Thomas E. Kennedy | May/Summer 2013

The State Correctional Institution at Graterford is located in Skippack Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, near Graterford, about thirty-one miles west of Philadelphia. The facility, built in 1929, is the state’s largest maximum security prison with about 3,500 prisoners in 3,200 individual cells on 1,730 acres of farmland. The prison includes a death row section, although executions have never been carried out in this facility. Prisoners are usually two to a cell.

Since the beginning of 2011, Jayne Thompson—a senior lecturer at Widener University in Chester, whose creative writing department supports her activities in the prison—has been mentoring a group of about twenty mostly life sentence prisoners here, between the ages of twenty-five and eighty, once a week for an hour and a half. She drives an hour and a half each way from her home. Some of the men were sentenced to life via a mandatory life sentence statute for having been present, or in the getaway vehicle, when a robbery went from bad to worse and someone was killed. Although Jayne could find out what the men are in for—it is a matter of public record—she doesn’t want to know. Nonetheless, she knows that murder is among the crimes for which the men have been convicted. She does know that perhaps four of them have a sentence less than life, and that a twenty-five year old who has been in since he was sixteen will get out next year. When I think of the changes that took place in the past decade—many of which I, a free man, can hardly keep up with—I can’t imagine how it will be for him, locked away from ten years of quantum advancement in quotidian technology.

We pull into the parking area outside the administration building, and I empty my pockets to leave wallet, keys, money, cell phone in the car, and slide off my belt—none of these are allowed into the prison. Alongside the administration building, a modern structure of brick and glass, a solid thirty-foot rebar-reinforced concrete wall looms up. At the end, a rifleman watches from a glass-windowed turret. The wall surrounds the sixty-two-acre prison compound, surmounted by nine such manned towers. Eddie, a member of the prison writing group, will later confide, “That wall is symbolic to us. What does it make you think of?” In fact, it makes me think of the hopelessness of ever getting through or over it.

We walk toward the building, through which we will have to pass to enter the prison compound. The reason for my presence is that Jayne has invited the men in the writers’ group to read my novel In the Company of Angels, about a Chilean torture survivor being treated in the torture rehabilitation center in Copenhagen and getting involved with a woman who has herself survived domestic abuse. The question of the novel, to which I attempted to discover the answer by writing the book, is whether two people who have survived such darkness are capable of experiencing love again. Jayne and I have been preparing for my visit for many months. There was considerable preliminary paperwork—including a disclaimer of liability, which I had to sign—as well as the mechanics of getting the books to the prisoners. Discovering that Amazon.com had a special limited-time offer of two dollars a copy, postage included, I arranged to have twenty sent to Jayne. I thought it might be pleasing to the “guys” (as Jayne refers to them) to have hardbacks, but that complicated matters. The lieutenant of the guard was reluctant to allow so many hard covers into the facility. Apparently, a hard cover can be fashioned into a weapon. But eventually, thanks to Jayne’s cheerful, patient persistence, the administration granted permission, and the men were allowed to receive the books.

This is the first in the visiting writer and scholar series that Jayne has started. Next will be the chairman of Widener’s creative writing department, Dr. Michael Cocchiarale, and a young Joyce scholar, Dr. Janine Utell. I will probably have one and a half hours with the guys.

“Our time slot is six to eight,” Jayne says, “but I can never be sure when the guard escort will arrive. It may be right away, and even if the guard walks me down on time, the men might be held up. In fact, they may come in very late, singly, here and there. They get held back sometimes for one thing or another.” When she speaks vaguely about it, I understand that she is glossing over the mechanics of prison bureaucracy, trying not to jeopardize the existence of the writers group. I ask no questions.

During the time available, I hope to do a brief talk about how I started writing, a twenty-five minute reading, a Q&A, and also talk to them about the book they are writing collectively, which Jayne is editing. Each member of the group will write a letter to his younger self, when he was between eleven and seventeen-years-old, about a choice he made that had negative consequences on his life. Serving House Books—a small, nonprofit house co-published by Walter Cummins and myself will issue it as soon as it is ready. The aim is to get it out among potential or early juvenile offenders, to help them get straight before they do something irrevocable; it will be a significant contribution by the guys to society. Jayne has access to many “juvies” through her volunteer service once a month for the Center for Resolutions, of hearing the cases of juvenile offenders and deciding their “penalties”—often a writing assignment.

