Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?: Twenty Years of the Prison Creative Arts Project

CHAPTER NINE

Failure

Ashley Lucas came to the 2008 Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners to perform Doin' Time: Through the Visiting Glass, her one-person piece about the family members of prisoners. On April 1 she visited English 319. We began with a talk circle, the students introducing themselves, saying what site they worked at, and sharing something on their mind about the work. They were just weeks from their performances, and I was struck by their doubts. They wanted to know how they were perceived. What meaning did they have in the lives of the prisoners, the incarcerated youth, the high school students? They had so little time with them. Sometimes those they worked with seemed not to care, and this hurt. Were they, really, having any impact on the boys, girls, men and women struggling with disturbing, often violent pasts and facing futures that held so little for them? Corey Blant, Tim Fillion, and the boys incarcerated at the Lincoln Center had co-created a lively, comfortable space, and when the boys spoke of their futures, they dreamed big. But Corey and Tim knew what the boys were up against and were disturbed at how the boys laughed off what threatened them. They both knew that the comfortable space and dreams, as Corey put it, “will all be shot down.”

That week, troubled by all he had heard and by his own words and thoughts, Corey wrote in his journal that he had failed his boys.

We met on Tuesdays for two hours. The following Tuesday I read back from my notes what they had told Ashley and mentioned what Corey had written. Everyone turned to him. He explained. The boys had brainstormed a play that tied the recent closing of Detroit schools to the street life of school droputs, but instead of guiding them into a meaningful exploration of this subject, he and Tim had gone along with their focus on being comic. Also, given the damage that had been done to the boys, the damage they had done to others, and all that waited them in the future, he had failed to give them anything that might be useful. He had let them down.

The others rallied to soothe him. Nan Howard in particular, who with Elise Rose was suffering through an extremely difficult workshop at another boys' facility,¹ reminded him that the boys live in tense proximity to each other twenty-four hours a day and that they have a pressured, disciplined week of classes and counseling connected to every aspect of their lives, including their crimes. That Corey and Tim had given them the opportunity to relax, run around the room, laugh, and have a great time was a gift, and sufficient.

Nan was passionate about this, and right, and wonderfully supportive of Corey, and of herself and Elise. After a while I told her so, but added: “And yet Corey still failed.” Corey nodded, Hannah agreed, but most of the class was troubled, even outraged with our position. The final journals were full of contention, even anger, and several students returned to the subject during our closing talk circle the following week.

Becky McMellen worked at Cooley High School, Corey at the Lincoln Center, Christopher Rapisarda with men at the Cotton Correctional Facility, and Hannah with women at the Huron Valley Complex. They confronted themselves in their final papers.

At Cooley, Becky and Ashley Braun had two classes of close to forty students each, a mix of interested and disinterested students, highly inconsistent attendance, sessions disrupted by long announcements over the PA and interrupted by school holidays (including our own spring break) and standardized testing. Although discouraged, she was very happy at how the youth stepped up for the final performances. She savored the respect that developed between her and the youth and was proud of one particular accomplishment:

I was worried about projecting too many of my own perceptions onto the play, so I tended not to give too many suggestions of my own. The students in second hour even began to catch on. After [my] defecting all of the questions they asked me right back at them, one student said, “Can't you guys see? She wants us to figure it out for ourselves.” I was really proud of that moment.

Ultimately, that is what I hope to have accomplished this semester in my workshops. Every Thursday morning, for approximately one hour, these students were responsible for their own decisions. The choices were not made for them by standardized tests or zero tolerance policies. I wanted each decision, from the story line to the title, to originate from their own ideas. In our class, during discussions, I was taught this same lesson. I was able to reach my own conclusions and make my own decisions, and was then encouraged to act on the issues I felt strongly about. In a smaller scale, through these theater workshops, I wanted to give this same opportunity to these high school students.

And yet she had also “failed.” She hadn't fully crossed the boundary between herself and the students, had withheld something crucial.

