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

CHAPTER SEVEN

Is the Scapegoat Not Our Brother?

THE SIXTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD POET DOESN'T REMEMBER

DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO REMEMBER RIGHT

WHAT SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD ROBERT REMEMBERS

I don't remember being pistol-whipped

a block down the raw street

from my unlit shut-in house

with its dirty carpet

and only

two large awkward comfortable chairs

in the living room, I don't remember

leaving Chicago when my mother died,

don't remember that my father came by a few times

in my lifetime,

don't remember I have no wish to go back,

don't remember

that my childhood friends are so much dead,

I don't remember the Benton Harbor crime

that sent me to Boysville, don't remember

what my brother was doing with the gun

when they picked him up, don't remember

that this Friday I take the greyhound bus

across state as the day darkens

around the bright wounding colors

of the fall trees to see him

for the first time in two years,

behind a long wire fence and locked doors,

I don't remember that they won't let me go home

to my Benton Harbor aunt, don't remember

that they might be right. I don't remember

stumbling this morning over the uneven concrete blocks

that serve for steps, don't remember

catching the bus to emergency because of my heart,

don't remember the loneliness of trying to do right

in a town without friends, the loneliness of the house

hour after hour after hour all day all night

POEM BY AUTHOR AFTER A LINKAGE TRIP, OCTOBER 15, 2003

It was spring 2002 and our first role-play in the early days of our rehearsals for When Can We Talk?, a collaborative creation by former prisoners and PCAP members under the direction of Gillian Eaton. We stood in a circle in the Frieze Building on the University of Michigan campus, in an acting studio inside the old Carnegie Library, and Gillian told us, “I've got bad news. It's that time again. One of us has to go. We'd better decide soon or they'll just come and grab one of us. If we can just decide which one of us is willing to be sent to the wilderness we won't have the usual battles and bloodshed. None of us are without family so I know it'll be hard, and I hate to draw straws. How can we choose who will go?” We were community goats. We needed to choose the scapegoat. And before the scapegoat was exiled, we would enact the ritual of Leviticus 16:21–22:

And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, and all their sins, and he shall put them upon the head of the goat, and send him away into the wilderness. The goat shall bear all their iniquities upon him to a solitary land and he shall let the goat go into the wilderness.

Nate Jones immediately volunteered. All too aware of his current weakness and despair, I spoke against sending him, trying to save him from such a personal step, but the others acquiesced. Gillian:

I remember Nate taking the role willingly and with some insistence, and when he knelt down and the sins were placed on his head, the atmosphere in the room became almost numinous—he either was re-living a ritual or creating the ritual for something that was extremely deep inside him. There was a shift towards real meaning in the room. Someone was connecting! And it was Nate.

It felt to me afterwards that Nate needed to acknowledge a role that he had consciously or unconsciously been playing in his life. That the role play we did was powerful for him. It may have been too powerful, because not long afterwards, he disappeared. I've only just thought about that—right now—and I hope it's not true, but the truth is a powerful force and I think there was truth in the room that day.

I do remember feeling the shift in the room and our wonder at Nate's willingness to play the role. I also remember that the sins we put onto his head were kinder than those society had burdened him with. Touché was the kindest, and the most moved—and represented, after Nate, the longest number of years spent incarcerated.¹

Nate went to the woods. We spoke among ourselves a while, I don't remember, possibly about the temporary safety we had achieved by accommodating what the sheep wanted of us, probably self-justifying talk, covering our fear and guilt for what we had done to Nate. Then it was ten or fifteen years later: the scapegoat was to return and tell us what we had done and reveal to us who and what we had become, return as both exile and prophet. I volunteered to go to him in the wilderness, speak with him, and accompany him back as his advocate. Back facing the community, Nate faltered of course: caught in his misery, he had little perspective on what had been done to him. He had little of observer and prophet in him. To what he did manage to say, the other goats wouldn't listen, resisted, fought him off.

Six years later, that exercise haunts me, because of my recognition that those we refuse to acknowledge as our children, our brothers and sisters, those we cover with our cruelty, have an insight, whether they know or can articulate it, into our very souls.

I met Nate in April 1992, an actor in our first workshop at the Western Wayne Correctional Facility. In Inside Out he offered his Detroit East Side stories of childhood physical and sexual abuse. At the end of 1994 he left prison and enrolled in January as a University of Michigan junior, and in English 310 and 319 co-facilitated workshops at Henry Ford High School and Maxey Boys Training School. He went to the University of Michigan School of Social Work and became my course assistant in English 411, where once he cried in class at the sudden realization, triggered by another student's epiphany—“We want black people in prison”²—that all his life, right up to the present, everyone had told him he belonged in prison.

Over the years, his other stories emerged: physical abuse by his father, sexual abuse by his cousin, time in juvenile hall, two long bits for armed robbery, white men trying to kill him, jabbing a knife at his eyes, in a Georgia army barracks, his treatment of his wife and endangerment of his sons, the illiteracy of his father, who as a child had watched his own father murder his wife and kill himself. After receiving his masters in social work, Nate worked and lost jobs, drank and wrecked cars, sank into the morass of drug use, and fought back. We attempted an intervention, which almost worked. He fathered a girl and adopted her and her sister away from a traumatic situation, settled into an apartment with them. In the summer of 2006 he left a trembling message on my answering machine. He had been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, and in his last months I spent every week having breakfast or lunch with him while he laughed, told stories, cried, teased waitresses, and was terrified. When he passed, I wrote a letter to everyone who knew him, soliciting funds for the education of his daughters:

When I arrived at his apartment in Romulus half an hour after his death—Janie, Gillian Eaton, and I were on our way to visit him—and saw him on the bed, hands over his chest, a bruise on his forehead where he had fallen, his face peaceful, I remembered a dream he had told me a month earlier. He had been in his casket in a large room, mourners walking all around, and suddenly his eyes sprang open, he leaned up in the casket, and cried “I'm alive! It was wrong, it wasn't true, I wasn't sick!” Now, in his bedroom, I notice a twinkle at the corner of his eye, and I wait, for long minutes, believing, knowing that he might in fact pull it off.

