One Big Self. C.D. Wright
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admitted that his son was in prison, too, in another state. He saw him once when he was a baby. And then, once, between sentences.
A guard pointed out a woman whose father, mother, uncle, brother, sister were all locked up, two were at Hunt, two here, and one at Big Gola. Her sister was her fall partner. It made you wonder who was left to look after the dog.
That day Debbie was photographing mothers and daughters, and twins.
Another guard told me he had made the mistake he had most dreaded making, delivering the execution letter, setting the date and the time, to the wrong man on death row.
In some prisons, you can’t have a last cigarette, but Valium is permitted.
I heard about a petition in a town out West to take back the night sky. The locals thought they were getting a second minimum-security prison, an economic pick-me-up. Instead, a supermax sprang up, that perverse marriage of mind and technology. Lights from the new institution burn so intensely the stars have gone dark on them.
Then there’s the bus that leaves from Monroe taking visitors to one of four neighboring pens, Al Derry’s Prison Transport and Popcorn Balls. Evidently, the popcorn balls make it the competitive ride. Only in Louisiana.
After a time. A lot of time. They stop coming. The free-worlders. They are too poor or too busy working or are already looking after others on the outside or their car is broken or they are too worn down or they move too far off or they get old, sick, and die. So the inmates wait for their turn.
They aren’t going anywhere. They have all the time there is.
“The only continuity of our lives,” wrote Malcolm Braly, American writer, American lifer, “was that we had none.”
“Waiting,” goes the motto at St. Gabriel, “it’s the LCIW way.”
I wrote a woman and asked if she ever had any pets. She wrote back: Bandit, Baby, Snobby, Elsie, Bear (those were the dogs). Tiger and Fuzzball (the cats), Jill, Ben, and Junior (the coons). “And a lot of unnamed fish, hamsters, rabbits, chickens, ducks, geese, guinea pigs, and a deer, not really a pet but I finally coaxed to the point she would eat out of my hand.”
Not to idealize, not to judge, not to exonerate, not to aestheticize immeasurable levels of pain. Not to demonize, not anathematize. What I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time. I wanted it given to understand that when you pass four prisons in less than an hour, the countryside’s apparent emptiness is more legible. It is an open, running comment when the only spike in employment statistics is being created by the supply of people crossing the line.
I wanted the banter, the idiom, the soft-spoken cadence of Louisiana speech to cut through the mass-media myopia. I wanted the heat, the humidity, the fecundity of Louisiana to travel right up the body. What I wanted was to convey the sense of normalcy for which humans strive under conditions that are anything but what we in the free world call normal, no matter what we may have done for which we were never charged.
The world of the prison system springs up adjacent to the free world. As the towns decline, the prisons grow. As industries disappear, prisons proliferate, state-funded prison-building surges are complemented by private-investment promising “to be an integral component of your corrections strategy,” according to an industry founder. The interrelation of poverty, illiteracy, substance and physical abuse, mental illness, race, and gender to the prison population is blaring to the naked eye and borne out in the statistics. Of the developed nations, only Russia approaches our rate of incarceration. And the Big Bear is a distant second. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, the warp in the mirror is of our making.
The popular perception is that art is apart. I insist it is a part of. Something not in dispute is that people in prison are apart from. If you can accept—whatever level of discipline and punishment you adhere to momentarily aside—that the ultimate goal should be to reunite the separated with the larger human enterprise, it might behoove us to see prisoners, among others, as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves. If we go there, if not with our bodies then at least our minds, we are more likely to register the implications.
I am going to prison.
I am going to visit three prisons in Louisiana.
I am going on the heels of my longtime friend Deborah Luster, a photographer.
It is a summons.
All roads are turning into prison roads.
I already feel guilty.
I haven’t done anything.
But I allow the mental pull in both directions.
I am going to prison in order to write about it. Like a nineteenth-century traveler.
Kafka put it this way, “Guilt is never to be doubted.”
Also: behind every anonymous number, a very specific face.
Also: there are more than two million individuals, in this country, whose sentences have rendered them more or less invisible. Many of them permanently.
First to Transylvania. Then Angola. Then St. Gabriel. These are their place-names.
Over the next year and a half Deborah Luster will photograph upwards of 1,500 inmates.
I will make three trips.
It is an almost imperceptible gesture, a flick of the conscience, to go, to see, but I will be wakeful.
It is a summons.
C.D. Wright
Count your fingers
Count your toes
Count your nose holes
Count your blessings
Count your stars (lucky or not)
Count your loose change
Count the cars at the crossing
Count the miles to the state line
Count the ticks you pulled off the dog
Count your calluses
Count your shells