Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (27 page)

For the blunt, indefatigable fact of tending the prison at night, Sully had his own approach. He was a humorist. Always had a “new one” for me. But when I arrived that night, Sully wasn’t smiling.

“D’ya hear what happened?” he whispered as I approached.

This is not the greeting one wants from a prison guard.

“No. What happened?” I said.

“Someone was stabbed.”

“Oh my God—who?”

“A famous actress. Reese … 
something.”

“Witherspoon?”

“No,” he said, “with a knife.”

A big twisted grin lit the guard’s face. A wicked little laugh wheezed and rattled in his throat.

“Howd’ya like that one?” said Sully, giving me a firm slap on the back. “No:
with a knife!”

After repeating the punchline a few more times, and laughing again with each retelling, he was through with me. I was permitted to enter.

The creepiness of prison at night was not diminished for being predictable. The halls were startlingly still, the yard thick in dysmorphic moon figures. Air shafts conveyed disquieting muffled squawks. But I’d anticipated something even more sinister and, after a few moments’ adjustment, was actually somewhat relieved. When I arrived at my post in the 3-Building, the library, I flipped the light switch—the switch whereby I dispatched my minimal legal duty, in the suggestive words of the nineteenth-century prison by-laws:
such provision of light shall be made for all prisoners confined to labor during the day as shall enable them to read for at least one hour each evening
. The space was washed out in gray fluorescent shadows, quiet and uncanny. A library never feels empty, even when you want it to be. A few startled mice took cover. At that moment, I was content to share the space with them, deeply relieved they were not people.

I walked through the labyrinth of bookshelves, through Biography, Geography, Politics, History, Fiction. And, finally, arrived at my destination: Poetry.

Having spent a day exploring the dreary emptiness of Deer Island and the even drearier busyness of the Liberty Hotel I was grateful for this flesh-and-blood space. The old prisons didn’t have libraries.

I turned to the Sylvia Plath section. In light of what happened to Jessica, I was seriously considering suspending it indefinitely. From my perspective, the shelf had served a simple practical function, making a popular writer more accessible.
More access, more access—
this is the credo of a library. But maybe I was doing a disservice, contributing to the death-cult in elevating Plath to a special shelf. Perhaps as a prison librarian, who served a vulnerable population, I had a responsibility to not only connect people to books but also to protect them from some as well.

The idea bothered me: Who was I to decide what books another person should read? Censorship was not my job. And yet, how could I sleep at night knowing that I had a special section for
Ariel
, with these lines from the poem “Cut,” “What a thrill— / My thumb instead of an onion. / The top quite gone / Except for a sort of a hinge / Of Skin … / I am ill. / I have taken a pill to kill / The thin / Papery feeling.” From “Edge”: “The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment.”
Ariel
would never arouse the suspicions of myopic prison censors, who reserved the right to remove books of incitement and violence. But just because
Ariel
was art didn’t make it less dangerous—in fact, it made it potentially far more so. I had women in my library who were borderline cases, cutters, suicide junkies, who might turn to Plath as an oracle of self-annihilation. Maybe I had a responsibility to shield them from this poem. Or perhaps reading the poem could help them in some way. Maybe I should teach the poem. Or maybe it wasn’t my business, either way. None of this was obvious to me.

But I decided to put the questions off until work hours. I was off-duty, after all; the space was officially closed. At that moment, I was in the library as a visitor, a reader. I was there to seek, not give, direction.

I flipped through a Plath biography, hoping to learn something about her experience of the 1938 hurricane—alluded to in “Point Shirley”—when the Deer Island prison was still the view from her window. Sylvia and her parents had weathered the storm in the family home. The windows of her father’s library had shattered. Entire homes had landed in the sea. Boats had floated to the other side of town. A shark lay in her grandmother’s garden, as though it had simply sprouted there during the night.