Later, thinking about this, I realized that for so many of us that was Nate Jones, Nate in every space dancing suddenly to his feet, Nate taking us seriously and making us laugh, Nate somehow always coming back from whatever destruction had taken him on, a spiritual resource, an inspiration, for our own hard times.³

I recognized that he represented the resiliency of the people we worked with, the destroyed children who created poems, the abused women who created plays and filled rooms with their laughter and meaning, that he was the Prison Creative Arts Project at its most hurt and at its best.⁴ I loved him, all of us who knew him loved him and his creativity and humor and spirit. On the one hand, I was always there for him, but, on the other, I didn't know how to help him, and sometimes I might have been more proactive. I was his brother. And not. After the scapegoat exercise he disappeared into some deep dangerous spot in a world I didn't know. In When Can We Talk?⁵ I stood behind an empty chair and spoke a monologue about his absence, his talent, my anger for him and at him. He reappeared for our second performance at the Roeper School and came onto the stage as my monologue ended and improvised powerfully. He was back. And he spoke as the outcast. But he wasn't ready to take care of himself: he only gave the audience the reasons we should be angry for him.

Thanks to a conversation with Ruth Morgan while I was a Bridge Resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts in July 1998, when we applied for a Michigan Association of Community Arts Agencies Planning and Implementation Grant to hire Gillian and to fund the play, I knew I had to get Equity wages for the formerly incarcerated actors who would join us. What I didn't know was the difficulties these returned citizens would face in trying to get to work. Pilar Horner, Jesse Jannetta, Vanessa Mayesky, Kristen Ostenso, Janie Paul, and I, PCAP actors and technical assistant for When Can We Talk? (Josh White Jr. was our musician) agree that we learned more and were moved more by walking at the side of colleagues who were attempting to survive the return from prison than from all our years working inside the prisons. We lost Nate and we might have lost any of the others as well.

When Nate disappeared, we invited two other former prisoners to join us. We knew Jason Rios as an artist and as a solid, earnest, determined human being. We didn't know if he could act. He was home on tether with a nightly curfew in Monroe, an hour from Ann Arbor. If he went for coffee during a rehearsal break and anything brought police to the café and they checked people's IDs, he could be charged with escaping and sent back to prison. If his car broke down, he needed to phone his parole officer immediately. Toward the end of months of rehearsal, his parole officer superior arbitrarily denied him permission to perform. If the parole officer had not courageously gone over her supervisor's head, and if her supervisor's superior hadn't been sympathetic, Jason would have been excluded from something in which he had become thoroughly invested. In When Can We Talk?, right after my monologue, while he performed his own monologue, “When Will the Punishment Stop?” three of us continually forced back to the floor a fourth actor, constantly trying to rise.

Dave Hawkins was the other replacement for Nate, a large, powerful, earnest, decent man. After a Parnall Correctional Facility performance, he had talked with me about continuing acting at home. During the year of When Can We Talk? he and his wife were struggling with their marriage and he was fighting to find and hold work in economically devastated Flint, one of the most dangerous and challenged cities in the country. On his way to rehearsal one late afternoon, his car went over in a ditch. Luckily he walked away.

Tracy Neal was born and spent adolescent years in Flint. She had moved on to Detroit. Pilar and I worked with her in the Sisters Within Theater Troupe—she appeared in five plays from 1995 to 1997—and knew, later, the courage it had taken for her to be the named litigant in a federal lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Corrections. Personal problems during the time of our rehearsals led her with her two infants to Ann Arbor's Safe House, and the cast became her official support group. Her allotted time at Safe House up, Janie and I signed security on her apartment lease and lost the security deposit when she left early. In When Can We Talk? she and the other women spoke her agonizing story of brutal interrogation and forced confession, the most powerful moment in the play.

Touché (Jeffery Smith) took the culinary arts course at the Thumb Cor rectional Facility and was working in food preparation at the Adrian Temporary Correctional Facility when he began acting in PCAP plays. A risk-taking actor, he was a fatherly presence for our members. When he learned I was coming to a performance, he got permission to bake cheesecakes for the reception following the play. Ambitious to become a baker, he knew that a professor would, of course, know quality cheese cake. I ate a huge cherry topped slab, then another covered with blueberry, and pronounced their greatness. The rest is history. He had played high school football in Flint but had never attended a University of Michigan football game, a longtime dream. We got him tickets when he returned home after sixteen years away. He looked up at the 100,000 fans and vowed to make 100,000 cheesecakes. He has pursued that goal for years now, without benefits, without health insurance, suffering one broken down car after another: an ingenious, persuasive entrepreneur with too little business acumen, a supreme optimist struggling against fate. There is no one like him in this world. One night after a late rehearsal, he beckoned me aside: he owed another ex-prisoner $2,000 for CDs he had promised he would sell along with his cheesecakes: if he returned that night to Flint without it, he would be killed. I screamed at him…and gave him the $2,000.⁶ In When Can We Talk? he acted out the scenes with this CD business partner, adding his daughter, and playing out the various voices in his head.

Clearly, Janie and I should not have given Tracy or Touché that money. Clearly, we should have done so.

Our civilization cast them out. Were they not once our children? How do their lives, how does Nate's life, reflect us? What might they, returned, say to us? What is asked of us? Is anything asked of us? Who are we? Wendell Berry, in The Hidden Wound, writes of his childhood,

Within the language there was a silence, an emptiness, of exactly the shape of the humanity of the black man; the language I spoke in my childhood and youth was in that analogous to a mold in which a statue is to be cased. The options, then, were that one could, by a careful observance of the premises of the language, keep the hollow empty and thus avoid the pain of the recognition of the humanity of an oppressed people and of one's own guilt in their oppression; or one could, willing or not, be forced by the occasions of sympathy and insight to break out of those premises into a speech of another and more particular order, so that the hollow begins to fill with the substance of a life that one must recognize as human and demanding.⁷

THE ACCESS GRANT

In March 1996 I brought Michael Keck to the Florence Crane Women's and the Western Wayne Correctional Facilities to perform pieces from Voices in the Rain, his one-man play about the African American experience of incarceration.⁸ In one monologue, a man just arrived back in town after years in prison stops at the local Y to ask about housing and a possible job. The manager offers him a cup of coffee and listens to him reminisce, describe his situation, and talk about how jumpy he got when two policemen sat next to him at a restaurant counter. In the discussions that followed the monologue, I heard in the voices of the men and women an anxiety I hadn't heard before. They were frightened. They had specific stories, they knew the odds. Their words mixed bravado and haunting uncertainty. The women talked about their individual, personal need to hold strong, and Sisters Within member Devora responded: Yes, but they needed to recognize that the plan was to send them back; they needed to be organized on the outside, sisters who supported and fought for each other.

