Reading behind Bars

by Jill Grunenwald

  It was going to take us two hours to get down to Columbus and we sat quiet for most of the first hour of the drive, neither of us awake enough to make passable conversation. Somewhere around our halfway point of Mansfield—filming location for The Shawshank Redemption—I commented that I was looking forward to meeting all of the other prison librarians.

  There was a pause. “I’m going to warn you,” Kimberly finally responded, her eyes never leaving the road. “Some of the librarians are kind of . . . weird.”

  I peeled my eyes from the rolling hills of central Ohio and turned to look at her. “Weird how?”

  “Just weird. You’ll see.”

  Librarian stereotypes are common, especially coming from people outside of the field like Kimberly. Usually we librarians are defined in one of two ways: the flirty sex kitten who just needs some encouragement and then it’s glasses off, hair down, party time; or the dowdy, matronly cat lady (under which the flirty sex kitten often is thought to be hiding). As a librarian, I of course knew this was incorrect, and took Kimberly’s “weird” descriptive with a grain of salt. Then again, I was (and still am) an introvert with almost antisocial tendencies, well on her way to being one of those “crazy” cat ladies. To many people, I was probably weird.

  The State Library of Ohio is a square building that sits snuggly in the middle of a Columbus neighborhood on the northern side of the city. It is surrounded by three major freeways, making it, if nothing else, easy to access, an important feature for a meeting that had librarians driving from all corners of the state. Nowadays, the area is one of Columbus’s more trendy neighborhoods, with hip restaurants and brand new condos. At the time, though, there was abandoned construction and abandoned buildings lining the street. The juxtaposition was striking.

  Kim pulled the van into the full parking lot, opting for a space in the back to allow room to maneuver. We climbed down and I followed her into the nondescript building.

  The front door led to a large, open lobby that consisted of wall-to-wall meeting rooms. I followed Kimberly down the hall, but my focus was distracted by the large room of books directly ahead of us. Before I had a chance to take a closer peek at the main section and examine the contents, Kimberly turned into the last meeting room on the left. I quickly followed.

  It was like taking a time machine and entering my high-school cafeteria all over again, minus the lukewarm pizza, cold fries, and humiliation.

  Long rows of tables and chairs faced the front of the room, pockets of people sandwiched throughout. Dead center were the “Popular Girls” in the room. The two slender white women—one a brunette, the other blonde—looked like they could have been cast in the Real Housewives of Ohio. With perfectly coiffed hair and fresh manicures, they looked like the type of women who had never gotten a papercut in their lives, let alone work around books all day. Meanwhile, my waist-length red hair had been left to air dry on the drive down after an early morning, leaving it limp and frazzled, although I at least had managed to put on mascara. Clearly, Kimberly’s reference to any weird librarians didn’t include those two women.

  The goddess-like pair chatted cheerfully with each other. Too cheerfully if you asked me, the one who had been awake since 4 a.m.

  Like a stone thrown into a pond, the remaining librarians radiated outward from there. Huddled groups said hello, greeting each other for the first time in at least six months. At the outer rings were those librarians without any friends here. The ones who sat alone, hunched over a book. Ah. Those were the ones Kimberly probably meant by “weird.”

  “That’s Grace,” Kimberly said, pointing to a woman at the front of the room. Grace towered over us, tall and intimidating. She kept her gray hair cropped close to her skull and even just standing still managed to convey a level of intimidation that radiated across the room. If this really was my high school lunchroom all over again, she’d be the lone wolf who was too cool for school. She also threw shade as if it was as light and airy as a Frisbee, her snark well documented even in emails. It was not an easy feat, as sarcasm often gets lost in translation when it comes to written communication, but not with Grace. Her tone was always on point.

  Kimberly and I stood off to the side of the room, silent. After two hours in the van on the way down, we’d officially run out of things to say to each other. At least temporarily.

  A plump woman in head-to-toe black, including, literally, the hair on her head, came over. Her fingers were weighed down with heavy rings while her neckline was decked with costume jewelry. “I’m Connie!” she said excitedly. She clasped my hand into both of hers, the metal from her rings cold against my skin. Connie was peppy and effervescent, like the school mascot hired to pump people up before the big game.

  Connie was my counterpart at our sister institution, which was located on the far east side of Cleveland. We’d exchanged a few emails here and there, and she had invited me out to visit her library a couple of times, although the timing had never worked out. I shook her hand warmly, happy to finally have a face to put to a name.

  As the room started to fill, I looked around and started to gather what Kimberly meant when she said some of the librarians were “weird,” although a more discerning eye would call them “socially awkward.” Every stereotypical high school has its set of cheerleaders, just as it has its set of highly intelligent academic whizzes who lack social tact, along with that one girl who just loved her bedazzled sweatshirts and was destined to live alone with her ten cats.

