DOING TIME
25 YEARS OFP RISON
W RITING
A PEN American Center
Prize Anthology
Edited by
Bell Gale Chevigny
Foreword by
Sister Helen Pre jean
To the memory of
Charles Caldwell (1941-1973)
and
to all the other men and women
who find their voice in prison
Copyright © 1999, 2011 by PEN American Center
Foreword © 1999, 2011 by Sister Helen Prejean
Introduction and afterword copyright © 2011 by Bell Gale Chevigny
Section introductions copyright © 1999, 2011 by Bell Gale Chevigny
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-144-3
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Foreword by Sister Helen Prejean
Acknowledgments
Introduction by Bell Gale Chevigny
INITIATIONS
Prison Letter, M. A. Jones
Siempre, William Aberg
Dog Star Desperado, William Orlando
How I Became a Convict, Victor Hassine
Arrival, Judee Norton
TIME AND ITS TERMS
Reductions, William Aberg
Where or When, Jackie Ruzas
An Overture, M. A. Jones
Vivaldi on the Far Side of the Bars, M. A. Jones
Killing Time, Roger Jaco
After Almost Twenty Years, Chuck Culhane
There Isn’t Enough Bread, Chuck Culhane
The Manipulation Game: Doing Life in Pennsylvania, Diane Hamill Metzger
Giving Me a Second Chance, Larry Bratt
Myths of Darkness: The Toledo Madman and the Ultimate Freedom, J. R. Grindlay
ROUTINES AND RUPTURES
Spring, Michael Hogan
Autumn Yard, Chuck Culhane
Letters Come to Prison, Jimmy Santiago Baca
Trina Marie, Lori Lynn McLuckie
After Lights Out, Barbara Saunders
poem for the conguero in D yard, Raymond Ringo Fernandez
In the Big Yard, Reginald S. Lewis
Old Man Motown, Patrick Nolan
The Tower Pig, Scott A. Antworth
The Night the Owl Interrupted, Daniel Roseboom
WORK
Chronicling Sing Sing Prison, Easy Waters
Cut Partner, Michael E. Saucier
Gun Guard, Michael E. Saucier
Skyline Turkey, Richard Stratton
Suicide! Robert Kelsey
READING AND WRITING
Coming into Language, Jimmy Santiago Baca
Pell Grants for Prisoners, Jon Marc Taylor
Tetrina, Bedford Hills Writing Workshop
Sestina: Reflections on Writing, Bedford Hills Writing Workshop
Behind the Mirror’s Face, Paul St. John
Black Flag to the Rescue, Michael E. Saucier
PLAYERS, GAMES
I See Your Work, Joseph E. Sissler
solidarity with cataracts, Vera Montgomery
Clandestine Kisses, Marilyn Buck
Ryan’s Ruse, Jackie Ruzas
Feathers on the Solar Wind, David Wood
Death of a Duke, Dax Xenos
RACE, CHANCE, CHANGE
First Day on the Job, Henry Johnson
Eleven Days Under Siege, Paul Mulryan
Pearl Got Stabbed! Charles P. Norman
Sam, Michael Wayne Hunter
Lee’s Time, Susan Rosenberg
FAMILY
Ancestor, Jimmy Santiago Baca
Uncle Adam, Diane Hamill Metzger
The Red Dress, Barbara Saundcrs
Ignorance Is No Excuse for the Law, Alcjo Dao’ud Rodriguez
Our Skirt, Kathy Boudin
The Ball Park, Henry Johnson
Norton #59900, Judee Norton
A Stranger, Anthony La Barca Falcone
After My Arrest, Judith Clark
To Vladimir Mayakovsky, Judith Clark
A Trilogy of Journeys, Kathy Boudin
THE WORLD
Prisons of Our World, Allison Blake
Pilots in the War on Drugs, Robert J. Moriarty
No Brownstones, Just Alleyways & Corner Pockets Full, J. L. Wise Jr.
Americans, Jon Schillaci
For Sam Manzie, Jon Schillaci
Diner at Midnight, David Taber
The Film, David Taber
The 5-Spot Cafe, Henry Johnson
Melody, J. C. Amberchele
Mel, J. C, Amberchele
GETTING OUT
Dream of Escape, Henry Johnson
After All Those Years, Ajamu C. B. Haki
Stepping Away from My Father, William Aberg
To Those Still Waiting, M. A. Jones
The Break, Robert M. Rutan
DEATH ROW
For Mumia: I Wonder, Kathy Boudin
Easy to Kill, Jackie Ruzas
Recipe for Prison Pruno, Jarvis Masters
Conversations with the Dead, Stephen Wayne Anderson
Walker’s Requiem, Anthony Ross
“Write a poem that makes no sense,” Judith Clark
Notes
Text Credits
About the Authors
Afterword: More About the Authors
Foreword
When I read anything I’m always hoping the writer will take me into realms of experience I wouldn’t otherwise have, experiences that push the edges of human life and our ways of doing things, put me up against myself and make me ask: What would I do in this situation, who would I become? Adventure stories are like that. Prison writings are like that. “Come with me,” these convict writers say, “I’ll take you into my world. Hang on. It’s quite a ride.”
