Viral Spring #12: Life in Stir

   -- By Tom Phillips

In 2011, a 59-year-old North Carolina man held up a bank, then waited for police to come and arrest him.  He was sick, uninsured, and wanted to go to prison to get health care.  Here in New York, many young black men say prison is the only place they've ever eaten regular meals.

Prison offers educational opportunities and a chance to make long-lasting friendships. It also gives you freedom to think and create.  Many authors have found inspiration behind bars -- from Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet to Eldridge Cleaver and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  And Martin Luther King  made his most profound and moving plea for racial justice in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."  

Not to romanticize incarceration; it's a drag at best, violent and life-threatening at worst.  Boredom and rumination are your worst enemies -- with little to do in present time, you can get hung upside down in the past.  It takes discipline to stay in the present, and not think about the future -- i.e. when will this be over?  It ain't over 'til it's over.

 But now that we're all under house arrest, those of us who have our own living space should count our blessings.

Plaque near Thoreau's cabin site, Concord MA  

Chief among them is the radical simplification of life.  Work has dried up, travel is out of the question, restaurants and bars are closed, meat is scarce, parties are banned, money sits in wallets with nowhere to go.

In a way our souls have transmigrated to an earlier America: e.g.Walden Pond in the 1850s.  Like Henry David Thoreau, we sit in our cabins, alone or with a lone companion, contemplating ourselves.  And like Thoreau's contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, we must rely on ourselves.

Following the closure of every coffee shop in our neighborhood, an 88-year-old friend of mine, a widower, has just learned to boil water and make his own coffee.  He feels empowered.

I cook, mostly vegetables.  I exercise, pray, read and write.  My digestion has improved.

With cars and industry idled, the air is clean and sweet. The birds and the bees are having a field day.

Family values are back. Children call their parents.  Couples with separate lives confront each other. Some fight, some fall in love again. Some both.

With schools shut down, education has improved online, at least for students with access to computers.  A high-school junior I know said she's taking better care of herself now that she doesn't have to get up at 6 a.m., learning faster without wasting time in class, and feeling less stressed with no worries about clothes and cliques. 

Social distance can be a relief.  People who don't like to hug don't have to. 

Prisoners can only talk to those within earshot. So strangers who live next door become neighbors.  Gifts appear mysteriously on doorknobs.                       

Unlike most white Americans, I've seen the inside of a jail.  In 1962, I was privileged to do a few days’ time in Rawlins, Wyoming.  Nineteen years old, I was picked up by a sheriff who didn't like strangers without cars, convicted of hitch-hiking. 

I had two cellmates in the youth section of the Carbon County Jail. Eddie T. Brewer was a black kid from Detroit, a fellow hitch-hiker bumming around America picking up odd jobs.  Roy Sanchez was a local guy, in for fighting in a bar.  We talked for three days, mostly about jobs and women and getting into trouble.  I never felt closer to any roommates.

I was stuck in jail over Easter weekend, waiting for the fifty dollars my father kindly sent for my fine and a bus ticket.  On Sunday, we looked out the barred window of the jail and saw the citizens of Rawlins going to church, all dressed up.  So I delivered an impromptu Easter sermon: They've locked up the good people, I howled, and the bad ones are running around free! 

That is just as half-true today as it was in 1962 -- maybe more than half, now that the whole country is run by people who see a pandemic as just another opportunity to grab attention, wealth and power. 

Down in the dungeon, we're just biden our time. 

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips 

     

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