Wright C.D. - One Big Self: An Investigation

Try to remember what I wore when I visited the prisons. Trying to remember how tall was my boy then. What books was I teaching. Trying to remember how I hoped to add one true and lonely word to the host of texts that bear upon incarceration. Something about the extra-realism of that peculiar institution caused me to balk, also the resistance of poetry to the conventions of evidentiary writing, notwithstanding top-notch examples to the contrary: Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Wilde, Valry, Celan, Desnos, et al. After all, I am not them.

She asked me to come down, my friend the photographer, and I went, and then I wanted to see if my art could handle that hoe. Trying to remember how my skin felt when I opened an envelope of proofs of Deborah Lusters intimate aluminum portraits of the inmates at Transylvania (the site of East Carroll Parish Prison Farm, a minimum-security male prison, now closed); then Angola (the site of Louisiana State Penitentiary, maximum security); then St. Gabriel (the site of the Louisiana Correctional Institution for Women, the LCIW). I was electrified by the first facea young, handsome man blowing smoke out of his nose. Behind every anonymous number, a very specific face. On the phone my friend described to me the rich Delta grounds of Angola, 18,000 acres.

Angola, where the topsoil is measured not in inches but feet. The former sugarcane plantation lies at the confluence of rivers and borderland of the unruly Tunica Hills. Grey pelicans nest on the two prison lakes, alongside the airstrip, the grading sheds, the endless fields of okra and corn. Then theres the prison museum, the prison radio station, the prison magazine; the tracking horses and tracking dogs trained by inmates and the tree-lined neighborhood of free-world residents, their children bused outside the fence to school. Then the immaculate cinder-block buildings that house the inmates, the administration building, and the death house; the greenhouse and extensive flower bedstake away the fencing and it resembles nothing so much as a college campus. The men in maximum number more than the men who lived in my hometown.

Then theres the geriatric unit, the award-winning hospice program; the caisson the inmates built to bear the men in the hand-built coffins to one of the two graveyards inside the prison. In the old burial ground most graves are not identified by name. The caisson is pulled by draft horses, French Quarter style. When the champion of the prison rodeo had a heart attack in the fields, a riderless horse led the final procession. The celebrated inmates uniform was retired to the prison museum. Everything about Louisiana seems to constitute itself differently from everywhere else in the Union: the food, the idiom, the stuff in the trees, the critters in the water, and the laws, Napoleonic, not mother-country common law.

The prisons inevitably mirror differences found in the free world. Where they came up with their mirrors is another mystery. (In maximum, they are made of metal.) The definition of the face is a memory. Vivid to me is Debbie saying that at the trial of her mothers murderer, she looked around and saw the people sitting on separate sides of the courtroom, the way they do at a wedding, the brides people, the grooms people, and she tried to take in the damage radiating through the distinct linesthe perpetrators side, the victims side. Vivid to me is leaving Angola after the first visit and Debbie asking what I thought, and I said (too fast) I thought those were the nicest people I had ever met, and the ironic laughter it provoked in us both, the car yawing. The obvious truth, people are people.

Equally, the damage is never limited to perpetrator and victim. Also, that the crimes are not the sum of the criminal any more than anyone is entirely separable from their acts. I remember an afternoon at the iron pile at Transylvania watching the men plait each others hair between sets at the weight bench. When I asked about a man whose face was severely scarred, a very specific face, with large, direct aquamarine eyes, a guard told me that the mans brother had thrown a tire over his head and set it on fire. This I did not know how to absorb. It was a steaming day; the men were lifting weights and plaiting their hair.

I remember Easter weekend at the womens prison. The day before, a long line formed outside the prison-run beauty shop. Inside, the women having their hair fixed were talking back to the soap operas on the small snowy screen. By visiting day the inner courtyard had been transformed into a theme park for the children. A trampoline had been rented, a cottoncandy machine; someone dressed in a bunny suit was organizing an egg hunt. The little girls wore starched, flouncy dresses, and the boys white jackets and black, clip-on bow ties.

The women were dressed up, too, even the ones shackled at the ankle and waist. Deborah photographed all day, nonstop. Identifiable pictures of children would have to be excluded from publication, but people wanted a keepsake. We left before visiting hours ended. It wasnt our place to be there. It wasnt really in us to be there.

Remember sitting in the frigid Holiday Inn bar near St. Gabriel, at the end of one visit to the womens prison, staring at the aquarium, not talking. I talked to a man who told me he has done a lot of time. Lot of time. He should write a book, he said. He wants to be a success.