Shakespeare Saved My Life Read online

  “Shakespeare?” said one of the officers as he walked one of my students past me on a leash. “These guys can’t read Shakespeare!”

  “We’ll see,” I answered, wondering if he’d ever read any himself.

  Flurried activity crowded the narrow hallway as pairs of officers arrived one after the other, bringing all of the students to class. As each prisoner was brought into the area, I tried to step aside enough to not be in the way, but not so far as to appear intimidated. I knew that any physical contact was prohibited, so I gently declined one prisoner who extended his cuffed hands for a shake. Still, I had to reach into the prisoners’ cuff ports to give them the Shakespeare pages I brought, and on my first day with the group, I wondered if any of them would try to grab my hand when I did.

  When the last of the prisoners was locked into his cell, there were two prisoners on each side of the hallway, with me in the middle. As the last of the officers left the area, I was left standing there alone with no officer beside me and with four sets of eyes glaring at me. I placed a milk crate in the middle of the hallway and sat down, with my back to the open doorway. I wondered if that was a smart arrangement; down the hall to the left was the SHU kitchen, staffed by prisoners—with knives. But down the hall to the right was the officers’ station. If, God forbid, something were to “go down,” surely they would hear my cries for help. Wouldn’t they?

  Just then, I heard a loud click. The door rolled closed, and with a resounding clang, sealed me inside—alone—with these four prisoners.

  “Okay…” I began, looking at the eyes staring at me through the opened cuff ports in the steel doors. This group included just four prisoners, but they had been selected based on a number of complicated criteria, including racial balance. There was a middle-aged black man named Thompson, a young black man named Peters, an intense white man named Hoffman, and an animated white man named Garibaldi, nicknamed Guido.

  “Well,” I continued hesitantly. “I’m glad you’re all here.”

  “We’re not!” said a voice from one of the slots, and the others all laughed.

  “Of course, not here in the SHU, but here in the Shakespeare group,” I restated my greeting. “So let’s start with introductions. I’m Dr. Bates—”

  “Ehhh, what’s up, Doc?” quipped Guido, chomping an invisible carrot in a Bugs Bunny imitation. And suddenly I realized that they probably didn’t know that I was a doctor of philosophy, not a medical doctor; why would they? They probably assumed that I was a psychiatrist, the type of doctor they were most accustomed to seeing there.

  “I should explain,” I added, “that I’m a professor—a ‘doctor’ of literature.”

  “Oh,” said Guido, “so no meds, huh?”

  “Right,” I replied, “no meds. Just Shakespeare—that’s my drug of choice.”

  This time, I got a laugh from the group. It felt like we were starting to warm up. The others were quieter, but Guido clearly enjoyed a chance to talk, so I started by focusing on him.

  “Before I hand out your first Shakespeare assignment,” I continued with a little more confidence, “I’d like to know what kind of reading you like best. I imagine you spend a lot of time reading here. Mr. Garibaldi?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Doc,” he replied in a tone that was suddenly shy. “I…can’t read.”

  I looked at him, trying to figure out whether he was joking. I wondered if I had inadvertently invited an illiterate prisoner into the Shakespeare group. As I was pondering how to address the challenge of “reading” a Shakespeare text with someone who can’t read, the others started to snicker.

  “Naw, Doc,” Guido confessed. “I’m joking! I can read.”

  Stunned to discover that long-term segregated prisoners still had a sense of humor, I found it hard to be annoyed with his constant quipping.

  I handed out their first reading assignment, which they each accepted eagerly but respectfully. Through the little glass windows in the steel cell doors, I could see each man begin to look it over immediately.

  For the next two hours, with no chairs in the cells, they kneeled on the concrete floor in front of the cuff ports. With the shackles still on their ankles, the prisoners communicated with one another through those little slots. Gradually, they grew accustomed to face-to-face communication, something they could not otherwise experience in the SHU. And they grew eager to begin their journey into new worlds, created some four hundred years earlier, by one William Shakespeare.

  Surely, solitary confinement was the most absurd environment in which Shakespeare had ever been studied.

  In the Shakespeare group sessions, I sit in between two rows of cells holding four prisoners on each side.

  (Photo credits: Indiana State University)

  (Photo credit: Indiana State University)

  CHAPTER 10

  The First Lesson I Learn

  Old boy Richard was right,” Newton told me when I arrived at his cell the following week.

  “About what?”

  “Pacing. We all do it. Man! Where does Shakespeare get this insight?”

  I had come to prison to teach prisoners about Shakespeare, but I would learn from them at least as much as I would teach to them. “Maybe he did time in prison himself,” I told him. “We just don’t know much about his life at all. Some people doubt that he even existed.” Then I added, “Tell me about the pacing.”

  “Everybody does it, even if they don’t acknowledge it,” Newton explained. “Just like animals. When you lock an animal in a cage, for a while it just sits there and waits, but over time, once it accepts its confinement, it starts pacing, and that’s when caregivers start worrying. When tigers start to pace, it’s taken the wild out of them. The psychological shift is happening. We do the same thing. If you had cameras on, you’d see that’s exactly what we do: sit around a while, get involved on the range, but over time, after the novelty wears off, we start pacing—just like the cats, you know what I mean? Doing the exact same thing. Everybody paces. And that’s what they’re all doing: playing out these fantasies in their head. You know, like old boy Richard.”