I never attempted to really fix the simple little holes in the plot. I doubted the students' ability to work through these minor problems. This is a major failing on my part. I should never for a second have doubted their ability to work out any problem I presented to them…. I think some of my failures in my workshops came because I was afraid to attempt a more meaningful connection. I think in many cases, I stopped just short…. I did not always trust the students to be able to answer any questions I might have about their play. At times, I did not know how to answer the hard questions they had for me. In my workshop next semester, I hope I will be able to take a step further to make that extra connection with the people in my workshop. I want to be more invested in their well-being. I want to be more active in their lives.²

Christopher, Elizabeth Sinclaire, and Sarah Bennett worked with five men. In their play Different Directions, each of eight characters on a bus had a personal story. Dialogue on the bus would reference the story, then characters would step off the bus to act out a crucial scene. The university trio and prisoners had a spirited working relation and developed great mutual respect as they worked their way through various disputes towards the final product. And remarkably this fledgling group pulled off a performance before the largest crowd in our history: 270 prisoners and ten outsiders perched on bleachers in the prison gym, a daunting acoustical challenge, to say the least.

When I outed Corey in class, Christopher was “dumfounded.”

First and foremost, Corey is a close friend and I assumed he would have come to me if he felt he and Tim were having any issues. But more importantly, I couldn't imagine how after doing the workshops that we as a class were doing, how could we fail? We were doing good, providing aid and a voice to a world that is all too often underrepresented and goes unappreciated. Wasn't that enough?

Over the next few weeks I searched for a possible answer. I realized that no, it wasn't. We were providing the men and women, boys and girls, an opportunity to be creative. We were giving these people a chance to be heard. But within our workshops, or at least mine, we didn't treat them as human or as equals, but we instead were willing to settle. I let my efforts to search for something deeper quickly evaporate because I didn't think it was worth feuding over. Or maybe my reasoning was that the prisoners just couldn't think or see things in a more complex way. Regardless of my intentions, I didn't push the men, I didn't challenge them, and I didn't trust them. For that, I failed them.

The five men had contributed very personal moments to the play: a funeral; an upcoming parole hearing after twenty-six years in prison; a visiting room relation with a wife; a confrontation with a daughter getting into trouble; and a longtimer's recent loss of his guitar because of a change in property regulations. Christopher, Elizabeth, and Sarah had not reciprocated, but played roles in the men's stories. Christopher, pretending to be trying out for American Idol, sang. Elizabeth performed slam poetry. Christopher:

I wonder why I never share those stories. Sure they are dear to my heart, tales that I opt more often to hide than share. But they are a part of me and vitally important in defining me. Maybe, just maybe, had I told a story from my past, my scene in the play wouldn't seem so awkward. Instead of an unnecessary audition for American Idol, I could actually have bonded with my fellow cast members and shared a small piece of what makes me me. Looking back, I suppose I was intimidated by the possibility that my story would sound far less significant than those of the prisoners…. I cannot speak for Sarah or Elizabeth, but I know that at least one of my regrets was not opening myself fully to this group. I shared details about me, but I didn't play fair: I expected them to supply the meat of the story and play without reciprocating and allowing the men to get to know the real me.

Like Becky, he resolved that his next workshop would be different.

If I can spend this first semester and learn how not to treat the men and women in prisons, or high schools or juvenile facilities, maybe the next time I will understand how to treat and respect them. Sure by the end of my workshop, I had the utmost respect for each and every member I had worked with over this semester. But the next time I will be aware of the fact that these, in spite of their decisions or circumstances, are all people and must be regarded as such.

For Becky it wasn't only that next time she would trust, respect, and connect. For her it went deeper, into her life choices.

I am angry that the school system is so unequal. I am angry that 1 in 100 U.S. adults are imprisoned. I am angry that the system is playing against minorities, and I am angry that people do not see that this kind of racism still exists. I am angry that according to statistics, only 1 in 4 of the students in my workshop is going to graduate.³ I am angry that the narrator in my first play got suspended, and I am angry that one day, one of the students might end up in jail. I am furious that we invest more money in imprisoning human beings than we do in trying to educate them. With so many enemies, there is no way that I am going to be able to stop fighting against this kind of injustice. I feel like I can do nothing else but dedicate my life to trying to make some kind of a dent into the rampant dehumanization of so many people.

Christopher, working his way to the same place, faulted the class:

I feel we were too often eager to settle for this sentimental, easy overlook of the course and our work. Each partnership, whether they were going to a high school, juvenile facility, or a prison encountered some kind of issue. Some had to deal with an ever-changing number of members. Others had to deal with a lack of enthusiasm. For most groups, though, and all of us at Cotton, we dealt with a conglomeration of both and many others, depending on the week.

