By Heart. Judith Tannenbaum
told us that his father was a newspaperman in the Chicano community around Bakersfield. Quick and wiry, Angel warned us about manipulation and an elite based on “material, power, and possession,” a phrase he sputtered at least once each class session. My favorite of Angel’s poems demanded, “Who decides what a poem is?” letting us know “I am a poem/The world is a poem/The butterfly is a poem…/This poem is a poem/Speaking in tongues is a poem/A rock is a poem/Shit is a poem/And the corn in it too/is a poem.”
Coties talked a lot about his children. He wrote them letters and called, but his family rarely had money for the long trip from Los Angeles so he did what he could at a distance to be the good father he wanted to be. Coties worried, not only about his own son and daughter, but about the community so many children like his own were growing up in. How had drugs become more important than black pride, Coties wondered. Coties let me know about anyone mentioned in the news doing good work, especially with youth. He told me to send these men and women poems from San Quentin; he told me to invite them all in to visit.
Elmo was the man guest artists commented on first as we walked away from the classroom, out the three gates, and down the long pathway back to our cars. “How can someone that smart be in prison?” most wondered. Elmo was not only smart, he could also talk with anyone, whether a fish (someone brand new to the prison), a professor, or a visiting poet. Elmo grew up black in a beach town north of Los Angeles, where he’d counted as friends thugs, hippies, low riders, and spiritual seekers. Elmo was editor of The San Quentin News, and both my strongest ally and biggest challenge. My ally because he went out of his way to teach me what he thought I needed to know about prison and because I could tell he looked out for me, even though I didn’t really understand what such looking out involved. And my challenge because Elmo’s sharp mind homed in on whatever seemed like a cover-up. Since childhood, I’d heard in my head what I called The Voice—a male drone that noted my every weakness, sloppily worded speech, or mixed motivation. Elmo noticed too, and always spoke out. I cared what Elmo thought and often over-reacted because his voice sounded so much like that of The Voice.
The mirrors of our classroom were poems read and written, visiting guest artists, conversations, laughter, and the human relationships we were building between us. In these mirrors Angel, Coties, Elmo, Spoon, and the others were not only prisoners, but also poets; not animals capable only of one worst act, but kind, funny, smart, generous, often sweet men. In San Quentin’s world of concrete and hatred, our classroom was allowed to reflect light. I loved being in that room.
4
Nowhere But Barstow and Prison
MY MOM AND DAD tried fifteen times to have a girl baby, but ended up with fifteen boys. We lived in a back house, just off Crooks Street, close to the dry river. A colorless, gray, two small-roomed, square, cement shack. One tiny bathroom and closet and another closet-sized impression of a kitchen. We bathed in an old round tin tub in bath water that had been boiled.
My dad worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. He and my mom came from Texarkana, Texas and Texarkana, Arkansas. My dad left the South first, after he got into a conflict with a white man and punched him, which was a hanging event for a black man in the 1940s. So he left, traveling as far away as he could, landing in Barstow, California, in the Mojave Desert.
There were hardly any fences on the river bottom where we lived. The soft sands rolled under and past Blacks Bridge. Blacks Bridge was all steel with bolts like small biscuits. When I lay under the bridge, and a train ran across, I felt its power like a herd of elephants or bison stampeding across the sky. I watched the different shapes the train’s shadows created on the white sands. Usually I wore no shoes so that I could feel the sands of the river as my feet sunk into them.
When I stepped out of our house on Crooks Street, the purple and red clay mountains that surrounded me seemed to hold the whole world. I thought that up must be the only way out, so I had a habit of walking with my head held back, my eyes looking upward. I often ran into things: trees, doors, and fences. Still, I kept my head up. Somehow I knew the universe was limitless. I looked for hours into the sky while lying on a sand dune along the dry river bottom. I had a secret spot beside the river, and sometimes I would whistle and semi-wild dogs would come running from all directions. When all the stars were out, I felt there was something hidden behind each one, as if the stars played hide-and-seek, off and on, like fireflies.
Spoon (front row, in striped shirt) with his parents and brothers.
FAMILY ALBUM
Whenever I saw a rainbow strung across the sky from B Hill to the mountains, I thought of a series of brilliantly colored sidewalks, each one leading into a new adventure, each one having its own mystery. Other times, I saw the rainbow as a gateway into a dream, a new dimension, something everlasting. Life seemed to go on forever. The stars, like the semi-wild dogs, were loyal to themselves, and they always shone together, even on the darkest night.
Spoon, age three. Little Stanleyand his mother, HortenseWhitney Jackson.
FAMILY ALBUM
We had domestic animals on our land: chickens, rabbits, pigeons, turkeys, greyhounds, and hogs. I could sit for hours, for an entire day sometimes, watching them. Other times I crossed the dry river, a half-mile or so from the back of our house, and watched the desert animals: road-runners, lizards, rattlesnakes, jack and cottontail rabbits, and birds.
Yet I always longed to see more exotic creatures, the kinds I had read about and had seen in picture books at school. I wanted to see pythons, elephants, bears, whales, and zebras. I wanted to see the large birds of prey, even vultures and buzzards. I wanted to see crocodiles and black panthers. I wanted to see the big cats, the lions and tigers that inhabited far away places.
So I was very excited about my first field trip. The Parks and Recreation Department ran a summer enrichment program to give children things to do—sporting events and excursions. One trip was to the San Diego Zoo, and I couldn’t wait. The night before, I didn’t get any sleep; I was up and dressed by three a.m., waiting.
We were to embark on this adventure from the Catholic school. Everyone gathered around the huge yellow school buses as we were loaded on to them. I ran to get a window seat so I could view the passing land as we traveled. I sat looking out of the window, thinking of all the animals I would get to see. Then another boy came and sat beside me. I wanted to be alone, in a seat to myself, to observe. So when the kid would not leave, I beat him up. Nothing bloody or long.
I was immediately kicked off the bus by one of the adults. As I stood there watching the yellow vehicles pull away from the sidewalk, one by one, a part of my heart pulled away with each bus. My heart dropped like a sparrow that had been shot. I sat down on the curb in the early morning sunshine and watched the wagons full of smiling children go on their way. I would have preferred a paddling instead of missing this field trip.
At least my mom and dad were not around, so they did not know the reason I was bounced off the bus. For the home beatings stung far worse than the paddlings I got at school. Sometimes my dad caught me with the extension cord in the bath tub. An extension cord on a wet, naked body stings like a whip. Dogs, cats, coyotes, and other howlers would have envied how loudly I bellowed. When the beating was over, my skin was afire, puffed up in places, as though lashed with a whip. Other times, when I thought I had gotten away with something, I lay sleeping in bed, on the floor, or on the couch, only to be awakened by a water hose, tree branch, or extension cord. The only safe place was my spot under the house, a place only dogs, snakes, and spiders lived. I never went that far under and I had to come out for food, school, church, and even—eventually—the whipping.
Unlike the beatings at school, though, my mom and dad beat me for a reason, when I knew myself that I had