The Prison Book Club (20 page)

I could see the men were curious about the women in our Toronto book group. Ben, his lanky form slung over one of the chairs, ran his hand through his dreads and asked whether “at least” some of them were young.

“Well, Betty's this young twenty-year-old redhead,” Carol said coyly, shaving forty years off her real age. She read aloud Betty's comment, which described in anguished terms how trapped the characters were.

“I think she is very intelligent,” said Dread, his dreads stylishly twisted with gold metallic yarn and partly stuffed into an overstretched black tam.

We were at risk of the men getting distracted by Carol's description of Betty, but then Gaston got to the meat of Betty's observation by disagreeing with her comment. “I don't think at any point the people in the book actually thought it was hopeless,” he said. “'Cause they were continually going forward.” He said it was evident in how they found a truck and fixed it up for the long drive west to California. The other guys nodded.

Ben agreed. More than anyone in the book club, he had internalized the Joads' determination. “Keep on movin' when life gets a bit hard,” he said. He was resigned to a rudimentary determinism and said he wasn't complaining anymore about being in prison. “I think our life is painted out. In that day you just have to live for that day.” I was amazed at how profoundly it had affected him.

The angle that really caught the men's attention, though, was Tom's decision to flout his parole restrictions in order to go west with his family. He wasn't allowed to leave Oklahoma. Carol asked if he did the right thing.

“Family comes first,” said Deshane.

I looked over at Deshane. He was wearing basketball shoes so shiny they seemed plasticized. By then, he had shared with me that he had OCD and was doing time for manslaughter, aggravated assault and weapons charges. A sort of Cyrano de Bergerac at the prison, he fashioned himself a crafter of what he called “lovey-dovey” poetry for other inmates. “Guys who are not really good at romancing their girls with nice words, I just write something for them and they send it, acting like it's them, right,” he had told me proudly. He didn't charge for the service.

Dread disagreed with Deshane, saying that crossing the state line would make Tom a wanted man and would bring heat down on his family. The men told us about the ROPE (Repeat Offender Parole Enforcement) squads in Canada that they said shadow parolees, especially upon first release, ready to haul them in at any sign of a parole violation. “Big jacked-up dudes,” was how Peter described them, his face strangely red. It agitated the guys just to think of these posses. Dread and a few of the others argued about the differences between parole conditions today and in the 1930s. Most decided it was easier in the '30s. For a while they didn't need Carol to prompt discussion.

Then Ben wanted to talk about the humanity and goodness of the Joads. He pointed to the final scene of the book where the Joads' daughter Rose of Sharon, at Ma's prompting, suckles a starving man who can no longer take in solid food. She had just given birth to a stillborn child and her breasts were full of milk.

The room fell strangely quiet as the men considered the image of a woman breastfeeding a man. Their eyes grew wide. I figured some were just imagining breasts.

“Wow,” said one man.

“She fulfilled her purpose,” said Ben, looking around the room with his gentle downward-sloping eyes.

“No, no, no, hold on, hold on,” said Dread, who, as usual, challenged Ben. “It wasn't even her idea, and it's not like she was a pervert. The guy was so sick he couldn't hold down anything, so the only form of nutriment he could take was baby's milk.”

Carol pointed out to Ben and Dread that they were actually agreeing with each other, though Dread didn't look convinced.

Ben's appreciation of goodness and humanity made me hopeful for him. I had seen it in his journal before the meeting began. He had broken into a shy grin when I opened it, as though he had a secret. There was a card wedged into the crease. His journal page that day described how he had found a birthday card inside one of the books that our women's book club had donated to the Collins Bay Book Club the previous summer. He saw that the card was addressed to someone named Ann and contained a warm message from a friend. He assumed the “Ann” was me and he wrote in his journal:

[I] started thinking about friends and what real friends are: And that is someone that has no bad judgment about you, you are comfortable around them and speak, act and express yourself freely, then I said Ann is a “great friend.” Thank you.

I let down my guard and we both laughed. It was just what I needed to feel safe inside. And I was glad that he felt encouraged by my friendship.