Then every time we would have a conversation in class about the sites, each group would share their varying array of difficulties. And although we have some differences, we try to find ways to console one another in class. But that's just it: not all of it is positive, not everything we are doing is good; the job is far from over. It is too easy to be complacent and take for granted what we've done. Far too often members of the class—myself more than most—will find the smallest positives in the gravest of circumstances. Instead, I should recognize the hardships and attack those; find the root of the issues and begin problem solving and evaluate what needs to be changed within the system.

Hannah too felt she had settled for less. “It's not enough to have a creative place,” she wrote.

It's not enough to add humanity. That's all nice and really important too, but I think our mission was to do more than that and I was unable to [do that more]…. It takes little to make a theater workshop in prison, but it takes a lot to make it push the women and challenge them and myself to make it realistic and from their own minds and lives.

The play, about a high school reunion, “was decidedly about leaving the past behind and moving on with our lives for the better—an incredibly noble message for all the workshop participants⁴ and everyone in general…[but] we absolutely lost it.” Because many women lost interest and dropped out, Hannah felt she and Sarah Miller had failed to make the space significant. Like Becky and Christopher, she felt they had disrespected the women by not opening to them. She had created a wonderfully acted comic nerd, which “brought light and fun to a workshop that had become heavy and tense, [but] it added nothing to the content of our play,” which degenerated into a relatively shallow and uninteresting comedy. Like Becky and Christopher, she hurt and learned: “In some ways…I'm glad I failed because it's a blatant slap in the face to make me keep working and acknowledge my own flaws.”

The Lincoln Center group had named themselves CoNtRoLLeD CHaOS, and their play, CoNtRoLLeD CHaOS, was one of the liveliest, most varied, most energetic performances in 319. The boys danced, rapped, sang, and presented some very interesting characters and a plot with meaning and some depth. They broke all of Corey's stereotypes, and between that, the reading, and the class discussion, he wrote, “the amount of change that I have experienced this semester has been incredible.” Most important was what he had learned about challenging himself.

It goes beyond what I had thought in the past, it goes beyond the idea of “seizing the opportunity” or stepping outside your comfort zone. The challenge is not about having fun, or laughing, things that our class took comfort in achieving. While we did take two of their hours a week and remove the routine and offer them the ability to create, that was not the challenge. The challenge is not about me, it is about something bigger than that. It is about responsibility, it is about failure, but more importantly it is about human lives. When I walked into that workshop I met 10 boys. I was in awe of their personalities and their energy, I understood that we weren't so different, I understood that society wanted them locked up and me to leave every Wednesday night and go back to Ann Arbor and forget about them. Unfortunately I succumbed to society, I didn't realize that they [the boys] wanted me to fight with them and so I laughed with them on Wednesday, thought about how I was going to challenge them the rest of the week and how we were going to fight next Wednesday, then went back on Wednesday and instead of fighting together we laughed. And then I left the Lincoln center for the last time on Wednesday and I really realized that I had missed the boat. These boys could die, they could end up back on the inside, it is now completely out of my hands. And while I can take comfort in the fact that we laughed together once, I cannot take comfort in the fact that I gave them all I had to give because I didn't.

He saw that “the most important thing that you can take from failure is the experience” and was eager for his workshop in the fall. And he had received a gift.

After our performance, Jeff⁵ kept coming up to me, at least two or three times and putting his arm around me. Each time he would look at me and say, I can't believe you're eighteen. One time though he looked at me and said, “even though you're eighteen, I really look up to you. But you better keep straight man and keep doin' what you're doin', if I find out anything happens to you…” and we both sort of laughed and the moment was over. While I am not sure of what Jeff meant by that, I know one thing, he is right. It is not ok to stop, this is not over, it probably won't even be over in my lifetime. But what I am doing can make a difference and is appreciated and while I might not have done a perfect job, I did something and Pod E needed that something. Jeff appreciated this and I know the guys appreciated having Tim and me there. But more than anything it is important that I continue, if for no other reason, I have to do it because I told Jeff I would and I intend to keep my word.

