Night Bloom -- Despair and Possibility in a Prison Writing Workshop

Turnout was even slower than usual, so I, a visitor to the workshops, and one inmate had the Programs Room to ourselves. The visitor was a young woman, a poet, and UA student who wanted to help with the workshops. The inmate was Champ, a thoughtful but hardened guy with the tattoos that go with gang affiliation. Likely because no other inmates had yet arrived, along with the novelty of a female visitor, he spoke openly about his offense, his time spent incarcerated, and his view of the future.

"One of the rules is that you don't rat. I'm in here because I didn't rat, but you know what? Nobody has stuck with me. I don't get letters from the woman who said she'd love me forever or the homies that said they'd stick, but still you can't cut from them."

He pauses to think, to consider whether or not he should say what he is about to say.

"Once you go down that road, the gang thing, it's hard to get out," he said. "So even after my sixteen years served for murder in here, I'll probably be back."

He said it with a flat, matter-of-fact certainty.

I asked him what he wanted to do if he weren't caught in the cycle of gang violence and politics.

"Something to keep kids from doing what I did. You know, someone who has been there can say it right, in a way that they'll understand."

"Nobody knows what the future brings," I said. "We could be hit by a meteor in the next second. You just don't know. That's all."

He thought about that. I had a book by Shaka Senghor, Writing my Wrongs, and asked him to read some of the forward. It spoke to the possibility of shaping a future that worked for more people, had more opportunity, more justice. He read the passage aloud.

"That's tight," he said.

Now I don't know the shackles that come with gang membership. And the talk about a future that might break from a past that seems all but certain to repeat itself must seem quaint to someone with a history like Champ's.

Other men arrive, and we get to work; our visitor reads a poem. In it she has a line about a gun being held to her head. It's a good poem about the perils of love. Her work is sharp, fearless. The men listen and then respond.

"Did you really have a gun held to your head? Do you know what that's like?" one of them asks.

It's a credibility thing.

"Yes," she says.

The man gives her a hard look that lingers, but then softens.

"That makes a difference," he said.

I try to divert the discussion to the features of the poem, lines that stand out, but the group lingers on the subject of coercion, threat, and the leg-trap hold of prison politics.

"You know a guy was murdered on the rec yard this week," one of them says. "He wanted out of a gang. He was stabbed over thirty times. That's why we were late. The cops were doing a drill to speed up response time."

That hangs in the air.

"How long have you been writing?" Champ asks the visitor.

"Since I was twelve. I wrote to figure out my place in the family. Writing was the only place I could see some way through an impossible situation."

Champ says "Yeah, I started writing in prison, about thirteen years ago. I was eighteen."

Then, he looks at me. "But I still haven't been published in that magazine."

He says it as a challenge, like it's my fault. I get that. I am a stand-in for all the obstacles that he and others face in moving forward into a life coming hard and fast and fearful down the pipe. The past is roaring toward them like a freight train. They want to tell it, and have someone hear it, before the train wreck.

The room feels charged, nervous, uncomfortable.

"I like the honesty, the self-awareness, and images of the poem," I say, just to say something.

You have to start where you are I think.

Champ doesn't waver, and asks to read a piece he has written about betrayal. It's succinct and dark and literal. I ask him where he wants to take it.

"To the magazine," he says. "I want this in the magazine."

I ask for responses, suggestions from the group. I ask how to take it from a list of events, a history, to something else, something artful. I talk about what others have done: Othello, for one.

One of the guys knows the work. We talk about betrayal and ways to live through it, to write about it, to give it fresh life and venom on the page.

Champ passes the baton of reading off to Handpoet who has written a piece about the power of music to trigger memories. When he hears songs on the radio, he hears, not the singer, but his father's voice. He means this literally. He hears the voice of his father.

The poem is good. It disrupts time. It renders memory as free from time, free from space; it makes a case that prison walls are no match for the power of the mind to remember, to imagine.

He says he keeps his music alive by singing on the yard sometimes, away from the clusters on men scattered around the field.

Champ asks him to sing, right there, in the Programs Room. Handpoet declines and shakes his head, but others join in. He agrees.

I don't know how this happened exactly, but Handpoet stands and begins to snap his fingers to some beat he hears. The room otherwise is silent.

He begins to sing, softly at first, then stronger. It's doo-wop song I don't recognize, but his voice is clear, on key, resonant.

When he is done, the men applaud.

Some of the tension in the room eases. Time is up. I have to pack up the tubs and get over to the next workshop. It's in a different unit and we have to catch a bus. My arms are heavy, clumsy, don't feel like my own.

The moment has cut me to the bone. I ask myself what one does when a gun is held to the head. The answer, impossible as it is, comes. You sing. You sing.