In 2000 the University nominated PCAP for a National Endowment for the Arts Access Grant and provided more than the matching funds required. By then I was wearing too many hats and was wearing down: it was clear we needed an administrator and clear NEA would not simply hand us an administrator. As grant writer, I had to come up with a new project. I remembered those prison discussions and decided that although PCAP's focus was on the incarcerated, we needed to address, at least in some small way, the anxiety I had heard. And so I imagined the Portfolio and Linkage projects. Because we were providing arts access to people who had none, we won the grant. I wrote to Jesse Jannetta, then in the Peace Corps in Armenia, and it turned out that the administrative position was just what he was looking for. Janie, Pilar, and I interviewed him when he came through town, at a South Main Market café. He was our best candidate. We were in business.

THE PORTFOLIO PROJECT

Through our workshops and the annual exhibition of art by incarcerated youth, we identify boys and girls who are discovering and deepening new sides of themselves through the arts and who wish to continue. Sometimes the Adrian Training School, Boysville, Lincoln, Maxey, and Vista Maria staff identify youth we haven't worked with.⁹ Each term between seven and nineteen PCAP members travel once a week to those facilities and work with the youth to create professional art and writing portfolios complete with resumés, artists' statements, and a letter of recommendation from the PCAP member. Judges have praised the portfolios and sent the youth home early. At home they proudly show the portfolio to parents, teachers, and employers. In 2003 when Ariella Kaufman, Suzanne Gothard, and I arrived at step-down sites to establish linkage mentorships, the youth would enter proudly carrying their portfolios, eager to show us their new work. Robert, the youth in my epigraph poem, whose memories already are so different from mine, was one of them.

At the end of November 2007, Kate Richardson, a year and a half after graduating, was a paralegal in San Francisco with Rosen, Bien & Galvan, a law firm focusing on constitutional and civil rights cases. She was responding to inmate correspondence, interviewing prisoners, preparing documents on prison conditions and overcrowding evidence, and actively involved in a case on due process rights for youth on parole. It is, she wrote, “a tedious job at times…an exciting job at times.”

When she joined the portfolio project in August 2005 and imagined entering a prison or juvenile facility, she felt intimidated, scared. She had “many preconceptions of prisons and the people they confined…conceptions…of murderers and rapists…of dark corners of atrocious human behaviors and malicious intent.” Over the next year she worked one-on-one with Marcellus, Danny, and Ben at Maxey, “the faces behind my veil of misconceptions…young men who had grown up in broken houses, full of addiction, loss, turmoil and mistakes.” Because of them she took her paralegal job and is headed toward a career in law. Reflecting on all this, she writes,

I have a picture of Marcellus, Danny and Ben in my small cubicle now. The picture was taken right after their special performance outside of Maxey, on our campus, on my campus. They are artists, writers, and boys. And they are happy. I look at them daily and I don't mind that I sit under a pile of documents waiting to be reviewed, searching them for due process violations, searching for lengthy detentions and use of force incidents. I don't mind that sometimes I feel like the problem is so huge, so institutionally corrupt that there is no end in sight. I don't mind because the name and C[alifornia] D[epartment of] Corrections number on the document I hold in my hand has a face and a history and a family and a life. We too often remove the humanity from our work. Their picture is a constant reminder to me that I am working for a sense of human decency, respect, and right.¹⁰

Portfolio relations are not often easy. The youth tests the student, needs to trust her. Both sides feel out the power dynamics, even week by week. The haunted past and incarcerated present of the youth come into play. Trouble at home, a bad visit or no visit, old pain, tension in their living unit where they spend twenty-four hours a day with troubled peers they did not choose to live with: because of all this they may refuse to come to a session or turn up arms folded, head down, closed, and the student, who is so committed to the youth and to moving forward, has to figure out how to get through, how to listen. Then there is the institution itself. Our liaisons and most staff love the portfolio project. But sometimes staff on duty don't understand, are not excited for the youth, don't provide a quiet space. Sometimes there is simply no such space available: the room is agitated with noise, and other youth stop by the table to observe, to talk, to divert.

And there is the struggle that goes with all teaching: how to find exercises, how to listen, how to discover the words that enable the youth to tap into their lived experiences, so that the beginners can rid themselves of “friendship is” and “love is” list-poems or of traced cartoon characters, so that they, and the more advanced youth as well, can find their way to their own stories, language, lines, spaces, and images, to originality and power. For many there is the fear of performance, fear of failure. At the end of the term, often in front of all the facility peers and staff, the PCAP member introduces and celebrates the youth, and the youth then shows her art or reads his poems.

We recruit students for portfolio from PCAP and from other courses. Normally they receive independent study credit from either me in English or Janie in Art and Design. They are supervised by the Coordinator of the Portfolio and Linkage Projects, who is sometimes assisted by experienced PCAP members, also getting credit. The students keep a journal, which is read each week, they attend PCAP meetings and meet together for the last hour, they meet individually with the coordinator and sometimes with Janie or me, and they prepare and present a final creative, analytic project about their experience. When we have someone at lecturer or professor level, like Joyce Meier or myself, we teach the portfolio project as English 326, Writing in the Community, and add a substantial reading list. We insist that students work for credit so that during crunch times other courses don't take priority. Our bottom line is responsibility to the youth. After doing portfolio for credit, many students repeat without credit.

Anna Clark, eager for a new challenge beyond her workshop experience,¹¹ became an assistant to coordinator Ariella Kaufman, guiding other portfolio students, and taking on her own portfolio relation with Claire,¹² who “was a wonderfully open young woman who saw Anne Frank as her soul mate, inspiring many of her poems.” With Claire she “centered on finding new forms and new words for her writing, to break out of the poetic molds she'd formed for herself” and “felt touched” when Claire started calling her “her big sister, especially when I knew she took her own role as a big sister so seriously.” Working with Claire and the university students, she “learned a lot—about checking myself to not be pushy, about not trying to pressure someone's thinking to match my own, about respecting the pace and trajectory of each person's journey,” lessons that have continued in her work as an advocate and organizer and in how she “interacts with others on an everyday basis.” She writes me that she came to love the Portfolio Project

for its focused attention on the talents of individuals; for its ability to foster deep one-on-one relationships; for the new kind of initiative and creativity and patience that it demands of facilitators; for its ability to draw new people into PCAP from many different realms at the University of Michigan; and for meeting a new need in both the people who are incarcerated and the people who come into that space.¹³

When Sari Adelson decided to take on an art portfolio at Vista Maria, she had “seen and been through a lot” in her short life and felt “relatively prepared for what I was getting myself into”:

I've been in psychiatric hospitals, substance abuse facilities, witnessed withdrawal from severe drug addictions, lost people close to me through suicide, dealt with self mutilation, eating disorders, and drug abuse. I thought I had seen and been through quite a bit, and although I know I'm not completely naive or ignorant, there are still corners of the world darker than what I've known.

