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Prison, Poetry, Grace: Page Two
Dale, used to the place, moved along, got her keys with an intricate series of punched buttons which unlocked the keys’ housing, and approached the school section of the jail, first going through an enormous and frightening gray cinderblock hall — I couldn’t imagine why it was so large. She opened a single gray door off the hall which led to the school.
Another CO at a desk checked me in and we arrived at the classroom where a bunch of teachers had gathered and were chatting and drinking coffee as though this was an insurance company or a department store. I was shivering, and it wasn’t from the air conditioning. But at least there was some color in the classroom — posters, flags painted on the walls, other classroom doors decorated with bright artwork, some of it quite good. But no windows. I wanted to ask them how they could work in windowless rooms—Dale later pointed to a window painted on the wall of her classroom. “I couldn’t do it ,” I said. “I just couldn’t.”
We went to the room where the workshop was to be held, and began arranging the desks in a rough circle, at my request. The women began trickling in. First was a young woman who claimed she remembered me from Touchstone—she was full of energy and life. She said she writes a lot of poems when she is angry and hoped to be a member of a writing group like I had created at Touchstone. I said I hoped she could too.
Soon the twenty or so women were settled around the table, somber in their maroon tee shirts. Dale introduced me and handed out the small poetry workshop books one of the inmates had made on the computer. I talked with the women about how others on the outside perceive them as bad people who did bad things and should be punished, and spoke to them of my passion for having their voices heard so this erroneous impression can be corrected, how I want the full stories told so all can understand that crimes are not committed in a vacuum.
I read poems from the anthology I had edited of my girls’ work—poems on running away, on The Most Horrible Day of My Life, on Where I Come From. I read some of my own poems too, poems about my own troubled family, and one called Saying No, a response to hearing the news that my 20 year old son had been found dead in Rome at 8:15 in the morning.
A Spanish-speaking woman asked if she could write in Spanish, I said, “Of course,” and they were off, pens whisking across the clean white pages. Before I began to write, I looked up once more at their faces, to soothe myself with their humanness.
But me — what was my story today? I began writing “I remember” … ”I remember the first time I came here, the coldness, I thought, how could anyone live in such a cold place … where could the spirit live? ... I have to stop and breathe, there is a feeling in here that defies adjectives, that challenges color. My throat is closing in. Only the faces of the women comfort me. There is no way out, no exit. I want to run out of here, to my black car, to my red house, my dog, my husband, soft pillows and couches, my kitchen table. But I am incarcerated along with you today…”
I think it was then I realized the connection, the attraction of the prison with its fill of uniformed sad-faced women. It was the convent I had longed for when I was young, the safety of the nun’s cell and the chapel, of knowing that everything I did would be proscribed by the structure imposed on me. I would be protected in a way my family and my life out in the world couldn’t protect me.
I longed to be a saint, the bride of Christ, to have a purpose in life other than what my dreary days presented me with, and imagined the convent would provide me with this path. I was so passionate, I wanted to vaporize in mystery, become a kind of mist, pass through my own boundaries, I wanted to rise above my life in my pink room in the ranch house on Glenview Drive like Jesus, be transported to some rosy glowing haven. I wanted grace, imagining it would come to me through the indulgences promised by rosary-saying, novenas prayed and hundreds of “ejaculations” — phrases such as “Little Flower, in this hour, show your power,” and “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” The Catholic church promised this kind of magic if we followed all the rules.
It’s a stretch, I know. Let me see if I can follow the threads. When I called time, and the women began to put down their pens, I had to urge them to read, Once one or two had read, the rest were willing to follow. We heard stories of rape, of incest, a child’s death, birth in shackles, remembrances of childhood homes, roads not taken. A woman began to cry and another brought a large prison-sized roll of toilet paper to the table. The Spanish woman, Magdelena, read her work in Spanish, and the woman next to her translated.
I praised and praised their work. It had rhythm, life, feeling. One young woman wrote on running away and our feet were moving in time to her words. The woman next to me, Barbara, had lost her son, as I had — I put my arm around her shoulder and talked about the sorority we belonged to, the mothers of dead children sorority, the one that no one wants to be in but when we are in it, we understand each other without words. I didn’t want to be anywhere else but here.
