Painstakingly handwritten manuscripts, sometimes illustrated, arrive alongside computer-generated text. Some send novels and treatises, others a few words, as if thrust into a bottle and tossed into the sea. The texts range from barely literate to highly polished. The strengths are those of the once-fortunate, or passionate, or reflective, or self-educated few; the weaknesses are those of any poorly educated group. Themes reappear obsessively — mother, shame, loss, salvation, the treacherous woman, the perfect crime, and the criminal-justice system. Some writers turn to desperate conventions — in verse, the Hallmark greeting; in narrative and drama, sci-fi, Dungeons and Dragons Gothic, the violent thriller, stand-up routines, and TV sitcom. Rich material and fresh language are often trapped in bankrupt literary formulas; simple morals are tacked onto undigested trouble. Those who have had the benefit of writing workshops offer more finished pieces, but some who toil alone take our breath away. Most contestants have become writers in prison, many are natural writers. Few professional writers compete.
Contest entries are divided into genres and distributed by the heap to members of generic subcommittees. Winnowing each haystack of manuscript for the irresistible needle is a daunting task. Subcommittees share their best manuscripts and deliberate for hours over winners.
Not all winning manuscripts could be found. Fortune News had published some winners from 1978 on; obliging collectors lent old issues. Materials from early years, stored in Princeton University archives, proved spotty, yet offered clues to some missing work. All honorable mentions had been mysteriously preserved, among them gems like Roger Jaco’s “Killing Time” (Time) and Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “Letters Come to Prison” (Routines).
After making a raw selection, I decided reluctantly to exclude drama. (Though powerful playwrights have won awards, drama is our smallest category; space limitations force us to omit examples.) Then authors’ permissions had to be secured. For most recent winners still incarcerated, this posed little difficulty. Several9 however, had been subjected to punitive transfer from prison to prison, in the process often losing their friends, scant possessions, a painstakingly constructed life — and their mail.
One day sleuth, the next posse, I pursued many writers from one prison or parole board to another, often across state lines. Teachers of prison workshops helped me find some ex-prisoners who, in turn, led me to others. (I discovered an American penal archipelago; prisoners’ nightmare of transfer — some call it “diesel therapy” or “plane therapy” — results in many comradely networks.) Otherwise I was dependent on the goodwill of parole officers. “I can’t help you” is the bureaucrat’s “hello.” I learned to explain my mission fast and to keep talking. Sometimes they amplified thus: “Even if I could help you, you don’t have the right information.” I learned that without the ex-prisoner’s birthdate or proper identification number, an unusual effort was being demanded. Everything hung on who picked up the phone.
“Is this Michael E. Saucier a black man or a white man?” a Louisiana parole board employee asked. “I don’t know! Have you really one of each?” “Yes!” she replied crisply, but she let me leave a message for the parole officer of one of them. That gentleman laughingly doubted that his client was a writer, but agreed to give him my number. And two weeks later, Saucier phoned.
Roger Jaco maxed out of parole in Newport News more than a decade ago. No Virginia Jacos knew him, but one referred me to a Jaco-genealogist in McMinnville, Tennessee; he held Jaco reunions, but knew no writing Jacos. But by then I had the information that Roger had a bunch of brothers whose names all began with R. “Ah!” said the genealogist. “Those Jacos! There were nine of them, and both their parents were killed in an automobile accident when they were little children.” He sent me to one brother who referred me to Roger’s adoring sister, Gladys, in Kentucky.
Vera Montgomery’s case was particularly intractable. She had also been paroled too long ago, central records said. I contacted her final parole board, then, desperate, the next-to-last. There a woman heard me out. “I wish someone would give me some money for my wonderfuKpoetry!” “Are you a poet?” She was, and she gave me Montgomery’s birthdate, alias, her parents’ names, and the information that she’d left the system in Newark. The Newark phone book listed none of these Montgomerys. I phoned one with her mother Elsie’s initial, though I knew Vera herself was born in 1936. “No Elsie lives here,” a man assured me. “Have you ever heard of a Vera Montgomery?” “She was my favorite aunt,” was the thrilling reply. Albert Montgomery recalled how Vera had died in a senior citizen facility, how she’d always spoken of writing and her desire to write a book. No one in the family had any of her writing — would I please send him some?
Final selection for the anthology was a complex balancing act, governed by commitments to honoring literary excellence and to encouraging some beginning writers. (The contest has always honored both.) I also looked for fine examples from each decade, and work representative of different subgenres, expressive of regional, racial, and gender diversity, and of prison experiences our writers have taught us they find crucial. While endeavoring to present as many writers as possible, this collection sometimes offers for depth more than one piece by a single author. Out of respect for the integrity of a work, excerpts are avoided.
Note on the Text
Some work has been lightly edited, with the author’s consent. Each text is followed by the name of the institution where (and in two cases, about which) it was written, and, to my best knowledge, the year it was submitted to the contest.
An asterisk in editorial introductions marks texts described or cited for their useful insights, but regretfully excluded from the anthology for space reasons.
