Plan B (12 page)

 

M
y pastor Veronica said yesterday that God constantly tells us to rejoice, but to do that, to get our 'joice
back,
we need to have had joy before. And it's never been needed as badly as now, when the world is hurting so badly, because joy is medicine.

San Quentin may not seem the obvious place to go searching for joy, but my friend Neshama and I went there last week to teach inmates how to tell stories. I would work with them on the craft of writing, while Neshama, who found her voice through the oral tradition, would pass along what she's learned in her work at a
guild where people teach one another to tell crafted stories from the stage.

I was glad to be there, for a number of reasons. First of all, because Jesus said that whatever you did to the least of his people, you did to him, and the lifers in penitentiaries are the leastest people in this country. Just look to see whose budgets are being cut these days—the old, the crazies, the children in Head Start—and that's where Jesus will be. He also promised that God forgives the unlovable and the unforgivable, which means most of us—the lifers, me, maybe you.

Second, my father had taught English and writing at San Quentin during the 1950s and 1960s. He published stories in
The New Yorker
about his students, and then wrote a biography of San Quentin; I grew up hearing and reading about his students and the place itself. He did not bog down in complex moral and ethical matters—victims' rights, recidivism. He just taught the prisoners to read good books, to speak English, and to write. My father treated them with respect and kindness, his main philosophical and spiritual position being, Don't be an asshole. My brothers and I stood outside the gates of San Quentin with him and his friends over the years, in protest and silent witness whenever someone was going to be gassed.

And last, I was happy to be there because one of the inmates, Wolf, the head of the Vietnam vets group there, had asked me to help some of his friends with their writing.

I had been inside the grounds for worship services at night, but had never visited during the day. When we went, it was pouring rain. Waiting outside the walls with Neshama, two San Quentin English teachers, and a friend from church, I felt aware of the violence and fear of the world. I hardly know what to feel most days, except grief and bug-eyed paranoia. But my faith tells me that God has skills, ploys, and grace adequate to bring light into the present darkness, into families, prisons, governments.

San Quentin is on a beautiful piece of land in Marin County, on the east shore of San Francisco Bay, with lots of sun, views of the bridges, hills, windsurfers. I tried not to worry as we waited. On Sundays, Veronica kept repeating what Paul and Jesus always said: Don't worry! Don't be so anxious. In dark times, give off light. Care for the least of God's people. She quoted the Reverend James Forbes as saying, “Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.” Obviously, “the poor” includes prisoners.

Jesus had an affinity for prisoners. He had been one, after all. He must have often felt anxiety and isolation in
jail, but he always identified with the prisoners. He made a point of befriending the worst and most hated, because his message was that no one was beyond the reach of divine love, despite society's way of stating the opposite. God: what a nut.

Finally, we stood outside an inner gate, showed our IDs to the guards, and got our hands stamped with fluorescent ink. “You don't glow, you don't go,” said one cheerful, pockmarked guard, which was the best spiritual advice I'd had in a long time.

As we stepped into a holding pen, my mind spun with worries about being taken hostage, having a shotgun strapped to my head with duct tape. I don't think Jesus would have been thinking these same thoughts: everything in him reached out with love and mercy and redemption. He taught that God is able to bring life from even the most death-dealing of circumstances, no matter where the terror alert level stands.

Our group was allowed to view the outer walls of the prison, which was built in 1852. San Quentin possesses great European beauty—ancient-looking walls, elegant gun towers. It's like a set from Edgar Allan Poe. Someone with the right attitude could do something really nice with this place, something more festive. It could be a
cute bed-and-breakfast, say. Or a brewery. I did not know who would be inside, only that most of the convicts were murderers serving life sentences. I imagined that some would be sullen and shifty-eyed, and others charming cons, trying to win me over so I would marry them and get them better lawyers, and consort with them on alternate Tuesdays. I knew there'd be camaraderie, violence, and redemption inside, because I'd read my father's account and the accounts of others. But those were written years ago, when you could still believe in caring for prisoners without being accused of being soft on crime.

Jesus was soft on crime. He'd never have been elected anything.

In the courtyard, we were met by several staff people, and then by Wolf and two of his friends, all polite and clean-shaven, with Vietnam vet caps on. We stood within the circle of prison buildings, in the center of concrete cell blocks, dining hall, classrooms, a hospital, a chapel. The grounds are brightly landscaped by the inmates, but the buildings look like a child's play structure that has been left outside for a hundred years—a plastic and castley hodgepodge of stone and concrete, ornate, crumbly, deteriorated.

There's razor wire everywhere, and a constant clanging and banging of gates and cells and doors. Guards carry arms, and keys that could be from the Middle Ages. Prisoners walk all over the grounds, as slowly as monks, with nowhere much to go. Of course, we saw your better inmates, the really polite ones, not the hard cases, not the men on death row. Those we saw and spent time with seemed to be sliding by, relatively seamless and calm. They're mostly older; you sense that their testosterone levels are down.