Her position in the Center for Resolutions, a semipublic initiative supplementary to the court system dealing with conciliation and “restorative justice,” is in a Youth Aid Panel Program, providing juvenile offenders the opportunity to go before a panel of trained community members who work with them—where violator and victim agree—to create a resolution that holds them accountable for their violation, encourages them to make amends, includes an educational component, and often recommends community service. Juveniles who successfully complete the Youth Aid Panel Program have all charges removed from their record, and are given a second chance.  The book, tentatively titled Letters to My Younger Self, would be offered as an educational component of the Panel. Paul Perry, the Internal Director of the Prison Literacy Project (mentoring fellow inmates who are unable to read), has enlisted an inmate at Graterford to assist with the artwork for the book.

At the foot of the steps to the administration building is a blackboard-sized sign setting out the prohibitions and regulations on the premises—essentially that visitors will be treated with the respect that they are expected to accord to the prison personnel, that abusive language or behavior will not be tolerated, and that illicit substances are not permitted. We linger in front of the sign; because I cannot photograph it and feel conspicuous copying it in short hand, I am trying to memorize it. A guard climbs down the wheelchair ramp toward us, leaning backward into the slant.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Just reading the rules,” Jayne says neutrally. “I’m a volunteer—teaching in the reading group which meets tonight. We’re from Widener University, and we teach a writing group here….” Out of the side of her mouth, she whispers to me, “Sometimes too much information is good,” and we ascend the eight steps—his eyes on us—to the building’s double-gated airlock-type main entrance. Thursday is also visiting day, so there is a line of family members standing before the registration desk. To the left is a cluster of benches on which a few women and a few children sit, a few children’s books scattered along the seat.

Jayne swipes her fingerprint card through a device mounted on the wall. We move to stand in front of yet another thick sliding door with chipped beige paint, and a window of dense glass, waiting for the door to slide open. After a few moments, it does, and Jayne introduces me to the guard there. I offer my hand, and he takes it, giving me the eye, and I give him my photo ID. The guard, a short beefy African American man of about fifty, opens a thick book and asks Jayne, “He here just this one time?”

“Yes,” she says agreeably, flashing her Jayne smile. “We did all the paperwork months ago.”

He flips through the book, locates a pouch with a deep swatch of pages, and begins slowly and meticulously to leaf through them. Jayne and I glance tensely at one another. She has told me that paperwork sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. I am thinking how close I am to meeting the guys, yet there are still many more thick doors between them and us. I begin to fear that I will not be let in, and can see in Jayne’s eyes we share that fear. I plan to ask her to go in if I’m kept out, to at least tell the men I was here, that I tried to keep my promise, and to ask her to give them my best wishes.

Then the guard says, “Here it is.”

He stamps the back of our hands with an ink that is only visible under the ultraviolet light of a scanner lamp; when we come out again we will place our hands under that lamp once more, and if the light doesn’t cause the stamp to fluoresce, we will potentially be considered escapees.

Next is the metal detector, above which is a sign instructing people not to hop, jump, or run through. I am told to remove my leather coat and sweater, and place my folder and book on the table. My pockets are already empty, and my pants, beltless, repeatedly have to be hitched up. The guard minutely examines the padding of my leather coat, flips through the pages of my book, opens my folder, leafs through it, and pushes his fingers into the pouches.

Then he ties a white bracelet around my wrist and says, “You don’t get out without that bracelet still on you,” and provides a visitor’s badge that clips to the collar of my sweater. We wait in front of another thick sliding door for a guard to escort us in. The door slides open, and a short, slight guard appears; his face is strikingly strange, seemingly utterly devoid of humor. He motions us to wait. Up ahead of us, perhaps fifteen feet, is a chain-link wall with an open gate.

“Very unusual,” Jayne says softly. “Both the door and the gate are open.”

My ears and my head are filled with the sounds of buzzers, echoing noises, sliding doors that slam with a bang. You could never break down a door like that; you could hardly even knock on it without bruising your knuckles. Looking through the open door and gate, I see prisoners and guards milling around inside the mouth of a long, wide hallway dotted with metal detectors in front of other doors to the left and right. Some of the prisoners are filing into the visitors’ room. The guards wear different colored tunics and peaked caps—white or blue-grey. The prisoners wear brown jackets with large letters on back: D.O.C. “For some of us,” one of the inmates will later mention, “that brown color has racial implications.”

