DARKENED ROOM

I sit in a darkened room
to hide
from nothing in particular.

I sit in a darkened room
to think
about nothing in particular.

I knock one devil on his ass,
ten more appear.

The angels, they want to stay
in the heavens, safe among the stars,
the lights of dusty immortality.

The devils swoop like hawks,
they swarm around the head
like summer flies.

I sit in bare-footed silence
chiseled in-between the two,
trying to keep symmetry.

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.

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.

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.”