Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (21 page)

Soon thereafter, Miller had been summoned for questioning. That’s when I’d witnessed Charlie telling him to go to SID. Word around the prison was that SID shook him down hard, reduced him to tears. But he repeatedly denied knowledge of the shank. Somehow—possibly by reminding him that he himself could do time for what he had done—SID had squeezed Miller hard enough that he confessed everything. Officers escorted Miller, red-faced and humiliated, from the facility. There is a protocol for officers’ escorting staff out in this fashion. These incidents occasionally happen. A full investigation would follow.

I listened to the story with a sense of awe and dread. Poor Miller! His situation was a staff person’s nightmare. A clear example of how being surrounded by criminals can easily turn you into one yourself, even with the best of intentions. And even if you typically made good decisions. What happened to him might have happened to any of us—who knows how we’d react if an inmate with a knife threatened us with blackmail or worse. My friend’s phrase,
Miller was named
, made me shudder.

A few days later, I was waiting for the front door to roll open, en route to a mandatory meeting for all non-uniformed staff. We were going to be collectively chastised for the Miller affair and rallied to the mission at hand. Eddie Grimes, the officer stationed at the front gate—a student of Zen Buddhism who always kept a book of Eastern thought at his post—dropped a piece of wisdom on me. As I waited for the heavy prison door to roll open, I asked Eddie for some insight from his studies. He thought for a moment and dangled a pen vertically between two fingers.

“The master teaches,” Eddie said, “hold the pen with great care but hold the weapon with even greater care, for the weapon protects the pen.”

It was a statement that captured the essence of the officers’ relationship to people like me. And it was a refutation of the cliché that the pen is mightier than the sword. Of course, in prison, where pens are turned into knives, this expression already holds a peculiar resonance.

At the meeting, we were told to, “Give the inmates nothing.
Nothing.”
Forest and I were depressed by this formulation of the policy. We were, after all, in the business of doing exactly that: giving the inmates stuff. We were also told that we had no confidentiality whatsoever with the inmates and that our loyalty was to the sheriff and the sheriff alone.

“Your ID card,” said Quinn, the assistant deputy, “has two names on it, yours and the sheriff’s. Those are your priorities here. Got it?”

Snitching was serious business. When you entered the prison, you would be asked to name people. How you named those people made you either a con or a cop. There was no third option, no neutrality.

B
ack in the library things were returning to normal. The inmates needled me for information. Among their population, rumors were rampant:

“I heard this wasn’t the first time that teacher guy did this.”

“I heard he knew the guy from the outs.”

“I heard that the teacher guy was selling drugs to guys in 3-3 and was scared that dude was gonna rat him out.”

Teddy, the ideologue, took a strong position on the issue.

“I respect that teacher,” Teddy said, as he helped Fat Kat enter new books into the library’s computer database.

“ ’Course you do!” said Pitts. “It takes a fool to respect a fool.”

“Nah, man,” Teddy said, “he was trying to help a friend. And even when the dude ratted him out, he kept strong, proud. Your
name
, man, that’s all you got.”

“That might be all
you
got,” said Pitts, “but that teacher guy had a
job
until he decided to be a damn fool.”

As usual, Pitts got the last word. The conversation died there. After a few minutes of quiet, Teddy spoke again. This time he addressed me.

“You’re Jewish, right?” asked Teddy. “Is it okay if I ask?”

I was curious what line of thought had led Teddy here.

“Yeah,” I responded. “I grew up Orthodox. Hard-core.”

Fat Kat’s eyes widened when he heard this; he looked up from the computer keyboard where he had been working. Like Teddy, Fat Kat was Muslim. He, however, was not a convert but a born Muslim, raised by back-to-Africa black activists. A week earlier Fat Kat had told me, with a big smile, about the time his mother dragged him and his siblings to a demonstration in Washington, D.C. Young Kat had stood in front of the White House waving his fist and chanting, “Reagan, Reagan’s gotta go! We support the P-L-O!”

“I had
no
idea what I was saying,” he told me. “I was just repeating what they said.”

We had had a big laugh about it. Now Fat Kat looked at me.