An extremely tall black guard, an officer I think, perhaps a lieutenant, greets Jayne with a warm smile. She tells me that he is a poet himself. “Mostly spoken word. Poetry slam kind of thing.” The guard with the strange face signals us to follow him.

Very slowly we walk behind the guard through the long, broad hallway, which I estimate is two hundred yards long and perhaps twenty or thirty yards wide with doors here and there along it—doors to the visitors’ room, to cell blocks, to the chapel. There are also windows, and Jayne points out the yard where the men exercise and lift weights.

“That’s where Ghani—one of the members of the writing group—showed me that there’s a nesting goose with a gosling in the nest. The guys take care of it. He was so happy to show me that.” Outside another window she points out a baseball diamond where the men play ball in good weather.

I am surprised by the seemingly disorganized comings and goings of the prisoners, and surprised to be so close to them with no walls or bars between us. Jayne told me she once forgot and walked that hallway before the guard escort had arrived, and both the guards and the guys scolded her; she risked losing the privilege of teaching here for a carelessness of that nature. Trying not to be too direct, I observe the men out of the corners of my eyes.

A young, tall African American man, muscular, struts past, and it occurs to me that if somehow I was imprisoned here, that if it had gone the wrong way, I might have ended in a place like this and, I might not last, probably wouldn’t. Later I happen to mention this, and a member of the inmates writing group says, “Consider that innocent men and women have been subjected to this intimidating environment.”

Finally the guard stops at a door over which is a sign—Education. He unlocks it. There is a hall and two guards seated at a desk about twenty feet along it. “I never met a famous author before,” the female guard says.

“I’m not really famous.”

“You famous to me,” she says.

A number of men, mostly African American, are placing passes on the desk and entering the door of the room we’ll meet in. Jayne has told me that being in prison is like being in high school—you have to get a pass for everything.

A little way from the desk, Jayne and I enter a large room full of men, most of whom are carrying my novel. Each in turn approaches to greet me, shake my hand, and introduce himself. Too many names to remember with a fit to each face, but the names themselves read a little bit like African American poetry—Saadiq Palmer, Eddie Ramirez, Terrell, Termaine Hicks, Ghani, Michael Walthall, Winfield Patterson, Aaron Christopher Wheeler, Jesse Faust, Elliott Eberhardt, Charles Diggs, Frank Ross, Ron—who is called “RC,” Aaron Fox, Mwandishi Mitchell, Christopher Murray, James (Muhammed) Taylor, Paul Perry… Aaron Fox—who Jayne calls “Mr. Fox”—has a beard and hair of white and gray—the other Aaron is much younger, only a couple of strands of gray in his wild, bushy beard. Paul Perry, an inmate who mentors fellow inmates who cannot read, is also a member of the Lifers Public Safety Initiative. RC—the only white man among them—refers to this writing and reading group as “Humanitarians at the Grate”—Grate, of course, is short for Graterford, and suggests a screen separating the men from the rest of humanity.

Chairs are arranged in a large oval formation, and one of the guys—Eddie, a Latino fellow—tells me that they have saved a chair for me at the head of the oval, and indicates another one with a desk on which I can place my papers and book.

Jayne and I sit next to each other, and Paul Perry sits to her left. She has told me that he always sits beside her; that is his seat as the man who has hand-picked all the members of this group. She has also told me that there will be no guard in the room. “Which is really good,” she added. I agree. How could you discuss writing or freely read out what you’ve written under the eyes of a guard? I often quote the writer whose name I cannot remember who said, “One of the most important jobs for a writer is to catch the policeman in your mind asleep.”

The tension I was not even aware of feeling is sliding from me at their warmth, at the clear welcome in their eyes, in their postures. Seated, I see that there is one Latino in the group—Eddie, the fellow who told me about the desk; not tall but with a deep chest and hard shoulders, he looks friendly and tough, full of a restless energy. He sits off to my right on the other side of a black man named Saadiq, whose desk is to my right, about a foot behind me. I understand wanting to have your back to the wall.