I like that in a prisoner.

Wolf and his friends showed us classrooms, the chapel, and the hobby shop where inmates work making wooden cable-car jewelry boxes and stained-glass hummingbirds and crosses. “Should you guys be trusted with knives and saws and extremely sharp implements?” I asked nicely.

They laughed. “We earned the privilege by good behavior,” Wolf told me. He showed us the old dining hall with the long walls covered in murals done by inmates in black and brown shoe polish. The murals depicted California's history and their own—the Miwok on Mount Tamalpais, Sir Francis Drake on the beaches of West Marin, the Spanish missions, the Gold Rush,
heroes of labor, farm workers, artists, prisoners, saints—and hidden inside the pictures were secrets only they could see.

We walked to the main cell block. The prison is overcrowded. The prisoners are double-celled, double-bunked. The cells are grotesque, like a Croatian zoo. I understand how the families of victims might think the prisoners deserve this, but seeing them stuffed in these cages affected me the same way seeing photos of the displayed corpses of Saddam Hussein's sons did. You had to wonder: Who are we? And what next? Bloody heads on stakes, outside the White House?

“What are you reading?” I asked a man in one cell.

He held out his book: true crime by Ann Rule.

Wolf led us to a dining hall, where sixty prisoners had gathered in bolted-down chairs near a stage. Behind them, a kitchen staff and prisoners were preparing the next meal, with guards nearby.

What you might call the aesthetics left something to be desired—an echoey, cavernous space, like a hangar, metallic, with the racket of people preparing food. It smelled like cheap meat and old oil and white bread.

I went onstage, took a long, deep breath, and wondered, as usual, where to start. I told the prisoners the
same things I tell people at writing conferences: Pay attention, take notes, give yourself short assignments, let yourself write shitty first drafts, ask people for help, and you own what happens to you. They listened dutifully.

Then I introduced Neshama, with a concern that the prisoners wouldn't quite get her—this intense grandmother with a nice big butt and fuzzy gray hair, wearing a loud plaid flannel dress. I had invited her because I love her stories and knew it would be more fun for me, and because some people at San Quentin, like Neshama, hate to write but love to read and tell stories.

I had extremely low expectations—I hoped a few prisoners might form a guild, like the one to which Neshama belongs; I hoped they wouldn't hurt her, or overcome her, or try to make her marry them. Neshama walked to the mike and told her first story, her version of a folktale. It was about a man with no luck, who comes upon safety, wealth, and a beautiful woman, but is too busy looking for fancier luck, somewhere else, to even notice her. Neshama painted the story with her hands, leaning into the crowd, and drawing back, hopeful or aghast at the unlucky man's journey, smiling gleefully at the story's close. And the place went nuts. She stole the show right out from under me like a rock star, while I looked as prim
and mainstream as Laura Bush. Here they had thought Neshama was going to teach them a lesson, and she had instead sung them a song. Their faces lit up with surprise. She was shining on them, and they felt her shining on them, and so they shone back on her.

They asked her questions. Where do we find these stories? And Neshama told them: “They're in you, like jewels in your hearts.” Why do they matter? “Because they're treasures. These memories, these images, come forth from the ground of the same wisdom we all know, but that you alone can tell.”

The prisoners stared at her, mesmerized. They looked like family, and neighbors, black and white and Asian and Hispanic, all in their blue denim clothes. Some looked pissed off, some bored, some attentive; the older ones all looked like God.

When I at last got Neshama off the stage, I gave them a second round of my best writing tips. There was warm, respectful applause. Neshama got up and told a second story. It was about her late husband, and a pool he would hike to, where there was a single old whiskery fish swimming around. Neshama stripped her story down to its essence, because only essence speaks to desperate people. And the men rose to give her a standing ovation. It was a
stunning moment. All she had done was tell them, “I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while.”

Neshama explained to them about her storytelling guild, and one of the guards sat down to listen. We did a duet, the two of us answering questions, telling the men useful stories of our own work, and the writers we love, whom maybe they would love, too, who have filled our communal well, worn and honed from many years and different backgrounds.

We had evoked the listening child in these men, with the only real story anyone has ever told—that the teller has been alive for a certain number of years, and has learned a little in surprising ways, in the way the universe delivers truth. While I saw these men through the haze of our desire that things go well, I also saw beautiful rough glass, tumbled in the turbulent and unrelenting streams of prison life. I saw that these men looked out for one another. I saw that they had nothing but the present, the insides of their minds, glimpses of natural beauty, library books, guilt, rage, growth, and one another. I saw that these lives were of value. I had a sudden desire to send them all my books, all of my father's and friends' books, as well. Also to donate my organs. Why did these men
make me feel like being so generous? Maybe it was all the fresh air we'd brought in, the wind and the rain and ourselves. It was as if we'd come with an accordion, and as we talked and listened, the bellows filled, and let breath, ours and theirs, in and out past the metal reeds.