Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (15 page)

“To quote Dirty Harry? Okay, Avi,” Kat said, walking away, laughing, “I’ll remember that.”

Jessica Returns

After the public embarrassment of my tainted Katrina drive and of my scene with De Luca, I decided to keep a low profile. I turned to a quieter matter: Jessica. I’d been mulling over her situation for weeks, wondering what it was Jessica was really after. If she wanted to connect with her son, she could. She knew where he lived. She could send him a note. Perhaps she had. She may have left him a letter, a kite, in the library books, just like everyone else. But my guess was she hadn’t and that her need to look out the window came in lieu of actually contacting him.

But what exactly was she doing in that window? Did she simply want to see what he looked like after all these years? Was she tormenting herself? Was she looking for some clue, some insight, some way to understand him? Everything about this scenario, this type of longing, was entirely beyond the scope of my life experience. It was inscrutable to me.

One thing was certain. When I saw her that first day, squinting in the sun, sitting with her perfect posture, hands folded in her lap, she seemed almost hypnotized by whatever it was she saw through the window. She was oblivious to the other people in the room. I’d had to rouse her. I’d been curt with her. I’d felt immediately bad for my impatience, and doubly so for wielding my authority crudely over someone older than I. But I think my regret originated from a less palpable source, from a sense that something else, something imperceptible to me, was happening. Even before I knew the truth, that I was interrupting her in some way.

But this remained a vague feeling. Even by the standards of this class, I barely knew her. She’d spoken maybe twice in the class, and almost always refused to hand in her writings. When she did, she rarely offered up more than a few stingy lines and was totalitarian in self-censorship.
I remember the day I first got arrested
, she once wrote for an essay assignment.
It was cold and cloudy. I don’t remember much else
. She didn’t bother including a fourth sentence in this essay (which was more of a haiku).

But still, I knew her silences were not for want of perception. This after all was the woman who’d examined Flannery O’Connor’s photo and, even before reading a word, clairvoyantly summarized O’Connor’s sensibility:
She ain’t too pretty. I trust her
. The little I knew of Jessica indicated that she had a sharp eye and that she trusted her vision. Perhaps that’s why I wanted to know what she saw through that window. I thought about this often. So often, in fact, I had to wonder further: Why did I care so much?

I decided to pay her a visit in the Tower. That was one advantage of teaching in prison. The inmate students could run but they couldn’t hide. It was impossible to play hookie in the joint. But as I stood in the elevator, I still wasn’t sure why I was pursuing this.

Even as the door to the 1-11-2 unit rolled open, I still didn’t know what I was planning to say. Before I could think about it, dozens of eyes turned my way. The women inmates, suffering from annihilating boredom, began to approach me. In seconds I was surrounded. My first reaction was,
Cool, I’m a rock star
. My second reaction was,
Get me out of here. Immediately
. I found myself in yet another seagulling situation. This time, it wasn’t reading material inmates wanted, but attention.

Somebody leapt out of the crowd—Short.

“Whaddup Harvey!” she said.

Another inmate, whom I recognized only by face, shouted toward me. “Hey library guy,” she said, waving a women’s magazine, “I’m learning how to be
Forty & Fabulous!”
She beamed a big, semi-toothless grin. Short suddenly turned serious and began working crowd control. She jostled her fellow inmates and said, “Let the man through, let the man
through.”
She escorted me. The world’s smallest bodyguard. Finally, I managed to slip through the crowd.

I found Jessica playing checkers. I thanked Short for her services and asked her for privacy. Jessica was not happy to see me. I cut straight to the point, even though I still wasn’t sure what my point was.

“I want you to rejoin my class,” I said.

She shrugged.

“I know why you left.”

She gave me a doubtful look.

“You wanted to see your son, right?” I said.

Again, she shrugged. Inmates rarely answered pointed questions, never sure if they were digging a grave for themselves or someone else.

