Running The Books : The Adventures Of An Accidental Prison Librarian Part 23

When snow collects in the yard-it is winter. When your cellmate smells particularly rank-it is summer. But these things don't imply anything beyond themselves. Snow doesn't mean sledding with your children, or skiing, or playing football or going to concerts for Christmas. It means snow.

The closest approximation of seasons in prison are the gambling seasons. When the Super Bowl gambling crunch hits, it is winter; when the NCAA basketball tourney happens, it is spring. These are the Christmas and Easter of prison. Aside from these sad interludes, prison time is neither marked nor shared by a community. It is personal and moves toward one holiday: the end of one's sentence. Each individual follows his own private eschatological calendar, which has only one holiday, the Last Day, the End of Days.

This is a very practical matter for those who work in prison. When you leave before a holiday, a well-meaning caseworker instructed me, you don't say "Merry Christmas" to the inmates. It doesn't make sense and, as she added, "It's kind of a slap in the face." In prison, seasons are best left unmarked and unremarked upon. And indeed it was always poignant to close up shop before a holiday, or even before a weekend. The looks that came my way then were invariably pitiful, sometimes desperately so, and it was in those moments I got a sense of what the library meant to many of the inmates.

For the next few days, I imposed a no-noise policy. I joined Elia in the stacks. For hours, we'd shelve books wordlessly. I heard the textures of silence, like those in the recorded interview of my grandmother. In the library one could hear the sudden crank and surge of nearby pipes. Digital squeaks. The low thrum, high hiss, of prison air pumping constantly from shafts in the ceiling-and the barely audible voices, occasional quiet shouting, from some far corner of the prison, all of it deposited into the library along with the processed air. These sounds were remarkable because they stream around constantly but are never heard.

This was the first real silence I'd experienced in the library since the night I showed up late after visiting Deer Island and the Liberty Hotel. And just like that night, the stillness of the library opened up the s.p.a.ce in a new way.

Elia often used the phrase "doing time." I saw what he meant by it. Time in prison isn't celebrated, commemorated, or even lived in, but something done done with your hands, a repet.i.tive ch.o.r.e, like doing laundry or shelving books. There's a difference between with your hands, a repet.i.tive ch.o.r.e, like doing laundry or shelving books. There's a difference between being in prison being in prison and and doing time doing time. Elia was, I now saw, making masterful work of that task.

Every time Elia placed a book on the shelf, he acted in opposition to the order of prison. His labors involved small interpersonal acts he created for himself and which affirmed he wasn't merely an object with a number attached to it. No: He He was the person, the subject, who imposed the order. was the person, the subject, who imposed the order.

He dusted and arranged each book with deliberation and grace. Aware of his place in an infinite circulation, Elia was not in any rush, not concerned with finis.h.i.+ng finis.h.i.+ng but only with but only with doing doing. By dusting, then placing each individual book in its precise spot he was reaching out, anonymously and indirectly, kindly, to a stranger, perhaps even an enemy. He was making it possible for others to find what they were looking for. He was using the library to set things straight. Carton by carton, shelf by shelf, book by book.

He wasn't the only one. Everyone who enters a library is in search of something something. It was right there, in the stacks, where Elia had made a home, where Jessica had sat for her portrait with a paper flower in her hair, where she'd given her anxious cellmate a comfort ribbon. It was where the young prost.i.tute from Dunkin' Donuts had sat with her art books. Where Chudney had learned some of his first recipes. Where hundreds of inmates had paused and searched. Sometimes not even certain what they were looking for.

In the silence of those hours of shelving books I remembered I had also arrived at the library in that way. In search of something, not certain what.

After nearly two years, I was still trying to figure out the purpose of my job and of the library at large. For this, I needed only take Elia's example. He wasn't merely counting down the days with each book. His elegant librarians.h.i.+p, his hands deliberating over each t.i.tle, the gentle way he dusted and kept notes and piles, the care with which he arranged the shelves, his silence, made me appreciate how order is created: Not through grand schemes-to which I was often drawn-but by small graceful actions, repeated often and refined with time.

Shortly thereafter, I found myself sitting on a gra.s.sy, wild-flower-covered hill on Deer Island, looking out at the Atlantic and eating tuna salad on a sesame bagel. I was serving my suspension without pay, my punishment for a.s.saulting Officer Chuzzlewit. It was spring and almost starting to feel like it. Boston Harbor was fussy and uncooperative. The ocean loomed in the near distance, black and vast.