As I closed the book, I was reminded why I had dragged myself out to the prison at this hour, to encounter a real library and not an online approximation. The book I was reading, like so many in the library, had a note left in it, a kite—a message for me, if I chose to see it that way. The moment I read it, I knew this document also had a place in my slowly growing prison archive. I folded it up and placed it on my archive shelf, next to the old government reports on prisons and newspaper articles about Deer Island, the nineteenth-century New England travelogues, the glossy brochure and press releases from the Liberty Hotel, random lists, a 1903 congressional report on prison archives, the ever-growing library of kites, the letter addressed to the Messiah, some information on contraband from my orientation class. The handmade wordfind game called “Things Found in Prison.”

The note that came to me that night was an abandoned letter, a fragment from one of the prison library’s tragic Plaths:

Dear Mother
,
My life is

Nothing more. An anonymous, half-finished sentence with no object and no conclusion. A
life
indefinite, unarticulated, open-ended. An unfinished, unsent letter. An infinity of white space. This too is a way to remember a prison.

DELIVERED    
Part II

CHAPTER 3
Dandelion Polenta

Tousled and disheartened, tired as a fossil, the Messiah shuffled into the prison library at 3:26 p.m. on a partly cloudy Wednesday afternoon. Few noted his presence. Sitting behind the counter, Dice called out, “Hey, Messiah, how’s it going, brother?” But the poor guy didn’t seem to hear. Dice turned to me, shrugged, and resumed reading the paper. When the man reached the counter, he clutched it like a lifesaver, and rewarded himself with a quick, standing thirty-second nap. The Messiah, a.k.a. Chuck, an inmate in the 3-1 unit, was a dud. In retrospect, though, he was right about the one thing he told me before he shoved off back into the void.

“See that guy over there,” he said, leaning on the counter. “You’re gonna want to know that guy. C.C. Too Sweet.”

I already did know a bit about this man, though only from afar. I saw how he rolled. He’d let the rabble shove in first: the users, gangbangers, thieves, pushers, and bustas. These were not his people. Only then would he make his entrance. He’d glide into the library at a peripatetic pace, conducting an animated conversation with a young inmate or two. Disciples. Or he’d come in alone, his mind working through its own dialogue. You could see it in his face.

When he arrived at the front counter, he’d ask Dice, or Fat Kat, or me, to see a road atlas. It seemed odd, and somehow subversive, to hand out maps in a prison. None of these men was going anywhere. For them, there was only point A.

But C.C. had his reasons. Maps were crucial visual aids to the stories he told. C.C. favored the omniscient perspective. He liked to set his scene on a large scale, to claim large tracts of territory, to pinpoint the exact spot where his life intersected with the great big world.

“Right here,” he once told me, pointing to Pennsylvania Avenue on a map of Washington, D.C. “That belonged to me. That’s where you’d find Too Sweet, man. Right next to the White House. I ran the Black House.”

When he saw a crowd gather for him, he’d take a little step back to give himself space to emote. He’d pause a moment to allow his audience to situate themselves. Then he’d smile.

“There’s two things you need to know about C.C. Too Sweet,” he’d begin, “he’s
iniquitous
and he’s
ubiquitous.”

Too Sweet had a million of these.

“Anyone here know what ‘pimp’ stands for?”

Nobody knew.

“Part pope, part chimp.”

C.C. always put a special Southern emphasis on that word,
pimp
, like the way an Evangelical preacher says Jesus—Geeee-zus. C.C. said pee-yimp. I couldn’t substantiate his claim to be a “famous
pee
-yimp, known around the nation,” but he seemed fairly well known within the prison. He was a pal of Fat Kat, which meant that he was in deep. Prison elite.

A light-skinned black man of Cape Verdean descent, midthirties, slightly red-toned hair, balding and squat, with bricklayer forearms, Too Sweet was most proud of his “teddy bear” eyes, greenish yellow, small, perfectly round, and close set. His head seemed a bit too small for his body. On one forearm, a giant Playboy bunny tattoo encroached awkwardly on a tattoo of a thorny rose. It was as if he hadn’t taken the ten seconds necessary to consider its placement. On his other arm, the name C.C. floated in pristine isolation—no other tats to cloud or complicate these letters.

