Chapter Eighteen
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I let a week go by before I get a pass from my counselor and find my way to the library on the top floor of the main building. Coincidentally, that guy Javier who chaired last Sunday’s meeting is working the circulation desk.
“Hey, there,” he says. “Corby, right?” I nod, pleased that he remembers my name. I ask whether he knows of any job openings. “Here, you mean? You’d have to check with the boss about that,” he says. He points to the small office behind him. “Door’s open, so you can knock and go right in.”
Fagie Millman has no eyebrows; that and the headscarf that’s riding back from her forehead reveal her baldness that says cancer treatments.
She’s warm and welcoming and remembers my name from Dr. Patel’s email, but says she doesn’t have any open slots.
“I’m happy to add your name to my waiting list,” she says.
“There are three ahead of you, but one of my current workers has applied for a job in food prep and is waiting to hear back. And there’s always a chance that someone will become eligible for early parole.
” In the meantime, she says, I should feel free to browse.
“And here, have one,” she says, holding out a plate of chocolate chip cookies.
“After he retired, my husband, Howie, was bored out of his mind until he discovered he likes to bake. I’d weigh a thousand pounds if I ate everything that comes out of our oven.
Warden Rickerby frowns on my bringing in goodies for you fellas, but nuts to her.
What’s she going to do? Fire me after twenty-eight years? ”
I thank her, take a cookie, and tell her I have a two-hour pass.
Does she mind if I hang around and do some reading?
She says she’d be delighted. Handing me a pencil and a slip of paper, she has me write down my name and inmate number.
When I hand it back to her, she compliments me on my legible handwriting.
Makes me smile when she says that. At Yates, you take whatever praise you can get.
The collection’s pretty thin. I browse through sci-fi, biography, nature.
When I read the titles on the shelf labeled “Local Interest,” I pull out something called Connecticut’s Carceral History 1773–2012.
On the cover are two photos: one of New-Gate, the state’s first prison, the other of this place.
I’m curious about New-Gate. When the state turned it into a museum, Emily took her sixth-grade class on a field trip there and came home with a brochure.
From what I remember, the prison had been a copper mine before it housed crooks, killers, and British prisoners of war.
Yates is bleak enough, but from the pictures in the book I’m holding, the conditions at New-Gate were practically inhuman.
I sit down at a table on the opposite end of an older Black inmate seated in a wheelchair.
Short gray dreads, horn-rimmed glasses drooping halfway down his nose, faded US Navy tattoo.
He’s mouthing the words as he reads, tracing each line with his finger.
When he looks up at me, I nod a hello. He nods back, not smiling, and holds up the paperback he’s reading, Charcoal Joe .
He asks whether I’ve ever read any Easy Rawlins books.
“Can’t say that I have,” I tell him. “I’ve heard of that author, though. ”
I can tell from his “pfft” that I haven’t won any points with that answer. “The author’s Walter Mosley. Easy Rawlins is the character . Who you think writes all them Tarzan books? Tarzan?”
Yeah, whatever, Gramps. I give him a half-smile and crack open Connecticut’s Carceral History .
The introduction describes how the public’s attitudes about prison is a pendulum that swings back and forth between punishment and rehabilitation, depending on which way the political winds are blowing.
The book was published in 2012, when Obama was president.
I remember reading about him visiting some prison and telling the inmates that some of them were there because they’d made the same kind of mistakes that he made when he was young.
His message was all about hope and change and getting past those mistakes.
Now that Trump’s in the White House, the political winds have shifted so abruptly, you could get whiplash.
I flip to the back of the book. Turns out the author, Nathan Kipp, was a prisoner at Yates who came here at nineteen for a gang-related assault.
Started taking correspondence courses while he was here and ended up as a college professor.
It says Connecticut’s Carceral History was his doctoral thesis.
In his author photo, he looks early forties maybe.
Bald-headed, full beard, arms folded across his chest. Despite his achievements, there’s a sadness in his eyes.
Did he always have that look or did he earn it in here?
