The Prison Book Club (21 page)

One bright spot during the season was “Christmas bag.” As Gaston explained it to me, under a federal prison directive allowing certain privileges at Christmas, the inmate-run canteen expanded the variety of goods for sale to the inmates and the men were allowed to spend $175 over the two-week period around the holidays, up from $90 every two weeks during the rest of the year. The canteen managers also took inmates' wish lists into consideration in ordering Christmas stock. While some guys listed vitamin supplements and protein powders to boost their workouts, Ben and some of the Jamaican men asked for cayenne pepper, ackee fruit and salt cod so that they could cook Jamaica's national dish, ackee and salt fish, in the cellblocks' common kitchens. But, as I found out the next month, something in that season's Christmas bag would cause trouble.

Despite Carol's attempts to ensure a good mix of inmates from Collins Bay's ghettoized racial groups, of the fifteen or so men attending book club that day in mid-December, only three were white, and I noticed that they all sat together: Gaston, Peter and Grow-Op. In the five months since Graham and Frank had left for minimum security, the book club had failed to attract many new white inmates to replace them. The other members that day, including Ben, Dread and Deshane, were mainly men from the Caribbean islands or second-generation West Indian Canadians. As I scanned the room, I noticed a black fellow with a name tag that read ROMAN. He appeared to be influential. There was an air of deference in the others' attitudes toward him, or maybe it was just an alertness among the men in his presence. I didn't read the mood as a threatening one, but my antennae were up.

Even though it was only two weeks since my last visit to the prison, my fearfulness had abated somewhat, partly through a disciplined effort to rehearse my father's advice about expecting the best of people and partly through seeing the vulnerability of men like Gaston. Every time fear welled up, I imagined a button marked
No Fear
that I could press to stop the cortisol and adrenalin rushing through my body. Then I shifted my focus to the literature we were about to discuss.
Just think
, I told myself.
Sharing O. Henry with the men!

We were surprising them with two humorous Christmas-themed short stories by the early-twentieth-century American short story writer and postponing discussion of Andrea Levy's
Small Island
for a month because the men had had only two weeks to read it. We knew that any men who had pushed to finish the novel would be disappointed, but when we asked those who had finished the book to put up their hand, only seven hands went up. Instead, Carol would read the O. Henry stories aloud in the meeting.

She began by explaining that O. Henry was a writer who knew something about life behind bars. He had served three years in prison more than a century earlier for embezzlement, and while in prison in Ohio published short stories under a number of pseudonyms. His real name was William Sydney Porter.

Carol read the stories aloud in her strong, steady voice. At the opening words of O. Henry's famous “The Gift of the Magi,” the men fell into a storytelling trance. Even those who usually sat with their backs to the wall, their eyes watching for danger, took up her invitation to close their eyes and listen. I resisted the urge to close my own eyes so that I could take in their reactions. A man to her right turned his chair backward, straddled it and rested his chin on his arms. Beside him sat a man name Olivier, a soft-spoken sometime attendee who was serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. Olivier sat with his lids closed, his afro gathered with an elastic into a pouf on top of his head, a long-toothed hair comb embedded in it. He was lost in the moment.

Carol did not act out the voices of the characters. She let the men's imaginations fill in the details. But she knew which of O. Henry's archaic words and phrases she had to define for the guys as she read:
watch fob
and
meretricious ornamentation
for example. When I finally closed my own eyes, I realized that when the story was read aloud, I absorbed every word. Unlike with reading text on the page, there was no skimming.

“The Gift of the Magi” is an old Christmas favourite of mine. O. Henry imagines a young wife, Della Dillingham Young, who has only $1.87 on Christmas Eve. She sells her much-admired knee-length hair to buy a platinum watch chain for her husband, Jim, as a Christmas present, only to discover that Jim has sold his gold pocket watch to buy a set of jewel-rimmed tortoiseshell combs for her hair. Although their love was boundless, their gifts were useless, and they had sold the two objects they prized most.

