Shakespeare Saved My Life Read online

  Sometimes, despite the closest scrutiny, the metal detector alarm would sound, and I had to step back out and try removing my wristwatch or belt buckle to see what was causing the alarm to register. I once brought in a new volunteer who repeatedly set off the alarm no matter what she removed. Finally, the male officer on duty said to her, “Uh, ma’am, I think I see what the problem is. Would you please cross your hands across your chest and walk through the detector sideways?”

  Sure enough, the alarm was being tripped by the metal in her underwire bra.

  A sign at the check-in desk at Visitor Processing clearly stated that female visitors or volunteers would not be allowed to enter the facility if they violate the Department of Corrections (DOC) dress code by wearing a short skirt, low-cut blouse, spiked heels, or excessive jewelry. These restrictions seemed obvious enough, though I was surprised at times to see women arriving in these and other types of inappropriate attire.

  Less obvious were some aspects of dress that I learned about only through my experiences over the years. A simple necklace or scarf can pose a strangulation risk; likewise, a tie for men. For this same reason, the DOC badge was worn with a clasp on a lapel and not on a rope around the neck. Through experience, I learned also to be aware of the distraction of bright colors in a world that is all bland.

  There was the day I wore a green sweater, and a student came up to me after class and said, “Dr. Bates, I couldn’t help noticing that you are wearing green, you read from a book with a green cover, and the word ‘green’ was mentioned in the passage you read. What does that mean?”

  “It means,” I replied, “that you are thinking too deeply about the coincidence.”

  I disregarded my own rule only once, opting to wear a bright and colorful Christmas cardigan during the holiday season that was adorned with different appliquéd characters. When I entered the classroom, I was immediately surrounded by the group of prisoners, as excited as a bunch of children on Christmas morning.

  “Look,” said one of them, pointing to my left sleeve. “Here’s a snowman.”

  “Here’s a Christmas tree,” said one on my right.

  “And here’s Santa!” said a voice behind my back.

  I had to take the cardigan off and return to my usual prison uniform of basic black turtleneck and jeans before I could get the group to focus on Shakespeare.

  On the other hand, bland colors could get you in trouble too, if they happened to match the prison uniform of your facility. A man wearing a khaki shirt and pants would blend in with the prison population at Wabash, while a male instructor was actually stopped trying to exit another facility where the prisoner scrubs were blue jeans and a white T-shirt.

  When I started teaching at the Indiana women’s facility, the ladies had no prison uniforms. They dressed in street clothes, with makeup and jewelry, and I worried that they simply had to grab my badge and briefcase to walk out of the facility. The only tip-off might’ve been that teachers did not dress as flashy as the incarcerated women.

  Finally, there was the distinctive dress of the special prisoner, whose scrubs were designed to set him apart from the general population. In the SHU, that was a jumpsuit of Day-Glo orange.

  “What’s the point of that?” Newton asked me. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “That is the point,” I replied.

  CHAPTER 13

  Childhood

  Didn’t you ever steal your mom’s car or something?”

  Newton asked me one day, trying to see if I had any criminal activity in my background.

  “We were poor,” I answered, divulging some personal information despite my rule against doing so. As a teacher, I know how important it is to keep the focus on the student, and in prison even more so, but there didn’t seem to be any harm in telling him, “We didn’t have a car.”

  “Yeah, well, they wasn’t so popular back in your day,” Newton teased me. “What, Model T?”

  True, we grew up a generation apart, but there were a number of similarities in our childhood experiences. I grew up in an inner-city ghetto, as did Newton. I was white in a black neighborhood, as was Newton. I was a scrawny insecure kid, as was Newton.

  We both grew up with too little parental supervision: his mother worked day and night to avoid relying on welfare; my parents were both poor immigrants working at the same factory. My father worked the day shift, and my mother worked the night shift. They rarely saw their kids, and with only those few minutes between shifts, they rarely saw each other. Both Newton and I grew up on the streets, avoiding school much of the time—although we were both good students when we “applied” ourselves. His hangout was the underpass of the highway; mine was the public restroom in back of the Shell gas station. We both spent our share of nights quite literally on the streets. And we both ran with older crowds that served as negative role models. Criminal activity was common among his peers and mine: shoplifting, vandalism, drugs, and gang violence were part of everyday life during our elementary school years. My first boyfriend was gunned down in a drug deal gone bad. It could have been Newton who was teaching Shakespeare to me.

  Growing up poor was what we had in common. Growing up loved or abused—that was the crucial difference. Newton’s childhood medical records include a history of untreated serious illnesses, injuries, and malnutrition. He grew up with a teenage mother who neglected him, a stepfather who beat him, an uncle who abused him, and an older brother with a criminal record of his own.

  “It was bad,” Newton acknowledged, “but I think the advantage of being a kid is the lack of perspective. Unless you can compare some other great life to this bad life, you can’t appreciate the distinction. If that’s your life, that’s your life.”

