Shakespeare Saved My Life Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Laura Bates

  Cover and internal design © 2013 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Vivian Ducas

  Cover illustration by Shane Rebenschied

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  From Bates, L. “‘To Know My Deed’: Finding Salvation through Shakespeare.” In Performing New Lives: Prison Theater, edited by J. Shailor, 33–48. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2011. Reprinted with permission of Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

  This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of her experiences over a period of years. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been re-created.

  Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a book about a prisoner in solitary confinement

  …and how his life was changed by Shakespeare.

  It is also about a Shakespeare professor

  …and how her life was changed by the prisoner.

  Welcome to a world that few ever enter,

  a world in which both prisoner and professor spent ten years together,

  learning, sharing, and growing through Shakespeare.

  I’ve been down this week.

  I was thinking maybe I’m a little homesick.

  Home. To me, I think it’s more an ideal than a place.

  Around the people you love, that’s home, that’s what excites me the most.

  The possibility of enjoying some of my life with the people I love.

  ’Cause it goes quick, don’t it?

  Life. Don’t it go?

  I mean, I’m only thirty. I’m not old.

  But, you know, I’ve been in here since I was a kid.

  It just goes so fast. Man! It just goes so fast.

  And everybody overlooks enjoying it.

  They just put themselves into so many prisons.

  —Larry Newton

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1: Favorite Freakin’ Shakespeare

  Chapter 2: The Value of Education

  Chapter 3: Breaking Out

  Chapter 4: Breaking In

  Chapter 5: I’m In

  Chapter 6: Newton’s In

  Chapter 7: Life Inside

  Chapter 8: The First Lesson I Teach

  Chapter 9: The First Group Session

  Chapter 10: The First Lesson I Learn

  Chapter 11: Regaining Lost Humanity

  Chapter 12: Contraband

  Chapter 13: Childhood

  Chapter 14: The Tragedy of Macbeth

  Chapter 15: Supermax Kid

  Chapter 16: The Closet

  Chapter 17: My Secret Life

  Chapter 18: Tough Freedoms

  Chapter 19: “To Know My Deed”

  Chapter 20: CSI: Muncie, Indiana

  Chapter 21: Death Penalty

  Chapter 22: Escape Artist

  Chapter 23: The Dagger I See before Me

  Chapter 24: The Shower: Newton

  Chapter 25: The Shower: Me

  Chapter 26: All Hands on Deck

  Chapter 27: The Boat

  Chapter 28: New Directions

  Chapter 29: Sensory Deprivation

  Chapter 30: Isolated…and Alone

  Chapter 31: Ghosts in the Cell

  Chapter 32: Insanity

  Chapter 33: More House Calls

  Chapter 34: Administrative Segregation versus Disciplinary Segregation

  Chapter 35: Killer Dog

  Chapter 36: Extraction

  Chapter 37: B-East

  Chapter 38: This Prison Don’t Matter

  Chapter 39: Meeting of the Minds

  Chapter 40: Dr. Newton

  Chapter 41: The Picture

  Chapter 42: “That’s Freedom”

  Chapter 43: Another Door Opens

  Chapter 44: Killer Dog Comes Inside

  Chapter 45: “Shakespearean Considerations”

  Chapter 46: Hamlet: to Revenge or Not to Revenge

  Chapter 47: Othello: Girl Meets Boy

  Chapter 48: “Shakespeare Saved My Life”

  Chapter 49: Shakespeare Saved My Life

  Chapter 50: Shakespeare Could Save Your Life Too

  Chapter 51: Doing Life

  Chapter 52: Romeo and Juliet

  Chapter 53: Romeo and Juliet for Youth Incarcerated as Adults

  Chapter 54: Balance

  Chapter 55: Tybalt Must Die!

  Chapter 56: Killer in the Classroom

  Chapter 57: Hands that Kill Can Also…Sew?

  Chapter 58: Fears and Phobias

  Chapter 59: Sociopath or…

  Chapter 60: Socrates

  Chapter 61: Doing Good for Bad Done

  Chapter 62: Correctional Education

  Chapter 63: “Cool!”

  Chapter 64: Timeline of Anxiety

  Chapter 65: Media Celebrity

  Chapter 66: Cell Phone in the Cell

  Chapter 67: Back to Seg

  Chapter 68: Remembering the Victims

  Chapter 69: Full Circle

  Chapter 70: Tragic Kingdom

  Chapter 71: “Stay Strong”

  Chapter 72: Closing Doors

  Chapter 73: The Letter

  Chapter 74: Powering through with Shakespeare

  Chapter 75: Revelation

  Chapter 76: Footprint in the World

  Chapter 77: Mother’s Day

  Chapter 78: Five Steps

  Afterword

  Reading Group Guide

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Foreword

  The work that Laura Bates has been doing for years with prison inmates and Shakespeare is of extraordinary importance. It has a kind of beauty and symmetry all its own.

