And another from the New York Times Book Review – thanks, Jay.
Essay
Visible Men
Edel Rodriguez
By HELEN ELAINE LEE
Published: June 14, 2013
The sliding door buzzes and rumbles open. The guard calls out: “Come on, you’re next.” I stand up from the waiting area pews, where I have stowed my bag, watch and jewelry in a locker, and step forward. I enter the trap, a room between outside and inside worlds. I turn my pockets inside out, remove my shoes, walk through the metal detector and receive an ultraviolet stamp on my wrist. Every few months for 12 years, I have visited a Massachusetts prison to teach creative writing to a group of locked-up men.
The visits begin with a welcoming. The men rise from their circled chairs and thank me for coming to their cramped classroom. They hurry to get me tea or instant coffee and animal crackers, for which they have chipped in. They pass around a baggie of what my grandmother called penny candy: caramel squares and peppermint wheels, root beer barrels and Atomic Fireballs. Take a minute to breathe, they urge me. How’s your moms, your son?
After we’re settled, we go around the circle for a check-in. I had a visit. I moved cells. I worked on my garden plot. I worked on my appeal. They tell their mostly mundane news, each one finishing up with And with that, I’m in, conveying his commitment to the group’s efforts while passing the focus to the next man.
After everyone has spoken, we turn to our afternoon’s work with meditation. “Close your eyes,” one of them says. “Picture yourself in a green meadow, feeling the sun, the grass, the summer breeze.” He banishes the wasteland of prison and conjures color, life, peace. When we have returned from our imagined freedoms, I offer up a writing exercise:
Write about a toy or game you played with as a child, revealing something important about your experience.
One speaks of playing with the Lone Ranger and Tonto on his bedspread, enacting dramas of power and race. Another remembers the toy backhoe, a miniature version of the one his father drove on a chain gang down South. One recalls playing checkers with his granny while she schooled him about life. And one seems almost free again as he talks about riding his yellow bicycle into the wind, away from the safety and constraints of home.
Write about when you ceased to be a child.
One was claimed at age 13 by the streets, as one parent succumbed to mental illness and the other disappeared. Another left boyhood behind at 12, when the only way to fulfill his duty as the eldest child — to bring home the items on his mother’s grocery list — was to switch supermarket price tags. Some were initiated by drinking, drugs or sex; others tie the shift to the right to drive, or vote. For one, the lynching of an uncle signaled the passage from boy to man.
Write about your neighborhood. Write about the stories you were told, a family journey, an act of generosity. Take us step by step through something you do well. Define masculinity. Write about a time when you were lost. Capture a memory through the sense of taste.
Their possessions and freedoms are few, but their memories are abundant. For three charged hours, through their writing, they become visible. They become more than their worst things.
Together, they excavate a home, a reference point, a goodness that was sown, a point at which they lost the way. They discover something to draw upon in a world defined by absence, where they grapple with the pain and loss they have suffered and caused. We push on, identifying ways to make the leap from life to fiction, and coaxing out detail. They probe for what matters, showing compassion, owning responsibility. Writers dream of going to the heart of things, and I am amazed at the brief access I’m given to the inner lives of men.
Early on, I struggled to reconcile what I knew about their crimes with what I saw and heard in that classroom. Now I try to hold before me the truths of their offenses, alongside the truths of the brotherhood, honesty and generosity I see them call forth. The forces that bring us to our present lives are tangled and complex. Each of our stories contains both wrongdoing and grace, and it is not my job to unravel the skein of their guilt, to judge or absolve. I am here as a witness. I am here in the name of story and its power to transform.
When we are done with the telling and the listening, with the Lone Ranger and bicycles tearing free, with all the things that grow us up and heal and haunt us, we go around the circle to check out, each person stating, according to the group’s custom, a feeling and a blessing.
Today I feel good, one says. You got me to remembering some things. You made me laugh, Helen. You made me think. Another says, softly, I’m grateful you took this time to come, when you could be out in the summer sunshine. I hope you get those papers corrected. I hope your moms feels better soon. I hope you get home safe.
We say goodbye until next time, and soon I am standing at the razor-wire fence, ready to go back through the trap, while they return to their cells and work at resuming their hard postures and concealing what we have just urged out into the light. What is home for them, I wonder, and what kind of safe return is possible?
I have finished writing the novels about prison that first inspired me to volunteer. But I still go. The men compel me. Something large happens as we write and talk together in that room, separated from the rest of the world. These men bring forth their best selves, and I, too, am the awake, compassionate me. Far too often I half-listen, already on to the next errand, the next place I need to be. Too busy to extend myself. Too pressed to pay attention. I fail to see the woman who has dry-cleaned my clothes or sold me my coffee, the man who pumps my gas. I fail to wonder at the past life of the woman making her way slowly across the street on her walker, or to imagine the private yearnings of the man-child with the snapback hat and sagging pants who slouches by the door of the subway train. With all the disconnection, discourtesy and relentless motion of the free world, it can be hard to recognize, let alone love, your fellow human beings.
A feeling and a blessing. I hope you know the power of your words and stories, I would like to tell the men who have revealed their youthful toys and games, and relived their crossings into manhood. Your humanity has been visible to me, I am saying to you here, on this page, and I see that you are more than your worst things. I hope you get home safe.
And with that, I’m in.
Helen Elaine Lee is the author of the novel “The Serpent’s Gift” and a professor of comparative media studies and writing at M.I.T.
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