I finished my sandwich too quickly. Possibly due to the influence of haunted Deer Island-or possibly a lingering effect of the childhood trauma of trying to lose my Israeli accent by sitting for hours in a windowless room with a speech therapist who forced me to endlessly repeat the word girl, girl, girl girl, girl, girl-my thoughts turned toward the Apocalypse. I wondered which place would be first submerged by the great imminent deluge: Deer Island or the landfilled South Bay?

It was a silly question. Of course Deer Island would sink first. It sits directly in the harbor. The water level in nearby Hull was already rising. It was only a matter of time. I finished my pickle in two and a half bites. My back twinged. I laid myself out flat, in the yoga pose-or non-pose-known as the Dead Man. It was really the only position I could pull off.

I thought about the nineteenth-century prison that lay in ruins in the manmade hill upon which I was sitting. And the minimalist librarian job description from that departed era: such provision of light shall be made for all prisoners confined to labor during the day as shall enable them to read for at least one hour each evening such provision of light shall be made for all prisoners confined to labor during the day as shall enable them to read for at least one hour each evening. A provision provision, from the Latin for foresight foresight. Listening to the waves, I thought about Chudney, survived by a five-year-old boy and a newspaper article about his murder. Even at the moment, Elia was in the South Bay prison, shelving books.

And Mike Pitts who had shown me the mug shot on his ID shortly before he was released, and proudly asked me to compare how much better he looked after years in prison.

"I'm not that fat dude anymore," he'd told me, "I'm trim, I filled my head with knowledge in this library, man, and I'm ready to go."

But, one sunny day, months after his release, his photo appeared in the Boston Herald Boston Herald, bloated and miserable. The victim of a horribly botched liposuction.

And the great Coolidge, whose photo appeared in the Boston Globe Boston Globe, standing in Ma.s.sachusetts Superior Court, wearing a crisp white dress s.h.i.+rt and tie. The article recounted the amazing story of how this man argued his own case, and persuaded two judges to ignore the fact that police found a treasure trove of stolen property from eight locations in his possession: ATM cards, purses, a rotary saw, a computer. A crime spree. According to court records, they also found "books on how to improve your writing."

The Globe Globe reporter marveled that a lifelong street criminal had repeatedly bested professional prosecutors by "relying on a state law so obscure that several defense lawyers interviewed were unfamiliar with it." And just as Coolidge had promised me when we first met, he was planning to one-up Napoleon and take his arguments on the offensive: He was demanding reporter marveled that a lifelong street criminal had repeatedly bested professional prosecutors by "relying on a state law so obscure that several defense lawyers interviewed were unfamiliar with it." And just as Coolidge had promised me when we first met, he was planning to one-up Napoleon and take his arguments on the offensive: He was demanding $66,000 $66,000 from the state, compensation for lost wages and a sum of money large enough to purchase a used SUV. He had other cases pending, though, and still faced a twenty-year sentence. from the state, compensation for lost wages and a sum of money large enough to purchase a used SUV. He had other cases pending, though, and still faced a twenty-year sentence.

I thought of my friend Yoni, who discovered that he wanted to be an anthropologist studying hippies. Enrolled in a Ph.D. program, he could now live his dream of roving the remote hills of Arkansas-wearing only a sarong and a cowboy hat-going native with a group of stoned moon-wors.h.i.+ppers. All in the name of science.

And what would my next step be?

I listened to the choppy sea, the rutted waves Sylvia Plath mournfully watched eat away at this sad little island. I imagined notes falling out of books, and the undelivered, unfinished letter: Dear Mother, My life is I thought about Jessica's undelivered note. About how she left her son in a church, then met him almost two decades later in a prison. About Chudney's son trying to stop the waves. Jessica sitting silently, looking out of the window, her hands folded in her lap, watching from way up in the prison tower. Doing what mothers do, what she never could do herself: Watching her son play in the yard. Just watching. How she made herself pretty for the portrait she would never give him. I thought about Elia placing books and books in their proper order.

Books, it was written on Amato's immovable sign, are not mailboxes are not mailboxes.

A provision of light.

I synchronized my breath with the waves. A decision fixed itself to my mind. I had an unfinished piece of business.

The Diameter of a Sunday Marcia Franklin, Chudney's mother, cried on the phone when we spoke. I'd told her what I had for her. She invited me to her home in Roxbury-where Chudney had been living when he was shot.

