Running the Books Read online

  I’d heard a great deal about this Amato. The former prison librarian. But I had to admit, I didn’t expect him to look quite so … conspicuous. The get-up was more Il Padrone than neighborhood librarian. In a gleaming gray double-breasted suit and cufflinks, he was, without a doubt, the flashiest librarian this side of Palermo. The hair was meticulously barbered and combed-back. The hard, leather-soled balmorals clicked a snappy little beat on the prison linoleum. He nodded slightly as he walked, as though conferring, just slightly, his much-desired approval onto his surroundings. Amato cruised by the library, fists in pockets, pouting and dapper, humorless as a tire iron.

  “You sure that’s him?” I asked Gilmore.

  “Oh yeah,” he replied, with a snort. “Who else could it be?”

  I hadn’t realized the infamous Amato still worked at the prison. As I soon discovered, his promotion to director of inmate vocational training had opened the librarian position. I’d seen him before without guessing his identity. But it was true. This man with the cufflinks was a certified Master of Library Science. Perhaps it wasn’t as incongruous as it looked. Perhaps in a prison library being a tough guy was as much a professional credential as a degree.

  It wasn’t until relatively recently that the prison had created a home for books. In the 1980s a room was cleared out in the previous facility on Deer Island, marking the first time inmates could make a proper library visit. The blueprint of the current facility, completed in 1991, included a permanent library space.

  But as soon as a space is carved out in a prison, it becomes a safety concern. The library, in particular, posed security headaches. It was one of the few places, aside from the prison yard, through which so many inmates passed and its layout made it difficult to monitor. Every shelf—some reached floor to ceiling—offered cover, every book a drop spot. The library was well-suited to prison mischief, for leaving notes or contraband, for passing gossip to inmate librarians to propagate within their respective prison blocks.

  For these reasons, the library had always been run by a strongman. Fu-Kiau Bunseki, now retired, had founded the library at Deer Island. He was a scholarly man, certainly not loud or mean, but he commanded respect. In an attempt to contact him with questions about how the library functioned, I discovered everything I needed to know in his outgoing voice mail message, which consisted of two words, deeply intoned in a heavy Congolese accent: “Be brief.” There was something dreadful in that baritone, and in that message. Something that really made you want to be brief.

  And then there was Amato. Amato took charge of the library after Bunseki and was the library’s second strongman. Unlike Bunseki, however, he was anything but quietly domineering. He was a pinky-ring autocrat. According to everyone, Amato was sometimes loud, always direct, and often confrontational. I’d heard a good deal of talk about Amato from both inmates and staff. The word territorial came up a lot. He was a character of legend. Just mentioning his name usually provoked a smile of recognition and a personal tale of fear and trembling. One caseworker told me she used to literally hide under her desk when she heard those shoes tapping on the linoleum. It wasn’t a positive development if Amato alighted upon your office doorway. It meant one thing: he was about to tear you a new asshole—and then a new asshole for that asshole. And without so much as loosening his tie. Now that I finally got a look at him myself, I understood. This was a gentleman who played hardball.

  According to the inmate librarians, Amato had whipped the library into shape, vastly increasing the collection and organizing it with care. Although his communications skills may have been questionable, his ability to impose order was not. One had to respect that. Forest and I were new to all of this. Neither of us had any experience in a prison. Even worse, we were both mild-mannered and bookish by nature. Forest was a painfully shy, sweetheart of a man, and I was a reedy, poetry club type. We were far from prison tough.

  Amato’s reign had been literally marked by the propagation of rules. His laws were posted, in capital letters, all over the library, on some manner of demonic, industrial-grade sticky paper. Impossible to remove. From day one, Forest and I neglected to enforce these rules. Amato’s permanently affixed signs stood as aging monuments to a former golden age of decorum and, by mocking contrast, as markers of our new, lax regime.