“It's irony,” said Ben in his sleepy voice. “She cut her hair and bought the chain link and he went and sold his piece to get her the combs, so it comes back as an irony for both of them.”

“Amazing,” said Gaston. “They each sold the one thing they valued most.” When he said it that way, I recognized that each man in the room had unwittingly traded in something that he valued highly: his freedom.

No doubt some of the guys in the book group, like the husband in the story, had been to pawnshops or Cash for Gold outlets in the past to sell something. But they wrestled with the idea of whether they would do what the characters in the story did—sell the most treasured possession in their house to buy a gift for their spouse. Gaston asked whether anyone in the circle would sell his car or TV to buy something for his “better half” if he didn't have the money at Christmas. He wasn't sure he could do it himself.

Ben admitted it would be hard to part with a Rolex. “I'm thinking if I bought my Rolex watch for ten thousand dollars, and I know that's all I have, I could get eight thousand for it, but am I really going to sell it?” he mused. “Because it's a
statement
piece.” To hear Ben the altruist say this gave me a jolt. Here was the guy who had pointed out the humanity of Rose of Sharon breastfeeding a starving man at the end of
The Grapes of Wrath
, and who had confessed during the book club's discussion of
War
that he was institutionalized. But now he was admitting that love had its limit, and that limit was a Rolex. He was being honest, at least.

With Ben in his camp, Gaston warmed to his argument and said that even though people today are still as romantic as O. Henry's characters, the world had changed. It was now a more material world. Dread agreed, saying that grand romantic gestures were part of an earlier age of chivalry and that the characters in “The Gift of the Magi” were “too unselfish.” Dread had never claimed to be an altruist. But I wasn't surprised when Deshane, the “lovey-dovey” prison poet, challenged them both, asserting that romance was still with us, causing people to buy “stuff they wouldn't normally buy.”

Peter then made a point that shone a new light on the story for me even though I had read it many times. An obvious point too. “My take is that the author is illustrating how possessions don't actually have a value,” he said. “The value is the intent and the love.” It reminded me of Ian McEwan's ruminations on stuff in his novel
Saturday
—how a character's household goods become disconnected meaningless objects after she dies.

With Peter's comment in our minds, we considered O. Henry's gloss at the end of the story: a comment on whether his characters were unwise in money, but wise in matters of love. Several in the room had a story to tell about mistakes they had made mixing love and money, but I couldn't hear them because so many were talking at once. Deshane said something about people doing “stupid stuff like co-signing for lovers,” showing that the men were not so unlike O. Henry's characters despite their street-smart facades.

It struck me that, in some ways, the prison economy at Collins Bay at that moment in 2011 was a lot like the economy of 1904, when O. Henry's characters were counting their pennies. For those inmates with a prison job, the pay averaged $3 a day—yielding only about $700 annually—less in real terms than the average annual wage back at the beginning of the twentieth century. Only one of the book club members that I knew had been able to secure a coveted higher-paying ($6.90 a day) skilled job at Collins Bay's CORCAN manufacturing shop. That was Gaston. In that job, he was eligible for “incentive” pay of $1.25 to $2.50 an hour on top of the flat daily rate. Even so, he and other inmates who earned more than $69 a month were required to pay 25 percent of their earnings to the federal government for room and board. And Gaston saved as much pay as possible to send home to his wife and four children. The gap between the Dillingham Youngs' income and the inmates' income was narrow.

Before Carol read the next O. Henry story, the chaplain came in to open a window to dispel some of the heat in the room. Deshane muttered that he was sure to catch a cold now. It was cold outside and warm in the prison, which was a good segue to O. Henry's “The Cop and the Anthem,” another of his best-known stories. Its hero is Soapy, a New York City hobo and drunk who tries in vain to get arrested before winter so that he can spend the cold months in a warm lock-up. After his small-time misdemeanours fail to result in a jail sentence, he lingers outside a church where organ music inspires him to go straight and apply for a job. In a twist, he is arrested for loitering. I was a sucker for old-fashioned twist endings, dated though they were.