  I liked the way he called King Richard “old boy.” Hoping that he wouldn’t see this as too personal a question, I asked him, “Would you tell me some of your fantasies?”

  “Yeah, absolutely, man!” He seemed pleased to be able to talk to someone, to share his experiences. (Later I would learn that, following the hostage attempt of May 2000, he had been locked on a range all by himself and that he had spent years—literally, years—without conversing with another human being: not family, not other prisoners, and certainly not the officers. Like so many of Newton’s extreme experiences, it seems impossible, but it’s true.)

  “I’ve been everything,” said Newton. “I’ve been a bum living on the streets in New York City, I’ve been an outlaw in Bolivia, I’ve been a doctor in surgery: Dr. Newton. Yeah.”

  He laughed. And then he was suddenly struck by a realization.

  “Hey, you know what’s really cool? Here’s old boy Richard in this supermax, and he’s building a world inside of there with his thoughts. He’s trying to make his life mean something. And then here I am—it’s really cool how they mirror!—here I am, in that same little prison, trying to make my life mean something.”

  The parallels were striking. For years, I’d studied these plays with some of the best scholars in the world—analyzed speeches, lines, words, and even points of punctuation, from every angle of literary criticism—but I had never looked at Shakespeare through such a perspective before. I found myself wondering if anyone had.

  “But mostly, these fantasies, these ‘fantastical walks,’ it’s just really simple things, believe it or not. Hanging out with my girlfriend, seeing my mom or my brothers.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I’m telling you, man!” (My husband liked the way Newton so often addressed me, a woman, with his common expression: “man.” Newton’s language was an eclectic mix of street slang and self-made
intellectual.) “I’m telling you, that’s what everyone back here dreams of: the little white picket fence, the family, the kids. I don’t care if he claims to be some great killer of the world; when you break through all that, scrape through all the bull crap, that’s what he really wants. Everyone just wants to be happy.”

  “Have you never met anyone who found his happiness in being the great killer?”

  “No, never.”

  He’d known more than his share of killers, so I accepted his statement as authority.

  “One of the cool things I’ve had in my life,” Newton continued, “even though I left it—it, life—so young, is that I’ve been out to the country, been to the ghetto, and had all these different experiences.”

  “So you have a rich source of fantasy material?”

  “Right, yeah!” He chuckled, apparently pleased that I was beginning to think like a segregated prisoner myself. “One of the things I remember is the church environment. They’d have these big picnics, play volleyball and baseball. So I would imagine being there, but right now, not like I was ten again, but like it was right now. The kind of conversations I would have, deep kind of philosophical conversation, not the ‘Oh man, I’m ready to go smoke a joint, really!’—not the kind of things that don’t mean anything. Maybe it’s with a student or somebody who’s in college, and I would talk about Socrates and how his great claim was: ‘I don’t know anything.’ And I would argue how knowing that in itself is something. Or that Nietzsche guy, I would talk about that Twilight of the Idols thing he wrote…”

  Nietzsche? Socrates? This from a prisoner who did not even know who Shakespeare was when he first joined the program? I would later learn that prisoners’ reading matter was quite eclectic. In segregation, it was largely determined by whatever was available to be circulated, illegally of course, from one prisoner to another. And Newton’s neighbor was Green, the prison philosopher.

  “But why does everybody pace?” Newton asked, more of himself than of me, and then he answered his own question. “I think it has to be attached to what goes on while pacing—exactly what Richard is doing, peopling his world, playing out fantasies, making this moment, this time, mean something. You’re definitely doing as he’s doing, you’re peopling the world, and while pacing! Like, I can be watching a movie and I’ll doze off into the fantasy I left off from yesterday, and without fail it’ll pull me out of the movie I’m watching, and I’ll get up and just start pacing.”

  “Pacing… where?” I asked, peering through the pegboard door into Newton’s seven-by-nine-foot cell, thinking how bored I got walking circles on the quarter-mile track on campus.

  “It’s five steps, from one end of the cell to the other.”

  He started walking from one end of the cell to the other, counting aloud with each step: “One…two…three…four…five.” He turned around, still counting: “One…two…three…four…five.” He returned to face the door. “Man! I’ve counted it a million times!”

  Five steps: his own “little world.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Regaining Lost Humanity

  Each week, I brought the prisoners another reading assignment, as well as homework questions to answer. The group session always began with each prisoner reading the homework he had written that week and all of the participants giving one another feedback. Usually, the feedback was positive, constructive, supportive. But inevitably, it also sparked discussion, and debate, about differing interpretations of key passages.

  Our first text was the soliloquy of Richard the Second because I had assumed that prisoners would be able to relate to it. Instead, half of them did not believe that Richard is, literally, in prison: “This prison where I live.” Instead, they insisted that Shakespeare is describing a metaphorical prison. But that is the beauty of Shakespeare: there often is more than one way of looking at the text, and I encouraged prisoners to do just that—and to respect one another’s interpretations. That lesson—how to look at things from more than one perspective—was precisely what they needed.

