Judith Tannenbaum

Kenneth E. Hartman’s is the third book to come out this fall written by men doing time. I’ve written before about Dwayne Betts’ A Question of Freedom and Jarvis Masters’ That Bird Has My Wings, and now I want to share a few words about Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars by Kenneth E. Hartman.

Hartman has done twenty-nine years in five California prisons. The years Hartman writes of are the years in which I’ve known the California Department of Corrections (“Rehabilitation” has recently been added to the department’s title, but as nearly all programming is about to be cut beginning next year, there’s no rehabilitation happening other than what the men and women inside create for themselves).

I know what I know due to the various poetry workshops I’ve taught inside, as well as to researching and writing a manual for artists working in prison for the state’s Arts in Corrections program. Through teaching, interviewing staff, or sitting in visiting rooms, I’ve been in at least half of California’s thirty-three prisons. I’ve learned most from close friendships with former students – including a recent collaboration with Spoon Jackson on our book: By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives. Spoon, Coties, Elmo, Smokey and the others are all lifers and each has served Hartman’s twenty-nine years and more.

Hartman tells not only his personal story, but also the broader story of what’s happened in California prisons in the past three decades. Both narratives are compelling, well written, factual (and accurate to what I know and hear), and incredibly important. I’ve appreciated all three books out this fall, but in many ways, Hartman’s got to me most. Due to his own skill, I’m sure, but also because so much that he writes mirrors the experiences and expressions of the men inside whom I know best.

Hartman’s personal story is one that moves from adolescent evil to adult consciousness. The book’s publisher – writer and editor James Atlas – comments on the book’s first line, which he feels is impossible to forget: “When I was nineteen, I killed a man in a drunken, drugged-up, fistfight.” Hartman immediately lets the reader know: “Anyone who knew me could have seen it coming.” He’d been in trouble for years and had spent a long time in the juvenile justice system. He was state raised (thus “Mother California”) and ended up with a life without possibility of parole sentence.

Hartman shares some of the familial reasons that logically led to his becoming such an angry young man, but there’s no blame or self-pity in his writing. Mostly his narration is objective, almost that of a journalist, not denying emotion but maintaining steady sight, and at just the right distance to allow intimate vision and wider understanding. In this way we watch the young race-identified white man do all kinds of bad in his first years in prison. And we watch, too, his increasing consciousness and self-directed change.

Since “increasing consciousness and self-directed change” is the path I’ve watched my former students walk, I am deeply curious about what encourages such opening. In Hartman’s case, writing played a part, but mostly it was love – first from (and to) his wife (who saw and reflected the good that was in him) and eventually from (and to) his beloved daughter. Although our era keeps moving away from this knowledge, everyone I know who works with young people or people in prison knows this exact truth: deep growth comes through love and bright reflection, not through punishment and negativity.

Eventually Hartman works with others to establish what’s called the Honor Program at Lancaster (California State Prison – Los Angeles County). I know a group of prisoners at New Folsom (California State Prison – Sacramento) who are also old lifers, also sick of their part in perpetuating race hatred in prison, also sick of negativity instead of steady encouragement toward greater humanity. This group, too, brings men together to do deep work on their own spirits. I’ve learned so much about real – self-directed and group-supported – change from these men. I wish the wider voting public understood that this kind of work – prisoner-led – is going on all over the country. I welcome Hartman’s report.

As Spoon and I prepare for the April 2010 release of our book, I am so glad for these three other books. “Each man does his own time,” as the saying goes, and Betts, Masters, Hartman, and Spoon Jackson prove that point. Each man “came awake” inside, but each journey was unique and not programmable.

That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row is Jarvis Jay Masters’ second book, and it comes with endorsements by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Van Jones, author David Sheff, and many others. Although Masters writes of the crimes he’s committed, as well as those he’s innocent of though convicted – and although he writes some about his life on San Quentin’s Death Row – That Bird focuses primarily on Masters’ childhood and coming of age.

Much of what Masters reports is heart breaking: being left to watch over young siblings with no food to feed them, beatings and cruelty of foster care families, being set up to fight for bets by older male relatives, choices he makes against his own best interest. But Masters also describes the love he shared with his sisters, his wonderful first foster parents, the neighbor who silently left food for the children each morning, his caring though drugged mother. When life gave him a chance, Masters was the little boy he was born to be: loving, sweet, curious, responsible.

