Ill fly away, p.1
I'll Fly Away, page 1
I’ll Fly Away
Further Testimonies from
the Women of York Prison
EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY
Wally Lamb
This book is for those who live in prisons
of their own or others’ making.
Disclaimer: The Connecticut Department of Correction neither approves of nor condones the use of vulgar language but recognizes its use as artistic expression in some of the works that follow.
Contents
Disclaimer
In Remembrance
Acknowledgments
Revisions and Corrections Wally Lamb
I. When I Was a Child…
Florida Memories Bonnie Jean Foreshaw
Kidnapped! Robin Ledbetter
Shhh, Don’t Tell Deborah Ranger
In the Mood “Savannah”
Tinker Bell Brendalis Medina
One Saturday Morning Chasity C. West
II. Gifts My Family Gave Me
The Captain Kathleen Wyatt
A Brother’s Gift Jennifer Rich
The Rainbow Ring Carmen Ramos
Pictures of a Daughter, Viewed in Prison Christina MacNaughton
Under-Where? Lynne M. Friend
Why I Write Careen Jennings
Lavender and Vanilla Kimberly Walker
A Gift Robin Ledbetter
III. Broken Dolls and Marionettes
Broken Doll Lynda Gardner
“No” Is Not Just a Word Christina MacNaughton
Wishes Charissa Willette
The Marionette Lynne M. Friend
Falling Robin Ledbetter
IV. Crime and Punishment
Lost and Found Roberta Schwartz
The Chase Brendalis Medina
Prom Queen Jennifer Rich
Down on the Farm Kelly Donnelly
Big Girl Jail Robin Ledbetter
Wasted Time Lisa White
Serpents Robin Ledbetter
The Lights Are Flickering, Again Susan Budlong Cole
Just Another Death Christina MacNaughton
V. I’ll Fly Away
My Three Fates Chasity C. West
Dance of the Willow Kelly Donnelly
I Won’t Burn Alone Brendalis Medina
Seasons’ Rhythms Kelly Donnelly
Flight of the Bumblebee Kathleen Wyatt
Reawakening Through Nature: A Prison Reflection Barbara Parsons
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Excerpt from We Are Water
Chapter one - Annie Oh
Copyright
Contributors
Facilitators’ Biographical Statements
About the Author
Credits
Books by Wally Lamb
Copyright
About the Publisher
In Remembrance
Diane Bartholomew, one of the York writing group’s original members, led by the example of her dedication to her own work and that of her peers. She died of cancer in 2002, a few months after her release from prison.
Corrections Officer Jack Mineo balanced professionalism with compassion, never forgetting that the women he supervised were human beings first, inmates second. Officer Mineo died of cancer in 2004 at the age of forty-four.
Barbara Mahon, a member of the writing group for a brief time, succumbed to the feelings of hopelessness and despair against which many inmates battle. She ended her life in 2005.
The State Farm for Women at Niantic, Connecticut, was the precursor of Janet York Correctional Institution. The Angel Memorial remembers and names 116 deceased infants born to State Farm inmates between 1919 and 1967 and buried at the nearby Union Cemetery. Their small, long-forgotten grave markers were unearthed by volunteers and York staff and inmates between 2004 and 2006. A granite monument at the site reads: “Brief sparks of life, on earth for too short a time, now cradled in the arms of God forever.”
We hope that I’ll Fly Away honors the memories of all the above.
Some of the advance received from this book has been donated by the contributors to Connecticut’s Office of the Victim Advocate and to the Barbara Fund, a college-in-prison program which seeks to counteract the hopelessness of life in prison with the rehabilitative power of higher education. Established by John and Bette Mahon in memory of their daughter, Barbara, the Barbara Fund is administered through A Sacred Place, PO Box 422, East Lyme, CT 06333. College-level courses are provided through Three Rivers Community College of Norwich, Connecticut.
Acknowledgments
The editor and contributors wish to thank the following individuals for their time, talents, and assistance in the birthing of this book:
Eileen Albrizio, Reggie Allen, Ginny Anderson, Martin Anderson, Carolyn Battista, Nancy Birkla, Richard Blumenthal, Aaron Bremyer, Martha Cameron, Susan Campbell, Bell Chevigny, Robin Cullen, Steven Dauer, Judy Dworin, Steven Ecker, Kassie Evashevski, Leigh Feldman, Julia Felsenthal, Jenifer Frank, Sianne Garlick, Kathy Borteck Gersten, Shari Goodstein, Dale Griffith, A.E. Hotchner, Michele Jacklin, Mark Jackson, Terese Karmel, Jeri Keltonic, Steve Kroft, Linda Lamothe, Theresa Lantz, Michael Lawlor, Joseph Lea, Richard Ljoenes, Mary Marcial, Colin McEnroe, Denise Merrill, Graham Messick, Faith Middleton, Calvert Morgan, Ronald Napper, Paul Newman, Diana Pacetta-Ullmann, Jonathan Pelto, Eddie Pettini, Pam Pfeifer, Judith Regan, Lori Ricks, Tabatha Rowley, Robert Shea, Larry Siems, Judith Tannenbaum, Andy Thibault, Nancy Whiteley, and Gale Zucker.
