Mississippi Quarterly Vol. 74. No. 1 by Johns Hopkins University Press

74.1MississippiQuarterlyTheJournalofSouthernCulturesSpecialIssueonMassIncarcerationintheUSSouth2021

Mississippi Quarterly The Journal of Southern Cultures Editor TED ATKINSON AssociateEditor ManagingEditor Robert M. West Laura E. West EditorEmeritus EditorialAssistant Robert L. Phillips MaryAna McGee EDITORIAL BOARD DEBORAHCOHN Indiana University SUSANV.DONALDSON College of William & Mary SARAHGARDNER Mercer University MICHAELKREYLING Vanderbilt University BARBARALADD Emory University LORIEWATKINSMASSEY William Carey University CHRISTOPHERRIEGER Southeast Missouri State University SCOTTROMINE University of North Carolina, Greensboro DONALDSHAFFER Mississippi State University JONR.SMITH Simon Fraser University ANTHONYSZCZESIUL University of Massachusetts, Lowell Editor,2005–2012 NOELPOLK Editor,1988–2004 ROBERTL.PHILLIPS Editor,1970–1987 PEYTONW.WILLIAMS,JR. Editor,1967–1970 SCOTTC.OSBORN Editor,1958–1966 ROBERTB.HOLLAND Editor,1948–1958 JOHNK.BETTERSWORTH Published for the Mississippi State University College of Arts & Sciences by Johns Hopkins University Press

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Mississippi Quarterly 74.1 2021 SPECIAL ISSUE M a s s I n c a r c e r a t i o n i n t h e U S S o u t h Katie Owens-Murphy and Jeanine Weekes Schroer, Guest Editors Introduction: Rethinking Mass Incarceration through the US South K ATIE O WENS -M URPHY J EANINE W EEKES S CHROER 1 Inside and Out: Black Trans Women Incarcerated in the South R ACHEL M ARIE -C RANE W ILLIAMS 9 The American Virus: COVID-19 and Carceral Liberalism J ENNIE L IGHTWEIS -G OFF 31 Pandemic Lockdowns as a Pathway to EmpathyBRETTTOMÁS G ONZALEZ 53 Dead Weight R ANDALL H ORTON 61 For the 95 Bodies Found on the Imperial Sugar Plantation J ASON M C C ALL 69

Welcome to the Farm Squad: Notes from the Prison Plantation A NONYMOUS 73 A Different Kind of Labor: Writing in Prison R YAN M. M OSER 85 “And Now She Sings It”: Conjure as Abolitionist Alternative in Sing,Unburied,SingJOANNADAVIS -M C E LLIGATT 103 Choose Your Own Homicide: Tinkering with the Machinery of Death in Alabama P ROJECT H OPE TO A BOLISH THE D EATH P ENALTY K ATIE O WENS -M URPHY 125

As the essays in this issue attest, the implementation of this logic and methodology is also regionally-specific. What is revealed when we examine mass incarceration through the lens of the US South? Statistical data specific to the US South illuminates not just the scale of incarceration but its extremities. Southern prisons lead the nation in violence: 853 violent assaults were reported in Mississippi prisons in fiscal year 2020, a 29% increase from the previous year (Associated Press). In Alabama, the Equal Justice Initiative reports, there have been thirty-four homicides since the Department of Justice concluded in

Introduction: Rethinking Mass Incarceration through the US South

THE NUMBERS HAVE BEEN REHEARSED MANY TIMES: THE UNITED STATES has the third largest incarcerated population in the world and leads the world in the number of incarcerated people per 100,000 citizens. Nearly 20% of the world’s incarcerated people are in the US. This astounding human rights failure has come to be known as “mass incarceration.” Yet, too often, critiques from the left focus only on scale, obscuring some of the most pernicious elements of incarceration modeled through other numbers. The incarceration rate for Black folk in 2018, for example, is 1,501 per 100,000, nearly twice the rate for Hispanic folk and more than five times the rate for White folk (Gramlich). Discourse about mass incarceration elides these and other particularities, as Dylan Rodríguez has argued: “it’s not ‘the masses’ who are being criminalized and locked up” (“Policing”). Only by attending to the specifics of the practices of incarceration can we render more clearly the complexity of the communal and generational trauma of its violence. Incarceration serves the creation of what Rodríguez calls the “systemic logicandinstitutionalmethodology that produces and coheres spatial, cultural, and juridical structures of human dominance” (“To Define”).

2 OOwens Murphy and Schroer

April 2019 that the Alabama prison system “routinely violates the Constitutional rights of prisoners” (“Two Men Murdered”; “Homicide Reveals”). There were also fifteen suicides in Alabama over a period of fifteen months in 2017–2018 (Gonzales). Florida’s system includes the oldest prison population in the US. Due to the state’s severe restrictions on parole as well as its “Truth in Sentencing” rule that requires people to serve 85% of their sentences, about 25% of those incarcerated in Florida are over the age of fifty (LongRoad 5). Outside of California, which has currently enacted a moratorium on capital punishment, southern states also lead the nation in the number of people who have been sentenced to death by the courts (Facts 2). As these numbers suggest, incarceration has a distinct flavor in the US South. Penal histories of the United States typically begin with Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, a model for spatial confinement justified through moral and religious ideology that was completed in 1829 and served as the nation’s first dedicated carceral institution. As Houston A. Baker, Jr., has argued, “There is a United States northern narrative of incarceration. . . . highlighted by expressive traditions that foreground legacies of Puritan and Quaker spirituality” through the isolation model of “[m]onastic solitude” (9). Such histories focus on punishments bounded by space and time in which people served finite sentences alone in single cells. By contrast, the US South—less concerned with physical confinement than with social control—extended the impact of incarceration across both space and time. Incarcerated people were routinely leased off-site to perform uncompensated labor on infrastructural projects ranging from railroads to coal mines. This reification of systems of enslavement through prison plantations and convict leasing, shored up through legislation such as the Black Codes, has been well-documented by work ranging from Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name and David Oshinsky’s Worse than Slavery to Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th. The US South also extends and deepens incarceration temporally through practices such as reincarceration for unpaid fines as well as felony voter disenfranchisement, through which incarcerated people lose the right to vote until they pay off their legal fines and restitution fees in what many critics argue amounts to another lifelong poll tax (Uggen et al).

Rethinking Mass Incarceration throughthe USSouth 3

Though the South has been a special site for carceral violence, it has been a remarkable site of resistance, as well. During the Civil Rights Movement, the Freedom Riders were famously sent to Parchman Farm to perform hard labor; when they sang freedom songs in protest, authorities humiliated them, served them inedible food, and took away their mattresses (Mississippi Civil Rights Project). When the Angola Three—Black Panthers incarcerated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, including Alfred Woodfox—were framed for murder and placed in solitary confinement for decades, they filed a civil suit against the Louisiana Department of Corrections contesting the long-term use of isolation for people in prison; Woodfox, who served four decades in solitary confinement before his release in 2016, even argued their case in federal court (Pilkington). More recently, the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), an inside-led organization within Alabama’s prison system, coordinated hunger and labor strikes in 2016 and again in 2018 to coincide with the August–September timeline of the Attica uprisings in New York in 1971. The strikes, which were designed to draw national attention to poor living conditions and exploitative labor conditions in US prisons, reached all the way to Washington state, where people detained in ICE facilities also participated (Da Silva). Many challenges to capital punishment have also emerged from southern states, including efforts toward a statewide moratorium spearheaded by people on Alabama’s death row that spanned several decades (PHADP). Rethinking mass incarceration through the US South reveals that imprisonment is not a problem of scale but a problem of ideology. This special issue outlines the ideological contours of the carceral South while also exploring efforts to disrupt and transform it. The essays in the first half depict the proliferation and amplification of carceral violence in the US South both within and outside of prison facilities. Rachel Marie-Crane Williams discusses the ways in which jails and prisons reinforce binaries of race and gender in her piece, “Inside and Out: Black Trans Women Incarcerated in the South.” Interspersing research with visual art, Williams illustrates the ways in which Black trans women are deprived of gender-affirming medical care and subjected to intersecting vectors of racial and gender-based violence in southern prisons. Individual case studies and graphic narrative provide

The climax of this episodic autobiographical piece describes a highstakes decision as the men put down their tools and refuse to work.

Using New Orleans as her case study, Jennie Lightweis-Goff analyzes the ways in which the US policy response to COVID-19 mirrors carceral punishment strategies in “The American Virus: COVID-19 and Carceral Liberalism.” In particular, she identifies a type of liberal COVID discourse that uses the conservative rhetoric of personal responsibility and pursues punishment, including incarceration, for mask and curfew violations in the name of public safety. Brett Tomás Gonzalez extends this critique by describing his experience with the pandemic from within a federal prison in Texas, creating parallels between lockdowns and quarantines and his own experience with isolation in “Pandemic Lockdowns as a Pathway to Empathy.” Using visual art as a springboard for autoethnography, Gonzalez considers the ways in which sustained isolation impacts incarcerated people, and how the effects of COVID-19 might provide the outside public with a window into the conditions routinely experienced by people in prison.

Jason McCall’s poem, “For the 95 Bodies Found on the Imperial Sugar Plantation,” was inspired by the mass grave of Black laborers that was discovered on the infamous Texas prison plantation in 2018. The poem, a belated eulogy, is a testament to the violence inherent in the ultimate symbol of mass incarceration in the US South: the prison plantation.Theessays in the second part of the issue center strategies of resistance. Anonymous, who is currently incarcerated, narrates his resistance to forced manual labor on a prison plantation in the Deep South in “Welcome to the Farm Squad: Notes from the Prison Plantation.”

Randall Horton’s autobiographical piece, “Dead Weight,” excerpted from his new memoir of the same title, describes the barriers he faced from universities when he attempted to enroll in college and, eventually, secure a tenure-track creative writing job after prison. Moving from his roots in Alabama to his incarceration to his complicated experiences with reentry, Horton illustrates the ways in which institutions of higher education perform the ideological work of carceral systems through interrogative interviews, background checks, and rescinded promises.

OOwens Murphy and Schroer thick descriptions of the threats that prisons pose to human dignity, autonomy, and safety.

Joanna Davis-McElligatt discusses conjure as an African diasporic resistance to carceral logic in “‘And Now She Sings It’: Conjure as Abolitionist Alternative in Sing, Unburied, Sing.” She situates Jesmyn Ward’s Mississippi-based novel as providing decarceral strategies through its attention to collectivist ethics and the disruption of “spacetime.” The last essay in this issue is written by Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty (PHADP), the nation’s only 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded and run by people on death row. Located in Alabama, the group recently navigated a change in the state’s execution methods in which they were given mere days to choose between lethal injection and nitrogen hypoxia. They detail this harrowing decision alongside their experiences with execution methods more broadly in “Choose Your Own Homicide: Tinkering with the Machinery of Death in Alabama.”Inour selection and editorial process for this special issue, we were faced with a number of decisions that have informed and enriched our orientation to this work. First, we strove to honor the singular voice of each contributor. Second, understanding the limitations of research access for some of our contributors, we welcomed essays that framed important research questions through lived experience; as a result, some of our contributors have chosen to remain anonymous. Finally, we strove for a balance of essays and voices—personal, critical, creative, visual, intertextual. The essays converse with one another in organically interesting ways, intersecting in terms of themes and events: three focus on the carceral impacts of COVID-19; three examine the continuing role of plantations in carceral logic; three explore labor in and out of carceral institutions; and all of the pieces engage with the physical, psychological, and spiritual violence imposed by the carceral state. Each piece supplies an important and unique qualitative dimension of the geographical and conceptual landscapes that help us to rethink mass incarceration through the lens of the US South.

Rethinking Mass Incarceration throughthe USSouth 5

Relatedly, Ryan M. Moser’s “A Different Kind of Labor: Writing in Prison” describes efforts to resist manual labor within the Florida prison system in favor of the intellectual labor of creative writing. He chronicles the work of the “Writers’ Guild,” a writing collective he formed and that carried out the work of the externally-facilitated writers’ workshop that was shut down during the COVID-19 outbreak.

6 OOwens Murphy and Schroer Works Cited Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, et al. Under Pressure: How Fines and Fees Hurt People, Undermine Public Safety, and Drive Alabama’s Racial Wealth Divide. 2019, p. 66, FactsCriminalBaker,Associated10-10-FINAL.pdf.appleseed.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/AA1240-FinesandFees-www.alabamaPress.“Analysis:WatchdogGivesBleakReportonMissis-sippiPrisons.”DailyLeader,24Apr.2021,www.dailyleader.com/2021/04/24/analysis-watchdog-gives-bleak-report-on-mississippi-prisons/.HoustonA.,Jr.“Incarceration.”KeywordsforSouthernStudies,editedbyScottRomineandJenniferRaeGreeson,ReprintEdition,UofGeorgiaP,2016,pp.9–21.Blackmon,DouglasA.SlaverybyAnotherName:TheRe-EnslavementofBlackAmericansfromtheCivilWartoWorldWarII.Anchor,2009.JusticeFactSheet.NAACP,24May2021,naacp.org/resources/criminal-justice-fact-sheet.DaSilva,Chantal.“ICEDetaineesJoinNationwidePrisonStrike,ManyRefusingtoEat:Organizers.”Newsweek,23Aug.2018,www.newsweek.com/ice-detainees-join-nationwide-prison-strike-many-refusing-eat-organizers-1088092.DuVernay,Ava,etal.13th.ForwardMovement,KandooFilms,Netflix,2016.AbouttheDeathPenalty.DeathPenaltyInformationCenter,18Nov.2021,p.4,documents.deathpenaltyinfo.org/pdf/FactSheet.pdf.Gonzales,Richard.“AfterInmateSuicides,AlabamaPrisonsOnTrial.”NPR,28Mar.2019,www.npr.org/2019/03/28/707822405/after-in-mate-suicides-alabama-prisons-on-trial.Gramlich,John.“BlackImprisonmentRateintheU.S.HasFallenbyaThirdsince2006.”PewResearchCenter,6May2020,www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/06/share-of-black-white-his-panic-americans-in-prison-2018-vs-2006/.“HomicideRevealsAlabamaPrisonCrises.”EqualJusticeInitiative,29May2020,eji.org/news/homicide-reveals-alabama-prison-crises/.

Rethinking Mass Incarceration throughthe USSouth 7 Horton, Randall. DeadWeight:AMemoirinEssays. Northwestern UP, Long2022.RoadtoNowhere:HowSouthernStatesStrugglewithLong-TermIncarceration.SouthernPovertyLawCenter,Feb.2021,www.splcactionfund.org/sites/default/files/Long-Road-to-Nowhere.pdf.MississippiCivilRightsProject.Parchman,MississippiStatePeniten-tiary.mscivilrightsproject.org/sunflower/place-sunflower/parch-man-mississippi-state-penitentiary/.Accessed5Oct.2021.Oshinsky,DavidM.WorseThanSlavery:ParchmanFarmandtheOr-dealofJimCrowJustice.FreePress,1997.Pilkington,Ed.“AngolaThreeInmateinLongestSolitaryConfinementSeekingDamagesinCourt.”TheGuardian,4Sept.2014,www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/04/angola-three-albert-woodfox-lawsuit-louisiana-prison.ProjectHopetoAbolishtheDeathPenalty(PHADP).“MoratoriumTalkingPoints.”1Jan.2011,www.phadp.org/?q=node/32.Rodríguez,Dylan.“PolicingandtheViolenceofWhiteBeing:AnIn-terviewwithDylanRodríguez.”InterviewedbyCaseyGoonan.TheBlackScholar,12Sept.2016,www.theblackscholar.org/policing-vi-olence-white-interview-dylan-rodriguez/.—.“ToDefine‘Incarceration’Against‘MassIncarceration’byDylanRodriguez.”ScholarsforSocialJustice,Mar.2018,scholarsforsocialjustice.com/ssj-blog-to-define-incarceration-against-mass-incarcer-ation-by-dylan-rodriguez/.“TwoMenMurderedinAlabamaPrisonsThisPastWeek.”EqualJus-ticeInitiative,12Oct.2021,eji.org/news/two-men-murdered-in-al-abama-prisons-in-past-week/.Uggen,Chris,etal.LockedOut2020:EstimatesofPeopleDeniedVotingRightsDuetoaFelonyConviction.TheSentencingProject,30Oct.2020,www.sentencingproject.org/publications/locked-out-2020-estimates-of-people-denied-voting-rights-due-to-a-felony-conviction/.

For women who are transgender, their experiences of oppression and power intersect with other identities they hold related to race, sexuality, class, age, and ability.

THE INTERSECTIONAL IDENTITIES OF PEOPLE WHO ARE INCARCERATED have deep repercussions for their quality of life in prison including their mental and physical health and safety. Variations in identity tied to race, gender, and/or sexuality have long been a source of scrutiny and an excuse prisons use for the heightened surveillance of in dividuals.

Prison systems in the United States have no formal acknowledgement of the variations and complexity of gender within human populations. For these women, simply existing in a system like this— designed to be harmful and isolating—is an act of resistance. Prison policy and culture are also complicated by regional politics. In particular, prisons in the US South have been instruments in the history of racism and cisheteropatriarchy further complicated by the long shadow of Christianity.

10 RRachel Marie Crane Williams

The subject formations of transgender women by people who play a role in their incarceration vary and can have lasting impacts on the experiences they endure. Like all people, incarcerated trans women have intersectional identities and various ways of being and world making. Despite this, there are many common threads which tie together their experiences in prisons and jails. These include ongoing threats of danger, inappropriate housing accommodations, a lack of appropriate medical care, and a perception by others that they are deceptive, dangerous, and untrustworthy. These experiences are further complicated by interlocking categories used by prisons and the justice system such as security classifications, offense, sentence, and status on the outside as a partner or caregiver.

Inside andOut 11

The intersections of gender, carceral, and racial identities subject these women under the “care” of the state to physical, psychological, economic, and sexual violence. ;

Trans women suffer not only the ongoing trauma and depravity that are intertwined and common in the lives of all people who are incarcerated, but suffer a unique psychological and physical harm at the hands of the system.

RRachel Marie Crane Williams

The lives of many trans women are stalked by violence. This violence follows them if they become incarcerated. Black trans women are even more likely to experience violence before and during their incarceration.Culture, medicine, and the law intersect to create an environment where the grinding and continuous deprivation, degradation, and violence trans people experience are amplified; in addition, it is likely that they will be subjected to extreme transphobia and their position as a trans person will be linked automatically to medicalization, “. . . the process of how non-medical problems become defined and treated as medical problems” (shuster 9).

The history of gender and medicine is fraught. For many decades, medical professionals classified people who identified as trans as having a psychiatric disorder. Even now, the medical community requires people who seek gender-affirming technologies to work through a series of gatekeepers and be diagnosed with gender dysphoria prior to prescribing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or surgery. Incarcerated trans people rarely experience compassionate treatment in prison, even by medical staff. Still, as Julia C. Oparah writes, “the medical model undermines the oppositional and liberatory potentiality of transgender identities even as it offers the potential for more compassionate treatment” (247).

Inside andOut 13

cementdiagn g y

In some systems, the state “allows” prisoners to self-identify in terms of gender, but for all intents and purposes those in power rely on a visual inspection including genitalia to determine how to gender people who are incarcerated. When people don’t “pass” as the gender they have identified, or are gender queer, trans, gender non-conforming, or gender fluid, prison officials will often assume there is deception at play deployed to get special treatment or privileges. Most are housed with others who share their sex assigned at birth. In addition, this medicalization of transness erases the fact that many people who identify as trans do not wish to change their bodies or engage with the field of medicine. This rejection of somatechnics further complicates their treatment under carceral regimes. Incarcerated people seeking medical care related to their gender are often subjected to unnecessary and discriminatory gatekeeping by prison officials and healthcare providers. In southern states there is a lack of competent and affordable providers who specialize in trans healthcare (Clark). rceral theirnics further

RRachel Marie Crane Williams

The segregated prison system of the United States is based on a series of rigid binaries. These can be traced back to colonial monolithic categories of gender (male and female) and race (Black and white). Even now, the Alabama Department of Corrections, for example, has only three categories for race: white, Black, and “other” (Alabama Department of Corrections 9, 11, 13). These limited binary categories bolster Anglo cisheteropatriarchy. After the Civil War, the system of the enslavement of Black people in the South was replaced by a system of “Black Codes” and convict leasing. This eventually gave way to prison farms and chain gangs. Skipping forward, the War on Drugs of the 1970s gave rise to the supermax prisons of the 1980s and 1990s.

InsideandOut 15

To contextualize the modern day experiences of trans people, especially those who identify as Black, who are incarcerated in the South, it is important to look at the history of prisons and examine hegemonic ideas related to gender and race undergirded by religion.

16 RRachel Marie Crane Williams

scientificplayedinferiority,aboutthederivedOriginallyfromBible,ideasdominion,andcriminalityakeyroleinshapingracism,theeconomy, and the laws and systems on which the United States was founded. Consistently, Black people have always been disproportionately targeted, positioned as inferior to whites, depicted as inherently criminal, and incarcerated at higher rates than whites.

Inside andOut 17

The cultural and spatial geography of the Bible Belt reinforces patriarchy, cultural hegemony, and conservative politics that overlap with racism. Violence is inherent at these intersections. This creates an especially dangerous atmosphere for people who identify as trans, who often experience extraordinary violence both publicly and privately.

The United States is steeped in a “cultural-nationalist and state-sanctioned model of sex and family” (Lindsey and Johnson 176). These ideas undergirded slavery in the United States, an institution where forced rape and sexual violence were inherent. Gender was important only as it related to reproduction and capital. Black people, who were enslaved, were characterized as hypersexual, predatory, and a threat to the nuclear family. Black women were cast as having the power to seduce white slave owners and Black men were cast as predators hungry to consume white women (Young). These harmful ideas have been repurposed as predatory narratives about people who operate outside binary ideas of race, sexuality, and gender. Gender is conceived in the United States with white cis heterosexual people as centered subjects; people who are not identified as white historically have already been perceived as inferior (Nordmarken; McClintock). These ideas have intersected and put Black trans women into what Deborah King terms “multiple jeopardy” (47).

RRachel Marie Crane Williams

This clash between naturalization of these ideas handed down by Christianity and the constraints they produce has been present since white Anglican settlers began to invade the Eastern seaboard. Constrained notions of sex, race, and gender traveled across the Atlantic with the colonists who settled Jamestown.

Inside andOut 19

Arkansas passed a number of anti-trans bills, one related to medical care, another related to sports bans, as well as a religious refusal bill. Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia also passed anti-trans sports bans.

Almost one in two Black trans people (47%) will be incarcerated in their lifetime (Grant et al. 163). Rates of sexual assault for trans women are much higher in men’s prisons than for men incarcerated in the same spaces. For trans women who are incarcerated in the South, where hegemonic masculinity is embraced, especially by white rural men, this danger can be heightened.

The South is characterized by conservative gender politics. In 2017, red states like North Carolina and Texas tried to pass “bathroom bills” and prohibit protections for people who identify as trans. This move created a swift backlash from more progressive sectors of the United States. Most recently, new anti-trans measures are being volleyed around which are part of an old strategy. Members of the GOP are pushing legislation that would not allow trans women to compete in women’s sports. Like the bathroom bills, this justification is tied to the safety of women. In 2021, there have been sixty-nine anti-trans sports bills introduced so far. Forty-two of those bills have been concentrated in states which fall below the Mason-Dixon line.

Rates of imprisonment are highest in the South in comparison with the rest of the United States, with the exception of Arizona and Idaho (Hubbard slide 12). Rates of murder for trans people in 2020 were also at a record high in the United States. Almost half took place in the South (“Fatal Violence”).

19831983

20 RRachel Marie Crane Williams

The story of Ophelia Azriel De’lonta illustrates what many Black trans women who are incarcerated experience. Her story has common threads with other stories of trans women in the system.

At seventeen, Ophelia committed armed robbery. It was a desperate attempt to escape the danger, poverty, discrimination, and confines of Virginia in favor of starting a new life in San Francisco. She imagined moving to a place where she might escape violence and finally be accepted as a woman, something she had sought to do since she was a child. She hoped that the money she might steal as part of the botched armed robbery would help her pay for medical care during her transition. If I a girl.

Inside andOut 21

For most people, even those who have high-quality health insurance, the costs of medical care related to transitioning can be insurmountable. For people like Ophelia, who desire access to somatechnics but are unable to afford them or gain access, there are high rates of suicidal ideation, depression, and distress.

In 1983 she was convicted and began serving a sentence of seventythree years in the Virginia Department of Corrections system. During her time in custody in various men’s prisons in the state she was repeatedly raped and assaulted (Spies).

In 2003 the Prison Rape Elimination Act was passed. It has failed to keep incarcerated people safe. In 2007, Valerie Jenness, a researcher, documented that trans women incarcerated in men’s facilities were thirteen times more likely to be assaulted than the men that lived there. Usually, these assailants use a weapon; it is not uncommon for correctional officers to be unaware of the assault and for the victims to receive no medical treatment.

