A Convergence Of Birds (2 page)

The other thing that drew me in to Emory was what he said about totem animals. Every person, he told us, had an animal companion, a sort of guardian. Even if you never noticed it, the animal knew. Even when you’re in prison, he said, an animal is on the outside living in the woods somewhere who knows about you, and who will answer your prayers and come to you in a dream. But you have to make yourself worthy, he said. You have to make a door in yourself where the animal can get through, and you have to make sure that when the animal comes inside that way, in a dream, he sees something that will make him want to come back. “He has to feel comfortable in there,” Emory said.

Emory didn’t say all this at once, like you’d read in a book, everything there on the page. If someone asked him a question, he’d try to answer. That’s how it began, I think, before I got there, a few respectful questions. Emory conducted himself in such a way, even the guards showed him some respect. He wouldn’t visit with the same people every day, and when guys tried to hang with him all the time, he discouraged it. Instead, he’d tell people to pass on to others some of the animal stories he was telling. When someone was getting out, he’d remind them to be sure to take the stories along.

The population at Estamos was changing in those days. It wasn’t quite like the mix you see on the cop shows. Most everybody, of course, was from the street—L.A., Fresno, Oakland—and, yeah, lot of Chicanos, blacks, and Asians in for the first time on drug charges. And we had hard-core, violent people who were never going to change: some difficult to deal with, some of them insane, people who should have been in a hospital. The new element was people in for different kinds of electronic fraud, stock manipulations, hacking. Paper crime. I divide this group into two types. One was people like me who believed the system was so corrupt they just wanted to jam it up, make it tear itself apart. I didn’t care, for example, about selling what I got once I broke into Northrup’s files. I just wanted to scare them. I wanted to hit them right in the face. The second group, I put them right in there with the child molesters, the Jeffrey Dahmers. Inside traders, savings and loan thieves who took money from people who had nothing, people who got together these dime-a-dozen dreams—Chivas Regal for lunch, you know, five cars, a condo in Florida. Every one of them I met was a coward, and the cons made their lives miserable. Of course, we didn’t see many of these real money guys at Estamos.

We had gangs there, the Aryan Brotherhood, Crips, Dragons, Bloods, all the rest. These could be very influential people, but the paper and electronic criminals, the educated guys, almost all white, they passed on it. If one of these guys, though, was a certain type of individual to start with, he might help a gang member out. Even mean people. Even not your own race. Prepare their appeals, lead them through the different kinds of hell the legal system deals you.

Emory, who was about fifty, was a little bit like those guys. He spoke the same way to everyone, stayed to himself. Even some of the Aryan brothers would come around when he talked. The only unusual thing I noticed was a few of the more educated whites made a point of ignoring Emory. They’d deliberately not connect with him. But there were very few jokes. Emory was the closest thing to being a real spiritual person most of us had ever seen, and everybody knew, deep down, this was what was wrong with the whole country. Its spiritual life was gone.

When I first asked Emory about teaching he acted surprised, as though he thought the idea was strange, but he was just trying to be polite. My feeling was that by telling stories the way he could, he was giving people a way to deal with the numbness. And by identifying with these animal totems, people could imagine a way over the wall, a healing, a solid connection on the outside.

Emory declined. He said people had been telling these stories for thousands of years, and he was just passing them on, keeping them going. Some of the others, though, talked to him about it, kept bringing it up, and we got him to start telling us, one animal at a time, everything he had heard about that animal, say grizzly bears or moose or even yellow jackets. Some guys wanted to learn about animals Emory didn’t know about, like hyenas or kangaroos. He said he could only talk about the ones he knew, so we learned about animals in northern Montana, where he grew up.

Emory spoke for about an hour every day. The guards weren’t supposed to let this go on, an organized event like this, but they did. Emory would talk about different kinds of animals and how they were all related and what they did and where they came from—as Emory understood it. Emory got pretty sophisticated about this, and we had some laughs, too, even the guards. Sometimes Emory would imitate the way an animal behaved, and he’d have us pounding on the tables and crying with laughter watching while he waddled along like a porcupine or pounced on a mouse like a coyote. One time he told us there was so much he didn’t know, but that he knew many of these things had been written down in books by white people, by people who had spoken to his ancestors or by people who had studied those animals. None of those books were in the prison library, but one of the guards had an outside library card and he started bringing the books in so Emory could study them.

For a couple of months, a long time, really, it went along like this. People wanted to tell their own stories in the beginning, about hunting deer or seeing a mountain lion once when they were camping. Emory would let them talk, but no one had the kind of knowledge he had, and that kind of story faded away. The warden knew what Emory was doing and he could have shut it right down, but sometimes they don’t go by the book in prison, because nobody knows what reforms people. Sometimes an experiment like this works out, and the warden may get credit. So he left us alone, and once we knew he was going to leave Emory alone our wariness disappeared. We could pay attention without being afraid.

That tension came back only once, when Emory asked if he could have a medicine pipe sent in, if he could share the pipe around and make that part of the ceremony. No way, they said.

So Emory just talked.

Two interesting things were going on now. First, Emory had drawn our attention to animals most of us felt were not very important. He talked about salamanders and prairie dogs the same way he talked about wolverines and buffalo. So some guys started to identify with these animals, like garter snakes or wood rats, and not with wolves. That didn’t make any difference to us now.

The second thing was that another layer of personality began to take hold on the cell block. Of the 120 of us, about sixty or sixty-five listened to Emory every day. We each had started to gravitate toward a different animal, all of them living in this place where Emory grew up in Montana. Even when we were locked up we had this sense of being a community, dependent on each other. Sometimes in our cells at night we would cry out in our dreams in those animal voices.

