Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (10 page)

The library offered both paperbacks and hardcovers. Patti insisted that we had permission to lend out hardcover books but many officers fervently disagreed. An officer walked into the library one day and gasped when he saw shelves piled high with hardcovers, which could be turned into weapons.

“Are you
kidding
me?” he’d said. “You can’t give these out.”

In many prisons this was true. For reasons that were never clear, however, this facility permitted it. At the same time, the administration neglected to put the policy into print, so it remained open for debate. Officers often saw this gray area as license to confiscate and, in many cases, dispose of books. This was an ongoing struggle.

Other policies were much more clear. Inmates could buy books by mail order, but only direct from publishers. No books could arrive in prison from private addresses. Prison regulations permitted inmates no more than six books in their cells. Inmates who ordered books often had to get rid of old books in order to keep the number under six. Some inmates sold their books to other inmates—an illegal transaction—some donated them to the library.

The library had a tiny budget. For bureaucratic reasons we weren’t permitted to buy from cheap online booksellers. Forest and I poached yard sales, laundromats, and used bookstores. Usually at our own expense. The major source of books was random individuals who arbitrarily showed up with giant shipments. These reliable donors were an assortment of hippies covered in dog hair, smiling evangelicals, and local oddballs, who did things like give you an unsolicited thirty-minute lecture on the intricacies of the formal Japanese bow (“it’s a lot like setting up a golf swing”), and then peer-pressured you into an embarrassingly elaborate bowing ceremony in front of the prison, in the presence of coworkers on their smoke breaks. But I was very grateful for the earnest efforts of these donors. When they dropped off their payloads, Forest and I enjoyed an out-of-season Christmas.

I
n prison, where scarcity is the norm and ownership is limited to a paltry few items, books themselves began to take on more functions. There seemed to be endless ways to use books. Hardcover books could be fashioned into body armor. Placed in a bag and wielded as a battle flail. Taped together and used as weights. Used to hide contraband. Books could be mined for paper or illustrations, or used to help prop things up around the cell. And for all of these functions, books became an item for barter.

One woman confided that she kept a book in bed with her while she slept. Its presence comforted her.

Some people even used books to read. For education, entertainment, therapy, a way of making sense of the world. Sitting at the library’s circulation desk, I saw more than one woman on the verge of tears while checking out a favorite children’s book that she hadn’t seen in years—
Charlotte’s Web
or
Curious George
. For many in prison, childhood memories were very difficult or nonexistent.

Book lending was also a means of communication with another person. An argument over a political or religious issue often resulted in inmates, and sometimes staff, drawing up reading lists for each other—often on the spot and in a huff—as a means of setting the other straight. In my first week, an inmate named Robert Jordan, upset by something I had said, told me he wouldn’t speak to me until I read
The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. DuBois. I told him I’d already read it.

“Read it again,” he told me. “ ’Cause you missed the whole point.”

The next time he came in, he brought the book with him and put it directly in my hands. I realized that he wasn’t asking me to understand DuBois but to understand something about him, Robert Jordan. I read it again, in this light. And since we were going to let our books do the talking, I gave him a similar reading assignment, Kafka’s “The Animal in the Synagogue,” a story about a mysterious dusty blue-green creature that has taken up residence in the balcony of a decaying synagogue. Needless to say, a favorite of mine.

I had many similar conversations-through-books with inmates. Much of my own reading came by way of these assignments. As a result, I found myself reading a lot of conspiracy theorists.

But for the most part, prison library reading tastes tended to match those of the wider American population. We had a shelf for Oprah’s Book Club selections. James Patterson, Dan Brown, James Frey books rarely lasted more than fifteen minutes. In order to keep an eye on them, we kept these popular titles displayed behind the counter. Inmates also loved reading books on real estate and starting small businesses. There were other, less concrete interests. Books on dream interpretation were wildly popular—this is actually an ancient prison genre: in the Bible, Joseph makes a name for himself by interpreting fellow prisoners’ dreams. Given their unfortunate present circumstances, prisoners have a special investment in future events. Astrology books were also much desired. After the ex-inmate mugged me—and boasted that he still had two books out—I checked to see just which Latino man, roughly five-foot-ten, recently released, still had two books due. It turns out that this profile fit one man, a certain Ernesto Casanova. And the two books he owed:
Introduction to Astrology
and
The Astrology of Human Relationships
.

The true crime genre was, obviously, also a favorite. I was asked for true crime books on a daily basis. From the wide assortment of small-time Machiavellis I got regular requests for
The Art of War
by Sun Tzu and
The Forty-Eight Laws of Power
by Robert Greene. Thanks to slain rapper Tupac Shakur, a.k.a. “Makaveli,” I was often asked for books by Niccolo Machiavelli himself. In his song “Tradin War Stories,” Tupac breaks it down thus:

     … a legend in my own rhymes
So niggaz whisper when they mention
Machiavelli was my tutor

The majority of inmates who read
The Prince
, however, returned slightly disappointed. The sixteenth-century text wasn’t as user-friendly as they’d hoped.

“Urban literature” was another popular genre, but inmates were frustrated that our collection was practically nonexistent. They would complain that the library “didn’t have no good books.” Standing feet away from shelves that held tens of thousands of books, some inmates would inform me “you guys don’t have
any
books here.”

Eventually I got wise and took advantage of this scarcity. I subtly encouraged the inmates’ black market for street books to find a home in the library. If inmates were going to find and read them anyway, they ought to come to the library to do it. As Fat Kat, the former gangster, noted, “We don’t want no competition out there. We gotta put them out of business.” I agreed. When it came to books in prison, we wanted to be the main show in town.