While some people who are incarcerated engaged in sex acts in exchange for companionship, commissary, privileges, or protection, it is hard to discern if the engagement is completely consensual. Assault and rape are not only perpetrated by the people who are incarcerated, but these acts can also be perpetrated by correctional staff. These crimes not only impact the victim of the assault, but might also impact their family members. Many people, including those who identify as trans, have supportive partners and loving kinship networks outside of prison.utside of prison

RRachel Marie Crane Williams

Inside andOut 23

According to Sarah Halbach, “An Eighth Amendment violation occurs where prison officials have shown ‘deliberate indifference’ to the serious medical needs of prisoners. . . . The Supreme Court has provided little guidance on what constitutes a serious medical need” (475). It took a decade for the Department of Corrections to allow Ophelia to receive HRT. Just a few years later in 1995, after she was transferred, the chief physician abruptly terminated her HRT treatment citing a newly writThe withdrawal made Ophelia feel nauseated; her skin crawled. This abrupt termination created not only a physical, but a mental health crisis for Ophelia. Her self-harming behaviors became even more pronounced. Her experience was excruciating and her mental health was deeply affected. Her suffering went on for years and her dysphoria grew

Ophelia did not have a strong system of support within the prisons where she was incarcerated. When she entered the prison system, she was diagnosed by doctors with Gender Identity Disorder (GID).

HRT.worse.Just in 1995, after sh abruptly terminated her HRT trea ten policy.

She tried over twenty times to remove her genitals. Every time she tried to castrate herself, she could never complete the act because of vasovagal syncope and blood loss.

RRachel Marie Crane Williams

She endured a variety of traumatic abuses during her incarceration including repeated sexual assaults. ty tim f, she could never bloodlossd blood loss.matic abuses her incarc ts.

Despite this small victory she was still deeply distressed. She sued again in 2011, desperate to have feminizing surgery and end her mental anguish. In 2013, just as she was beginning to make legal headway, she was granted parole (Walker and Alexander). Serving time left physical and psychological scars. e, she was allowed to re le l head ng

Inside andOut 25

In 1999, Ophelia sued the state of Virginia and won. After four years of legal red tape, she was allowed to resume HRT and dress as a woman.

Ophelia’s story is like many other stories of trans prisoners who are abused, denied care, humiliated, scrutinized, isolated, and harmed because of their gender. In North Carolina, Kanautica Zayre-Brown had begun to surgically alter her body. She changed her name and gender formally. Despite this, after she was arrested and convicted in 2017, she was housed in a men’s facility and referred to by her dead name and male pronouns. She and her husband constantly feared the possibility of sexual assault and abuse. She was eventually moved and put in solitary confinement. Public pressure and organizing by her husband, the ACLU of North Carolina, and local activists caused the North Carolina Department of Public Safety to buckle and transfer her to a women’s facility (Nichols).

RRachel Marie-Crane Williams

Prior to her release in January 2014, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, decided in her favor: according to the ACLU, the court “ruled that Ophelia De’lonta stated a ‘plausible’ claim that the Virginia Department of Corrections violated her constitutional rights when it refused to have her evaluated for sex reassignment surgery” (ACLU Virginia). Many saw her parole as a way for the Virginia De-partment of Corrections to avoid having to provide her with proper medical care.

The history of antebellum ideas, oppressive religious ideologies, xenophobia, and Anglo cisheteropatriarchy continues to imbue the carceral South. Trans people incarcerated in the South and across the United States will continue to suffer as agents of the state deny their personhood, fail to allow them access to appropriate medical care, ignore their safety, and continuously discipline and punish them simply for Theexisting.state is a harmful presence in the lives of most people who are trans. In prisons that harm is hidden from public view, magnified, and inflicted with an eye toward retribution and punishment not just for a crime, but also for resisting hegemony. These ideas are deeply embedded in the culture of the US South and can have deadly consequences not just for people who are trans but for anyone who resists. Overlaying the carceral geography we currently inhabit in the United States with these ideas makes visible how harmful and sometimes deadly historical hegemonic ideas related to race, gender, sexuality and punishment have been and continue to be in the United States.

The South will always be haunted by a long history of repressive and disciplining practices related to race, gender, and sexuality that are intertwined in the current culture and carried out in the carceral spaces that dot the landscape. Trans women, especially women who identify as Black, experience the intersection of their racial, carceral, and trans identities in ways that are deeply impacted by social stressors in and practices of oppression and violence carried out by the state. Within carceral spaces the stressors are magnified and in some cases part of the punishment they experience while they are incarcerated. Every person has a human right to be recognized before the law. The identity of people who are trans is regularly ignored or used as a weapon of humiliation and violence.

Inside andOut 27

Kanautica may never be allowed to consult with appropriate medical professionals at UNC-Chapel Hill or surgically finish her gender transition as long as she is incarcerated in North Carolina, a conservative Southern state with a record of anti-trans legislation.

28 RRachel Marie Crane Williams Works Cited ACLU of Virginia. “De’lonta v. Johnson (amicus).” [2021.] acluva.org/ Alabamaen/cases/delonta-v-johnson-amicus.DepartmentofCorrections,Research and Planning Division. MonthlyStatisticalReportforApril2021. www.doc.state.al.us/docs/ Clark,MonthlyRpts/April%202021.pdf.Maria.“SouthernTransAdults Struggle to Find Health Care. Here’s Why.” Daily Advertiser, 13 Dec. 2019, De’lontasouth/3945129002/.com/story/life/2019/12/12/transgender-health-care-access-american-www.theadvertiser.v.Angelone.UnitedStatesCourtofAppealsFourthCircuit,27May2003.CivilRightsLitigationClearinghouse,UniversityofMichiganLawSchool,www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/PC-VA-0006-0002.pdf.De’lontav.Johnson.BriefofamicicuriaeAmericanCivilLibertiesUn-ionFoundationandAmericanCivilLibertiesUnionofVirginia,Inc.inSupportofAppellant.6Jan.2012.ACLU,acluva.org/sites/de-fault/files/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/2012DeLontBrief.pdf.“DidlawmakersnotlearnfromHB2?NewNCSenatebillwouldharmtransgenderteens.”Herald-Sun,12Apr.2012,www.heraldsun.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article250603519.html.Dotson,Kristie.“MakingSense:TheMultistabilityofOppressionandtheImportanceofIntersectionality.”WhyRaceandGenderStillMatter:AnIntersectionalApproach,editedbyNamitaGoswami,MaeveM.O’Donovan,andLisaYount.PickeringandChatto,2014,pp.43–57.Dugan,JessT.,andVanessaFabbre.“ToSurviveonThisShore:Selec-tionsfromtheSouth.”SouthernCultures,vol.25,no.2,2019,pp.19–45.JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/26696397.“FatalViolenceAgainsttheTransgenderandGenderNon-Con-form-ingCommunityin2020.”HumanRightsCampaign,www.hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-trans-and-gender-non-conforming-community-in-2020.Grant,JaimeM.,LisaMottet,JustinE.Tanis,JackHarrison,JodyHer-man,andMaraKeisling.InjusticeatEveryTurn:AReportoftheNationalTransgenderDiscriminationSurvey.NationalCenterfor

Inside andOut 29 Transgender Equality, 2011, Lindsey,Lamb,Hubbard,Halbach,docs/resources/NTDS_Report.pdf.transequality.org/sites/default/files/Sarah.“FramingaNarrativeofDiscriminationUndertheEightAmendmentinTheContextsofTransgenderPrisonerHealthCare.”JournalofCriminalLawandCriminology,vol.105,no.2,2015,pp.463–97.JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/26402454.Kaia.“TenStatesWiththeHighestIncarcerationRates.”U.S.NewsandWorldReport,12Mar.2021,www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slide-shows/10-states-with-the-highest-incarceration-rates?slide=12.King,DeborahK.“MultipleJeopardy,MultipleConsciousness:TheContextofaBlackFeministIdeology.”Signs,vol.14,no.1,1988,pp.42–72.JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/3174661.Amanda.“StateMovesTransgenderInmate,ButNottoWomen’sPrison.”WRAL.Com,24May,2019,www.wral.com/state-moves-transgender-inmate-but-not-to-womens-prison/18298786/.TrevaB.,andJessicaJohnson.“SearchingforClimax:BlackEroticLivesinSlaveryandFreedom.”Meridians,vol.12,no.2,2014,pp.169–95.doi:10.2979/meridians.12.2.169McClintok,Anne.ImperialLeather:Race,Gender,SexualityintheCo-lonialContest.Routledge,1995.Mitchem,StephanieY.“Embodiment,Gender,andRe-Li-gion.”Cross-Currents,vol.68,no.4,2018,pp.550–60.JSTOR,www.jstor.org/sta-ble/26756885.Nichols,JamesM.“NCPrisonerKanauticaZayre-BrownSaysDPSWon’tLetHerGetGender-AffirmingSurgery.”Indy-week,4March,2020,indyweek.com/news/northcarolina/nc-prisoner-ka-nau-tica-zayre-brown-gender-affirming-surgery/.Nordmarken,Sonny.“QueeringGendering:TransEpistemologiesandtheDisruptionandProductionofGenderAccomplishmentPractices.”FeministStudies,vol.45,no.1,2019,pp.36–66.doi:10.15767/feministstudies.45.1.0036.Oparah,JuliaC.“Feminismandthe(Trans)GenderEntrapmentofGenderNonconformingPrisoners.”UCLAWomen’sLawJournal,vol.18,no.2,2012,pp.239–71.escholarship.org/content/qt25r8541z/qt25r8541z.pdf.

30 RRachel Marie Crane Williams Scott, Daryl Michael. “The Social and Intellectual Origins of 13thism.” Fire!!!, vol. 5, no. 2, 2020, pp. 2–39. JSTOR, www. jstor.org/stable/

Young,Walker,Spies,shuster,10.5323/48573836.stef.TransMedicine:TheEmergenceandPracticeofTreatingGender.NYUPress,2021.Mike,“WhatIt’sLiketoBeATransgenderWomaninaMax-securityPrison.”Vocativ,8Apr.2015,www.vocativ.com/under-world/crime/what-its-like-to-be-a-transgender-woman-in-a-max-security-prison/index.html.Diane,andTerryAlexander.“TransgenderInmateGrantedParole.”NBC12,16Jan.2014,www.nbc12.com/story/24466381/transgender-inmate-granted-parole/.HershiniBhana.“InheritingtheCriminalizedBlackBody:Race,Gender,andSlaveryin‘Eva’sMan.’”AfricanAmericanRe-view,vol.39,no.3,2005,pp.377–93.JSTOR,www.jstor.org/sta-ble/40033670.

Almost all the media coverage . . . has been aimed at the . . . groups now minimally at risk, as if the high-risk groups were not part of the audience. And in a sense . . . they’re not.

—Leo Bersani, 203 I. AA Sense of Place IF YOU WALK BETWEEN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER AND THE BAYOU SAINT

John in New Orleans on Mardi Gras morning, you will pass through the twentieth century.1 The two previous centuries dominate the tourist’s imagination, but the cracking of sidewalks, the closure of pedestrian routes, and the rise and fall and rise again of housing values provide a panorama of “the bulldozer revolution” (Brundage 227–69). Those are the decades in which preservationists protected the nineteenth-century mansion at the expense of the nineteenth-century slum. The priorities of preservation are visible on Rampart Street, the French Quarter’s northern boundary. There, you will find the entry to Louis Armstrong Park and, beyond it, the “million dollar-blocks” from which 1 In a single dizzying month in May 2021, I went from my home in New Orleans to my two points of origin, New York City and the Blue Ridge Mountains on the South Carolina–Georgia Border, all while completing preliminary research and primary writing of this essay. I am grateful for the support of the University of Mississippi Department of English and the Lillian E. Smith Center in Clayton, Georgia. These two institutions provided material support for a writing retreat. Clark Bucko, Phillip Lightweis-Goff, Ashley Roach-Freiman, Katie Van Wert, and Dan Veksler gave it a base to which to adhere.

Prisons are ubiquitous. They’re everywhere and nowhere.

JENNIE UniversityLIGHTWEIS-GOFFofMississippi

—Thomas Reem Cotton, returning citizen

32 JJennie Lightweis Goff urban residents are removed to be housed in rural maximum-security prisons.2 The city itself is a capital of mass incarceration. Had the slum clearance of the 1950s and 1960s not happened, had it not shoved Armstrong Park and the Municipal Auditorium as a border between the tourist quarter and Black neighborhoods, had it not cut roads in half and chained closed park gates, one could walk a straight line between the River and Tremé. It would benefit not only me, a precariously-employed white professional, but my neighbors who work in the service industry in a tourist city with low car ownership and stagnant wages. As it stands, their pedestrian commute takes them through the shell of the Claiborne Avenue Corridor. Fifty years ago, this grand boulevard rivaled St. Charles Avenue for tree-lined grandeur. Now it is a concrete overpass for I-10 with massive supports painted with murals of the trees mowed down to build it. Black New Orleanians could once rely on this street for employment, full-service stores, and green space in a city with segregated city parks. People blame its current state on the segregation that devalued its property and the integration that forced it to compete with prestigious white-owned businesses (Crutcher). Few disagree that it was destroyed to preserve Decatur Street, the southern border of the French Quarter slated as the original route of WhenI-10.Iwalked the Mississippi River five days before Carnival 2021 with a beloved friend taking refuge from locked-down New York, we navigated around cops erecting gates between the riverfront and the road. Walking shoulder-to-shoulder, an immigrant and the daughter of an immigrant were knocked off course by the chain link fences crawling right up to the Carrara marble feet of the Sicilian child carved in the Monument to the Immigrant in Woldenberg Park. By the time we crossed the mile of the Quarter toward Tremé, the temporary gates erected by a putatively progressive mayor to prevent Mardi Gras revelry were nearly to my doorstep. The barriers menaced Bourbon Street, 2 Million-dollar blocks are low-income neighborhoods inside of cities where the state pays more to incarcerate residents than it would cost to buy their homes and invest in their communities. The Spatial Information Design Lap and Justice Mapping Center visualize “the city-prison-city-prison migration flow” in New York, Phoenix, New Orleans, and Wichita. To see these geographical patterns in New Orleans, see the Justice Reinvestment project at Columbia’s Center for Spatial Research (“Million Dollar Blocks”).

See Rebeca Snedeker and Rebecca Solnit’s edited collection UnfathomableCity:A NewOrleansAtlas,especially Joel Dinerstein’s essay on second-line parade culture.

These enclosed, criminalized, and forbidden sites were entirely outdoors long after collective acknowledgment of the vanishingly rare chance of outdoor transmission; their closure pushed pedestrians from wide-open public space to narrower streets with closer physical contact. Since March 2020, cities and counties in the United States have closed public parks, the pulsing lungs of a city, in the interest of public safety. They roped off benches and bus stops for fear of surface contamination, thereby making public space even less accessible for the elderly and disabled. They enshrined the value of the “household,” relying on heteronormativity as solution to a crisis. They disproportionately enforced masking ordinances on already-targeted populations. Faced with a choice between what John Fabian Witt has described as the liberal “sanitationist” and conservative “quarantinist” angles of public health, they flailed between them (36). They used carceral technologies, including escalating fines for non-maskers (which can result in jail time, as anyone on parole or probation can tell you) to enforce public health protocol. This is to say, they passed COVID “prevention” measures that spread COVID. And yet, any questioning of these policies has been mistaken for aid and comfort to the deniers and anti-vaxxers, to xenophobes and Trumpers. High, locked gates communicate to locals that their neighborhood does not belong to them. These conditions, carved into place by the priorities of a segregated midcentury city, have been heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Society as we built it, the “surface of the earth”

The American Virus 33 too. The difference between Bourbon’s gates and Claiborne’s? The former came down minutes into Ash Wednesday. The latter placed COVID restrictions in the rut dug by carceral surveillance and urban apartheid. They were my neighborhood’s constant company for the next six weeks. Video gamers and game theorists alike joke about “minmaxing,” hyper-cultivating only one skill while others atrophy. For the New Orleans Police Department, that skill is crowd control. Stronger metal and higher walls corralled businesses and residents on what remains of the Claiborne Corridor, where African American families displaced by the overpass gather with portable grills and music on Mardi Gras and the “39 Sundays” of the second-line parade season.3

5 See Ashley Southall’s May 2020 account of these arrests in The New York Times. Unlike many institutionalist liberals, I do not take these numbers as an argument for arresting more white people or passing new PATRIOT Acts to apprehend the unmasked Capitol Rioters. I see them, simply, as the unjust exercise of power which can only be answered with the erosion, not extension, of that power.

With half of New Orleans vaccinated by May, with the country as a whole edging toward herd immunity, TheNewYorkTimes introduced its readers to “the four kinds of people holding us back from full vaccination.” I was astonished to discover in their typology that I am a COVID skeptic, despite knowing nearly a dozen people who have died from the disease. Among this motley crew, I am apparently a moderate. Not a believer in germ warfare or implanted microchips, I nonetheless endorse the “conspiracy theory. . . . [that] COVID-19 has been exploited by the government to control people” (Sgaier). It is not a conspiracy to see disproportionate impacts; it takes the most baseless conspiracy of them all—a belief in a social and structural innocence— to ignore them. There is no shadowy, single government operating at a wide remove to control the populace; there is, instead, the neat inversion of libertarianism as it is theorized in the United States. Among the

34 JJennie Lightweis Goff as we have trod it, is “deep with the ruts of tradition and conformity,” as Henry David Thoreau wrote of the dirt around Walden Pond (426–27). Institutions disproportionately punish the marginalized, so much that they would remain oppressive and violent without a single vengeful bigot at their helm. The salutary force of public health can maim.4 When masking ordinances and high gates arrive in an unequal society, they have nowhere to land but in the deep ruts dug by inequality; hence, in an April 2020 weekend in which the New York Police Department made forty arrests for social distancing violations, thirty-nine were of people of color.5 American culture turned the vulnerable into perpetrators, and then fed them to municipal lock-up, where they were more vulnerable to COVID. And more likely, if they were infected when they entered the congregate site of the jail, to spread it to people whose health was never a priority.

4 These claims about institutional life and momentum are informed by Critical Race Theory (CRT), now a negative shibboleth among conservatives. Writing in the shadow of another culture war about teaching CRT in American classrooms, I assure my reader that when I refer to the discipline, I mean the work pioneered by Derrick Bell (Faces at the Bottom of the Well) and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Racism Without Racists), not the corporate-friendly anti-racist training offered by Robin DiAngelo’s WhiteFragility

The American Virus 35 libertarians we meet here are people who regard the federal government as malicious in its distance, while local authorities are more benign and accountable, thanks to smaller constituencies that make the “people” less abstract. This ideology is, not surprisingly, tolerant of the oldest forms of governance that come with badges and guns, and less tolerant of the newer facets of the government: the techno- and bureaucratic power crafted by Franklin Roosevelt during the fleeting truce between capital, labor, and the state. That broken parallax is the central problem of American carcerality. The government that governs most is most pernicious, but it does not live in the District of Columbia. It lives close enough to erect a wall in your backyard, to clock in at the beginning of a shift on your tier, to toss you off a public bus because you forgot your mask as you rushed to your shift at Walgreens. Its presence is felt most acutely by the least powerful.

The movement that passes for a left in America is not free of delusions about the innocence of power. By trusting “science” and proximate forms of authority that reigned in our pandemic years, the putative resistance ceded its skepticism. The frenetic politics of 2020’s so-called racial reckoning enabled many privileged liberals to question the absolute centrality of the police to the daily lives of marginalized people, but they stopped short of questioning the authority of those who apportioned police budgets and also funded the placement of obstructions between Tremé and its richer neighbors along the River. Technocratic language of prediction, prevention, and modeling obscures the structural inequalities that render SARS-CoV-2, imagined as the “China Virus” by Trump, the American Virus. In June 2020, the United States, which accounts for 4% of the global population, was the site of 25% of global COVID-19 deaths. If that number strikes one as familiar, it is because we are also 4% of the world’s population, while holding captive 25% of its prisoners. Nearly a year later, in the middle of Joe Biden’s forceful vaccination campaign, America still accounts for 15% of COVID deaths. Despite the availability of three effective vaccines in developed nations and a radical expansion of new infections within the Indian subcontinent’s most vulnerable populations, a limitlessly wealthy imperial power struggles to keep its citizens off of ventilators. The easy answer, facilitated by the liberalism that is the fetish of the professional classes, is to gesture to the “selfishness” of anti-maskers

36 JJennie Lightweis Goff and anti-vaxxers who are far smaller in number than the poor, the marginalized, the incarcerated, the people with pre-existing conditions and no prospects for social distancing in poorly-renumerated service labor.6

7 See Tara Parker-Pope’s “A User’s Guide to Face Masks.”

The technocratic liberal answer, credulous towards the authority of institutions and expertise, has been to circulate more information about, rather than produce more access to healthcare. That strategy has produced a culture of substitution, wherein the kid who could not surrender Spring Break 2020 stood in for people trapped in carceral space; the

A year out from anti-lockdown protests that seemed to crawl from the conservative pockets of the Great Lakes—the South that floated above America on Election Night 2016—the signifier of the culture war has shifted from the mask to the vaccine. “Overnight, masks have become a symbol of social responsibility,” wrote TheNewYorkTimes in April 2020, offering ideological cover to the “experts” at the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization who couldn’t make up their minds if masking was a sign of one’s virtue or a sign that one was hoarding personal protective equipment (PPE) that ought to have been reserved for doctors.7 Symbolic framing belies the fact that my respiratory system is not a metaphor. It’s tissue and tubes. A year on, charts showing varying vaccination rates between “red” and “blue” states circulate to congratulate competitive distancers and attribute death rates to matters of ignorance and partisanship.8 Buried within those stories is the grimmer truth: among the vaccine-hesitant are people who believe they cannot afford a freevaccine, and others who cannot spare time off work to obtain one (Sgaier). Doubtless there are also incarcerated people skeptical of what will be offered to them after two years of invasive tests administered, when available, by untrained correctional officers.

8 See Domenico Montanaro’s “There’s a Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes to States’ Vaccination Rates” and Peter Sullivan’s “State Vaccine Rates Fall Along Red, Blue Divide.”

Images of the unmasked enemy are the signifying monkeys that frame “personal responsibility” as a salve against disaster. The virulence and fatality of this disease have been assisted by structural inequalities and resistance to these inequalities has been hampered by the fantasies of American liberals, for whom what is actually a luxury—social distancing—has instead become a mark of personal virtue.

6 See Ed Yong’s “America is Getting Unvaccinated People All Wrong.”

The American Virus 37 sidewalk replaced the prison; and the mask was asked to perform work that only universal healthcare can. II. An Epoch of Displacement

Who among us remembers the last pandemic? I do not ask in terms of fleeting time or fragile human memory, but in a political field where AIDS shaped generational perspectives on sex and a symbolic field where people not only calculated risk but performed that arithmetic after the fact for people who suffered from disease. Surely the very signs of suffering were themselves delegitimizing of their personhood or, in the most extreme cases “legitimiz[ing] of the impulse to murder” the infected (Bersani 198). In the early days of AIDS panic, critic Leo Bersani refused the twinned cults of monogamy and respectability that were proffered as a cure—as much if not more than testing, research, vaccines, and the antiretroviral cocktail. Bersani powerfully theorizes how vigilance spread through the culture. The “peculiar exclusion of the principal sufferers in the AIDS crisis” relied on high visibility of hemophiliac kids and “nauseating processions of yuppie women announcing to the world that they will no longer put out for their yuppie boyfriends unless these boyfriends agree to use a condom” (202–03). To teach vigilance, media coverage of COVID restrictions similarly framed each reader as equally vulnerable to disease, resulting in the “peculiar exclusions” of prisons and other congregate living facilities from discourses of prevention. During anti-lockdown protests in Michigan and reopening winks from Donald Trump, Brittney Cooper memorably called conservative politics “a gross necropolitical calculation” that sacrificed poor and working-class people of color for the comforts of privileged whites. Meanwhile, social distancing and working from home provided a necropolitical protection racket for many liberals, with predictable polarization leaving this truly bipartisan death-politics uninterrogated. Someone was delivering the groceries, but when workfrom-home moralists talked about reducing risk, the accuracy of their math relied on never counting laid-off workers who were making ends meet as Instacart shoppers.

Primetime news and early-afternoon Donahueand Oprahspectacles taught people who were less likely to contract AIDS to speak about their profound vulnerability but, in the 1980s and 1990s, they were not the only sites of vigilance pedagogy. Born in 1979, I was a child of 1980s

38 JJennie Lightweis Goff New York City, where hand-scrubbing and surface-avoidance—including grim rumors of hypodermic needles stuck in theater seats— were recommended by vernacular public health guidance. (That is, homophobia.)

A friend who grew up closer to San Francisco remembers a grade school field trip to the Golden Gate Bridge where teachers required scrubbing-up before allowing students to get on the school bus home. Reading these lines now, you might easily identify that frantic hand-washing as a symptom of AIDS stigma that progressives collectively fought for decades, though you might also recollect that no less a figure than Anthony Fauci circulated the now-discredited theory that AIDS spread through surface transmission.9

Vigilance pedagogy shaped the daily terrors of America’s first lockdown spring. As a traveling instructor working around community colleges in Mississippi, I live in the state’s cross-border urban boundaries in New Orleans and Memphis. The latter passed an absurd masking ordinance that confidently asserted that heavy breathing made outdoor jogging and cycling high-risk activities.10 The website of the Memphis Public Library similarly asserted that books were vectors of disease, promising a two-week quarantine and deep cleaning for bits of paper, some of which have survived many more bitter influenza seasons than my asthmatic lungs and fragile sinuses could weather.11 The ordinance aimed to make life miserable for the locked-down and stir-crazy; the 9 See Randy Shilts, AndtheBandPlayedOn 299–300.