“You was raised
Orthodox?
Like with the hats and the hair,” he said pointing to his sideburns, indicating the traditional long sidelocks of the Hasidic sects. I could see that he was trying to imagine me dressed in a black frock coat with matching black hat and curly sidelocks, stroking my beard and walking briskly down Lexington Avenue in New York City. I laughed.

“Not exactly,” I said, “I was like a plainclothes Hasid.”

“Yeah, yeah,
Hasids!”
said Fat Kat with a big smile and a clap. “I remember those guys from the Feds, man,” he said, referring to Federal Prison. I later learned that Fat Kat also knew them well as reliable clients of a sex-for-hire business he once ran in Brooklyn.

“Those dudes don’t fuck around, right?” Teddy, always the diligent disciple, asked Fat Kat. “Pardon my language,” he said, turning to me.

“Yeah, they take care of they shit,” replied Kat. “Man those dudes was funny, though. In the Feds, if the Hasids got upset with something, they’d swarm around the warden and start doing this …” He did an impression of a flock of nervous men chattering and furiously wagging index fingers. I recognized the gesture and laughed. Fat Kat was fascinated by Hasidim. I rarely saw him this animated.

“In the Feds,” he went on, “there was this black dude—I’m talking, straight up
black
guy—who dressed like them, the Hasids, and rolled with them. And we was just like, ‘Okay, man, if that’s how you gonna do it, that’s cool.’ ”

Fascination with Hasidim, I understood. But, admiration? That struck me as strange. Blacks and Hasidim, as I understood it, had a relationship of mutual suspicion. And then there was the issue of style.

“Really?” I said.
“Cool?”
It wasn’t a word I had ever associated with my Hasidic brethren.

“Yeah!” said Teddy, who had never met a Hasid in his life. “You ever see them dudes rolling, like four in car, matching beards, man, matching pimpin’ hats, music bumpin’ …”

Teddy, himself piously bearded, cocked an imaginary hat on his braided head and nodded rhythmically to a nonexistent bass beat. He dissolved into laughter.

“Yeah,” I said, “when
you
do it, it’s cool …”

“Nah, man, I’m serious. I respect those guys,” Teddy said.

Pitts shook his head, “Here we go again …”

“They know what they about,” said Teddy. “Isn’t that true, Kat?”

Fat Kat nodded earnestly. “That’s true,” he said.

As Teddy began to chide me for neglecting my Orthodox practice and for not dressing proudly as the Hasid I was meant to be, it occurred to me that Hasidim were, in ways that I had never quite appreciated, the epitome of gangsta. The inmates on the detail respected the Hasidim because, in their minds, Hasidim embodied the ideals of the thug life. Hasidim had a reputation of viewing the world as us-versus-them, and running their businesses and community institutions without any regard for a system of law imposed by outsiders, persecutors of their community. And what’s more, they did it in style. They dressed their own way, talked their own way, walked their own way; they wore distinctive, indeed, completely unique clothing, and they wore it with pride wherever they went.

But most of all, as Kat explained, based on his own experience in Brooklyn, “You did
not
fuck around in their neighborhood, unless you had the green light. If they caught you out of line, man, they’d fuck you up. Those dudes guarded their neighborhood by any means necessary.”

“Yeah,” said Teddy. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

That was the main job of a gang, after all. And that’s what the Hasidim were to these men: an exquisitely well-organized gang—a gang with a long and illustrious history, a proven track record.

Every gang ultimately strives to be a full-blooded tribe. Tribes-people share a common history and fate, expressed through religion. They are loyal to each other and to their families until death. And they would never, ever snitch. A gang wasn’t just a group of guys roaming around wearing matching clothing; they were an attempt at a community. They shared a history, either real or imagined. It’s not an accident that the Latin Kings gang attaches itself to ancient myths and observes their own holidays and fasts. Nor was it an accident that Teddy was attracted to Sunni Islam and to Hasidim.

I thought back to my Orthodox upbringing and how I was raised to say the line, part of the central prayer of Judaism, “And may the informers have no hope …” I had said this prayer every day,
three times a day
. When I said it, I meant it. I knew more about gang loyalty than I had realized. Apparently I’d been raised with it.

