Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (25 page)

This is the flip-side to the skeptical old Jewish joke:

A small town pays a ne’er-do-well to sit on a bench, wait for the Messiah, and to announce his arrival to the rest of the townspeople. For years, that’s exactly what the man does: sits on the bench all day, every day, waiting. One day a man asks the ne’er-do-well why he took such a thankless, low-paying job.

“It’s true, the pay is low,” says the ne’er-do-well, “but it’s a steady job.”

In a world where nothing, not even God’s promises, is reliable, at least one can rely on disappointment. And as the joke says, the doomed optimism business offers wonderful job security. It’s a perfect summary of prison work.

At the moment, it is my work. When I return to my office, I draw up a propaganda poster to be placed in the prison blocks—it shows an image of the library and a child.
Use the Prison Library
, it reads,
So Your Children Won’t Have To
. It’s a bit pessimistic, perhaps, but also optimistic in a way. It turns out that even after I defected from yeshiva, I still abide by the medieval Jewish article of faith, which is itself full of doubts and subtle irony:
I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and even though he tarries, nevertheless I await his arrival every day
.

The Archive

Forest, my co-librarian, was beginning to wonder about me. In his abundant politeness, he’d kept mum. But one afternoon, shortly before taking off for the day, leaving the library in my hands, he finally turned around from his desk on the other side of our shared office and spoke up.

“So,” he said, in his near whisper of a voice, “what are you doing over there?”

I’d been clearing precious shelf space for empty boxes and was now filling these boxes with piles of raggedy-looking sheets of paper.

“I’m making some storage area for kites and stuff found in the library.”

“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

He put his coat on, closed up a few Word documents he’d been working on. He stood watching me for a moment, wearing a pained expression.

“Like an archive?” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Exactly.”

“I think you’re more an archivist than a librarian,” he said.

He told me that archivists and librarians were opposite personas. True librarians are unsentimental. They’re pragmatic, concerned with the newest, cleanest, most popular books. Archivists, on the other hand, are only peripherally interested in what other people like, and much prefer the rare to the useful.

“They like everything,” he said, “gum wrappers as much as books.” He said this with a hint of disdain.

“Librarians like throwing away garbage to make space, but archivists,” he said, “they’re too crazy to throw anything out.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m more of an archivist.”

“And I’m more of a librarian,” he said.

“Can we still be friends?”

He flashed me his shy smile and headed out the door.

I was rational enough to realize that refusing to throw out kites, and other such material, was a bit eccentric. But I couldn’t help it. It seemed brutal to trash a letter that someone had taken the time to handwrite. And there was some part of me that thought,
Who knows, maybe these letters will be important to someone in the future?
I majored in history and literature, and wrote newspaper obituaries. I spent many hours looking at letters and artifacts that some oddball had decided not to throw out. There is no history, no memory, without this.

I couldn’t bring myself to destroy records. When I thought about it, I could link this impulse to my emotional investment in Jessica and her letter: if not to reunite a family—a tall order under the circumstances—then at least to preserve a record, some scrap of family memory, for Chris and his children, if he has any.

For months, I had been vaguely conscious that the prison itself maintained an archive. But since it hadn’t directly related to my work, I’d forgotten about it. Now, given that Forest had correctly diagnosed me as an archivist, I was curious what an actual prison archive looked like.

W
hen I approached Patti with an awkward and vaguely phrased request to “see the archive,” she said she’d see what could be done. That same day, Deputy Mullin, the warden, called me himself to tell me that he’d put me in touch with the prison archivist, Sergeant Gallo—whom the deputy accidentally, or possibly intentionally, referred to as Sergeant Gallows. Deputy Mullin had told Gallo/Gallows that I was a “history buff” and would “appreciate a tour.” When he recounted this, he laughed faintly.

“Knock yourself out,” he told me. “But watch out for Gallows. He’s kind of a character.”