“Because running or bicycling causes people to more forcefully expel airborne particles,” reads the June 2020 masking ordinance, . . . runners and cyclists must take steps to avoid exposing others to those particles, which include . . . wearing a face covering when possible; crossing the street when running to avoid sidewalks with pedestrians; slowing down and moving to the side when unable to leave the sidewalk and nearing other people; never spitting; and avoiding running or cycling directly in front of or behind another runner or cyclist who is not in the same household. (“Memphis Masking Ordinance”)

11 Like much of the COVID ephemera of 2020, this policy has disappeared from the internet, but it is easy to locate companies’ onerous hygiene and quarantine policies on their corporate social media feeds and websites, often illustrated with images of masked women cleaning surfaces. The “sanitationist” impulse as defined by John Fabian Witt has a public face in the corporate communications designed to assuage the body-management worries of the professional-managerial class (36).

Chapter 9–104 of the Memphis masking ordinance is available in full text and thrilling detail at the Municode Library.

12 At the risk of turning mainstream media outlets into convenient straw men for an academic argument—truly, the definition of disproportionate response—I note that The New York Times helpfully offered an etiquette guide for employers interested in welcoming domestic workers back into their homes in June 2020. In December 2020, anthropologist Shannon Mattern acutely diagnosed the failure of “the new architectures of protection” to shield the bodies of low-wage workers. “Pandemic plexiglass is deployed as part of a preventative, conservative practice, a means of maintaining social and biological order that, in turn, promises epidemiological and economic resilience,” Mattern writes.

Yet the plexi shields and hoods are little more than the architectural equivalents of hydroxychloroquine, snake oil neatly packaged in capsules and vials—jury-rigged shells mocked up so that we can keep working and consuming and pretending that social space hasn’t split open at its long-deepening fault lines; that the worker on the far side of the screen isn’t standing there all day, at risk. These anti-glare barriers allow us to look right through to a seemingly familiar quotidian, denying the need for long-haul adaptation. They’re a temporary accommodation, like an umbrella, to be put away when the sun comes out again.

The American Virus 39 library policy further immiserated the already high-risk labor of janitors and maintenance staff, and delayed the provision of materials to children who were displaced from their schools.12 A generation before, the people suffering from AIDS-related illness were rhetorically omnipresent even as their bodies were locked on hospital wards, thanks to what Bersani defines as “the American genius for politically displaced thought.” Through this displacement, “those being killed are [turned into] killers” (204, 211). A generation later, those requiring protection were turned into human shields. Laborers with the most onerous service jobs were tasked with protecting people who already had ample resources to protect themselves. Displaced. With constant vernacular use as synonym for “replace,” the term has lost much of the light with which it illuminates concrete space. In more precedented times, this would be bad news, especially for urban neighborhoods. Outsiders (and performatively-outraged tweets) posit new bakeries and bike lanes in Tremé, East Atlanta, or Austin’s SoCo as gentrification’s canaries, without mentioning residential mortgages and leases: that is, the structural barriers governing the places from which people might actually be displaced. The COVID pandemic has itself been spatial, with disparate effects based on regional governance and institutional inequities. Whether one lives on a prison tier or works in poorly-compensated “essential” professions—including restaurants, now officially the most dangerous workplace in America—

14 As a Marxist professor, I am accustomed to having my profession—or some nebulous notion of what I do—turned into a cornerstone in an irrelevant culture war. But nothing, I suspect, could have prepared personal service professionals for the same treatment. Early in the pandemic, in one of the endless “dos and don’ts” lists, Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, urged caution and a tight bubble. But she also noted that haircuts are not a “a big concern” because they are “one-on-one interactions. . . . [with] a lower likelihood that exposure is going to occur that way” (Tiffany). Within a few months, thanks to “Operation Haircut” in Michigan and a willingness among liberals to denounce reopen protestors as motivated by frivolous demands for roots touch-ups and manicures, a haircut became a key symbol of recklessness and vice. Despite the reduced risks of one-on-one contact (as opposed to contact with dozens of people in crowded sites, or even living in a multigenerational household) identified by Watson, laypeople were eager to use the physical closenessof the stylist as symbol of danger. See Abad-Santos, “How Hair Became a Culture War in Quarantine.”

40 JJennie Lightweis Goff matters far more than rituals of masking and hand-washing.13 Space is not a metaphor; turning it into an abstraction is a moral disaster. I mention the odious terms “hold space” and “safe space,” which refer to no geographical landscape, sign-posting only the interior terrain in which the speaker crowns herself with laurels for her good political sense. Without an accessible and concrete language for theorizing space, Americans have relied on Bersani’s displaced, even redistributed, risk for shaping vigilance against COVID-19. Viruses are not just anywhere in this framework; they are everywhere. Never willing to redistribute wealth, America instead redistributed vigilance from congregate living facilities to playgrounds; from intergenerational households to sidewalks; from prisons to hair salons.14 By the beginning of our “Hot Vax Summer” in 2021, one-third of American prisoners had had COVID19; I suspect it is not because they were unaware that both Beyoncé’s “Love on Top” and Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” provide twenty-second choruses to guide us through vigorous handwashing. Material deprivations produce risk; the carefully-wrought, strategic delusions of “communicative capitalism” demand the circulation of information (and moralistic messaging) without attention to its use or reception. “Who sent it is irrelevant. Who receives it is irrelevant,” writes Jodi Dean in her definition of this most recent phase of capitalist decline; “The only thing that is relevant is circulation, the addition to the pool” (58).

13 Stunningly, the highest-risk works are not in healthcare. They are cooks, machinists, farmworkers, bakers, construction workers, garment workers, and people who work in shipping (Wells).

A June 2020 interview with Anthony Fauci on NPR’s All Things Considered attributed the surge of cases among younger adults in the southern states (especially Texas, Florida, and North Carolina) to a rush to reopen restaurants and bars.15 TheNew YorkTimes’s now-defunct COVID tracker showed similar data, but the slightest political skepticism challenged the flippant narrative of selfish anti-maskers swarming into red-state Applebees with their masks flying off their chins. In May 2020, the Timespredicted devastating surges in the Metropolitan Statistical Areas of Fayetteville-Springdale, Arkansas; Sherman-Denison, Texas; Hanford-Corcoran, California; Yuma, Arizona; Hickory-Lenoir, North Carolina; and Laurel, Mississippi. These areas saw new COVID cases doubling every six to ten days.16 That their largest employers were open, essential, and exploitative— Tyson Foods (in three separate municipalities), the California State Prison at Corcoran, the Arizona State Prison Complex at Yuma, Sanderson’s Farm, and Wayne’s Farm in Mississippi—went unmentioned in write-by-numbers accounts of too-swift reopening. Conditions of containment, whether in nursing homes, on prison tiers, or on factory floors densely populated with disempowered immigrant laborers, spread COVID. Restaurants and bars, so often mentioned as viral hotspots, were virtually never mentioned as workplaces; they haunt these stories as sites of sociability and implicit consent to infection. Truly, restaurants are to COVID as bathhouses were to the AIDS panic.

15 The story not only interviews Fauci, but confidently asserts, in its headline, that it knows “the reasons behind the surge . . . across the Southern states” (Stone).

16 The reasons that outbreaks menace particular regions have not changed; their chances have only been diminished by improved vaccination rates. Nonetheless, The NewYorkTimesUpshot stopped updating its COVID tracker on May 24, 2021.

With this sleight of hand, capitalism and mass incarceration evade scrutiny. “You are being set up to blame each other for the spread of COVID-19 to distract you from the deliberate failures of governments and corporations who’ve contributed far more to the pandemic,” wrote

The American Virus 41 Seasons change, but the malignant logic of personal responsibility is evergreen. If we rewind a calendar year to the 2020 summer of the “Southern Surge,” we see the logic of blame aimed toward the most materially vulnerable sites in the United States, sites that have powerful tethers to the prison industrial complex. Underpaid labor sustains both carceral sites and the proximate, related industries that accrete in underserved, rural communities.

42 JJennie Lightweis Goff sociologist Katherine Cross on Twitter. Neither risk nor blame are equitably distributed, of course, though American politics produces a tidy, color-coded red and blue map to measure our relationship to virtue and vice. The ruddy swath on the electoral map disappears a legacy of southern radicalism, keeping names like Pauli Murray and A. Philip Randolph out of our living memory. “Believing a false dichotomy of liberal and conservative, racist and non-racist, or red and blue states,” as Colby King writes, “ignores history and silences Black people and people of color in all of them.” Through this logic, the southern “surge” of Summer 2020—which followed months of tighter closure, with quantifiably flattened curves—aimed fingers towards the selfish, atavistic, imaginary southerner and away from the failures of powerful institutions.Prisons reside in forgotten spaces; sometimes, they mirror the broken development of rural industry. The signature visual signifier of rural southern economies is, to me, a dilapidated former Walmart in the shadow of the Supercenter that replaced it. On the border in Brownsville, Texas, the old Walmart is in use by Immigration Control and Enforcement, who renamed it Casa Padre, and interned 1,500 boys between the ages of ten and seventeen within its walls.17 In Pennsylvania, SCI Graterford (“a prisony looking prison,” as an incarcerated student told me in 2014) is now abandoned in the shadow of SCI Phoenix; a gothic castle replaced by a sheet rock warehouse. In Alabama, Draper Correctional Facility had long ago been replaced by the proximate Staton Correctional Facility, but then COVID pried open its doors again. Without beds, tiers, cells, or working toilets, it serves as a mixedstatus detention facility with no distinction between levels of offense or need for care. As late as September 2020, as much as 1.5% of its population tested positive for COVID on any given day; the number is likely dwarfed by the real tally, concealed by the fact that an incarcerated person had to register a fever of 103 degrees Fahrenheit to even qualify for a test.18 There, residents sleep on cots. They fill jars with urine that they are allowed to dump once they are at capacity. Portable toilets are available for defecation, though they require permission

18 For interviews with both men incarcerated in Draper and Alabama Department of Corrections officials, see Connor Sheets’s 2020 expose for the Alabama Media Group.

17 See Michael E. Miller, Emma Brown, and Aaron C. Davis’s story and accompanying video essay during the child separation crisis (“Inside Casa Padre”).

19 Taibbi’s essay on Kucinich mentions one group who we are consistently invited to mock: the fat. During our COVID year, we have been invited not only to mock, but

III. Beyond Small Talk

In the midst of total war in Iraq, Dennis Kucinich proposed a Department of Peace. Of his loss in the 2004 Democratic Primary, political reporter Matt Taibbi wrote that he could “never forgive America” because of the savage mockery that marked our civic religion as a belief “that a certain kind of idealism is actually childish weakness, and that the only pragmatic way of approaching life upholds force and commerce as the chief engines of social organization.” We laugh at people who talk about peace, Taibbi noted, to “avoid being identified as outsiders by the remorseless center” (2004). Over the last year and a half of COVID, I have thought of the political moment of Hurricane Katrina obsessively, as the poverty and under-resourcing of New Orleans were omitted by editorial tough talk about Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest. The evacuated streets of a public-facing city made the connection frighteningly direct. Nothing is past; nothing is forgotten.

The emblem of the Bush years is not New Orleans in the broken levee’s bathtub or even burning Fallujah, but the foreshortened career of a losing politician with a funny voice, a frequently-misspelled name, a small stature, and a desire for a world without violence. (We share these four traits.)

Politics might have moved on, following the trajectory of Katrina truth-teller Kanye West, who went from Bush antagonist to Trump supporter in a few short years, but pain resides even when the referent loses focus. Back then, it was blame for living in a drained swamp in a hurricane-prone place on a burning planet, and, of course, for failing to have money on hand to evacuate. Early in this pandemic, New Orleans had fewer overall cases than New York City (of course), but twice the death rate among the infected.19 Story after story in the national media

The American Virus 43 from a correctional officer to leave the tier and go outdoors. The Department of Corrections provides four masks and limitless soap, though residents report that fights break out because of its scarcity. What “symbol of social responsibility” can index this misery or the force of our collective forgetting? Inside region’s porous container is the hard kernel of the prison, the oubliette.

If you come to town to trace the origins of a public health disaster, I would visit three institutions within a three-mile radius of the French Quarter: Charity Hospital, the Lindy Boggs Medical Center, née Mercy Hospital, and Orleans Parish Prison (OPP). Only the latter institution had much of its physical plant destroyed by the floods that followed Hurricane Katrina, and yet it is the only one that is presently open for business. Technically, OPP is also a hospital with a Medical Department boasting “a full nursing staff. . . . specialty psychiatric and medical units. . . . [and] [b]oard-certified physicians” (“Medical Department”). People incarcerated in this behemoth—the ninth largest county jail in the thirty-fifth largest metropolitan area in the United States—pay $3 for a doctor’s visit and $2 for a prescription.20 Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman’s transparent, eminently web-searchable description of robust medical care for the incarcerated—who, in his facility, are largely awaiting trial—presumes that their health is taken seriously, forgetting how often they, like people on the outside, are incentivized to ignore pain to evade cost in a for-profit healthcare system. The website provides no information about COVID diagnoses inside the facility.

If you are discharged after a night in jail from intake on Broad Street in Central City New Orleans, you can easily walk to two blighted hospitals. Prepare for whiplash. At Lindy Boggs Medical Center graffiti tags abut the name of the former Ambassador to the Vatican, US Representative from Louisiana, and mother of journalist Cokie Roberts. The crumbling physical plants sits next to a doggie daycare center, a beer garden, and a condominium complex ($1,200 for a 500-square-foot studio) on the Bayou St. John. Charity Hospital is now technically part of the LSU Health Sciences Center, but that is in name only. Its iconic white stone Public Works Administration building, completed in 1939, floats above Tulane Avenue like a whale bobbing to the surface of the to blame them for their own deaths. See Brad Brooks’s “Why is New Orleans’ Coronavirus Death Rate Twice New York’s? Obesity is a Factor.” 20 See the website of the Orleans Parish Sheriff Office’s Medical Department (“Medical Department”).

44 JJennie Lightweis Goff began with a throw-away line about festival season. The chief engine of social organization in the city—more pleasure than force or commerce, though there is plenty of the latter at Carnival—became an explanation for our suffering. A posteriori explanation; another rhetorical bathhouse for another pandemic of blame.

The American Virus 45 water. Despite staying dry during the levee breaches of 2005, the doors of these institutions have been barred since 2005. Blocks were cleared and people displaced for the construction of LSU Health Sciences in 2015. The shining, intact physical plant—built in a much more floodprone neighborhood—looks like it was airlifted from Houston or Atlanta. Developers preferred to think of—and indeed, to produce—postKatrina New Orleans as a “blank slate.”

On move-in day in the Seventh Ward in 2011, my neighbor said, “There’s only one rule on this block. Don’t get sick. Too long of an ambulance ride.” Don’t get sick. That’s the secret motto of American healthcare as practiced in a for-profit system, of public health as practiced in folk wisdom about the infectious potential of the sidewalk, of biopolitics as practiced along the imaginary borders of red and blue states. Do not get sick . . . but if you do, be aware that we are monitoring all the failures of personal virtue and responsibility that presaged your path to that ventilator. “Throngs of revelers may have brought the coronavirus to New Orleans during Mardi Gras celebrations here,” wrote USA Today. “This spring New Orleans was meant to host the city’s fifty-first Jazz and Heritage Festival,” began the story in The New Yorker. “By sheer luck, I missed Mardi Gras this year,” was the first line in a personal essay in VanityFair.21 Imagine if these early COVID reflections had begun, not with speculation on which parades the nowsick had attended, but the hospitals at which they might find themselves . . . or, for that matter, the hospitals at which they worked. The latter requires longer memory, structural thinking. Culture wars about personal responsibility—from compulsory masking to vaccination disinformation to social distancing—provide all the familiar comforts of smallWhentalk.I met Thomas Reem Cotton in 2014, he was incarcerated at Graterford State Correctional Institute in Wallingford Parish, a rural place that disproportionately held captive men from the North Philadelphia “Badlands.” We met in an Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program icebreaker called “the wagon wheel,” in which outside visitors sat in an interior circle with “inside guys” switching chairs on an external circle.

Generally, you had enough time to introduce yourselves, say a name and what brought you there, but when time was called Reem was still 21 See Jervis, Clark, and Reyes; Meade; and Horne.

46 JJennie Lightweis Goff talking: not about himself but about the ideas that animated him during his two-and-a-half decades inside. I said “we don’t do small talk!” as he switched seats; I cannot forget his vigorous nod and laugh as he sat down again. A few months before we met, my partner’s father had died of a lingering illness; a few weeks after I returned home from Philadelphia to New Orleans, my beloved cousin committed suicide. Memory bends around a death so that you recollect the last “normal” moment; you remember the day before the funeral better than any day you might randomly select from some other twenty-four hour window in your life. You recollect that first night’s sleep after you got the news, a fitful night in which you negotiated with the universe to turn that loss into a dream. The time inside Graterford is riveted into my memory, especially now that Reem has died of COVID-19. He left the world not from a prison infirmary, but as a “returning citizen”: parent and child, friend and stranger. Years spent in prison, as incarcerated readers already know, are costly for the human body. From 2018–2020, Reem led workshops at Eastern State Penitentiary called “Beyond Small Talk: Navigating Conversations on Mass Incarceration.” Having survived one disaster of American life, he fell to another, but he leaves us with an injunction against the lazy shorthand of political small talk. The conclusion of an essay offers a moment of potential, Reem’s “beyond.” Here I ask for a longer history. At the height of 1970s feminism, Jo Freeman diagnosed “the tyranny of structurelessness” within the movement.22 A self-proclaimed movement against elite knowledge and control will produce platitudes about liberty and leaderlessness, as Freeman argues. Conservatism has appropriated the countercultural rhetoric of Freeman’s feminist generation, culminating in the election of Donald Trump, a man who purported to buck the system, drain the swamp, and fix a sick society. He did not, because he did not intend to. In the absence of early preventive action that would have saved lives, Trump activated the worst impulses of his opposition, who meet that reappropriated countercultural rhetoric by becoming proud technocrats, constantly waving their credentials in the faces of the rubes and arguing for the strength and power of institutions like the CDC, which failed vulnerable constituencies during both AIDS and COVID. The 22 See Jo Freeman’s personal website, which contains the essay in full and the vexed history of its publication.

23 For a history of Guy Sorman’s accusation that Foucault preyed on Tunisian children, see “The Black Masses of Michel Foucault and the Bullshit of Guy Sorman.” For a refutation of that account in the Tunisian press, see Frida Dahmani (“Tunisia”). To see Foucault blamed for making “the self. . . . the battlefield of politics,” and confession into communion, see Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora (“Today, the self is the battlefield of politics”).

The American Virus 47 generational shift in managerial class liberalism is perhaps most visible in activist Larry Kramer’s sense of Anthony Fauci as “monster . . . murderer . . . and incompetent idiot” (1988). Now, a good progressive is much more likely to have an image of Fauci emblazoned on a Novena prayer candle, available for $24.99 on Amazon.

Philosopher Michel Foucault theorized the shift from a culture of public punishment to a disciplinary culture with lower visibility: introspection and forced penitence, often behind the high walls of the penitentiary. A phantasmatic Foucault haunted the headlines in the months around the 2021 vaccine push: first with a discredited tale of sexual misconduct, then with a wildly-inaccurate story blaming him for the culture of confession that he diagnosed but did not advocate.23

To my (outside) students, I have made one, consistent argument against prisons: that institutions find a way to build themselves even when we claim to dismantle them. In the absence of robust educational funding, we have a school-to-prison pipeline. In the absence of wellfunded mental health programs, we turn prisons into asylums. In the absence of two hospitals for the poor in New Orleans, we lock the sick and the dying in prison. No institution collapses. Another institution bears the weight of what it cannot carry. The municipal institutions that the Trump resistance celebrated as a countervailing force to his incompetence run on stasis and indifference. Behind them is the shadow of the prison. At this advanced stage of tyrannical structurelessness, we suffer together and alone. In the absence of national policy around testing and contact tracing, we built a culture of community surveillance. Yelling at neighbors about masking and distance failed to build a healthier world; it saved not a single life. In the absence of healthcare, we urged people to treat themselves as though they are always-already diseased. In the absence of reliable information networks, we produced folk wisdom that frequently exceeded advice coming from those institutions. Excessive vigilance for the low-risk is the progressive form of vaccine denial.

48 JJennie Lightweis Goff

The last two years of pandemic life have ballasted a vision of power that Foucault could and could not have predicted; the full force of self-regulation was wielded against a deadly virus that cared not a bit about your good sense and better values. The solution to a leaderless America, to rudderless institutions that long ago ceded their authority to carceral power, was paradoxically tyrannical and ineffective. A nation of atomized, angry individualists floundered in the absence of social connection. COVID left Americans sadder and lonelier, the predictable result of urging each other to leap into the inaction of “social distance”: a term I knew, before 2020, as an index to the fissure between the daily experience of free and incarcerated people, between professors and the janitors who scrub campus toilets. We need that term to collectively fight COVID; we swapped it for the other, an individual answer to a social crisis. Nothing can redeem the death of Reem Cotton or millions of our COVID deaths. Truly, he died in vain, but his living voice still urges to get “beyond small talk.”Works

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The American Virus 51 immigrant children.” WashingtonPost, 14 June 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/local/inside-casa-padre-th Parker-Pope,O’Dowd,Norquist,Montanaro,“Million06/14/0cd65ce4-6eba-11e8-bd50-b803where-the-us-is-holding-nearly-1500-immigrant-children/2018/e-converted-walmart-89a4e569_story.html.DollarBlocks.”ColumbiaUniversity,CenterforSpacialRe-search,2006,c4sr.columbia.edu/projects/million-dollar-blocks.Domenico.“There’saStarkRed-BlueDivideWhenItComestoStates’VaccinationRates.”NPRPolitics,9June2021,www.npr.org/2021/06/09/1004430257/theres-a-stark-red-blue-di-vide-when-it-comes-to-states-vaccination-rates.Grover[GroverNorquist].“Mygoalistocutgovernmentinhalfintwenty-fiveyears,togetitdowntothesizewherewecandrownitinthebathtub.”Twitter,26Jan.2016,twitter.com/Grover-Norquist/status/691989279774527489.Peter,andChrisBentley.“HowaBlackNeighborhoodinNewOrleansFitsIntoBiden’sPlantoFixUrbanDesignInequities.”WBUR:BostonPublicRadio,2April2021,www.wbur.org/here-andnow/2021/04/02/highway-new-orleans-treme.Tara.“AUser’sGuidetoFaceMasks.”NewYorkTimes,10April2020,www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/well/live/coronavirus-face-masks-guides-protection-personal-protective-equipment.html.—.“HowHousekeepersandDomesticHelpersCanSafelyReturntoWork.”NewYorkTimes,18June2020,www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/well/live/coronavirus-housekeepers-maids-domestic-workers-housecleaners.html.Poche,Kaylee.“CantrellannouncesnewMardiGrasCOVIDre-strictions:barclosures,streetbarricades.”Gambit:TheBestofNewOrleans,5Feb.2021,www.nola.com/gambit/news/the_latest/arti-cle_7fee3366-67e4-11eb-a7dd-0fe15358a246.html.Sgaier,SemaK.“MeettheFourKindsofPeopleHoldingUsBackFromFullVaccination.”NewYorkTimes,18May2021,www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/18/opinion/covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy.html.Sheets,Connor.“‘Don’tletmedie’:InsidetheAlabamaPrisonSystem’sCOVID-19QuarantineWard.”AL.com,13Sept.2020,www.al.com/news/2020/09/dont-let-me-die-inside-the-alabama-prison-systems-covid-19-ward.html.Shilts,Randy.AndtheBandPlayedOn.St.Martin’sGriffin,2003.

52 JJennie Lightweis Goff Solnit, Rebecca, and Rebecca Snedeker. UnfathomableCity:ANewOrleansAtlas.U of California P, 2013. Southall, Ashley. “Scrutiny of Social-Distance Policing as 35 of 40 Arrested Are Black.” New York Times, 7 May 2020, Taibbi,Stone,html.com/2020/05/07/nyregion/nypd-social-distancing-race-coronavirus.www.nytimes.Will.“TheReasonsBehindtheSurgeinCoronavirusCasesAcrosstheSouthernStates.”NPR:AllThingsConsidered,30June2020,www.npr.org/2020/06/30/885659555/the-reasons-behind-the-surge-in-coronavirus-cases-across-the-southern-states.Struyk,Ryan.“GeorgeW.Bush’sFavorableRatingHasPulledaCom-plete180.”CNN,22Jan.2018,www.cnn.com/2018/01/22/politics/george-w-bush-favorable-poll/index.html.Sullivan,Peter.“StateVaccineRatesFallAlongRed,BlueDivide.”TheHill,18May2021,thehill.com/policy/healthcare/554005-state-vac-cine-rates-fall-along-red-blue-divide.Matt.“OddManIn:DennisKucinichisNoOne’sFool.”Spank-ingtheDonkey:DispatchesfromaDumbSeason,NewPress,Ebook,2018.Thoreau,HenryDavid.Walden.1854.ThomasY.CrowellPublishers,1910.HathiTrustDigitalLibrary,babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t1jh44m0f&view=1up&seq=9.Tiffany,Kaitlyn.“TheDosandDon’tsofSocialDistancing.”TheAtlan-tic,19March2020,www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-what-does-social-distancing-mean/607927/.Wells,Madeline.“LinecooksareatthehighestriskofdyingfromCOVID,saysUCSFstudy.”SFGate,28Jan.2021,www.sfgate.com/food/article/Cooks-restaurant-workers-risk-death-COVID-UCSF-15905789.php.Witt,JohnFabian.AmericanContagions:EpidemicsandtheLawfromSmallpoxtoCOVID-19.YaleUP,2020.Yong,Ed.“AmericaisGettingUnvaccinatedPeopleAllWrong.”TheAtlantic,22July2021,www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/07/unvaccinated-different-anti-vax/619523/.