  For example, the following week, when we began to study Macbeth, our first full play, I raised the question, “Why did Macbeth have second thoughts about killing Duncan?” And each member of the group had a different perspective.

  Guido: “Duncan’s a friend, man. That’s ugly.”

  Thompson: “We should ask, ‘Why do we have second thoughts about killing someone?’”

  Peters: “I’m gonna take it back to the streets. You’re out there being greedy, and a guy might have more power than you, and you think, I’m gonna take this guy out, even though he’s a friend—but over what? Over some poison, over reigning over some neighborhoods that don’t even matter. Your name ain’t ever gonna be engraved on these streets. It’s just a cycle, same as Macbeth.”

  Hoffman: “Ultimately, here’s the question Macbeth needs to face, and it’s the question we all need to face: What does it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul? Seriously. You gain everything but you lose your humanity. This is what happens to Macbeth. And that’s what happens to us, out of the choices we make.”

  Peters: “Straight up! Shakespeare seen this essence of life. He put in his plays how the world really is. You read his play and you’re like, ‘Wow, this stuff is going on! This stuff is for real!’” I was impressed with the ability of the prisoners I was working with. Granted, I had some drop out from lack of interest, and other losses due to transfers. But, for the most part, I found that the prisoners who had a genuine desire to read Shakespeare were able to do so, even though many of them had limited education and little, if any, previous experience with this literature. I had assumed that we would read each scene aloud as a group and that I would have to translate the language for them. I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.

  From the very first session, the prisoners let me know that reading the text out loud is a waste of their precious conversation time. From then on, the prisoners read the text individually in their cells, and each week when they came together in the group, they kept the conversation going with very little commentary from me. They raised the questions, and they answered them. I was not teaching them how to read and understand Shakespeare; they were teaching one another.

  The prisoners in the group were just beginning to read, comprehend, and explore this complex text, but eventually they would create their own original adaptation not only by putting the text into their own language, but also by making the story relevant to a prison audience, placing it into a contemporary urban city setting. The following summer, another group of prisoners in open population would perform the Shakespearean adaptation written by the segregated prisoners. Videos of the performance would be broadcast on the institutional channel, so that all 2,200 prisoners in the facility could view it—including the segregated authors, who would thus be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. This challenging, but monastic, environment offered prisoners the opportunity to closely read Shakespeare’s plays and, in those extended periods of contemplative isolation, they were able to connect with the text more deeply than the average reader.

  “This place is great!” Newton told me that day, gesticulating around his cell. “Great for reading Shakespeare!”

  Newton through the cuff port.

  (Photo credits: Jon Mac Media; Jessica Kingsley Publishers)

  CHAPTER 12

  Contraband

  Each facility has a different check-in process, and in the many prisons I have either worked in or visited across the country, I have experienced everything from a full strip search to a simple computerized eyeball recognition scan. Some facilities require an officer escort or issue an emergency communication device with a panic button. Others stamp your hand with an infrared dye that is checked under a black light upon entering and exiting the facility. “My” prison had none of the above. The following was the standard
check-in procedure for entering Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in the years that I worked in its SHU.

  Driving into the compound required stopping at the guard’s post and showing photo identification for the driver and any passengers, as well as a facility-issued parking pass for the vehicle. The car had to be fully locked and all personal possessions left there, such as purse, wallet, and, of course, cell phone. In the Visitor Processing Building, I showed my badge to the officers on duty and signed in to the certified volunteers’ logbook, indicating time of arrival, purpose for the visit, and destination. Coat, shoes, book bag, and lunch sack were all placed on a table for inspection: books were leafed through, shoes were peered into, any item that looked suspicious (such as my tape recorder) was questioned and the appropriate authorization had to be confirmed each time.

  Then I received a pat-down (by a same-sex officer) and walked through a metal detector while my possessions went through an x-ray machine. Once reassembled, with coat and shoes back on, I was buzzed into the first of several double-door sally ports (where the door behind you locks before the door in front of you opens) to enter the prison compound itself. Another check-in post and another set of gates brought me into the maximum-security zone of the compound, a third such set brought me into the SHU building, and a final series of gates brought me onto each range of the SHU itself. “Open locks, whoever knocks,” say the witches in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. I have calculated that, in the decade that I spent in the SHU, I caused approximately half a million locks to be opened.

  Contraband would be discovered during check-in, and I am pleased to say I was never guilty of a single transgression in that regard, whether intentional or not. But I heard of a teacher being fired for trying to bring in a birthday cake, and I chastised a new volunteer for bringing in a Halloween-size bag of candy (clearly, she was not intending to consume sixty Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups herself). Pens had to be without the spring feature that could be used as a tattoo gun, and felt markers providing handy tattoo ink were also frowned upon. Beverages had to be in clear plastic containers and arrive unopened. (The reason for this rule was that one officer was found to be smuggling cell phones in his gallon-sized thermos.) Luckily, my ubiquitous vitaminwater was acceptable.