The Prison Book Club (11 page)

Carol opened her purse a few minutes later and pulled out a letter that had been mailed to her via the Collins Bay chaplain. It was from Graham writing from Beaver Creek, where he and Frank were now serving the next stage of their sentence. She read the letter aloud to us. Graham wrote that there was no book group at the prison and could Carol please help him start one. She looked up, her eyes shining. I whooped for joy. Derek and I high-fived. Here were men who were becoming hooked, not on drugs, but on books. It was the first concrete triumph for Carol's project.

Derek waved goodbye to us as he drove his car off the ferry and turned east to his island house, while Carol and I drove our cars off the ramp and turned west to her house. Once settled at her place, she proposed a swim. We grabbed towels and bathing suits and walked across the sheep pasture to the island's westernmost tip. Rams with enormous ankle-grazing testicles led the way along the sheep path. That night I celebrated Carol's birthday with her, giving her a Guinness ginger bundt cake and one of my favourite novels:
The Summer Book
by Tove Jansson, a series of funny vignettes about an inquisitive six-year-old girl and her crusty grandmother and their family summers on a remote island in the Finnish archipelago. It was a perfect book for summer and I had given it to some of my most cherished friends.

Carol talked about the frantic feeling that she sensed was building in the men because of the difficulties of prison life. One inmate for whom she had found legal representation had been caught with pineapple juice, she told me, which meant that he was suspected of fermenting it in a plastic bag to produce hooch. She seemed to be frustrated that just as she was helping him finally get a fair shake, he was busy screwing it up.

The island fauna, too, were under stress following the unusually wet spring and the summer heat. As I fell asleep I heard coyotes howling and a lone lamb baa-ing. One animal penned in, the others desperate to get at it. The next morning, on my drive to the ferry, I passed, quite close, two young foxes with white-tipped tails, black stockings and amber eyes, lounging by a stream bed. They should have run off. But they just sat there staring at me, perhaps dazed by the already oppressive morning heat.

As the ferry pulled away from Amherst Island, I looked back at the nodding shoreline willows and thought about the island's absurdly abundant and bold animal life, reflecting on why it was so important to me. My parents had raised my three brothers and me to be keen observers of the natural world, believing that a close connection to nature would help us put the human experience into perspective. They imbued us with a sense of wonder and curiosity, teaching us where and when to look for marsh marigolds, gentians, Dutchman's breeches and lady's slipper in the wild and how to identify birds by their song alone.

What was it about nature that I now found so pleasantly distracting and reassuring as I interacted with men in prison? Its umbilical cord back to my safe childhood, I suppose, and its predictability. Each spring, blossoms unfurled in the same order: snowdrops and crocuses first, followed by carpets of indigocoloured scilla and on and on through forsythia and magnolia. I was awed each year when plants emerged from the ground knowing how to assemble themselves into their predetermined shapes, each so distinct from the next. The progression of bird migrations was equally reliable, as was the birdsong that tinted the air as purple finches and others passed through.

But even non-naturalists couldn't help but encounter wildlife on the low-lying twenty-kilometre speck of land that was Amherst Island. Animals had taken over there, thanks in part to its position on an avian migration route. The lounging foxes were just the latest. And I'd even seen my first whippoorwill—a rarely viewed, seemingly neckless bird sitting nonchalantly on the edge of the gravel road one evening soon after sunset, its large doe eyes gleaming red in my car headlights. I was so grateful to Carol for sharing her island paradise with me and I resolved to share my enthusiasm for nature with the men whenever possible.

The drive from the ferry to the prison was quick that day, just fifteen minutes. After all the failed attempts in June and July, I was finally going to sit down with Ben for my first one-on-one to get to know him better. We found seats in the chapel storage room. A fan whirred in the far corner to help move the air and the window was open in an attempt to capture a breeze.The air remained stubbornly close, though. Through the windows, we could hear the sharp chirp of sparrows over a lower chorus of crickets, then suddenly a loud burst of men shouting. I jumped. Ben looked unfazed.

“What's happening?” I asked.

“Those are the guys in segregation. Calling from their windows.”

“Who are they calling to?”

“Other guys are walking by right now, probably going to work at CORCAN and they'll shout to anyone they know is in the hole.”

So
that
was segregation, a.k.a the hole: solitary confinement. The seg cells were housed in one of the old wings branching off from The Strip. Inmates wind up there either by requesting it for their own protection, or when the warden deems they're jeopardizing the security of the penitentiary or the safety of others. In Canada's federal prisons at that time, fewer than 20 percent of those in solitary were voluntary admissions. While there, they spent twenty-three hours a day in their cells, with one hour out for exercise. Some men from our book club ended up there from time to time.

We walked to the storage room window and listened to the exchange for a minute. “You fucker” was all I could hear clearly. It died out quickly. The passing inmates had to report to their prison jobs. Ben and I settled back into our chairs.

He spent some time giving me a few glimpses into his early life. He'd been born in Canada, but went back to Jamaica with his mother for his early schooling. “Education is like number one there,” he told me. “You're nobody if you don't have an education. They're so competitive there: spelling bees, math bees. We used to go around in school and sing our times tables.” His aunt was the principal of the school so there was no slacking off. He remembers having access to books in the house: geography books, dictionaries and
Ebony
magazine.

When he returned to Canada for grade seven, the school authorities placed him in grade six, not recognizing the test he had passed in Jamaica enabling him to skip a grade. “It was discouraging, Miss. And what I was learning in Canada wasn't of any substance. They're teaching you home ec. or some ridiculous stuff—life skills that are not intellectually stimulating. Or they have the whole class playing recorders. I got distracted.”

