The Prison Book Club (7 page)

While it was the chaplain who had made it possible for Carol to launch the book club, the meeting with the ambassadors reminded her that the book club's home in the chapel was a mixed blessing. Religion and books sometimes didn't mix. She was feeling similar unease about her partnership with Prison Fellowship Canada, which for the previous few months had carried out her book orders and shipping to the prisons, as well as extending to Carol their standard book discount. An old friend, who was her contact at Prison Fellowship, was being noncommittal about ongoing funding. Carol told me she sensed that the organization was not willing to help buy books beyond the book club's start-up period. She said that Prison Fellowship had also expressed a desire for more influence in her selection of volunteers, in keeping with its mandate. In particular, Carol told me, it wanted assurances that the book club volunteers were people of faith. Carol insisted that this was a secular book club and that she wanted volunteers whose passion was books. Impatient as always, she accelerated the process of registering Book Clubs for Inmates Inc. as a non-profit corporation, the first step in registering as a charity and tapping alternate sources of funding. Another organization was not going to call the shots.

Carol was at the wheel again that day, driving us back to Toronto. She looked exhausted and I wondered if I should offer to drive. I knew she suffered from sleep interruptions and I had heard her up at night during one sleepover at Amherst Island. She wore earplugs to bed in the spring to avoid being woken early by the birds' dawn chorus. But as we talked, I learned it was something else that had caused her to lose sleep the previous night. It was lambing season, and Carol's neighbours at Topsy Farm on the island had phoned her in the middle of the night to ask if she would help rescue newborn lambs. During one of the dampest springs on record, many lambs were hypothermic after gushing out of their mothers' wombs into fields pocked with near-freezing puddles of water. Working together with her neighbours, Carol had wrapped the lambs in towels and brought them into the farm kitchen to warm them with her body heat. Gradually they began to shiver, open their eyes and bleat, their umbilical cords lolling against their bellies. She felt maternal and literally pastoral all at once.

Now Carol had flocks inside and outside the prison. And both flocks had guards. Topsy Farm's most popular photograph of their sheep is one in which all the animals are facing the photographer. It's only when you gaze at it for several seconds that you realize that posing among the white-faced sheep, and almost identical in colouring and size, are white Pyrenees guard dogs.

4

THE N-WORD

C
AROL'S EFFORTS TO MAKE the Collins Bay Book Club feel more like a book club on the outside had already moved into its next phase: inviting prominent authors to visit and answer the men's questions about the books. The first writer she targeted was Lawrence Hill, whose breakout 2007 historical novel,
The Book of Negroes
, had won a 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and had become an international literary hit. The book's title refers to a real historical document, a ledger that recorded the passage of slaves transported to Nova Scotia in return for their loyalty to Britain during the American Revolutionary War. Hill brings the slave narrative to life through his protagonist: a stoic West African woman who preserves her dignity despite her deprivations—a situation with which men in prison could identify. And Lawrence Hill was particularly well positioned to have additional street cred with many of the men in the prison book club. Born of a black father and a white mother, he was a role model as a successful black man.

After Carol's first call and email inviting him to attend, Hill declined because of a busy writing schedule and the three-hour drive to the prison. She contacted him several more times and asked in a variety of pleading ways without success. Finally, as he tells it, she invited him out for coffee, where he showed up intending to say no, but found he was no match for Carol's persistence.

That was in 2010, before I joined the book group. Frank, Ben and Dread were among the members in attendance at that first meeting with the author. “It was the most intimate, detailed, focused, sustained conversation about the book that I'd had with any group, period,” Hill later told me. “And that includes PhD students and graduate seminars and everything. So they were really amazing.” The experience was so rewarding that he told Carol he would be happy to return.