As About the Authors was shaped in collaboration with all living authors, an unforeseen range of striking histories emerged in sharply individual voices. Each was asked to write something about his or her literary development, education, and background, including — only if the author cared to do so — mention of crime, conviction, or sentence. We do not condone crime, but we agree with Sister Helen Prejean that a person is more than the worst thing he has ever done. Focusing on the self-rehabilitative work of writing, the committee rarely knows anything of criminal backgrounds. For this reason, though many claim innocence or are appealing their sentences, this data does not appear in the biographical section. Our emphasis rather is on the illuminating stories of how they became writers and what writing has meant to this extraordinary group of practitioners, how it has enabled them to do time.
—Bell Gale Chevigny
August 2011
Initiations
…I have been classified, collated and rated fingerprinted photoed and filed I am an examined, inspected cut of meat dressed in khaki and set in concrete.
The ritual dehumanization of entry is a powerful theme for prison writers. In the excerpt from “Fair Hill Prison”* above, 1987 prizewinner Nolan Gelman resisted the process by naming it. Fundamental disorientation may strip one of words as well as of civilized garb. M. A, Jones’s “Prison Letter” here captures the problem of wordlessness — another name for fear — at the most private level.
To become a prisoner is to enter an alien universe. One’s most trusted resources fail to help interpret the new setting, and the simplest social interaction may be fraught with peril. Sometimes seasoned inmates help newcomers begin to do time. In William Aberg’s “Siempre,” set in an unusual Arizona jail that housed both men and women, a veteran talks a novice through fear of the penitentiary {the pinta, in Mexican argot} to which she is being sent.
More often it is a “cellie” who helps a “fish” to learn the ropes. In Clay Downing’s 1974 story “The Jailin’ Man,”* the title figure teaches the narrator how to heat water for coffee in the glass part of a lightbulb and in the process to feel less sorry for himself. Ingenious ways to prepare food are also shared with newcomers. Jarvis Masters describes learning how to make powerful wine in “Recipe for Prison Pruno” (Death Row).
Advice on how to avoid danger abounds: “Drink plenty of water and walk real slow” is a typical admonition.
“Symbiosis” between inmates is possible, according to the avuncular mentor in David Wood’s story by that name (1996),* if you learn how to carry yourself like a true convict: “Look every man square in the eye and let him know you’ll fight back. You don’t have to win a fight, just hurt the other guy bad enough so he won’t want to scrap with you again.” This swift cultivation of attitude, a particularly male response, is not restricted to men. Thus in Denise Hicks’s 1996 entry “Where’s My Mother?”* the neophyte reports: “I was learning the none-of-your-business stare; the no-you-don’t-know-me stance; and the why-I’m-here-could-not-possibly-be-of-any-concern-to-you pivot.”
Old hands school new prisoners in the cons’ rules, as crucial to survival as institutional regulations. Each prison has its underground economy and its informal government, with leadership ranging from fluid to stable. Prison mentors elucidate the “code” of the “stand-up” convict, a signal feature of prison subculture for generations, particularly among men. Akin to “honor among thieves,” it has tenets like “Be loyal to cons,” “Don’t let anyone disrespect you,” and “Never snitch.” This ideal is still nurtured by old-timers who nostalgically lament the bygone days when convicts, they say, ran penitentiaries. In “Ring on a Wire” (1996),* a story by George Hughes, the narrator’s “cellie” celebrates a mythicized golden age when they could “take your freedom, take your property and everything else away from you, but not your word.” For such as he, only a “convict” was a “real man.”
But beginning in the 1980s, new throngs of rash and fearless teenagers doing time made a much more menacing experience. The “code” began to degenerate into little more than vengeance against snitches or, as Victor Hassine puts it, “Darwin’s code: survival of the fittest.” In his poem “Convict Code” (1988),” Alex Friedman describes “walking on by” scenes of weapon-making and gang rape, and then being stabbed twenty-eight times by a stranger—”and everybody walked on by.”
In “How I Became a Convict” (extracted from his book Life Without Parole), Victor Hassine describes his adaptation to Pennsylvania’s prison for the most violent criminals. His first impulse was to retreat and build himself a cocoon. His ultimate decision to engage the life around him typifies that of most effective prison writers.
For many, survival begins with mastery of prison lingo. (See “I See Your Work” in Players, Games). Some novices feel compelled to create lexicons of their new argot. Often harsh and minimal, this patois is sometimes rich in nuance. For the transferred prisoners facing reorientation on a new turf in William Orlando’s “Dog Star Desperado” (the first chapter of a novel-in-progress), battles of rhetoric are all they can afford. Like the “dozens” played on ghetto streets and the rough banter of the armed services, this patois allows its performers to position themselves against one another while strutting their stuff. It also offers them a kind of collective armor as they size up their new surroundings and their new keepers, who are also pulled into the force field of prison language.
On another level, Orlando’s story enacts the galvanizing of the spirit to meet the shock of dehumanization. In their own way, women, too, cultivate such resources. In “Arrival” here, for example, Judee Norton calls up the inviolable inner liberty of the Stoics and converts her shackles into jewelry. Her summoning of her innermost self marks her starting point as she begins to do time.