In high school, he read books only if required for an assignment, finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate. His friends in grade nine started smoking weed and experimenting with LSD. “I could get a little bit of weed here and there and kids started buying it off us at lunchtime. You see the money coming in. It's pulling. I got to grade ten and dropped out due to circumstances.”

I asked him which of the books we'd read in the book club had been his favourite. “I don't know if I have a favourite,” he said. “Each time I do a reading, it opens a window in me. Each book is a humbling situation and allows me to be more clear and detailed in my life. All the books that I've read have contributed to who I am today and how I look at life.” His answer was so complex and fascinating that my question sounded simplistic by comparison. As I had for Graham and Frank, I gave him a journal to track his reflections on books and prison. He was pleased to be asked. We shook hands and said goodbye. He made his first journal entry later that day.

Dread, who'd been waiting in the chapel while I talked with Ben, walked into the room with a gait so loose-limbed I thought his thigh bones might detach from his hips. Prison hadn't etched worry lines in his face, and Canada had barely dented his strong Jamaican accent, even though he had left his home country at the age of eleven. Too impatient to read in Jamaica, he spent his youth there riding his bike, hunting doves with a slingshot, fishing for perch and snapper and watching TV. As an adult now stuck in the confines of a prison, he expressed that kinetic energy in competitive chess games with other inmates and an irrepressible flow of ideas for business schemes. It seemed natural to ask him, therefore, if he had had a job before coming to prison.

“Yeah.”

“What did you do?”

“I sold drugs,” he said, breaking into a long wheezing laugh that turned
drugs
into a five-syllable word.

“Stupid question.”

“No, but I had legitimate jobs too. I'd buy homes, renovate them and put them back out. But drugs was the majority thing.”

He describe at length how he “cooked” cocaine, to stretch it and make a greater profit, which led him to describing his affinity for cooking “legitimate” food. Despite being on Unit 4, which didn't have a full kitchen, he managed to fry chicken on a piece of foil above toaster slots.

Dread was one book club member who had had some experience with a book club before coming into prison. His “girl,” the mother of his two children, had a book club with her female friends and he would prepare food and drinks when the meetings were held at his house. Even though he missed his children acutely, the prison book club gave him “another little family, another little escape,” he told me. He said he had internalized Carol's pitch on the power of Rohinton Mistry's writing style and it had changed his perception of books. He equated it to acquiring a taste for wine and becoming a wine connoisseur. “A little light went off inside me. You start looking for the literary genius, the oak, the flavours, not the excitement.” He admitted that he was tempted to pounce on some of the “stupid questions” that other members of the book club asked from time to time, but that he was learning from us how to welcome others' comments politely.

When it was time to say goodbye, I gave him a journal too.

For months I had been curious about the prison library and its role in the book club members' lives. It resided in another building in the prison, and volunteers like me couldn't just walk there alone. Clive, the prison librarian, had to come and get me. In the dog days of that hot summer he agreed to give me a tour of the library at a time when the inmates would not be there.

Blond and soft-voiced, Clive had worked in bookstores around town while pursuing courses in filmmaking. We hit it off immediately and I recommended that he read Avi Steinberg's hilarious memoir,
Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
, which was on my bedside table. As we walked through the grounds, Clive told me the harrowing story of his first days on the job three years earlier. Back then, the library had occupied a deteriorating wing off The Strip. The carpet had mould and the heaters were falling apart. His mother, who had been the previous librarian, had moved over to a teaching role in the prison and there was no one in charge for a time. Given the gap in supervision, one or two inmate contingents had moved into the stacks, controlling parts of it as their territory, according to Clive. I pictured one gang in Fiction, and the other in Non-Fiction.

“And that's good, I guess, that the inmates see books as prime territory?”

“Well, it was bad, because if you wanted to go into the library you had to pay.”

“Oh.”

On Clive's first day on the job, the prison was in lockdown and guards were searching the old library. “When I opened the door there were about a dozen officers tearing the library apart—taking books out, examining them and then kind of haphazardly putting them back on the shelf. It was an unbelievable mess.” As he was talking to one of the guards, he spotted another officer picking up a large hardcover book. “Out of the spine of the book slides this huge shank and it just missed his foot and hit the floor. It just went
thunk
and fell over.” By the end of the search, the officers had also unearthed stills to manufacture alcohol from juice. Clive couldn't show me the old library premises. The whole wing was shut down. Its orange-painted “fishbowl,” the windowed guard post at the entry to the wing, sat empty and the books had been moved to a new building.

Our walk to the new library took us outside the main building, past the more recently built hub-and-spoke cellblocks, Units 7, 8 and 9, and around the back of the cafeteria. The inmates were all in their cells, but I could imagine dozens of eyes watching me silently from the windows. Clive pointed out the grassy area where aboriginal inmates constructed temporary sweat lodges for traditional ceremonies.

The library was part of the relatively new programs building, and was air-conditioned. It had the look of a gymnasium, some seven metres high, with a row of windows beneath the roofline. A small law library occupied a glass-walled locked room at the back, with case law going back to 1890, and library users could request access. It was there that guys who were going to be deported went to consult the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act for example. And it was there that Clive had made temporary space for the book club's summer reads. For two months the books donated by Carol's friends had been available only to the men in the book club. That specialized access was irresistible to inmates, because it conferred a certain status and identity. Once the summer was over, Clive would move the remaining books to the open shelves.

During its normal opening hours, three days a week, the library was relatively quiet and inmates needed passes to be there. At those times, Clive was able to help men carry out research for their courses or their cases. But two evenings a week, when the entire inmate population was in the programs building for recreation, Clive unlocked the door and inmates flooded in, sometimes forty at a time.

He let them know that he ran a pretty tight ship. No contraband in his library. No weapons, no alcohol and no “kites,” the secretive notes about drug debts or other matters that inmates leave for other inmates in hiding places in the prison.