Special thanks to editor Terry Karten and to York Correctional Institution liaisons Monica Lord, Leslie Ridgway, and Karen Oien.
Revisions and Corrections
BY WALLY LAMB
Oh how glad and happy when we meet I’ll fly away
No more cold iron shackles on my feet I’ll fly away…
—ALBERT E. BRUMLEY
I knew from the time I was eight that I wanted to be a teacher but not that I wanted to be a writer. In third grade, my lowest marks were in reading (“Walter needs to check out more library books”) and writing (“Walter needs to practice his penmanship and be less sloppy”). If you had suggested to my teacher, prim Miss Comstock, that I’d grow up to be a novelist, she might have slapped her knees and guffawed.
My eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Cramer, took us outside to write about nature (which I liked) and made us memorize her favorite poems (which I didn’t). Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” Vachel Lindsay’s “The Potatoes’ Dance”: none of these works spoke to me, and anyway, what kind of men had first names like Vachel and Joyce? At a schoolwide assembly, our class was made to mount the gymnasium stage and recite, in unison, “The Potatoes’ Dance.” I’d been tapped for a solo quatrain that required me to step to the front and speak the following lines, which, at age fifty-six, I still remember, possibly because of post-traumatic stress syndrome:
There was just one sweet potato
He was golden brown and slim
The lady loved his dancing
She danced all night with him
As I spoke, I could see the science teachers snickering at the rear of the gym. I forgave them immediately. I thought literature was kind of stupid, too.
Later that school year, President Kennedy got killed. Then Beatlemania happened. Then it was eighth-grade graduation. I was only half paying attention when Miss Higgins, the scary teacher at the microphone, called my name. I got off my folding chair and took the perp walk to the front of the auditorium. Miss Higgins handed me an envelope. On the outside, it said “Julia Pease Award for Writing.” Inside was a crisp ten-dollar bill. A writing award? For me? As I returned to my seat, Mrs. Cramer’s wink implied that there had not been a mistake. But later that day at Ocean Beach Park, I spent all my prize money on ski ball and mini golf, just in case.
In high school, I read and wrote because I had to, not because I wanted to. In English, a book report was coming due. I was a pokey reader who favored short books for these assignments, but I’d already reported on Orwell’s Animal Farm and Steinbeck’s The Red Pony. From my sister’s nightstand, I grabbed the paperback she’d been yapping about, To Kill a Mockingbird. The cover had a Technicolor picture of Gregory Peck and some little girl in overalls. I opened the book and read the first sentence: “When he was nearly thirteen years old, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” Three days later, I finished Harper Lee’s tale of innocence lost, conscience tested, and hypocrisy skewered. A novel had never kidnapped me before. Until Mockingbird, I’d had no idea that literature could exert so strong a power.
I taught high school English from 1972 to 1997, and most of my students read To Kill a Mockingbird with me. I still have my coverless teaching copy of the novel, its pages lousy with underlinings and margin notes and held together with a rubber band. Nine years into my teaching life, I, too, became a fiction writer. I hadn’t planned it. It was Memorial Day 1981. My wife, Christine, and I had just pulled an all-nighter in the delivery room and the outcome was our first child, Jared. After the new mom went to sleep and the squawking newborn went off to the nursery, I hurried home to call the relatives and grab a shower. Fatigue, exhilaration, and shower water: those were the ingredients that led me to hear my first fictional voice, a wiseass adolescent crabbing about his summer job as an ice-cream truck driver. Unsure of what was rattling around in my head—I certainly didn’t imagine it was fiction—I padded naked and dripping down the hallway and scrawled onto a piece of paper what the voice had said.
Two years and umpteen drafts later, Jared was being potty-trained and my first short story was being published in Northeast Magazine. “Mister Softee” is a fiction about a smug teenager who has his conscience pricked and his hypocrisy skewered. The day it came out, I drove to the store, bought several copies of Northeast, and returned to my car. Staring at my printed work on the page, I began to cry like a newborn. For me, fatherhood and fiction writing are as intertwined as tree roots.
Quickly enough, I hit the wall of all I didn’t know about how to write fiction. I enrolled in a master of fine arts program at Vermont College, where my teacher, Gladys Swan, asked me what I hoped to accomplish by writing stories. Because I’d never asked myself that question, I had to wing it. “Well, To Kill a Mockingbird never misses with my high school students,” I said. “I guess I’d like to write stories that kids would read because they wanted to, not because they had to.”
Gladys frowned. “Don’t write stories for teenagers or any other group,” she advised. “Write them for yourself and let the audience that needs them find them.” Nine years after that conversation, I finished my first novel, She’s Come Undone, a first-person narrative in which a young girl’s innocence is stolen by a rapist. Along the way to writing Undone, I’d begun to teach writing differently. I sat and talked with kids now while they were drafting their work, instead of writing copious comments about what they might have done after they’d already finished the job. I championed the necessity of revision and taught my students how to give feedback to one another. “But two of my girlfriends read it, and they thought it was perfect just the way it is,” a big-haired sophomore named Paige told me. Her jaw was set. Her body was clenched with attitude.
