Walls: Essays, 1985-1990

Walls: A Journey to Auburn

Walls: A Journey to Auburn Paul The willows are gold again and now the season seems past thinking seems past remembrance, seems past the long lean taking of your breath: I remember you Paul , always, how you strutted among the city-Lord of the manor; how you fought with the drivers , how you never let one person call you nigger. I remember how you struggled with Dad-loving him in the stridency of your ill-conceived conquest: you wanted to love him and he you: Yours is the story too often repeated: the city boy driven to alcohol, death: But the willow once green is golden and I remember you part in desire, part in fact: You would have hated the lie I make of you; you would have hated the fact: Still the willow turns green to golden and still you visit me in mid-morning, telling me of this awful place, of the omnipresent them, who would not let you live and I listen: You who were too proud to equivocate: you who loved as freely and deeply, as messily, as the world could imagine : Paul, I miss you. I miss your hard-bearing, stern confidence, your anger which made ghettos of all of us: No one struggled more; no one asked more; no one took the risk of presence more sacredly; in your loss I understand not only the shores of grief, but how its walls se()]n forever rising. 29 Walls: Essays, 1985-1990 At first glance, Auburn Correctional Facility calls to mind a feudal castle or a stone and brick edifice worthy of Humphrey Bogart or Edward G. Robinson. One readily envisions prisoners dragging their balls and chains, the late-night prison break, or the lights slowly flickering, presaging the imminent electrocution. This is the stuff of movies, of prison lore. Yet for most of us, these images, dispatched out of Hollywood, are all we shall ever know about the real life in our nation's prisons. Most of us will certainly not be sentenced there; few of us will choose one as a place to visit. Yet in every stereotype there is also a residuum of truth: people employ generalizations to celebrate a certain verity about the world; and no myth would have any currency if it did not, to some unassailable extent, identify something in actual experience. Certainly these cinematic incarnations are not the prison's reality, but they contain a grain of truth, nonetheless. Undeniably, though we may not know what a prison is, our imaginings, however incompletely, convey that the prison is a hellish place. Indeed, nothing in our arsenal of national fictions suggests that the prison is other than horrific. In this case, it is not a matter of correctness but of degree. The prisons-at least the prisons I have encountered-are infinitely more hellish than our Hollywood dream makers relate. Inmates in these places are not planning breakouts or prison riots; they are not planning anything. To dream of escape is to believe that one has something worthy of salvaging, to believe, that is, in the proposition of a self-orchestrated future. The prisons I have visited are spirit killers: the inmates-no matter how smart, capable, or ongaging­ have little sense of their own inextinguishable worth, their own human possibility. And this is not by accident. Auburn Prison is certainly not the worst reformatory in this country, nor is it the best. Like most, it probably sits in the thick middle range: no inmate would ask to be sentenced there; certainly some might wish to be transferred out; a few of the hard-nosed might even like it, its attraction resting in its utter banality. Neither good (that is, experimental) nor bad (and the 30 Walls: A Journey to Auburn word here almost has no meaning, since Auburn, at least to my eyes-and no doubt to those of its inmates-is bad enough), Auburn just is. At bottom, to cast out is not to cast off, and the long trek to Auburn Prison-through the mill town and over the prover­ bial railroad tracks-is our reminder that the great prison is a great industry: people earn their livings there; whole towns, including Auburn, are built on the day-to-day catering to our national pariah. And, like anything that both haunts and fasci­ nates us, we come to the prison's gates armed...