  He showed me a photocopy of his childhood medical record. It was compiled by his state-appointed defense lawyer at the time of his sentencing in 1995. Such an extensive history of childhood abuse would normally serve as a mitigating factor, but in Newton’s case it did not.

  “The one thing I remember,” he said, pointing at the entries, “is all these ‘missed medical appointments.’ ‘Follow-up not done.’ ‘Shots not up to date.’”

  He looked at me and asked, “Is that normal?”

  I shook my head.

  “You know, that’s why they called me Dink. I shrunk up. They thought I had cancer, but it was some kind of nickel deficiency or something. I was malnourished on my mother’s milk—no joke! Anyway, I remember at my trial, the lawyer was pointing out the neglect.”

  At the trial, when his attorneys tried to mitigate his guilt by describing his mother’s neglect, Newton sat with his fingers in his ears.

  “Mom made a lot of mistakes. She never really wanted to take care of us, so she would send me to live with my aunt. She wasn’t really my aunt; she was just someone willing to take care of me. And then there was this one time, I’m too young to remember, but Mom says I was being babysat and these kids strapped me down to this ironing board and they were burning my arms with the iron. She pulls up and hears me screaming from outside the house. She says both my arms were all black.”

  It was on the record: January 1978. He was fourteen months old.

  “And then later, when I got a little older, I would run away all the time ’cause my stepdad would just beat the crap out of me. I’d be home five minutes, go to my room, and climb out the window.”

  “How bad were the beatings?”

  “Hospitalized me twice. Welfare took me out of the house. Said they wouldn’t let me back in unless he signed a paper promising not to beat me anymore. But here’s the thing: he refused to sign—and they put me back in anyway!” He laughed, then turned serious again. “They got, uh, pretty bad. And once I hit the bricks, man—”

  I interrupted him. “Uh, bricks…?”

  “Yeah, bricks, you know, the streets. And man, once I hit the bricks, that just ended my life. It was over with! Before I was running from home, now I was running to the bricks. I had thirteen cases by the time I
come to prison at the age of seventeen, and a lot of them are just plain runaways. I could go through why I kept running away, but what does that mean? It just kind of mitigates the point. But once I did start running away, then it was the bricks. I was free! That itself was addictive. It got to the point where even when I could defend myself and fight against him, I just wanted that life. I was just free, you know what I mean? I didn’t have any real responsibilities. I was an outlaw pretty much. I could do anything I wanted to. I lived with anybody I ever knew, stayed out all night, one night with this guy and another with this guy. There’s some people who noticed that trend: ‘I noticed that he was never at home and I wondered what was going on.’ I remember one time I run away and I was walking, man. I was gonna walk all the way to Portland, Indiana. Walked all day, man, and come to a sign: Welcome to Muncie.” He slapped the cuff port and laughed. “I had just walked in a big old circle around Muncie!”

  Muncie, Indiana, is the small Midwestern town in which Newton was born and raised, a working-class industrial city fallen on hard economic times. It was on the streets (the “bricks”) that he finally found the caring family that he never had at home.

  “There’s an underpass,” Newton recalled, “and we slept back there: me and a bigger guy, older than me, and he’s trying to cover me with his arm to keep me warm. He didn’t have to do that, you know? But he did it. And, oh man! Semis waking me up all night. I still remember the sound of ’em. We’d go back behind Kmart—their deli throws out a lot of food—and we’d get our food, the best food ever ’cause it was free, not just free of price, but free. As crazy and dumb as that sounds, I was free.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The Tragedy of Macbeth

  I am afraid to think what I have done;

  Look on’t again I dare not.

  —Macbeth, act 2, scene 2

  I chose Shakespeare’s criminal tragedy Macbeth as the first full play for prisoners to read because, better than any other Shakespeare play (or nearly any other work of classic literature), it gets inside the mind of a killer. Macbeth is a good man who makes a bad choice because he has, in Aristotle’s terms, a “tragic flaw.” My goal in presenting this play to these prisoners was not as lofty as wanting to teach them not to kill, or even to get them to do what Macbeth himself could not: “look on it [the deed] again.” That idea would come later—from Newton. At the start, my goal was simple and selfish: I wanted to learn from these convicted killers whether Shakespeare’s representation of murder is accurate. Whether it has verisimilitude, as they say in literary studies.

  I didn’t give them the full play all at once—for two reasons. One, I couldn’t afford to buy twenty copies of the book. I was not only volunteering my time to this program, but I was also covering all my own expenses: reading materials, gas, a quick burger and fries munched on the road, and a bottle of vitaminwater that kept me going through the long evenings. Two, some books were contraband in supermax. I could not give a segregated prisoner a hardbound book at all; it was considered a potential weapon. (Can you imagine what The Complete Works of Shakespeare, at two thousand pages, might do in the wrong hands?) And I could not give him even a little paperback without going through a long series of administrative channels. It was easier, cheaper, and faster to print out one act of the play each week (along with some homework questions). This had an unforeseen added benefit: the prisoners had no way of knowing where the play was going next. It was like a TV miniseries. It was also like the experience of Shakespeare’s original audience, since they didn’t know how the play would end.