  The week after Officer Gilmore had pointed him out, Amato paid me a visit. Through the library’s big windows, I watched him pass through the door from the yard and stroll down the hall. Hearing those hard-leather soles tapping in my direction, I have to admit, I felt a spasm of panic. I seriously considered diving under my desk. But before I could execute any sort of drastic evasive action, Amato was standing before me, the prison lights glaring heavily from his shimmering suit. There he stood, in fluorescent splendor, adjusting his cufflinks.

  It turned out he hadn’t come to see me, but to procure a certain legal form from our collection. He was doing this favor, he explained, for “one of my guys.” We had a little chat.

  “You the new guy?”

  “Yup.”

  “How’s it going?”

  I shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

  He seemed concerned by this answer.

  “Let me give you a piece of advice,” he said. “It takes a lot of work to keep this place looking right, working right.”

  “I’m learning that,” I said.

  “Just don’t forget where you work,” he said. “I’m serious, now. Don’t let it become an anything-goes zone in here. I know you’re just a college kid or whatever, but you’ve got to control stuff in here or there could be some serious problems. This is a prison. Don’t forget that for a second.”

  Amato then launched into a story of what happens when the library is not guarded well. The story involved gangs, knives, shields, and possibly spears. I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t actually listening at that point—too distracted by the top of this man’s head. With the benefit of a close view, it was now safe to draw conclusions: the hair was impressive. Soft, kitten-soft, yet combed to a satisfying sturdiness. Such hair merited the word coiffure. It was a professional job. Had there been a way to inquire where I might find the stylist, or what products were used, without sounding like a smartass, I would have.

  He was wrapping up his tale. There was a grave nod of the head, some clicking of heels. Then he was gone.

  Once the coast was clear, I walked up to one of his signs, the one that warned inmates not to loiter by the front counter. I tried to peel it off. Then I tried harder. But the damn thing would not budge. Amato’s legacy wasn’t going anywhere.

  Solitary Departs

  Back in the tower, I was making some headway with the women inmates’ creative writing class. The practice of examining authors’ photos before reading their work had become a firmly established practice. I would pass around a photocopied author’s portrait and have the women spend the first or last five minutes of class composing a little response to it, putting in their vote at the end. It became a writing exercise.

  Regarding Toni Morrison, Short wrote, “Dats what I’m talking ’bout Harvey.” Of a young photo of Lorca, “That boy is Trouble. My vote Yes.” Brutish had strong views on Marquez. “That man is a liar,” she wrote. Nasty said, simply, “No.” For Whitman, Brutish wrote, “Hellzz ya!!”

  The women were especially taken by a self-portrait of the photographer Arthur “Weegee” Fellig, peering from behind his giant Speed Graphic camera, a lit cigar dangling from his mouth.

  “That is one greasy-ass motherfucker,” observed Short.

  This was a compliment—and one Weegee would probably have appreciated. We looked at his photos from late-night 1930s New York City: hookers, strippers, society ladies, circus freaks, crime scenes, and a series of tenement fires. One photo showed a man running down a fire escape in only his boxers, holding a pair of pants. He wears the hyperalert look of a man stunned into consciousness and seems amused by his good fortune. Another, which I flipped through quickly, pictured two women wailing
as their family dies in a fire.

  The final photo depicted two firefighters clutching a statue of a heaven-gazing angel playing a dulcimer. The angel had been pulled from a burning church. I asked the women to write about the fire series but to focus on this last photo, which Weegee had captioned “Two firefighters rescuing angel,” a print from 1939. The women seemed to like these photo response essays and eagerly got to work.

  But Solitary seemed bored. After class, she walked past me and muttered, “Sorry.” “For what?” I asked. She shrugged. She was just sorry. That was it.

  She was perhaps apologizing for her lack of interest. Her indifference had irked me, but I forgave it. In general, if an inmate was just looking to escape the prison unit, that was fine by me. As far as I was concerned, nothing good ever came from staying on the unit. But still, I had to run a class. If I let one inmate isolate herself and stare out the window, I would have trouble keeping order with the rest.

