Prison, Poetry, Grace: Page Three
In the afternoon it was the same thing. I didn’t know if I could do it again though. It was a group of mostly young ones, and we were all tired from the heat outside and the digesting lunches in our bellies. Kathie, an enthusiastic young woman who sat down next to me began telling me how the prison was a wake-up call for her — how she had been nowhere before she got busted, and now was educated and ready to go out and take her place in the world as a powerful spokesperson for the prison experience. I tried to imagine prison being a positive experience.
At lunchtime, Dale had taken me to the units so I could see where the inmates lived. We had run into Jen, a young woman who I knew well from Touchstone. She looked terrible, dazed and flat. I asked her what she was doing here and she said she wanted to be at Niantic, that it was better than Touchstone because she felt free here. I was astonished.” Free?” I said, “How can you be free when you are locked up?”
“I can do what I want here,” she said. “Just go to school is all I have to do. No one questions me , I don’t have to do all the things that I had to do at Touchstone.” (Since Touchstone was a treatment facility the girls were required to do “confrontations” and give feedback and do group process all the time.) She didn’t miss her clothes or her possessions. It was safer here for her than in a demanding outside world. I knew that her mother had sold her for drugs as a baby, so I suppose it was better than that world too. Jen looked like all the life had been beaten out of her. I guess that’s what Dale referred to as “institutionalized.” Many of the women here had been admitted and readmitted repeatedly. They must feel the same way. I was overwhelmed again.
The afternoon writing session was even more full of pain than the morning one. Dale’s boss, the school principal, joined us for the end of the workshop, and witnessed many more tears and shaky voices. We were all choking up. I felt like we were all merging into one being — I was spilling out over my boundaries and mixing with them. It was a scary feeling. It was like the feeling I had longed for as a young girl yearning to be a saint or a nun, maybe a little like what the Buddhists called “no self.” It was like the feeling of orgasm, ecstatic, not quite grounded.
I still wanted to run home, I still was having trouble breathing, but I could feel how much I wanted to stay in this enormous humanness, how big it made me feel. I remembered years ago standing on the Great Wall of China, gazing out at the massed beings beyond me, too many to comprehend, and the relief I felt. ”The world is too big to save,” I thought. I relaxed into that world, lost my boundaries for a few moments.
Dale’s face was reddened from all the tears. The women were reluctant to leave, and some stayed behind to talk. Robin and ------ asserted to us that they would never lose themselves in prison, that they would keep their individuality and fight to do so. And I knew I would too, in a convent, in China, as the “bride of Christ,” as an inmate at Niantic. But for this day I had lost myself, and remembered and connected with my young girl self who had longed for that loss, that grace that would change me.
We walked out to our cars. I felt the heat of the scorching August afternoon, as we talked tiredly about how powerful the day had been. But there weren’t many words. We hugged and talked of another meeting, drove with relief past the guardhouse and out to the open road. Today, we had not been on the edges of experience. In the gray corners of Connecticut’s prison for women, we had been home.
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