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  • Alcatraz
  • Danielle Evans (bio)

Everyone had told me that Alcatraz was nothing but a tourist trap these days, but I was desperate for anything that would give my mother a sense of closure, and it seemed fortuitous that the prison that had opened all the wounds in the first place was right in the middle of the water I could see from the window of my new apartment. I hadn’t come to the bay on purpose—a string of coincidences and a job I hadn’t known I wanted until I got here had brought me to Oakland. Still, almost since the day I’d arrived, it had seemed like the only thing keeping me from Alcatraz was deliberate avoidance. I felt like I’d gotten it backwards; everyone else I’d met who’d come to California from the East Coast was running away from something, and I’d gone and gotten so close to the sting of the past that from the Bay Bridge it sometimes seemed I could practically touch it.

Before I or any of the things that had brought me to the West Coast existed, they’d kept my great-grandfather in the basement of the prison, and told him every day that when he was dead they would feed him to the rats. He was eighteen then, finally of legal age to be in the army, except he’d been in it three years already thanks to a falsified birth certificate. My mother had a carbon copy of it in our attic. This was back before the gangsters and the Great Depression. Alcatraz was still a military prison, infamous mostly among would be deserters. They were still building the parts of the prison that would later be immortalized, but it was already enough of a prison to be Charles Sullivan’s private hell, the one he’d never really left, the one my mother, God bless her, was still trying to redeem.

For the better part of the previous two decades, my mother had been involved in some form of litigation or negotiation with the U.S. government. It started with letters to the Board of Correction for Military records, the same board her grandfather had been writing letters to for years before he died. By my mother’s calculations—which she had me double check annually, adding the accrued interest—the U.S. government owed us $227,035.87.

I was a kid when she first started all of this. It was right after my parents’ divorce, though I’m not sure it’s fair to imply the correlation. My mother talked about her Poppy well before my father moved out, and even before the divorce they had fights about him—about the fact that she wouldn’t sell any of his old belongings, or clear the boxes of paperwork out of our basement, or stop blaming herself for having, to her mind, chosen the man she married over the man who raised her. With my father out of the house, my mother threw herself into a mission to clear her grandfather’s name, to finish in her lifetime what he hadn’t been able to finish in his, and there were no adults around to talk her out of it. There was me, but she asked me once, if someone told a lie about her, and she died with it still written down somewhere, whether I wouldn’t fight forever to prove the truth. I knew even then that the only correct answer was yes. [End Page 1041]

Her odds of succeeding were low. Even when she started the process, it had been fifteen years since Poppy’s death, and more than seventy since the conviction that led to it. Still, there was some logic to her argument—she’d found the paperwork that said he’d been pardoned, and thought it would be easy, from there, to have his dishonorable discharge changed to an honorable one. She reasoned it didn’t make logical sense, if he’d been cleared of the crime he was accused of, that the government should consider him dishonorable. There was also precedent on her side...

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