I came out of my reverie at that point to hear Carol telling the men that she and Ruth had cared so much about the characters, they had cried while reading the book.

“But it's not even a true story,” said Dread.

“It's touching, but I wouldn't cry,” said Ben.

“You cried,” Dread goaded Ben. “You told me you did.” The room erupted in laughter and loud talk.

The men wrote down comments for the women to consider. Peter was the only one to dwell on Steinbeck's left-wing politics. “I believe the book questioned the morals of a capitalist society and demonstrated how ruthless men in power are willing to be towards the masses,” he wrote carefully in pencil. By that month, Peter had joined his buddy Gaston's classics reading project and Carol ordered a second set of the Professor Duffy–prescribed books for him.

Before we broke up, Gaston asked, “I have one question in regards to your women book club members. You say they're all in their twenties, but they seem to have older-generation names. I'm not sure you're being 100 percent honest.” Carol and I burst into laughter.
Busted.

I was once again sleeping over at Carol's island house so I could return to Collins Bay the following day to chat with Deshane about his poems. Poetry is a great vessel for anger, as Steinbeck had demonstrated in the book, and I wondered whether Deshane's “lovey-dovey” poems would have a dark underside. By the time Carol and I arrived at the house, the setting sun appeared as a glowing orange slit of light along the horizon beneath a lid of black cloud that covered the entire sky. It felt like the eye of the world closing.

At bedtime, Carol turned the thermostat down to fifteen degrees Celsius while I watched with dismay. This was probably a sleep strategy because, on previous visits, I had heard her up at night. I found an extra blanket made from the still-musky wool of the sheep from Topsy Farm next door and crawled under the covers with one of Bryan's many books on Churchill.

Long before the sun rose, I awoke shivering. As I walked to the car to catch the pre-dawn ferry, a coyote yipped in the field sometimes occupied by the Topsy sheep and their look-alike protectors, the white Pyrenees dogs. The sun rose as an orange wildfire, so that the hay wagons, bales, tractor and barn on the eastern rise appeared as black silhouettes. It had been a wet year on Amherst Island— nothing Dust Bowl about it.

At Collins Bay, two inmates joined the chaplain and me as we walked down The Strip: Joao, the blue-eyed boyish chapel cleaner and occasional book club member, and another guy, who wasn't in the book club. When we got to the narrow sidewalk, the men fell in behind us. The other guy was bigger than Joao and began insulting him, signing off with a smack to the back of his head as he split off to the workshop. Joao said nothing and the chaplain hadn't noticed, but it was my first concrete glimpse of bullying in prison, and evidence that the walkway could be lawless territory.

Deshane was waiting for me. As he handed me his journal, a sheaf of drafts fell out and he rushed to stuff them back in because he said he didn't want me to see rough work. One draft was a “Godly” poem for the chaplain, he said, but he let me hear two lines, which I admired. The couplet tapped into Delta blues and gospel, but its rhythm was all rap. He ended it with an admonition to let go of the past and let the devil keep “bouncin'.”

I opened the journal. The first poem was called “Only You.” He read it aloud to me, again in a rap rhythm, speeding over some words and landing hard at the end of each line, imagining that if love was “a crime,” he would be doing “time” like C-Murder.

“C-Murder?”

“Yeah. The dude that got life. Got a life sentence.”

Deshane was surprised that I didn't recognize the dude. C-Murder was an American rapper, convicted for fatally shooting a sixteen-year-old fan at a Louisiana nightclub. Unbelievably, the musician had managed to release an album while serving life at Angola, Louisiana's maximum-security prison farm, famed for its inmate rodeo. A life sentence was not a metaphor that most poets would employ to describe loving someone
forever
. I wondered how this image might strike the girlfriend receiving the poem.

“I didn't know I had it in me till I got arrested,” Deshane said, referring to his writing ability.

I offered to get him some books of poetry, but he was quick to tell me that he wasn't interested in “old school” stuff. “I like poems that are more affectionate, about feelings, about pain,” he said. “Do you ever go to Hallmark and they have a card for each thought? That's what I like.”