These four students and a majority of their 319 peers are demanding of themselves that they become authentic and effective activists. I admire them. They are far beyond myself at their age. Retirement, which I must face soon, is for me as for most people complicated and challenging, enticing and scary. One reason for my reluctance to enter it is that I will no longer be in a classroom with people like them. As I seek in whatever limited way to keep my hand in, I will continue to hear their voices acknowledging failure and moving on, and I will draw on their courage as I struggle against the infirmities that await me.

When Elise and one or two other students early in the term insisted that “one can never do enough,” many of their classmates pulled back, perhaps frightened at what they had gotten into, but more likely and rightly offended at being given an absolute and denied the chance to shape their lives in any direction they chose. It reminded me of the English 310 discussion in which, working through the starfish metaphor, the students found a way to be generous with themselves and others and to value each other as allies,⁶ and I was hopeful that we would recover and get to a similar point.

And Elise's insistence begged the question: what is enough? Given the enormity of what has been done in my name in my time, given the enormity of the privilege I was born into and the advantage it gave me over women and people of color, given the enormity of the dying infrastructures in megalopolises all over the world,⁷ given the enormity of the wars, concentration camps, and massacres ahead as pure water disappears, saltwater rises along the coasts, and fires spread, given what others have been capable of during my time, given who I might have become, I am hauntingly aware that I have failed in courage, character, imagination, and intelligence. And of course I have failed in small ways, always, as well. And my students will always fail. And not. So sometimes I tell them a story that has always sustained me.

Marcel Ophul's documentary The Sorrow and the Pity⁸ investigates the German occupation of a southern French town. He interviews many participants, including the occupiers; a local man inspired by Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will to join the Waffen SS; Pierre Mendes-France, later French president, who escaped from a local prison where the Germans held him; farmers who became members of the Resistance and served time in concentration camps; and a pharmacist who was too frightened to join the Resistance. I haven't seen the film for years, but I can still picture him in his home talking to a circle of young people. He had continued his life and his profession during the occupation. But he somehow managed to keep two Jewish girls working in his pharmacy safe from deportation. And every now and then, he would wrap something in a pharmaceutical package, place it in his bicycle basket, and deliver it to a Resistance location outside town.

In August 2002, I wrote “Back Off,” agonizing over my own place in world and in Nate Jones's world, where Nate, despite his University Michigan bachelors and masters in social work degrees, was in agony.

“Back off.” I call from a roadside phone

on 72 and 33 heading north out of Mio.

We've been on the river an evening hour

and afterwards suffered a bad burrito

at the local pizza shop.

The tones are loud as I punch in the codes

making me hope a clear voice

at the other end will out-enunciate

the truck rush and cycle rattle fifteen yards away.

Barbara answers and I ask if she has news of Nate,

who disappeared again from where she watched him

through the night after he'd gone crazy

in the housing complex yard

while neighbors, horrified, called paramedics

and laughed. And Barbara replies, “back off,”

I mean

she says eagerly “I'll put him on,”

loving that her man

is back,

though she should have said,

“I've called the hospital, they're on the way.”

I wait.

Nate comes on the line and says

“Back off,”

I mean

he barely enunciates in a thin voice

so full of the sadness of a lost life,

the sadness Tracy heard in the corridor

of city indigent

waiting to contest eviction,

“hello” and “I'm all right”

and, when I ask how he got home

hoping the police had found him,

“I walked,”

though he should have said

“drugs pulled me into the night

again”

and “I'm lost” and

“I'm hurting a good woman” and

“I've got to turn myself in.”

And I,

angry at them both,

say “Back off,”

I mean

I say “Okay,

I'm just checking in”

and “goodbye,”

when I should have said

I don't know what,

told him to tell the truth or told him my anger

or gotten Barbara back on the line and shouted

or I don't know what.

By telling each other to back off,

we protected our territory,

saved our lives as they are.

Barbara held on to the co-dependence

on which she painfully thrives,

Nate held on to the downward spin,

the lie, the evasion,

that enable him to keep his habit.

And I

supported them in this, I held on

to the distance and relative peace

so important to continuing my work,

I avoided going to dark places and to conflict

I can't sustain.

We said back off and backed off

and continued forward, backward,

to more pain and sleepless nights.