The story Masters shapes for the first two-thirds of the book lets the reader in very close as the child tries to make sense of his experience, as he learns to protect himself from hurt, and eventually, as he comes to feel most comfortable in institutions. Masters’ telling is honest, well written, deeply (humanly) interesting.

The last third or so of the book is also interesting, honest, and well written, but to me feels tacked on – more like a handful of essays than the continuation of an unfolding story. Perhaps the publisher felt the book needed to include stories from prison itself.

Both Masters and his publisher (HarperOne) seem to want the book to speak out most strongly about the foster care system. An important goal that Masters achieves. But I think the book does even more than this. That Bird shows one life – its huge difficulties and its few gifts – and how a being is shaped by both.

R. Dwayne Betts – “a good student from a lower-middle-class family” – carjacked a man, went to prison, and has written a book about the experience. Betts was sixteen when he committed the crime, but tried and convicted as an adult; he served eight years in Virginia prisons. He’s been out for four years now and in that time has earned a BA, founded a book club for young men (YoungMenRead), been an intern at The Atlantic, married and become a father. Betts is now a graduate student at Warren Wilson College. His book of poetry – Shahid Reads His Own Palm – won the Beatrice Hawley Award and will be out from Alice James Books in May 2010.

A Question of Freedom is getting lots of attention (from NPR to HipHopWired), and I’m very glad. Those of us on the outside – the ones making decisions about who we lock up – need every report on prison we can get from those who’ve been there. Betts’ report is that of a very young man – a teen-ager still (“Sixteen years hadn’t even done a good job on my voice,” is the book’s first sentence) – and therefore shines important light on this aspect of contemporary US incarceration practice.

What I appreciate most in A Question of Freedom are the ways Betts attempts to:

1. understand why he was drawn to the uncharacteristic moment that brought him to prison;

2. express the responsibility he feels, especially to his mom;

3. speak out about all the young black men in prison with him, while at the same time working hard for a complex – rather than a simplistic – analysis of this fact;

4. present the varieties of senselessness he encountered in prison;

5. describe the various ways he educated himself (with some, but not much, help from prison programs or staff);

6. claim how literature – reading and writing – shaped the man he became as he walked out of prison.

Betts is no longer a teen-ager, but he is still a very young man. A Question of Freedom is being marketed as the first work of an emerging author, and that description makes sense. The book has the virtue of rawness – conveying as it does the confusion and circuitous thinking experienced by a child locked up with adults – and some beautiful writing. Betts’ telling also bears the (probably inevitable) limitations of a young mind that has not yet developed enough scope or distance to create a coherent whole. No matter the “more” I wish from the book, A Question of Freedom is important and I’m very glad to see it building a large readership.

Just home from residency at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island overlooking Puget Sound. Six women writers are each given a cabin to live and work in, as well as meals. Applications for February through November 2010 must be postmarked by September 24, 2009.

During this stay I finished work on By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives, the two-person memoir I’ve been writing with former San Quentin student, Spoon Jackson. By Heart will come out April 2010.

On my next-to-last night, I read Spoon’s first chapter in our book to the group. After I read the last word, the room was completely silent. I looked up from the page and saw each woman was crying. I went back to my cabin and tried to describe this amazing moment to Spoon in a letter to where he’s housed at New Folsom. Each woman wrote him her own note about what his story — and the beauty with which he wrote his story — meant to her.

Richard Shelton — whose excellent Crossing the Yard I praised in a blog post a couple weeks ago — is featured tonight on The Jim Lehrer NewsHour along with his prison workshop. A decent first look at what this work is; some fine poetry and interviews with the prison poets; and Richard speaks so wisely, beautifully, and from his heart.

You can watch the segment on the NewsHour site. And check out Walking Rain Review, visible on the desks in the NewsHour segment.

New Village Press will publish By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives, a two-person memoir Spoon Jackson and I are writing together. We will talk about prison, poetry, education, inequity, beauty, possibility, and what it means to be human. The process of our conversations — in person at San Quentin, and in letters over the nineteen years since then — is one Spoon calls diving, and both conversation and diving give shape to By Heart. You can read more about Spoon who is currently at CSP-Sac serving Life without Possibility of Parole.