And so on my fifth meeting of the Collins Bay Book Club, in the early summer of 2011, Lawrence Hill was back to talk to the inmates. He was wearing a blue plaid shirt and a shiny jacket that was a marked contrast to the plain-colour prison blues and whites that the book club members were wearing. One of Hill's previous books documents his journey as a light-skinned black man straddling two identities. And that day the men saw a man with a close-trimmed Afro that could pass for just very curly hair and a man whose skin tone was ambiguous.

I was captivated by the protagonist of Hill's book,Aminata Diallo, who is kidnapped, at age eleven, by slavers from her native West Africa in the 1700s and sold to a South Carolina indigo plantation. Before boarding the slave ship, she is forced to walk in a coffle to the ocean, during which time she experiences her first menstrual period. She survives the horrific conditions of the slave ship and years of plantation labour, while enduring what surely must have been the most agonizing aspect of her bondage: having her two children taken from her. Even though it was the voice of a young female narrator, it could have been the voice of some of the black inmates' female ancestors. Aminata's journey takes her to Nova Scotia after her name is entered in the ledger that comes to be known as the Book of Negroes. The actual historical ledger now sits in the National Archives at Kew in London. But Nova Scotia is not where the story ends.

The book club ambassadors had done a good job advertising the author visit and some thirty men showed up for the meeting on that hot June day. It was the largest turnout I had ever seen— double our usual numbers. Most of the new faces were black and many of the new arms were heavily tattooed. We scrambled to set up extra chairs for the attendees.

Ben kicked off the conversation by commenting, “You always cultivate this grace in all your books, I noticed.” Ben had been present at Hill's 2010 prison visit, when they had first discussed the book, and since then he had read another of Hill's works, the author's debut novel,
Some Great Thing
.

The author's eyes opened wide and he smiled at Ben. He talked about imbuing his characters with admirable qualities like courage because he liked to ask himself whether he would have that courage under those circumstances. “It's the same thing with grace,” said Hill. “I mean there's something to be said for people who keep their dignity, even when all hell is breaking out around them and they're enduring really horrible things and they keep their dignity and don't forget that they're just as human as everybody else.” He was answering Ben's question but he appeared to be slipping in a stealth message to every one of the guys in the room: that he admired their courage and their humanity in how they were enduring prison. I felt the power of his words. And his comments affected the men too. A muscle twitched in Graham's cheek and Ben smiled his slow smile. Many of the others sat rapt.

Juan, an inmate who was vocal about his writing ambitions, wanted to talk about the writing process for such a long book. He was wearing a yellow White Sox cap, sunglasses and, hanging on his chest, a huge wooden cross. He asked his question in a staccato delivery, at high volume.

Hill told Juan that he generally started in the middle of the book and waited for something interesting to come to him. “You have to have a lot of faith,” Hill said. “I'm not a religious person, personally, but I guess I have my own sort of faith—a non-religious spirituality that you have something beautiful to say, something worthwhile to say and I think every person has something worthwhile about them, something inherently dignified about them and you want to reach down and find that piece of beauty inside yourself and bring it out. And you don't necessarily even know what's down there. So writing is about pulling out secrets inside your own soul and spilling them out onto the page. It's kind of like mining. You don't know what you're going to pull up.” Perhaps he had observed Juan's cross and mentioned religion as a means of finding common ground. But the subtext of his statement crept up on all of us—that even guys in prison have something beautiful inside worth mining.

“Do you decide the characters first?” asked a burly inmate with a sun and moon tattoo on his arm. His name tag read STAN.

“I think of a person in a difficult situation,” Hill responded. “Story happens when a character's under pressure and we, the readers, are watching them cope. In this case I talk about a girl stolen from a village in Africa. What if this were my own daughter? I think of this novel as a road trip. She's on the move her whole life. I think about the longing she might have.” The answer seemed to resonate for the men whose own lives had been stolen and whose own journeys were still uncertain. One of the guys nudged the man next to him and nodded.

Dread, who had been reading Hill's autobiography,
Black Berry, Sweet Juice
, about his childhood in a predominantly white suburb of Toronto, said, “You really opened up my mind to the experiences you had as a child. Like you're so divided—you're not really accepted by the black people and the white people saw you as a black person.”