I open the front and read the dedication: “To those who live in prisons of their own or others’ making.” He’s inscribed this copy to Fagie Millman, thanking her for believing in him before he believed in himself. Nice.
I skip the rest of the introduction and dip into the history.
The first chapter says that in the 1600s, the Puritans believed crime and sinning were the same thing, and that punishment was more about public humiliation than keeping people locked up.
Thieves, blasphemers, drunks, liars, adulterers, idolaters, practitioners of witchcraft or Quakerism could be lashed, put in stocks, branded on the forehead with a red-hot iron, or banished to the wilderness.
The most egregious transgressors could have an ear severed or be escorted to the gallows, where they would meet the noose.
Kipp writes that New-Gate was the first of its kind in Colonial America: a state prison.
At New-Gate, the book says, incarcerated men were forced to live seventy-five feet underground in the caves and shafts of the converted mine, and that the facility was later replaced by Westfield Penitentiary, a four-story brick fortress built by New-Gate prisoners who were then locked up there.
In a way, it’s not that different from what happens at this place.
A lot of the guys here work for Prison Industries, making office furniture and body armor, assembling electronics, doing DMV data entry—all for a whopping fifty cents an hour.
I overheard some guy in the shower room griping to his buddy that from the twentysomething dollars a month he earns “working for the man,” they take out for taxes, victim restitution, and program costs.
The book says that by 1850, the prison population had far outgrown the Westfield facility, leading to overcrowding, escapes, brawls, and the stabbing death of a controversial warden.
Deemed ineffective with the now more violent population, the penitentiary system was abandoned and the pendulum swung back to a more punitive—
“If I was you, I’d begin at the beginning.”
I jump a little; I forgot about the old guy on the other side of the table. I look over at him, confused. “ Devil in a Blue Dress. Start there.”
“Oh,” I said. “Mosley. Right.”
“There’s over a dozen Easy Rawlins stories. And he’s got other series, too.”
I’m more interested in what this guy looks like than what he’s saying.
His dreads are more salt than pepper. Smooth caramel-colored skin, hands as big as catcher’s mitts.
He’s big and broad-shouldered with a body gone to fat on prison food, but he must have had a fullback’s body when he was younger.
I feel my right hand moving under the table as if I’m sketching him.
When he stops talking and wheels himself over to the back window, I look at the other books on his side of the table: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time , a biography of Satchel Paige, The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness .
Dude’s reading a lot more than detective fiction.
When he wheels back to the table, I ask him whether he’s planning to read all of those.
“Gonna re read Baldwin,” he says. “For the others, I got a system. Give everything the fifty-pages test. If I like what I’m reading, I keep going.
If I don’t, I stop. What are you—in your thirties?
” Thirty-five, I tell him. “Well, I ain’t got as much time left as you, so I’m choosy. What’s that you’re reading?”
When I hold up the book, he says he could’ve written that one—that he’s a walking history of this place.
“Been here since nineteen hundred and eighty-two. Much better back then. They used to let us go fishing in the river, swim when the weather was hot, play softball. They supervised us, sure, and you had to earn them privileges. They didn’t just hand ‘em to you.
But back then, we was treated like more than just our crime.
The warden? Warden Hayden Barnes? He used to put on a hot dog roast for us on the Fourth of July and him and his deputy would do the cooking.
“And get this. If you didn’t have no tickets for a year, you could enter a drawing to win an overnight in the trailer with your missus so that you and her could have some private time.
Enjoy some marital relations, know what I’m saying?
The time I won, January of ‘84, my wife, Mary, brought in some home cooking in a picnic basket. We have four kids and the youngest one got made in the trailer that night after my belly was full up with baked Virginia ham, sweet potato pie, and peach cobbler.”
“Nineteen eighty-four? That’s the year I was two.”
“That right?” As in, so what? “You got kids?” he asks.
“Two,” I say, then catch myself. “Well, one, actually. A daughter.” I feel my face flush as he stares at me, puzzled. Luckily, Mrs. Millman comes toward us, rescuing me with her plate of cookies.