Читать книгу By Heart - Judith Tannenbaum - Страница 9

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This Near-Stranger’s Words

“NINETY DEGREES hotter, I’d be warm,” Spoon Jackson tells me. Spoon sits near the bottom of a circular metal staircase in front of San Quentin’s education building. I stand, nervous as usual. Nervous not because this is prison, but because I’m always nervous. Nervous system nervous, nervous inside my skin. Skin now wet with the day’s unusual heat. Spoon and I wait for the officer to arrive, to unlock the door with a key from his belt, and to let us inside.

Us: a tall, black man in his late twenties; a short, white woman ten years older.

“I’m from the Mohave, the heart of the high desert,” Spoon says. A fact and, I assume, the cause of Spoon’s love of swelter.

That anyone could want this hot day even hotter is shocking enough. More shocking still are all these words from Spoon’s lips. Spoon? The man who has spoken so little in our poetry class this past year? I’m too hot to express my surprise with any grand flourish but I’m definitely surprised. I don’t know what Spoon notes on my face. His eyes are hidden by sunglasses, as usual, and I can’t see what he feels. We’re in pause-mode as we wait for the guard: small talk instead of conversation, silence (Spoon), smiles (me).

We wait and men move all around us. Mostly men dressed in blue denim, the blue that Spoon wears. A fair number of men in green. For example, the guard walking toward us. A few women, too, wear the green uniform. Some people are dressed, as I am, in street clothes. This Wednesday I wear a long flowered skirt, a turquoise shirt, Birkenstock sandals. Hippie both prisoners and guards tease me.

Movement, Afternoon Movement. That’s how this time of day is referred to at San Quentin. Most prisoners’ jobs are now over and the men in blue are on their way back to their cells or to workshops and classes that run until count clears, an imprecise moment that usually occurs between four thirty and five.

I’ve been teaching poetry at the prison for just over one year, and what I know of San Quentin is Monday nights: the sight of boats on the bay as I walk from the parking lot toward the castle-like structure ahead; the sound of guards joking as they go through the papers I carry; the creak of metal gates opening to let me inside, the clang as they shut; birdsong in the tree in front of the captain’s porch at the edge of what’s called the garden plaza; the slight dungeon-y smell of the education building and our basement classroom; prison place names: Yard Side, Bay Side, West Block, Four Post, Max Shack, the Upper Yard; walking through the last gate after class is over and hearing the sound of the bay lap the rocky shore, as though along the promenade in Nice or some other Riviera town. I know the men in my class—Angel and his jeremiads, Coties’ concern for his children, Elmo’s intelligence and strength, Spoon nearly silent. I know what they tell me, their writing, the poems and conversations we share. I know something and know this something isn’t much.

Now, this very day, begins the expansion of my poetry program from Monday nights to twenty hours each week. One element of this expansion is the addition of weekly conversations with one, then another, of my students. I’ve chosen to meet first with Spoon because he is the man I’m most curious about—he’s in class every Monday though he says nearly nothing and shows us few poems. What is he getting from our workshop, I wonder. Why does Spoon come to class every week?

The officer finally arrives. He checks Spoon’s name on the movement sheet, takes his ID card, and waves us downstairs. I expected that I would have to do all the talking, but as we walk past the window that frames Mount Tamalpais, Spoon tells me how, as a boy, he’d stand on Crooks Street and look out at the mountains. “I thought those hills held the whole world,” Spoon says as we descend the staircase. “How naïve was I.”

I carry a bundle of poems in case Spoon has brought none of his own. But as we walk along the basement hallway, I note the cardboard container Spoon carries. I’m prepared with poetry talk, but once we’re inside the classroom, Spoon empties his makeshift briefcase and spreads file folders out on the table between us. I have readied a speech about the purpose of these individual consultations, but before I begin, Spoon reaches into a folder and hands me a thick stack of poems.

Spoon removes the sunglasses I’ve never seen him without and looks toward the heavily barred window through which some late afternoon late summer light falls. The room is so quiet with only the two of us in it, though I hear prisoner musicians play with their teacher, Malonga, at the end of the hall and boot steps as the guards patrol outside the classroom.