Saadiq is young and tall, a beard squaring his jaw, bare from lower lip to chin. His eyes are dark, intense, and look directly into mine. The white man, RC, is seated at the far left end of the oval, tall and lean. All the others in the room save Jayne and myself are African American.

The percentage of African Americans in U.S. prisons is vastly disproportionate to their percentage in the general population. The total U.S. prison population, according to Wikipedia quoting U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics, is the highest documented rate in the world with 743 adults incarcerated per 100,000 population—in all, at the end of 2010, 2,266,800 adults were in prison in the U.S., and nearly 40% of them were African American, and over 20% Hispanic. By contrast, only about 13% of the U.S. population is African American and only about 13% Latino.

When we are all seated, I have a moment of uncertainty—what happens now—but remember something that Paul Perry once said to Jayne, “You are in charge.” So I start by conveying greetings from Inge Genefke and Bent Sørensen who called me the day before I left, to be certain I remembered to send their greetings to the prisoners. I tell the men that Inge and Bent have spent decades, most of their professional lives, fighting against torture and trying to help rehabilitate torture survivors, raising money for the antitorture movement. Through Jayne, I give Paul Perry three copies of The Meeting with Evil: Inge Genefke’s Fight against Torture, a selection of reworked chapters from her biography by Thomas Larsen, which I have introduced and translated from the Danish (ServingHouseBooks, 2010). It also includes an interview with Bent Sørensen who, for many years as a U.N. Rapporteur, visited prisons in countries that were signatories to the UN Convention against Torture to try to intervene if he detected signs of torture being used. I promise Paul to send additional copies of the book to Graterford through Jayne.

As agreed with Jayne, I address the group about how I began to love reading when I was fifteen-years-old, and my father gave me a book by Dostoyevsky. I was instantly hooked on it and from that day forth was an avid reader. The book was Crime and Punishment, but I refrain from mentioning the title for fear the guys might think there is a subtext to the message. I ask whether anyone in the group has read anything by Dostoyevsky, and several murmur titles—The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot…

Ghani, light-skinned and slender, sitting about halfway down the oval on the right with his magnificent dreadlocks, even two or three dreads in his long beard, says distinctly, “The House of the Dead.”

“That is an amazing book,” I agree, remembering reading it when I was sixteen, and being completely absorbed by it. I wish that I could find words to express how much I appreciated that book—about Dostoyevsky’s four years in a penal colony—to a man who is living that life for far more than four years. My imagination fails me. I realize that the policeman in my own mind is patrolling my thoughts before I speak them—but this policeman is well-intentioned. He is trying to do the right thing, and what he whispers to me is that these men do not have their freedom, that that is their burden, and that I must not do anything to contribute to that burden. Rather, I should attempt to try and lighten that burden, to try to help them see how writing and literature can make them, as Alain de Botton puts it in The Consolations of Philosophy, healthier and happier.

For me, I tell them, discovering reading was like discovering an invisible door in the little bedroom I slept in as a kid—a door that I never knew was there before, and through which I could enter into the minds of others who had made them accessible by writing a book, and through those books, I could enter into my own mind as well. I tell about how at the age of seventeen, a short story by Katherine Mansfield, “Miss Brill,” so deeply moved me that I decided the only thing I wanted to do in life was to write—to discover what was in my own mind and heart and to share it with others. That is my spiritual discipline. But it took me so long to get anything published—twenty years—that I tried to quit writing, even sold my books to a second hand bookshop to get them out of my sight, but started missing them and buying them back.

The guys laugh with understanding.

“Must have cost you a fortune to get ‘em back,” Winfield—tall, with elegant dreadlocks, says with a friendly smile.

It took me twenty years to learn to write, I tell them, but then I finally published a story and became familiar with the place that my stories came from and they came more quickly and many more stories and books followed. Something I read in the diary of Dostoyevsky, written when he was eighteen-years-old, and which I read when I was eighteen, nearly a hundred years later, might be of interest to them: “Man is a mystery. This mystery must be solved, and even if you pass your whole life solving it, do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery because I want to be a man.”