  Newton completed the same assignments as the other prisoners by working individually in his cell and then handing in the pages to me. Very quickly, Newton’s weekly inquiries grew more and more intense. For example, I gave him Shakespeare’s description of the witches’ brew:

  Round about the cauldron go;

  In the poison’d entrails throw.

  Toad, that under cold stone

  Days and nights has thirty-one

  Swelter’d venom sleeping got,

  Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.

  Double, double toil and trouble;

  Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

  Fillet of a fenny snake,

  In the cauldron boil and bake;

  Eye of newt and toe of frog,

  Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

  Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,

  Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,

  For a charm of powerful trouble,

  Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

  Double, double toil and trouble;

  Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

  Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,

  Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf

  Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,

  Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,

  Liver of blaspheming Jew,

  Gall of goat, and slips of yew

  Silver’d in the moon’s eclipse,

  Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips,

  Finger of birth-strangled babe

  Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,

  Make the gruel thick and slab:

  Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,

  For the ingredients of our cauldron.

  And he wrote:

  I spent three days trying to piece together a pattern in the witches’ spell, finding some hidden meaning. Would all the animal parts used in the spell equal a complete anatomy of something?

  That was an original approach to this passage that I had never heard any scholar attempt. And he was scrupulous in his analysis.

  First of all, the First Witch gives instruction for this charm and says, “in the poison’d entrails throw.” Now, I understand “entrails” to be the “innards.” And if that is the instruction, then are the ingredients mentioned all innards of that part of the anatomy? I am not guessing so, but it reads that way if it is so instructed. “Fillet” of a fenny snake; is “fillet” the head? Okay, the “blindworm” I know to be a slowworm. And my conclusion is that it is the legless lizard and not the species of skink, because the very next ingredient of the spell is the leg of a lizard. The legless lizard (slowworm) would obviously not provide a leg, so one would still be required. Why did Shakespeare not define the type of lizard that the leg was from? He obviously took care in choosing the animals. He distinguished the toad from the frog! He chose the European adder’s fork and it is the only venomous British snake. Why not describe the lizard? Anyways, again with “owlet’s wing.” I know of two owlets: the owlet moth and the owlet frogmouth (bird). Both are winged. Which is it? My guess is that it is the owlet moth! Why? Well, the owlet frog-mouth is native to the Tasmania area, so it would be an exotic ingredient, which makes sense, but the rest of the ingredients are obtainable from England. Also, because the owlet moth is a destructive moth! It devastates vegetation. That would fit the image of the ingredients.

  Either he had access to a contraband encyclopedia or he had an encyclopedic mind!

  Okay, scale of “dragon”; what “dragon” is referenced? Initially, one would think of a reptile, but can’t it be a fish? Dragonet or dragonfish? Both are fish, and as far as I know both have scales. It makes more sense to me, as he chose these animals with some care. Now, liver of blaspheming Jew! Why the liver? Or is the greater question “blaspheming”? Liver itself makes some sense as it is disgusting and it secretes bile. Although it also detoxifies harmful substances. But as a liver, why would it matter who it comes from? So, the blaspheming Jew is the key! But why not the heart? The liver just seems out of place. Maybe that is why! It gives the ingredient greater impact on the reader. Now, nose of “Turk” and “Tartar’s” lips! I cannot make it out! There are the Tartar people of Russia, who speak Turkish, so I almost make that connection to Tartar’s lips. But nose of Turk is holding me from that. So, what is it?

  And he concluded by pointing out an error in the great bard’s words:

  I have a problem with the spell! What is it
, you ask? The Second Witch gives instruction for the cauldron to boil and bake! I spent an entire day seeking an accurate definition of “boil and bake”! I discussed the possibility with others gifted in the culinary arts, as well. My conclusion is that it is impossible to do both simultaneously! So, it truly is magic itself! Silly, huh? Well, that is how my mind has been overanalyzing things. I do not mind, though, as I believe it is healthy.

  I think it’s safe to assume that no scholar has ever analyzed that passage in such detail!

  ***

  The witches present Macbeth with a prophecy that he will one day be king. They do not tell him that he needs to kill the current king, however. That idea is added by his wife, his “dearest partner in greatness.” From my prisoner-students, I learned about the necessity of having a partner in crime.

  We were discussing the murder of King Duncan. Macbeth leaves the scene with the two bloody daggers still in his hand. To me, that had always seemed implausible. Why would he do that? He refuses to bring them back and smear the sleeping bodyguards in order to implicate them, forcing his wife to do it. To me, that had always seemed out of character. Why would he do that? Literary analysis had never provided a good answer, but the prisoners did.

  “He needs for her to get her hands dirty too,” said the new student in the group named Bentley.

  With a waiting list that was growing longer each week, I increased the size of the group from four to eight. It was a real effort to make their voices heard across such a large space, from one row of cells to the other, but the prisoners relished the opportunity to come together for these weekly conversations.