Ashley,¹⁴ her portfolio partner, at first meeting seemed “uninterested…apathetic.”

There was something about her though, something that struck me. She didn't laugh, she didn't smile, and she didn't seem to care one way or another, but there was this look in her eye suggesting that she was more excited than anything in the world. Her eyes were glazed over, and she was rather fidgety. She was either heavily medicated, or incredibly tired.

When they finally had the chance to talk for more than a few minutes, Ashley's “life fell into my lap, and cracked my heart.”

Her drug history, sex life, promiscuity, sexuality, self mutilation, depression, bipolar disorder, losing her mother, not seeing her brother, meeting her sister and real father for the first time in her life, age, different homes, placements, suicidal thoughts, medication, feelings about Vista. Her life was an open book, and by the sounds of it, she wasn't done talking. She's been in the system since she was 12, moving from placement to placement, after running, self mutilating, drugging, and sexing her way out of the placements before. She talked of her life post Vista, about her dreams and aspirations, her desires to come to Ann Arbor, to attend the University of Michigan and get a degree in psychology. She's smart, real smart, well read…

Ashley wanted to knit, crochet, sew, and quilt, but wasn't allowed needles. So they worked with pencils, markers, and fine black pens, and Ashley started multiple pieces of art for her sister and father, who each time would be visiting the next day. But Sari didn't know what to do about the portfolio that required completion by the end of term. She hated having a structured plan, so she “abandoned the structure.”

This project was about creating the space, allowing us to function organically, together. I wasn't teacher, or authority, I wasn't there to make her finish certain things at certain times in order for me to have something substantial to say at a meeting. This wasn't about a grade, or a final presentation, it was about her, and me, and things we discussed and did within that room with the two way mirror each Thursday. I brought numerous supplies every evening, and if they got used, awesome, and if not, if Ashley had had a rough day, and wanted to vent about staff, other girls on the unit, about her dad, about missing her mom, that's what I was there to do, to lend an ear to listen, and a heart to love.

They looked through her poems and worked on rendering them into art. One night they looked through her journals, full of “very detailed, vivid accounts of memories from her earlier years.” Talking it over with Sari, Ashley decided to portray the memories visually and brainstormed one night, going through the journals, “finding the things she wanted for each page.”

There would be a page, or a panel for each of these periods in her life, each page [composed of poetry and art] chaotic and colorful, depressing, yet delightful. With this her portfolio was born. That night I remember her telling me not only how excited she was about doing all this, she could see the images in her head, about how much it meant to her to have me there to help her get it all done. With a huge smile on my face, I told her of course, this is why I'm here!

“Ashley's life has been nothing short of hell,” Sari writes, and

she says she wants to share her life with other people, she wants people to see her work and know who she is, and what she's been through…. Her artwork, and the opportunity to be doing this specific portfolio, is cathartic, cathartic in the traditional sense, but also in terms of expressing her feelings and her demons in a form other than the words she's been speaking in psychotherapy for the last almost 10 years of her life. Ashley found great pleasure in seeing the pages finished, as if a chapter had been officially closed, not because she got it out of her, but because she took something awful and turned it into art, something beautiful. I brought my computer in last week so she could see her poems typed up, and she was floored. She had said to me that “they look so much more…real, when they're there on the screen, than when they are in my notebook.”

While Sari thought she knew what she was getting herself into, she hadn't anticipated the pain and had not anticipated the relationship that would come with the portfolio: “We learned, laughed, and loved. We were friends, caring, honest individuals for one another. We were two people looking to start something new.”

Ashley told Sari toward the end, “I've always been able to talk about my life, and I've always been able to make art, but not until you came along was I able to do both…when I leave here, we need to stay in touch.” “These are the reasons,” Sari adds, “I do this work.”

My experience this past semester at Vista Maria has been one of the most meaningful of my life thus far…. Ashley has taught me a lot about life, about trials and tribulations, about trust, honesty, and integrity. She reminds me that things aren't always as they appear, and that not everyone has the best of intentions, but the people who have been there since the beginning, the ones that never gave up on you; those are the ones you hold close. She has taught me to be strong, to fight for what I believe in, and always keep my head up. She is an inspiration and for this I thank her from the bottom of my heart.¹⁵

We are given so much by these hurt, beleaguered, resilient youth. Most of all, as Sari says, we learn to be strong. And we take away, in their name, a commitment to struggle, one way or another and in spite of our fears and limits, on their behalf for the rest of our lives.

“ We need to stay in touch,” Ashley says. “She started calling me her big sister,” Anna reports. “I have a picture of Marcellus, Danny and Ben in my small cubicle now,” Kate writes, “artists, writers, and boys…happy.” For Kate, for Anna, for Sari: the scapegoat as brothers and sisters and permanent influences. For the scapegoats: Kate, Anna, and Sari, brothers and sisters who will continue as resources whether physically present or not.

THE LINKAGE PROJECT

In the spring of 2002 Terrell was mostly confined by his tether to his brother's tiny apartment on Detroit's west side. Jesse and I visited him there to talk about PCAP's Linkage Project. He brought out his sketch pad to show us his work. He talked about his job prospects and plans to attend Wayne State University's art school. We told him about PCAP's modest scholarship fund. Jesse and I agreed afterward that his environment and personal situation seemed stable enough for him to enter the linkage project and take on a mentor.