As agreed with Jayne, I read three scenes from my novel that they have read—the first chapter, which contains a flashback of Bernardo being tortured; the chapter midway through, where Bernardo first meets Michela Ibsen and dances a tango with her; and the scene where Nardo tells the story about how when he was in prison, being tortured, and had not even seen the sky or the sun or had a breath of summer air for two years, and he wanted to give up, he was visited by two angels who took him out of the prison for a moment and let him feel the sun on his flesh, healing him, and promised that one day he would be released.

When I begin to read a section, I say what page in the book it starts on so that those who want can follow the text. It seems that they all do. When I am finished reading, we have about forty minutes left, and I open the floor to discussion. Right off there is a dicey moment. Mike, a tall younger man, beard following the lines of a square jar, stares directly, perhaps sharply into my eyes, and asks whether I chose the scenes I read for “a particular reason,” the phrase dripping significance.

Whoa!

I thought they would enjoy that scene about the angels, but maybe I made a mistake choosing it; Mike seems to think so. Maybe some of them found it condescending or presumptuous—too “near-going,” as the Danes say—impertinent.

“No, no reason,” I deadpan. “I thought those scenes were good reading pieces, the images and the rhythm of the language. That’s the only reason.”

His face relaxes. He nods appeasingly, and the discussion takes off.

The younger Aaron comments that the writing style includes very detailed description and symbolic use of names, words, places, events, and conversations which lodge them into his attention to help recall at a later recurrence. That is exactly what I tried to do, and am impressed by the comment.

Ghani says a few words about my use of metaphors and similes, pointing out how in the tango scene I describe Nardo’s and Michela’s movements “like courting birds.” He notes how just three words create a whole picture and discusses how it is necessary to use your eyes as a writer to observe and arrive at particular images.

Eddie asks how important I think a formal education is for an author. “Does a writer have to know all about realism and surrealism and magical realism and modernism and postmodernism, for example?”

I tell him it sounds like he already does, but emphasize that anything a writer knows will help him with his craft and his narrative and his characters and dialogue, that even if you only know a little bit about something, it can help. After all, a fiction writer only has to create the illusion of knowing in order to frame his narrative—that the knowledge that you impart through a book of fiction is less important than the wisdom you can find in it, and that the wisdom is imparted through the interaction of your characters and of the narrative, via your use of language, and how much of human experience it illuminates—your knowledge of the heart rather than of facts.

Mwandishi, off to my left, beefy and dark with an easy smile, asks if he might read aloud a scene he has highlighted from page eighty-two:

In the silence quiet piano notes and bass runs spoke and answered one another, with Miles Davis’s trumpet saying, asking, Soooo what? Sooo what? So simple and simply until the horns of Cannonball Adderly and John Coltrane and Davis began to weave from that simplicity a more intricate pattern that lowered Voss’s eyelids with the pleasure of the evening.

“You read that beautifully,” I say, thinking how I could never have imagined when I wrote those lines eight years ago that I would one day be sitting here having them read aloud to me by a man who seemed to love them as much as I did, but he’s spending his life in prison. And how if we write, if we create, the future may contain amazing surprises.

Mwandishi smiles, clearly pleased that I liked the way he read it. “I know that music,” he says, then asks, “You like jazz? What kind?”

“Mostly bebop.”

His smile deepens. “My man!” Later he will send me a four-page list of nearly 500 “must-hear” jazz titles that he urges me to listen to.

Then Paul Perry—large and dark, with short hair and eyeglasses and a gentle air about him—wants to talk about Michela and how I felt about writing from a woman’s point of view. Did any women complain that I got it wrong? Noticing a long scar on his neck—looks like someone might have tried to slit his throat, which makes my book seem far less interesting than this man, I tell him that was the first whole novel I ever wrote that didn’t have any Americans in it and where a large part of the central intelligence in the book was a woman’s. “But I trusted Michela. I fell in love with Michela.”

Eyes smiling behind the lenses of his glasses, Paul says with quiet conviction, “We all fell in love with Michela.”

“Me, too,” Jayne adds.

“No women complained about Michela,” I say, “but a few complained about Voss, the drunken womanizer.” Paul smiles and just says, “Voss,” seeming to convey his view of Voss’s clownishness as the behavior of a child, but Eddie adds, “I understand Voss. I see him as an honest, insecure character.”

