Shakespeare Saved My Life Page 3

  Spoken by the overthrown king who is now imprisoned, the speech begins: “I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world: and for because the world is populous and here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it.” Along with the speech, I attached a blank sheet of paper with one question: What do you understand from the excerpt?

  While most prisoners scribbled a brief response, Newton submitted a full page, both sides, with incongruous smiley faces punctuating every few sentences:

  I understand that he is in prison, and clearly in a type of solitary confinement. His thoughts are his only companions, his method for populating this empty world so that it can be compared to the world outside of those walls. He had studied a way to compare the two—so it is clearly his attempt. I cannot tell if it is extremely complex or rather simple? It seems like you can spend time on just about each passage and come up with three different conclusions.

  That comment alone earned him a place in the program. Awareness of multiplicity of interpretation is the key to reading Shakespeare. And then Newton continued with a college-level example of close critical reading and explication of a literary passage:

  Like in the area dedicated to scripture. It appears as though he is a believer in the word as it is the “better sort” and having so much time to think, no thought is “contented” as he says, and the better thoughts are exposing flaws or contradictions. Making him doubt, at least challenging him to doubt. If so, it must be a scary idea to lose the “better sort” of thought.

  I struggle to bring out the comparisons, because to me it only speaks of his conduct in there. His thoughts, conclusions, and he seems to be making a statement rather than a comparison. I can relate to much of it, if I am right in reading it, or maybe it is art left for interpretation?

  Not bad for a fifth-grade dropout. What came next was a prisoner’s perspective on the passage, exactly the kind of insight I looked for in my prison work:

  I can really relate to the thoughts of ambition plotting unlikely wonders! I can see him now pacing around and playing out these great fantasies and then the quick reality check and it leaves and he feels silly. Maybe that is what he meant by “die in their own pride”?

  And his conclusion captured the deeper philosophical lesson about the meaning of life in Richard’s speech:

  I guess as in art, I can overcomplicate the work, so I will just close it up. It seems to me that he has gone from king to prisoner, and in his thoughts goes back and forth, but seems to conclude with saying that until you have been at peace, or content, with nothing…you cannot be pleased with anything. Or that you cannot be truly happy until you have come to terms with being nothing.

  Wow. That was the most thoughtful response I had ever gotten to an initial Shakespeare assignment—in prison or on campus. And Newton didn’t even know who Shakespeare was.

  CHAPTER 7

  Life Inside

  So what’s it like in there?

  The supermax unit that housed Newton when we met in 2003 is a different place today since a recent Human Rights Watch lawsuit found the conditions to be inhumane. Back then, it was dirty: floors were littered with tossed food trays and homemade “parachutes” or “kites” (messages tied to strings that are sent across the range floor) and other contraband. It was noisy: tormented cries of the criminally insane and shouted taunts of hostile prisoners filled the ranges. It was smelly: overflowing toilets, remnants of food trays, and human body odor created a stench. Hot in summer. Cold in winter.

  The individual windowless concrete cells contained a concrete bunk bed with a thin mattress, a stainless-steel platform and bench that served as a table and chair, plus a toilet and sink. The metal pegboard door obscured the view to the other side, but there was nothing on the other side except another concrete wall. Inmates were housed in side-by-side cells, so there was no face-to-face view of another human being—except when an officer shoved a food tray into the slot or when the nurse delivered a pill. In the SHU, there were 288 such cells (twelve on each range), in which isolated prisoners spent nearly twenty-four hours a day with no human contact—for months, even years at a time. In Newton’s case, it was a record ten years.

  Think of all you’ve done over the past ten years: gotten a degree, gotten married, had a baby? Or maybe just gotten a new kitten or puppy? Newton had done none of that.

  Think of all the places you’ve seen: a city skyline, a mountain landscape, a beach at sunset? Newton had seen none of that.

  Now think of all the choices you make every day: what to wear, what to have for dinner, whom to call on the phone—these are choices Newton had not made in more than a decade.

  Think of simply stopping at a stoplight, deciding which way to go. Are you going to go forward or turn? Either road leads someplace. “Man,” said Newton. “That’s freedom!”

  During my SHU orientation days, I walked the ranges accompanied by Father Bob, the resident chaplain. With his long gray ponytail, his denim attire, and his laid-back demeanor, he reminded me of Willie Nelson (one of my husband’s favorite singers). “Hey, Father!” an inmate called out to him one day. “My brother’s dying. Would you pray with me?” I stepped back to offer a little privacy in this unit that offered none, and from across the range, I saw Father Bob’s head bent in prayer next to the inmate’s, the steel cell door between them like the partition of a confessional stand.