In my imagination, an archivist—a real archivist, unlike me—is meticulous, pedantic, solemn, a person who doesn’t let anything slip, neither a document nor a candid phrase. Sgt. Gallo was not this man. He was of another genus altogether. The sergeant was a charmingly unkempt fellow, quirky and freewheeling, a man who wore both his officer’s stripes and his effusive emotions on his sleeve. Perhaps he preferred the solitude of the archive, or perhaps he’d been banished there—it wasn’t clear. Gallo, who teetered as he walked, was a perfect square of a man, as though almost three decades toiling in a box-shaped cinderblock room, surrounded by boxes, had turned him into one himself. He grunted and snorted, boasted, told off-color jokes, and proudly subverted the ethos of his job: He told me that he’d been “itching” to destroy an entire wall’s worth of boxes (once the court gave him permission, of course). He had no affection for history (“it’s all bad news”) and was much more concerned with making room for new documents. Apparently, he was more of a librarian.

“Empty space is gorgeous,” he told me, “it’s literally beautiful to me. But, as you can see, there ain’t much beauty up here.”

When I’d first arrived in the archive—riding on an elevator that started and stopped at the whim of a distracted officer in central control—I shook hands with Gallo and immediately marveled at the stunning view of Boston’s skyline and at the luxuriant sunlight pouring in through giant skylights. He squinted in the direction of the grand windows, as though he had never noticed them. Perhaps he hadn’t.

“It’s all right I guess,” he said, “if you’re into that kind of thing.”

He then harangued me for almost an hour about how nobody appreciates him or the work he does. Most of his fellow prison guards routinely implied that he spent his time “sitting around touching myself all day.” Although the little square-shaped sergeant didn’t find this amusing at all, he finally cracked a smile and conceded, “This is mostly not the case.”

I asked him about the photos hanging over his desk. In the spot where most people might hang a family portrait or a pinup girl, he had photos of an old, decrepit brick fortress on a gray overcast day, the path leading to it marked by foot-deep tire tracks in fresh mud.

“That,” he said, a smile suddenly brightening the thick creases of his face, “is Deer Island.” The old prison facility. Everyone who’d spent time at Deer Island—inmates, officers, and civilian staff—all spoke of it as a depressing hellhole. But not Gallo. He became nostalgic when recalling the beach picnics and barbecues that officers had up there.

“There weren’t so many
rules
at Deer Island. It was great. Nobody cared what went on.”

For most people, that had been precisely the problem with the place. Gallo turned serious again and told me that nobody on the prison staff respects the archive space. When people hear of the existence of the archive, he said, “They think this means ‘garbage dump.’ ” He’d been constantly turning away broken down prison fixtures and appliances.

Sometimes, however, he’d strip a fixture for parts. During his spare time in the archive, Gallo toyed with his “inventions.” In a corner of the space, he’d set up a workshop where he built and tinkered with various devices he didn’t care to discuss. Gallo was one of the more idiosyncratic people I’d met in prison. His hours in the archive ran from 4 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day. A singular shift indeed.

When Gallo had begun his tour, he had asked me, with bald incredulity—bordering on mockery—why I wanted to see the archive. I had no suitable response and relied on Deputy Mullin’s excuse: I was a “history buff.” Gallo had narrowed his eyes when I said that. But he executed the boss’s order and showed me room after room of boxes containing incident reports, disciplinary write-ups, medical records, memos, inmate booking papers, and God only knows what else.

“Nobody really knows everything that’s in here,” he conceded.

He pulled out yellowed documents from the ancient prison at Deer Island.

“If you do time, your ugly file stays in here forever,” he said, with a grin, “the prison archive doesn’t ever forget.”

B
ut does it
remember?
And, what exactly does it choose to commit to memory? Would it tell a future historian that a man named Messiah once lived in a cell on the third floor? That the inmates named their basketball tournament the Summer Classic? Would it record the names of the prison’s most watched TV show or most read book? Would it remember Jessica and her son?

The twenty-five-minute tour with Gallo had tantalized me. The space itself—its piles of papers representing decades of tangled history—reminded me of all that I didn’t know and couldn’t know. This itself is part of the wisdom of archives. By creating a finite space, where some things are included, some omitted, an archive challenges you to examine its dusty spaces, but more importantly, to search for what has been entirely left out. After Jessica’s death, I felt an even greater need to preserve, to create a home for those things in danger of slipping into oblivion.