Prison Letter
M. A.Jones
You ask what it’s like here
but there are no words for it.
I answer difficult, painful, that men
die hearing their own voices. That answer
isn’t right though and I tell you now
that prison is a room
where a man waits with his nerves
drawn tight as barbed wire, an afternoon
that continues for months, that rises
around his legs like water
until the man is insane
and thinks the afternoon is a lake:
blue water, whitecaps, an island
where he lies under pale sunlight, one
red gardenia growing from his hand —
But that’s not right either. There are no
flowers in these cells, no water
and I hold nothing in my hands
but fear, what lives
in the absence of light, emptying
from my body to fill the large darkness
rising like water up my legs:
It rises and there are no words for it
though I look for them, and turn
on light and watch it
fall like an open yellow shirt
over black water, the light holding
against the dark for just
an instant: against what trembles
in my throat, a particular fear
a word I have no words for.
1982, Arizona State Prison-perryville
Buckeyc, Arizona
Siempre
William Aberg
She tells me through the vent
from the cell below
that they’re taking her
on the morning train to che pittta,
that the guards have already packed
everything but her sheets, blue jumpsuit, and towel.
Through the floor,
with my heart as with an eye,
I can see her as she sits
on the bunk, face
cupped in her hands,
elbows propped on her thighs,
cheeks smudged by fingermarks
and tears, her dark
hair eclipsing her knees.
I try to reassure her
with wisdom I do not have,
and hope I try to fake,
that the hammer
and anvil of coming days
will forge us into
something stronger.
By the time they unlock
my cell at breakfast,
she has already gone. But later
as I walk back in my boxers
from the shower, an older guard,
the kind one, slips a note
into my hand, whispers,
She sent her love. Back in my cell
I unfold a note that says,
Te amo, siempre in crude letters
formed by a finger and menstrual blood.
1994, Pima County Jail
Tucson, Arizona
Dog Star Desperado
William Orlando
It had been a journey.
We were bussed from USP Leavenworth during one of those polar Novembers in Kansas. It was a day cold and white and hushed, a solitary morning of the snows.
Our prison transport showed its age. It looked as knackered as some of the convicts it had aboard — men in bad flesh who’d let themselves go, turning gray with the years and bitter for it. The bus smelled funny. The odor of cigarette butts and rusted apple cores, the odor of stale, brooding sweat. A prisoner smell. We sat in our chains and stared holes through the bus windows. We had little rap for one another, anyway. Most of us were just faces — a surly face that grunted at you over a morning bowl of grits. We were content to look hard and forbidding. Desperadoes all.
Those that did talk, talked shop. Who was hot and snitchin’. Who got stabbed and good for the motherfucker. Who bugged out. Who busted loose one fine morning in Kool-Aid lipstick, cue-chalk blue eye shadow, and bikini briefs over buns of steel. Gossip and lore. Amazing, I thought, that so little could be so absorbing. Still, absent any stone tablets, this was how they passed on the tribal Decalogue — defining value and boundary. This was how they staked out their claims as regulars, as men, as convicts. Real ones. Very few of us left, they would have you know. Rats and queers taking over.
“Yo, baby!” a six-plus-footer dubbed Wonder Woman called out to me from the back of the bus. “Yeah — you, cutie.
You can break me down like a shotgun, and ride! Just two hundred cash.”
All heads turned. I grinned, embarrassed.
“Two hundred?” I replied at last. “You bump your head, bitch? For that much you can fuck me.” The bus rocked. Laughing just to laugh. Prisoner laughter, and afterward gravity.
It grew, the distance between us and the prison and the distance between each other. Who could acknowledge the thoughts, let alone share them? We rode quietly out of Kansas and through Oklahoma, passing here a frosted wood and there a stubbled field, a ragged scarecrow under leaden skies; rode across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, across miles and memory and heartbreak in a country song; rode, finally, the last leg westward to California and the sea, so by the time the bus reached Lompoc’s gate we could’ve lifted our heads and howled — Lompoc looking, to transfixed eyes, as welcome as hoof-prints in the snow to winter wolves.
It had been a journey.
The guard riding shotgun stood up and unlimbered his weapon from its overhead mount. Then he stepped heavily off the bus, plucking free the imbedded seat of his pants. This correctional officer wore the dark blue blazer, dress shirt with tie, and gray slacks — new image, new name.
The driver, likewise uniformed, followed after his lumbering partner, but returned in minutes to key open the bus security grill — a steel mesh partition between their inviolate space and ours.
“Let’s move it out, happy campers.”
“But, officer!” fretted someone, “There’s criminals in there!”
The driver shifted a wad of chaw in his mouth. “Hot grub, too.”
Our response was Pavlovian. Hands cuffed, feet shackled, and chained at the waist in twelve-man coffles, we rattled off and away from the bus — shuffling like coolies. The bright Lompoc afternoon was typical for this part of the central California coast. The sun batted our eyes into a squint, and the aggressive breeze nipped at our prison khakis.
Doing Time Page 4