A few times a week, Forest and I would pack a few boxes of paperbacks, newspapers, and magazines onto a pushcart and visit those prison units that weren’t permitted to visit the library. The men in the vast federal immigration wing—a giant prison unto itself—the units of pretrial detainees, the infirmary, and New Man, the unit where newly minted inmates were housed until they received their permanent classification.

These visits gave us the chance to explore different corners of prison. We would show up at the heavy door of a unit, wave to the officers on duty, wait for an eternity before the door would decide to roll open, then we’d push into the unit and place the goods in the designated spot. The first few times we made deliveries, we arrived when the cells were open and the inmates were roaming around the dayroom.

This was a mistake. There was a palpable air of desperation in these prison units, whose inmates were almost completely cut off from the world. By a force of animal hunger, something like electromagnetism, the inmates would swarm us from all corners. A few would simply start grabbing the items, right out of our hands. It was almost as though they couldn’t see us or were looking right through us. They saw only what they wanted and lunged for it. Within seconds we were surrounded on all sides by burly, desperate prison inmates. It put us on edge.

The officers on duty regarded this as hilarious. From afar, it probably was. Without fail, our arrival in New Man was accompanied by a grin from the officer on duty. Before opening the door for us, he’d tap his partner, the international sign for,
Hey get a load
of this
 … They were never disappointed. Just as we were getting swarmed and gang-mugged the officers would stand at the side with big smiles. One comedian of an officer would begin flapping his arms and screeching like a seagull,
caw caw caw
. And exclaim loudly, “Look, it’s like Revere Beach, the seagulls are coming down, guys!” It was a nasty comment made the more nasty because it had some truth to it. Equally nasty was this officer’s suggestion that we walk in and dump the goods onto a table—without even trying to arrange them properly—like a zookeeper dumping feed into a trough.

The word
seagull
quickly gained currency all over the joint. People would ask us if we “got seagulled today” or warn us, “now don’t get seagulled over there.”

The short but noteworthy era of seagulling soon ended when we stumbled on the brilliant discovery that we could time our deliveries for those moments when the inmates were locked in. But I did learn an important lesson during one particularly dicey seagulling session. While the officer kept to the side, too busy enjoying the spectacle to help us, I took matters into my own hands. I shouted—something I didn’t even know I was capable of doing—and told the inmates in front of me to step away. Now. This was directed at one particularly aggressive inmate. The young con pulled back, crossed his arms, and laughed.

“Shit,” he said. “Ain’t me you got to be worrying about. You got to watch the people
behind
you, man.”

I turned around and saw a group of inmates standing behind me, big shit-eating grins on their faces.

That summed up how I felt during those first weeks. Every time I felt secure that a situation had come into focus, a more important fact, a new grinning variable would tap my shoulder from behind.

The up&up and low low

Mars Bar just got to prison; her pregnancy test was positive. Shizz, also relatively new to prison, accuses her of having cheated on him with a certain someone.

“Lady, you know who!” he says.

After reminding Shizz that he’d been spending a lot of time with his own babymomma, Mars Bar denies his charge, insisting that he, Shizz, is the father.

“Remember the night before you was arrested? Why do you think I TOLD you I was pregnant!”

Yes, he remembers. It was a night that started at that Jamaican joint and ended at his crib. His mood changes completely. Suddenly he’s thrilled, planning their future, promising to be a better father than Mars Bar’s other babydaddy, from whom she kidnapped her oldest son.

But then it turns out she’s not pregnant.

Not long after the pregnancy episode has concluded, Mars Bar accuses Shizz of having HIV and not telling her. He becomes furious and demands to know where she heard this. She admits it’s a rumor.

He promises to produce a document that proves he’s HIV-negative and to find the rat who is spreading the rumor. Again, they reconcile and reminisce about the times they used to get fucked up, make baked ziti and play video games together.

Every day for nearly a month I tuned into this soap opera—all of which took place inside an ordinary reference book. Using volume 57 of the
Federal Reporter
, a bulky series of case law, as their ad hoc mailbox, Shizz and Mars Bar, two inmates who never came face-to-face inside the prison, maintained their stormy relationship. The correspondence ended one day, leaving me to wonder what ever became of their complicated romance.

As I made my daily rounds, I discovered notes—sometimes pages long—wedged in books. In an art book, or a guide to women’s health, or a giant concordance of Lord Tennyson’s works. The denser, the better.

“Ill leave you the next one in the boring books,” wrote one inmate to his lady pen pal. He was referring to the
Encyclopedia Brittannica
.

As I learned from reading them, a prison letter is known as a
kite
. The word appeared everywhere. Stix, a nineteen-year-old first-time convict, always signed off his letters with a promise to “fly ya another kite next week.”

I liked the connotation of the word. It was a tidy metaphor for a letter, especially from prison, a precious and precarious little creation, a physical object—unlike most forms of letters today—folded up and sent out into the world for another person to see from afar. Sometimes these letters were addressed to a specific person, sometimes they were left for whomever found them. Often, that person was me.

I didn’t always intercept these missives. When a male inmate, who had just entered the prison, broke the news to his sister, an inmate in the tower, that their mother had just died, I obviously wasn’t going to remove the letter.

“See lil’ sis,” he wrote, “you
know
you still got me. Don’t never forget.”

But in general, I treated even the innocuous letters as contraband, as per my job description and Amato’s warning to prevent the library from becoming an “anything-goes zone.” I made regular searches through the books and shelves, scouring hot spots, keeping an eye out for inmates dropping notes. I checked disks and computer desktops for e-kites. I felt bad tampering with other people’s mail. One never knows what’s behind even a silly letter, what the context is. Removing letters seemed more of a misdeed than the placing of one.