Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (7 page)

“You want to look serious,” she said, “not
sad
. You look like you’re going to cry. No good.”

Also, she wasn’t happy with my height. I might want to wear clogs, she advised, or some shoe with a tall sole. I imagined throwing caution to the wind and coming into prison with a leisure suit and platforms. When she spotted the inmates en route, her smile faded. She tapped me. I knew what to do. Battle stations!

When the inmates stormed in, we were already standing in formation, shoulder to shoulder—or, to be precise, my shoulder a couple of inches below hers—our arms folded. She mowed down the first wave of inmates, sending them back to the block for running. When they protested, she clenched her teeth and said, “You either turn around or I’ll send you to the hole.”

The rest of the hour proceeded from there. She made a big scene with one of the inmate library workers. His uniform top was inside-out. She commanded him, loudly and in front of other inmates, to change it. In a clear effort to save face, he told her he’d do it when he went back to his cell.

“No,” she said, “now.”

They glared at each other for what felt like a full minute. Finally she said, “You want to go to the hole?” He continued glaring. I heard him mutter, “You can’t treat me like a damn child.”

“And why don’t you show me what you have in that pocket?” she said, referring to the bulging, now-concealed inside-out chest pocket.

He reached into his shirt and pulled out a little volume of Psalms. He smiled smugly. But before he could gloat, she said. “Go into the back and flip your shirt the right way, right now.”

But he didn’t go into the back. Instead, he walked to the middle of the library and, with dozens of inmates now stopping to watch, removed his uniform top, stood there for a moment pitiably half-naked—a silent protest—and finally flipped it the right way. He continued his protest by abandoning his post behind the library counter. He went to the other side of the library to shelve books, which he did furiously and, from what I could discern, in no particular order. Meanwhile, my caseworker tutor held her ground, arms crossed, jaw clenched. But the red in her face betrayed her.

T
he advice came from all sides. My friendly union boss, Charlie—a.k.a.
Chah
lie—popped his head in one day during the first week. Though technically Patti’s assistant, in reality he was no such thing. Charlie was what parliament-run governments call a “minister-without-portfolio,” a staffer-at-large. He was an old patronage hire, part of the former system who arrived on the scene before the staff had professionalized, back when the prison was merely a junket of government jobs—when it was about who you knew, not what experience or training you had. He also happened to be a lovably politically incorrect grandfatherly gent. Charlie knew everybody by name and was a unifying presence, friends with officers and civilians alike.

On my third day, he pulled me aside. He’d seen me from the hall, he said, through the library’s picture windows (for security reasons, everything has to be as literally transparent as possible, every room in the prison has large hall-facing windows). He shook his head disapprovingly.

“You’re moving around
too
much, and you’re moving
too
fast,” he told me. “You trying to set a record?
Don’t
work so hard.”

Charlie was a relentless jokester, but he actually wasn’t joking. I was on union time, union pay scale. I got paid the same amount regardless of how hard I worked or how well I performed. More important than achieving anything, as far as he was concerned, was to arrive and leave on time. Not a second earlier or later.

“Don’t get fancy,” he told me. “Just do your job, stay healthy, and keep your nose clean.”

And take your union-protected break. Charlie had demonstrated this last one for me himself, during my initial job interview. In the midst of his tour, we’d stopped for a spell at the front gate. At the time, I had no idea why we were standing there, just staring at a chain-link fence and the sky. After about a minute of silent reflection, he’d announced, “This is where you come for your break. It’s in the contract. So you take it.” Running around like a waiter and “trying to set records,” however, was not in my contract.

Gilmore, the night-shift officer stationed outside of the library at the time, also had advice.

“You need to have open eyes in this place,” he said. “It’s like boxing. The punch that knocks you out is the punch you don’t see.”

He’d taken measurements, he told me. The space was outfitted with giant security mirrors, designed to see around corners. If you stood in a certain spot behind the circulation counter, you could see almost every inch of the space. He even offered me pieces of tape to mark the spot on the floor.

