Doing Time (5 page)

Recreating the outside world, many writers seek other forms of reconciliation. For example, J. C. Amberchele's powerful pair of stories of a fictional victim (The World) symbolically attempt to make reparations. And reconciliation, albeit sad, with the self shaped by crime and punishment, is at the heart of Robert Rutan's tour-de-force (Getting Out).

Men and women sitting on death row confront the myriad violence — physical, mental, emotional, and moral — endured by ordinary prisoners. But they also have a uniquely precise foreknowledge of death; such knowledge earned its owner the famous Louisiana salute, “Dead Man Walking!”
Doing Time's
final section shows how brilliantly some face this ultimate imaginative challenge of transcending their conditions.

Editor's Note

The selection process for this anthology has depended first on the prisoners, for all texts were written by contest winners. The contest is announced in prison journals, and in the late nineties, PEN receives annually about seventeen hundred stories, poems, plays, and non-fiction pieces. Most are by men. As we have seen, women represent only around 7 percent of the prison population. Those who write seem to send their work out more reluctantly than men unless they have political backgrounds (as is the case with many women here). To compensate for this imbalance, I have sought out additional work by prizewinning women for this collection.

Painstakingly handwritten manuscripts, sometimes illustrated, arrive alongside computer-generated text. Some send novels and treatises, others a few words, as if thrust into a bottle and tossed into the sea. The texts range from barely literate to highly polished. The strengths are those of the once-fortunate, or passionate, or reflective, or self-educated few; the weaknesses are those of any poorly educated group. Themes reappear obsessively — mother, shame, loss, salvation, the treacherous woman, the perfect crime, and the criminal-justice system. Some writers turn to desperate conventions — in verse, the Hallmark greeting; in narrative and drama, sci-fi, Dungeons and Dragons Gothic, the violent thriller, stand-up routines, and TV sitcom. Rich material and fresh language are often trapped in bankrupt literary formulas; simple morals are tacked onto undigested trouble. Those who have had the benefit of writing workshops offer more finished pieces, but some who toil alone take our breath away. Most contestants have become writers in prison, many are natural writers. Few professional writers compete.

Contest entries are divided into genres and distributed by the heap to members of generic subcommittees. Winnowing each haystack of manuscript for the irresistible needle is a daunting task. Subcommittees share their best manuscripts and deliberate for hours over winners.

Not all winning manuscripts could be found.
Fortune News
had published some winners from 1978 on; obliging collectors lent old issues. Materials from early years, stored in Princeton University archives, proved spotty, yet offered clues to some missing work. All honorable mentions had been mysteriously preserved, among them gems like Roger Jaco's “Killing Time” (Time) and Jimmy Santiago Baca's “Letters Come to Prison” (Routines).

After making a raw selection, I decided reluctantly to exclude drama. (Though powerful playwrights have won awards, drama is our smallest category; space limitations force us to omit examples.) Then authors' permissions had to be secured. For most recent winners still incarcerated, this posed little difficulty. Several
₉
however, had been subjected to punitive transfer from prison to prison, in the process often losing their friends, scant possessions, a painstakingly constructed life — and their mail.

One day sleuth, the next posse, I pursued many writers from one prison or parole board to another, often across state lines. Teachers of prison workshops helped me find some ex-prisoners who, in turn, led me to others. (I discovered an American penal archipelago; prisoners' nightmare of transfer — some call it “diesel therapy” or “plane therapy” — results in many comradely networks.) Otherwise I was dependent on the goodwill of parole officers. “I can't help you” is the bureaucrat's “hello.” I learned to explain my mission fast and to keep talking. Sometimes they amplified thus: “Even if I could help you, you don't have the right information.” I learned that without the ex-prisoner's birthdate or proper identification number, an unusual effort was being demanded. Everything hung on who picked up the phone.

“Is this Michael E. Saucier a black man or a white man?” a Louisiana parole board employee asked. “I don't know! Have you really one of each?” “Yes!” she replied crisply, but she let me leave a message for the parole officer of one of them. That gentleman laughingly doubted that his client was a writer, but agreed to give him my number. And two weeks later, Saucier phoned.

Roger Jaco maxed out of parole in Newport News more than a decade ago. No Virginia Jacos knew him, but one referred me to a Jaco-genealogist in McMinnville, Tennessee; he held Jaco reunions, but knew no writing Jacos. But by then I had the information that Roger had a bunch of brothers whose names all began with
R.
“Ah!” said the genealogist.
“Those
Jacos! There were nine of them, and both their parents were killed in an automobile accident when they were little children.” He sent me to one brother who referred me to Roger's adoring sister, Gladys, in Kentucky.

Vera Montgomery's case was particularly intractable. She had also been paroled too long ago, central records said. I contacted her final parole board, then, desperate, the next-to-last. There a woman heard me out. “I wish someone would give
me
some money for
my
wonderfuKpoetry!” “Are you a poet?” She was, and she gave me Montgomery's birthdate, alias, her parents' names, and the information that she'd left the system in Newark. The Newark phone book listed none of these Montgomerys. I phoned one with her mother Elsie's initial, though I knew Vera herself was born in 1936. “No Elsie lives here,” a man assured me. “Have you ever heard of a Vera Montgomery?” “She was my favorite aunt,” was the thrilling reply. Albert Montgomery recalled how Vera had died in a senior citizen facility, how she'd always spoken of writing and her desire to write a book. No one in the family had any of her writing — would I please send him some?

Final selection for the anthology was a complex balancing act, governed by commitments to honoring literary excellence and to encouraging some beginning writers. (The contest has always honored both.) I also looked for fine examples from each decade, and work representative of different subgenres, expressive of regional, racial, and gender diversity, and of prison experiences our writers have taught us they find crucial. While endeavoring to present as many writers as possible, this collection sometimes offers for depth more than one piece by a single author. Out of respect for the integrity of a work, excerpts are avoided.

Note on the Text

Some work has been lightly edited, with the author's consent. Each text is followed by the name of the institution where (and in two cases, about which) it was written, and, to my best knowledge, the year it was submitted to the contest.

An asterisk in editorial introductions marks texts described or cited for their useful insights, but regretfully excluded from the anthology for space reasons.

As About the Authors was shaped in collaboration with all living authors, an unforeseen range of striking histories emerged in sharply individual voices. Each was asked to write something about his or her literary development, education, and background, including — only if the author cared to do so — mention of crime, conviction, or sentence. We do not condone crime, but we agree with Sister Helen Prejean that a person is more than the worst thing he has ever done. Focusing on the self-rehabilitative work of writing, the committee rarely knows anything of criminal backgrounds. For this reason, though many claim innocence or are appealing their sentences, this data does not appear in the biographical section. Our emphasis rather is on the illuminating stories of how they became writers and what writing has meant to this extraordinary group of practitioners, how it has enabled them to do time.

—Bell Gale Chevigny

August 2011

…I have been classified, collated and rated fingerprinted photoed and filed I am an examined, inspected cut of meat dressed in khaki and set in concrete.

The ritual dehumanization of entry is a powerful theme for prison writers. In the excerpt from “Fair Hill Prison”* above, 1987 prizewinner Nolan Gelman resisted the process by naming it. Fundamental disorientation may strip one of words as well as of civilized garb. M. A, Jones's “Prison Letter” here captures the problem of wordlessness — another name for fear — at the most private level.

To become a prisoner is to enter an alien universe. One's most trusted resources fail to help interpret the new setting, and the simplest social interaction may be fraught with peril. Sometimes seasoned inmates help newcomers begin to do time. In William Aberg's “Siempre,” set in an unusual Arizona jail that housed both men and women, a veteran talks a novice through fear of the penitentiary {the
pinta,
in Mexican argot} to which she is being sent.

More often it is a “cellie” who helps a “fish” to learn the ropes. In Clay Downing's 1974 story “The Jailin' Man,”* the title figure teaches the narrator how to heat water for coffee in the glass part of a lightbulb and in the process to feel less sorry for himself. Ingenious ways to prepare food are also shared with newcomers. Jarvis Masters describes learning how to make powerful wine in “Recipe for Prison Pruno” (Death Row). Advice on how to avoid danger abounds: “Drink plenty of water and walk real slow” is a typical admonition.

“Symbiosis” between inmates is possible, according to the avuncular mentor in David Wood's story by that name (1996),* if you learn how to carry yourself like a true convict: “Look every man square in the eye and let him know you'll fight back. You don't have to win a fight, just hurt the other guy bad enough so he won't want to scrap with you again.” This swift cultivation of
attitude,
a particularly male response, is not restricted to men. Thus in Denise Hicks's 1996 entry “Where's My Mother?”* the neophyte reports: “I was learning the none-of-your-business stare; the no-you-don't-know-me stance; and the why-I'm-here-could-not-possibly-be-of-any-concern-to-you pivot.”

Old hands school new prisoners in the cons' rules, as crucial to survival as institutional regulations. Each prison has its underground economy and its informal government, with leadership ranging from fluid to stable. Prison mentors elucidate the “code” of the “stand-up” convict, a signal feature of prison subculture for generations, particularly among men. Akin to “honor among thieves,” it has tenets like “Be loyal to cons,” “Don't let anyone disrespect you,” and “Never snitch.” This ideal is still nurtured by old-timers who nostalgically lament the bygone days when convicts, they say, ran penitentiaries. In “Ring on a Wire” (1996),* a story by George Hughes, the narrator's “cellie” celebrates a mythicized golden age when they could “take your freedom, take your property and everything else away from you, but not your word.” For such as he, only a “convict” was a “real man.”

But beginning in the 1980s, new throngs of rash and fearless teenagers doing time made a much more menacing experience. The “code” began to degenerate into little more than vengeance against snitches or, as Victor Hassine puts it, “Darwin's code: survival of the fittest.” In his poem “Convict Code” (1988),” Alex Friedman describes “walking on by” scenes of weapon-making and gang rape, and then being stabbed twenty-eight times by a stranger—”and everybody walked on by.”

In “How I Became a Convict” (extracted from his book
Life Without Parole),
Victor Hassine describes his adaptation to Pennsylvania's prison for the most violent criminals. His first impulse was to retreat and build himself a cocoon. His ultimate decision to engage the life around him typifies that of most effective prison writers.

For many, survival begins with mastery of prison lingo. (See “I See Your Work” in Players, Games). Some novices feel compelled to create lexicons of their new argot. Often harsh and minimal, this patois is sometimes rich in nuance. For the transferred prisoners facing reorientation on a new turf in William Orlando's “Dog Star Desperado” (the first chapter of a novel-in-progress), battles of rhetoric are all they can afford. Like the “dozens” played on ghetto streets and the rough banter of the armed services, this patois allows its performers to position themselves against one another while strutting their stuff. It also offers them a kind of collective armor as they size up their new surroundings and their new keepers, who are also pulled into the force field of prison language.

On another level, Orlando's story enacts the galvanizing of the spirit to meet the shock of dehumanization. In their own way, women, too, cultivate such resources. In “Arrival” here, for example, Judee Norton calls up the inviolable inner liberty of the Stoics and converts her shackles into jewelry. Her summoning of her innermost self marks her starting point as she begins to do time.

You ask what it's like here
but there are no words for it.
I answer difficult, painful, that men
die hearing their own voices. That answer
isn't right though and I tell you now
that prison is a room
where a man waits with his nerves
drawn tight as barbed wire, an afternoon
that continues for months, that rises
around his legs like water
until the man is insane
and thinks the afternoon is a lake:
blue water, whitecaps, an island
where he lies under pale sunlight, one
red gardenia growing from his hand —