“Your girlfriends are loyal to you,” I said. “I’m loyal to your work.”
A silent staring contest followed, as if Paige and I were two gunslingers facing off at the O.K. Corral. Then she blinked, stood, and walked away. The next day she produced a second draft that hit the moon.
I taught high school kids for twenty-five years, then university students. These days I teach writing to inmates at the Janet York Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s maximum-security women’s prison. It’s one thing to read the statistics about the injustice of the American justice system; it’s another to walk the grounds of an American prison. The first thing I noticed was the predominance of black, brown, and cinnamon-colored skin. I’m pretty sure the inmates took note of my skin color, too, and my gender. Their body language—suspicious gazes, arms locked defensively against their chests—spoke loudly. What’s this guy doing here? What’s his game? What does he want from us?
What I wanted from them was whatever they needed to write. Two pages minimum. No bullshitting themselves, or one another, or me. Okay? They nodded in agreement, but just barely.
At the time I began volunteering at York, the governor of Connecticut was John G. Rowland. He’d been elected three years earlier, partly on the campaign promise that convicted felons in his state would know they were serving time in prison, not vacationing at Club Med. Governor Rowland had appointed John J. Armstrong as his Corrections commissioner, and Armstrong carried out his boss’s vision with a vengeance. Inmates were now “corrected” with changes in policy that degraded and dehumanized them. Several suicide attempts had triggered an epidemic of hopelessness at the prison.
It was suicide that brought me to York CI. Two of the inmates had ended their lives; others had tried. The teachers at the prison school were desperate to equip their students with ways of coping with the despair that had infected the institution. They thought writing might help.
The statistics are alarming: 70 percent of incarcerated women have been the victims of incest and sexual violence. Over time that percentage was borne out in my students’ personal essays. Some had landed in prison for single acts of violence committed after years—lifetimes, in many cases—of horrific and predatory abuse. Others were incarcerated for having numbed the pain and become addicted in the process. Some of the writers lost their nerve and left the program rather than reflect honestly about their lives, but the majority hunkered down, struggled their truths onto the page, and read them aloud, often in tears. Doing so was hard, but it made them feel better—less weighted down by the gravity of their histories. Within the confines of the prison, their writing began to give them wings with which to hover above the confounding maze of their lives, and from that perspective they began to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That’s the funny thing about a labyrinth: what’s baffling and illogical on the ground makes perfect sense when you rise above it, the better to understand your history and renovate yourself.
The women’s first drafts were almost as bad as my first drafts. Their second drafts were serviceable. I assigned them books on craft and readings from literary magazines. They began giving each other feedback—reluctantly at first, then willingly, then generously. Over time, their writing evolved into prose of publishable quality. Publisher Judith Regan agreed. Couldn’t Keep It to Myself was scheduled for release in January of 2003. But the week before the book’s publication, Connecticut’s attorney general Richard Blumenthal, at the behest of the Department of Correction, sued the inmate writers—not for the modest earnings they would receive after they left prison, but for the entire cost of their imprisonment. They charged them $117 per day, as if they were staying at the Sheraton instead of the slammer. One writer, sentenced to forty-five years after a trial that was rife with racism, had $3 in her commissary account with which to buy overpriced toilet paper and shampoo from the prison commissary. She now owed the state of Connecticut $917,000. The lawsuit demoralized and frightened the writers, but it didn’t surprise them. Several likened the state’s treatment to the treatment they’d received at the hands of abusive men. Connecticut was just the latest in a long line of batterers.
I had neither the time nor the stomach to take on the state of Connecticut in a fight I was pretty sure the women and I couldn’t win. But if I had taught the inmates a thing or two about writing, their writing had taught me some things about how and why women land in prison and what happens once they get there. Couldn’t Keep It to Myself had the power to open minds and challenge stereotypes. The lawsuit had the power to silence writers who had just discovered their voices—women who were in no position to fight back against bureaucratic bullying. So, like it or not, I took up the fight—not alone, but with the help of lawyers, legislators, teachers, and some fair-minded journalists who love the First Amendment and hate the abuse of power.
I got slimed during that fight. Having attempted to communicate with the Department of Correction about the women’s book for two years, I now read in the Hartford Courant that the department had learned of the project only when book contracts were confiscated in the inmates’ mail. And because the DOC didn’t like “surprises,” my status as a volunteer was being investigated. Until this Kafkaesque turn of events, I’d assumed I was the fiction writer.
After the lawsuit had languished for a year, I nominated one of the incarcerated writers, Barbara Parsons, for the PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award, a prize that recognizes writers whose freedom of speech is under attack. When Parsons won the award and a $25,000 prize that went with it, things got really ugly. The DOC suspended the writing program, told me to stay away from the prison, and reassigned the teacher with whom I’d run the workshop for six years. A memo was circulated to the school staff: no teacher was to allow workshop members to use class time to write. Worst of all, the women’s computer disks were confiscated and their work was erased from the hard drives of the school’s computers. Five years’ worth of hard-won insights in some cases—eliminated just like that.