“O. Henry has a thing for irony,” said Ben.

The other guys got it too. “When he actually tried to stay out and do something good, he found himself in jail, right?” said one of the guys.

This was the third month in a row in which institutionalization had cropped up as a theme. First it was the soldiers in Sebastian Junger's
War
wanting to return to the front, then the parolee in
The Grapes of Wrath
missing the comforts of prison. And now Soapy yearning for a nice warm jail. But the men may have been sick of that topic, because instead they wanted to talk about whether short stories were experiencing a comeback. I confirmed that the short story was indeed enjoying renewed popularity and told them about some popular contemporary short story writers like David Bezmozgis, a Canadian whom
The New Yorker
had named among the top twenty promising fiction writers under forty.

At the break I took a moment to ask Deshane how his poetry was coming along. He took off his Celtics cap and repositioned it on his head. “Just fine, Miss,” he told me. But I could tell from his evasive expression that the assignment of writing a poem about
The Grapes of Wrath
had either been forgotten or ignored as uninteresting.

He saw my eyes drop to the tattoos on his arm. The dark ink on the dark skin made them hard to make out. I asked him what they signified.

“This one is ‘Can't Live Without Money,'” he said, a droll counterpoint to O. Henry's message in “The Gift of the Magi.” “And these are just project buildings, like I've lived in,” he added, pointing to a large tattoo of high-rise apartment buildings. “And this is ‘Never Give Up' in Chinese.” The Chinese character was emblazoned on one side of his neck. Barely visible at the neckline of his short-sleeved shirt were the initials of his family members. “My fams.” Home and those he loves. A few words to live by. Deshane was a romantic, but with a love for money too.

Like many of the other men, he also had tattooed images of a smiling face and a frowning one.

“Comedy and tragedy?”

“Laugh now, cry later,” he said. I could see now why so many of the inmates had that tattoo. The mantra was essentially “live for today, worry about the consequences later.”

Several of the guys then gathered around me with their coffee. They had noticed my husband's Mercedes key, which I had forgotten to deposit in the lockbox at the prison reception and had stupidly taken out of my satchel while looking for another pen. My husband had insisted I drive his company car that morning because my old station wagon was unreliable in winter. It was as though the men had homing devices for the logo. I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck as they crowded around. They wanted to know if the Mercedes was mine. I wasn't surprised that they liked nice cars or gravitated to material status symbols, given how little they had. But how quickly they had forgotten the O. Henry parable. Their interest made me feel a little panicky. The last time a criminal paid attention to a Mercedes key in my hand, I was being strangled.

I was grateful that at that moment Carol summoned the men back into the circle. There was one more literary gift she had planned for them that day: a reading of T.S. Eliot's poem “Journey of the Magi,” which he wrote as a kind of Christmas card in 1927, the year he converted from Unitarianism to Anglo-Catholicism. The poem operates as a metaphor for his own personal conversion. Narrated by one of the Wise Men in his dotage, the lines reminisce about how he and the other Magi travelled to visit the newborn Jesus, but along the way encountered premonitions of the death of Jesus and the end of their own Zoroastrian beliefs. It conveys feelings of alienation and of being surpassed by a changing world—themes that would resonate for some of the men at Collins Bay. Technology alone was evolving beyond recognition while the inmates did time.

Carol read it aloud. I recognized one line of Eliot's as the source for the title of Rohinton Mistry's novel
Such a Long Journey
, which the men had read in the summer. I caught Ben's eye. Carol read it a second time, more slowly, and urged the men to listen with their imaginations, not their heads. The opening stanza was wonderful for its gritty portrayal of the Three Kings not as regal bearers of frankincense and myrrh, but as put-upon travellers in winter, with obstinate camels and unreliable camel drivers.

“T.S. Eliot has taken a little bit of the story and tried to humanize it,” explained Carol. “What picture did you get of the camel keepers?”

“They wanted their women and liquor,” said Roman.