Part 14 (1/2)
”How are you?” he asked.
It seemed easy, in that moment, to admit the truth.
”A little overwhelmed.”
He nodded with understanding. ”There's been an epidemic of that lately. They have me under investigation now, did you know that?”
I did not know that.
From the kitchen counter he found a sheet of paper and pa.s.sed it over. A memo, marked disdainfully with a mug ring.
I read the official notice. Envelopes bearing Brother Mike's home address had been discovered in deceased inmate Jon Crowley's personal effects. This demonstrated an inappropriate and unprofessional degree of intimate contact, and a decision of suspension from employment was being deliberated.
”It's complete rubbish, of course. I don't deny that the correspondence occurred, but such things are overlooked,” he said, ”except when they are not.” He sipped his tea. ”They're putting a great deal of pressure on me. I can't enter the inst.i.tution without getting searched. My art cla.s.ses, when I'm allowed to hold them, are constantly interrupted. Even my private counseling sessions are cut short. Worse, my colleagues are experiencing similar problems, clearly because of my transgressions. They're being supportive, so far. I heard you were under investigation for inmate a.s.sault.”
I raised my mug in a toast to that. ”No wonder you didn't want to see me.”
He smiled, a little sadly. ”It wasn't that. I apologize if it sounded that way. But what is it that you're here for?”
I hesitated for only a second, and he grabbed my arm to interrupt.
”Hold that thought. I have something I want to show you.”
We went out the back door. In the mudroom, he found me a pair of galoshes and a heavy sweater to wear, and I felt like a child traipsing behind him through the path worn into the snow. We approached the strange hut I'd seen from the kitchen window, and I sensed great warmth coming from it and an unusual but pleasant smell, like hay in a barn or recently harvested wheat baking in the sun.
”This is my kiln,” he said. ”I'm a potter by calling. The rest of it, the restorative justice work and the art cla.s.ses are duties I perform in service of my own conscience. If I were free from all that, here's where I would be. I'm firing right now. I only do it twice a year. Do you want to look?”
He lifted a tarp, and I heard a hushed roar from within, like the sound of the ocean in a seaside cave or a gurgling volcano. The air was hot in my nostrils, but I smelled charcoal and metal. When I could stand the heat blowing out, I saw a patch of darkness only a foot square and a show of shooting stars inside. It was beautiful, but I stepped out to get relief from the heat, and Brother Mike let the tarp fall back into place.
”My style is derivative of the j.a.panese masters who come from the region of Bizen. Most j.a.panese pottery making is extremely precise, involving many tests and carefully controlled temperatures. In Bizen-yaki, however, the kiln is a primitive s.p.a.ce fueled by kindling and logs, even branches, leaves, straw. In the heat and flame the contaminant materials disintegrate into fine particles and blow about in a maelstrom of sparks that collide with the fresh pottery and stick to it, burning into the clay like fossilized lines. It's a largely unpredictable process, and it brings out colors only G.o.d could come up with.”
The energy radiated from him, his face glowing with excitement.
”It's comforting to me,” he added, ”that beauty can come from violence, if only in metaphor.”
I huddled in the thick sweater he'd given me, cold now that the tarp was down, feeling a slightly feverish heat linger in my cheeks.
”I want to know more about Crowley's comic book,” I said. ”What was in it. What it meant.”
No change in his face, nothing altered in his smile, but everything different nevertheless.
He began to walk slowly around the kiln, checking the tarps, feeling the heat with his hand a few inches away. I followed him. There was a pile of pottery shards in the back, where the woods edged up to his property.
”All sorts of animals are attracted to the warmth,” he said. ”Once, I unintentionally baked a cat or a muskrat in a large pot. It must have crawled in while my back was turned.”
”Tell me about the character in the comic book,” I insisted. ”The Beggar.”
He picked half of a vase up from the snow and swung it down casually to smash it further. There was nothing angry in the gesture, only preoccupation.
”The Beggar,” he replied. ”I thought, for Jon's purposes, the name Beggar was quite apt. It has a fine historical and literary lineage.”
I asked what he meant.