I got an early start that day. It was a Sunday. Our meeting had been planned for the early afternoon to give Marcia time to return from church. Before the meeting, I took a short driving tour of Roxbury. I knew of only a few sites connected to Chudney. The prison, his mother's house, and the corner store where he was shot. And a few other places he had mentioned. Most of what I knew about Chudney concerned his imagined future, not the streets of his actual life. Driving around his neighborhood I realized how little I knew of his life outside of prison, even though we had spent much time in conversation.

The site of the shooting was across from Crispus Attucks Place, a small street, more of a glorified parking lot, named for the most famous of the five people killed by English gunfire during the Boston Ma.s.sacre of 1770. In American mythos, Attucks was "The First to Defy, The First to Die," the first casualty of the Revolution. A large mural nearby depicted Attucks-an iconic African American-not as the civilian he actually was, but rather eyes ablaze and musket bayonet poised, charging into an apocryphal battle.

Further down the street, a minute or so away, was 72 Dale Street, where Malcolm X lived as a teenager. And around the corner in the other direction, the home where Martin Luther King Jr. lived during his years as a seminary student at Boston University. These streets were heavy with the ghosts of martyrs.

While Chudney's mother prayed in church, I decided to pick my own text for meditation. Mine wasn't from the Bible but from Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai. I read "Diameter of a Bomb" with all of my writing cla.s.ses. It was the poem Dumayne had read in memory of Chudney, after his eulogy at the library poetry reading: The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range-about seven meters.

And in it four dead and eleven wounded.

And around them in a greater circle of pain and time are scattered two hospitals and one cemetery.

But the young woman who was buried where she came from over a hundred kilometers away enlarges the circle greatly.

And the lone man who weeps over her death in a far corner of a distant country includes the whole world in the circle.

And I won't speak at all about the crying of orphans that reaches to the seat of G.o.d and from there onward, making the circle without end and without G.o.d.

The poet's method of cold, numerical measurement is an appropriate way to begin dealing with the horror of sudden violent death. It gives the mind something concrete, objective, to grasp when trying to contemplate the enormity of murder. But as the poet concludes, taken far enough the dimensions of these measurements become too vast, too mysterious, for either human or divine calculus.

As I drove around Roxbury, I used my odometer to take some preliminary measurements of my own. Chudney was shot a quarter of a mile from where he lived with his mother, where he had once seen a deer run through the middle of the city; a rough mile from the market where he bought ingredients for his banana pudding; three and a half miles from the nearest market that sells fresh rosemary; less than two miles from where he had been imprisoned; probably about a mile and a half from where he was born and a mile or so less than that from where he had gone to school. He died one mile from the Greater Love Tabernacle Church, where his mother was praying for his soul. And about a mile from Roxbury Community College, where he was applying to begin his new career with a certificate course in Food and Beverage Preparation. His sister lived roughly twenty miles away in the quiet suburb of Wellesley; about seventy miles away, in a Connecticut town, lived his five-year-old son, who-according to the Boston Globe Boston Globe article about Chudney's murder-had asked his mother "why G.o.d called him." article about Chudney's murder-had asked his mother "why G.o.d called him."

How far did this circle of loss extend? I certainly didn't know. Ultimately, as the poet said, it was a "circle without end," fundamentally a mystery.

As I drove up Chudney's street, I looked down at the sheets of folded printing paper sitting on my empty pa.s.senger seat. These were Chudney's writings: now in the form of a kite. A small letter, written and then left behind in a hidden corner of the library. The kind of thing I was trained to discard. But I was very pleased with this breach of my job description. I had intercepted so many misguided notes, witnessed so many unfinished, unsent, impossible letters-here was one good one, as complete as it would ever get, that I might see properly delivered. It was a small thing, but at least it would arrive. For Chudney's family, and especially for his son, a modest provision of a few words for the coming eternity of silence.

Books are not mailboxes-yes they are they are. It was a bit of graffiti I had often imagined scrawling in the margin of Amato's sign.

My trip to visit Marcia was unusual for a variety of reasons. First, I was a youngish white guy, well-dressed (in honor of Marcia), in the heart of the hood driving a (borrowed) Saab with Cambridge parking stickers. Any illusion that this was a neutral event was banished when I parked the car and walked up to Marcia's apartment building: People literally stopped what they were doing to stare at me. Some with contempt, most with curiosity.