“You've said it so succinctly,” said Hill. “I had to find my way in a culture that was pretty much entirely white, and the only blackness I had access to was in the United States, when we went to visit my family there. So I found my way through reading and writing and travelling. I started reading black literature and all the books that my parents had on their bookshelves. And I started travelling to Africa. And I went to live, as you know, in the States.”

Carol asked Hill to read a couple of passages from
The Book of Negroes.
He read two of the most memorable passages of the book: when Aminata has just disembarked from the slave ship and is frightened by the “smoke” coming from her mouth as her breath condenses in the cold morning air; and when another slave inoculates Aminata against smallpox by implanting a lesion under the girl's skin.

Then it was time for the men to come forward to have their books signed. I was moved to see how eager they were—how precious this opportunity was for them. All toughness was gone, their respect for Lawrence Hill palpable. I was also disappointed that I hadn't heard their reactions to the novel. But I wasn't surprised. When my London book club had organized author visits by William Dalrymple and Esther Freud, the members' curiosity about the writing process dominated and we often refrained from asking tough questions about the book itself.

Sitting beside Hill, I had the opportunity to hear him talk to each man. Dread was second in line and asked for his book to be signed to his wife and daughter. Hill asked him how old his daughter was.

“Ten,” Dread said. The mood between them was warm and Dread lingered, asking him about the subject of his next novel. Hill confided that it was a book about an illegal immigrant. Dread smiled broadly and left abruptly. I watched him walk away and wondered what could have affected him so much about what Hill had said.

When Ben came forward with his book, they chatted about the other novel that Ben had read,
Some Great Thing
, which draws on Hill's years as a reporter for a Winnipeg newspaper.

“Did you like the part where the guy got arrested for putting a vacuum cleaner down a mailbox?” asked Hill. “I had a lot of fun writing that.”

“I liked his character,” said Ben.

“I met a guy in court one time who got arrested for vacuuming letters out of a mailbox. That gave me the idea for that scene,” said Hill. He'd been a reporter covering the court beat that day.

When it was his turn, Graham asked Hill to sign the book to him and thanked him for coming, in a way that communicated thanks from all the men. Carol told Hill that Graham hoped to work with youth once he was granted parole. I had a feeling that she would try to get them together “on the outs,” prison slang for “on the outside.”

Juan engaged Hill in a conversation in Spanish, knowing that the author had lived in Spain for a year.

As the lineup gradually shortened, I noticed that Carol had stepped out of the room and left her orange leather purse sitting open on her chair. “Nothing is ever taken,” she told me when I remarked on her trust at the prison. Indeed, according to protocol, she would have left any valuables, like her wallet, keys and cellphone, in a lockbox at reception. However, the black markers for writing name tags disappeared from the name tag table by the end of the meeting that day. As we learned soon afterward, the ink was valued for tattooing. We realized that it would be better to print out name tags in advance.

An hour later, over lunch in downtown Kingston, Lawrence Hill told me there had been one question from the men this time that he had never considered before. “When Ben asked me about grace—nobody's ever put that to me,” he said. “It was an utterly fascinating thing to hear my own books reflected back to me in that line.

“Those guys are likely taking a lot more from books than other people because they have more time and they have more energy and they're able to focus on it and they have more need.” He said that he was particularly attuned to those who had lived on the margins due to race and that some of the books that had affected him most profoundly had come from the prison experience, which was one reason why he had felt compelled to visit the book club, despite his busy schedule.

He had also engaged with people inside before, it turned out—a few years earlier. When a secure-custody facility for juveniles in Ontario was frustrated with its inability to get a small group of young men to read, the corrections authorities called Hill and asked if he would give it a try. The kids were between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, serving long terms, and they
could
read, just wouldn't. Other interventions had failed, but Hill succeeded after getting together with the boys once a week over lunch in the prison library.