BRETT TOMÁS GONZALEZ Federal Medical Center, Fort Worth, Texas MississippiQuarterly 74.1 (2021): 53–60 © 2022 Mississippi State University Pandemic Lockdowns as a Pathway to Empathy E ARLY ON IN MY INCARCERATION , MY PARENTS GIFTED ME WITH something that only a few individuals receive while in prison: a subscription to a national newspaper. At first, the subscription overwhelmed me. I was trying to hide from a world that I felt wanted me hidden. As I began to accept my reality and find peace in the present, I read the paper more and more. It eventually became a bridge to the outside world which had moved on without me. It challenged me to think thoughts that were no longer part of my life. Ultimately it allowed me to understand that I was still a part of the world, but after ten years of incarceration, the gap between me and that world had widened. The newspaper became my primary source of understanding a society that I no longer fully recognized. I remember when the first articles appeared warning of a novel virus originating in China. At first it was just like any other event, something out there. As time went on and the news became more and more dire, I started to wonder if the coronavirus could find its way into my facility. Then it happened. One morning, on the way to the chow hall for breakfast, we saw a sign on another housing unit’s door: WARNING This Unit is Under Quarantine. Two days later we lined up to go to breakfast only to be sent back to our rooms. We were under quarantine as well. Those were scary times. But for the first time, my scary times matched up with the scary times of the outside world. Newspaper articles that helped me understand what was happening out there now helped me understand what was happening in here as well. Finally, a shared experience.Forthe first time in over a decade, I was going through the same things as everyone else. You were locked down, I was locked down. You had food delivered to your house, I had food delivered to my cell.

“Anxious About Returning to Normal Life?” the newspaper now routinely asks. This is a dread I know well. Like you are now experiencing, I have lived in a very isolated environment with relatively little interaction with those outside. While the paper has become my win-

54 BBrett Tomás Gonzalez Brett Tomás Gonzalez. “Self-Portrait, On the Yard.” Water-soluble oil paint on watercolor paper. Justice Arts Coalition collection. Your world was filled with sickness and fear, my world was filled with sickness and fear. It was this last aspect that felt so universal: the fear that was felt out there was the same fear felt in here. I, too, worried about what would happen if I got sick. I, too, saw person after person disappear to the hospital not knowing if they would survive. I, too, looked at others with distrust when something so vital as breath could become my downfall. More than ever, the newspaper was my lifeline to information, something the institution refused to provide to us. This lack of institutional candor led to widespread misinformation and rumors that obscured the truth—another aspect of the pandemic in here that seemed to mirror the pandemic out there.

Pandemic Lockdowns as a Pathway to Empathy 55 dow to the world, I understand that it is an inadequate window. It provides only part of the context and half of the story. As many on the outside are now learning in their COVID lockdown with a limited view of the world through media, there is no substitute for truly being out there among others. In the past, I became severely depressed thinking about how removed from the world I am. But as I read about our society currently experiencing similar constraints, I now have hope that others might understand what I am going through. We may not be going through the same exact experience, but it is a similar experience that may allow for real empathy and a change in the public’s understanding of what resources and support returning incarcerated persons need.

The articles appearing in the newspaper today seem to deal mostly with people’s fears over having lost the ability to relate person to person. After a year and half of lockdown using Zoom and other remote tools, there is a concern that some may have lost their skills for socializing in public. This is a fear I understand well. While the institution in which I am imprisoned holds around fifteen hundred people, much more than the average home during the pandemic, it becomes very small when those are the only people one sees for years at a time. When I leave here, I will have spent over fifteen years interacting with only a relatively small number of people in a social environment very different from the one found out there. I fear I no longer know how to act in society and will stick out immediately. I experience this already as I have a harder and harder time connecting with my family and friends on the outside. Although I am very lucky to still have non-incarcerated people in my life, I can only interact with them through the phone, a very limited email system, and no-contact visits with the few who are capable of visiting me. Over the years, the number of people who have visited me is no greater than twenty. These limitations have prevented me from staying fully connected to the outside world in a way that is more extreme than what most have experienced during their self-imposed lockdowns. It is very hard to express the innate fears produced through incarceration, and I wonder how close they are to what others are currently experiencing as they leave pandemic lockdown. Recently, in the midst of our lockdown, these fears drove me to our facility’s psychology department. My hope was that they would know what I could do to help overcome the feeling that I no longer knew how to socialize with the

outside world. The psychology intern who answered my inquiry was nice but ultimately unable to help. The Bureau of Prisons has no preprescribed solutions to institutionalization—the adaptation of a person to prison in a way that endangers their ability to be a productive member of society. Her answer was to insist that I wait until I am released and then I can use trial and error to find a way to adapt. After reading countless articles about the anxieties of returning from pandemic lockdown, I have not yet seen this suggestion in the newspaper. While the prison system is confused about how to address these issues, counselors and doctors across the country already have solutions for those affected by pandemic isolation, and they are currently being printed for the generalAlthoughpublic.

the psychology intern was unable to help, it was initially helpful to talk to someone who wasn’t also incarcerated. As we talked, however, I noticed that she had no real working understanding of our world in here and I started to have a hard time connecting to her as a person. It felt like I was talking to someone who grew up in a different country. She used the same language as me but somehow it seemed slightly off. When I realized that I was the one who was off, not her, I became overwhelmed with the feeling of being detached from my own humanity. I found myself trying to mimic her tone, speed of speech, and mannerisms in a way that must have seemed childish from her perspective. The more I tried, the more contrived my efforts felt and I found myself filled with irrational anger over what she was saying. Deep down, I knew it wasn’t about the intern or the message she was conveying and decided to stop talking so she could end the session. Sitting in the small room that acts as my cell afterwards, back into the environment I have known for so long, I felt safer. Will trying again and again to interact with society without any guidance, as this intern suggested, really work? I just don’t know.

There is a story that we tell ourselves in here. It isn’t a pretty story and no one really knows if it is a true story. But I have heard it many times, and each time, I wonder if it will be my story. The location of the story often changes in the telling, though a typical choice is Walmart. In this very common American expression of daily life, we enter as a newly released incarcerated person and, for the first time in many years, see colors and choices and people. Do we stare in wonder at all that we have been away from for so long? Do we run from aisle to aisle

56 BBrett Tomás Gonzalez

Yet another common concern is how to explain the “pandemic gap” in employment. Ultimately, employment specialists of many stripes agree that employers will understand such a gap. Since it is something so many went through, resume gaps won’t be held against applicants. I wonder if they will use the same understanding and sensitivity towards my fifteen years of “imprisonment gap”? Classes held in my institution teach us to put down jobs we held while incarcerated in an attempt to hide such a gap. It would be nice if this actually helped, but I wonder if many potential employers will be impressed with my ability to throw trash into a compactor or push carts full of wayward individuals’ property to the hole. Will teaching a card making class or stock trading class in prison look good on my resume?

57 like a kid in a candy store? Are we filled with gratitude to finally be back into the world? In every telling of this story, we turn away and leave as quickly as possible, oftentimes making a scene. It is simply too much for us to handle and we are too overwhelmed to move forward through the store. My fear is that this will happen to me since I have done so much time and have been away for so long. There is no way to know if this is how I will react when I am released and find myself in a store for the first time, but there is a real possibility. When this happens, how will I look to you? If you were to find out that I was just released from prison, my hope is that your experience of entering into society after the pandemic lockdown would have you look on me with sympathy and inspire an attempt to help me in my moment of crisis.

Another concern that receives plenty of attention is what to wear out in public after spending over a year at home. This is something I also understand but for slightly different reasons. When I go outside of my housing unit during the week, I am required to wear a uniform. When I go to the recreation yard, I can choose between the same gray shorts, shirts and sweats they have sold at the commissary for years or . . . my uniform. When I lift weights, I like to mix it up by wearing a gray shirt and . . . my uniform pants. After having such limited options for so many years, I no longer have a full grasp of any kind of fashion sense. Sometimes I think about what clothes I would like to wear but it all seems so confusing now. My only access to what others wear is through magazines and TV which never has had the best of intentions behind what they represent. The choice of clothing myself now seems fraught with stress and something that I also don’t look forward to.

Pandemic Lockdowns as a Pathway to Empathy

58 BBrett Tomás Gonzalez

I have also read plenty of news articles that address the variety of difficulties post-pandemic people are experiencing as they find themselves dating in person again. From rusty small-talk and flirting skills to feeling awkward around unexpected miscues, dating after lockdown is a challenge for many. In a men’s federal prison, there aren’t many opportunities to talk to a woman. Well, not as a woman anyway. The only women I come in contact with are officers or staff members, and it is at the risk of disciplinary action, including spending time in isolation, to treat them as anything other than their position of authority. I have felt myself become mystified by the opposite sex during my prolonged isolation from them. Alternatively, several gay friends of mine have expressed similar anxieties around dating after their release even though they are currently surrounded by men. In the carceral system, their sexuality is essentially outlawed and relationships often take on a very different tone due to their need for secrecy from authorities, gangs, and others who would wish to see them punished in some way.

Whether gay or straight, incarceration often stunts a person’s ability to form a true union with another. Although it is hard for me to express my fears of no longer being able to connect with others in general, it is almost impossible for me to even look at my fears around entering into a romantic relationship after incarceration. It is a fear that is too great for me to fully examine: it cuts to the core of what it is to function as an individual after the dehumanizing reality of long-term imprisonment. It feels as if the romantic entwinement of two people is now outside of my understanding.

While in my bunk the other day, I was struck with the sudden understanding that I no longer remember what it is like to hold a woman’s hand. With no one looking, I held my own hand and wondered how close that felt. Even the most innocent of gestures, such as holding the hand of a person I like, was outside of my grasp and memory. What other aspects have I forgotten over the decade it has been since I have gone on a date? So many sacrifices were unknowingly placed on the altar of my incarceration and I won’t understand the full consequences until I am released. When I was first processed into the system, my primary concern was violence. This was prison after all and I had heard the stories just like everyone else. What I could never have imagined was that before the end of my sentence, it wouldn’t be the expression

59 Brett Tomás Gonzalez. “On the Altar of my Imprisonment.” Pastel on a pastel board. Justice Arts Coalition collection. From the artist: “In my version of the Dutch-inspired vanitas, I removed the flowers from their stems as I have been removed from society. The clock is my actual prison alarm clock and the 2:10 signifies the number of months in my sentence: 210.” of violence but the inability to express tenderness that would keep me awake at night. The fear of being no longer able to hold a woman’s hand without anxiety and trepidation haunts me today, but an unspoken question haunts me further: “Who wants to be in a relationship with someone so broken?” In the future, there may be some kind-hearted soul who will come to my rescue in the checkout line as I struggle to figure out how to use a pay system that didn’t exist prior to my incarceration. But that is much different than someone who is willing to help me learn to reconnect romantically to another person in a healthy and mutually beneficial way. My ultimate fear is that the best I can achieve is a dysfunctional relationship that will be as unsatisfying as being alone.

Pandemic Lockdowns as a Pathway to Empathy

Until my own release, I doubt I can fully understand what my time in here has done to me and what challenges I will face. Even when going through this process of writing an essay, I was confronted with inaccuracies in my knowledge of society created by my long-term isolation. While I am grateful for the opportunity to overcome these issues, very few incarcerated people get the same chance. To make matters worse, there is a dearth of information available for people returning from incarceration and we often are entering into an environment that is openly hostile towards us. I do not think that my feelings are universal. There are those who do time and seem to have no issues, just as there are those who don’t encounter any of the post-COVID lockdown impediments to normal life that many are now experiencing. My hope is that those who do experience anxiety around post-pandemic life can one day empathize with what I am going through. We can connect through our shared experience of isolation of one type or another. This pathway to empathy can create real change regarding how we as a society interact with people who are going through another type of isolation and lockdown: incarceration. These parallels between incarceration and pandemic-induced lockdown make me wonder how incarcerated Americans such as myself will be received by society upon our release. Will we be welcomed back with the same understanding and care with regard to our sensibilities and missteps? Or will the lessons learned about the effects of isolation be lost when it comes to our return? My hope is that others in society, those who will never know what true imprisonment feels like, can take their current experiences and use them to help a group whose time for release has yet to come. Dazed and awkward, one day I will exit a bus wearing prison issued blue jeans and a white tee shirt after years of imprisonment. When this day finally comes, will you have the empathy to overcome your fear of me? Or will you forget what it felt like returning from your own form of lockdown? I beg you don’t, as my chances of ever fully being a part of society again depend on it. There is no vaccine or herd immunity that will hasten my return to society. I still have years to go. Just maybe, when the time comes, there will have been another national conversation regarding all Americans who go through such transitions. Maybe even with newspaper articles to help.

60 BBrett Tomás Gonzalez

HAD NEVER THOUGHT MUCH ABOUT THE INSTITUTIONAL GATEKEEPING that decides who can and who can’t participate in the American experiment, an experiment that was fundamentally founded by illegal aliens in their own right. The effects of incarceration have opened my eyes to the ways in which the ex-convict is never really free, and at the center of this sought-after freedom is often a gatekeeper, in one fashion or another. The acceptance then overturned admittance of Michelle Jones at Harvard, or the Connecticut State Bar initially denying Reginald Dwayne Betts to the bar because of his past convictions, are microcosms of the way gatekeeping can be harmful and hypocritical at the same time (Forman). If you laid my life bare on a petri dish and looked through a microscope, there you will find the same kind of gatekeeping that tried to put more dead weight on top of what I was carrying, even after I had served my time in prison and was off probation. Obtaining a full-time teaching appointment at a college or university is no small feat by itself. Add seven felony convictions, and the barriers could seem insurmountable.Theone-year non-tenure-track position at the University of New Haven was offered after an interview with the chair of the English Department, Don Smith, and another department faculty member. While on the phone, Smith probably thought I gave zero flying fucks about employment, with my deafening silence and unwillingness to be as excited as he was about the offer. I wanted him to somehow understand that the inexplicable silence belonged to former inmate 289-128. Since he could not read tea leaves or tarot cards, I wondered what protocol to follow in admitting to seven felonies and outlining the narrative of their occurrence when trying to gain productive employment. How 1

On the surface, having seven felony convictions suggests a lifelong dedication to criminal activity. According to stereotype, felons are committed to wrongdoing, so their chances for contributing to the hypocritical society that asserts debtpaidare minimal. Before incarceration I had minor brushes with the law—shoplifting, misdemeanor obstruction of justice, destruction of property, unlawful entry, trespassing, possession, and possession with intent to distribute—but none of these led to prison time.

Explaining seven felonies to the person holding the fate of your livelihood in their palm is like flossing alligator teeth.

62 RRandall Horton does a person negotiate the dead weight that attaches itself to the body after being discharged from prison?

My felony convictions stemmed from two court cases, one in Virginia and the other in Maryland, over three years, beginning in 1997. In the first case, I served an eighteen-month sentence for three felony theft convictions to run concurrently with a six-month misdemeanor sentence. In the second case, I was convicted of three felony counts of theft by possession along with one count of second-degree burglary, the latter being classified as violent even though no violence or threat of violence took place. I was sentenced to five years at Roxbury; after serving a year I was transferred to a drug rehabilitation program at a facility in Durham, North Carolina, and released in 2000.

The situation is complicated, and the offenses were not lifelong, but there will forever be the dead weight of seven felony convictions. The number seven usually symbolizes some form of good luck, like three sevens making blackjack with the dealer holding twenty; in Chinese culture, however, seven is symbolic of death. In order to kill the memory, you have to relive it. It’s really at that moment, and we all have one, where the thought of outrunning history becomes fantasy. No matter how hard you churn both legs, or how evenly the hands and elbows slice the wind while getting ghost—dead weight and prison ID 289-128 catch up with you. One felony is a memory refusing to die. Seven could be considered an eternal nightmare. I gave a truncated explanation to Smith, the department chair, first by phone and then in person. From his office I went directly to Ron Nowaczyk, the dean of arts and sciences, to regurgitate my state of affairs. Nowaczyk remained indifferent during my presentation, and I didn’t know if he believed me or was preparing to

Because it was only a one-year appointment, I did not know where I would be teaching afterward. So, during that first semester, while preparing lesson plans and syllabi, meeting students during office hours, and teaching classes, I applied for several jobs elsewhere in the country.

In November, I received a call from David Shevin, the chair of Central State University’s English department, informing me that out of about two hundred applications, mine had been selected for the Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence post. I would be responsible for three tasks during the spring semester: (1) teaching an honors class on culture memory, trauma, and the Black radical tradition; (2) delivering a campus-wide lecture on poetics; and (3) giving a poetry reading in the community. The residency came with a stipend of thirty thousand dollars, and I accepted it.

When I told Smith about the job offer, he immediately went to Nowaczyk to see if my position could be held until I got back, practically guaranteeing that I would work at UNH well past my one-year appointment. The decision to leave was difficult since the institution had blind faith in my ability to do the job, motivate students, and provide them with a learning experience to prepare them for what lay ahead outside the university walls. But the opportunity to teach at a historically Black university was something I couldn’t pass up, given how I had squandered my undergraduate years at Howard University in Washington, DC. Only a few years earlier, Howard had introduced me to the dead weight when it denied my reentry to the university upon my release from prison.

DeadWeight 63 throw me out of his office. When I was done he asked, “Is that it?” and matter-of-factly pointed me to the human resources department, where I would repeat the process and prepare for the background check to confirm what I’d already revealed. At the time, I was living in Albany, having completed a PhD in English and creative writing in May 2009, and when I returned home, I kept waiting for the phone to ring and a voice telling me that there was no way in hell I would be working at the University of New Haven. When the phone did ring, however, I was informed by the administration that all the information I provided was confirmed by the background check. I would be allowed to teach during the upcoming school year.

Central State mailed me the contract, and I returned it, signed, within forty-eight hours.

Three weeks after my initial conversation with Smith, after having told him I would not be back for the spring semester, I received a registered letter from the provost of Central State, which basically stated,

64 RRandall Horton

anciesofDr.Horton,aftercarefulreconsiderationofourinitialoffer,asprovostCentralStateUniversityIamrescindingourofferbasedondiscrep-inyourapplication.Pleasedonotcallorattempttocontactus.Shevin,thechairofCentralState’sEnglishdepartment,calledmelaterthatnight,furiousattheuniversity’sdecision.TheprovosthadtoldShevinnottocontactme,butoutofsheermoralityandhumanness,hedidreachouttoletmeknowwhatreallywentdown.IhadfullydisclosedmypastwhenIappliedforthepositionandwhenIacceptedtheofferoverthephone.Shevinassuredmeitwouldpresentnoproblemwhatsoever.Ididn’thidetheminorbrusheswiththelaworthefelonytheft,second-degreeburglary,ortheftbyposses-sioncharges.Iwasupfrontaboutallofit.I’dadmittedtobeingadrugsmuggler,drugseller,anddrugaddict.Atthatpointinmylife,aGooglesearchof“RandallHorton”wouldhaveproducedscreenafterscreenofnegativeinformationaboutmypast.ItwassomethingIcouldneveroutrun,soIranstraighttowardit,placingthedead-weightnarrativeinmyownhandsinsteadofsomeoneelse’s.OnthephoneShevinwentintogreatdetailabouthowtheprovostseemedhell-bentonnothavinganex-felononcampus.Subsequently,Shevinhiredalawyeronhisowndimetoseeiftherevocationcouldbereversed.AftertalkingwithmeandagreeingthatCentralState’sactionswereuncalledfor,thelawyermetwiththeuni-versity’sgeneralcounselandwastoldthatCentralStateofficialsdidnotcareifIsuedforbreachofcontract.Theywerewillingtogotocourtandloseratherthanhavemyex-convictselfworkingattheirlongstand-inginstitutionthatfocusedonthebettermentofAfricanAmericans.ThelawyertoldmethatIdidhaveacaseandwouldlikelywin,butIwouldneedtoweightheprosandconsoffilingsuit.Foronething,becauseIhadonemoresemesteronmycontractatNewHaven,anydamagesIwouldreceivewouldbeoffsetbypotentialearnings,meaningIwouldgetonlytwentythousanddollarsminustheattorney’sfee.Second,andmoreimportant,ifIsuedCentralState,Iwouldbeputonablacklist,anditwouldbecomeharderformetogetajobinacademia.

I would have told the provost how I made a series of mistakes for which I have deep remorse, but since my release I have been doing everything in my power to make sure I contribute positively not only to the Black experience but to the human experience. Again, however,

It is important for these communities and social networks to realize that, according to a 2020 report by the Pew Research Center, Blacks are “far more likely” to be incarcerated than Hispanics and whites (Gramlich). At the end of 2018, the study found, Blacks were imprisoned at a rate nearly twice that of Hispanics and more than five times that of whites. When you think about the incarceration rate for African Americans, how the prison-industrial complex attaches itself through parole, probation, and conviction long after release, you would expect HBCUs to be at the forefront of reeducation and rehabilitation. This was not the position, however, that Central State was taking with its decision. I would have loved to have sat down and talked with the provost, but I never got the chance. I would have told the provost that I am the product of an HBCU union, my mother and father having met at Alabama A&M University. But more than that, I would have explained how my parents’ love for HBCUs filtered down to my sister and me. They made sure that we attended the Magic City Classic, a game between the oldest HBCU football rivals in the country, Alabama A&M and Alabama State University. My sister graduated from A&M, her oldest daughter is an alumna too, and her youngest is on track to finish in two years. My parents’ friends attended HBCUs as well.

DeadWeight 65 Central State’s defiance and intimidation left me pondering the actual purpose of an HBCU. The situation brought me back to Amiri Baraka’s autobiography and his recollections of life at Howard University in the 1950s. One day a faculty member witnessed him eating watermelon while sitting on the school’s wall facing Georgia Avenue—a main artery of traffic within Washington, DC—and told him he was setting Negroes back fifty years. Baraka would constantly question why Black institutions tried to “outwhite the whites,” arguing that these knew-knee-grows seemed stuck in the age of the New Negro, measuring all accomplishments against the success and prestige of white institutions.After the dust settles, or when the ashes clear, what path lies before the social outcast who carries the dead weight of prison? Is redemption possible within the community the outcast came from?

When I tried to reenroll at Howard after my release from prison, I believed that my being a returning student, along with well-documented rehabilitation, would result in an acceptance letter. The letter I received, however, was very different, announcing the rejection of my application because of my felony convictions. This news destroyed the dream I had dreamt every night in cell 23: to get an undergraduate degree from Howard University, to finish what I started, to prove I could represent the university in a positive manner. I wanted to prove that I had changed, but was not given the opportunity by the Black elite at Howard. Instead I went to the University of the District of Columbia, which accepted me unconditionally. Given my disappointment with HBCUs, it was both a surprise and an honor to be invited in 2018 to deliver the annual Ralph Ellison Lecture at Tuskegee University in southeast Alabama. The HBCU, located about sixty-five miles from my hometown of Birmingham, was home to the likes of Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. Ellison attended the university and wrote the great postmodern novel InvisibleMan, whose protagonist gets immersed in a brand of Blackness that is not only confusing but terrifying. The irony of my selection to deliver the address on Tuskegee’s pristine campus, with its rich Black history, did not escape me. I could not help but think, Whoknowsbut that,onthelowerfrequencies,Ispeakforyou? as I began to address a room of hopeful college students. Perhaps the time is now to publicly question HBCU institutions like Howard and Central State that adopt the same philosophies the protagonist in Invisible Man had to endure at the mythical HBCU in Ellison’s novel—a philosophy that mimicked

I never got the chance to prove that I was indeed worthy of having been picked by Central State’s English students and seconded by the faculty to be a Distinguished Fellow even though they all knew my incarceration history. Instead, Central State administrators chose to add to the dead weight one carries after prison, reinforcing stereotypes while being contradictory and hypocritical in carrying out its mission. True, the university owed me nothing; and yet, I did not ask for a handout—only to be judged on merit and the ability to have an impact on campus. That rejection brought me back to the first one at Howard University, which I now realize was the first sign of the residue of incarceration that would never go away.

66 RRandall Horton

DeadWeight 67 the mentality of the oppressor to further oppress those who blindly subscribed to operating within the white gaze.

I am left with the terrible realization that the institutions I love so much are helping to perpetuate a troubling brand of Blackness.

The University of New Haven is not a large institution, so I’m not exactly operating with a lot of research money or summer stipends, but I have been resourceful, and my experience there has been great. After that first year I went on the job market again, but I also applied for a tenure-track position at UNH, and received tenure after five years. I am the only person of color in my department, but when I teach courses that educate students about Blackness, enrollment is always at capacity, with the majority being students of color. Also, I never lose sight of the fact that many of the students I cross paths with will be employed in some form of criminal justice, which is the reason many attend this university. I am the unicorn, the outlier my students need to see before they pursue their chosen profession. It is my hope that these future leaders will remember Dr. Horton—what he stood for and how he tried to exemplify change and dispel stereotypes and misconceptions about convicted felons. My office is in need of a coat of paint, and its thirty-year-old industrial rug has only recently been replaced—slow change, but change. The wall is gradually being filled with framed photos of memorable events and occasions.