We next met with Detroit artist Michael Cooper and went over the Linkage Project requirements. Mentor and mentee must meet at least once a month. They respond to each other's work and develop their skills, with an emphasis on what the mentor can offer. The mentor seeks opportunities for the mentee: workshops, classes, other community artists or writers, venues for exhibition or performance. The mentor does not loan money, is not a social worker, avoids co-dependency or entanglement in any of the social needs of the mentee. That will be a challenge, and the borderline won't always be clear. The mentor receives a token fee of $500 for the year, paid in two installments. The mentee receives $300 and must submit receipts to be reimbursed.¹⁶

We arranged for Terrell and Michael to meet. After each communicated with us separately that they were compatible, the linkage kicked in. Terrell took advantage of our scholarship to take classes at Wayne County Community College and used his $300 to purchase art supplies from Utrecht. To supplement his income, he drew portraits at parties. Michael met with him frequently to help him develop his portraiture, charcoal drawing, and landscape skills.

At the beginning of this endeavor Jesse and I were on our own. Unexpectedly, the Linkage Project met resistance within the PCAP executive committee and indifference within PCAP. Some executive committee members resented that I had written the NEA grant without consulting them about ways it might stretch PCAP energies. Focused on their workshops and the annual exhibition, PCAP members seldom picked up on the anxieties of those coming home, and the project was invisible, with no easy way for members to get involved. Jesse and I were meeting great enthusiasm around the state from community artists and writers—they had been waiting for something like this—but it was difficult to convey that when we sat in the executive committee meeting room at the Ginsberg Center. Eventually Pilar Horner, a leader in PCAP who had worked with incarcerated girls, men, and women, but who had been one of the main skeptics and antagonists, chose the Linkage Project as her School of Social Work placement and became an enthusiastic convert. When we hired Ariella Kaufman as our first coordinator of Portfolio and Linkage, she, Suzanne Gothard (Jesse's successor as PCAP administrator), and I continued the lively trips Jesse and I had taken. We added numerous mentees, and the project took off.

The early years were exciting and full of promise. In 2003 and twice in 2004 we held conferences with linkage mentors and mentees, former portfolio youth, and PCAP members who had worked with them. In January 2004, thanks to our Rockefeller PACT Grant, we brought as participants and advisors Ellen Barry of Legal Services for Prisoners With Children in San Francisco, Rochelle Perry of Project Return in New Orleans, Benay Rubenstein, who supports returning women prisoners in their search for higher education in New York City, and Andrea Scott of Amicus in Minneapolis. Participants in the projects were bold in their suggestions for improvement in relationships, communication, and networking.¹⁷ Mentees showed their art and read their poems. Some of them were eager to become mentors themselves.

The linkages were often dynamic and engaged. Tim, who had been in a number of our workshops at Adrian Training School, learned directing and stagecraft from Gillian Eaton at Performance Network in Ann Arbor and read his work publicly. Dave Hawkins, an actor at the Parnall Correctional Facility, studied playwriting under Bill Ward, director of the Flint Youth Theater. He auditioned and took a role in one of Bill's plays. India Sullivan, with the support of Barbara Pliskow, patched together a computer with her $300, wrote and read her poetry and exhibited prisoner art at a local café and in her own exhibition. Cathy Babcock helped Danny Biddinger create a small chapbook of his art and poetry. Donna Hiner helped Suzie Thompson break through her structured approach to art, and the two of them shared life stories and found they were kindred souls. Mentees spoke in front of University of Michigan audiences, and seven of them, at one point or another, joined our National Advisory Board.¹⁸

By November 2005 there had been sufficient activity for us to hold “Are We Free: A Linkage Exhibition of Art” at the Duderstadt Center Gallery. Curated by mentor Nancy Lautenbach and mentee India Stewart and organized by Jean Borger, it was a great success. Twelve mentors and ten mentees read, performed, and testified during the vibrant opening and closing receptions. Several of them told the audience that PCAP coming into the prisons had brought an unprecedented respect for prisoners as human beings and creators. “Then,” they said, “we came home, and they were the same people.” Nine mentees and six mentors exhibited sixty-two works of art: which included drawing, painting, scratch art, photography, mixed media, sculpture, ceramics, jewelry, fashion, and installation. Over thirteen hundred visitors attended the exhibition, and total income for the artists came to $2,115.

It was an ambitious and energizing time.

WHEN WILL THE PUNISHMENT STOP?

But the linkages were also difficult. Seven or eight months into his work with Michael, Terrell disappeared. Other cases followed. After eliminating a mentor interested only in assessing Will's “criminal mind,” we found him Robert Stamps, an energetic playwright and author who fully committed himself to Will. After six months Will disappeared. We brought Melissa together with Michael Gillespie of Oakland University's theater department, but before they could start, her lost confidence as an actor, work complications, and visits to her children in Flint ended the linkage. As we were seeking the right musician for Billy, he reoffended, then escaped from prison. Mary returned home after twenty-six years to care for her dying mother and then her father with his gradually mounting Alzheimer's disease. Joan could not afford long-distance phone calls and had trouble keeping contact with her mentor. We had to suspend John's and Anthony's linkages because they began using again and were sent to rehab. Jerry admitted his felony on forty job applications and was turned down, then finally lied and was hired to caulk houses, developing pains in his arms and hands so severe that he was unable to hold a paintbrush. When they discovered his lie, he lost the job. James disappeared. Will Copeland watched one of the most talented poets we have worked with be reincarcerated once, then jailed. Theresa, raped by her lawyer employer, desperate, the same day reverted to an old practice of stealing credit cards, and returned to prison.

Men and women who have spent any substantial time in prison return home physically disabled, according to Mary Heinen, our current Linkage and Portfolio coordinator. Close quarters, heating and cooling conditions they can't individually regulate, noise that makes long periods of sleep difficult, starchy diets, and often inadequate care for serious ailments take their toll. The Detroit House of Corrections, which became the Western Wayne Correctional Facility, housing men until 2000 and women until 2004, was built on a toxic-waste site and had methane detectors in the units. Before it was finally closed, the women in the horticulture program were told not to put their hands in the soil.¹⁹ The Florence Crane Women's Facility, according to Mary,

was built during the great depression as a state school for disabled children. [The warden] told me it had three wells. Two she had to close due to high toxin levels, including nitrates. She said she was worried she would have to close the third. One of the guards was a real estate agent in Coldwater. She said she had been unable to sell property for miles around the area due to water and ground pollution from a chemical fertilizer plant nearby. The chemicals leaked into the farmlands/wells and were known to contain nitrates. Our water had a noticeably oily film on top of it in our coffee cups—when heated in the microwave the water turned foamy. It had white crystals floating in it cold or hot. The water was a major topic of discussion. We were not allowed bleach to clean because the old asbestos-wrapped pipes would rot from the caustics, officials told me.

Bleeding was a serious problem for the women. Some had no periods for weeks. I learned nitrates are a compound found naturally in nature and I believe the pollution of the wells in Florence Crane came from the fertilizer plant toxic runoff in the area. The plant used bird droppings shoveled off forest floors for their mixtures. FCWF knew this and added bags of water softener to the water softening tanks in the basement, adding salt to a salt. Many of the women had strokes, raw ulcers that would not heal, cancers, seizures, headaches, bladder and kidney infections, and other terrible disorders and diseases. Many of the women I knew have died from brain, breast, colon, lung, bone, liver and pancreatic cancer. Most of the lifers I knew in my age group and older developed cancer and died. Nitrates are used in the manufacture of paint, explosives, and farm products. Warning signs used to be up in the visiting room warning guests not to drink the water. Pregnant women were not allowed to transfer to Crane because of it. Some became pregnant there. We were forced to bathe in the water and eat food cooked in it. There were times there were open sewage pits in the yard from failed repair jobs. The place was crawling with rats. I was there from Jan. 25, 1989, until the day the pit of hell closed [it closed for women and became a men's facility in November 2000]. God save us from the consequences.²⁰

And many return home mentally disabled.²¹ Over the past three decades prisons and jails have become the principal mental health care facilities for those deinstitutionalized by the closing of state mental hospitals since the early 1980s and for those deranged by living on the streets as a consequence of Reagan economic policies. The afflicted do not easily follow instructions. They either isolate themselves in their rooms or go to the yard and act out. For those reasons they serve more time than others. Their illness deepens.²²

Other prisoners suffer the results of what psychologist Craig Haney calls “‘prisonization'—the psychological process of adapting to life in an institution, where one is neither expected nor permitted to make decisions; where trust is a liability and intimacy a danger.”²³ Interactions with other prisoners and officers are often charged with violence, tension, and potential physical, mental, and sexual humiliation. Jerry writes that prisoners at his prison are requesting segregation, because current overcrowding is causing such random, frequent violence.²⁴ Judith Herman tells us that “a single traumatic event can occur almost anywhere. Prolonged, repeated trauma, by contrast, occurs only in circumstances of captivity.” “One of the most intractable aftereffects of this kind of trauma, according to Herman,” Nell Bernstein tells us, “is helplessness, or learned passivity…. Walking out the gates does not automatically reverse this process.”²⁵

Our state and federal legislators over the past three decades have voted to keep returnees feeling helpless and overwhelmed. Those with drug convictions (the majority of returnees) normally cannot receive student loans and may not live in public housing. If a family member takes them in, the family risks eviction. In most states those with a criminal sexual conduct conviction are restricted in where they may live, in some states so severely restricted that they find themselves under bridges or in isolated group houses in the middle of nowhere. They are also placed on permanent public lists and are subject to hounding and harassment. Returnees with felonies may not apply for a wide range of jobs. They are also much less likely to be called back for job interviews or attain employment than peers without criminal records, as Devah Pager has demonstrated in Marked, her study of Milwaukee employers.²⁶ If the purpose of mass incarceration was to create a caste of black high school dropouts whose life courses would be drastically altered and who would be eliminated from the workforce,²⁷ the effect continues unabated when they come home.

Because the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 led to a 250 percent rise in termination of parental rights of the incarcerated, parents return to permanently dismantled families. “This will be known,” Pam Martinez says, “as the great baby-snatching era.” Ida McCray, founder of Families With a Future, notes that the tougher sentencing and child welfare laws that disproportionately affect black families have “set in motion ‘the greatest separation of families since slavery.'” “The mood in prison,” Philip Gentry says,

is one of despair. Essentially what incarcerated parents are being told is that no matter what they do—how hard they work at overcoming the issues that put their children in foster care and brought them to prison—they cannot avoid having their parental rights terminated.

Bernstein concurs, alluding to women who have come home:

For many women, losing the right to care for their children triggers a powerful despair—at their own failures, their children's resultant suffering, and the seeming omnipotence of institutions that many find incomprehensible, if not hostile. They treat this despair not with Prozac or Zoloft but with methamphetamine, heroine, crack cocaine—taking themselves one step further from the rehabilitation that is ostensibly the motive for incarcerating drug addicts.²⁸

The problem in this country, Robert Moses says, is that “we do not think of others' children as our own.” Now the incarcerated are unable to think of their own children as their own.²⁹

And they return to families and neighborhoods damaged and wounded by their preprison behavior and by their absence. They had abandoned their children, and their children are loaded with grief and anger. They have been taunted in school. The families left behind have often lived in shame and, unable to pay for housing, have been on the move. The remaining spouse, if there is one, or the grandparents have suffered great economic and emotional stress. Returnees face high and often impatient expectations for them to reintegrate, take up parenting, and get a paycheck. They face people who hold them to their past, who stigmatize and distrust them no matter how much they have matured. And, especially in the early days and weeks, they face old associations, triggers, and temptations, which may deepen and seduce as they experience the mortifications of unemployment, housing denial, and health challenges. They face weekly (even daily) visits to parole officers who during the last three decades came to see their job as one of violating the returnee, sending them back to serve more time,³⁰ although in Michigan this is now shifting. With so few resources, such high levels of stress, and no health insurance, they are especially susceptible to illness.³¹ In Michigan, which has perhaps the best-funded prisoner reentry program in the nation, they face the slowest economy in the country.

And so the exiled, disabled, returning citizen scapegoat remains disabled, remains scapegoat, sometimes truth-teller and prophet. Just as the Wayne County Court judge, lawyers, court officers, and stenographer froze when Jerry Moore spoke his powerful story, so do the rest of us turn deaf ears to the story about ourselves that our exiled relative reveals.³²

It needn't be so. In an aboriginal sentencing circle in Canada, the elders apologize to the offending youth. “It is our fault you are here,” they say: “we didn't raise you well.” And they explain to him that they are seeking workable sanctions, because they need him in the community.³³

THE DECLINE OF THE LINKAGE PROJECT

By the time of the November 2005 Linkage exhibition, we had established thirty-eight linkages. We had held three Linkage/Portfolio conferences by the end of 2004. As I said, it was an exciting era. Yet in the year succeeding the exhibition we added only one linkage, and between October 2006, when Mary Heinen became coordinator, and June 2008, we added only six more, none of them youth. And after December 2004 we failed to bring participants together for a sharing, assessment, and planning conference.