  It didn’t take long for the window gazing to become a problem.

  “Why does she get to sit by the window?” complained Brutish.

  “The only reason she want to be there is to look at the dudes”—in the prison yard below—“so she’s got something to remember later …” said Nasty, making an appropriately nasty gesture.

  Brutish smiled, “Yeah, yeah! That’s what I’m talking ’bout! I wanna look out the window too!”

  Poor, the group’s unofficial spokeswoman, mournfully laid out the terms of an offer. “How about you let us stare out the window for the first five minutes of class? We’ll pay attention more.”

  I considered this for a split second. “No,” I said. Even after a few sessions I already had enough experience to know that the opposite was true. If they stared out the window, they’d be distracted and gossipy for the remainder of the period.

  “Damn,” said Short, crossing her little arms. “I know you ain’t a bad dude, but you done had a cold-heart transplant.”

  I couldn’t have said it better myself. After this conversation, of course, I had to pull Solitary into the circle, away from the window. But now, staring at the window from the other side of the room, or perhaps at the blank sky, she grew even more distant.

  As usual, she walked past me after class and mumbled an abstract apology. She skipped the next class to “meet with her lawyer.” And the one after that, for a visit (an unlikely occurrence at that hour). Then she had to go to the infirmary; then she had to take a shower. The excuses were getting weaker. She didn’t show for weeks. I removed her name from the roster. I was inclined to hunt her down, but decided to lay off. From the outset, she hadn’t been interested and frankly only hurt what little morale existed in the class. Without her we had now upgraded to “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Perhaps this was progress.

  Ever since she’d skipped out of the class, Solitary had also quit visiting the library. It was a shame. But that’s how it went. Everything in prison was personal, especially for the women, many of whom were borderline personalities: they either loved you or hated you, and they assumed you operated the same way. She believed that she had to lay low and avoid me. And so, one of her few outlets in prison, the library, was now off-limits. I sent a message to her through a semi-reliable inmate: she shouldn’t hesitate to come down to the library on my account, I wasn’t mad at her and she wouldn’t get in any trouble. I sent the same message through a caseworker, to no avail.

  But among the women inmates there were no secrets. It was inevitable that I’d learn the truth about Ms. Solitary.

  The Day to Day

  The prison library was a lending library. Inmates were permitted to check out no more than three books at one time. With each checkout, they were issued a receipt that doubled as a contract obligating them to return the item. But we rarely levied fines for late or unreturned books. This was another dangerous liberalization of Amato’s regime.

  It wasn’t mere carelessness on our part. In prison it was simply too common for checked-out books to disappear—either removed by a vindictive or indifferent officer or stolen by a fellow inmate. Fining for lost books would discourage even honest people from borrowing them. And, ironically, the prison library—whose clientele included the largest concentration of thieves of any library in the world—lacked an alarm system. In short, we operated on the miserable premise that every book on our shelves would eventually turn into prison fodder.

  The library offered both paperbacks and hardcovers. Patti insisted that we had permission to lend out hardcover books but many officers fervently disagreed. An officer walked into the library one day and gasped when he saw shelves piled high with hardcovers, which could be turned into weapons.

  “Are you kidding me?” he’d said. “You can’t give these out.”

  In many prisons this was true. For reasons that were never clear, however, this facility permitted it. At the same time, the administration neglected to put the policy into print, so it remained open for debate. Officers often saw this gray area as license to confiscate and, in many cases, dispose of books. This was an ongoing struggle.

  Other policies were much more clear. Inmates could buy books by mail order, but only direct from publishers. No books could arrive in prison from private addresses. Prison regulations permitted inmates no more than six books in their cells. Inmates who ordered books often had to get rid of old books in order to keep the number under six. Some inmates sold their books to other inmates—an illegal transaction—some donated them to the library.