Years have passed since Central State rescinded its offer of employment. After teaching two classes on a Monday, I slide back into my chair and turn on the desktop. I log onto Facebook, where I see a post reporting that David Shevin has passed away. I am stunned. Shevin was the chair of the English department at Central State. He saw the real me on a curriculum vitae that offered no human connection; and yet, the people Shevin interacted with on a daily basis failed to see me for who I was or what I could become. Shevin believed in me so much, he hired counsel to fight my cause—placed his job and livelihood in jeopardy so that I might have a chance. Through this guy I was able to see the good in humanity. Shevin died with no one knowing this part of him but Imagineme.if more human beings like Shevin looked beneath the surface to see the prison-industrial complex for the damage it does? We have to remember that the original mandate of HBCUs was to provide

68 RRandall Horton an opportunity for African Americans coming out of slavery, not only to help them be competitive in a capitalistic society but to level the playing field of inequality. If we are to believe author Michelle Alexander’s assertion that mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow, then what mechanisms are in place to assist those caught in this new systemic bias against Black people and people of color? And yes, while we can say shame to Harvard for not letting Michelle Jones attend Harvard, and we can say shame in the Connecticut State Bar’s decision regarding Dwayne Betts—I personally say shame on Howard, Central State, and the many other HBCUs whose policies sometimes outwhite the whites instead of helping the community they swore to protect and serve.

Works Cited Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the AgeofColorblindness.The New Press, 2010. Forman, James, Jr. “A Prison Sentence Ends. But The Stigma Doesn’t.” New York Times, 15 Sept. 2017, Gramlich,opinion/a-jail-sentence-ends-but-thewww.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/-stigma-doesnt.html.John.“BlackImprisonmentRateintheU.S.HasFallenbyaThirdsince2006.”PewResearchCenter,6May2020,www.pewre-search.org/fact-tank/2020/05/06/share-of-black-white-hispanic-americans-in-prison-2018-vs-2006/.Horton,Randall.“DeadWeight.”DeadWeight:AMemoirinEssaysNorthwesternUP,2022,pp.35–41.

JASON M C CALL University of North Alabama MississippiQuarterly 74.1 (2021): 69–71 © 2022 Mississippi State University For the 95 Bodies Found on the Imperial Sugar Plantation1 sionandplantationblackInFebruary2018,constructionworkersdiscoveredtheremainsof95workersonthesiteoftheformerImperialSugarPlantation.Thewasinfamousforitsbrutalityduringboththeslaveryeratheconvictleasingera.SomescholarsclaimthatLeadBelly’sver-of“MidnightSpecial”wasinspiredbyhistimeasaprisonerattheplantation.Eventhemachinesmissedthebodiesontheirfirstscansbecausemachinescanplaychess,playthepiano,playthemarket,buttheycan’tlearntolielikeamagician,neverlearnedhowtomakeabodyvanishandmakethecrowdapplaudthedepartureofthatbody,name,footstepsthattoldthefamilythatbodywaswalkingthroughthefrontdoorintimefordinner.Theplantationwillturnintoaschool.Torturebecomesteachablemoments.LeadBellybecomesCCR.Buteverygoodtrickdesiresanillusion,soourwideeyeswillswear1OriginallypublishedinTheSummersetReview(Fall2019)andrepublishedinAManAin’tNothin’(PorkBellyPress,2020).Reprintedbypermission.

70 JJason McCall

they see the ghost of the accountant’s assistant smiling while he watches a little black girl sweat over a calculus midterm. We will swear there’s a ghost in the locker room watching little boys of all colors— chalk, cream, and coffee-black—trade dick jokes before practice. We will swear there’s a chorus of ghost hands clapping at graduation while the valedictorian gives a speech about the work ethic she learns from her father by watching him rise up from the dead of night and go work two jobs. We’ll swear we saw those ghosts smile one last time before they bathe themselves in the Lethe-soaked light of oblivion. But those ghosts know every trick the country has ever played. Those ghosts aren’t in any hurry to leave. They need to know why we left them on this plantation when we could’ve imagined them anywhere else. They need to know why we keep talking about work when there are 95 funeral songs that need singing. They need to know what else are we willing to share after sharing an article or a solidarity emoji. And they need to know if Viola Davis or Octavia Spencer

For the 95 Bodies Foundon the ImperialSugar Plantation 71 will play the one black woman forgotten in these 95 boxes of black bones and they need to know how we believe in 95 ghosts being only 95 ghosts and they need to know how we ever learned to walk in a country where every sidewalk is a lost graveyard. They need to know how we ever managed to turn something so rotten into something so sweet.

I STOOD IN LINE, STRIPPED NAKED, ASKED TO OPEN MY MOUTH, LIFT MY testicles, and bend over and cough. We were placed on bunks in rows only feet apart, stacked next to as well as on top of each other. Counted, fed, and sometimes beaten before being shipped to the next plantation Allow me the opportunity to introduce you to a system filled with pain, violence, negligence, and sometimes death known as the “Department of Corrections.” Phase 1: The Bullpen

I was sitting in a cell called the “Bullpen” with twelve other men, awaiting my turn to receive the final meal for the day. As I pulled the greasy tray through the tray hole in the bars, I looked at its contents: a soybean patty, roll, green peas, sometimes cold and uncooked, along with a scoop of mashed potatoes. This meal became the norm for us all. The tray itself was covered in grime. Was its purpose to motivate family members to send funds for the commissary? I was crushed to see that no one really cared about what we ate, as food is a vital necessity for sustaining life. This was my first indication that the system really didn’t care about our lives. I stayed awake most of the night out of fear of not knowing any of the individuals around me. I had noticed that the only time guards came was a fight or to count those of us present in that section of the jail. Knowing this made me aware of the reality that my safety, care, and concerns were now all on me alone. Another reason I didn’t sleep was because most nights someone was screaming and pounding on the doors trying to get the attention of staff for medical, safety, or sickness. Needless to say, they rarely came, as this would go on for hours with no attention being given at all.

. . .

74 AAnonymous I expected someone to show up that next day and at least check to see how I was doing. That never happened. You would think that there would be some sort of system in place to monitor the shift in one’s mental state. The only ones that began to check on me was the ones in the “Bullpen.” Knowing what I was experiencing, they asked frequently if I was okay, as they knew my thoughts were drifting. Those around me had been in that condition longer than I had. They had missed their families longer, fought their emotions longer, thought “What’s next?” longer, but most of all, fought for self longer. And although I appreciated their support, I couldn’t help but notice the isolation setting in even deeper. In that moment I was schooled by an old Black man who had experienced that condition several times. He taught me how to carry myself once I made it to prison. After being there for only thirty days, my entire attitude and posture had begun to change. I had to learn to talk and walk all over again as I was thrust from the womb of society into this place. I made myself callous as a means of survival. I developed an “I don’t care” attitude so fast that you would have thought it was natural. (It wasn’t.) I was now standing at the bars hollering down the hall to other inmates, or talking back to the guards, and even rapping about how I felt as a means of creating an identity. I had watched several occasions where other inmates were beaten, or taken advantage of for expressing too much emotion. Missing their families so much they cried was a sign to the vets in this environment, and they always attacked as a means to gain something either physically or financially. As for how bad you were hurting, or would get hurt, that was neither their concern nor a concern of the guards. So I did what most youngsters did to elicit fear or respect from others: I talked louder. I looked the meanest. I even fought the hardest. I built a reputation so that I would not be played with. This was the story my exterior told. On the inside, I was simply an emotional mess. I used to wonder why the hamster ran so fast and hard on its wheel. It’s the only way he can feel like he’s going somewhere, even though he’s going nowhere at all. I was on that wheel. We rode from the jail to the processing center for State Corrections/Corruptions. We knew this day was coming and had spent the previous night sleepless with most of us wondering when our number was up. Those who had been upstate were ready to go back; those of us who hadn’t were hoping we were skipped. The names would be called

All over the state, the county jails send their convicts to a single plantation to be processed. From death row to work release status, we all went through this processing place. They separated or isolated only those with life without parole or death row. When they brought men from death row to the infirmary, the guards would yell out, “Dead man walking!” and we all had to look the other way and face the wall. I guess they didn’t want us to see the pain in their eyes, or didn’t want them to see the life in ours. As for the rest of us, whether you had 20 months or 220 years, we were all placed in the same blocks. I will never forget that first day. It was early January, the sky had this gray gloom to it, and it was extremely cold. This was the Processing Plantation where life as most knew it, including myself, was about to take a different turn. This particular facility had a transit system, and I am sure that it rotated hundreds by the day. They pulled in, we all stepped off the van, and they did roll call, better known in the South’s system as the “Master Roster.”1 I never really thought about it until just now, but that was the last time that my name would be called instead of my institutional number. It has been my name for nearly twenty years, with numbers that I may never forget that changed my very identity from person to “prisoner.”

1 “Master” is just what it says, and “Roster” was a list of personnel checkoff sheets they used to make sure all of us were on the plantation.

Once inside, we were asked to step up to a line and remove all of our clothes. Standing not even three feet apart from one another, we were stripped of every article of clothing. The guards made jokes as they told us to turn to the side and tighten up the line, almost placing the man behind you right up on you. What happened next is what I have always considered as the system’s way of stripping a man of his manhood. We were told to bend over, spread our buttcheeks, and cough. They said this was for a cavity search. I myself have never been able to understand how bending over and spreading your buttcheeks and coughing had anything to do with cavity searching because it simply didn’t work.

Welcome to the Farm Squad 75 from the hallway and those called would be advised to get ready. The more I heard those chains rattle, the more my heart raced, the more nervous I became, and I was starting to realize that I was a slave.

Phase Two: The Big House

Some vets who had seen this process before would suddenly go to the bathroom only to return with cigarettes or drugs. The finish was to hold up the bottom of your feet and then back to face the officer. Attached to this procedure was a test for compliance. During this process if someone resisted for any reason, an example was made of them on the spot. This is before the state attempted to adopt a “hands-off” policy, so instantly it was hands-on, in addition to the use of sticks and boots. Guys would be beaten into submission, placed in handcuffs, hit a few more times, and then carried away to isolation. In more than a few cases, some of these victims died. We went to see our classification specialist and then took this intake psychiatry exam that I really didn’t see the use of. After going through this process, we would prepare to be released into general population after a few days. During this phase, I realized that the officers were acting differently. Initially, when eating, we would be rushed to eat with no talking at all. We were ordered to walk in straight lines to what is called the “chow hall” and once we were done straight back to our dormitory. Once we were released into general population, the guards seemed to relax and become less strict. I noticed that they even talked and joked with us in general population. We were placed in bigger living units that had at least 200 people in each block. My block had close to 300.The first thing I noticed in these blocks was the bathroom arrangements. The toilets were in a straight line side by side with nothing to divide or separate you from the person beside you. For this reason there were inside rules to be followed, the most important being to never sit next to someone on the toilet. This was the only way of providing some type of privacy. Then there was the shower stall, which we referred to as a sex dungeon. To get in the shower with the wrong group would expose you to a life you weren’t ready for. The stalls were close to the toilet and there was only a door separating those of us in the shower from the TV area. Once you finished showering you had to step outside the door and get dressed. This would expose some people to being sexually assaulted, as it would allow those sitting on the toilet as well as TV area room to watch you. This arrangement and lack of privacy was the reason so many people were sexually assaulted. If you showed any signs of fear or you weren’t from a big city with a lot of homies to support you, you were especially at risk.

76 AAnonymous

Another way to protect yourself was to be affiliated with some organization. This is why so many people in prison join gangs. The larger groups would even take advantage of others, even if it was stealing their commissary items. This would also contribute to an atmosphere of violence, as groups would oftentimes clash over these kinds of issues. As for the guards, they had little to no care or concern for us anymore. The only thing they cared about was an accurate count.2 During count time, if you dared to speak, you were beaten. For that reason, count time used to be the quietest time in the dorm. After count, the block belonged to those internal groups. One night during count time, I accidentally turned the wrong way. My feet were hanging in the walkway as the officers came through for count. After ordering me to turn around, they came back afterward and escorted me outside. As a young man with a small frame, I felt very small as they hovered over me, but I learned a valuable lesson about not backing down or showing signs of intimidation. They hit me, but being that I felt I was in the right for having made an honest mistake, I swung back, much to their surprise. I gave them a good fight, but I learned that “fair” didn’t exist between these walls. They took turns beating me that night until I said I’d had enough. I was placed in segregation for 40 days. They didn’t give me a violation because they would have had to justify their actions against me. They didn’t give me a body chart, either.3 After my 40 days were up, I was released back into general population with a black eye: their way of showing they meant business. Others thought that my having a black eye made me a weak target. This is where I learned what it meant to be a homeboy vs. a “country boy,” as the homeboys called us. If you weren’t from a major city, you were a country boy, and this made you vulnerable to those from larger cities because you were alone.

Welcome to the Farm Squad 77

3 A body chart is issued by the Health Care Unit to report injuries after an incident.

The basketball court was another site for violence. The competition and egos really took over and a game could turn bad at any moment, especially if you were a country boy. The first of my many fights would start on the court. I was attacked there, for example, by all of the men on my team for simply not passing the ball. They were homeboys, not country boys. We were throwing hands and a crowd started forming 2 They count us six times per day.

Phase 3: The Farm Squad

4 “Sally port” is the nickname given to the place where you process in and out. “Sally” is also the name of a famous slave ship. 5A recruiting post, or shakedown shack, is where gangs recruit members when they arrive at institutions.

It was clear right away that the administration did not control this facility, which looked more like a work release center. In fact, I had been transferred to Gang Land. After going through intake—again, my property was searched, my body was strip-searched, and I was asked to bend over and cough and hold up my feet—we were held in a shakedown shack. I noticed that I was in a recruiting post.5 Guys were walking up seeing where everyone was from as well as who’s who in the shakedown shack. Once again, if you were from a big city, you were somewhat safe. If you weren’t, you were asked about your affiliation. If you were Blood, Crip, or Disciple, then you were more than likely to be with those guys. If you did not become actively involved, you were at least going to do a meet and greet. If you were young, white, and looked timid, or if you were light-skinned with curly hair and what was called funny-colored eyes, you were considered fresh meat. Because

A few days later, I was woken up in the middle of the night and asked to gather all of my things. I was very nervous and mentally prepared to be thrust into the unknown again. I was taken to the sally port —the back gate of the institution.4 I was stripped and searched thoroughly. I was crammed into a transit vehicle, a van intended to hold six to eight passengers with maybe twelve of us on board. After a quiet ride and being given a jug in which to urinate along with a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, I arrived at my next destination, a medium-security prison with a farm squad.

78 AAnonymous around us, including a few officers who were enjoying the show. They watched for about five minutes before someone finally stepped in. I gained the respect of a lot of people that day, including the officers who were watching. That night, I was even visited by the officers who had jumped me; they joked by asking why I didn’t fight them like that. I couldn’t tell them that, had I fought them in the same way, I would be dead. We were not people to them; we were prisoners.

Welcome to the Farm Squad 79 passes were made all the time, you had to be very mindful and pay attention.Once we were inside the facility, we were called to the shift office and given our bed assignments. I was placed in a block where anything goes. My bed assignment was against the wall, which appeared to be a hangout spot. Almost everyone who came in from other blocks stopped at the wall and talked about whatever. Conversations would range from street memories to case information to various actions taking place inside the institution. But what made my bed assignment worse was what took place two days later. One guy owed another guy money for some weed, and they were fussing. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, a fight broke out between them. One was a Crip and the other was a Disciple. A large crowd surrounded them. The Crip got on top of the Disciple and beat him so badly that you couldn’t see his face. Blood was everywhere as he tried to make it out the door. Once he was next to my bed, the Crip decided to beat him some more. I got out of the way just in time as they fell onto my bed, fighting. Blood covered the bed, the floor, and the wall as everyone cheered. The Disciple finally made it out the door and got an officer’s attention. They came in and ordered us to our beds while they looked for the Crip, who they never found (neither person in the fight slept in my block). We were let up and things continued on as usual. Guys assigned as dorm cleaners washed the blood from the floor and the wall. As for my bed, I had a fresh institutional number, which meant I was green and didn’t know how things go in situations like this. No one seemed to care that my sheets were covered in blood.Anolder guy walked over to me and offered to help me to get new sheets from the laundry. I went back to my block and after fixing the mess that had been made, I felt like breaking down. Not even 90 days ago, I was at home with my family playing with my daughter. I had just lost my grandmother, who was like a mother to me. Along with this emotional hurt, along with missing my family and freedom, I became toxic toward my relationship with my daughter’s mother. This place was doing exactly what it was designed to do: isolate. I was slowly detaching myself from the outside so that I could deal with life on the inside.Istarted to become desperate at surviving in the lives and hearts of those that I loved, so I became crafty at trying to get as much of their

80 AAnonymous attention as I could while simply hoping and praying that someone would come and save me. Save me from what or whom? Myself, because I was obviously about to become my very own worst enemy. I was an emotional mess within, so instead of healing, I only knew hurting. I became bitter. My struggle for survival mentally and physically eventually took me places that I will never forget. Places where even the wind refused to blow out of fear of the unknown. While I was going through this inward transformation, there existed nothing to help me adjust to this shift. Now that I look at it, I think it’s because they wanted me to adapt and become a part of prison, as their goal was to produce a prisoner.Iwent to job board, where they assign you a job after about two weeks.6 Most if not all of us in my age range (up to about fifty years of age) were assigned to the Farm Squad. We would be woken up at 5:45 a.m. and told to be at the back gate by 6:30 after the shift change. Once we were there, if our squad number was called out, we stepped through the sally port to wait on the Farm Boss. The Farm Boss was an officer who would come out with a sidearm on his waist and shotgun in his hand and climb up on his horse. We would then be ordered to pick up tools, mainly sling blades, hoes, and shovels, all made from steel. This tool weighed every bit of 30 to 35 pounds and was assigned to us individually until we checked back in. They said the weight of it was such to prevent us from attacking each other, when truth was carrying it was an attack. Initially I thought that we were going to be around the outside of the gate being that I knew we weren’t about to actually be farming. By 7:00, we were ordered to “deuce it up”: this is when you form two lines or two side by side and are ordered to carry your tool over your shoulder. We would walk at a minimum noise level for what seemed to be at least an hour, we were so far away from the facility.

The Farm Squad had nothing to do with farming; it was simply the state’s way of reminding us that we were on a plantation. We cut up weeds and grass in the fields; our work had no purpose other than to control us and keep us tired. We worked outside in the summer heat until we fainted. If we refused to work, we were beaten or chained to

6 All “institutional” jobs in this state’s DOC—cooking, mopping floors, taking out trash—are unpaid. If you refuse to work, you are issued a disciplinary, then segregation, and too many disciplinary actions would get you closed out and sent to max custody with guys who have life without parole.

8 A split sentence is like pre-negotiated probation. When the judge gives you 20 years split 5, you only do 5 years in prison and then you are released on probation—a trick, for if you violated the split and it was 15 split 3, you had 12 more years to serve without any institutional “good time.” It is worse than parole.

Two people were picked, one to be the “flag boy” while the other one carried the cooler with our water and the paper cone cups we would drink from.7 They usually would pick different guys until they found that one in-house “Squad Boss.” The Squad Boss was the 21st century version of a field n----- trying to be accepted in the Big House. To those of you sensitive to my language, I apologize; I’m just calling it how we see it. This was usually someone with leadership skills but who had lost his way due to being institutionalized. This character was always someone who had the mindset of a bully and the brains of one, as well. I say so because he failed to realize in his attempt to control us, he was being used as a tool by the System. These tactics of intimidation usually worked with guys who had something to lose, who would be going home soon, or were serving time on a split.8 Guys with these sentences usually tried to avoid trouble at all costs in an attempt to make it home.Imyself had so much time that I could get four 20-year sentences and still have room for another. Sure, I have the possibility of being released on parole, but at that time I had to do a mandatory of 15 years before even being considered. I was young, full of energy, and slowly becoming a threat to the Squad Boss because nothing I could do would make my sentence much worse. It soon came to a head. I checked him and put him in his place. Come to find out he had been to this facility twice and familiarity had him known amongst the guards, but even he was back on a 20 split 5. He had something to lose, and I assured him that I didn’t, and was ready to die standing before I would be stepped

Welcome to the Farm Squad 81 the gate in the heat. One day, when I refused to work, I was handcuffed to a post called the “hitching pole” which was held in cement in the hot sun with no shade. I had to wait there until my squad checked back in. I could either check out and face the consequences or go through the same process again. This system has a way of breaking a man in the methods that you would use to break a mule.

7 Someone carried a flag to mark where the men were working. It was a strategic way of forcing the stronger to seek the position and be manipulated into overseeing those considered weaker.

82 AAnonymous on. The Farm Boss tried to get me to carry the flag or the cooler as he wanted me to be an extension of his control and order. I refused both. I was developing a love for my people and I wanted to stand with them. Eventually, I met someone who didn’t have an institutional job. I asked him, how do I get off this farm squad? And he said, “bruh, just buck.” The next day, about nine of our squad members along with myself decided that we were going to shut down once we were on the job site. This would be the day that the system would feel my first push of resistance, my first attempt to show that I still had a choice—my first time attempting to say “I refuse to be a slave.” I thought of our ancestors as we stood in the fields, out in the heat, both young and old, only allowed to drink one paper cone cup of water in heat of 98 degrees and not getting paid one red penny for our efforts, not even a job report.9 They weren’t even willing to do that. I remember it like it was yesterday. I honestly thought we were dead. We checked out and got on the work site and after about ten minutes we decided that we weren’t working anymore. The ten of us standing up that day had an effect on the rest of the squad because we all shut down. The officer on the horse called for the truck to come. The trucks were only called when a fight broke out, or someone was too sick to work, or any other issue that was too big for the Farm Boss to handle alone. Once the truck pulled up, a white man looking like Burt Reynolds got out of the truck talking to us like we were the scum of the earth. Once we started talking back, he did the unthinkable: he pulled out his sidearm. I thought to myself, this fool ain’t about to shoot us, the state would fire him and it probably doesn’t even have any bullets in it. So a few of the guys and I started laughing. This fool didn’t think anything was funny. He cocked his pistol and fired nine rounds in the ground just a few feet in front of us. It was so close that dirt from the bullets hitting the ground was hitting us. But for some reason, he didn’t get the response he was looking for. Instead of fear, we gave him fury.Once a man accepts death in his mind, he’ll put his life on the line. That day, we were all ready to die. In my mind, I was already dead; the state had killed every hope and dream I ever had the moment they took 9 A job report is when the officers can write a work report to be placed in your file to show that you have been a good conforming slave.

Phase 4: WhenConformitytheFarmSquad failed to keep us at bay, they used visitation as a means of population control. There were entirely too many people at our small facility to be so understaffed and still exercise the control they had. I hated seeing my loved ones leave after visitation was over. I hated the process of re-entering the facility following visitation even more. As if taking your family wasn’t enough, they would strip us down, we would once again bend over and cough, every time. Some people would try to exchange drugs during visitation, but not many. The real purpose of this process was to remind us that, though we felt a taste of freedom, we were still state property. Bending over and coughing while naked was their way of showing us that they own us. Visitation created an environment of conformity that made the masses move with little to no hostility. This kept the population from doing things that would cause them to receive individual infractions.

Punishments included no commissary, phone, or visitation privileges for 45 or 90 days. This is how one man was able to tell one hundred men to be quiet. This is also how one man with a gun on horseback could tell thirty men to form deuces and work in the hot sun for hours with no pay and no resistance. This is how grown men allowed other grown men to count us daily. They could place us in the kitchen with knives and on farms with tools and within every inch of each institu-

Welcome to the Farm Squad 83 me away from my family and sold me to a system that would destroy everything I knew. As I fight back tears writing in this moment, my ancestors are again on my mind, standing in those same fields where a threat was made on our lives and where some of them had lost theirs— shot, hung, or maybe burnt alive for refusing to work for a system that had taken everything they ever had while giving them nothing in return but false dreams and lies. We were checked back into the institution. We walked back to the admin building and demanded to see Classification, Captain, or Warden. Once we stated what was going on and told them we refused to check out anymore and that we were ready for the consequences, we were immediately removed from the Farm Squad. I think they did this to sweep the issue under the rug because it was never mentioned again.

Like my ancestors, I sit waiting once again for federal intervention to step in and do something about this new southern rebellion.

Is this how my ancestors felt when they were awakened daily to work the fields? There are no protests on a mass scale to address our conditions. The state has placed more security cameras in our dorms to monitor our actions: this is supposed to stop the violence. But people know to group together to prevent individuals from being singled out on camera. Even visitations are losing their power to control this violence: Securus has developed for-profit technology for video visitations, and face-to-face visitations may be a thing of the past.

It has been nearly twenty years since I first processed into the prison plantation—a system built on retribution, where its overall objective is punishment. No relief from the heat, no relief from the agitation or tension, nothing put in place to prevent the violence that would follow.

In this moment, I am mentally and physically preparing for the next wave of violence that is sure to follow as the state is making efforts to crack down on contraband within these facilities. The state DOC has failed to produce anything in its mission or vision statements. They have not provided a safe and humane environment for those that they house. They have not provided conditions for rehabilitation or reentry.

84 AAnonymous tion to do a job. They created a lie that promised us a little bit of pleasure and in return we continued to willingly experience a whole lot of pain.Ihaven’t even scratched the surface in this essay: I could tell you stories that would cause you to lose sleep, like the first time I watched a man cut another man in his face, neck, shoulders, arms, stomach, and back with a box cutter. I could tell you about another man who had spent twenty years in isolation and, once released, stabbed two men and was wrestled down by officers who soon discovered that he had tied and duct-taped knives to his hands. I have watched people die at the hands of officers and fellow inmates. All I could do was keep moving. There is nothing in place to help us to cope with these acts of violence. I learned to sleep on my side with my heart pressed up against the bed and my arm over my jugular vein. We were taught to sleep like this so that we would not be killed during the night. I became the monster society said I was. I had to prepare to fight for my life all the time.

Different

of Labor: Writing in

a prison library wall

“It’snevertoolatetobecomewhoyoumighthavebeen.”—quoteon

A Kind Prison

WE CALLED OURSELVES THE WRITERS GUILD: THREE RACONTEURS brought together by a creative writing workshop and our mutual passion for words. There were others in the class, but none as dedicated as us. Brad was quixotic, always stretching his vocabulary to defend the relationship with the soul; Ethan was my sounding board and a master of the metaphor, layering image upon image to deliver his messages of hope or loss; and I was the storyteller. Between us, we’d won the monthly short story contest six times in a row, besting our fellow classmates over and over with our collaborations. The workshop met once a week in an old classroom by the chow hall, and after returning to our cellblock, the three of us would sit in the noisy TV room at a small table comparing notes, establishing outlines, developing characters, and revising our work until it sparkled like a polished diamond. Some months, we would labor on just one story, toiling away by the faint night light in the cellblock hall or whispering comments back and forth; other months, we’d each write our own and pick the best to submit—a friendly competition within a competition. Trying to find a quiet place to study or write in a state correctional institution is difficult on most days, and impossible on some. We were lucky to have a space to meet at all. The Florida Department of Corrections has stabbings and drug overdoses almost every day, and these emergencies result in lockdowns with no movement to classes or programs. Everybody knows that when you see a wheelchair and two medical orderlies running down the sidewalk, or the Emergency Response Team (aka the goon squad) taking pictures of a crime scene, we’re about

The Writers Guild

The Writers Guild was my personal dream team, but the creative writing class was my favorite time of the week: it was my first formal workshop, and a glimpse into the possibilities of collaborative creativity. Society mostly views people in prison as violent, selfish inmates who don’t care about helping each other—a group of lone wolves out to get each other. I found that to be very different when it came to the men I had met, and the community of writers we talked to had similar dreams and vivid imaginations. The class was revelatory for me: I didn’t

86 RRyan M. Moser to be sitting on our bunks or confined to our units for an indefinite amount of time. Violence is prevalent at many institutions in the state, so programs, volunteers, educational and technical training, and recreation time are scarce. With officers pulled in so many directions to address major problems, everything else stops.

“This one has some real potential,” Ethan told me as we talked over lunch. “You should send it out to magazines.” I balked. I didn’t want to submit my writing to serious places because I knew I wasn’t as good as the other authors I’d read throughout my life, floating across the thought clouds of the sage guides before me— Franzen, Homer, and Burroughs. Basho and Keats. Hirshfield. The immortalized Jung. Self-doubt prevents me from even trying. But when my story won the monthly writing contest, I decided to take a chance. I mailed copies to several literary journals listed in my Writer’sDigest and felt like I’d taken a step toward something credible.

“What are you writing?” I would hear all day long from each passerby. Imagine sitting in Starbucks with every customer who walks past your table asking you a question about your work, even though you are wearing headphones. There were also constant interruptions for head counts, chow, and the daily fist fights that are a part of our struggle, but we were assiduous and produced some gratifying literary work.One month in 2018 I wrote an ekphrastic short story called “The Farmer’s Pond,” an autobiographical piece inspired by a photo of a young farmhand in a book about Amish life. The Writers Guild refined the plot and edited for grammar. We revised scenes on the weekends while everyone else played Texas Hold ’Em, watched football, or got inked with gang tattoos. Eventually, I was able to complete a final draft that everyone considered my best piece yet, and I basked in the glow of having finished my first quality short story.

A Different KindofLabor 87 understand things like theme or universality or tropes, but I seemed to thrive under the tutelage of our teacher, a retired journalist doing time for domestic abuse. I was a dilettante, yet took the time to memorize parts of speech, essay formats, and anything else I thought could improve my writing. I really enjoyed learning for the first time in my life. With the encouragement of my small writing workshop, I started to practice different genres and forms, and created a portfolio of completed work. I ordered textbooks on prose and read more nonfiction andOnpoetry.thecellblock, the Writers Guild helped me with a synopsis for a novel I had been considering. Ethan and Brad spent countless hours in my cell fleshing out ideas, reading material, editing, or just storyboarding possible ideas for a plot. We created characters in great detail and sat for hours talking and laughing. Everyone took the time to give each other feedback on individual work; we were chipping in to proofread stories during count time or waking up early to review my newest chapter. It was a job and we took it seriously, skipping movies or rec yard to work on a piece. We were developing into disciplined writers, but I still had a lot to learn. As the months passed, I received several rejections in the mail from literary journals, but wasn’t fazed. I welcomed the impersonal form letters as my long distance link to the writing community and the world at large, an invisible tether connecting me to the literati. Mailing submissions out and then waiting for editors to respond was like throwing a boomerang in the Outback—I didn’t know when, but my self-addressed stamped envelopes would come back to me every time. Most writers are discouraged by reactions, but I saw them as a challenge; I worked harder and faster. Writing became my vocation inside the DOC, and I became its top laborer. With no access to a computer or copy machine, I spent countless hours hand copying my poetry and short stories for submission to journals. Eventually, I mailed home my master copies for archiving and employed my family members to photocopy and mail back fifteen pages at a time (the maximum allowed). I requested books of stamps from everyone I knew. Each night, while others watched television, I studied magazines and set up an assembly line of paperwork on top of my bunk; I authored cover letters and addressed dozens of envelopes to send out into the world.

88 RRyan M. Moser

One day, I received a piece of familiar mail—another self-addressed stamped envelope returned from a publisher. I looked at my cellmate and writing partner. “You open this one, Ethan,” I said. “I need some luck.”My friend tore the letter open and, after a moment of suspense, read it aloud. “Congratulations. The EveningStreetReview is happy to inform you that ‘The Farmer’s Pond’ has been accepted for issue number thirty-two in the fall of 2019.” We looked at each other, stunned. LaboringPhilosophers claim that having a raisond’êtreleads to better mental health. When I first came to state prison I was faced with an existential question: how can I choose to find meaning during my eight years of incarceration? What is my purpose? I knew that I didn’t want to waste another single day of my life and needed something bigger than my ego to direct my existence. So I decided to turn a dire situation into a productive one. After all, the Chinese character for crisis also means opportunityWeareexploited by the DOC for free labor on a daily basis: working long shifts in the kitchen, landscaping the grounds, and washing clothes in the sweltering laundry room are common prison jobs forced upon us. First, I became an educational aide and tutored prisoners taking the GED, but that quickly turned into a daily battle with those who were required to attend class. Then I tried being a librarian, hoping to share my passion for reading and writing with others. But a prison library is the devil’s den: dope deals went down in the Classics section; the Bloods met in the Fantasy area; the Unforgivens stood in the Romance section, their swastika tattoos inked on bald heads shining under the fluorescent lights. My hopes of finding a place of solace to write were dashed by shakedowns and arguments; the one place where I hoped to find civility was a breeding ground for confrontation. One afternoon as I checked out books, a fight broke out and the officer on duty sprayed us all with mace. As tears rolled from my red eyes, snot dribbled from my nose, and the taste of cayenne pepper burned my tongue, I oddly recalled that in the past, many masters had worked from behind the walls that surrounded me now. Cervantes and Wilde.

Viktor Frankl and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Dante. Defoe. Sir Walter

Before I quit working in the library, I would sift through the literary magazines on the dusty shelves, scan the author biographies in the back, memorize their MFA credentials, and imagine myself winning a Pushcart Prize or O. Henry Award. But I knew it was never meant to be for me, a career criminal. I was just a juxtaposition of wasted potential and an erudite vocabulary. These unpaid assignments are mandatory, but toiling over my words and submissions was something I volunteered to do for self-betterment. We in the Writers Guild were consciously engaged in collective labor. Our intellectual studies were by choice, and individual growth was one of the few things we could control during our prison sentences.

A Different KindofLabor 89 Raleigh in the Tower of London. What tools for punishment were used against them? Did they also sit in a broken chair and read the handwritten margin notes in worn tomes? Or stare at the same red property stamps adorning weathered spines? Did they find old bookmarks inside donated novels? Did they too write prose from a place of desolation?

I applied for and was accepted to a first-of-its-kind prison in the Everglades, an incentive-based, program-oriented institution. I knew that I’d miss the Writers Guild, but my path was leading me further south. The five hundred-mile trip was brutal. It took me ten days, four bus trips, three layover prisons, and one fist fight to get to my new temporary home—I was exhausted and had second thoughts after this miserable journey. But from the moment I arrived at Everglades CI, I knew things would be better. When Malcolm X was transferred to a similar experimental rehabilitation prison in 1948, he shared in his autobiography that it was the most “enlightened form of prison” that he had ever known, providing access to “‘intellectual’ [engagement] . . . group discussions, debates, and such” (171–72). As I looked around me, I felt the same way. I’d always addressed correctional officers as “sir” or “ma’am,” but now they called me “sir,” as well. The outside grounds were landscaped with lush beds of flowering jasmine and marigolds and orange blossoms. Sabal palms dotted the paths to all the buildings and other inmates said “hello” just to be friendly—completely against prison code. Most importantly, the brochure I was handed at our orientation had a list of dozens of self-betterment programs that I couldn’t wait to start. One stood out to me immediately:

90 RRyan M. Moser Exchange for Change—Writing that Transforms! E4C teaches writing in prisons Crazyhorseandmagazines,dedicatedthatmyfirstspentalone.polishedsitywritingprogrameagerhavingleavingflashstandingandrunsanonymousletterexchangesbetweenincarceratedstudentsandstudentsstudyinginoutsideuniversities.E4Calsoofferssemester-longcoursestaughtbycollegeprofessorsandpublishedauthorsinanattempttofostervisionandunder-onbothsidesofthefence.Enrollmentforcreativewriting,poetryandnonfictionstartingsoon.Ihadn’treallythoughtaboutmypreviouswritingworkshopsincethedustypanhandlefortheleafytropicsoftheEverglades,butanassociationofwordsmithshadhelpedmesomuchthatIwastojoinanewgroup.ExchangeforChange(E4C)wasthefirstIsignedupfor,andIcouldn’twaittotakeacoursewithaprofessorfromFloridaInternationalUniversityortheUniver-ofMiami.Myportfoliowassmallbutstrong—eachworkagood,piece—butIwantedtogetbetterandIknewIcouldn’tdoitIhadtowaitseveralweekstostarttheincentivizedprograms,soIthattimegettingsettledinatmynewtemporaryhome.Forthetimeinmylife,Istartedtoactlikeaprofessionalwriter.Havingshortstorypublishedwasthebeginningofanewmission,andnowIwaslivinginanenvironmentconducivetoawriter’sspirit,Imyentirebeingtoallthingsliterature.Iorderedwritingsetself-imposeddeadlines,purchasedcompositionbooksstamps,andstudiedthe2019Writer’sDigestasifitweretheDhammapada,scrutinizingsubmissionguidelineslikesutrasfromtheBuddha.Imadespreadsheetslistingtheliterarymagazinesthatac-ceptedsnailmailandtrackedeachletterIsentout—colorcodingthegenresandwordcounts.IsentdozensofsubmissionstojournalslikeandBoulevardandTheNorthAmericanReview.Iday-dreamedaboutgettinginprintagainandstartedabucketlistformyremainingfiveyear-sentence: 1.Get published in the Paris Review 2.Get published in the NewYorker 3.Get published in TheSun 4.Win a PENAmericanPrisonWriting award 5.Sell a book I held no delusions of grandeur, just high hopes for the possibilities of tenacity. In the meantime, I read everything I could get my hands on. Newspapers. Magazines. Award-winning novels. Memoirs and satire. I

“Ryan . . . phantasmagoria.” I looked at my unimpressed teacher and she grinned. As she described the syllabus it became clear that I would learn a lot about craft in her class. She spoke of setting and dialogue and imagery and self-exploration—things I’d heard about but didn’t have a firm grasp on. “. . . and over the next eight weeks you will complete one essay, which we will periodically read, review, and revise. This workshop is ‘under the dome,’ which means that when you receive feedback, don’t defend your work. Politely listen and take notes. And for those who do comment, make sure to encourage as well as critique.”

“My name is Sam and my word is nervous.”

“Welcome to PersonalEssays. I’m a freelance journalist and the director of Exchange for Change. Before we get started, please go around the circle and say your name and then choose a word of the day. Whatever word comes to mind.”

I read somewhere that those enrolled in education and literacy programs are 45% more likely not to return to prison. I don’t know where that statistic came from, but when I walked into the classroom for my very first accredited writing workshop, I saw ten men who were trying to change their lives in a positive way. The tiny wisp of a woman sitting at the head of our roundtable carried an air of authority and a compassionate smile, and I sat down across from her, unsure of what to expect. I felt like I was in over my head.

A Different KindofLabor 91 wrote fan mail to Terrance Hayes and Leslie Jameson and Zadie Smith. I became obsessed with Mary Carr. Slept next to Jennifer Egan. Grew fixated on Anthony Doerr. I knew that if I wanted to evolve as a writer I had to keep reading sanctuary scripts—the lessons I pulled from these pages were monumental and my true north, and I’d experienced so many moments of satori in my life through reading. I was introduced to Zen by Salinger and FightClub; fell in love with a Bohemian girl I’d only met in a paragraph; traveled into outer space and beyond . . . I wrote prose to feel alive and I read books to be free. Joan Didion famously said that “[w]e tell ourselves stories in order to live” (185); I wanted to etch those stories onto a page and then fly away. Exchange for Change

“I’m Manuel. Um . . . excited, I guess.”

I was working on the first draft of a traumatic episode in my life: having my appendix removed needlessly after pill-shopping at a hospital emergency room. The brutally honest essay was hard to write and even harder to read aloud in class whenever my turn came. As we neared the end of the semester I tweaked my working title into a description of what addiction was to me: “Injuries Incompatible with Life.” By the last class, I had a 3,000-word confessional that hurt my heart to share. When I finished, I looked around the workshop and noticed that another student was crying.

At the same time, I was beginning to feel used. I had a lot of conflicted feelings: I received many requests from editors to share my worst prison experiences. I felt like people only wanted to read my work if it involved retelling some devastating trauma or war stories about prison life. It felt like cutting my wrists in front of an audience. However, it also felt so good to be recognized for anything while inside prison that I was willing to compromise myself in order to be known. I’d never felt motivated to write about prison, mostly because I hated to think about being incarcerated—it bored me, and I didn’t want to write about something so stigmatizing, but I felt cornered. I knew that I was writing other material that was good, but those pieces were often rejected, so I

At that moment, I had a realization that writing was not just a passionate pastime: it can be cathartic, it can move people to act, and it can lift up ideas. I understood that I could reach people emotionally with my stories and could change a small part of the world with my words. Writing allowed me to talk to myself—to work out issues and face my regrets in order to move on.

92 RRyan M. Moser

I’d never spent two months on one story before and I started to doubt my resolve, questioning whether this diminutive pro would see me as an amateur. After all, I didn’t even know how to write a personal essay. But week after week, the instructor would bring us writing samples of accomplished essayists: we’d dissect Rick Bass and Sparrow and Roxane Gay and practice with prompts as she challenged us to revise and improve. She preached universality and carved my sentences like a Thanksgiving turkey. Phrases like “killing your darlings” and “show, don’t tell” began to make sense.

“As a recovering addict, that story really touched me,” he said. “Thank you.”

A Different KindofLabor 93 published essays that were personal and horrific, exposing my inner secrets and fears. As I submitted to more university journals and literary magazines, I started to see the other limitations placed on incarcerated writers by a publishing industry that simultaneously supported and precluded our success. Many publishers only accepted online submissions, virtually cutting out an entire population of writers without internet access. My limited resources made research nearly impossible, and editors consistently asked me to include current statistics and facts in my essays. For every organization that catered to us, there was another that shut the Tdoor.heWildWordWhenthenext semester rolled around, I signed up for new classes with high expectations. I was invited to attend an exclusive Polished Piecesworkshop facilitated by the director of E4C, and we met weekly to discuss fresh ideas, feel out new pieces, and give feedback. I began real training as an essayist and learned what it felt like to be edited by a honest

fiercely

Wordnalpostedothers’mysonalbutRyan—thisexpert.storyaboutfamilylifeiscompetentwritingonatopicnotapersonalessay.I’mnotsurewherethedisconnectisbe-tweenwhatwestressedinclassandthecriterianeededtobeaper-essay.Goodeffort,buttryagain.MyfriendStephen,thepeerfacilitatorintheclass,assuredmethatfeedbackwas“typical”oftheinstructorandwelaughedovereachshortcomings.ItwasinthePolishedPiecesclasswhereshethefirstofmany“callsforsubmission.”“Ourpoetryprofessorhasafriendwhoeditsanonlineliteraryjour-aboutcultureandsocialjustice.She’sseekingessaysforTheWildaboutlifeinsideprisonforanewcolumn...everyonefeelfreetoturnsomethinginbythetenth.”Iwasalwaysmoreinterestedinshortfictionandpoetry,memoirsandnovels.ButwhenIgotbacktomycellthatday,IdugthroughmygrowingportfolioandpulledoutastoryI’dpenciledatmylastinsti-tutiontitled“SunriseOverMe,”acolorfullydescriptivetaleaboutatypicaldayinprison,wakingupandwalkingtothechowhallfor

94 RRyan M. Moser breakfast. Begrudgingly, I passed the essay to our instructor at our next class and forgot all about it.

Working with a community of incarcerated writers became my mission, and I enjoyed sharing my literary dreams and writing insecurities with the guys in my classes. My fellow students were respectful, interesting, and engaged, and we recommended books to each other before creating a lending library. About 70% of prison inmates test at or below a ninth grade reading level; despite the imbalance of talent between us, we all had the same determination and dedication to the assignments. And we had passion. Joyce Carol Oates once wrote, “For what is passes so swiftly and irrevocably into what was, no human claim can be of the least significance” (5). We possessed a record to reveal and it mattered just as much as anyone else’s (we weren’t the scholars of the ivory tower; we were the misfits of the streets). These classrooms allowed us to be heard, to have a voice inside of a barren place of silence.

In 1727, Ben Franklin and a group of friends established the first reading and writing club in Philadelphia called TheJunto. Such gatherings became an important part of American literary culture. Three hundred years later, Exchange for Change assembled the same type of club, analyzing the same themes of love and hate, alienation, morality, and the relationship between life and art. I felt like I was a part of something larger than the anonymous violence and hopelessness of prison when I walked through those doors, and E4C was the panacea for my forced isolation.

A lot of things were happening with the writing program that autumn of 2019: Stephen started up a peer-facilitated class called Just Write, a forty-five-minute crash course in stream-of-consciousness with critique; I received my first contributor copy of a journal from the property room, hastily flipping the pages while looking for my name.

And amidst dozens of rejection slips from literary magazines—seemingly implying that I wasn’t good enough—I received a bright ray of acceptance.TheWild Word lovesyouressay‘SunriseOverMe’andwould likeyoutowriteamonthlycolumn.Overthenextfewweeks,thatpersonal

essay circulated around the internet and Facebook like a viral whirlwind, with family members and Medium.com promoting my work. I had the privilege of joining some classmates reading our work at E4C’s graduation ceremony in front of

ofreallypeoplehidetion?Question:prompt:Whatisyourbiggestfearaboutwritingflashnonfic-Answer:Idon’tlikewritingaboutmyselfthatmuchbecauseImypast.IguardmywordsandonlyshareinformationwithothersbaseduponwhatIwantsomeonetothinkaboutme.IneedtothinkI’mnormalandwelladjusted,butIguessnooneisnormal—mostofusarejustgoodatpersonifyingsociety’sideanormal.Intheend,we’reallf*ckedupinourownway.Illusionandreality.Self-delusionandself-discovery.Anindividual

The Creative Nonfiction class called to me; I was certain I would become an essayist. On the first day of class, the British professor handed us a in conflict with society’s institutions. Struggles with faith. These were issues I’d faced since coming to prison, and I learned that writing about them could link me to the reader because nearly everyone has experienced some form of emotional, intellectual, or spiritual exploration. By using my personal journey as a template for my topics, I was able to write relatable yet unique stories from inside the walls. I penned essays

A Different KindofLabor 95

a hundred people. The praise I received boosted my writing confidence, and by the time the piece reached TheMarshallProject and their social justice website, I was receiving fan mail from other writers and sympathizers. The essay would eventually be published by three anthologies and four online journals. I couldn’t believe how connected I felt to the outside world through my words. I was slowly building a relationship with the editors who had given me a chance, and just being able to have a conversation with a professional made me yearn for my old life. Attending sales meetings and special events and socializing with my friends and family was replaced with email revisions, telephone calls with publishers, and a social media presence. I was forming a connection with the outside world through my writing and it gave me hope for the future.

Just before Christmas, in a serendipitous twist, my cellmate and Writers Guild partner Ethan moved down from the panhandle and into the verysamedormitory that Stephen and I lived in. We couldn’t believe our luck, and immediately started collaborating again. Ethan, Stephen, and I were the new and improved Writers Guild, and we attended every writing course that we could, collaborating and commiserating over plots and vocabulary.

In March 2020, the COVID-19 virus hit the United States with the force of a meteor, exploding in a crater of uncertainty and projecting pieces of carnage and sadness and fear across the landscape. No volunteers were allowed to enter the prison. No classes or programs were held. No family visitors were permitted. We were quarantined in our designated living areas, and a non-security lockdown began. Although we couldn’t predict that the lockdown would last twelve months, the E4C students had a feeling that it’d be a while until we saw our professorsStephen—whoagain. had been a copy editor on the streets—suggested that the Writers Guild start a creative writing class on our own. He reproduced the curriculum and began teaching it in the dormitory, opening it up for anyone who wanted to workshop together. And so began CoronaCreativeWriting. The hunger for knowledge and the drive to engage was no less present in the dormitory than it was on the compound at large. When the lockdown first started, I was worried that losing formal classes would slow my momentum, but as the workshop met each week in our dorm, I realized that I was developing some incredible new personal essays simply based on our writing prompts.

96 RRyan M. Moser

about converting to Buddhism; my new activist efforts toward fighting mass incarceration and institutionalized racism; the difficulties of being a recovering addict; losing a loved one while incarcerated. I produced seven or eight different pieces over the three-month course, and the class’s feedback helped me to transform my rough scratch into melodic prose.The E4C workshops and the Writers Guild were making me a better writer. I swallowed every morsel of knowledge I could find. When I saw my fellow writers around the compound or on the way to chow, we would have conversations about techniques we had learned or stories we were working on. My monthly column with The Wild Word was garnering attention, and I was building on a solid body of work. The support I was getting was phenomenal and I received more acceptance letters entering into 2020. It felt like I was finally discovering the edges of my purpose—still hidden from my consciousness but peeking into view. Then the world stopped.

Corona Creative Writing

A Different KindofLabor 97 EvenI’veIfThesoundofcomfortis...youfollowthechronologyofalife...alwayswantedtowriteyoualettertosay...thoughI’dneverbeenafanofprompts,thesenuggets were the genesis for some of my best work yet. The workshop had fifteen eager men who were all there to improve their lives in some way through our writing program, and I ended up answering a lot of questions about how to get published. I’d always thought that getting published was a fait accompli if I persevered—not out of misplaced arrogance or delusion, but based on the numbers game. If a moderately talented writer submitted thirty pieces a year, the chances of getting published once were fairly good. I averaged 100 submissions per year with around a 10% acceptance rate; however, rejection was an inevitable part of a writer’s life, and I was always prepared for the rebuff. Most rejection letters from literary journals start out the same way: throughganizationsteachersRachel(Santamaria).commontalent”teered1976,ganization.pectednatelyThankyouforyourinterestin[insertnamehere],butunfortu-wecannotuseyourworkatthistime.Pleasesubmitinthefuture.Sincerely,theEditors.SowhenIopenedaletterfromthePENAmericathatspring,Iex-moreofthesamefromtheesteemedinternationalliteraryor-ButwhenIsawthefirstword,myeyeslitup.Congratulations!Yoursubmission,“InjuriesIncompatiblewithLife,”haswontheHonorableMentionforNonfictionEssayawardfromthePENAmericaPrisonWritingProgramcontest.InadditiontobeingfeaturedinPENAmerica’santhology,youwillbepairedwithanexperiencedmentor...Igrinnedandcheckedoffoneitemonmywriter’sbucketlist.InwhenMadeleineL’Engle,authorofAWrinkleinTime,volun-tomentorarecipientofthisaward,shestatedthatshesaw“rawinanunrefinedwriter,andthat“literatureis,infact,astrongmeetingground”betweenwritersofdifferentupbringingsMadeleineL’Engle,EdwardAlbee,andmynewmentor,Scher,wereallpartofalonglineofsuccessfulauthorsandwho’dgiventheirtimetoguideincarceratedwriters,andor-likePENwereleadingthewaytowardsreformationeducation.Iwasproudtobeanewmentee.

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Everyone has insecurities. Combine being a convicted felon with a self-doubting writer, and those insecurities soar. My entire adult life, I had lived with a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I wasn’t good enough, having been through the juvenile system, jail, and prison by age twenty-nine. The literary establishment is an industry built on saying people are not good enough, and sometimes I fell into the trap of seeking validation from editors I’d never even met before.

Because of my team, I was gaining confidence and ability, and each publication was a notch on my belt that I’d worked really hard to get. But I didn’t do it alone, nor would I have been able to. The Corona CreativeWriting class was a strong collaboration among men of different backgrounds who came together as one unit—completely on our own.