The consequences of this decline were evident in the second Linkage exhibition, “Are We Community,” which ran from November 9 to January 30, 2007–8, at Focus: HOPE on Detroit's west side.³⁴ The opening was attended by 110 people, who, according to Mary, “were even sitting on the stairs going up to the third floor.”³⁵ The spoken word presentations were lively, the mood spirited and celebrative. We paid formerly incarcerated people to design and create the programs, to do the matting, and to provide the baked goods. However, the master of ceremonies was not a linkage participant. One former mentor and no mentees participated in the spoken word entertainment.³⁶ The striking exhibition poster was by mentor Tony Bacon, not by a mentee. And of the six mentees exhibiting their work, two had already completed their linkages, three (one of whom had been home from prison for at least six years) had barely begun, and one was temporarily suspended, because he had relapsed and was in treatment.³⁷ It was a proud occasion but a far cry from the participation in 2005.

What happened?

Jean Borger in her first year as coordinator—late summer 2004 until summer 2005—added eleven linkages, vigorously committed herself to mentors and mentees, and organized the December 2004 conference and November 2005 linkage exhibition. But she also saw mentees struggling, hurting, and even returning to prison. Especially sensitive to what this meant to them and their loved ones, she felt inadequately prepared. Although a highly empathic listener, she knew she couldn't listen professionally like a trained social worker and couldn't easily provide or guide them to job opportunities, physical and mental health support, housing, drug counseling, family and other social services. She began to isolate herself within her role and gradually decrease her participation in PCAP meetings.

She hinted that we should add no new mentees unless we hired a social worker (we had no funds for this), and we suddenly noticed that she had in fact quietly added only one linkage during her second year. Her position was agonized, compassionate, and legitimate, but she was attempting a total reorientation of the Linkage Project to serve fewer people.

At the June 2006 Advisory Board meeting, she pointed out that although we tell the mentees “this is just an arts relationship…they come with life needs and ask questions because that's the lifeline.” She proposed that we should focus on the handful to whom we were already committed and fund them for a second year, doing what we could to help with services and adding no new mentees.³⁸

Michael Keck, recognizing from his own experience with youth that the borderline was subtle and painful, nevertheless urged PCAP to make our role clear to mentees, to set limits on what we can do, and to continue to offer linkages to people coming home. Janie remembered:

I visited an art project in a township art center in South Africa, where most of the participants were homeless and very needy in terms of services; the center only did art, and that was very exciting for the participants, it was a resource, a place they could be thinking, creating, and healing, and it was clear that working at something like this that they loved was enabling them to confront other needs.

Jesse Jannetta, now a board member, concurred: “A social worker may not be needed—the art can be the powerful thing, the thing that we focus on/ do really well.” Pat Gurin assented: “We don't have resources to help people who have nothing—art will have to be a part of helping someone who has other resources.” It was a tough issue: if particular mentee circumstances took us over the border into their personal needs, we would have to struggle with that.

The consensus was to continue with new linkages and focus on what we could offer. But when Jean asked the Advisory Board point-blank to tell her not to add mentees, the members were silent. Since they did not actively instruct her to add mentees, the discussion remained in limbo, and it was her intention in the next year to add no new mentees. Since my intention was the opposite, we did not have a good match. Luckily, she found a better-paying job in September and moved on. I took on portfolio as an overload and worked with eight students. A month later we hired Mary Heinen.

In the next twenty-one months Mary added only six mentees. She was new to the position and to PCAP, needed to sort things out, was long on personal experience but short on connections to art communities around the state. I left on sabbatical in January 2007 and, although I stayed in town through mid-April, I needed to focus on this book and on the always overwhelming annual exhibition. Most of the remainder of the year I was away. In January 2008 I returned to intensive teaching, the exhibition, patches of focus on the book, and the growing PCAP demands that have come with our success. I was less available for Linkage than I once was, less able to travel the state to meet with potential mentors, with mentees.

Mary in the meantime, always a powerful speaker, diversified the coordinator position. She joined the Michigan Prisoner Re-Entry Initiative (MPRI) steering committee, attended and addressed local conferences, initiated a writing workshop with Washtenaw County returnees, and was left with too little time to pursue linkages. I insisted on a Linkage advisory committee composed of community members (including myself), but it met only twice in eighteen months and an August 2009 meeting was sparsely attended.

And all this while we were having a difficult time, as always, getting our members to see beyond their workshop experience to what returning citizens face. They did not think to identify committed actors, artists, and writers for Linkage, despite our periodic pleas.

Since 2006 Jean's concerns have been alleviated by the establishment of the Washtenaw County MPRI group under Mary King's and Joe Sum-mers's excellent leadership. The group thoroughly researched local assets, contracted with agencies, and created a sensitive, dug-in program for prisoners returning to Washtenaw County, which in 2007 had the highest recidivism rate in the state. Mary is able to draw on the wealth of agency services MPRI has identified throughout the state.

And Linkage suddenly is coming back. Mary has taken it on now and has been persistent especially with exhibition artists we know are returning. From July 2008 through July 2009, she has added ten linkages, six in the visual arts and four in poetry and spoken word. Only one is a youth. We are required to go through the juvenile facility social worker to contact the caseworker. We can't make direct contact. So much depends on those individuals. I am gradually applying myself to this in support of Mary, and we have two youth linkages pending, both talented poets. A luncheon on May 30 to begin planning a November conference meant to reconsolidate and move forward was well attended by artist mentees and some mentors. Our next Linkage exhibition, in 2010, will be led by returned citizens.

Linkage is our most difficult project because for those coming home the punishment never stops. At its best it is a great resource, worth reviving.

THE LIFE OF LINKAGE

And here is why. This is the story of Wynn Satterlee.

In late January 2002 we stood in the lobby with Phil Klintworth, the great special activities director of the Southern Michigan Correctional Facility,³⁹ looking at the submissions for the Seventh Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners. One was The Lost Swimmer, a haunting expressionistic piece: a hat floating, three figures in black top hats and dark gray shirts with vertical blue, teal, lavender, and purple stripes in various poses searching in the water. We decided to take it. Phil told us that the artist had terminal cancer and that our selecting his work might keep him alive a little longer. So we took two more of his pieces! They were more abstract, not yet Wynn's signature work.

