The Prison Book Club (19 page)

As for the first of the two stabbings, it had happened a few days earlier, on Ben's cellblock, 4 Block, the prison's toughest unit. Ben had sensed that something was brewing and scribbled a few lines in his journal:

Up waiting to go for breakfast, strange feeling in the air two small fights last night nothing much about it. One of them seems like it's not over. Went for breakfast, boiled eggs on Sunday. I came back on the range I see one of the guys in a fight last nite walking down the range all bloodied, I'm like man here's a lockdown for sure. (Ya he got stab up this morning). He got caught sleeping no good in prison don't matter how big you are. That's his own fault should have been up and ready.

Once the guards unlock the cells each morning, anyone still sleeping is vulnerable. The victim on Ben's unit might not have known that because he was a “fish,” prison slang for a newbie. This particular fish had already annoyed the guys on his cellblock by trying fit in too quickly, according to Ben. But he sealed his fate when he bumped into a man who “had seniority” and failed to apologize. Even Ben didn't sound sympathetic. Perhaps that was because he too had once been caught with his guard down and the incident landed him in Collins Bay. Carol had told me that Ben had been surprised by an armed home invader and had shot and killed the intruder. The incident was still unclear to me, though, and I assumed there were other extenuating circumstances that had led to Ben's conviction for manslaughter.

Two days after the bloodied inmate staggered to the guard post and collapsed, Ben wrote, “One inmate in the hole, the other in the hospital.” Amidst the violence, he wrote a line about finding solace in the Joad family's strength. “The family, especially Ma, having that perseverance to keeping moving on no matter what is coming at you.”

I'd seen the shanks that had previously been seized from inmates in Kingston prisons. One was carved from a toothbrush. Others were whittled down three-sided plastic rulers, filed metal blades or curved daggers and there was a hammer-shiv with a blade nearly ten inches long. Most were crude tools that would rip and lacerate. I couldn't imagine what horrible damage they would do, especially to an eye. Inmates fashioned the handles from scavenged padding, held together with a spiral of cloth-based adhesive tape. The grip styling struck me as familiar, but it was only later that I twigged. It had been borrowed from that most Canadian of icons: the taped hockey stick.

Even though I had grown accustomed to the prison environment, the knifings rattled me. My usual route to book club took us through what seemed to me less-supervised reaches of the prison. The Strip has a large guard station at the top and another halfway down. But at the second station we had to turn left and leave the main building through a door that the guards released. From there it was a long route along a narrow sidewalk flanked by a chain-link fence on the left and a thin stretch of grass on the right, as you made your way the hundred or so metres to the building that housed the chapel and the workshop. No guards were permanently stationed along the route. The previous month, a group of inmates from the prison workshop had passed us on that stretch. The sidewalk was so narrow that we had to accommodate each other by walking single file. They were men I didn't know, men who weren't in the book club.

I could have stepped out onto the grass and given them a wide berth, but I thought that might have been disrespectful. It's the same logic that made me reserve judgment about the two men in Hampstead before they attacked me. It would have been insulting to turn and rush to our little garden door. Also you don't run from a bear. It gives the bear permission to chase you. We passed each other single file without incident.

I refrained from discussing my renewed unease with Carol when I saw her at our women's book club meeting in Toronto that week. I didn't want to distress the others. As part of the next phase of Carol's efforts to show the men that discussing books could broaden their world, she had asked our women's group to read
The Grapes of Wrath
at the same time as the fellows in Collins Bay. We would make comments on the book to send to the men on a first-name-only basis and receive comments back. It was the first time the Collins Bay prison book club would read in tandem with a women's book club “on the outs.”

Our women's book club had been running for six years and the members were affluent, well-educated friends of ours in their fifties and older. One or two were visibly nervous about communicating in writing with inmates, and some thought Carol was batty to even suggest it. But no one says no to Carol. So, with one woman altering her first name to protect her identity—“Could I just be Lillian instead of Lillian-Rose?”—the two wildly different book groups agreed to read three books together. In addition to
The Grapes of Wrath
, we would share Roddy Doyle's novel about an abused woman,
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
, and American author Diane Ackerman's
The Zookeeper's Wife
, a non-fiction book about a zookeeper in wartime Poland who hid Jews in empty animal cages.

While the lockdown postponed the prison book club's meeting, the women's meeting went ahead in Toronto. We gathered at Lillian-Rose's art-filled three-storey brick house, which occupied a corner lot in a leafy downtown neighbourhood. She served a hot pear-and-apple crumble with vanilla ice cream, three cheeses with crackers, dried apricots, figs, wine and tea. We filled our plates and made our way to the living room, settling on comfortable chesterfields or in armchairs.

Betty kicked it off by saying she found the book incredibly powerful. “When the Joads were picking peaches for two and a half cents a bucket you got such a vivid sense of how utterly desperate they were,” she said. “And I thought it was an appropriate book for today. It's about the haves and have-nots.”

“The 1 percent and the 99 percent,” said Deborah, who had lived in a commune in the '70s. The Occupy movement and its instantly viral slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” were on everyone's minds, whether we sympathized with the movement or not. Two months earlier, Occupy Wall Street had taken over Zuccotti Park in Manhattan to protest social and economic inequality and the power of the richest 1 percent of society. As we sat talking at Lillian-Rose's, across town Occupy Toronto protesters were burning eviction notices, while not far from the Collins Bay prison, Occupy Kingston was manning its encampment. No question, it was Tom Joad's kind of scene.

Deborah told us that she had dined with Cesar Chavez, the farm worker who led the boycott of table grapes in 1968 in support of underpaid farm workers in California. Like the Joads, Chavez's family lost their farm and moved to California in search of work during the Great Depression. We went on like that for a bit, trading information about social upheavals, industrial agriculture, the history of organized labour in the United States and the origins of the Dust Bowl. But then we got down to how distressing and heartbreaking the story was. Carol and Ruth confessed they had cried while reading it.

Like Ben, we agreed that the one uplifting message was Ma Joad's philosophy of resilience and how it would help anyone, especially someone in prison. Carol found the passage and read it aloud. It was all about toughness born of persevering through hunger and illness and having the goal of just getting through the day, and it was narrated in Ma's folksy Oklahoma vernacular.

“You don't look back and you don't look ahead,” summarized Carol. “You just do the day.”

When we'd talked ourselves out, we drifted out into the evening, where the smell of decaying maple leaves reminded us that winter was approaching. We lingered and gossiped, offered each other rides home, calling goodbye as we parted, laughing and chatting. It was a stark contrast to the prison book club, where the men left in a frantic dash not to be late for Count.

While we were enjoying our pear-and-apple crumble at Lillian-Rose's, the lockdown and cell search was in full swing at Collins Bay. The guards searched Ben's cell that day and he had no way of knowing if they had found and read his journal. “I'll just clean up their muddy boot prints left on my chair and desk and organize back my books and keep on moving,” he wrote in his journal, echoing Ma Joad's stoic message.

He didn't elaborate on what a search entailed. But I phoned Vince, and he filled me in. It's not just rifling through belongings. The first step, he said, is a body search.

I sensed he was holding something back. “You mean a strip search?”

“Yes.” He said the guards order you to remove your clothes, open your mouth and move your tongue around to show that nothing's inside, then lift each foot to show that nothing is stuck to your soles. Finally they tell you to bend forward. Then you dress and sit in the common area while the guards comb your “house,” jail talk for
cell
. They check the mattresses and pillows for cuts, examine toiletries, shake out clothes, open and shake books and take pictures off the wall. They pull the refrigerators away from the walls and ensure that the sealing tape on the televisions hasn't been tampered with. Until each inmate and cell is searched, prisoners remain in their cells twenty-four hours a day.

If the guards suspect that an inmate is concealing weapons or drugs in a body cavity, a doctor may perform a cavity search. It's hard to imagine hiding weapons in an orifice, but Vince said: “They wrap it in cellophane and shove it up their ——.” He didn't say the word.

I shuddered at the image, but knew the searches had to be done. Also, I knew that the purging of any weapons from 4 Block would be a big relief for Ben.

The Collins Bay Book Club finally reconvened on the last day of November under grey skies after a night of heavy rain. I met Carol for tea a block west of the prison. She had bought several packages of chocolate chip cookies in a clear plastic wrapper for the men. I told her that Graham had advised us to stop bringing in cookies, and she agreed that it was good advice for future meetings. At prison reception Carol fished them out of her grocery bag for the guard, who inspected them through the plastic, then ran them through the X-ray machine.

As we walked The Strip and turned left to leave the main building for the smaller one where the book club met, I was thinking again about the stabbings, the long walk between the buildings past unfamiliar inmates and the guards' stab-proof vests. Now I knew why inmates taped magazines to their abdomens as body armor. I should have brought my back issues of
The New Yorker.
It was my ninth month in the prison book club and I was starting to regress into the post-traumatic anxiety that had followed my mugging in Hampstead.

Carol and I stepped through the doorway onto the narrow sidewalk. I held my satchel close to my body. The high walls flanking the prison walkway reared up like the brick garden walls lining our street in Hampstead. What would happen to the bag, with its precious tape recorder and notebooks, if I were attacked? I tried to calculate whether I'd be able to pitch it over the chain-link fence. My mind shot back to throwing the yellow purse. That first summer in England, I'd bought a bright yellow purse at a little shop in Highgate to replace my old torn brown one. It wasn't expensive, but it contained our family's passports and other identity cards, as well as the house keys. When the muggers came at me that day, some autonomic response kicked in: “While you are running, throw your purse over the garden wall.”

It didn't occur to me that throwing the purse might provoke them. It was an involuntary reflex born of years of recurring dreams about lost purses and luggage. But that was why, when one of my assailants was choking me and the other was trying to grab my legs, they found only my cellphone and the car key. When I regained consciousness and stumbled into the garden yelling for my husband in an unrecognizable voice, I saw the purse on the pebbled walkway that led to the front door. Only then did I fully realize I had thrown it. For a moment, amid the shock of the assault and the joy of being alive, I felt heroic. I had saved our identities. I had saved the family.

On Collins Bay's narrow sidewalk, three unfamiliar inmates walked toward Carol and me. One was bald and heavy with tattoos climbing up his thick neck and a stoned look in his eyes. I couldn't look at the others. I just stared ahead, and then we were past them and at the building. Two guards waved to us from their post.

In the meeting room, some of the men had already arrived for book club. These were
my
inmates and I felt safer among them. They poured cups of coffee from the drip machine in the corner and came to sit in the circle. I watched the cookies disappear in four-biscuit handfuls. No one volunteered any comment about the stabbings or the lockdown and I didn't feel like asking about it. Instead, I made small talk about how the soil in parts of Oklahoma really is red. I explained to them that I'd lived next door in Texas for four years.

Carol started off the meeting with praise and encouragement for tackling
The Grapes of Wrath
. She pronounced it “wroth,” the word familiar to her from the King James version of the Old Testament. “It was a tough read. If you finished it, I'm impressed. If you sampled it enough to get a sense of it, I'm also impressed.” Four of the fifteen said they'd finished the book. Then unrelated chatter erupted among a few of the inmates in the corner but Carol put an end to it quickly. “You with us?” she asked, staring at them. The reaction was instantaneous. They fell silent.

Order restored, Carol reminded them that this was the first month her women's book club had read the same book as the men and that she would read aloud comments from Evelyn, Lillian and the others to start the conversation.

Gaston, his baseball cap on backward over his brush cut, interrupted: “Can I join your book club when I get out?”

“I don't see why not,” said Carol, forgetting briefly that Lillian-Rose would have freaked out. Carol had no gene for risk aversion. But seeing my raised eyebrows, she corrected herself and said her preferred plan was to set up book clubs for members when they left prison.