Two college seniors and nine convicted felons fill desks in what might be an elementary classroom on the bad side of town: ragged curtains, cranky heat register, stained ceiling. The convicts, all men, wear sweats in state-issue green. The students (I’ll call them Tyler and Lisa) wear the dress-down cool of American undergrads. Tonight we’re discussing a story by George Saunders, then examining a new draft of an essay by one of the men, Radman. His essay, based on a real incident, describes a winter blackout, a night when 2,200 men and their keepers felt the balance of power tip.
I didn’t know what would happen when I first brought undergraduates into this prison. As with most successful teaching, though, the value of the effort has been revealed by the players themselves.
Lisa and Tyler spend thousands of dollars a year for one of the best liberal-arts educations in the country. The men owe five to 20 to life without parole in one of the nation’s toughest jails. For 10 weeks, Tyler and Lisa have been my students in English 342: “20th Century American Prison Writing”; for the three years since I started this class—with clearance by prison administrators—the men have been producing the material we study.
The men and I start to work. Lisa and Tyler have not been here before, and by state regulations cannot come again (although as a registered volunteer, I can). They seem caught in a slightly out-of-body experience. It happens to everyone the first time in: passing through a 30-foot-high wall, 15 automated gates, and nests of disgruntled-looking corrections officers, past inmates walking in military formation, glancing through barred windows at men huddled at outdoor phones or tables claimed by gangs as a cold drizzle falls through stadium lights. Yet the moment the men enter the classroom, I see a change in my students’ eyes: The institution vanishes as Paul, Mohammed, Mandrake, Dan, Radman, and the others step into the room and shed the pall of jailface—grinning and grateful to be out from under the eyes of the officers and their own dangerous cohorts. Each comes to Tyler and Lisa, shaking their hands, introducing themselves before greeting and joking with each other or picking over the books laid out on a table: Dubliners, Middle Passage, The Odyssey, Possession, Black Boy. ...
Then they sit in a semicircle. Lisa and Tyler listen intently to the news since my last visit: tear gas in B yard, talk of new regulations to shorten the sentences of men with good records, corrections officers intent on copies of Guns & Ammo—"'Fraid Obama’s gonna take their private arsenals,” Mandrake quips, drawing the first collective laugh of the evening. I can see the tension release from Lisa and Tyler’s spines. They laugh too long. The men smile at Tyler’s embarrassed blush. Several of them have told me how much they enjoy the presence of young people who have the world before them; who have not formed the emotional armor that such a place demands; who are unlikely ever to face the choices—dignity or peace, self-respect or a clean prison record—that the inmates must make every day.
I check on the progress of drafts, men turn in new work, and then we start with the Saunders story. Lisa and Tyler listen, clearly impressed by the men’s ability to dissect the technical points of time shift, character development, rising and falling action. Both have heard reports from classmates who have preceded them. But nothing could have prepared them for the stark materiality of nine men who carry on their backs an equal number of murdered souls. One can sense a gravitas in men who have killed, and who have reflected long upon their actions amid the labor of survival in jail.
The prison contains men who cannot control themselves. It also contains men who live each day in the knowledge that they have destroyed lives and damaged families—including their own—and through the crucible of remorse have found a way to wisdom. Given its racial demographics, it would suggest some degree of racism to assume that the American prison system, our fourth-largest city, could not produce a number of such able thinkers and writers. But these thinkers and writers must work in a field of violence and death. So Lisa and Tyler will report, too, that this is the most intense discussion they have witnessed in all their years of schooling. These are precious hours for the men. As they have said, here they are readers, thinkers, and writers among others who share those priorities. They are so well prepared with deeply considered opinions, it is easy to forget where we are.
Then Radman (the joker and self-designated schlemiel) says to my question about what writing means to him, “Look, we’re a bunch of killers. It’s a bad neighborhood. ... Writing gives me something to do besides sharpening things.”
Lisa’s fingers tighten on the edge of her desk as we return to Radman’s description of himself and his friend TJ, strobing Bic lighters through darkened halls that the officers had fled. Dan comments, “The first time I read this, I was in C Block, where people are getting beaten or stabbed every day. I thought Radman was softening the picture. But now that I’m in Honor Block, I can picture lights out in a place where you can move around.”
Tyler’s eyes dart to me at the word “stabbed"—a mildly panicked look. I nod to him—"it’s OK"—as I did to Lisa. He takes a breath.
Then—like their peers before them, and those to follow—Lisa and Tyler find their voices. They grow animated, as intent as the men on the beauty of this line, the humor in that one. I see students I have never met in our regular classroom. It’s nerves, no doubt. But it’s also the discovery that in this company of men older both in years and experience, they too can hold a place as critics of metaphor, scene, and mood.
Lisa and Tyler have spent weeks reading prison work songs and Jack London, Kate Richards O’Hare, Martin Luther King Jr., George Jackson, and Assata Shakur. Their self-assurance rises as they speak to the living bearers of this literary tradition. They are speaking to nine black and white faces that live the experience they have studied and who listen to what they have to say. The men lean to catch every word. They take notes, they ask for clarification. (Mohammed and Paul scratch down “objective correlative” as it trips from Lisa’s nervous lips.) Everyone benefits. But most striking is the way these students grow before our eyes, discovering that they can contribute some good to this hidden world before leaving it forever.
After two and one half hours, the bell sounds. We pack up and share heartfelt handshakes. In the hall, Lisa, Tyler, and I make our way between men coming from GED and Bible classes as corrections officers watch from behind the doors ahead. We turn and wave. But Mandrake, Mohammed, Radman, Dan, and Paul have already resumed their jailhouse personas. They barely nod, or they move their hands without raising their arms. As though the floor has opened, we glance across a chasm. Lisa and Tyler turn away. (In class tomorrow there will be a new passion in their readings of the assigned text.)
As great as the joy in being here is the joy of getting out. Tyler is so excited that he side-hops a few steps. A bald officer wearing a black Fu Manchu—his tattooed forearms the size of Popeye’s—gives the three of us a stern look. But the gate clangs shut behind us, and soon we are welcomed by the sting of a frosty night, where Lisa releases a high “Whoa!”
I’ve been asked, “Why do you take undergraduates into a place like that?”
I say, “You’d have to be there.”
