in the mirror all I see is me

  And us, so please trust, we can’t be touch

  standing together forever is a necessary must.

  Soon enough, he sent me Bree’s annual prison shot. She was posed as a woman, lying on the floor like a sports pinup, made up and in colorful clothing. Bree was beautiful or, at least, in that territory, and certainly ready to compete with Hisprettygirl and Jackjack, the women who sought to turn the prison visiting room into the site of their “hot dates.” I don’t have that picture anymore, but I do have Michael’s words describing, I think, the impression that Bree made on him. He shared the experience in the form of an essay that he had just written about “The Knight’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. He called his essay “Two Tales and Four Desires.”

  In “The Knight’s Tale,” two cousins of royal blood have both been imprisoned for life in a tower. One of them, Palamon, glimpses a lady, Emily, walking in the garden near the prison. “Desire immediately sets in,” Michael wrote and added, quoting Chaucer, “and Palamon wants Emily. He cries out in pain ‘he blenched and gave a cry as though he had been stabbed, and to the heart.’” Like me, the cousin, Arcite, thinks Palamon’s distress is caused by his imprisonment and chides him to endure. But “Palamon tells Arcite that prison has nothing to do with his distress but it is from a lady that he sees wandering in a garden below the tower.” Arcite looks out the window “and he is also hurt by her beauty.”

  If “The Knight’s Tale” tells the story of aristocrats in love, Michael wrote, “The Miller’s Tale” tells a story of peasants in love, but a shared theme of desire’s power unites the two tales. He concluded, “Desire is powerful and it creates a lot of other emotions. It makes men do things that they probably would not normally do.” He expressed his core point this way: “In both tales, we could not predict the decisions that men filled by longing and desire would make. Nor could we correctly guess the outcome of their decisions.”

  Michael spoke oracular words. He prophesied. He knew, without knowing that he knew it, the course his life would take.

  I was oblivious. I thought the essay was about Chaucer. No one could have guessed the final outcome of Michael’s life because none of us took into account his most dizzying desire.

  20.

  THE BIGGEST WILDFIRE IN CALIFORNIA HISTORY

  All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl, but this has always been my way. As June heated up into July, and summer brought the threat of wildfire, I simply kept pushing Michael onward with his college courses. I cheered him on with his firefighting. Work and its rewards were what I could see then.

  Now, I can see more. I believe that this year, 2003, was the best year of Michael’s life. It was the year in which he learned how to drive. It was the year he wrote extraordinary things. It was also the year that he found love.

  And it was the year he fought an inferno, the biggest wildfire in California history.

  The California Fire Siege of 2003 burned some 800,000 acres. The largest single fire within it, the Cedar Fire, was and still is the biggest fire in California history, a blowup, shooting two hundred feet of flame in the sky. At one point, 80,000 acres incinerated in ten hours. Over two acres per second went up, in a raging roar like that of a fleet of freight trains, shattering fields of crackling bones. Twenty-two people, including a firefighter, were burned or smoked to death.

  FIRE BURNS ABOVE THE CITY OF SAN DIEGO

  Michael fought the Pass Fire, one of the first to burn. This 2,387-acre fire was reported at 4:11 P.M. on Tuesday, October 21, and raged through the dry grass and brush of Reche Canyon, north of Moreno Valley in Riverside County. Firefighters fought aggressively, battling exhaustion and heat across inaccessible terrain, cutting lines to forestall the fire’s path, knowing the weathermen were predicting wind, holding the hot air in their lungs. The wind came and the fire jumped hither and yon, a broadjumper, a long jumper, now this way, now that, an erratic hurdler clearing the firefighters’ lines. At its peak, it took 696 men, rapidly withering, parched, their legs turned to lead, to face down the fire. Three residences and two outbuildings were sacrificed, and then the gods were appeased.

  Michael earned $1 a day fighting this fire. But that is not, of course, why he did it, and he never appeared to resent the wage. He did it because it was the most challenging, most meaningful, most rewarding thing he had ever had the chance to do. He recorded his experience in writing, a second tale of an inferno. Although he delivered it to me in a six-page single continuous paragraph printed single-spaced and in ALL CAPS, I’ve added paragraph breaks to make his fire report easier for you to read. In fighting fires, Michael found freedom.

  Michael’s Fire Narrative

  On October 21, Tuesday, was the beginning of history. It was the beginning of the largest fire in the state of California. I’m a member of a CDF fire camp in Norco. We have a total of three hand crews that are trained in wildland fire fighting. The core of our training deals with the process of ‘cutting line.’ Cutting line is a process in which fuel is removed from the ground to the point of mineral soil or bare dirt. A full hand crew consists of a possible 19 men or women. 18 members are inmates and 1 member is the captain. On this particular day we had a crew of 13. We were working at the MWD (Metropolitan Water District) also known as Lake Mathews. On that day our captain was Shane Porter. The first call came in approximately at 12:30 or 1:00 p.m. The headquarters in Perris had dispatched a couple crews from Oakglen and Bautista. Oakglen and Bautista are also inmate CDF hand crews. The next couple of calls that came through were only for Oakglen and Bautista. Before the calls began coming in we had a visual on what would turn out to be the Camp Pendleton fire. As we work during that day we anticipated getting called to a fire. It began to seem that we were not going to get called. As the day continued we notice 3 more smoke columns; each in a different direction. We were almost certain that a call would come in for one of Norco hand crews or even to dispatch our strike team: 9382GULF. There are different types of strike teams. When dealing with CDF hand crews, a strike team is two hand crews coupled together as one large hand crew. At 3:00, still no calls for Norco crews. One of our captains makes a call on the radio in frustration, “Norco still does have fire crews.” A couple of us laughed because we understood and we as well were becoming upset.

  As the end of the day continued to approach we had convinced ourselves that we were not going to get called. I had spent most of the day hoping and waiting for a call. As we started to drive back to the camp, myself and the cr
ew had concluded that we did not want to get called to the fire. We had resigned with contentment just to go back to the facility to shower and relax. One of the things that we were discussing on the drive back was that the captain had said two of the fires were federal and that they did not want any CDF assistance. Apparently the fire that began in Fontana was U.S. Forestry property. In my opinion that was a lame excuse to refuse CDF assistance but from a political view I could see that they wanted to “milk the fire.” Meaning that they wanted the fire to continue burning in order to make more money. With the help of CDF hand crews the fire’s progress is tremendously slowed. When the fire is slowed down, it increases the containment. When the fire is being contained at a fast pace it means the fire is almost out. I do not know whether or not CDF hand crews were dispatched to that fire but I do know that if multiple CDF hand crews were dispatched on the same day when the fire began that there could have been a significant decrease in what was burned. Remember, I am only speculating but that does not change the possibility that U.S. Forestry wanted the fire to burn longer in order to make more money. All of these things were discussed on our bus. When we had arrived to the camp we had found out that Crew 1 and 3 had been dispatched to the Reche Canyon fire. Myself and the other crew two members were glad that it wasn’t us. Additionally, out of our three crews, crew two had the most fire hours which put us at the bottom of the dispatched list. As we watch the other two crews prepare to “strike it up,” we stood around laughing about how we were going to warm beds and T.V.s and relaxing for the rest of the weekend. Of course that was too good to be true. Several minutes later the captain told crew two to Nomex up. We stared in disbelief halfway hoping it was just a joke. I say halfway hoping because in every single firefighter there is a switch of adrenaline that is activated by the anticipation of being on the fire line.