  The library had a tiny budget. For bureaucratic reasons we weren’t permitted to buy from cheap online booksellers. Forest and I poached yard sales, laundromats, and used bookstores. Usually at our own expense. The major source of books was random individuals who arbitrarily showed up with giant shipments. These reliable donors were an assortment of hippies covered in dog hair, smiling evangelicals, and local oddballs, who did things like give you an unsolicited thirty-minute lecture on the intricacies of the formal Japanese bow (“it’s a lot like setting up a golf swing”), and then peer-pressured you into an embarrassingly elaborate bowing ceremony in front of the prison, in the presence of coworkers on their smoke breaks. But I was very grateful for the earnest efforts of these donors. When they dropped off their payloads, Forest and I enjoyed an out-of-season Christmas.

  In prison, where scarcity is the norm and ownership is limited to a paltry few items, books themselves began to take on more functions. There seemed to be endless ways to use books. Hardcover books could be fashioned into body armor. Placed in a bag and wielded as a battle flail. Taped together and used as weights. Used to hide contraband. Books could be mined for paper or illustrations, or used to help prop things up around the cell. And for all of these functions, books became an item for barter.

  One woman confided that she kept a book in bed with her while she slept. Its presence comforted her.

  Some people even used books to read. For education, entertainment, therapy, a way of making sense of the world. Sitting at the library’s circulation desk, I saw more than one woman on the verge of tears while checking out a favorite children’s book that she hadn’t seen in years—Charlotte’s Web or Curious George. For many in prison, childhood memories were very difficult or nonexistent.

  Book lending was also a means of communication with another person. An argument over a political or religious issue often resulted in inmates, and sometimes staff, drawing up reading lists for each other—often on the spot and in a huff—as a means of setting the other straight. In my first week, an inmate named Robert Jordan, upset by something I had said, told me he wouldn’t speak to me until I read The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. DuBois. I told him I’d already read it.

  “Read it again,” he told me. “ ’Cause you missed the whole point.”

  The next time he came in, he brought the book with him and put it directly in my hands. I realized that he wasn’t asking me to understand DuBois but to understand something about him, Robert Jordan. I read it again, in
this light. And since we were going to let our books do the talking, I gave him a similar reading assignment, Kafka’s “The Animal in the Synagogue,” a story about a mysterious dusty blue-green creature that has taken up residence in the balcony of a decaying synagogue. Needless to say, a favorite of mine.

  I had many similar conversations-through-books with inmates. Much of my own reading came by way of these assignments. As a result, I found myself reading a lot of conspiracy theorists.

  But for the most part, prison library reading tastes tended to match those of the wider American population. We had a shelf for Oprah’s Book Club selections. James Patterson, Dan Brown, James Frey books rarely lasted more than fifteen minutes. In order to keep an eye on them, we kept these popular titles displayed behind the counter. Inmates also loved reading books on real estate and starting small businesses. There were other, less concrete interests. Books on dream interpretation were wildly popular—this is actually an ancient prison genre: in the Bible, Joseph makes a name for himself by interpreting fellow prisoners’ dreams. Given their unfortunate present circumstances, prisoners have a special investment in future events. Astrology books were also much desired. After the ex-inmate mugged me—and boasted that he still had two books out—I checked to see just which Latino man, roughly five-foot-ten, recently released, still had two books due. It turns out that this profile fit one man, a certain Ernesto Casanova. And the two books he owed: Introduction to Astrology and The Astrology of Human Relationships.

  The true crime genre was, obviously, also a favorite. I was asked for true crime books on a daily basis. From the wide assortment of small-time Machiavellis I got regular requests for The Art of War by Sun Tzu and The Forty-Eight Laws of Power by Robert Greene. Thanks to slain rapper Tupac Shakur, a.k.a. “Makaveli,” I was often asked for books by Niccolo Machiavelli himself. In his song “Tradin War Stories,” Tupac breaks it down thus: