The Prison Book Club

The
Prison
Book Club

The
Prison
Book Club

Ann Walmsley

A Oneworld Book

First published in Great Britain and the Commonwealth
by Oneworld Publications, 2015

This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications, 2015

Copyright © Ann Walmsley 2015
By Arrangement with Westwood Creative Artists Ltd (2015)

The moral right of Ann Walmsley to be identified as the
Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78074-783-5
ISBN 978-1-78074-784-2 (eBook)

Oneworld Publications
10 Bloomsbury Street
London WC1B 3SR
England

For Bruce

 

Never leave prison with a partly-read book.
You will return to complete it.
—popular superstition among prison inmates

CONTENTS

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE

C
AST OF
C
HARACTERS

1 A Walk in the Cemetery

2 Promises Kept
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time

3 Are You Normal?
The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

4 The N-Word
The Book of Negroes

5 Red Sky at Morning, Jailers Take Warning
Such a Long Journey

6 Summer Reading

7 The Book Club Alibi
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

8 Frank and Graham's Book Club
The Cellist of Sarajevo

9 I'm Institutionalized, Bro
War

10 Abuse or Neglect?
The Glass Castle: A Memoir

11 Just Do the Day
The Grapes of Wrath

12 Christmas in Prison
“The Gift of the Magi”
“The Cop and the Anthem”
“Journey of the Magi”

13 A Book Club of Three
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
Outliers: The Story of Success

14 Island Life
Small Island

15 A Different Kind of Prisoner
Infidel

16 The Wounded
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

17 The Suspects
Ordinary Thunderstorms Six Suspects

18 Good Is More Contagious Than Evil
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

19 Reconstructing a Narrative
Alias Grace

20 My Last Book Club
Alias Grace
Redux

21 The Exmates

 

EPILOGUE

READING LIST

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AUTHOR'S NOTE

T
HIS BOOK IS A MEMOIR based on my experiences as a volunteer in two prison book clubs in 2011 and 2012 and does not represent the experiences of other volunteers in Book Clubs for Inmates Inc., or the role that they may play. The names of people incarcerated in the prisons and the names of people who worked in the prisons have been changed to afford them some privacy. Volunteers' names have also been changed, as have those of the women in my Toronto book club with the exception of Carol's name and my own. In one or two instances, a descriptive detail about the inmates' lives has been changed, to afford even greater privacy. There are no composite characters. Most dialogue is based on audio recordings that the men, the prison authorities and others graciously allowed me to make. In a few instances, the timing of events has been compressed and descriptive details reconstructed for ease of reading.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

All names listed below are pseudonyms except those of Carol and Ann.

THE COLLINS BAY BOOK CLUB

-----

The Ambassadors

BEN Serving a four-year sentence for manslaughter, he particularly enjoyed Andrea Levy's
Small Island
but says he has no favourite book. “All the books that I've read have contributed to who I am today and how I look at life.”

DREAD Serving a sentence for drug-related crimes, he says Margaret

Atwood “transports you like an avatar.” FRANK Serving ten years for aggravated assault and weapons offences, his favourite book is
Alias Grace
by Margaret Atwood.

GASTON Serving a six-year sentence for a series of bank robberies, his favourite book is
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

GRAHAM Serving seventeen years for drug trafficking and extortion, his favourite book is
The Cellist of Sarajevo
by Steven Galloway.

PETER Serving a four-year sentence for armed robbery, the most enduring books for him are
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck and Charles Dickens's
A Tale of Two Cities
.

The Other Members

THE BEAVER CREEK BOOK CLUB

-----

The Ambassadors

Graham

Frank

The Other Members

Bookman

Byrne

Dallas

Doc

Earl

Hal

Jason

Jones

Mitchell

Pino

Raymond

Richard

Tom

THE VOLUNTEERS

-----

Ann

Carol

Derek

Edward

Tristan

THE TORONTO WOMEN'S BOOK CLUB

-----

Ann

Betty

Carol

Deborah

Evelyn

Lillian-Rose

Ruth

THE PRISON STAFF

-----

Blair – a chaplain

Clive – a librarian

Donna – an official

Meg – an assistant

Phoebe – an English teacher

Renata – book club leader at a halfway house

The
Prison
Book Club

1

A WALK IN THE CEMETERY

W
HEN MY FRIEND Carol Finlay invited me to join a monthly book club that she had started in a men's prison, everything about it screamed
bad idea
. The prison book club's members included drug traffickers, bank robbers and murderers. I admired the work she was doing but I wasn't sure I could do it. Eight years earlier in England I had survived a violent mugging. Two men had chased me down a dark lane beside my London house near Hampstead Heath, strangled me in a chokehold until I lost consciousness and fled with my cellphone.