“This is your post,” he said. “Just stand here for the next thirty years and you’ll retire a happy man.”

He gave me a friendly pat on the back.

T
he opinions I encountered pointed to a larger question: What
was
the role of the prison library? Almost everyone I asked during those first weeks had a different answer. Some thought it was a sham that, at best, served no function; at worst, coddled the inmates and gave them a place to plan and commit crimes. Some thought it was an effective way to numb inmates to the reality of captivity, to calm their nerves. The library made the prison safer for everyone, I was told. One senior officer mentioned that it was a good place to gather information from inmates who didn’t realize they were being watched. As Coolidge liked to point out, the heart of the prison library, strictly speaking, was the law collection: Inmates had a legal right to it.

Some staff believed it was a place to awaken, not numb, inmates. A place inmates might be able to change their lives, pursue an education, do something productive—though few actually did. There was the model of Malcolm X, who underwent a major transformation in a prison library, in the same Massachusetts system in which I worked. In his autobiography, which sat on our shelf, he wrote, “Ten guards and the warden couldn’t have torn me out of those books. Months passed without even thinking about being imprisoned … I had never been so truly free in my life.”

A young black officer told me he believed that prison libraries were lost on 99.9 percent of inmates, but for the chance of producing another person like Malcolm, it was worth it.

On the other hand, there was the model of James “Whitey” Bulger, the murderous Boston Irish crime boss—whose $2 million reward puts him second on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, behind Osama bin Laden. Bulger refined his notoriously ruthless tactics, and his method of systematic, brutal repression, by making a careful study of military history. This also happened in a prison library. The FBI’s wanted poster for Bulger indeed notes that he is “an avid reader with an interest in history. He is known to frequent libraries.” Whitey, like Malcolm, first discovered books in the prison library. And it was there, in the quiet of its shelves, that he made his first and most diligent intellectual efforts. Both men had entered the prison library as unread young street thugs but emerged as leaders—with opposing visions of power.

During my first days of work I noticed that the names of Whitey and Malcolm came up often. People wanted to read about them, to read what they had read. Or just to talk about them. For each person seeking spiritual guidance or the development of his political conscience, like Malcolm, there was a cold materialist, studying how to employ violence more efficiently in the service of brutal criminal endeavors. Just like Whitey.

O
fficer Gilmore, and others, had told me to
be on the lookout
. That was the phrase he used. When I asked him what it meant, he indicated that it was a broad comment.

“I know,” he said, “that this probably seems messed up, right, to be constantly watching other people.” He shrugged. “I mean, it
is
messed up. But you get used to it. There’s no getting around it, though. In here, privacy is a problem.”

In prison, where privacy is a problem, reading is considered a just bearable form of self-seclusion. And yet, after a few days, I was beginning to detect that there was a problem even with this abstract form of privacy—the kind that occurs when a mind sits alone with a book. It wasn’t obvious, and certainly not to me, how to distinguish a Whitey from a Malcolm.

This was precisely the source some of my coworkers’ skepticism regarding the prison library. And it wasn’t anything new. Writing in 1821, prison chronicler George Holford noted that he couldn’t discern “whether the prisoners are working, or gambling, reading history books or Psalm books furnished by the chaplain, or legends and songs of a very different description.” The charged relationship between books and prison was probably as old as the institution.

During lunch in the staff cafeteria, I asked Diana what she thought was the purpose of the prison library. She smiled.

“Oh no, silly,” she said, grabbing my wrist under the table. “Don’t think about it too much. These guys have a lot of time on their hands. Reading is just a good way for them to pass the time. That’s the way it’s always been in prison.”

As she tightened her grip on my wrist, her silver rings slowly digging into my radial artery, I nodded in complete and utter agreement. But her answer seemed too easy and left me even more curious.