New Village Press also published Arlene Goldbard’s excellent New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development. And here’s another brand new New Village Press book I strongly recommend: Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World’s Frontlines by William Cleveland.

Also, I have one more new book to recommend. Uncommon Community: One Congregation’s Work with Prisoners documents and discusses three prison programs begun by a Unitarian congregation in Texas. The work is interesting, the perspective broad and deep.

Teach the Free Man is a book of stories by someone who knows prison. Peter Nathaniel Malae doesn’t advertise time he has or hasn’t done, but his intimate and intricate knowledge of California prisons, and what it is to be locked up in them, speaks for itself. Most of the stories show us men in cells, visiting rooms, on the tier, on the yard at Avenal, Quentin, and CMC. A couple stories are of parolees; one is in the voice of a guard whose own son has been charged with murder.

Malae can write. He was a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University this past year, he won the prestigious Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award for his first novel, and he was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lion Award in fiction this year. You can hear “Turning Point,” the book’s opening story, on KQED’s Writers’ Block.

Here are a few of the lines I noted:

“Prison is many things, after all, but mostly it is the gross simplification of life’s complexities.”

“No visits, no riots, no incidents. Only the clicks of the popping cell in trochaic monometer. Clink. Clank. Clink. Clank. Clink. Clank. Only unquestioned directives over the PA in the same. ‘Lockdown!’ ‘Med call!’”

“I rolled into the Unit Monday morning, absorbing the whole setup without even consciously trying, that’s what institutionalization does to you: You’ve always got your radars going, like an insect. There were little framed signs up, the kind you find in convalescent homes: ‘Footsteps in the Sand’ and ‘Chicken Soup (for Convicts).’ Bullshit to keep you from thinking about the loaded deck of the system.”

The book’s title is from Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” Here’s the stanza the words live in:

In the deserts of the heart
let the healing fountain start.
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

I encourage anyone wanting to know more about prison and prison arts to read Richard Shelton’s Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer (The University of Arizona Press, 2007). Shelton is often referred to as the OG prison writing teacher, having done this work – while also a full time professor, poet and writer – since the early 1970s. At that time, Shelton received a letter from a man on death row asking if the professor would be willing to read and comment on some of his poems. One thing led to another, and Crossing the Yard tells the story of the journey.

Shelton is such an honest reporter. He tells us about his initial morbid curiosity when asked to “read the poetry of a monster” – an attitude he’s now ashamed of – and the desperation he felt when witnessing unexpected horrible consequences for some of his prisoner students as they became poets. He tells us about institutional stupidity and the subversion he found he had to use in order to get anything good done inside. Many of Shelton’s former prison students are now prize-winning writers: Jimmy Santiago Baca to Ken Lamberton (Ken has his own new book out, Time of Grace).

I love the life Shelton has made of his thirty years crossing the yard. And also I’m something like envious. From the beginning Shelton has visited students, written to them, had them over to dinner once they’ve been released; some have become nearly part of his family. I can no longer work in California prisons because I visit and write to my former San Quentin students. Also, almost all of these men are still inside (the three men I’m closest to serve their 30th year this year). I can only wish for sharing meals and movies, hikes and afternoons in bookstores – the sharing Shelton and his wife have made part of their lives.

Many of us doing this work debate about what verb to use for what we do. Are we teaching? Facilitating? Sharing? Shelton is clearly a fantastic teacher, willing to be very honest when responding to the men’s writing. He is also, with equal clarity, a human being sharing with other human beings. He doesn’t sing his own praises in his memoir, but the details he writes of – what he did and how he did it – inspire me to sing his praises.

Crossing the Yard closes at the end of a workshop in which nearly all the men report they’re going to be transferred, many of them to private prisons in other states, most of them to facilities where there will be no support for the good work they’re doing – transferred for no sensible reason at all. The last line of the book says better than I’ve ever heard said what my prison arts friends and colleagues say when we speak to each other of what we’ve experienced and witnessed: “I want to put my head down on the table in front of me and weep with a pain that will not be comforted and a rage I cannot express.”