  I have had the remarkable experience of being with her in small group discussions, first at Chicago’s Cook County Jail in 1996 and more recently with her inmate students in the correctional facilities of the state of Indiana, most notably the maximum-security Wabash Valley. Few experiences are as lastingly and vividly etched on my consciousness.

  At the Chicago lockup, security guards ushered me through at least four heavily locked gates that clanged shut as I passed through them. I then found myself in a sizable, windowless room with Laura as teacher and some eight or nine prison inmates, all of them African Americans in the age range of twenty to thirty-five and guilty of violent crimes including homicide as students. But no armed guards were present. The business of the day was to work on what one might call the “rumble” scene, right at the center of Romeo and Juliet, when first Mercutio and then Tybalt are slain in street fighting. Laura took her students through the scene, word by word, making sure that everyone understood what was being said. This led to a discussion of the ethics of gang warfare, hearkening back to the opening scene of the play with its violent confrontation of Capulets versus Montagues. Who started the brawl in act 3, scene 1? Who or what was to blame for the ancient quarrel between the two families? Why does Me
rcutio challenge Tybalt to a fight? What are we to make of the gentle words Romeo has for Tybalt when Romeo has been openly insulted by his opposite number? What do Romeo’s friends make of his “calm, dishonorable, vile submission”? Is Romeo to blame for changing his mind after the death of Mercutio? To what extent are peer pressures responsible for his decision to fight Tybalt? On all these matters, the student inmates called on their own extensive experience with gang rivalries and machismo codes of male honor. Everything they said seemed beautifully appropriate to me.

  Then Laura had them stand up and speak their lines as dialogue. They did quite well, even if the proper names came across as strange: Tybalt, Mercutio, Capulet, and Montague. Laura’s next move was wonderful, I thought: she asked them to paraphrase what the lines said in their own habits of speech. “Hey, man, let’s get out of here,” said Benvolio to Mercutio. “It’s hot, man, and those dudes the Capulets will be here any minute and there’s going to be trouble.” “You have about as much courage as a sick chicken,” said Mercutio in reply. “If you don’t have a couple of drinks in you, your face turns as white as my shirt.” And so it went, with greater and lesser degrees of accuracy. Laura was cool. She was in charge. She didn’t stand for any nonsense, but she listened, she helped, she respected. The men were plainly willing to be doing what they were doing. A gutsy performance on all sides.

  Years later, I visited Laura at Indiana State University, where I had the stirring experience of talking with some of Laura’s student inmates in the Indiana correctional system. They asked good questions. They talked with one another. The subject at hand was Macbeth. Even gutsier than her Romeo and Juliet work in Chicago is her work with Macbeth in solitary confinement.

  Recently, I copresented with Laura at a Shakespeare conference, where she showed a documentary of her work at the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility. Here the prisoners were not only inmates of Indiana’s maximum-security prison, but they were also in solitary confinement because they were judged to be especially violent and thus dangerous to guards and other inmates alike. They were in individual cells, each with a small aperture at waist height designed to facilitate the passing into the cell of food or whatever. Their voices could be heard, and their faces were partly visible when they crouched down at the aperture. They were escorted from their cells one at a time with two armed guards. No other person was allowed in the corridor when a prisoner was released into that space. Here it was that Laura sat on an improvised chair, asking questions, leading a discussion about Macbeth’s decision to kill Banquo. It is terrific that these prisoners have a chance to read and think about Macbeth, because what hangs over the play so much is the sense of fallen human nature and the threat of temptation that even an honorable man cannot resist: there but for the grace of God go I.

  The most remarkable of all the inmates whom I’ve gotten to know through Laura at the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility is Larry Newton, the subject of this fine book. Laura set up an interview between Larry and me one day. I was impressed at once with Larry: a serious person, gracious, good-humored, alive with intellectual curiosity. Laura suggested to Larry that he start things off by asking me questions that were on his mind.

  Larry asked me, “Do you think that Shakespeare wrote King John after the death of his own child? The pain he describes just seems so real.”

  To say the least, this question took me entirely by surprise.

  Larry was raising one of the most sophisticated and detailed questions in Shakespearean scholarship today. Stephen Greenblatt, in his Will in the World, has weighed in on the side of arguing that King John needs to come after the death of Shakespeare’s only son at the age of eleven, because Constance’s exquisite lament for the plight of her son Geoffrey (“Grief fills the room up of my absent child,” etc., 3.4.93) reads like a personal response on Shakespeare’s part to an unbearable loss. I am skeptical because we find other equally moving tributes to the death of a son in earlier plays, like Lord Talbot’s sad tribute to his slain son and heir young John Talbot in Henry the Sixth, Part One, 4.7.1–16 (“and there died / My Icarus, my blossom, in his pride”). And there are others. King John seems earlier than 1595–6, when Shakespeare wrote Richard the Second.