“Okay, listen, I don’t care if your son is out there or who he is or anything. But I’m willing to make a deal with you. You can sit by the window, but you can’t stare out the whole class. You need to look at me as much as you look outside, you need to do it quietly and not draw attention to yourself. And you need to participate in class. That means speaking up and putting real effort into your assignments. And do me a favor,” I said, with a sigh, “don’t tell anyone,
no
one, or I’m going to get every single person asking me to make deals. Got it?”

She smiled faintly. We had a deal.

The Green Light

Written words continued to wash up in the library. Each wave of inmates that crashed through brought forth more prison literary detritus.

At the end of a period the library would be littered with notes and shards of notes. I would walk around like a shell collector on a beach, gathering up legal documents, love letters, queries, manifestos, grievances, marginalia, scribbled receipts, remnants of illicit transactions, wrap dates, rap sheets, rap lyrics, business plans, country songs, handmade advertisements for “entertainment” businesses, journal entries, betting lines, greeting cards, prayers, recipes, incantations, and lists. Many lists. The found poetry of the everyday:

T-shirts

socks

the divorce

US v. Ferguson

M&Ms

In their brevity, some of these notes possessed a wise cryptic quality, like a message from an oracle. A single suggestive word or phrase:
No!
or
Please
or
It was his heart
. One that gave me pause:
Take Heed
.

And plenty of new kites—aborted, shredded, completed. The inmate who described the terror of a recurring dream, a reliving of an actual trauma, in which he is caught in a house fire—only to wake up, in a fright, and realize, “Thank God, I’m only in prison.” Sometimes a line or two would stay with me for days: “To Whom It May Concern: I am a 36 year old mother, grandmother and addict. The latter I’m not proud of.”

The kites also brought new insights. That in the world of inmate dating, for example, a full set of teeth was a prized enough possession that it was often mentioned along with other relevant measurements. And as always, the kite writers introduced me to new, dizzying patois: “I miss u so much remenicen about them summer days buggin out bottles of henn purp hayes burning in the dutch us and the goonies … I wanna get dipped out and make my rounds yo! Saly laided up 40’s bagged will actin up like he was contributing to me popin my tags …”

Among the staff, the library was synonymous with inmates leaving letters for each other. It was common for me to come across an officer in a far-flung corner of the prison—usually when I was making deliveries—who would smile upon learning that I was the prison’s librarian. I always knew exactly what he was about to say: “Read any good letters lately?” And I told him the truth. “Yes, always.”

The letters had clearly vexed hardline Don Amato. He had posted an enormous sign on the door leading out of the library. Like all of his signs, this was impossible to remove:

BE AWARE!
LIBRARY BOOKS
ARE NOT
MAILBOXES.
IF CAUGHT,
WE WILL TAKE AWAY
ALL
YOUR
LIBRARY PRIVILEGES.

Although Forest and I didn’t exactly allow letters, we didn’t hand out punishments either. And so this was another immovable Amato sign unheeded. As usual, our semi-relaxed attitude was perceived as a green light, and we were left with a steady flow of missives from the shadows.

CHAPTER 2
Books Are Not Mailboxes

I couldn’t help myself. I saw an opportunity for Jessica. She was a woman in her late thirties; her son was an eighteen-year-old kid, her only child, whom she had abandoned when he was almost two, and when she had been roughly his current age. Their lives had brought them to this place, to this self-enclosed world, visible to each other through the window.

And they were even nearer to each other than that. There was a portal through which they could almost touch. The library. It was a space they shared, though not at the same time. The place-ness of the library—that dynamic physical quality that made it somehow different than a pushcart of books wheeled to cells—created many unforeseen possibilities.

For a Sudanese woman awaiting deportation, for example, the library was a place for prayer. She’d find a quiet spot between the shelves, facing Mecca, pronounce the
shahada
, and prostrate herself before Allah. I asked her why she chose the library. There were two reasons. First, it was simply that time of day. And the second reason:

“This,” she said, indicating the library with a sweep of her hand, “book place, holy place. Good place for pray.”