Quite a ride indeed. I am not unacquainted with prison life. I’ve visited prisoners for fourteen years, accompanied four men to execution, know a lot about death row, wrote a book, Dead Man Walking. But I know I’m an outsider. I’ve never heard the clang of bars behind me as I said good-bye to freedom. Never had all the eyes in the room turn to me, “fresh meat,” coming in. At the end of each visit I get to walk out. And every time I find myself taking deep gulps of freedom.
Here are fifty-one writers who take us into a world we hope we never do more than visit. A world where you never touch a doorknob, where you have no control over your environment. A world without privacy, a world of frequent strip-searches, a world where the “shakedown crew” swoops down upon you and throws all your stuff out of your “box” into a heap, laughing, pointing at your photos, walking across your baby’s smile. A world where many of the people have serious personality disorders, and you can’t get away from them. A razor-wired world where you never sit under a tree because the yard is stripped bare for securiry reasons, where security governs everything.
We i
ncarcerate a whole lot of people in this country: 1.8 million, more than any other country in the world. We are building a small country of these throwaway people. How can you expect literature from the refuse pile of humanity? Who would look for eloquence from convicts? Or insight or depth of thought or honesty or the intimacy of self-revelation? Watch for the self-serving subtext. When your heart is moved, can you trust it? When you feel for the writers of these words, are you being had? Cynicism about convicts is in our bones.
Test this doubt by sampling these pages. The words in them have made their way into our hands against great odds. Several of these writers have done long stretches of time in the hole for their writing. Why, at such cost, do they write? Read their reasons in the back of this book. To bear witness, to stay sane, to keep their heart pumping, to not be eaten up by rage or despair, to figure out how they got there, or to discover what truly matters — these are just some of them.
And then they hone their craft — if they’re lucky, in workshops, more often in the horrific din of the cellblock — learning to get past the words other people say to that voice of their own they almost doubt they have. Somehow they hear of the PEN prison writing contest, hear that at the very least someone will read what they wrote and write back. They decide to take a chance.
I think this book is a significant piece of literature. What do you think? The writers are locked away from you, but you’ve already opened a door to their world. Step inside. You’ll never be the same.
Sister Helen Prejean
March 1999
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Center on Crime, Communities and Culture of the Open Society Institute for awarding me a Soros Senior Justice Fellowship to pursue this project. I thank especially director Nancy Mahon, Katherine Diaz, Miriam Porter, Mart Cotter, and Soros Justice Fellows Joycelyn Pollock, Ellen Barry, and Angela Brown.
My greatest debt is to all members of the PEN Prison Writing Program committee over the years who cared enoguh to read through the formidable mass of manuscript and to write something constructive to each contestant. And especially to our invaluable Prison Writing Program director, Jackson Taylor, and the current members of the committee who entrusted me with this task and pointed me in the direction of interesting work: Susan Braudy, Beth Dembitzer, Bob Hamburger, Starry Krueger, Claudia Menza, Janine Pommy Vega, Marie Ponsot, Rochelle Ratner, Sue Rosen, Joan Silber, Layle Silbert, and Chuck Wachtel. Members Fielding Dawson, Hettie Jones, Bibi Wein, and Jackson Taylor offered very useful reactions to my first raw selection. Anthologists Fielding, Janine, and Hettie also helped locate texts and ex-prisoners, Chuck and Marie offered poetic counsel, and Bibi editorial experience. Current chair Hettie was a ready ear and wise adviser every step of the way.
For searching files and memories to recreate the story of PEN’s origins, I am grateful to Thomas Fleming, Lucy Kavaler, Vicki Lindner, Ann McGovern, Kathrin Perutz, and especially John Morrone, who for several years helped place prison writings in magazines. At PEN in the late eighties, Gara LaMarche helped rescue the PWP from near-death and later supported it materially from his position at the Open Society Institute. From the PEN staff, special thanks to PWP Coordinator Agustin Maes for swift provision of vital PWP materials. I appreciate the consistent backing of PEN American Center’s former and current executive directors, Karen Kennerly and Michael Roberts, and especially President Michael Scammel.
From Fortune Society, Harvey Isaccs, Sheila Maroney, and Sylvia McKeane helped me locate past winners’ texts; so did Harry Smith, of the Smith, and Martin Tucker, of Confrontation. Anthologists and prison teachers Joe Bruchac, Janet Lembke, and Richard Shelton aided in locating authors. For generously sharing their myriad expertise, I thank Claudia Angelous, Jennie Brown, Raymond A. Brown, Scott Christianson, Lois Morris, H. Bruce Franklin, Jim Knipfel, Mark Mauer, Dorothy Potter, and Richard Stratton. I am indebted to John and Sue Leonard and the Nation for publishing my article on PEN prison writing.
I thank Elizabeth Kronzek for archival research at Princeton, Brennan Grayson, Lesley Scammell, and Chloe Wheatley for research assistance, and Sara Lorimer, Bob deBarge, Grazyna Drabik, and Laura Schiller for typing the manuscript. I am blessed with friends who are passionately opinionated readers—Janet Brof, Bill DeMoss, Marilyn Katz, Danny Kaiser, Lee McClain, Antonia Meltzoff, Howard Waskow, Grey Wolfe, and Paul Chevigny.