I swoon the internal swoon that I hope will allow me to settle. I try to shut it all out—the shaft of bright light in the basement’s darkness, the drumbeats, the boots—in order to focus on Spoon’s poems, to bring myself to this near-stranger’s words, and to enter the world these words introduce. Greyhounds, rabbits, railroad tracks, a small boy alone on B Hill. Twenty or thirty poems. No poem yet masterly, no poem ready to be proclaimed, but clearly Spoon—behind his dark shades—was not simply sleeping during our Monday night class.

My mind races. A cliché, as I’d note to any student. A cliché and also accurate - my mind does race. I hear the buzz of its motor, feel its incessant forward motion. I affirm, remark, praise, ask questions, offer a few suggestions. Mentally I go through my poetry library at home to see which books Spoon might want to read. I assess what formal material about poetics might be most useful. I talk to Spoon about the power of the concrete, pointing to lines in his poems, to particular phrases: those greyhounds, rabbits, and railroad tracks. When I get home, I’ve already decided, I’ll type up the words Spoon spoke in this hour together. I want Spoon to hear his actual voice on the page. The city jail’s across from the high school, and I couldn’t see but I heard the sounds of the games, those football games I’d gone to my whole life in that town. I want him to note the details of his own stories. My nephew wrote me a letter, first time in the ten years I’ve been here. He wrote he remembers I taught him to drive, to whistle. He remembers us washing my car. He wrote, “Dear Uncle Stanley.”

I see Spoon: his slight mustache and beard, his wide nose, light reflected off his dark skin. I hear Spoon’s speech, a slow slur of sound different from any I know. Not urban, not old time Southern. Some kind of country, I guess. Spoon’s words run together and it takes me awhile to find how to listen.

Although I’m most conscious of what’s right before me—the physical fact of Spoon Jackson, the words he speaks and the poems he’s written—my attention is also caught by more subtle matters. Space, for example. My happiness and surprise, as well as my effort to understand every word Spoon speaks, tilt my body forward. Spoon’s words reach out, too. A little, at least. His body, though, rests against the back of his wooden chair. The space between us—space I lean into, space Spoon reclines at the edge of—creates its own story. What am I saying to Spoon with my forward motion? What is he saying to me with his apparently casual slouch?

“Pay attention,” I’ve exhorted most weeks in class. “A poet’s task is to pay attention.”

And my students have laughed. “Judith, when we came down the stairs tonight, did you notice that the garbage can is no longer by the computer lab, but right next to our classroom?” one or another has asked me. “Did you see that the light was dimmer than usual in front of the music room? Did you hear how quietly those cops whispered on their way down the hall?”

I shake my head no.

“And you’retelling usto pay attention?”

So I know, although we’re saying nothing about it, that Spoon is noting as I am the space between us and the way this space shifts as we talk. I know the speed at which I ask question after question speaks some story to Spoon. As does my smile, as does the folded sheet of paper I use as a fan. But what? What story?

Prison rules might want me to remove everything that is not neutral and reduce this encounter to only the dictionary meaning of the words Spoon and I speak. But poetry isn’t only dictionary meaning and neither is life. Poetry and life are both filled with connotation. I don’t know Spoon well enough yet to even imagine what connotations he might bring to this exchange we’re now in the midst of. I trip over my feet—metaphorically, imagistically—trying to avoid any pitfalls concealed by all this unknown nuance. No wonder I’m always nervous: doing my best to skirt trouble I can sense as possibility but not see as fact, to plan beforehand, and to notice exit routes just in case.

Here’s an example, arranging a classroom. Teaching is thought of as imparting knowledge or skills. As inspiration, maybe. Lesson plans, assignments, evaluation, class management. All relevant, of course. But also relevant is how the room is set up. At first I pulled two heavy tables together in our Monday night classroom and we all sat around the rectangular surface. This seating created its own equality. Or it seemed so to me. Then we were given a room with wooden desk-chairs, which I placed in a circle. The men didn’t like my arrangement, though, and moved their seats into informal rows leaving me to the teacher’s desk in front of the room. I guess my students wanted me to claim more professorial authority than I did when left to my own what-do-you-think, Socratic-questioning, Power-to-the-People instincts.