  No volunteer had ever worked in this unit before, so there was no volunteer training program in place. Instead, I was required to complete the standard weeklong training program along with officers and other prison staff. I learned:

  • How to respond in a hostage situation

  • How to perform CPR

  • How to handle hazardous waste

  • How to frisk and handcuff an offender

  • How to throw off an attacker (when I got home that evening, I practiced this move on my husband, a former college wrestling coach—and it worked!)

  The following week, I walked the ranges unescorted, ever mindful of Father Bob’s caveat: “Be ready for anything. Every time you step out onto a range, it’s different.” That’s true; there was no such thing as a routine day in the SHU. I quickly learned that it wasn’t the noisy ranges but the quiet ones—eerily quiet—that I needed to worry about. Whenever I stepped onto a quiet range, I wondered whether everyone was sleeping, or medicated, or planning the next prison riot.

  As soon as the steel gate that sealed off each range of twelve cells was rolled open—through remote control by an officer in the glass pod above—the prisoners on the lower level alerted those upstairs: “Female on the range!” I received a variety of greetings, as you might expect. Immediately, some of them got an urge to pee, sidling up to the toilet at the front of their cell, barely visible through the steel pegboard cell door. In the beginning they assumed that I was a visiting psychologist or a new counselor. Volunteers never entered the SHU. Once they got to know me, they called out, “Shakespeare on the range!”

  The officers informed me that being “gunned down” was the biggest risk—not with bullets, but with semen, urine, or worse. So I started to keep a change of clothes in the car, just in case. The floors were often wet, with God knows what, so I also designated a special pair of SHU shoes.

  Because of Newton’s stabbing of Sgt. Harper (the only stabbing incident in the history of the SHU), the central administration in Indianapolis issued a mandate that everyone who worked in the SHU—officers, counselors, and, yes, even the Shakespeare professor—wear a bulletproof (i.e., knife-proof) vest. It was bulky and weighed a ton. One day, I dropped my pen on the floor and couldn’t even bend over to pick it up. The officers complained: “If we fall over in them things, we’re like a turtle on his back. Fuckin’ dumbasses in Central Office!” (In my experience, male officers often cussed in the presence of a female visitor; prisoners rarely did so, and when they did, they usually apologized.)

  I soon learned that the most popular reading material a
mong SHU inmates was true-crime stories. Typical topics for conversation on the ranges were pro wrestling, hot rods, hot women the inmates have known, and what they’d like to do to the officers.

  “You’ll never get these guys to talk about Shakespeare,” an inmate told me.

  CHAPTER 8

  The First Lesson I Teach

  I have been studying how I may compare

  This prison where I live unto the world:

  And for because the world is populous

  And here is not a creature but myself,

  I cannot do it; yet I’ll hammer it out.

  My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,

  My soul the father; and these two beget

  A generation of still-breeding thoughts,

  And these same thoughts people this little world,

  In humours like the people of this world,

  For no thought is contented. The better sort,

  As thoughts of things divine, are intermix’d

  With scruples and do set the word itself

  Against the word:

  As thus, ‘Come, little ones,’ and then again,

  ‘It is as hard to come as for a camel

  To thread the postern of a small needle’s eye.’

  Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot

  Unlikely wonders; how these vain weak nails

  May tear a passage through the flinty ribs

  Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls,

  And, for they cannot, die in their own pride.

  Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves

  That they are not the first of fortune’s slaves,

  Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars

  Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame,

  That many have and others must sit there;

  And in this thought they find a kind of ease,

  Bearing their own misfortunes on the back

  Of such as have before endured the like.

  Thus play I in one person many people,

  And none contented: sometimes am I king;

  Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,

  And so I am: then crushing penury

  Persuades me I was better when a king;

  Then am I king’d again: and by and by

  Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke,

  And straight am nothing: but whate’er I be,

  Nor I nor any man that but man is

  With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased

  With being nothing.

  King Richard the Second, act 5, scene 5

  This was the first lesson I taught in the SHU, following up on the initial assignment. I chose this excerpt to introduce segregated prisoners to Shakespeare because Richard is speaking from solitary confinement. I assumed that the prisoners would be able to relate. The day would include a group session in the specially designated wing where the prisoners would be brought and placed into individual cells, with me seated in the middle. But first, I had an individual session with Newton. He was not allowed to join the group. Given his history, he was considered to be too great of an escape risk. No doubt, the officers would not want to grant this offender anything that might seem like a privilege, either. But I was given permission to work with him at his cell each week.

  Because I was working alone on this, my first day of actually teaching in the SHU, I had to figure out how to get my handouts through the closed cuff port in the middle of the cell door by myself. Surely, the inmate inside was not going to be able to help me. With some difficulty, I managed to slide the stiff metal bar, pull down the little ledge, and place the sheet of paper on the opened cuff port.

  “Mr. Newton!” I called out into the darkness of the cell, wondering whether he was awake or asleep…or something else.