As I stood on the elevator, I made a decision to officially embrace my inner archivist. It would be another use of the library as a space—to amass the stuff of memory, artifacts, documents, fragments. By some neurotic compulsion I was undertaking this process anyway. I appreciated that Forest had been kind enough to dignify it with a name: a prison archive, a small collection that could fill in some memory gaps left by the official archive on the top floor. And even if I was a weirdo for doing it, I’d still be only the second strangest prison archivist in the building.

A Night Kite

As part of my self-appointed job as prison archivist, I decided to pay a visit to Deer Island and take stock of Boston’s ancient prison. Although the facility was out of use, I hoped the structure might reveal something. More than most buildings, a prison
is
its architecture, an institution whose form is its meaning.

I knew the basic outlines of its story. In the 1840s, as property values rose in South Boston, the city relocated the prison from Southie to Boston Harbor. There it remained until 1991, a barely functional hulk, the longest continuously used prison facility in the United States. With the notable exception of Sergeant Gallo, and his wistfulness, there was a consensus of disdainful respect for Deer Island. For the prison guards, staff, and inmates, time served in Deer Island was worn as a badge of honor, proof that you were dangerous—nineteenth-century tough—that you had survived the primitive. The island prison was a notorious no-man’s-land, a war of all against all, where electricity and plumbing rarely worked, wildlife roamed the halls, where inmates and guards settled disputes using the law of the jungle. One inmate told me that if you had been in Deer Island, you were “from a different era.” On this point, all sides agreed. “Deer Island,” went the refrain from both inmates and guards, “now
that
was prison.”

Was
, it turned out, was the key word. When I arrived at Deer Island I discovered nothing more than a pretty wasteland. There was nothing to see.

Today it serves two functions: the site of the country’s second largest waste-treatment plant, a $6 billion complex, created by emergency federal decree to clean Boston’s contaminated harbor—and an unmarked burial ground for nearly five thousand anonymous people. As a whole, Deer Island is a bulky 210 acres fortified by an elevated seawall built to global warming specifications. A few hills tumble abruptly into a lowland that is dominated by the sewage plant, a sprawling campus with no people, and large, prim, unidentified buildings of indefinite purpose. The air over the island is thick with a sweet putrid aroma, cut by an occasional salty breeze from the east. At the foot of the steep seawall is a modest sand and stone beach that seems to shrink with every black, foamy wave. From here, one stands flush against the vast blue-gray expanse of the Atlantic.

The story of the island’s prison begins with a natural history, a buried record that must be observed today mostly in its absences. The first of which: there are no deer on Deer Island.

It wasn’t always so. In deep history, the island served as a refuge for deer fleeing hungry mainland timberwolves. How they got there is a mystery. A nineteenth-century travel guide surmised that a few courageous deer swam the 325 feet that separated the island from the mainland, a saltwater channel known as Shirley Gut. Or perhaps they walked over ice. Free from predators, the deer flourished and grew into a colony, a merry cotton-tailed Eden. By dint of nature, therefore, Deer Island is primarily an asylum.

The island served as a wood commons for the residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Men would row out to the island, collect wood, and hunt deer. Soon enough, there were no more trees to be had and the deer were hunted into oblivion. Thus began the human saga of the place.

Deer Island marked the area beyond the fringes of the new European inhabitation, the spot just on the other side of the social contract, the devil’s ground on the outer reaches of the City on a Hill—the domain of pirates, vigilantes, hangings, criminals, the stricken, and the dispossessed.

For the Natick tribe, Deer Island was a desperate exile, a seventeenth-century concentration camp. Having made the mistake of converting to Christianity—assuming the status of a “praying tribe”—the Natick were considered traitors by other natives and, at the same time, regarded with deep suspicion by the English. When King Philip’s war broke out in 1675, frantic English colonists interned the Natick, along with other unwanteds, on Deer Island. Roughly five hundred people, men, women, and children, starved and died during the brutal winter.