I still cringed when I saw someone graffiti “Stop Snitching” into a desk in the library or when Fat Kat went on a tirade against snitches. But I also understood it personally. I understood why Teddy wanted to respect Miller.

I wondered if, in some small way, I could help shape the library detail into a gang of sorts. In prison, where sharing is literally against the rules and community building is often seen as a threat to order, the library was a place built on the basic tenet of both a gang and of community: sharing resources. People share when they trust each other. And in respecting the library detail—by treating them like men and not prisoners—I hoped to earn their loyalty and to convert them to the cause of the library. And yet, Miller might well have thought the same thing about his students. I could respect the inmate library detail, but I couldn’t let myself be deceived into thinking we were on the same team.

I
never referred to an inmate by his nickname. I was a public servant; I was expected to use an inmate’s official name, his gov. Still, it was hard to resist. The nicknames were so descriptive of personality. When a guy comes into the library every day and speaks in an incomprehensible Mississippi accent, it’s hard not to call him “Country”—especially when that’s what everyone calls him. If a name seemed appropriate for a person, it seemed inappropriate to ignore it. Months after an inmate left the prison, I often couldn’t recall his gov. More often, I remembered his street name. But it was beside the point. In prison, when it came to naming, superior descriptiveness was irrelevant. Names expressed solidarity with a group; they were bound up in one’s affiliation. I was on the sheriff’s payroll and I had to show my solidarity with the law. If I used a street name both the officers and the cons would draw the same conclusion about my allegiances. There was no room for expressions of private relationships that were neutral to the cop-con division. One had to choose sides.

In a culture like prison, which is about honor and shame, how you use a name matters. Honor systems are obsessed with public appearances, public actions. If you use a nickname, you honor both the individual person and the group that named him. If you use the name, you’re part of the gang.

And that’s where snitching came in. Snitching was, essentially, an act of unnaming someone, an undoing of a person’s street name. By naming another person to the authorities, one, in fact, re-established that person’s official identity over and against his street identity. Miller had refused to name the inmate and the result was, as my colleague had whispered to me that night in the cafeteria, he was named. His name became another prison commodity to be traded on the black market.

I decided to be more careful. It wasn’t savvy to let inmates give me a nickname, even a wonderful one like
Bookie
. Nor, for that matter, was it wise to have my actual name broadcast over the radio by the L-Crew to all of Greater Boston. I had to avoid sending the message that I was somehow on the inmates’ side in the prison war—especially if I also did stupid things like mouth off to Officer De Luca. Even if it wasn’t my intention, I was misaligning myself by doing these things. The next thing I knew, I’d end up like Miller, a well-intentioned chump holding a shank for some inmate. If I allowed inmates to name me, I might eventually allow them to unname me. I couldn’t get drawn in.

For example, with Jessica. By handing a “gift” from her to her son, I wasn’t really doing anything wrong. Or was I? Perhaps I was even doing something right. It was hard to tell. But I was doing something … with an inmate. This, as I was told during orientation, was how trouble started. The little transgression. I was moving into that gray area, into what I’d been warned against repeatedly by my coworkers, and by many inmates themselves, and now formally by the deputy. I knew what pragmatic union boss Charlie would tell me: keep your nose clean. Even if it goes your way this round, he’d say, next time you’ll get screwed; that’s how it goes here. How many times had I been told, “Keep your distance” and “Don’t get involved”? With Jessica, I was now involved. And every time I convinced myself that it was fine, that I was doing something right, I remembered Miller’s mortified face, drained of all blood, lying to Charlie and probably in denial himself. If these hesitations hadn’t entered my mind, I’d already be in denial.

The good news: people still had no idea what to make of my name, Avi, itself a nickname for Avraham. This name, which is as common as Tom in Israel and Orthodox enclaves, was exotic in prison. Many people still had trouble saying it. I got called everything: Ari, Javi, Ali, Artie, Avery, Arnie, Alley, Arlo, Albie, Harley, Halley, Arfi, Advil, Alvie, Audi (as in the car), Arby (as in the fast food chain), A.V., Harvey, Harvin, and my personal favorite, which I heard but once: Ally. That name got right to the point.