The Hobbes Girls

My first impression of the creative writing class for women inmates, held up in the tower, was less than positive. I was looking at a pretty rough bunch. For a moment, I wondered if I’d accidentally walked into a neck scar convention. I counted three. The one who didn’t have a neck scar had a neck tattoo. The one who had neither sported a lewd cupcake-shaped hairdo and looked just plain mean.

I was reminded of the famous line from
Leviathan
, in which Thomas Hobbes envisions a grim world without a strong central sovereign, a “war of all against all,” in which the life of a person is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Here they were, reunited in one room, sitting right in front of me: Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short.

The first to speak was Short. Short was both short and wiry, especially in her prison uniform, which appeared roughly five sizes too large. As is common for her kind, Short balanced a massive chip on her shoulder. When I asked her to please join the small circle of seats, she leaped up, threw her chin forward, and said, “You gonna make me?”

With my response, an equivocal “uh,” she smiled and loosened up.

“I’m just playin’ with you,” she said and bounded over to the circle.

But she wasn’t. I already knew Short routinely looked for, and usually found, fights. In preparation for my class, I had read her litany of prison disciplinary reports, many of which attributed to her such winning quotes as, “Bitch, I’m gonna cut your damn titties off.” And: “You fucking cunt ass ho, you got the stinkiest damn pussy in this whole place.
Bitch.”
This woman was a perfect fit for a creative writing class. She had me at
titties
.

And then there was Nasty. Nasty, unseemly cupcake hairdo upon her head, really was rather nasty. But mostly just morose. She’d stare ahead for periods of half an hour without saying a word, her face waxing bitterer with each passing second. I could tell time by watching this woman’s loathing grow. She usually said only one thing during a class, always at the end, as a sort of summary statement, and always genuinely mean-spirited.

I have to admit I had a soft spot for Brutish. Sure, she was brutish. She behaved like a frat boy, displayed little to no socialization. She’d slump in her chair, drop her hands deep into her prison-issue pants, probe the region, make a little adjustment, cop a little feel. She said whatever came to mind. The profane, the foolish, the casually defamatory. “Your shirt is old,” she’d say. Or “Your hair looks like shit.” (At least, that’s what she’d say to me.) Everything was shit—shit was her currency and her compass. Negative developments were
bad shit;
positive were
good shit
. Her winters were cold as ____, and her summers hot as ____. She picked her nose, passed gas, betrayed confidences. But she meant no harm, and it was a testament to her irrepressible good humor that somehow people forgave her for acting like a prize hog at the state fair.

She and Poor were pals. They were an odd couple: Brutish, fat and carnal, Poor, a stick figure—though sturdy in her boniness—constantly grubbing, ever fearful. A permanent expression of doom in her eyes. Brutish abused Poor’s neediness, but also watched out for her. Or so it seemed.

Solitary intrigued me. She sat at the far end—alone, of course—staring out the window. Later, after everything that happened, I still held on to that first image of her: sitting very upright, legs crossed, hands folded neatly on her lap, squinting in the sun, a frowning, preoccupied Betsy Ross–at–work air about her (if Betsy Ross had been a washed up ex-stripper). She was hard, proud, and prim. Didn’t utter a peep during our first meetings.

The first words out of Solitary’s mouth, however, immediately endeared her to me. For the first two classes, I had brought in three short readings—poems by Philip Larkin and Amiri Baraka and a passage from
Beloved
by Toni Morrison. We read and discussed each in class. I did this mostly to get a sense of where these women were in terms of their reading skills and interests. The discussions were a bit forced but not entirely discouraging. Solitary, for her part, kept mum.

Finally, I decided to up the ante. For homework—which, Poor corrected me, should not be called homework but “cellwork”—I asked them to read a short story by Flannery O’Connor.

Solitary raised her hand.

“Can we see a picture of her first?”

“You won’t read it until you see a picture?” I said.

“That’s right,” she replied, unsmiling.

I flipped to the author’s photo in the Library of America edition of O’Connor’s collected works, and forked it over. Solitary examined the photo.