You have to wonder about a person who etches his own name into his body. Usually one tattoos the name of the person one loves beyond all others. Or of one’s God. Was this true also for those who tattoo their own name? Or perhaps they’re simply uncreative. C.C. was certainly not in this latter category.

When he wasn’t performing, C.C. kept apart from the crowd. Sometimes he appeared dejected, slumped in his seat like a ruined millionaire. But most of the time, there was something active brewing. I’d see him studying a map alone, lost in thought. Devising an escape, it seemed. And this wasn’t so far from the truth. To C.C., maps were not a way of plotting a future route as much as returning to the past, to the lost places of his life—the list of which was ever mounting. He was a man whose life had been shaped primarily by streets, intersections, alleys, and highways. All of which had led him here. So he gravitated toward a book that laid these streets out before him once again, clean and blank and open to his interpretations. This was all he needed to begin his journey back.

It was in the midst of listening to one of these stories that I had asked him to join my creative writing course.

The Penguin Joint

I was in a recruiting phase for the class. Though pimps and hustlers were a natural—and, in the library, a most readily available—group from which to draw, I found students in all corners. C.C. was enlisted from the front. But I came across others in the back, on the periphery.

The back room, Coolidge’s former office, had been liberated. It was now open to the general inmate public (though I did keep a few legal volumes there in his honor.) We occasionally used the room to screen movies—National Geographic nature films, PBS documentaries, and assorted features. The women favored
The Color Purple
or
Beloved. Roots
was a favorite among men and women alike.

But the most popular genre among the male inmates was nature documentaries about carnivorous animals. The men loved watching films with titles like
Cheetahs on the Prowl
or
Snake Safari
. When they grew bored of these, they’d play a film about tornadoes. But they preferred for the mayhem to have a face, and so predator flicks it was.

Some men would sit and watch the film, others would set up shop nearby—with a chessboard or a law book—and only give their full attention to the film during the good parts. Even from the other side of the library, I knew that the lioness had finally pounced when I’d hear inmates yelling at the screen, “Get ’em! Get ’em!”

Once, and only once, I heard an inmate take the gazelle’s side and cry out,
“Run, run!”
You knew that the gazelle had succumbed and was being devoured when you heard inmates shouting, “You show ’em, lion!” or “That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!” I suggested
March of the Penguins—a
film that documents the struggle of penguins, who walk hundreds of miles to lay eggs, then spend an excruciating winter as the males shield the eggs while the females waddle, in epic fashion, to the sea to hunt before returning, again epically, to their starving kin with bellyfuls of food. The inmates scoffed.

“I’m a grown man,” one inmate growled at me.

Another better-humored inmate tried to keep it simple for me: “Avi, man, that penguin shit is
whack
. Nobody wants to watch it.”

I understood where he was coming from. The aesthetics of testosterone are clear on this one: lions make for better action than penguins. But still, I didn’t relent. I forced the movie on them. Those bored enough to stay enjoyed the drama.

The next day a youngish inmate swaggered into the library in the exaggerated faux limp popular among my thug clientele.

“Yo,” he said, as he approached the counter. I braced myself for his request. “You still got that penguin joint? We didn’t finish it yesterday.”

I smiled and handed him the DVD. After dispensing with the usual requests, I wandered to the back room, where
March of the Penguins
was wrapping up with the satisfying conclusion, the miraculous collective hatching of the eggs. The only person sitting there was the inmate who had requested the movie. He was watching the film intently and scribbling furiously in a prison-issue notebook.

“You like writing?” I asked, taking a seat next to him. Annoyed by my presence, he paused the movie and looked up.

“Just taking some notes.”

“On the
penguins?”

“Yeah. Listen, I’m trying to finish up here and I only got ten minutes.”

I cut to the point.

“I run a creative writing class,” I said. “You should join.”

“Fine,” he said, “sign me up.”

He said this without so much as lifting his head from his scribbling. My eye picked off a phrase from his notebook,
It’s about being a MAN
.