Over the next years he stayed alive and developed his art. Now and then we would meet with him when we came in for selection, as at the Macomb Correctional Facility. One painting with several variations placed him in an open grave with many people gathered around. Janie and I own his piece with hundreds of floating hats, his depiction of prison mail-call time, his painting of four men sitting with their hands in their faces, a black splotchy hole in the floor, and perhaps my favorite painting of all I've seen over the years, Free My Daddy: fathers are locked in birdcages, and figures dressed like executioners restrain desperate children trying to get to the cages. He became one of the exhibition's best, most original, most moving artists.

When Wynn came home—a judge had reviewed his case and declared him innocent—now a cancer survivor, he spoke at the opening reception of the 2006 annual exhibition. He also purchased a motel just outside of Manistee, fixed it up, and opened for business. When we stayed at the motel during our art selection trip in 2007—Oaks Correctional Facility is in Manistee—we found him painting fourteen hours a day and filling his own quarters, three rooms, from floor to ceiling with his art, with other canvasses piled one atop another. I have never seen anything like it. It was brilliant, beautiful, determined.

We offered him a linkage with Donna Hiner, who had already worked with Suzie Thompson. He had his doubts about linkage, but agreed to meet with her. What follows is the story in their own words. It illustrates at its best what happens when we make a connection inside and carry it over into the world outside. First Donna:

Wynn…Wynn is great. We met at Big Boy and we were both I think a bit unsure of whether or not this would be a good match…however that was dispelled the first 5 minutes of talking with one another. I knew the moment I saw some of his art work that Wynn is an artist extraordinaire. I wanted him to show his art, he was reluctant, but over the months I began to see a willingness to begin sharing his art with the world. I think for some artists the work is so personal that the thought of someone looking at it and critiquing it is quite a scary process in itself. I downloaded all the New York galleries, addresses and phone numbers for Wynn. I felt that there were areas in and out of the country that would be more receptive to his art. Montreal would be a very good city to expose his art. I couldn't contact the galleries for him as I am guardian to my twin 3 yr. old grandchildren and struggle to find time for myself. But Wynn is a force in himself and if he could focus all [his] energies into one area, [he] would be a well-known artist. Wynn did begin to look at himself as an artist along with being a businessman. And I believe Wynn began to see the possibilities of making a living off of his art. We still talk from time to time, but with him in Reno [where he moved to be with his son], it is difficult to mentor in any productive capacity.⁴⁰

I sent a message to Wynn, asking him (as I had Donna and other mentors and mentees) to tell me what he could about what, if anything, the linkage connection had meant to him. Here is his reply.⁴¹

Hello Buzz

It is a great pleasure hearing from you. I have thoughts every single day of my life that either you or Janie or Mary [Heinen] or simply the University of Michigan appear. Every day. Every day.

from that statement alone maybe you can feel the impact that you all had and still have on my life.

Mary always answers the phone when the rest of the world seems to be like a poison in front of my face. She has kept me on the ground more times than even she knows.

the support of all of you couldn't be replaced with blood. I have an unexplainable love for all of you. In a strange way…closer than family.

It was an incredible honor to be at your wedding. I was awakened in the moment and felt almost like a regular person for the afternoon. even in your most personal moment in your lives you were still reaching out and healing this wayward soul.

I told Katherine Weider that her “chanting session” as part of your ceremony is without a doubt the most remarkable vision I have ever witnessed.

It still moves me and it sets your wedding day out as the most remarkable wedding I have ever attended.

you guys are forever amazing me.

thank you for everything and your friendship.

now I will answer your questions to the best of my ability.

I did get motivated with Donna. It was hard for me as you know to accept any type of critique even knowing full well that I was not perfect…far from it. But I was so content on being “wonderfully naive” that I did not want the intrusion. If that makes sense.

I didn't care, but again reluctantly I gave in due mostly to Katherine

Weider. She was interviewing me and she very delicately kept reasoning with me about the chance to just participate in the program. See where it goes. She has a way of influencing me…pretty women always do. So with her encouragement I proceeded.

Donna turned out to be wonderful. She came into my life and cared. Didn't push me around.

She drove out of her way and didn't complain. And I enjoyed every session we had.

Donna is definitely an asset to your program.

She also needs the outside attention from her other world and in its own way your program helps the mentor as well as us.

My humble opinion.

I faced so many adjustments [when I came home] that I am still facing them. Minute by minute, hour by hour, and of course the big standard day by day.

but in truth it is moment by moment.

the other day I was with my son and took him to the Dairy Queen. I ordered a chocolate ice cream cone just out of the blue. I don't eat ice cream. But I love chocolate ice cream.

I was eating it and my son said…dad that's not how you eat ice cream. I looked at him and he was serious. So I asked him how he ate it, he said you lick it and turn the cone.

I didn't know…or forgot, but I did as he said and turned the cone. It was good and fun. A simple pleasure.

I was down to the cone and without thinking I took a bite from the cone.

I almost spit it out.

It tasted like old stale cardboard.

My mind went racing and came to a screeching halt.

After I realized that it had been over 12 years since I had an ice cream cone.

Reality checks that puncture the moment.

those are the defining scales that measure just how deeply damaged that time did to me.

I forgot that we are supposed to know the cone tastes like cardboard…and love it anyway.

golly grasshopper.

it can not be told in one story. Your impact on me goes far before I was released and has continued on just as this e mail I am now answering is in the moment.

you invited me to get involved and didn't get upset when I was unfit for human consumption.

I could step up as I wanted to but you always understood. You still kept inviting me to be a part of things. Thank god for your determination. little by little I was re-entering the world.

It was just never again going to be the same world. I know that now. And I can live with it.

But not easily by any means.

I believe that if I had to say words to describe what you have done for me and for my life is

nothing short of a miracle.

You talk so highly of my art. You praise my efforts, but you don't fully realize that you gave me life years ago when you helped this sick man before you even met him.

It is called hope…love…and forgivness.

My art even shocks me after it appears on canvas. My art would not be here if it was not for you and the program. Period.

so what do you think…how important do you think you are in my life?

art is all I have now. It is a spirit that has taken over.

thank you again for that gift.

I will be glad to contribute more words if you need them.

I am not sure what more I can say but it is an effort from my heart to assist you.

please ask me more questions and I will answer.

hope to hear from you soon.

wynn