Old men repaired a rusty car. Young men in hoodies, bedecked in clanging jewelry and sneakers whose gleaming white stood in stark relief to the garbage-lined street, sat on stoops and strutted for each other in front of the boarded-up and graffitied liquor store on the corner. All watched me as I walked up to the building.

But what made my visit even stranger was that I was a prison worker making a house call to the family of a former inmate. This didn't happen every day.

Marcia buzzed me into the building and welcomed me with a big smile. She wore sweatpants tucked into her socks and a billowy extra-large T-s.h.i.+rt with a picture of her slain son, RIP RIP and his birth and death dates printed on it. There are shops in town that specialize in the paraphernalia of street-corner martyrdom. In the picture, Chudney's arms are fully extended out at his sides, his palms facing up in a jaunty "bring it on" sort of pose. His head was slightly c.o.c.ked and he wore the face of tough-guy indifference. and his birth and death dates printed on it. There are shops in town that specialize in the paraphernalia of street-corner martyrdom. In the picture, Chudney's arms are fully extended out at his sides, his palms facing up in a jaunty "bring it on" sort of pose. His head was slightly c.o.c.ked and he wore the face of tough-guy indifference.

For me, it was a jarring way to encounter Chudney for the first time in his regular clothes, not in his prison uniform. He looked different. Healthier.

Marcia's apartment was small and neat, shades drawn, dim lighting. Framed and unframed family photos and religious quotations adorned the walls. Nearby loomed a small, square mirror with a prowling black panther painted on it. A murky fish tank gurgled and hummed in the background. The TV, tuned to BET, remained on. Later, when Marcia and I went into another room to retrieve old photos, I noticed another TV that she'd left on. She lived alone in an apartment full of the commotion of television voices. Perhaps this helped her alleviate loneliness.

She sat in an easy chair; I took a spot on the couch across from her. She turned down the volume on the TV. Hip-hop music videos, specters of scantily clad women fawning over c.o.c.ky young men continued to flicker next to us as we talked.

I took out Chudney's writings, the kite he'd left in the library. She read it for a long time. As tears filled her eyes, Marcia gently folded up her son's words and placed them on the coffee table.

"I'm gonna have this laminated," she said.

She told me that her son's murder was ordained from on high. "The Scripture tells us that we don't know the hour and we don't know the place," she told me. "And that's exactly how it was with Chudney."

I told her that I believed a little haiku-like piece that Chudney had written was in fact a religious poem. She picked it up, looked it again, and read it aloud slowly.

plane flying high in the sky, me standing alone, sunday morning in the yard.

"Why do you think it's religious?" she asked.

I told her that I had a.s.signed the cla.s.s to write this little three-line poem and to give them a leg up, had furnished them with the last line. The line I suggested, which I had scrawled on the board, was monday morning in the yard monday morning in the yard, meaning the prison yard. I'd picked "Monday morning" because of that moment's proverbial connotation of working week dread. Monday morning is also a frenetic time in prison, when inmates are released from extended weekend lockdowns.

But Chudney had changed my line to "Sunday morning," a moment of the week with vastly different connotations. I'd noticed this alteration when he made it and had wondered if it had anything to do with Sunday as the Lord's day. I had meant to ask him, but forgot.

But it wasn't just that. The images in this lonely Sabbath morning encounter with the sky also suggested a spiritual meditation. The contrast between the plane soaring, an image of heaven-bound freedom and power, and with his own radical feeling of earthboundness-standing alone, static, in captivity, in the prison yard. There was some kind of longing in that. It was the quiet fire that burned under The Plan The Plan. He rarely spoke of it. But it was understood.

Chudney's mother told me that she found comfort in the fact that he had died next to a church. "It might have been the last thing he saw on this planet," she said.

Marcia told me that, as a child, Chudney had wanted to be a clown. He had made her look in the Yellow Pages for clown jobs. He loved making people around him smile.

The second oldest of five, he would do anything for his mother: cook, clean, put the children to bed. And when he did these things, he went all out. He didn't just clean the oven, he would take it apart and scrub it clean. He would make sure that the house looked presentable and cozy when his mother returned home from a long day of work as a janitor at Beth Israel Hospital.

"You know when you come home, you want everything to look right-Chudney always made sure that happened, even without my asking him. There were some things he just knew to do."

After he was released from prison, he began working in construction. Every night before he went to bed, he'd make his lunch for the next day. He'd make his tuna sandwich with great care and would wrap it with great care. Each part of his lunch was placed together in the refrigerator, ready for him to grab it on his way to work, she told me.