  “Mr. Newton?” Momentarily, I saw a shadowy figure approach the door, and from inside the cell, a hand reached out to receive the paper. It was slender, almost delicate, pale white from years without sun exposure, and adorned with tattoos. The pegboard door allowed only 60 percent visibility, so my first glimpses of Newton were not very revealing. I could tell only that he was not very big, not very tall, and dressed in white undershorts. It was not a sign of disrespect; it was the typical attire for segregated inmates—and why shouldn’t it be? Their cells were stifling hot, and they rarely, if ever, saw another human being. Still, out of respect, I suppose, or maybe because it was a bit of a special occasion, Newton soon began to dress for my weekly visit: orange scrubs, the standard issue for segregated inmates on the disciplinary ranges.

  Standing outside of the cell door, trying to keep my focus through the dots in the steel, made me dizzy after a while. Years later, Newton told me that it was equally dizzying looking out from the inside—why did I think it wouldn’t be?

  Our conversation was nearly drowned out by the whirrrrr of a large fan in the hallway. Outside, it was a cool autumn evening; inside, it was still stifling summer. With no natural light and an artificial light on twenty-four hours a day, segregated prisoners had no way of knowing if it was day or night. Surrounded by concrete, they didn’t even know whether it was winter or summer. When I arrived from the outside world, they never asked me about the weather. It didn’t matter in there.

  “What does he mean by ‘fortune’s slaves’?” Newton asked me, looking at the paper.

  I had to lean in close to hear him and I did so, fully aware of the risk and the fact that I could get in trouble if anyone were watching. (Father Bob had cautioned me to stand off to the side of the cell door, and a foot or two back.) That I got no such scolding was a good indication that no one was paying attention.

  “Fortune’s slaves?” I repeated, and Newton’s neighbor, Green, piped up. He had also signed on for the program, and it was soon clear that he provided a healthy dose of competition for Newton.

  “Fortune could be a reference to the classical idea of the Wheel of Fortune that determines man’s fate regardless of his actions,” he suggested. “It raises the dilemma of free choice versus predetermination.”

  Newton was eager to engage in a philosophical debate: “Predetermination. Is that like—”

  “Oh man, that Vanna White is red hot!” another voice called out from across the range.

  “I’d like to crank her wheel!”

  “You got that right, bro!”

  “Not that Wheel of Fortune, asshole!” Green shouted across the range. Then he muttered, “Freakin’ psych patients.”

  Despite the occasional interruptions, Newton and Green’s dialogue continued for some time, and I found myself reflecting that I had never heard such an enthusiastic Shakespearean discussion in any college course I’d taken or taught. In graduate school, in particular, our analysis seemed disconnected from the real world. Literary theory always struck me as too, well, theoretical. Yet here were a couple of prisoners locked away from the world, finding real-life meaning in Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old words. I thought my Shakespeare professors would be impressed. I thought Shakespeare would be impressed.

  “Hey! Are you guys ever going to shut the fuck up?!”

  The intellectual discussion was rudely interrupted again by an angry voice from the upper range. He was offended by the intrusion of Shakespeare into the wrestling match on his TV.

  “Well, not now, no!” Newton shouted back at the cell door, sending his voice to the upper level of the range. Then he turned to face the wall of his cell to resume his conversation with his neighbor: “So is it free will or predetermination that puts Richard in that cell, that put us in our cells…?”

  Although they could not even see one another, their dialogue continued even after I gave Newton his homework assignment and said good-bye. As the range door slid open to let me out, I could still hear their voices. As I left Newton’s range and headed down the hall to meet with my Shakespeare group, I couldn’t help beaming as I realized that on my very first day, I had already achieved what the prisoners th
emselves told me was impossible: I had gotten these guys to talk about Shakespeare!

  (Photo credit: Indiana State University)

  CHAPTER 9

  The First Group Session

  Group work in solitary confinement sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Selected SHU prisoners who participated in the Shakespeare program received the privilege of leaving their cells to come together for our weekly group sessions that took place in the R&R (Receiving and Release) area in the segregation unit. To get to the segregation unit from the entrance of the prison complex, I passed through a series of checkpoints, x-ray machines, metal detectors, razor-wire electrified fences, and double sets of steel doors operated under the scrutiny of armed guards in the towers. In other words, prisoners who were brought to the R&R area were still a long way from a direct escape route out of the prison. Nevertheless, because they were classified as the most dangerous prisoners in the state—and had earned that classification often through violent behavior in prison or escape attempts—any movement out of their cells was quite an ordeal.

  To come to the Shakespeare group, a prisoner had to place his hands through the cuff port in his steel cell door and be handcuffed behind his back before his door was opened. He was frisked and sometimes strip-searched. With his hands and feet bound and a leather leash attached to his chains, he shuffled along, flanked by two officers, to the Shakespeare “classroom,” where he was again locked into an individual cell, placing his hands through the slot to be uncuffed.