  The point here is not my attempt at an answer, but the remarkably probing and well-informed nature of the question. Larry had clearly done a lot of reading, all the more remarkable considering he did not have access to books about Shakespeare, getting his insights instead from the Shakespearean texts themselves. We talked about the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet and the dating of King John, and moved on to other matters, prompted again by his intellectual curiosity. Our conversation lasted over an hour and touched on at least ten plays. Clearly, Larry was not just throwing me preplanned, researched questions. I was amazed.

  He says that he wants to be the first prisoner in the state of Indiana to earn a PhD while incarcerated. I have no doubts of his ability.

  David Bevington

  University of Chicago

  CHAPTER 1

  Favorite Freakin’ Shakespeare

  Oh, man, this is my favorite freakin’ quote!”

  What professor wouldn’t like to hear a student enthuse so much over a Shakespeare play—a Shakespeare history play, no less! And then to be able to flip open the two-thousand-page Complete Works of Shakespeare and find the quote immediately: “When that this body did contain a spirit, a kingdom for it was too small a bound”!

  He smacks the book as he finishes reading. Meanwhile, I’m still scrambling to find the quote somewhere in Henry the Fourth, Part One.

  “Act uh…?”

  “Act 5, scene 4,” my student informs me, again smacking the page with his enthusiastic fist. “Oh, man, that is crazy!”

  Yes, this is crazy: I am sitting side-by-side with a prisoner who has just recently been allowed to join the general prison population after more than ten years in solitary confinement. We met three years prior, in 2003, when I created the first-ever Shakespeare program in a solitary confinement unit, and we spent three years working together in that unit. Now we have received unprecedented permission to work together, alone, unsupervised, to create a series of Shakespeare workbooks for prisoners. Newton is gesticulating so animatedly that it draws the attention of an officer walking by our little classroom. He pops his head inside.

  “Everything okay in here?” he asks.

  “Just reading Shakespeare,” I reply.

  He shakes his head and walks on.

  “That is crazy!” Newton repeats, his head still in the book.

  A record ten and a half consecutive years in solitary confinement, and he’s not crazy, he’s not dangerous—he’s reading Shakespeare.

  And maybe, just maybe, it is because he’s reading Shakespeare that he is not crazy, or dangerous.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Value of Education

  Ostracized. When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s in a west side Chicago ghetto, I didn’t know what the word meant. I didn’t know what many words meant because my immigrant parents didn’t speak English. With both a linguistic and a cultural gap, I often felt out of place among my classmates at the public school. I felt, well, ostracized.

  As World War II refugees from Eastern Europe, my parents had lost everything: home, possessions, friends, and family. Although they could not teach my sister and me the English language, they taught us a far more important lesson: the value of education. “No one can ever take that from you,” my mother told us. She had never had the chance to attain an education herself beyond six years of elementary school. One of four children raised on a little farm in the “old country,” her parents could afford to educate only every other child… and she was the other. Her older brother became a carpenter’s apprentice, and her sister went to nursing school. But she and her younger brother stayed home to help herd the sheep and harvest potatoes.

  The war came and shattered lives. Years later, this uneducated young woman found herself in the big city in a fo
reign country halfway around the world. At the age of twenty-three, she had married her childhood sweetheart the day before fleeing their homeland. They had expected to share the rough journey together, but on boarding the refugee train, the men were separated from the women. My mother spent the next five years searching for her husband, her brothers, or any living relative. She never found any, so eventually she traveled to America—alone. Ten stormy days crossing the ocean: in Shakespeare’s words, “tempest-tossed.”

  Although my mother must have been terrified many times, my favorite recollections are of her spunk (like the time she refused to give up her purse to a would-be mugger). Not surprisingly, I inherited her mix of fearlessness and fearfulness. The dangerous ghetto environment I grew up in did not scare me, but bridges, elevators, even cars did. A thunderstorm would have me running into the basement, and any insect would have me running out of the house. I walked the dark streets alone at night but could not sleep without the reassuring sound of a little black-and-white TV—to the chagrin of my sister, with whom I shared a bedroom. My list of personal phobias was quite long. At the top of the list, inspired by my mother’s terrifying ocean journey, was boats.

  Twenty years later, at the age of twenty-five, when I first entered a prison, I was less frightened by the convicts staring at me behind the bars of their cells than I was by the rickety elevator that took me to my basement classroom. I started doing volunteer work in Chicago’s Cook County Jail because of an argument with my husband’s friend, John Bergman, a theater practitioner working in maximum-security prisons. “Those guys are beyond rehabilitation,” I insisted. “You should focus on first-time offenders.” And, to test my own hypothesis, that’s what I did. At the time, I could not have imagined that eventually I would be working in supermax—that is, the long-term solitary confinement unit, the prison within the prison.

  In prison, I was again fearless in an environment where most people would be fearful, and maybe that is why I was able to successfully reach those prisoners when others could not. I also recalled my mother’s words about education. Like war refugees, prisoners have lost everything: home, possessions, friends, and often family. For a prisoner, education has a special value as the one thing that no one can take from him.