I identified with the striped skunk, an animal Emory said was slow to learn and given to fits of anger and very independent in its ways. It is a nocturnal creature, like me. When I began dreaming about the striped skunk, these dreams were unlike any I had had before. They were long and vivid. The voices were sometimes very clear. In most of these dreams, I would just follow the skunk, watching him do things. I’d always thought animals like this were all the time looking for food, but that’s not what the skunk did. I remember one winter night in the dream I followed the skunk across hard-crusted snow and along a frozen creek to a place near a small treeless hill where he just sat and watched the stars for a long time. In another dream, I followed the skunk into a burrow where a female had a den with two other females. It was spring, and there were more than a dozen small skunks there in the burrow. The male skunk had brought two mice with him. I asked Emory about this, describing the traveling and everything. Yes, he said, that’s what they did, and that’s what the country he grew up in looked like.

After people started dreaming like this, about the animals that had chosen each of us (as we understood it now), our routine changed. All the maneuvering to hold positions of authority or safety on the cell block, the constant testing to see who was in control, who was the most dangerous, who had done the worst things, for many of us this was no longer important. We’d moved into another place.

Emory himself didn’t make people nervous, but what was happening to the rest of us now did. The guards, just a little confused, tried to look tougher, figure it out. Anytime you break down the tension in prison, people can find themselves. The gangs on our block, except for the Aryan Brotherhood, had unraveled a little by this time. People were getting together in these other groups called “Horned Lark” and “Fox” and “Jackrabbit.” Our daily schedule, of course, never changed—meals, lights out, showers—but all through it now was this thing that had gotten into us.

What was happening was, people weren’t focused on the prison routine anymore, like the guards playing us off against each other, or driving each other’s hatred up every day with stories about how we’d been set up, who was really to blame, how hard we were going to hit back one day. We had taken on other identities, and the guards couldn’t get inside there. They began smacking people around for little things, stupid things. People like Judy Hendrix, who thrived on the sexual undercurrents and the brutality on our cell block, started getting violent with some of their clients. The Aryan brothers complained Emory had stirred up primitive feelings, “African feelings,” they called them. Their righteousness and the frustration of the guards and the threat of serious disruption from people like Judy Hendrix all made Emory’s situation precarious.

One day the story sessions just ended. They moved Emory to another cell block and then, we heard, to Marion in Illinois. With him gone, most of us fell back into the daily routine again, drifting through, trying to keep the boredom at bay. But you could hear those dream calls in the night still, and people told stories, and about a month after Emory left one of the guards smuggled the letter in from him that everybody has heard about, but which only Emory’s people actually read. And then we destroyed it. He told us to hold onto our identities, to seek the counsel of our totem animals, to keep the stories going. We had started something and we had to finish it, he said. By the night of the full moon, June 20th, he wrote, each one of us had to choose some kind of bird—a sparrow, a thrush, a crow, a warbler—and on that night, wherever he was, Emory was going to pray each of us into those birds. We were going to become those birds. And they were going to fly away.

There were some who accepted right away that this was going to happen and others who were afraid. I would like to say that I was skeptical, but I was one of those who was afraid, a person for whom fear was the emotion on which everything else turned. I could not believe.

We got the letter on the 14th of June. The beatings from the guards, with people like Hanover and Judy Hendrix having a hand in it, none of that affected the hard-core believers, the guys they put in solitary. Especially not them. In solitary they’d turn themselves into the smallest birds, they said, and walk under the doors.

In that week after the letter came, a clear line began to divide us, the ones who were leaving, the ones who were going to stay.

The night of the 20th, about eight o’clock, sitting around in the TV room, I was trying to stay with a game show when a blackbird landed on the table. It cocked its head and looked around the way they do. Then I saw a small flock of birds like finches out in the corridor, swooping up and landing on the handrails on the second tier. A few seconds later the whole cell block was full of shouting and birdsong. The alarms started screaming and the guards stormed in. They beat us back into our cells, but by then birds were all over the place, flying up and down, calling out to the rest of us. My cellmate, Eddie Reethers, had told me he was going to be a wild pigeon, a rock dove, and it was a pigeon that hopped through the bars and flew past me to the window of the cell. He kept shifting on his feet and gazing down at me, and then he stepped through the bars out onto the ledge and flew away. I ran to see. In the clear air, with all that moonlight, I could see twenty or so birds flying around. I jumped back to the cell door. As many were flying through the corridor, in and out of the cells. The guards were swinging away at them, missing every time.

Five minutes and it was all over. They shut the alarms off. The guards stood around looking stupid. Seventy-eight of us were at the doors of our cells or squeezed up against the bars of the windows, watching the last few birds flying off in the moonlight, into the darkness.

In the letter, Emory told us the birds would fly to Montana, to the part of northern Montana along the Marias River where he grew up, and that each person would then become the animal that he had dreamed about. They would live there.

Joseph Cornell

THE HOTEL EDEN

1945

38.3 x 39.7 x 12.1 cm

assemblage with music box

Erik Anderson Reece

The hands had flown off the clock at the Hotel Eden

and above its blank face

a small wooden door opened in silence

to announce the eternal now

The concierge introduced himself as Pascal

“The Pascal” we asked

He shrugged and said “Here at the Hotel Eden

you are what you were before the the”

He rang for the bellhop whose pillbox cap read Apollinaire

“The Apollinaire” (we couldn’t help asking)

He blew a soap bubble out the bell of his tiny clay pipe

and said “Every poem is the world in miniature”

Then he showed us to our room on the eighth floor

right between lilas and pensee

Outside the window a troupe of angels

was dancing Swan Lake atop a single obelisk

Below the belfry a cockatoo still held in its beak

the chord that once woke monks to their vespers

Apollinaire suspected the bird was an invention