A writer could not ask for a more energetic agent than my friend Sydelle Kramer at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency nor a more sympathetic editor than Coates Bateman at Arcade Publishing.
“Hands like yours help cup the flame,” William Orlando wrote in thanking PEN. The authors’ eloquent reminders of how much this work matters to them and others behind bars has made the work most gratifying. For generous research assistance, I thank especially William Aberg, Marilyn Buck, Chuck Culhane, Victor Hassine, Diane Hamill Metzger, Paul Mulryan, Charles Norman, Barbara Saunders, Joe Sissler, William Waters, and members of the writing workshop at Bedford Hills. And finally, I am forever indebted to those who got me started—my parolee students in the Queens SEEK Program in 1967–68 and my class at Westchester County Penitentiary, 1969–71, especially Charles Caldwell, whose example of self-transformation through reading and writing has stayed with me over the decades.
Prison, the PEN Contest, and
Doing Time with Words:
An Updated Introduction
Life in prison in the late seventies was good for those who knew how to serve their time, to be strong, to mind their own business, to not get involved with drugs, alcohol, gambling, loansharking, or other deathtraps guaranteed to bring men down. One could go to school, earn a high school equivalency diploma, study college correspondence classes, take vocational classes and learn a trade, take self-improvement programs to learn to be a better person, go to religious services, attend AA, learn how to create works of art to earn spending money through classes in arts and crafts, share relaxed visits on weekends with loved ones, behave themselves, and earn their release on parole. They could go home. Now the emphasis is containment, storage, and warehousing of growing inventories of faceless, psychotropically over-medicated zombie felons. The keys have been thrown away.
—Charles Norman, Tomoka Correctional Facility, Daytona Beach, Florida
I write because I can’t fly.
—Jackie Ruzas, Shawangunk Correctional Facility, Walkill, New York
No one ever said it better than the prison writer Fyodor Dostoevsky— to paraphrase: you can measure the level of a civilization by entering its prisons. What does it say about the level of our civilization that we imprison more human beings than any country in the world? As most of us do not enter prisons, we need those inside to show us what is done in our name and with our taxes. Fortunately, PEN American Center, the writers’ association, has been sponsoring an annual literary contest nationwide for writers behind bars since 1973. Doing Time presents the best work of the winners from the first twenty-five years. By bearing witness to the secret world that isolates and silences them, these writers offer an incisive anatomy of the contemporary prison and an intimate view of men and women struggling to keep their humanity alive.
To put this work in context, here’s a brief history of the shift in American attitudes toward prisoners and the goals of incarceration in the last five decades. Fifty years ago there was wide acceptance of rehabilitative programs, a growing prisoners’ rights movement, and an unprecedented interest in prisoners’ writing.
The social turmoil of the sixties and early seventies profoundly shaped public attitudes toward prisoners. The civil rights and student movements and opposition to the Vietnam war created a climate critical of established authority and sympathetic to those held down by it. In rapid succession, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Native Americans, women, and gay people developed self-awareness and political consciousness and demanded recognition. In response, American culture grew more receptive to the voices and needs of minorities. And for a while the War on Pov
erty was committed to building a more participatory democracy by offering opportunity to the poor and the marginalized.
Prisoners, especially (but not only) African-American male prisoners, played a strong role in these explosive times. The Autobiography of Malcolm X awakened readers to the powerful claims of this dispossessed group, and showed how a man could find himself and his voice behind bars. Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, and Angela Davis soon followed, influencing activists, black and white, with their social analyses. And when movement activists were jailed, they helped politicize prison culture. Inmates began to compare incarceration with slavery, to call themselves political prisoners, and to protest conditions rather than fight with one another.
A prisoners’ movement began to grow outside as well. In New York in 1967 David Rothenberg produced Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a play by Canadian ex-convict John Herbert that brought to life the devastating effects of imprisonment for one young man. When a member of the audience challenged the play’s authenticity after one performance, an ex-con rose from the audience to defend it. As more ex-convicts came to the theater, some making public their past for the first time, the post-curtain debate became as absorbing as the play. Rothenberg’s theater office evolved into the first office of the Fortune Society, an organization that provides a therapeutic community for ex-prisoners and advocates criminal justice reform.
Dramatizing the social upheaval of the nineteen-sixties were the inner-city riots that became more destructive with each summer and helped spark riots behind the razor wire. Forty-eight riots were reported from 1968 through 1971, every one growing in intensity, the coherence of its racial or political ideology, and organization. In 1970, riots in New York rocked Manhattan’s Tombs and the upstate Auburn Prison. In July 1971, a “Liberation Faction” of prisoners in Attica Prison presented the corrections commissioner with demands to change “brutal, dehumanized” conditions. In California, on August 21, 1971, George Jackson was killed in an alleged escape attempt from San Quentin. The next day, Attica prisoners protested with a mass hunger strike. On September 9, they seized the prison, killing one guard and three inmates. The uncompromising state response four days later was a police assault that wounded 128 and took thirty-nine lives, ten of them hostages.
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