”I mean that historically, most inmates were debtors, or beggars. Ordinary people who'd committed no crime but being poor, not unlike today's minor drug offenders. As late as the early 1900s, if you walked by a prison in a city such as New York or Philadelphia, you would see hands outstretched, the prisoners inside begging for alms, sometimes dangling a shoe from an upper cell grate to the street below-the beggar's grate, as it was called. They could earn their freedom, you see, if they bribed the keepers. Another, more literary reference, perhaps, was John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Have you seen it? You really must, as a corrections worker. It was inspired by Newgate Prison and featured a keeper who secretly runs a criminal organization from within the prison, using helpless inmates as lackeys. A brilliant lampoon of cla.s.s structure and a call for reform. If you believe that our inst.i.tution of prisons today is in part a tool of the capitalist system, whereby the undercla.s.ses are ruthlessly punished and only the rich have access to justice ...”
I couldn't take it anymore.
”I know the Beggar's name is Earl Hammond.”
”You know about Hammond?” No pause in him, no stunned surprise.
”You do, also, apparently.”
”I've heard of him. Most of us in the restorative justice field have followed his work. Hammond was another inspiration for Crowley.”
His work. All those sources of inspiration. The pretension took me back, roused my irritation for the skewed sensibilities of weak sisters.
”Hammond killed a CO, a man working a dangerous job to keep the rest of you safe. Hammond was so violent even within a maxium security prison that they kept him in extreme isolation.”
”Yes,” Brother Mike acknowledged. ”For years. But that was before my time, and I can't pretend to understand it all. And there was nothing about Hammond then that would have moved someone like Jon. It was what happened afterward, when Hammond was released from extreme isolation, that transformed him into someone worthy of admiration.”
”What did happen?”
”Why, he changed.”
He said it matter-of-factly, as if I should simply understand.
”Changed how?”
”He'd been a gang leader, drug dealer, and murderer. Through whatever miracle was visited upon him, years of isolation didn't destroy his mind but freed it. He became an anti-gang leader, a fearless and outspoken advocate for inst.i.tutional reform and restorative justice. Hammond was one of the first significant inmates to go public with such support. And that, as you can imagine, was no easy road. He tried to make amends for his own transgressions, even reconcile with the family of the CO he'd slain, but the COs lobbied for him to be isolated again. The gangs hated him, too, because he'd betrayed them, turned over all he knew about them to destroy their way of life, in exchange for more access to other inmates. He was fearless about being a model for personal responsibility and the power of forgiveness.”
”You told Crowley about Hammond.”
”I did. I used his example in the context of our conversations about restorative justice, and I saw how Hammond's spirit and example changed Jon's heart. Jon became a disciple of sorts. Hammond's voice had been silenced for so many years, and Jon wanted to tell the world Hammond's story, show the path that is possible. Jon's comic book was a way of chronicling Hammond's redemption. As an artwork, it was daring and bound to be controversial.”
I did not want to argue about what Crowley's book had accomplished. Instead, I wanted to know more about Hammond.
”How was Hammond silenced? What happened to him?”
Brother Mike shrugged. ”I have no idea. It was rumored that he'd been given a new ident.i.ty, for his own protection, and hidden somewhere in the federal detention system. But that's not a story I trust, since I doubt the Hammond I read about would have agreed to it. The worst side of me believes he was eliminated, if that's not too sinister a phrase. Perhaps I communicated that suspicion unintentionally to Jon, because it pervaded his work.”
I was put off by the idea that Hammond might have been ”eliminated,” even though it seemed like a coherent and reasonable explanation. It jabbed against my own misgivings, the suspicion not of conspiracies, but of delusional fantasies. The comic book reeked of that.
”Why did he draw such a strange world? Why didn't he just show Hammond as he was? In Ditmarsh, in the City, in other inst.i.tutions, speaking to inmates.”
”You're asking an artistic question, and a political one, and perhaps a practical question as well. There was no support for Hammond as a person. You saw Jon's fight with Lawrence in the yard. An inmate with gang a.s.sociations and any knowledge of Hammond's history would have loathed Hammond and hated anyone who wanted to glorify him. Same with the COs. It was too contentious. So Crowley's decision was to depict a figure like Hammond.”