When she returned from the hospital after he was p.r.o.nounced dead, Marcia opened the refrigerator. There was his sandwich-still fresh-meticulously made and wrapped, ready for him to grab on his way out. She picked it up and examined it: it was put together so thoughtfully, by his living fingers, only hours ago.

There were questions about Chudney's death that I didn't dare ask his mother and she probably wouldn't have known the answers in any case. Did Chudney know the killers? Was this the result of a previous conflict? The prison beef? And how many people had witnessed this murder but were bound by the code of silence-or were too scared to talk?

Was the bullet intended for Darius? Was Darius in a gang? Was Darius plotting revenge? For all I knew, he'd already taken it. For all I knew, Chudney's killer would walk into the library next week and ask for a good book.

A few weeks later I dropped by Marcia's home again to chat and to look at photos. I stayed for a while and when I finally left, it was dark. As I walked out of the apartment complex, I heard a voice behind me.

"Hey, you from South Bay?"

I turned around. A man, whom I did not recognize, was sitting on the stoop. He was glaring at me.

"Yes," I said. "I'm not from from there, I work there. You don't seem happy to see me." This was my attempt to be friendly. He continued to stare. there, I work there. You don't seem happy to see me." This was my attempt to be friendly. He continued to stare.

"Yeah, I remember you," he said. "You're the guy in the library."

"That's right. What's your name?"

He smiled sarcastically and shook his head. Even through the shadows I sensed his truculent eyes searching me.

"I remember you, you didn't let me make some important copies. You were just like the rest of them."

Yes, now I did remember him. He had made a big scene in the library about how I was trying to prevent him from doing some important legal work, because I hesitated to make him sixty pages of copies. The library's policy was no more than ten pages per person at a time, which I extended within reason. We were perennially short on paper and ink.

As I stood on a dark side street of Roxbury, this anonymous man began berating me about how his rights were violated again and again in prison, how I had no idea about the abuse he suffered in there. He told me that there were some people from prison-both inmates and staff-whom he had vowed to "f.u.c.k up" if he ever caught them on his turf.

It occurred to me that if I were one of those people, I was in serious trouble. If anything did happen to me, the cops would undoubtedly have wondered why I thought it was a good idea to be in this neighborhood at this hour. There wasn't anyone nearby, just me and a belligerent and possibly intoxicated ex-con.

I thought about turning around, going straight to my car and booking it the h.e.l.l out of there. But then I remembered what happened to Chudney. Turning my back to him would be a sign of blatant disrespect and also make me vulnerable. The less risky option was to try to have a conversation with him. I took a step toward him.

I apologized to him and said, "The only reason that I denied you copies was that we are always short on paper, crazy as that sounds. If I give you all those pages, it means someone else doesn't get anything. And you know what the person will say to me? You're preventing You're preventing me from doing my legal work me from doing my legal work-and he'd be right. My job is to make sure each person there has equal resources."

He continued to stare.

"You chose to be a part of that system," he said, "you profit off that system, man-you gotta answer for it. And then you be coming into this building up in here...Why you here?"

I didn't like the way this conversation was going. I devised an exit strategy: to talk like telemarketer.

"I appreciate your criticism," I said absurdly. "Whether you believe me or not, I do try to make the library a place that goes above and beyond. If I'm performing under par, please tell me how to improve. I welcome it."

I extended my hand to him. He looked at it in disgust but took it, squeezing a bit harder than he needed to.

"I need to run," I said.

Never had those words been so true.

"But thanks for your comments. I'm always trying to improve the library."

"Yeah," he said.

"My name is Avi Steinberg, by the way."

"My name is Mike. Mike Tree," he said, as his eye caught a tree.

Really original, I thought.

"Nice to meet you again, Mike Tree," Tree," I said as I walked toward my car. I said as I walked toward my car.

As I drove home, I felt as though I were surrept.i.tiously slipping back across a border at midnight. Two cop cruisers tore past my car in full shriek and throttle.

Picking up some new library patrons, I thought.

As I drove past the corner where Chudney was shot, I flicked my odometer to zero. I thought of Chudney's final poem, with its longing for a realm apart from our fallen world. As I drove, I recalled the poem Chudney wrote about his baby son, a poem heavily laden in question marks. I decided to commit it to memory: Where did you come from?

No Place that I know.

A place full of the love And the glory of pure joy.

Where did you come from?

Where is this place?

When I got home, I looked down. I lived 3.4 miles from the corner where Chudney was shot.