In class, Spoon took seating arrangements into his own hands. Literally. He lifted wooden chairs and carried them to the doorway where he constructed a half-circle of chairs as a perimeter he sat down within. Spoon was in class, but on his own terms. Some teacher might mind, might insist Spoon join the group. I didn’t. I didn’t mind and I didn’t insist. Another artist teaching at the prison told me that Spoon scared him. Spoon didn’t scare me. After all I was shy and liked being on the periphery, too. Besides, who says equality requires uniformity? From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. I wasn’t a Marxist, but this phrase of Marx’s seemed to me central to good teaching practice.

I often laughed at myself, or Fate, or whatever force had me standing so often in front of a group. I hated groups. Not hated, but groups made me uncomfortable and leading them made me a bit woozy. For one task of being a teacher is to welcome each individual, while simultaneously tracking the group as a whole. Offering the floor to each student and keeping things moving is two things, and doing two things at once, as I say, made me dizzy.

Still, this dizzy dance is one a teacher must master. When a kindergarten girl in the class circle launches into a detailed account of her grandmother’s visit, a teacher’s obligation is to listen with excitement while at the same time to skillfully offer the floor to the next child with his hand in the air waving like mad. When Spoon Jackson sat in his half-circle of chairs, I affirmed his right to separate from the group while simultaneously including him: making eye contact, mentioning his name, asking if he could see the videotaped poetry reading I had just put on the VCR.

This September afternoon, Spoon and I meet for our first individual consultation; I am thirty-nine years old and my work life, for more than a decade, has been anchored in the belief that making art is a human birthright. Creating, I believe, is not only the province of an artist in his garret, but also of children, hospital patients, soldiers, drug addicts, cowboys, and old folk. And the province of prisoners, too.

So I put myself in front of groups of children, old folk, and prisoners. We read poems together, write poems, study poetics, and converse about the world—the smell of a pippin apple in October and the nature of time, the taste of a grandmother’s pecan pie and what we mean when we write the word “love.”

Although I do all I know to welcome the us my pedagogy honors, in my heart of hearts I believe writing is a solo journey. So I am most grateful to have been granted the residency I am now beginning. Its promise of twenty hours each week at the prison means that I can add individual consultations, such as this one with Spoon, into my weekly schedule. My curiosity now will have plenty of room. I’ll have time to ask: Who is this person, my student? What are his loves, interests, and responses to the world? Which writers, poems, artwork, and theories might move him? The residency will give me time to listen and to read each student’s work so I can at least catch a glimpse of his path. And then more time to find material—books, single poems, recorded poetry readings—he might respond to.

Right now Spoon Jackson is before me, and I turn from my thoughts to the man. Twenty-nine years old, Spoon started serving a life without possibility of parole sentence when he was twenty. My daughter has recently turned sixteen. For the sharp slice of one moment, I imagine that Sara has fewer than four years more to live in the world, that at twenty she might end up in prison or disappear in some way. No! I throw a mental screen down fast on the thought. I will not imagine that. No!

How can I hold that No!—a human reaction that makes me want to turn away—and still say Yes to Spoon Jackson? How can I feel for Spoon’s fate, and the harm he caused that shaped that fate, and yet not be washed away by emotion? A Goldilocks question about finding “just right” between the poles of too much and too little. And also another task of a teacher not often listed alongside lesson plans and the rest. Right now, in this basement classroom, does “just right” require more distance? I could turn Spoon Jackson into a story. I love stories and Spoon has just shared an epic about a young man’s path from high school to state prison; from the heart of the high desert to San Quentin, the infamous Bastille by the Bay.

Or does “just right” require less distance? If so, I have to rouse myself from all this thinking and look at the human being on the other side of the table, the one whose eyes slide everywhere except toward my face. This twenty-nine-year-old man I’ve been talking with since 3:30. Real, no story. Dark skin, broad nose, a heart beating under his blue prisoner’s shirt. Spoon Jackson. A near stranger now slightly less strange.