Chapter 14
Fourteen
worth around two grand. In Germany, college students were taking sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall, climbing up onto the ruins
to wave flags and pump their fists. Communism had imploded in East Germany, an event that shook the world; Arthur hardly noticed.
pay. But then, as he slid the book into his backpack, a queer lightheaded sensation rolled over him and he began to feel sick.
His heart quailed at the thought of stealing something so precious. It was too much. He grabbed a first edition of All the Sad Young Men by Fitzgerald instead.
He had considered taking sixty thousand dollars of books all in one go, but Gwen had cautioned him against it. “Tell them
you can’t take too much too quickly. Tell them there’s always other students around and that you have to be careful. Give
’em one book worth a grand, another worth two.”
“But I could pay off everything I owe by Thanksgiving.”
“And what do you think happens then?” she asked him. “You think they’ll shake your hand, say it was a pleasure doing business,
and you’ll never hear from them again? You think they’re the kind of people who get tired of free money?”
He drove to Black Cricket to visit his mother the weekend before Thanksgiving. Arthur was braced to see the Nighswanders—more
than 150 visitors were there for an afternoon holiday dinner with their incarcerated relatives—but they didn’t show.
The buffet was in the prison gym: lukewarm turkey, congealing brown gravy, and a yam casserole under a half-inch of toasted marshmallows.
Folding tables had been set up for the families, red-and-white-checked cloths thrown over them for a touch of class, white cards to indicate where people should sit.
Maybe half of the families in the room were Black.
There was a certain grim, nihilistic comedy in it, he thought.
At a prison get-together, he blended right in; at the college where he hoped to graduate with honors, he was the only Black face in the whole cafeteria, unless the janitor had been summoned to mop up a spill.
Arthur found their table without seeing any sign of his mother.
He was antsy, wondering if he should ask a guard if she was being held up for some reason, when Erin mounted the low stage at the far end of the room.
She wore her usual prison jumpsuit, with her clerical stole tossed over her shoulders.
It had fallen to her to say grace. When she smiled down at them, Arthur felt like he had turned his face into the first warm rays of spring.
“Aren’t we the lucky ones,” she said, and there was a bit of laughter—families sitting with loved ones doing ten years for arson, twenty for transporting, thirty for homicide.
“Most of the women in this room never expected to live this long. Most of our families never thought we would either. Most of us have done things we’d give anything to take back, but somehow people have decided to love us anyway, and they’re here with us today .
. . though we’ve put them through plenty of sorrow .
. . and believe me, folks, we aren’t done yet.
You haven’t tasted sorrow till you’ve tried prison cafeteria turkey.
” This time the laughter was almost raucous.
His mother had always been good at this, at finding her way to the words others needed to hear.
“You don’t have to be in prison to feel trapped.
You don’t have to receive a sentence to feel like you’re serving life.
Most of us weren’t free before we were locked up.
We were already serving time, the worst kind of time, locked away with our own guilt while doing things that made us hate ourselves.
Your own head can be solitary confinement.
But here we are now, and it’s Thanksgiving and the people we love are with us still, serving our sentences with us.
Counting the days with us. Their love is our parole.
Let’s bow our heads and say thanks for them, thanks for our good luck.
Because we are loved, prison doesn’t have to be where freedom ends .
. . it might be where freedom begins. Amen and God bless. ”
By the time she stepped from the podium, Arthur was fighting tears, blinking furiously to hold them back.
Oh, Mom, he thought. No parole for me. I have been found guilty of being a helpless chickenshit and my warden is Jayne Nighswander.
His mother reached the table, touched his cheek with one finger, brushing away a tear.
“Damn,” she said, trying to make a joke of it. “I knew I was good, but I didn’t think I was that good.” Then, in a gentler voice, she said, “You all right?”
For a moment he was close to telling her. But if he told, she’d tell. And then what? In the absolute best-case scenario, she would be placed under protection, and the police would round
up Jayne, Ronnie . . . and Tana. Tana would have that baby in a prison hospital, and it would be both the first and last time
she ever held her infant in her arms.
And that was only if everything went exactly right. If anything went sideways, his mother would be stabbed to death in the
exercise yard and Tana would still have her baby ripped away from her. No. He was committed now. He would steal books until he got caught or Erin got parole
and set them both free.
He rubbed roughly at his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Look around, Ma,” he said, gesturing at the wet-eyed families and choked-up convicts seated at the other tables. “You killed
’em. It’s a massacre. Someone ought to call the cops.”