 

Another poem emerged as I was writing “Back Off.” And so I titled it “A Companion Poem.”

The female tarantula

seizes four crickets at a time,

webs them up with silk,

sucks their insides out,

then is still again.

The female tarantula hawk,

hunts down and stings the fabled spider,

lays then buries its eggs

in the paralyzed body,

and leaves the larvae

to eat the tarantula alive.

SECONDARY TRAUMA

In November 2000 two close friends, Ellen Franklin and Raya Chyorny, revealed to me that I was suffering from secondary trauma. I had told them that ten years of working in prisons had put a new sadness in me, although I was still a happy person. I told them about my father's death three years before, about how Suzie DeWitt cried for twelve days after the parole board flopped her for two more years, about the arbitrary treatment Romando Valeroso suffered in prison, about my hurt that such remarkable human beings as he, Mary Heinen, and Sharleen Wabindato might never be allowed to come home.⁹ Raya, who lived in Denver, suggested I go into counseling and offered to help me, through her connections, find someone back in Ann Arbor.

On the advice of the woman with whom I then did short-term therapy in 2001 and into 2002, I read Judith Herman's Trauma¹⁰ and learned that trauma hits deepest when it disrupts one's worldview. If one views the world as a beneficial place, then the traumatic experience of war or torture or rape or incarceration shakes everything apart. In my case, perhaps because of my frightening experience of childhood bullying, I had an inordinate need for personal autonomy. I had built it early by becoming like my father, and in his last years we had built a very whole friendship. Having had the courage, finally, to end an inadequate marriage in 1990, with Janie I was in a fulfilling, loving, respectful, supportive relationship that we both intended to last until the end. And I had secured autonomy in my professional life, achieving a reputation, and a sureness, that gave me considerable control over what work I chose to do.

But I had stepped out of that cocoon to work in prisons, any one of which could eliminate me at any moment for a “breach of security.” And I had chosen to work under the aegis of the Michigan Department of Corrections, which could also shut us down, as Deputy Director Dan Bolden in fact did for a month in early 1999, succeeding, even after he was forced to reverse himself, in crushing our dance workshop at a women's prison.¹¹ I had made myself vulnerable. More importantly, I had entered into work with and established friendships with talented vital people who were deprived of control over their movements, who were subjected to arbitrary treatment by fellow prisoners, corrections officers, and the parole board, and who were sometimes in physical danger with nowhere to fee. My empathy with them and my helplessness to do for them what I had done for myself got inside me, disrupted my own autonomy, and saddened me. In that August 2002 phone call, Nate, who called me his “best friend” and “only friend,” was bringing up his and my helplessness and the fact I was responsible for some part of that helplessness. Was he not my brother? The companion poem illustrates how overwhelming and fatal this felt.

COMING HOME

In August 2002, we were in the final month of rehearsals for When Can We Talk? As I recounted in chapter 7, not only had Nate dropped out, but each of the formerly incarcerated actors was struggling.¹² Earlier that year we had begun the Linkage Project, committing for the first time to people who had worked with us inside and had come home. In this commitment we have experienced much success, and much sorrow. Inside “Back Off” are many lives and much disappointment.

When Steve¹³ first submitted sketches of cheap nudes, we turned him down. He set to work and the next year presented us with wiry, intriguing, original drawings. Returned home, he entered the Linkage Project, joined our Advisory Board, and spoke eloquently about the importance of our prison work. The Michigan Department of Corrections website now lists him as “absconded.” Why?

Troy, his art more and more intriguing each year, became clerk for the special activities director and an instructor of other artists. When he came home to Flint and dined with us, he was self-confident, well-spoken. He found work and had family support. He wished to develop his jewelry skills, so we linked him with a Detroit jewelry-maker and ordered him supplies. He didn't stay in touch. He returned to prison. I don't know the story, though we have talked by phone since he has again come home.

Morris, one of the very best of the thousand and more exhibition artists, would win a first-place award or honorable mention, then a week later be denied parole again. When he came home, his family couldn't bring him from Grand Rapids for the opening reception. We bought him a bus ticket and hotel room, then waited in vain at the bus stop. A day later he left a slurred message, saying he was now at the bus station. His cousin, at another prison, told me he was back on drugs. His wife accused him of domestic abuse. Why? Where do we come in? Do we come in?