In the autumn of 2020, to my humble surprise, my editor at The Wild Word nominated me for the Best of the Net 2020 award and the prestigious Pushcart Prize. So many people in my life were contributing to my triumphs, and I was grateful for the many opportunities; before them, every door had seemed locked, and now I was writing like it was the end of the world. If a story is “a formula for extracting meaning from chaos, a handful of water we scoop up to recall an ocean” like the writer John Edgar Wideman once said (x), then I was wading in the vast sea of my life, immersed in the words and phrases and metaphors of my past and the world’s present.

I began to reach out to different mentors asking for their advice, and scoured the writers’ magazines for tips on how to be a successful, selfemployed writer. I doubled my efforts submitting to journals in order to build my resume, and sent letters to semi-famous authors, attempting to broaden my network. Then one day I received an email on my tablet from an unknown contact: ermentMr.Moser,I’mafreelancejournalistfromNewYorkrepresentingEmpow-Avenue,anonprofitartistcoalitionfoundedatSanQuentin

With every passing day closer to home and to my release, ideas of becoming a freelance writer who actually got paid were swirling through my head. I’d been receiving contributors’ copies and “attaboys,” but that wouldn’t pay the bills when I was free. Interestingly enough, though all of the journals that had accepted my work for paid publication, only one out of twelve actually did. Maybe if I had changed my return address, things would have been different.

A Different KindofLabor 99 Penitentiary.Afterreadingyourworkin The Wild Word and The Marshall Project,wewouldliketoinviteyoutoparticipateinour pilot program for select incarcerated writers. As your sponsor, we makelearningside”memoirpersonaltations,mentspostedwithhadfortunatebutfull-timeexperiences—goodingpurpose.engagingtion,professionalusingpursuetunemyazinestwelvewithandwentsmallwillpairyouwithaprofessionalwriterandvolunteerwhowillsub-mityourwritingforpaidpublication...Asthepandemicraged,manyuniversitiesclosedtheirdoorsandpressesweregoingoutofbusiness;dozensofmysubmissionsunansweredandprogressstalled.ButnowIhadanewprospect,thetimingwasperfect.Inevercouldhaveimaginedgettingthisfarmywriting.MyauthorbiographywasnowonthebackpageofbookanthologiesandIhadthirtypiecesfeaturedinonlinemag-...somethingthatseemedimpossibletomewhenIhadstartedprisonsentencesixyearsearlier.MywritingworkshopcommunityinprisonhadhelpedmetofinemycraftuntilIbecameapublishedwriter,andmydecisiontosocialjusticeissuesthrewanundiscoveredplanetintomotion:theartsasaformofexpressiontowardculturewasbecomingmyobjective.WhenIwroteaboutmassincarceration,addic-diversity,andinjustice,itsparkedanewlevelofthinking,andbywithintellectualsandacademics,IfeltarenewedsenseofIpicturedmyselfwritingmorejournalismandessaysregard-thehumanconditionandenvisionedafuturewhereIcouldusemyandbad—toreachanaudienceofconsciousreaders.ByJanuaryof2021,vaccineswererollingoutandwritingwasmyjob.Thevolunteerswerestillnotallowedinsidetheprison,weallstayedincontactviacorrespondencecoursesandemail.Iwastobepartofaleadershipteamintheincentivizedprisonand24-houraccesstoacomputerlab.Mymorningsstartedatsevenadouble-shotofcoffeeandclassicalmusiconmyheadphones,upinfrontofmymonitorandworkingdiligentlyonassign-anddeadlines.Iwouldtakeafifteenminutebreakforsunsalu-andthenheadbacktothelabformore.Ibouncedfromessaytoshortfictiontopoem;completedonestoryformyandstartedacriticalessay;wrotemymonthly“FromtheIn-columnforTheWildWordonlinemagazine.Everydaywasaexperience,andIdrewfromthewellofexpertiseathandtothebestproductIcould.

Education and literacy programs are paramount to the transition success of incarcerated men and women—for every $1 spent on education, $4 is saved post-release. Recidivism rates fall when people are given an opportunity to learn instead of simply surviving. These classes were a lifeline for students like me—men who’d made mistakes but needed to stay motivated while still paying our debt to society. In my PersonalEssayclass I was told that writing can help you to learn about yourself through self-exploration. We were growing. No harm can come from teaching someone in prison to be a better student and teacher. Much harm can come from warehousing people in a cell block filled with violence until they are released.

When I look at how far I’ve come as a writer, I’m proud of my modest accomplishments, but I never thought it would happen because of a ragtag group of readers and prison writing workshops. Now as I sit and ponder my life’s purpose, I can say that I’m one step closer to that answer. interested in volunteering, making a donation, contributing time just want find out more about Exchange Change, FL, 33145

100 RRyan M. Moser

or resources, or

Over time, I realized that the reward of writing for a living is only gained after a hard-fought battle of determination, professionalism, talent, motivation, and maybe a little bit of chance. But most of all, every writer needs a team of editors and publishers and collaborators to lend a helping hand—a symbiotic literary community. I found my greatest allies in this within a cold place of hardship and sorrow, and the bond I formed with other men writing inside the prison was greater than all of the other resources combined.

for

* * * * * If you’re

please 2103Exchangecontact:forChangeCoralWay,2nd Floor Miami,

(305) www.exchange-for-change.orginfo@exchange-for-change.org771-3241

A Different KindofLabor 101 Works Cited Didion, Joan. “The White Album.” We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, Everyman’s Library, 2006, pp. 179–Moser,342. Ryan. “The Farmer’s Pond.” Evening Street Review, no. 20, Spring 2019, pp. 97–108. —. “Injuries Incompatible with Life.” Breathe Into the Ground: 2020 PEN America Anthology, 2020, pen.org/injuries-incompatible—.with-life.“Sunrise Over Me.” TheWildWord,Nov. 2019, thewildword.com/ Oates,ryan-moser-sunrise-over-me.JoyceCarol.WhatILivedFor.New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Santamaria, Abigail. “Madeleine L’Engle’s Private Correspondence with Ahmad Rahman.” VanityFair, 29 Jan. 2021, -ahmad-rahman.com/style/2021/01/madeleine-lengles-private-correspondence-withwww.vanityfair. X, Malcolm, and Alex Haley. TheAutobiographyofMalcolmX. 1965. Ballantine, 1999. Wideman, John Edgar. Preface. Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction, edited by Terry McMillan, Penguin Books, 1990, pp. v–x.

Sing, Unburied, Sing I N THIS ESSAY

Conjure as Abolitionist Alternative Jesmyn Ward’s I CONTEND THAT J ESMYN W ARD ’ S 2017 NOVEL SING, Unburied,Singconstructs conjure and, more specifically, conjure healing as a decarceral strategy—or what Angela Y. Davis terms an “abolitionist alternative” (105)—to counteract racism, class bias, patriarchal domination, ecocide, and the lingering violence of enslavement and its carceral aftermath. As an African diasporic syncretic system rooted in transformation, interrelation, collectivity, and radical change, conjure exemplifies what Mariame Kaba describes as a “justice infrastructure,” or a structurally creative justice system whose practice by Indigenous and/or African peoples has been suppressed by imperialist violence (62). Transformative justice, Kaba argues, requires rethinking all forms of complicity with carceral apparatuses, creating new structures that advance collectivism and interdependence, and reducing engagement with the criminal legal system; in other words, transformative justice is a call to “not only change how we address harm but also . . . change everything” (5). To that end, I adhere to Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey’s definition of abolition as a movement concerned both with the eradication of the prison system and “the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society” (114). I argue here that Sing,Unburied,Sing reclaims conjure as a model of transformative justice that advances the survival of Black people through rituals of healing and radical change, intracommunity interdependence, and by providing methods for the redress and prevention of harm.

Though the narrative structure of Sing,Unburied,Sing intentionally disrupts space-time, the novel is primarily set in 2010s Bois Sauvage,

Mississippi, a racially-segregated rural town on the Gulf Coast saturated by the conditions of life in the afterlife of slavery—ecological precarity, structural underdevelopment, deep poverty, early death, and carceral state violence. Among the novel’s most urgent work is its close attention to the destructive effects of these spiritual, interrelational, and environmental forces on Black life. The novel follows a family of Black conjurers struggling to survive together: Philomène, the family matriarch, her husband River, their children Given and Leonie, and their grandchildren, thirteen-year-old Jojo and three-year-old Kayla. Just as the family is connected to one another through their unique conjure powers, however, so too are they cohered—and simultaneously fractured—by the violent intrusion of the carceral state. The primary action of the novel follows Leonie, Jojo, and Kayla as they make their way from Bois Sauvage to Parchman prison to pick up the children’s white father, Michael, where he has been incarcerated. While there, Jojo meets Richie, a boy-ghost killed by River during their own joint period of childhood incarceration at Parchman. Haunting all of the text’s characters, both literally and figuratively, is Given, whose murder at the hands of Michael’s racist cousin several years before the present moments of the text results in a traumatizing trial that offers the family neither justice nor reprieve. Over the course of the novel, conjure magic and healing emerges as the family’s most powerful way to resist and circumvent the complex of violences that accompany life in a carceralWhereasstate. carceral logics advance isolation, dominion over the land, hierarchical stratifications between self and other (including animals, plants, land formations, and the universe), and authoritarian control of space-time, conjure values communitarianism, sacred ecological balance, and interconnected interdependence between all living things, existing things, and their domains. As I will make clear, conjure justice can be seen as an interdimensional intercollective healing event in which the individual and their community are inevitably changed. In its emphasis on the healing event as a necessary counterpoint to harm, conjure justice infrastructures resist modes of carceral (in)justice, in particular those that emphasize isolation, separation, and confinement as punishments. Most importantly, however, conjuration holds that life continues on in the spirit world after death; in Sing,Unburied,Sing,

104 JJoanna Davis McElligatt

Other Alternatives: Conjure Healing and Harm Sing, Unburied, Sing is preoccupied with what Kameelah Martin calls “spirit work,” or “an intimacy with both the healing and harming ritual practices of African-derived religious practices that evolved in the New World: obeah, Vodou, Lucumí, espiritismo, conjure and hoodoo, Candomblé, Voodoo, and others” (1). While conjure resists strict definition, I follow Martin and adhere to Alma Jean Billingslea Brown’s definition of conjure as work that “contains a sacred dimension, a transcendent sphere of awe and untouchability. . . . [m]anifested practically

“AAndNow She Sings It” 105 orishas, loas, and saints answer prayers, the dead can communicate directly with loved ones through the veil, and ghosts find themselves mired in time, unable to cross over the water into home. As such, conjure is a system of eternal futurity in which adherents and practitioners can continue to interact with and exert influence over their communities even—or perhaps especially—after death.

If visualizing abolitionist alternatives, as Davis argues, requires rejecting the premise that the prison industrial complex is “natural, necessary, and permanent” (85), and instead doing the work to “[explore] new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor” (21), I suggest that conjure presents important ways of thinking beyond the prison and carceral systems of punishment by advancing a holistic and communal approach to healing, kinship, and spirit. Following Davis, I argue that conjuration “envision[s] a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment. . . . that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society” (107–08). As Kaba has explained, I suggest that conjure enacts transformative justice as “a community process” that “[prioritizes] healing, repair, and accountability” (59). In particular, I make the case that Sing,Unburied,Singadvances “an abolitionist agenda of decarceration” (Davis 111) through representations of conjure as a system that envisions self, others, the natural world, and the spirit world as entangled and mutually constitutive; by reimagining interpersonal connections and obligations to one another as forms of interrelation that center connection and interdependence; and, finally, by reconceiving the relationship between time and space through the intervention of deities, ghosts, and spiritual gifts who disrupt conventional limitations of space-time, and thus reimagine the potential of Black futures.

Of critical paramountcy to conjurers is the ability to cure, treat, and stave off illness and disease, perform the functions of childbirth and abortion for women, and assist in the rituals of death for a community who, once deemed objects or property, more often than not were abused and exploited by white medical institutions. Initiated on southern plantations by skilled practitioners with deep connections to ancestral African healing practices, conjure was additionally influenced by the regional histories of enslavement in the US South. The methods of healing available to conjurers are borne out of and thus contingent upon the present lived conditions of the conjure community; to that end, conjure rootworking methods shifted from West Africa to the US as practitioners adapted to regionally-specific plant and animal life, drew on local Indigenous botanical wisdom, and occasionally borrowed from European medicinal practices. The forms conjure magic took likewise changed over time—the charms and spells intended to allow for an escape from the plantation under slavery, for example, were no longer needed in the postbellum era. As conjure methods adapted to emergent temporal and regional dynamics, “first from the practices inherent to slavery and then from the racist legal and social system of the

106 JJoanna Davis McElligatt in the acts of healing, divination, and the casting and uncrossing of spells” (Martin 2). Conjure emerges through a balance of three interconnected realms: the spiritual; communal and interpersonal; and the individual body-mind. According to Martin, the term conjurer “encompasses the individual vocations of root worker, fortune-teller, midwife, herbalist, two-head doctor, spiritual medium, persons born with second sight, and others who are gifted with verbal and/or visual communication with the invisible world” (2). Conjurers perform a wide range of services for their communities, from doctoring with herbs and plants to producing protective charms to communicating with supernatural beings, often referred to as ghosts, specters, and ha’ints in the US South, and known throughout the African diaspora as “the Ancestors, loa, orisha, or simply Spirit” (2). Given that spirit work takes place at the intersection of the incorporeal universe and the mundane earthly sphere, only highly-trained rootworkers can make gris-gris or perform “full-blown magic” (Anderson xi). As such, Jeffrey E. Anderson suggests that conjurers in both fiction and as real-life spiritual practitioners be recognized as “more than sorcerers; their magic offers a means to magically heal, or transform, society” (23).

“AAndNow She Sings It” 107 . . . South” (84), they extended protection to adherents against the “inequity . . . apparent in the southern legal system . . . reputedly preventing their clients from going to prison” (85), in many instances by thwarting legal proceedings through magical means. In this way, conjure emerged as one of the primary modes of Black resistance to white power structures—indeed, when all else failed oppressed Black folk, conjure “provided other alternatives” (84) for survival. Even so, conjure maintains a fundamental internal balance in which “alongside positive magic existed the evils of witchcraft” (39). To that end, conjurers have the capacity to cause harm through the manufacturing of curses, charms, and spells that manifest in physical and mental illness, disability, and death—though bad magic most frequently causes merely “bad luck, discomfort, and other inconveniences” (80). As with positive sympathetic magic, bad magic also requires the interdependence of the individual body-mind, the community in which harm takes place, and the spiritual realm, accessed by the rootworker. Yet because only conjurers can successfully ward off bad magic, they far more frequently seek to foster spiritual equilibrium through the prevention and healing of affliction, magical or otherwise. Conjurers provide counterspells, gris-gris, or charms of protection that neutralize harm before it ever takes place, as was the case for Frederick Douglass, who credited a gifted root as the primary reason why, after a physical fight with his slave master, he was never whipped again (84). In instances of direct intracommunal harm, conjurers often facilitate a collective healing event that manifests in forms of accountability that “prevent recurrences of magical illnesses by identifying those who had caused them” (83). Drawing the afflicted into direct intracommunal relation with the person who harmed them is central to conjure healing practice; in many cases, direct acknowledgment of harm done is all that is required to eradicate the effects of a dangerous curse or spell. By that same token, those who choose to cause harm must deal directly with the spiritual and interpersonal impact of that choice, and undergo their own distinct process of communal reconcilement. All processes of reconciliation are scaffolded by collectives, both earthly and spiritual, that provide guidance, assistance, or further opportunities for redemption and healing as needed. As Kaba argues, given that “a world without harm isn’t possible and isn’t what an abolitionist vision purports to achieve” (3), conjure

A Multitude of Voices Ringing from Any Living Thing: Conjure as Intercollective Ecological Praxis

instead enacts “being intentionally in relation to one another” (4) as an essential part of the healing process for the harm doer and the harmed.

A relational vision that requires dependence upon both supernatural and community support for healing provides essential support for communities who are in constant danger of being separated from one another through the forces of slavery, incarceration, or white state violence. However, because healing is principally a supernatural endeavor in which conjurers function as intermediaries whose powers manifest only at the direction and behest of higher cosmic powers, they may not be able to identify a cure. As a consequence, disability, continued illness, and death are expected outcomes of the healing process, not distinct from it. Even so, by fostering a vision of the individual’s worldscapes as always-already interrelational and overlapping, conjure offers a powerful antithesis to death logics of carceralism that forcibly separate individuals from their communities. To that end, conjure justice infrastructures operate as a spiritual-communal-individual healing system in which harm can be redressed through accountability, spiritual or medicinal mediation, and, in many cases, prevented altogether. Conjure justice infrastructures emphasize change and transformation as operative conditions for healing, given that both harm and healing transform the individual body-mind. Yet, as Anderson notes, whether used by the enslaved or by freed Blacks to continue to work toward liberation, conjure provided Black people with the “means of subverting the pervasive racism and exploitation of the period” (85), and offered adherents not only hope for survival, but the very means to bring it about.

As Sharla Fett argues, enslaved plantation communities sustained a “relational vision of health” that “connected individual health to broader community relationships,” “honored kinship relations by bridging the worlds of ancestors and living generations,” and “located a healer’s authority in the wisdom of elders and divine revelation” (6).

108 JJoanna Davis McElligatt

Having trained and worked for decades as a midwife, rootworker, and healer, the most knowledgeable conjurer in Sing,Unburied,Sing is Philomène, the family matriarch, whose work included “birthing babies and doctoring folks and making gris-gris bags for protection”

Healing here results from the collapsing of distinctions between the practitioner and the afflicted, the self and body, and human beings and “any living thing”—rather than operating as singular isolates functioning alone, individual bodies are instead understood to be communal entities “singing” in a “multitude of voices.” Seen from this perspective, the body is itself also a relational system produced out of and sustained by an internal and external community. Multiply-voiced bodies are thus not only in deep internal interrelation and musical exchange, but they are also in concert with other multiply-voiced bodies—though only experienced conjurers will be able to hear, comprehend, and interpret their utterances. Given that afflicted body parts, diseases, and wounds sing not in isolation but “loudest,” communal interconnection emerges as the core of conjure healing praxis, central to its proffering an abolitionist alternative to carceral dialectics that insist on the singularity of the individual. Marie-Therese and Philomène therefore begin the work of conjure healing by confronting illness and injury as deeply local problems harmonizing in concert with an interconnected whole. Marie-Therese is drawn to Philomène because she too can hear ailing and changing bodies and body parts belonging to nonhuman animals and people sing, speak, and hum. Yet Philomène can also hear the songs of plants and herbs which communicate to her their use. Conjure is in this way a form of ecological magic comprising all living things, including human and nonhuman animal bodies, distinct body parts, and plants and vegetation. Living things need not be conscious or sentient in order to speak or to be heard; voices from cows’ uteruses, vegetation, faces, stomach ulcers, and cirrhotic livers all sing in the same language, their collective song resisting the tyranny of inductions to

“AAndNow She Sings It” 109 (Ward 41). Philomène’s training was facilitated by a powerful conjurer and experienced midwife named Marie-Therese, who explains to her how she is able to hear the singing of illness, injury, disease, and bodily change:Howshe might hear a multitude of voices ringing from any living thing, and how she followed the loudest voices, cause these was the most likely. How the clearest voices sang over the jumble of the rest. She could hear sound come from one woman’s face in the supply store: FlipslicemeacrossthefacefordancingwithCed. From the man that run the store who had a leg that sang: Thebloodturnsblackand pools,thetoesrot. How a cow’s belly said: Thecalfiscominghoovesfirst. (41)

After witnessing Philomène’s ability to hear and comprehend the language of all living things, Marie-Therese explains that she has “the seed of a gift,” and “put her hand on my heart, and prayed to the Mothers, to Mami Wata and to Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, that I would live long enough to see whatever it was I was meant to see” (39–40).

individualism and standing in radical opposition to white supremacist and colonialist hierarchical orders of things, animals, and people. Because the health and well-being of the afflicted is intimately connected to an environment both constitutive of and greater than themselves, conjure can be seen as both a human and ecological praxis. Conjure healing thus collapses boundaries between the human and nonhuman animal, and the human milieu and the natural environment, and in doing so challenges the presumption that all living species on the planet are fundamentally different and therefore unrelated.

110 JJoanna Davis McElligatt

Philomène’s conjure healing work is both manifested in and inseparable from her spirituality, from herbal and plant-based healing arts, and

Philomène ascertains from Marie-Therese that conjure is a spiritual task manifested in the rites of spirit worship. To that end, Philomène maintains an altar embellished with candles and river rocks, to which she offers a statue of the Virgin Mary and invisible ancestors “strings of peppers, potatoes, yams, cattail, spider lily, Spanish needle, sweet bedstraw, and wild okra” (215). Philomène invokes saints and orishas according to her needs, but in order to maintain immediate contact with the spirit world she always carries with her a talisman of “woven orange yarn with little orange beads on it,” “knotted . . . in the pocket of her skirt” (145). Leonie remembers that Philomène’s orange talisman represented the interconnected spiritual, natural, and social dimensions of her conjure work: [W]hen me or Given done something stupid, something like Given getting drunk for the first time and showing up with a sick mouth throwing up all over her herbs on the porch, or like when I pulled up some plant she was growing in the garden, mistaking it for a weed, she’d grab that little piece of orange and start praying: Saint Teresa, I’d hear. OurLadyofCandelaria, she’d mutter. And then: Oya ForOya ofthewinds,oflightning,ofstorms.Overturn our minds. Clean the world with yourstorms,destroyitandmakeitnewwiththewindsofyourskirts. And when I asked her what she meant, she said: Ain’tnogoodinusingangerjusttolash.You prayforittoblowupastormthat’sgoingtoflushoutthetruth. (145–46)

“AAndNow She Sings It” 111 from intense affect—in this case, Philomène’s deep anger at her children’s carelessness. Philomène’s conjure is both Catholic and West African in inflection; she prays, often in French, to Oya, the orisha “of the winds, of lightning, of storms,” and seeks the aid of the Catholic martyrs Saint Teresa—perhaps Thérèse of Lisieux, the patron saint of gardens, flowers, and florists—and Our Lady of Candelaria, who is often represented as a Black Madonna. Because Leonie and Given have a vastly different relationship with and orientation to the natural world than their mother, Philomène prays for her anger to be transformed into “the truth”—yet her supplication also signals a deep attention to death, mourning, and rebirth, of which Oya is also orisha; if vegetation and trees have been able to withstand or re-germinate following the violence of hurricanes and storms, configured in her prayer as “clean[ing] the world,” so too might her healing herbs and plants survive the intrusion of her children.

Leonie’s rejection of conjure healing as a mode of being-in-theworld culminates at the convergence of Philomène’s cancer diagnosis, Michael’s incarceration, and the Deepwater Horizon industrial disaster, in which a BP-operated drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico off of the coast of Louisiana exploded and killed eleven workers; in the four-

Philomène instructs Leonie that spiritual gifts typically surface at the onset of puberty, and insists on teaching her the rudiments of conjure. Leonie recalls that “[s]tarting when I was seven, Mama would . . . point out plants before digging them up or stripping their leaves and telling me how they could heal or hurt” (102). As they moved through the woods together, Philomène “quizzed me,” explains Leonie, on the look and attributes of cow parsnip, pigweed, milkweed, wild strawberry, or wormseed: “But it was hard for me to remember everything” (103). Philomène’s instruction continued throughout her daughter’s childhood, though as she grew into adulthood Leonie worked hard to avoid her mother’s “plant lessons” (48). Unlike Philomène, Leonie cannot hear plants or herbs singing, and struggles to connect with them, recollect their precise functions, or develop an interest in their healing and harming properties. While Philomène’s relationship to the enmeshment of the human, natural, and spiritual cosmoi is sustained through a preponderance of utterances, Leonie is immersed in deep silence, and thus detached and separated from the worlds around, without, and within her.

At least initially, Leonie has every reason to expect that Philomène’s methods will cure her cancer, because she trusts her mother’s medicine.

112 JJoanna Davis McElligatt month-long oil spill that followed, already-fragile ecosystems harboring animal and marine life were destroyed, and precariat, coastal communities were devastated.

Leonie’s lover, Michael, who worked on the DeepwaterHorizon rig as a welder, returns home following the explosion with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. As a result of the intense trauma following the loss of his co-workers and friends, the lack of medical or mental health care to assist him following the calamity, and his inability to “find another welding job anywhere in Mississippi or Alabama or Florida or Louisiana or the Gulf of Mexico” (93), Michael begins to manufacture, sell, and, eventually, use “meth, crystal, crank” (94). Even after Leonie correctly links Michael’s physical deterioration to the effects of drug abuse, she misconstrues an anodyne for a cure, and comes to treat meth as a therapeutic because it serves an anesthetizing function. When Michael is incarcerated for the sale of meth and removed from his family, Leonie continues to use drugs to “burn up all the sorrow and despair I felt” (51)—even if her drug use also has the paradoxical effect of isolating her from her family, the world around her, and her own emotional states. In that regard, the impacts of Leonie’s drug use parallel Michael’s incarceration; neither yields a corrective, and both serve to detach them from the very communities that might heal them in the moment they need intervention and care the most.Philomène is diagnosed with cancer during Michael’s incarceration in Parchman, a time when Leonie is “always buzzing from the night before” (104). Philomène does turn to conventional medicine, but she “began by treating it herself with herbs. . . . She’d be out in the woods, picking and slowly dragging bushels of young pokeweed shoots behind her. Every time, she said: I’mtellingyou,it’sgoingtocureit” (103–04).