A tall, muscular man named Termaine, light-skinned and short-haired, asks about the quote that Nardo uses in the book: I do not create, I destroy. I chop ice. He asks it with a large, wide smile, as if it tickles him. At that moment, I cannot recall the name of the German writer who said that but promise to try to find out and tell it to Jayne to tell him. Termaine nods, satisfied. “I think it was the guy who wrote The Three Penny Opera, but I can’t remember his name.”

A man on the far side of the circle, Frank Ross, who is seventy-nine years old and looks rather like Bill Cosby, says, “I think that was Kurt Weill.”

“I think he wrote the music to The Three Penny Opera,” I say. Afterward I realize the name I was groping for was Bertolt Brecht, but cannot remember whether he actually said that or not. Perhaps it was Kafka. In fact, browsing through my books I just found a similar statement by Kafka: “A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us.” But not quite. Maybe I made that up myself!

Frank Ross will later send me an envelope of his writing, one page of which contains a beautiful 200-word prose poem about his yearning to touch a tree.

“Do you ever have a feeling that your scene is too long, that it’s taking too long to write it?” asks Terrell, short-haired, spectacles spanning his thin, dark-skinned face. I say if it feels too long it might be too long. But if you take the trouble to write it, you might be happy with it finally—or you can always take it out, or shorten it.

In their questions to me about my craft, I feel we are having a conversation, that their questions reveal as much about them as my answers do about me. Maybe more, in fact. Because, if a man in prison for a long time still cares about the art of literature and the craft of its creation, or has come to care about it, then that is a whole man, I think, a healthy man, a man who will stay on his feet. His caring about these details will keep him alive, will help him not to despair—just as they help me not to despair.

Mwandishi asks hesitantly, when I say in the book that the Chilean junta had learned the art of torture from their neighbors to the north, “Did you mean…?”

I nod. “The CIA.” And I want to ask what political beliefs he has, what all of them have, wondering what a man might think about a system that locks him up for the rest of his life—with ostensibly no hope of ever getting out alive—that locks so many black men up. Suddenly it all seems hopeless to me again. As hopeless as it did in 1961, when an older woman I had known and liked at work one day, when Fats Domino came on the radio, said, “Some nigger’s driving a Cadillac off what he earns on that song,” and I thought about how my parents never allowed us to say the N-word, and I thought there was no hope for my country, even a century after the Civil War, when ostensibly nice white people can say such a hateful thing based on the color of a man’s skin. And Hoover bugged Martin Luther King Jr., and then they killed him, shot him down, a brave visionary pacifist with a dream who would not back down…. There seemed no hope. Then, when Obama was elected, I thought all that was over, but it is not over. Men are locked away for life because they inherit the effects of all this.

Maybe the best way to get out is to go deeper into yourself. Maybe through that undiscovered door inside your spirit. Maybe these men and I are all searching for the same thing. Maybe we are all prisoners inside our skulls.

As though he hears my thoughts, the white man, in the far corner of the oval, RC, asks how many languages I speak. I tell him two, English and Danish. “I used to almost speak French when I lived in France as a young man, good enough that I learned to flirt with the bakery girl I bought my morning bread from.” I hear from their laughter that they like that.

Ghani asks whether I feel like a citizen of the world, now that I can write a book with so many different people in it, from so many different countries, and not even one American. And it’s true in a sense, I no longer feel completely American, but I’m not completely European either. I wish that I could have thought at that moment of what Alain de Botton quoted from Montaigne about Socrates in his book The Consolations of Philosophy—that when Socrates was asked where he was from, he did not say “From Athens,” but “From the world.”

With a chuckle, Ghani mutters, “But you can flirt with that French bakery girl okay!” Which creates a ripple of laughter, and I remember at that moment palpably when I was in the army and lived with black men for the first time in my life, what good-natured, good companions most of them were. And I remember something Jayne told me about Terrell, one of the darkest guys in the group, beautifully black; how he had asked her, “You know what I didn’t like about myself when I was young?” And pointed at his own hand, and she understood him to mean the color of his own skin.

Suddenly I notice that it is almost eight p.m., and we haven’t even done the signing yet. Our time together has vanished—we could easily have used another hour or two. Mercifully, the guard gives us an extra ten or fifteen minutes—an extraordinary occurrence I understand from Jayne, who has warned me not to request more time if the guards say that the time is up.