In a famous Michigan case, an eleven-year-old boy convicted of murder as an adult was saved by his judge from adult prison. Several PCAP members worked with him in poetry and theater and a writing portfolio. Both the juvenile facility and his step-down house committed themselves to him. He came home thanking his judge for “taking that chance and believing in me,” worked hard on his music and got a contract, and then, a year and four months after his release, was caught selling 250 Ecstasy pills in a parking lot. He received a four- to twenty-year sentence. Rochelle Riley, columnist for the Detroit Free Press, asked where his backers were, why they had let him down.¹⁴

So much is asked of so many of those who come home, and so much that is external and so much that their lives has burned into them stand in their way. And so many fail. And so many of us are so helpless. For all our good words, for all our goodwill, for all we actually do, we fail with them. It is systemic. It is also the human condition.

We come into the workshops together looking for what is missing in our lives. We pick up a pencil and look inside ourselves and make a drawing for the exhibition. Or we come to the prison and select art, and talk, and wear ourselves out fighting to keep the exhibition alive. We all act, write, sing, draw, love, fight, risk together, looking for strength, connection, a receptive ear, a kind of forgiveness. We come home. We welcome those who come home. We live in separate communities. We have our own lives. We are brothers and sisters. We are not brothers and sisters. We are torn apart. We choose, and don't choose, how we will live. Some are guided by faith, some by other resources, most of us also by our origins. We organize, we teach, we grow, we come out into the world, we send out into the world, we keep going. I am in awe of everyone's struggle, in awe of the voices they find, in awe of how they, how we, come back from failures.

If one of my students or a high school student or an incarcerated person or someone just come home asked me, or if I asked myself, what we should be doing on this earth, I wouldn't have a ready answer. Normally I would listen to them or myself as we talked further, trying to hear what they are telling themselves, trying to hear what challenges them and stands in the way, then say what words I can find to help them, or myself, on the way. But perhaps the answer is more clear now than it once was. I dreamed the other night, the night of June 26, 2008—stimulated by news of hundreds of lightning strikes and uncontrollable fires in California—that our entire country was swept with fires. I wrote another poem in August 2002.¹⁵

ENTERING PRISON

As I write this, rain falls through the tree

beyond my window while obscure birds

take suet from the log feeder hidden by leaves.

Water, a wet season in Michigan, the river flows.

And I have entered prisons so many times

that the first time blurs.

                                    I recall only

the muster room and its foolish murals

of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,

Disney style, for the children who came

by country road to Coldwater

to play with temporary mothers.

And today as I enter this prison to read this poem,

I know that every eight seconds a child somewhere dies

from drinking contaminated water.

In the muster room four of us began theater

with Mary and Joyce, we improvised and talked,

we felt our way together toward creation

of the Sisters Within.

I have entered prisons once a week

for thirteen years now,

                                    and today

as I enter this prison to read this poem

I know that thirty-one countries

and more than one billion people

completely lack access to clean water.

I know that the earth's fresh water is finite,

less than half a percent of all the water in the world,

I know that fresh water, common property

of the peoples of the earth, is increasingly controlled by private firms,

I know that when the people of Kwazulu-Natal

could not pay their bills

the company cut them off

from sanitation and water

and one hundred thousand

sickened with cholera,

I know that in South Africa women walk,

collectively, the equivalent of a road to the moon

and back sixteen times a day to fetch water

for their families,

                                    I know that

Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestle, and others

mine and bottle our precious water

and sell it for more than the price of oil,

I know that they sold ninety billion liters last year

for a gain of twenty-two billion dollars,

I know that Perrier mines the water of Michigan,

I know that the Rio Grande no longer reaches the Gulf of Mexico,

I know that this is the crisis of our new century,

perhaps the final crisis of humankind.

And so I enter the prison today with questions for us all:

Should Sarah and I come to prison,

should any of us come to prison,

should we write poetry and make art

during this crisis that kills a child

every eight seconds across the globe,

or should we instead join

what may be the last

what may be the most important

struggle,

        join,

                so that,

                            perhaps,

if we fight together and well,

our brothers and sisters,

our descendants,

will have access to the life that is their due?

Or, should Sarah and I enter prison each week,

should we all come into this room, each week,

because here too we fight for water?