  Although I didn’t own a bedazzler, my love of cats had already been well-established from a young age. In high school, I was more of the artistic variety of student, involved in theater and choir. I eschewed athletics, preferring to put my energy into drama club. As a senior, I did letter . . . but in marching band. So the ones Kimberly called “weird” were the ones I would have been friends with in high school.

  But even several years past high school, I was still socially awkward, and also nervous at being surrounded by strangers and colleagues, so I stayed silent and merely hovered around Kimberly. She’d been coming to these meetings long enough to know everyone. In the future I’d be attending alone but for today, I was content to let her act as my cruise director.

  From her position at the front of the room, Grace called out. “Okay, everyone. Take your seats. We’re going to get started soon.” I followed Kimberly’s lead and she took us to the far left side of the room, about two or three rows back. As soon as we sat down, there was a “Psst. Kim!” from behind us. We both turned and saw two men sitting next to each other. The older of the two, patches on his tweed jacket, raised his hand and waved. Kim waved back.

  “James and Lawrence,” she explained in a whisper, turning back to the front. “They work across the street.”

  Puzzled, I mentally reconstructed the scene outside the state library. Was there a prison across the . . . oh. Oh, right, Kimberly meant across the street from us. Yeah, that made way more sense.

  Lawrence was the head prison librarian at Lorain Correctional, James, his assistant. Later, during lunch, James explained that Lorain is a closed camp. Unlike our prison, which had an open yard and our inmates were free to move around and go from place to place, at Lorain they were herded like sheep, with a set day and time everyone was allowed to visit the library.

  “We have a new member,” Grace called out to the group while looking at me. I stood and gave an awkward wave. “Jill is working with Kimberly, who has been joining us at these in the interim. Welcome, Jill.”

  I sat down amid the polite applause as Grace continued on with the agenda. Now, my brain was so overwhelmed with information and people that apparently my memory was unable to hold on to any of it, because I can’t remember a single thing from the program of that day. The agenda of the other meetings that I attended over the duration of my time tells me that we probably talked about new policies that had been put into place for the prisons, and various issues that my colleagues had been dealing with at their facilities. I came
to learn that not all of the institutions had a security staff as supportive of the library as the officers at ours. All of the guards I had come to know in my first few months of my employment found the library to be a positive space at the prison and encouraged the inmates’ use of it.

  At the end of the very long day, Kimberly and I climbed back into the white van and headed north back to Grafton so she could drop the van off and we could each head home. My brain was full and buzzing with information. It felt like my first day all over again.

  I had been working for the prison for about three months and I admittedly still had no idea what the hell I was doing. Most days I was making it up as I went along.

  But I had also been there long enough to see gaps that could be filled and solutions that I could implement. For one thing, we needed to move away from the circulation card system and introduce an OPAC or computer database. It would take some convincing—additional computers meant additional opportunities for the inmates to get online—but it was necessary and very much needed. I also needed to rework the ILL, or interlibrary loan program. As I worked my way through the pile of books that had been left behind, I realized that some of them were library books that belonged to the State Library. That is, the library I was sitting in: the previous librarian had borrowed them for the inmates to read when they requested a book we didn’t have. Only somehow, in her absence, they had been forgotten, and we ended up owing some hefty fines. That said, it was a powerful program and a good way to introduce content into the prison that we just did not have the budget for. It would need some tweaking and, again, lots of convincing, but it was also something that was necessary.

  Just a few months ago I had stepped onto the yard for the first time terrified and unsure of everything. While I was still unsure of most things and constantly stumbled and fell down, I was starting to really find my footing.

  PART II

  WE’RE ALL MAD HERE

  “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

  “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

  “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

  “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Chapter 8

  New Sheriff in Town

  It is the policy of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC) to require the managing officer, deputy wardens, and administrative duty officers (ADO) to make unannounced visits to the institution’s living and activity areas at least weekly to encourage informal contact with staff and inmates and to informally observe living and working conditions.

  —ODRC 50-PAM-02

  A new season had dawned, and summer was here at last. I’d been at the prison for six months and was finally starting to feel comfortable. With the change in season, came a change in the administration of the prison: Deputy Warden Francis’s job as second-in-command was being split into two.

  Now, instead of there being one Deputy Warden who handled both the security and the programming side, Francis would now be known as the Deputy Warden of Operations and the facility was actively recruiting for a Deputy Warden of Special Services. This role would focus on the non-security side of things. The “softer skills” so to speak, of a prison. Recreation. Commissary. Education. And, naturally, the library.

  As soon as news went out that there was a new opening, the staff began gossiping about possible internal recruits.

  “I think Dr. Harald’s going to apply,” Kim confessed one day over lunch. Dr. Harald was off that day, an occurrence that was becoming more and more frequent, especially on either Friday or Mondays (or both). My usual lunch companion, Stephanie, was also off so I found myself eating with the other Education staff members for the first time in months.

