by Clarinda Harriss

After Writers’ Club Meetings at the Jessup Prison

Clarinda Harriss, The Night Parrot, Salmon Publishing, Galway, 1988

 

After a night in that cool green maze

I expect everyone to be very polite

for days

after the writing class

I recall the guards’civility

and more

the courtly residents

who can tell by the twitch of an eyelash

I need someplace to flick my ashes

their sweeping elegance

“Ma’am the entire floor

is yours”

 

For days

after a night at the Jessup House of Correction

(drab kitchen mouse

princess for a night

at the Big House

with everyone else in whimsical clothes

and elaborate hair)

I wait ladylike before

every door

every door securely closed

(the door to my car, the door to my house)

for a stranger’s hand to

let me out

 

Mute passivity:  it took only a couple of hours a month for me to learn and relearn it as a volunteer at the notorious Maryland House of Correction for Men at Jessup (known as “The Cut”) in the 1980s.    Helplessness in the face of the arbitrary is one of prison’s most basic and terrible lessons.  

Walter Lomax never learned it.  

He didn’t learn it when he was convicted of murder in 1967, during a period when Baltimore—his home town—was torn by riots following the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King,    The dead man was a white store owner.   An eyewitness to the crime identified Walter Lomax, young & black, as the shooter.  Despite the known unreliability of eyewitnesses, and despite the simple facts—such as Walter’s right hand (he is right-handed) being in a cast that would have made firing a gun impossible, and his being verifiably elsewhere at the time– he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. 

He didn’t learn helplessness (not to mention bitter rage) when he spent the next four decades behind bars. 

Instead, Walter Lomax learned  that if the judicial system, in which he had believed, could fail him so completely, he would have to believe in himself, his innocence, and the power of his words and mind.   He learned that passivity and patience are opposites.  

Having entered prison functionally illiterate, he decided his first action had to be to teach himself to read and write.   He read.   He wrote.   He soon earned the nickname “Mandela” from fellow inmates.  At first, his “young man’s fancy turned to thoughts of [poetry].”   A collection of his poems, Mandala (a nice play on his acquired middle name), was privately published early in the years of his incarceration.  The poems that follows are two that particularly moved my Towson University students when he visited my classes during the Spring 2007 semester. 

 

Soliloquy With Malcolm

Malcolm my man, I sho-nuff like talking with you.   It seems like after we're through I always know exactly what to do.

It's getting rough though, people beginning to think something wrong…think I standing there talking to myself, beginning to whisper, 'maybe the cat ain't still strong.'

Malcolm I know just what you meant, and I can see that you had your hands full. Now life still ain't no joke, in fact, brother the load is harder to pull.

What's done happen is the tranquility done set in. The tranquilizer ain't coming from without no more, it's coming from within.

I shouldn't be surprised though, cause you told me in the beginning things wasn't right, but brother you could have at least pulled my coat to the type of people I was going to have to fight.

Now don't misunderstand me, I am not giving up the struggle, cause I know that there are a lot of innocent people caught out there in the jungle. It's just that I uptight this morning, and getting off on you, cause you're the black shining prince, and where I turn when lost for what to do.

 

 

 

My little brother and Malcolm

Malcolm, I didn't even know that you were alive. You see I was patting my feet to Smokey's hip beat and some other jive.

Then they took you out, and I said what's the fuss about, who's this cat
with all that clout?

Now, I was coming from behind, but I wasn't wasting
much time.    See, I was looking for some answers, looking here, looking there, looking everywhere to see what I could find.

  I read your biography and most of your speeches too. Brother, I was still lost, I just couldn't seem to get your meaning, and really didn't know what to do.

Now Malcolm, it's a damn shame how I came to see the light.  Man, I had to lose my little.  Now this is just between you and me, Malcolm, you know that ain't right.

 

By the time Walter Lomax stepped into the post of editor-in-chief of THE CONQUEROR, the prison’s monthly magazine, prose had taken over most of his writing time: work including a book about taking responsibility designed for parents and children to read together;  FROM THE WAR ZONE, a collection of vignettes of men who died in the Baltimore ‘hood;  and of course the editorials, one a month for nearly a decade, as well as numerous other articles.  None railed against the System, much less “Them.”  All contained specific stats, news, things-to-do.   One I especially love reminded the men to be grateful to the women in their lives.   All were designed to help residents of the Cut “do their own time,” make their prison time worth something to themselves and others.

Late in 2006, Walter Lomax walked out of Judge Gale Rasin’s courtroom a free man.  His elegant cap of tight braids was far more elaborate than the electric storm-cloud ‘fro he sported three decades ago, back when I first began reading his poetry, fiction, and essays.   There was no whimsy in his finely tailored black flannel suit, no mock gallantry in his courtly manner.  Acknowledging that the trial which had ended 39 years ago with Lomax sentenced to life in prison had been a travesty, Judge Rasin chose to conclude the hearing by addressing him directly with these lines from a poem by Mary Oliver:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

In the context of the hearing, the question was both apt—exactly what DOES a freed lifer do with the life “outside” he resumes?—and rhetorical:  it was already clear from the hundreds of pieces which Walter Lomax wrote for THE CONQUEROR that he would use his powerful, reasonable voice to serve and to teach.   Yes.  That’s what he would do with his one interrupted and  precious life.   Judge Rasin bet her professional life on it in 2006, and I bet on it, too, when I described Walter Lomax as  a  “ gentleman and a scholar,”  one whose skills would be an asset to my publishing company, in a letter to the court years earlier, when he was petitioning to join a work release program that the Maryland system subsequently abandoned.    

The judge had invited me to be present in her courtroom during the 2006 hearing where she would “sentence” Walter Lomax to “time served”—thirty-nine years, remember, longer than the full sentence of many a man convicted for a murder which he (unlike Walter Lomax) had actually committed—and release him to supervised probation.  Beforehand, Judge Rasin had asked me,  “Can you think of a poem I can quote?”

Sadly, all the lines I could come up with had already become clichés, with Richard Lovelace’s seventeenth-century pronouncement that “Stone walls do not a prison make” playing in my head like one of those tunes that worm into your ear and drive you crazy.  Luckily, Judge Rasin found Mary Oliver. 

At a second hearing, where his attorneys  petitioned the court to end his supervised probation, Judge Rasin said this of Walter Lomax: “He became the prisoner poet, then the probationer poet.  And now he will just be the poet.”     The way his own prepared statement ended revealed as clearly as his editorials that he is, among many other things, a writer.  Dissatisfied with excerpting, he chose to read Mary Oliver’s entire poem aloud to the court.

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Beacon, 1992                               

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

“Your honor,” he said (I’m quoting him from memory here), “When I looked up the poem you quoted at the previous hearing, I felt kind of funny.  It was about a grasshopper.  But it was beautiful, and it was about what you do with your life, and here it is.”                                  – – –

  (to read Walter Lomax's persepective, On Getting Out of Prison, click here…)