1Microverse
Summer 2014
The old brick building to which we were being led had served as an internment center for German nationals during World War II. Now it mostly held Americans. I wondered briefly whether I should write this down the next time I managed to get hold of a pencil.
There were eight of us being escorted across the compound of Federal Correctional Institution Seagoville, which had been put on lockdown as a result of our actions; prison inmates, confined to whatever building they’d happened to be in when the incident began, stared at us through the windows. I’d never seen the yard before, having spent the preceding months in the prison’s jail unit along with others who were awaiting trial or sentencing or transfer. Our own building had been modern, purpose-built for incarceration, and we never really saw it from the outside. Out here, on the other side of the tall barbed-wire fence that bisected the compound and divided the jail from the prison proper, the whole place had the look of a college campus—albeit a third-rate college in a second-tier state, never producing any really successful graduates who might be inclined to write an endowment check.
When we arrived at the brick metaphor for American decline, situated at the other end of the yard from the jail unit that had lately made up my universe, we were taken through the main door and then down a stairwell to the receiving area, where we were divided into pairs. As our turn came, two of us were placed in one of the holding cells at the foot of the stairs. The cell gate was locked behind us, and my companion and I took turns backing up to the bars so that the guards could remove our handcuffs through a little rectangular gap.
“What’s got you so mad, white boy?” an intake guard asked me. I declined to respond. I wasn’t mad anymore; the regret had already begun to set in. Also the guard himself was white, which I found confusing.
We stripped and threw out our jail uniforms. In exchange we were handed bright yellow spandex pants, flimsy boxer shorts, white T-shirts, and blue slip-on shoes, and then left to wait. The corridor was made of concrete. All the light came from naked bulbs.
There was a light switch in the cell, and I turned it on. “Leave it dark,” drawled my companion. “That bulb’s gonna make it hotter.”
“We’re gonna have to get used to that,” I retorted.
“Oh, that’s right!” He said this with great cheerfulness, and I liked him for it. I’d barely known him back in the unit, where we’d played chess a couple of times. Now we would be living together for twenty-three to twenty-four hours a day in a small concrete room for at least a month or two over the course of a Texas summer, with no air-conditioning and little to occupy our time. He had already accepted this.
I hadn’t. The adrenaline rush I always get from confrontations with unjust authority had played itself out, and now I regretted the loss of my books, the spacious corner cell I’d shared with the old Vietnam vet, my phone calls, my little radio. I’d been held in the Special Housing Unit once before, upon arriving at another prison, but only for a few days while I waited for space to open up in the jail unit. That time, I’d been able to bring books into the hole, along with paper and pens. Now I had nothing. And so I went over the events of the last few hours, wondering if it had been worth it and deciding that it hadn’t. Nothing had really been accomplished by what we’d done; the elderly man we’d been trying to defend had been brought to the SHU along with us, which was the very outcome we’d set out to prevent. Probably he’d be in more trouble now. And I wouldn’t have any coffee for days and days and days.
My new friend and I were cuffed back up and taken to a cell about halfway down the corridor. The door was already open; we walked in; the door was closed and locked; we backed up against it to be uncuffed through the rectangular slot located at hip level, which was then closed and locked from the outside. We dropped our blankets on our mattresses and appraised our quarters. The bulk of it was taken up by the bunk bed, a stainless-steel sink-and-toilet unit, and a metal desk affixed to the wall. A window with a tightly laced metal grille sat in the wall opposite the door; it had a rotating lever that could be used to draw the glass in, which I knew to be an unusual feature, representative of the more easygoing approach to prison design that marked mid-twentieth-century facilities. The window looked out upon a courtyard, and a tree.
Regret gnawed upon my soul, as it does each time it occurs to me that my past self has sold out my present self, depriving him of later comfort in exchange for momentary satisfaction. Previously this had taken the form of heroin addiction. Now it was the impulse to defy authority without clear strategic advantage.
“Is that you, Brown?!” someone shouted from down the hall.