  “Really?” I asked, picking at the sloppy pile of black beans in front of me. It took a couple of months, but eventually I started getting the free lunch offered to staff members. As a vegetarian, the options were limited: if it wasn’t some bland beans and rice combination, it was a small pat of peanut butter, an even smaller pat of grape jelly, and two sad, flimsy pieces of white bread. Still, my pay was low and my downtown rent high. A free meal was a free meal.

  I had a hard time imagining Dr. Harald in a position so high up the prison hierarchy. He was . . . fine as a manager. He took a hands-off approach, which for our team here in the Education department was probably the appropriate way to manage. We all had our own tasks, did our own things, and knew we could go to him when needed.

  That said, for Dr. Harald, taking a hands-off approach often meant turning a blind eye to some of Kim’s more questionable absences. Eventually, though, I noticed that Kim had a tendency to take advantage of Dr. Harald’s blind spot, rarely ever working a full week. It was like she had unlimited vacation and sick time, while the rest of us were constantly reminded to not go over our allotted time off hours. It was frustrating, to say the least, and did not endear her to me.

  Still, her prediction was right: a few weeks later, Dr. Harald appeared at work in his suit. I’d only ever seen him wear it for graduation; after all, our dress code was business casual and Dr. Harald’s standard, everyday uniform was khakis with a polo bearing the prison’s logo. A suit stood out.

  Even if I couldn’t really imagine him in the position, he was their best bet. He already led a department within the purview of the Special Services department and had been at the prison since it had opened. He knew the facility and the inmates and he was fairly well-liked. I mean, if they wanted an internal candidate, who else were they going to hire?

  “Highland?” I asked Stephanie over lunch after the announcement had been made. “Highland-Highland. Meredith Highland, Head of HR Highland?” I shook my head in disbelief. “That seems . . .”

  “Weird,” Stephanie confirmed, her head bobbing in agreement. “Really weird.”

  “Like . . .” my voice dropped off as I parsed my thoughts. “I just don’t get it.”

  Highland was head of Human Resources. She spent all of her time up in a windowless office in the Administration building, rarely stepping foot onto the yard. She had no reason to. She was the prison’s Human Resources person. That is, HR for the staff. It was never necessary for her to interact with the inmates, let alone walk over the red line of delineation. If any of us needed her human resources expertise, we all knew where to find her up in the Admin building.

  It was just such a bizarre promotion. Dr. Harald I would have understood—for him, it would have been a step straight up the ladder. But this . . . the head of HR getting the position of what was essentially co-second in command of the entire prison was kind of like that time Harry Potter tried to use Floo Powder for the first time and instead of saying “Diagon Alley” he said diagonally and ended up in Knockturn Alley. The trajectory was skewed.

  Soon, though, I started to suspect that Highland had used her insider knowledge to her advantage. As someone who worked in Administration, she saw this prison from the inside out. Highland knew where the gaps were, both in staffing and policies. Presumably, she went into her interview with a plan of attack.

  Highland was on a mission. Highland was going to whip every part of this place into shape, come hell or high water.

  And, as I was soon going to come to learn, the library was one of the first objectives on her list.

  “Hello, Ms. G.,” Highland said politely, opening the log book. “How’s the library?”

  “Uh, fine,” I said. Since taking over her new role as Deputy Warden of Special Services, Highland had made a commitment to keeping up with weekly rounds of the facility, something her predecessor rarely did. I had never interacted much with Deputy Francis: once in a while she’d stop by the library on her rounds. But her visits were few and far between, and even when she did stop by, it was just long enough to sign her name into the log as proof that she had visited. The library,
it seemed, was so far down her list of priorities she just . . . didn’t care. Granted, in a job where you had to balance an outdated copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica against homemade shivs, well, I could understand her apathy.

  Not so with Highland. Because of the new job split, all of her attention could be focused on the sort of softer side of institutional living. Highland not only consistently came once a week on rounds, she always stayed for several minutes to analyze the state of the space, and chat with the inmates.

  She signed her name in the log in a single flourish. “So,” she said. She closed the log book and leaned forward, eyes trained on me with laser focus. “About the books.”

  The . . . books? I wondered. It was a library; we were literally standing in a room full of books. I needed more context.

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure . . .”

  “The books,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “The donated books.”

  Right. Those books. The hundreds of books sitting on the metal shelf behind me. The books I had, for the most part, pretty much forgotten all about. In the beginning I had been all gung ho about cataloging the books and adding them to the collection, but as the months went on, my interest level declined and they had spent the past six months sitting in a state of neglect. There were too many books and not enough shelf space. Plus there was that spreadsheet to contend with. Every month or so a few would get added, but it was haphazard at best. A frustrating and terrible way of keeping track of the books in the collection.

  Clearly, this whole “pretend the books don’t exist and maybe they’ll catalog themselves” tactic was no longer going to work out for me.

  “Yes,” I said with a nod. “Yes, the books.”