The men line up with their books. It takes a while because many of their names are foreign to my ear and have to be spelled for me. Misspelling a name when you are trying to personalize a book with a dedication is the quickest way to depersonalize it. Also, I want to try to find something appropriate to write to each of them, this meeting has been so special to me, but it is difficult in so short a time. I ask if they want me to write “Graterford” on the dedication page, too—they do.

Ghani asks me to dedicate it to “the name my mother gave me—Kempis” because he wants to show the book to her.

When I’ve signed the last book we still have a couple of minutes left, and I stand chatting with a few of the men. My novel tucked under his arm, Ghani thanks me for my visit. “You know,” he says. “Victor Hugo is said to be the perfect stylist. I think you surpass him.” And with that, I begin to realize how much these men appreciate any gesture from the world outside. I remember how Jayne had told me that she brought them little notebooks in which to record their thoughts—she had not been allowed to bring in the pocket-sized spiral pads she bought at first, but found others that were not considered contraband, not considered potential weapons, and the men had been profoundly moved by the gift.

Eddie asks if I were writing a memoir, and said that a man was running and fell in horseshit when in reality it was mud he fell in, whether I would consider that untrue. Jayne told me about a discussion at an earlier meeting of the group when Saadiq had written that someone fell in horseshit, and later admitted that in fact it was mud, but thought it was more entertaining as horseshit. Saadiq stands off to the side chuckling.

Trying to be light, I say to Eddie, “I’d go for the horseshit,” failing to realize how important the question was to him. I don’t have enough time to explain to him my feeling that all writing contains a degree of untruth—because we have to select, arrange, leave things out, and simply because we cannot catch all of reality in language, have to settle for a small piece of it, but that the important thing, it seems to me, is not whether a man falls in horseshit or mud, but whether we are true to the essential facts, whether we are true to our heart and spirit and understanding. But that if it is important to Eddie whether someone fell in horseshit or mud, why then that is his own essential truth and I would salute him for being loyal to it. But I cannot think quickly enough to go into all of that; there is not enough time. Eddie says, “I only meant to get clarity on whether it is okay, when writing a memoir, to invent a detail for effect.”

The men are returning to their cells. RC comes from his far corner of the room and tells me that he has an idea for a story. He will write a story from the point of view of the watch strapped to my wrist. “And then, as your watch, I’ll be traveling with you to all the cities of the world you travel to, and I’ll see all the places.”

The lump in my throat will not give passage to the words of encouragement I want to say to him.

Ghani comes over just before he has to leave to ask if Serving House Books is still going to publish their book, and I realize suddenly that we never got to talk about that. “Absolutely,” I say. “As soon as the book is ready, it will go to press.”

Then the pretty young African American guard is waiting to walk us out along the broad corridor, talking about a bookstore in Boyertown where I could do a reading, and I am disoriented to see Mr. Fox, as Jayne calls him, the older Aaron, walking toward me with a smile. He shakes my hand again, his black white-bearded face, white-haired pate, tilted back a little—somehow I understand why Jayne only calls him “Mr. Fox.” He deserves the title.

And then Jayne and I are shoving the backs of our hands under the ultraviolet lamp, to show that the validating stamps fluoresce, and we return our white bracelets and visitors badges and pass through three more doors—seven doors in all, from the classroom to the open night, and the guys will have to go through two or three more doors, deeper into the Grate.

Outside, Jayne says, “Thank you so much for doing this.”

I tell her that the thanks are mine. “If it weren’t for you, I could never have experienced this. You are doing beautiful work for those men, and I could see how much they appreciate it.”

An image flashes in my mind of a poem by Rumi:

A dragon was pulling a bear into its terrible mouth.
A courageous man went and rescued the bear.
There are such helpers in the world, who rush to save
anyone who cries out. Like Mercy itself,
they run toward the screaming,
and they can’t be bought off.
If you were to ask one of those, “Why did you come
so quickly?” he or she would say, “Because I heard…”

Thomas E. Kennedy’s many books include, most recently, the first three books of his Copenhagen Quartet from Bloomsbury, Kerrigan in Copenhagen, A Love Story, 2013;  Falling Sideways, 2011; and In the Company of Angels, 2010. New American Press published his Getting Lucky: 20 New & Selected Stories, 1982-2012. He teaches in the low residency MFA program of Fairleigh Dickinson University.