It seemed safe to ask a guy who liked Hallmark cards more about the crime he had committed.

“I was defending myself—I got stabbed,” he said. “But they said I used too much force. It was a handgun. The person got shot.” Tom Joad said virtually the same thing. Deshane said that he had been at Collins Bay for five years and in lower security for a year, “but then they sent me back here, over some, say, ‘security incidents'—and a butter knife was sharpened.”

A butter knife was sharpened. The person got shot.
Always the passive voice. A number of the men used it when describing their crimes, as though they had been mere agents of some force beyond their control. I liked them better when they owned up to what they had done and expressed regret. But I understood the instinct to self-protect.

From the corridor, the chaplain called, “Count.” I quickly asked Deshane to write a poem about
The Grapes of Wrath
for next time and read him a sentence from the novel to show him how Steinbeck used rhythm to evoke powerful feelings. The line talked about tear-gassing the hungry rioters in California. When I looked up, there was an odd expression on Deshane's face. It was later that I found out that a police canine unit had captured him by tear-gassing him out of his hiding spot under a porch, after a police dog and pepper spray failed to dislodge him.

On my drive back to Toronto, I detoured close to the Occupy Kingston encampment, remembering that Ben had mentioned his admiration for the Occupiers. Using a park bandstand as a base and a patchwork of tarpaulins, the protesters had created a yurt-like central tent, like the Joads' tarpaulin shelter. Five days later they would be evicted, but not before their campaign had swept in two other prison-related protest groups: End the Prison Industrial Complex and Save Our Prison Farms. The people who end up in prison are usually not the 1 percent.

There and on the darkening highway, as I returned to Toronto, I listened to Springsteen's “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and thought about how Steinbeck might have seen the passing landscape. My gaze took in a line of Russian olive trees shedding their long silvery leaves—the last of the deciduous trees to give up their foliage, flaunting their resilience to poor soil. As Springsteen lamented, I saw that the sumac drupes and bulrush sedges had browned off and in the fields, dry yellow-brown stalks reminded me of arid stretches of Texas and Oklahoma.

12

CHRISTMAS IN PRISON

C
HRISTMAS IN PRISON was like a poorly attended Visitors Day in a seniors' home. Many men at Collins Bay remained unvisited and lonely. And those who were visited couldn't count on their loved ones making it past inspection, where guards used frisk searches and sniffer dogs to detect contraband while visitors spread their legs wide to stand on two footprints painted on the floor. The drug-detection equipment was sensitive, and routinely picked up cocaine traces on paper currency because snorters' residue contaminates a large percentage of banknotes in general circulation. Some book club members said they didn't want to put their families through the ordeal.

The season was particularly painful for the fathers in the prison book club. When I talked to Gaston at the beginning of December, he broke into tears as I read in his journal that it would be his third Christmas in a row without his four children. “My son is eleven, and he thinks I'm at work and asks, ‘Why isn't Dad coming for Christmas?'” he said, after I finished reading, his voice cracking. “The younger ones say ‘Daddy' on the phone but they don't really know who I am. It's a horrible feeling. To be honest, Christmas is the worst time of all.” No inmate had cried in front of me before, let alone a serial bank robber with a weakness for crack. I wanted to put my hand on his arm, but I refrained, respecting his dignity.

His remorse was not just as a father, but as a son, because his own parents had never missed Christmas with him. And, as if the holidays couldn't be more depressing, he hadn't spoken to his wife for several days. His journal said that she was frustrated about having to work full-time to support four young children on her own. In Gaston's view, she was the one serving time and he felt helpless. He wiped away his tears, self-conscious not just about weeping, but about a bright red infection that had developed on his nose.

Nor did he expect any presents from his family other than a Christmas card. He said that the restrictions on sending and receiving gifts were too onerous to bother. Three days after Christmas he planned to send his wife $110. It wasn't a Christmas present, just a portion of his pay from his CORCAN job. In the run-up to Christmas he focused instead on reading Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island
for his reading-the-classics project;
Small Island
, by Andrea Levy, for the book club; and, to feed his devotional needs, the Bible.