A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [143]
“What’s so funny?” Howard said, coming into the living room where I was huddled into the sofa, clutching my stomach. Before I could explain, Emma said sternly, “It’s a joke I have with Mom.”
He raised his eyebrows and backed off. “Wouldn’t ever want to get between a private joke.”
She came to me and whispered in my ear. “Did you have a water tube, and the green pellets to eat, and sawdust on the floor?” To gratify her, to keep her beside me, I spun out my laughter, trying to keep it even and continuous, relishing our first little confidence.
I had wittingly hid from the terrors of the world in the bosom of our farm. I had been grateful not to worry about crossfire on my way to the grocery store, grateful about not having to lock our doors, grateful there weren’t yet signs of gang activity in the high school. I had known that a person’s place in society was precarious, that an ill wind could push you across to the other, the wrong, side. Theresa carried on at length in her letters about how difficult it must be for someone such as I to deal with the horrors of jail. She meant well, I know. And while jail is a shock to a middle-class person—more so than for the drug addicts and prostitutes who regularly come in off the street, I came to think that for the common good everyone should spend a little time reduced to a hamster, that incarceration should be mandatory, like jury duty. Lynelle, a prisoner who was dying from AIDS, said, “Bein’ cooped up make a person feel, I don’t know, real churchlike after a while. Your big old body ain’t nothin’ but shit, so it make you think about whatever else is kickin’ around. I sees visions, I hears words. And then, when you gets out, don’t the air smell good? Damn, even the cold smell good.”
Howard, like Emma, curious about places he’d never been, at first seemed to have an urgent need to know all about my experience. I understood that he wanted to relieve me of the burden of it, to feel as if he had somehow shared in my misery. I think he must have thought I was bent on denying him the opportunity, that I was holding my trials close to my chest as I made my way to martyrdom. For the longest time I couldn’t speak of what it had been like to be locked away, partly because it was only afterward that I registered fear. I’d start thinking back and break out into a sweat. I sensed that what he really wanted was a neat package, a summary which concluded with the assertion that I was well. It wasn’t as simple as telling the family a narrative about a trip downtown. Jail is one of the last holdouts on earth, a place where there is still an oral tradition. Sometimes I think the inmates made trouble not only so there’d be a story to tell, but so there’d be five stories to tell, each rendition becoming funnier or more grotesque or outlandish. There were stories to tell, certainly, but there were also stories to tell about the telling of the stories. Although I long ago lost faith in the idea of Truth, I knew that once I spoke, the stories would take on their own shape, their own truth. In my darkest hour I doubted that there was even a lesson to take from that rubble of time. But whatever the moral was, I knew I needed to fashion the pieces together, and to myself, before all of it came tumbling out, the essence drifting heavenward, gone before I understood what it was.
Plenty has been recorded about the violence, the foulness, the utter uselessness of jail life. A great deal more will be said as the years wear on, with the present trend of sentencing criminals without the opportunity for parole. The Racine Jail was a relatively mild place and I should count myself lucky that I wasn’t part of a larger, poorer system. It is marvelous how few details there are in jail; it is a feat, that in a world so various men can pare a place down to hard