I went back to the steel door, which featured a metal lattice grille over a rectangular gap, situated vertically and at face level, two feet above the horizontal chute. I pressed my cheek against the grille and shouted out confirmation that I was myself and could be no other.
“I’ll send you some coffee tonight! You’re awesome, Brown!”
It was a Hispanic fellow I’d vaguely known from the jail unit, where newspaper and magazine articles about my adventures on the outside had circulated for some time before my arrival. Now he was offering tribute.
Julian the Apostate, raised to Caesar but not yet Augustus, and wavering in the face of necessary civil war, must have been likewise affected when a Gaulic auxiliary shouted out from the ranks that he must follow his star. Even Emma Goldman had had her moment of doubt and pain, only to be rallied back to her natural strength through the stray words of some admiring fellow prisoner. I had no idea how this fellow proposed to give me coffee from his cell down the corridor, but that was rather secondary.
For was it not I myself who had decided, from adolescence on, that there could be no middle ground? Had I not filled teenage journals with inane yet consistent juvenilia to the effect that I would be Caesar or nothing? Had I not since taken a thousand conscious steps away from the sordid path of the postwar Westerner, in revolt against the passive mediocrity of our age? Had I not pledged myself to the life of the revolutionary adventurer, and to the unfinished work of the Enlightenment?
Each of the great men who had formed my psychological pantheon from childhood on had suffered for his efforts. And the road to the palace often winds through the prison. Yes, I had been cast into the crevasse. So had any number of those giants who once roamed the earth; they emerged, cast now in bronze.
But it wasn’t the example of my personal deities that drove me on. There are lives, and fragments of lives, that we may look to for direction as the faithful look to saints. Two girls, as later reported by Solzhenitsyn, were held in an early Soviet prison where talking was forbidden; they sang songs on the subject of lilacs, and continued singing as guards pulled them down the hall by their hair. These accounts merely shame me, as they should shame you. But shame is not sufficient groundwork for the things that I would have to do if I were to prevail in a cause that was not only just but entirely compatible with my own eternal cause, which is me. Duty is enough for some. I require glory. And now I saw the way forward, once again.
Yes, I was in the crevasse. But my soft power, cultivated over several high-stakes years, extended even here, in the form of an inmate’s deference. Someday it would extend everywhere and take other forms.
I had miscalculated today. But I’d miscalculated before while still managing to make many such failures the foundation of some future victory. This situation, too, could be turned to my ultimate advantage. And if the guards dragged me down the hall by the hair, I would take the opportunity to sing my own praises.
That night, a guard came by, opened the chute, and passed through a blank envelope. It was sealed. I opened it. It was filled with instant coffee.
* * *
One is awoken by the clang of the metal door slot as it’s unlocked and falls into its resting position. A breakfast tray is slid onto the now-horizontal slot, to be taken up by one of the inmates and replaced by a second tray, which is also taken up, followed by four plastic bags of milk and two apples or bananas or, if you’re unlucky, pears. As long as the guard is there, one might ask him to hit the light switch that sits outside one’s door. It’s about 5:30 a.m. They return after some ten or fifteen minutes to take back up the trays, and, if it’s a weekday, to ask who wants to go outside for their allotted hour of recreation later that morning. They must know this in advance so that the duty officer can plan things such that incompatible inmates who may be inclined to attack each other on sight aren’t placed in the same recreation cage.
I already knew all these basics from my original three-day stint in the hole at the Fort Worth Federal Correctional Institution, which, like all institutions run by the Bureau of Prisons, operates under a series of program statements composed out of the national office and officially applicable to federal facilities from California to Maine.
But rules have no importance in a country such as ours. It’s quite enough to know the whims of those they’ve placed in charge.
“Get that cup off my windowsill!” shouted some sort of fascist.
I stood up and glanced through the door grate. It was a pig I’d never seen before. His name tag read Mack. He was in charge here.
After I removed the offending foam cup from the fascist’s windowsill, he explained to me, in somewhat less aggressive tones, that no objects must be placed on the windowsill, which was his.
Copyright © 2024 by Barrett Brown