Perhaps, like creating a mosque, or using books as mailboxes, this was one of the unique improvisational properties of a library in prison: a space in which to reconnect, in some way, a mother and son.

When Jessica showed up to class again, I adjusted the seats so that the group was situated closer to the windows, and Jessica seated strategically. As the session went on, she gazed down eleven stories, watching her son walk circuits around the prison yard, shoot hoops, crack jokes with the officers. She kept her end of the agreement, humoring my assignments and bringing her attention into the discussion.

I rolled with the window-gazing concept, even integrating it into the class. I asked the women to observe and describe the view through the window. A similar assignment had previously borne some fruit with the men, when I had asked them to describe the scene through their cell windows. With a painterly eye for detail (the single perk of being a jilted lover) one inmate described a crushing scene. It was a late afternoon in February. The city was enveloped in a bright white cloud. It was beginning to snow. Big, succulent, slow-drifting flakes. It must have been at just the freezing point. From his cell window, which faced the front of the prison, he saw his woman, who had just brought their five-year-old son to visit. Her new boyfriend walked with her and the boy. They stopped momentarily. She said something to the new boyfriend. He leaned over, unzipped the purse she was holding, and pulled out a scarf for her. A scarf that he, the inmate watching this, had given her. Then the new boyfriend combed back her hair with his fingers, wrapped the scarf around her neck, and zipped up the purse. The three of them walked away. Witnessing this tiny moment of intimacy destroyed him, he said. He cried, he confessed, “like a little bitch.”

Jessica dutifully described her view through the window. The pigeons, the seagulls, the tiny birds whose fearlessness she admired. (Sometimes too fearless for their own good.) She described the sky, the moon, the clouds. Anything but her son in the yard below.

Short said she “wasn’t in no mood” to look out the window. This was not uncommon. Inmates were often ambivalent about windows facing the world. Window gazing in prison is not neutral. From up in the Tower, one could see not only the yard but the world beyond prison, the city’s buildings, and even some details from the city streets. It was just too tantalizing to be reminded of what you couldn’t have. In the library, Pitts had told me he was happy to have a cell window that faced the yard. He didn’t want to look at the world while he was in prison.

And then there was Tanisha, a nineteen-year-old gang member and library regular. A window view inspired her to begin writing a book. It happened during her first week in prison. From her cell window in the prison tower she could see her entire neighborhood in the distance. She’d never had a bird’s-eye view of it. But there it was—the whole picture, her entire life framed in a single window. A prison window. Perhaps it was the sudden experience of objectivity, of seeing the familiar places of her life at once—the churches, the corners where she used to hang out, the high school where she’d nearly graduated, the houses of friends and enemies, streets where she’d witnessed shootings, the building in which her mother, a homeless addict, once showed up to buy drugs from her, unaware that this particular drug operation belonged to her own teenaged daughter. Seeing everything suddenly small and silent. Something about this new vantage point, this literal new perspective, made her life and those places seem like a
story
—and she, standing in that tower, its narrator. After seeing her neighborhood from up there, she told me, she’d immediately opened up a notebook and didn’t stop writing until lights out. Four hours straight. And then every day since.

In one of her window-gazing assignments, Poor noted that the prison looked like a hotel. Sometimes she liked to imagine that she was on a trip, staying in a nice hotel, waiting for room service, like in the movies. She’d never actually stayed in one. I was amazed at how many different perspectives could be brought out of one prison window.

As an introduction to these assignments we read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from
The Republic
. Socrates imagines the world as a cave and all its human inhabitants as chained prisoners who “see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.” These prisoners’ view of reality is fundamentally skewed, and yet they cannot realize it. In class, we discussed this problem not as a general allegory but more literally, as a description of actual prison life. It wasn’t hard for the prisoners in my class to relate to the problem. They lived their lives right on the edge of the “seeing problem,” as one of them described it.