It had taken me months to overcome the trauma, and during my remaining three years in London I was too frightened to walk alone at night, even with my new ear-splitting pocket security alarm and a weapons-grade, thirteen-inch flashlight with an alarm that mimicked a barking Doberman. I wasn't sure that I could enter the prison without triggering my earlier traumatic response. But then I remembered that in the weeks after the attack in England, and before I was asked to look at a lineup of suspects, I had felt an unexpected maternal impulse as I imagined how distressed my assailants' mothers must have felt about their errant sons. Something my father once said to me also came to mind: “If you expect the best of people, they will rise to the occasion.” He had been an Ontario Court judge and had seen people at their worst. By the slimmest of margins, my curiosity began to outweigh my apprehension. I couldn't resist seeing for myself what the convicts would say about the books.

It's a journey that began in a cemetery.

Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery is popular among walkers for its winding routes past nineteenth-century obelisks and sorrowful statues, overhung by unusual species of trees. Carol was an avid walker, and I had invited her to join me there for a stroll. Before setting off, we stood at my father's gravesite, taking a moment for reflection. The grave lay beneath a catalpa tree on a grassy path between two rows of monuments. I had spent many happy hours in my childhood climbing a catalpa, so I found the spot easily among the larches and yews, copper beeches and magnolias. The tree's heart-shaped leaves fanned us and the long bean pods clacked in the wind as we contemplated the slightly sunken rectangle of grass still waiting for its marker. My family had commissioned a sculptor to chisel a bas-relief of a bird rising up from tall grasses on a round disc of black granite. The shafts of the feathers and the midribs in the blades of grass would mirror each other, as would their capillaries: the feather barbs and the leaf veins. All living things pattern themselves on each other and become one. Dad, a naturalist, would have liked that thought.

Turning away, Carol and I adopted an exercise pace and made our way through the headstones to the paved road that snaked through the plots. She was a new friend, but was already unreserved and candid in the way old friends are.

“Did you know that you walk with a forward tilt?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I didn't.” Why had no one told me that before? I consciously pressed my shoulders back and my abdomen forward in an attempt to be more vertical.

I looked sideways at her and saw that she stood ramrod straight. Her father had been in the military. Her mother had been a headmistress in a private school. “Plus they were British, so they were frozen in aspic,” I once heard her say. She was ten years older than I was and still beautiful—with lively blue eyes and a wide smile of perfectly straight white teeth. She was dead smart too, and sprinting to make her mark on the world because she had a keen sense of her own mortality.

As we walked past the cemetery office, she asked me if I had any good book suggestions for the book club she had started at Collins Bay Institution. It was a medium-security federal penitentiary for men, in Kingston, two hours east of Toronto. She'd been running it for a year and had exhausted her best picks. Now she was deputizing a book selection committee and wanted me to be on it.

We had already talked several times about her project. It fascinated me that she was so brave and so entrepreneurial at the same time. I knew that she had the men reading good literary fiction and non-fiction and that they met once a month to discuss a chosen book. It was in some ways just like the book club that Carol and I belonged to on the outside, except that we were women and not in jail.

“Why me?” I asked.

“I don't know. You're bookish.”

Maybe she sensed I was also in a bit of a rut. A year earlier I had lost my job as the senior writer at an investment management organization. At the time I'd been on a leave of absence to care for my twenty-three-year-old daughter, because her struggle with anorexia had taken a life-threatening turn. A few weeks before I was due to return to work, my department had let one-quarter of its staff go. Somewhat disconcertingly, my supervisor emailed me in advance to ask that I meet her on the HR floor on my scheduled first day back. My husband, who is a lawyer, told me what that meant: I was about to be sacked.

On my first day back, my supervisor said exactly what my husband had predicted she would say (word for word!): “As you know, the department has been going through a reorganization, and I'm so sorry but we're going to have to let you go.”To ward off an emotional reaction, I had rehearsed a humorous response, but in the end I just sat there trying to look composed.