Leonie recalls that Philomène “put homemade ointments on me when I broke out in rashes or gave me special teas when I was sick,” a conjure healing praxis that was “more than mothering,” in which Philomène became “more than [a] mother” (42). Mothering, for Leonie, is made manifest in a desire for bodily well-being—mothers “put ointments on” and pour “special teas” as an extension of their love and affection. Conjure healing is, however, “more than mothering” because it is the desire for wellness catalyzed. Leonie’s understanding and acceptance of

Leonie’s insistence that conjure healing manifest in a cure that extends life on earth is invariably frustrated given that conjure praxis often results in death. After Leonie returns from Parchman with Michael in tow, Philomène informs her that “[i]t’s time. . . . [f]or me to go”: “I done did everything I could. Brewed all the herbs and medicines. Opened myself to the mystère. For Saint Jude, for Marie Laveau, for Loko. But they can’t enter. The body won’t let them” (214). Philomène separates “myself,” “the body” and “the mystère,” framing each as autonomous yet interrelated aspects of herself and her worlds. Philomène understands her “I” to be more than “the body,” yet also contained within and controlled by it. Indeed, “the body” is powerful enough to resist the help of the spirits willing to assist in her healing, and to whom she avails “myself.” Conjure healing is therefore restricted by the ambit of “the body.” Even if Philomène and the spirits to whom she appeals

In the earliest stages of Philomène’s illness, Leonie is centrally involved in the healing process, preparing the plants and herbs her mother gathers: “I chopped and cleaned and boiled and made pitcher after pitcher of tea for her to drink. . . . But it didn’t cure it” (104). As Philomène grows progressively unwell, however, Leonie becomes cynical about the work of conjure healing. Philomène had always impressed upon Leonie that “if I look carefully enough, I can find what I need in the world” (102). The conception that “the world,” or the nexus of natural, spiritual, and individual cosmoi, can provide for a person’s “need[s]” is not, however, a guarantee that they will be able to be healed into complete wellness. Philomène’s illness therefore becomes a sign for Leonie that “the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds. . . . I resented her . . . for the lessons and the misplaced hope” (104, 105). Leonie reads her mother’s illness as evidence of a capricious natural world refusing to maintain its own balance, and a failure of conjure healing to do the work of “more than mothering.” Yet her eschewal of healing is a fundamental misapprehension of the function and scope of conjure as a spiritual practice. Rather than return the afflicted to a state of complete wholeness, conjure healing instead emphasizes transformation, change, and sacred balance, at times taking life and at other times extending it.

“AAndNow She Sings It” 113 Philomène as “mother” and “more than [a] mother” is, then, a radicle of conjure healing.

Philomène is ready to cease living in her body in large part because she does not believe that life ends after death. But she is also aware that communication with the dead is possible. After Given’s funeral, Philomène explains to Leonie that her Tante Vangie, the woman who taught Marie-Therese conjure healing magic, “could see the dead. Marie-Therese ain’t never had that talent.

114 JJoanna Davis McElligatt are able to perform rites of healing, however, none of it will work without cooperative balance from “the body.” Be that as it may, in death the “I” will inevitably exceed “the body” and all of its inherent limitations, including those of time and space.

Me neither I dream about it.DreamIcanseeGivenagain,walkingthroughthedoorinhisboots.ButthenIwakeup.AndIdon’t....AndIknowit’sthereRightontheothersideofthatveil”(50–51).Philomèneconfiguresdeathnotasatotalobliterationofself,butasanalternativeformofexistencebeyond“th[e]veil”separatingtheearthlyrealmfromthespiritualone.Philomènebelieves—or,rather,“know[s]”—thatGiven,thoughde-ceased,remainsinexistence.Afterrelinquishing“thebody,”Philo-mènebelievesthatthe“I”whichanimatesitwillremaininstatesun-boundedbytheconventionsofspace-time;inotherwords,lifedoesnotendafterdeath,butgoesonandoninotherforms.Blackdeath,then,isnotapermanentabsence,butthebeginningofeternalfuturity.Nev-ertheless,thepainattendingBlackdeathisreal,exacerbatedbythein-abilitytoseeorcommunicatewithpeoplewhoexist“[r]ightontheotherside.”Leonie,however,canseetotheotherside.Whenshegetshigh—“everytimeIsnortedaline,everytimeIpoppedapill”—Leoniewit-nessesGivenappeartoher“likehecouldbefleshandblood”(34,36).WhenshefirstseesherbrotheratapartyshortlyafterMichaelissenttoprison,Givenappears“withnobulletholesinhischestorinhisneck,wholeandlong-limbed,likealways....Hewasshirtlessandredabouttheneckandfacelikehe’dbeenrunning,buthischestwasstillasstone.”GivenattemptstospeaktoLeonie,butshe“couldn’thearhim,andhejustgotmoreandmorefrustrated”(51).InthesamewayLeonieisawashinsilenceinnature,sotooisthespiritworldinaccessibletoher.DespitethefactthatGiventriesrepeatedlytocommunicatewithherinotherways,hisnonbreathingstillnesscombinedwithLeonie’sinabilitytohearhimconvincesherthatheisnotarealspirit,buta“chemicalfigment”whomshenamesGiven-not-Given—andbecause

Whereas Leonie possesses spiritual gifts she neither acknowledges nor nurtures, her children are formidable nascent conjurers with powers that are amplifications of those extant in the family. Jojo, her oldest child, is a radical telepath, capable of hearing the immediate thoughts, emotions, and desires of insects, birds, fish, and other animals—specifically pigs, goats, and horses (14), mosquitoes (29), geese (30), betta fish (108), rabbits (219), dogs (236), termites (249), and raccoons, snakes, and vultures (280)—as well as of his sister, Kayla (118), and his grandfather, River (181). Unlike Philomène who must be taught how to interpret the chorus of voices ringing out from bodies, plants, and animals, Jojo needs no training to understand the voices he hears. For example, without effort he apprehends a mosquito who, after sipping his blood, thinks to itself, “Soscrumptious” (29), and River’s horse, who brags, “Icouldleapoveryourhead,boy,andohIwouldrunandrun

“AAndNow She Sings It” 115 she believes he is a hallucination caused by intoxication she “didn’t tell my mama nothing” (52). Exacerbated by the violence of the carceral state that failed to provide justice for her brother or her lover, Leonie’s incapacity to connect meaningfully to Given is an extension and expression of her spiritual cynicism. By repeatedly misrecognizing her gift as a drug-induced anomaly, she is unable to interfuse herself with the spiritual world and liaise with her brother. Yet Leonie’s spiritual soundlessness is also the result of profound unresolved trauma that is not yet and perhaps will never be fully healed—and, importantly, can never be healed by systems that insist on confinement and spiritual isolation. Indeed, healing is only possible by abolishing the anticollectivist and antispiritual carceral strategies that mire Leonie, and instead by harnessing the potential that lies in ecological communalism and transformational change.

andyouwouldneverseeanythingmorethanthat.Icouldmakeyoushake”(14).Unlikehisgrandmother,Jojo’sattentionisnotdrawntolociofaffliction.Jojoisinsteadengagedinpresent-tenseinterspeciescommunication,transmittedfromtheanimalbeing’s“I,”inPhilo-mène’sterms,tohisown.Yet,inareverberationofPhilomène’sgifts,Jojofoundit“impossibletonotheartheanimals,becauseIlookedatthem,andunderstood,instantly,anditwaslikelookingatasentenceandunderstandingthewords,allofitcomingtomeatonce”(15).The

Home Across the Water: Conjure for the Dead

116

Philomène explains to Jojo that “when someone dies in a bad way, sometimes it’s so awful even God can’t bear to watch, and then half your spirit stays behind and wanders, wanting peace the way a thirsty man seeks water” (236). As a result, Jojo understands that Richie’s rest has been disrupted by his death at the hands of the state. Upon their return trip home to Bois Sauvage, Richie climbs into the car, and sits facing Jojo on the floor in an impossibly small space between his sister’s car seat and the front seat. As was the case for Given-not-Given, Richie appears to be as solid as any human and yet is immaterial to such an extent that he “blurs at the edges” (131). Looking at Richie, Jojo is struck by the feeling that “[s]omething’swrong”: “Even though he’s skinny, arms and legs racket-thin, he should be too big to fit in the space he done folded himself into. He’s sharp at the edges, but there’s too much of him” (169). Jojo’s ability to see beyond the accepted perceptual limits

prattle both calms and discomfits Jojo, not least because he cannot control his abilities; while he appreciates never feeling alone in a world crowded with chattering beings, he nevertheless worries that his gift is evidence that something is deeply and fundamentally wrong with him.

JJoanna Davis McElligatt

Jojo and Kayla are also capable of seeing the dead, though she refers to them most often as “birds” (127). Unlike Leonie, both children can hear the voices of ghosts and communicate with them directly, though they cannot control how or when they see them. Jojo first meets the boy-ghost Richie in the parking lot of Parchman prison following his father’s release. He immediately ascertains who the ghost is, having learned from River that Richie was twelve years old when he was incarcerated for stealing food to feed his nine siblings. Though also a child himself, River cared for Richie as though he were kin, often doing his work when he was unable, healing his wounds after a brutal public whipping, sharing a bunk with him night after night, and protecting him when possible from hard labor and violent men.

David Oshinsky notes that Parchman prison was segregated only according to race and sex, and that adults were housed “with juveniles, some as young as twelve and thirteen. . . . The result was a brutal, predatory culture made worse by the prison’s vast and isolated expanse” (138). Consequently, very young children were expected to carry the same physical workload as adult men, and were subject to identical punishments for failing to meet the prison system’s cruel work standards—many of them, unnamed and forgotten, lost their lives to unimaginable violence there.

“AAndNow She Sings It” 117 of space into the spirit realm is evidence that the boundary between the earthly realm and the spirit world is diaphanous. That Jojo can see Richie at all, however, is evidence that ordinary perception is often incomplete. Richie’s physical form troubles the materiality of ostensive space—he is both too big for the area and paradoxically inside of it. In that sense, he exists not only in space, but also beyond, around, and within it—and, in his own way, so too does Jojo. Richie is also unmoored in and by time. As he explains to Jojo from the floor of the car, “Sometimes I think it done changed. And I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none” (171). The perception of the passagelessness of time is exacerbated for Richie, given that for nearly seventy years he “was trapped. . . . [because] Parchman had imprisoned me again” (186). As Richie becomes anchored to the ground itself, burying himself in the earth to sleep and arising at different moments in the history of the prison and of the land itself, Parchman became “past, present, and future all at once” (186–87). As he moves through various temporalities, Richie shifts between the very recent present to the distant past without any sense of linearity, moving without control through iterations of “the new Parchman” “bound by cinder blocks and cement,” with its “men who wore their hair long and braided to their scalps, who sat for hours in small windowless rooms, staring at big black boxes that streamed dreams,” to “the Delta before the prison, and Native men . . . ranging over that rich earth, hunting and taking breaks to play stickball and smoke” (186). Richie can perceive differences in time—he understands, for example, that the Indigenous men playing stickball on the land “before the prison” and incarcerated men sitting watching television in cells occupy different periods—yet he experiences all moments as happening simultaneously. Though Richie will argue that the “nature of time” (187) is that “everything is happening at once” (186), he nevertheless struggles to glimpse into the future in which he is no longer bound to Parchman.

Jojo’s arrival at Parchman disrupts Richie’s experience of time as passageless and simultaneous—or, in other words, his inability to experience futurity—by bringing Richie into alignment with the present moment and dissolving his tie to Parchman. Richie’s reengagement with the future is evident in his insistence that Jojo bring him to River so that he might hear the story of his killing, which he cannot remember but believes will help him “get home” (182)—or, as he explains it,

Richie’s final spiritual realm, that which he is near though not yet of, is as euphonious as the earthly realm as Philomène perceives it, though in the spiritual domain singing erupts from everything—“black earth,” “trees,” “ever-lit sky,” “water,” and “people”—all of which suggests that the songs she hears are an expression of the eternal spirit of each living thing. Richie is disconnected from the song at Parchman, yet deeply attuned to its variances; indeed, as he waits to fall asleep in the earth, he “sing[s] songs without words,” “songs [that] come to me out of the same air that brings the sound of the waters: I open my mouth, and I hear the rushing of the waves” (240). Nevertheless, Richie’s watersongs are incapable of guiding him across it on his own.

Sing,Unburied,Sing concludes with three interconnected and very nearly simultaneous conjure healing rituals designed to help the dead return home and become one with the eternal song. Each of these conjuration rites—performed by Jojo, Leonie, and Kayla, respectively— disrupts the conventional flow of space-time for all participants, living and dead alike, and imbricates the terrestrial domain with the discarnate. In this way, Leonie, Jojo, and Kayla serve as conjure healers for the dead, working not to bring about a return to wholeness or wellness, but instead to provide expeditious passage into death—and thus into an never-ending future. The first ritual, performed by Jojo and River at Richie’s request, is a failure. After Richie learns that it was River who killed him in order to prevent him from enduring brutal torture at the hands of the prison guards after an attempted escape, he implodes with rage, growing “darker and darker, until he’s a black hole in the middle of the yard, like he done sucked all the light and darkness over them

118 JJoanna Davis McElligatt to become one with “a song. The place is the song and I’m going to be a part of the song” (183). While confined in Parchman after death, Richie can both see and hear “home,” or what one might call his final resting place beyond the veil. Over an abundance of dwellings and houses nestled among mountains, valleys, and beaches “across the face of the water,” Richie can see people: tiny and distinct. They fly and walk and float and run. . . . They are never silent. Ever present is their singing: they don’t move their mouths and yet it comes from them. . . . It comes from the black earth and the trees and the ever-lit sky. It comes from the water. It is the most beautiful song I have ever heard, but I can’t understand a word. (241)

“AAndNow She Sings It” 119 miles, over them years, into him” (257). Feeling deep betrayal and sadness, Richie both beseeches and attacks Philomène, who is lying in bed waiting for Leonie to perform a death ritual. Though Philomène had never before been able to see the dead, in her final moments on earth she can hear Richie both keening and speaking “[l]ike somebody talking three doors down” (264). Philomène instructs Leonie to call Maman Brigitte, “[t]he last mystère” and “the mother of the dead,” so that she might possess her and “take me with her” (215); after Leonie agrees to perform the ritual, she gathers rocks from the cemetery where Given is buried, as well as cotton, cornmeal, and rum to place on the altar to gratify the loa. During the performance of the invocation of the mystère and through to its conclusion, Philomène, Leonie, Jojo, and Kayla inhabit space-time in the same way Richie and Given do; indeed, Leonie laments that “[t]here’s no time. This moment done ate it all up: the past, the future” (267). As Leonie recites the litany in what feels like a perpetual present in which past and future have been permanently suspended, she implores “Grande Brigitte, Judge” to “[a]ccept our offerings. . . . Enter. Dance with us” (268, 269). As she begins to pray, chaos ensues: Richie appears on the ceiling as a “boy with the face of a toddler” (267) and holds Given so that he cannot move; Philomène begins to bleed “everywhere [Leonie’s] hands touch” (264); Jojo is both furious with Leonie for reciting the ritual and with Richie for menacing his family, and captivated by seeing his uncle for the first time; Kayla weeps silently and open-mouthed. The ritual is successful in many ways. After Jojo instructs Richie to leave, to Leonie it appears “as if Jojo has unlocked and opened a gate, because Given pushes through whatever held him” (268). Given explains to Philomène that he has “come with the boat” (269) to ferry her across the water to the place where they will both rest. As Given approaches Philomène, his hands “pulled the veil from her head and let it fall back so they can look upon each other with love, clear and sweet as the air between them. Mama bucks and goes still. Time floods the room in a storm surge” (269). In the litany’s collapsing of the corporeal and metaphysical realms through the invocation of deities who disrupt the conventions of space-time, Philomène’s transition is evidence of the power of conjure healing to do transformative work. After the litany has concluded, Philomène and her family are not made whole. Yet through the ritual of death, conjure

120 JJoanna Davis McElligatt creates space for the family to move forward together in the knowledge that Given and Philomène have become ancestors and been remanded home. Through the restoration of transcendent change, the second ritual demonstrates the power of transformation to end suffering and usher in new possibilities.

In the presence of the tree full of translucent ghosts, Jojo and Kayla are transitioned beyond the conventions of space-time and into the extramundane universe. Yet because the ghosts are described and behave as “a murder of silver crows” (283), or birds “perch[ing],” floating, flying, their clothes a kind of “plumage,” they are also deeply and intimately connected to the earth. Conjure imagines the universe as cosmologically liminal and interstitial, expressed in and as a simultaneity of planet, cosmos, and spirit world. The stories the ghosts tell do similar work; through their telling, they place themselves at disparate—yet interrelated—moments in Black life in the US, each of them invoked as victims of antiblack violence ranging from enslavement to police brutality to domestic abuse to mass incarceration. The ghosts in the tree thus emerge as metaphysical representations of the afterlife of slavery, defined by Saidiya Hartman as “skewed life chances, limited access to

The third and final ritual is performed by Kayla. Following Philomène’s death, Richie continues to wander on the property, still unable to find his way home. Though Jojo tries to ignore him, Richie explains that there are “[s]o many of us. . . . Hitting. The wrong keys. Wandering against. The song” (282). And, indeed, Richie is not alone— behind the family home is a tree “full with ghosts”: There are women and men and boys and girls. Some of them near to babies. They crouch, looking at me. Black and brown and the closest near baby, smoke white. None of them reveal their deaths, but I see it in their eyes, their great black eyes. They perch like birds, but look as people. They speak with their eyes: Herapedme saymelockedandsuffocatedmeuntilIdiedIputmyhandsupandheshotmeeighttimesshemeintheshedandstarvedmetodeathwhileIlistenedtomybabiesplayingwithherintheyardtheycameinmycellinthemiddleofthenightandtheyhungtheyfoundIcouldreadandtheydraggedmeouttothebarnandgougedmyeyesbeforetheybeatmestillIwassickandhesaidIwasanabominationandJesussufferlittlechildrensolethergoandheputmeunderthewaterandIcouldn’tbreathe....Thesunmakingscarletplumageoftheclothestheywear:ragsandbreeches,T-shirtsandtignons,fedorasandhoodies.(282–83)

“AAndNow She Sings It” 121 health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment”Kayla(6).instructs the ghosts to “go home,” but they “don’t still, don’t rise, don’t ascend and disappear.” As was the case with River’s story and Leonie’s litany, spoken utterances do not possess the right magic to usher the lost dead home. When the ghosts fail to respond in anything but agitated whispers, Kayla begins to sing “a song of mismatched, halfgarbled words” in a “melody, which is low but as loud as the swish and sway of trees, that cuts their whispering but twines with it at the same time.” As Kayla “twines” together her song with the intonations of the ghosts and trees, she begins to restore balance to the natural and spiritual realms. As she “sings louder,” Kayla “waves her hand in the air,” which Jojo recognizes as a gesture of calm and comfort: “it’s how Leonie rubbed my back, rubbed Kayla’s back, when we were frightened by the world.” As she continues to sing and lull the ghosts with her melody, the ghosts lean forward, entranced, and “smile with something like relief, something like remembrance, something like ease” (284). Kayla’s song, resolved into a simple humming at its conclusion, contains within it the memory “of the sound of all water, and now she sings it.” Kayla’s waterlogged anthem, both lullaby and call-and-response ritual, concludes with each ghost—collectivized as “they”—exclaiming “Home.... Home” (285). I choose to read this ending as evidence of Kayla’s conjure powers, just as I read the ghosts’ final proclamation as a sign that her melody worked to carry them across the water, that they heard the song and become one with it—and that they have exited the limits of spacetime and entered into the future. Kayla’s song is a culmination and cementation of the ability of conjurers to move between and heal within interconnected-yet-distinct planes of existence, perform rites and rituals of healing for the dead and living alike, and to enact ceremonies that are transformative, ameliorative, and actualized in the future-tense.

Everything Must Change: Conjuring Abolitionist Futures adrienne maree brown argues that “[a]bolitionists know that the implications of our visions touch everything—everything must change, including us. In order to generate a future in which we all know we can belong, be human, and be held, we must build life-affirming institutions” (1). As a system devoted to change, transformational healing, and

the creation of sacred ecological and collective liberation, conjure justice infrastructures are inherently abolitionist institutions. The potential for conjuration and conjure healing to do magic in the world and to offer critical abolitionist altern atives that destroy and restructure systems of oppression is a way of simultaneously imagining and makingpossible a future Black people create, encounter, and develop for themselves. This future is not only possible in life, however—it is also possible through death, which is not an end. As conjure justice infrastructures work to bring about the destruction of unjust systems on earth, the ancestral dead, spirits, loas, orishas, and saints can influence and protect adherents in the present time, and can offer guidance into liberatory action that creates new futures. Conjure justice infrastructures therefore imagine healing not as a promise of a return to wellness or wholeness on earth, but as the inevitability of the transformation and transcendence of that space-time altogether.

Sing,Unburied,Sing does not conclude with a return to wholeness and wellness—at its end, Philomène is still dead, Leonie is still sick, and

122 JJoanna Davis McElligatt

Abolitionist movements, brown argues, are best guided by efforts to collectivize for group accountability, growth, transformation, and social change, and the creation of a world where “harm is the anomaly” (10). Because conjure justice infrastructures are dynamic and adaptive systems that respond to the present environment of adherents, they offer alternatives to carceral systems that isolate, punish, harm, and destroy. Through methods and modes of intercollective healing, ecological and spiritual balance, and the dissolution of boundaries between people and their environments, conjure enacts a “shift from individual, interpersonal, and inter-organizational anger toward viable, generative, sustainable systemic change” (70). Conjure justice infrastructures effect such a shift by refusing to isolate harm doers, by insisting on the innate interconnected internal and social nature of human existence, and by offering structures of accountability that provide care for people and their mundane and spiritual environments. Justice according to conjure praxis is, then, as Kaba argues, “not a destination. . . . [but] a process” (145); transformative justice, she suggests, requires “unrestrained imagination” in which people “conjure visions of what a better world could look like” (25). Conjure justice infrastructures offer one possibility of such a world.

Anderson, Jeffrey E. Conjure in African American Society. Louisiana State UP, 2005. brown, adrienne maree. We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of TransformativeJustice. AK Press, 2020. Davis, Angela Y. ArePrisonsObsolete?Seven Stories P, 2003. Fett, Sharla M. WorkingCures:Healing,Health,andPoweronSouthernSlavePlantations. U of North Carolina P, 2002. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic SlaveRoute. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. Kaba, Mariame. WeDoThis’TilWeFreeUs:AbolitionistOrganizing andTransformingJustice. Haymarket Books, 2021. Martin, Kameelah L. ConjuringMomentsinAfricanAmericanLiterature:Women,SpiritWork,andOtherSuchHoodoo. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Mellis, James. “Continuing Conjure: African-Based Spiritual Traditions in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing,Unburied,Sing.” Religions, vol. 10, no. 7, 2019, pp. 1–14. Moten, Fred and Stefano Harvey. “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” SocialText79, vol. 22, no. 2, 2004, pp. 101–15. Oshinsky, David. “WorseThanSlavery”:ParchmanFarmandtheOrdealofJimCrowJustice. Free Press Paperbacks, 1996. Ward, Jesmyn. Sing,Unburied,Sing. Scribner, 2017.

“AAndNow She Sings It” 123 River, Jojo, and Kayla are still in mourning. The novel instead concludes by suggesting that conjure is a mode of abolitionist futurity in and of itself that offers strategies for resisting the violence of isolationist, punitive, and death-dealing carceral approaches to social organization. Decarceral logics, conjure shows us, have no power against a practice that advances a radical politics and poetics of liberation, acknowledges and yet eclipses the limitations of space-time, encourages its practitioners to reorient themselves and their adherents into a boundary-shattering collectivist worldview, and perpetually focuses on helping folks heal enough to cross the waters and find their way home. Works Cited

PROJECT HOPE TO ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY Holman Correctional Facility KATIEUniversityOWENS-MURPHYofNorthAlabama MississippiQuarterly 74.1 (2021): 125–142 © 2022 Mississippi State University Choose Your Own Homicide: Tinkering with the Machinery of Death in Alabama

IN HIS DISSENTING OPINION TO THE SUPREME COURT’S RULING IN CALLINS v. Collins (1994), Justice Harry Blackmun famously wrote that he would “no longer tinker with the machinery of death.” He elaborated: “I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed . . . the problems that were pursued down one hole with procedural rules and verbal formulas have come to the surface somewhere else.” Since the reinstatement of the death penalty with Greggv.Georgia (1976), states have tinkered with a variety of conditions surrounding executions and their incongruity with the Eighth Amendment’s clause barring cruel and unusual punishment.1 In their latest tinkerings, states have begun to experiment with execution methods themselves. As Austin Sarat writes, “The course of the last century is littered with various technologies—hanging, firing squad, electrocution, the gas chamber, lethal injection—used in a continuing effort to find an apparently humane means by which the state could take life” (4). The semblance of progress, however, is a myth: lethal injection, Sarat argues, carries the highest number of botched executions, 1 Editor’s Note: These “tinkerings” largely focus on who is executed and for what crimes. For example: Cokerv.Georgia (1977) established that capital punishment was grossly disproportionate sentence for the rape of an adult woman; Roperv.Simmons (2005) established that those who were under the age of eighteen when they committed crimes cannot be executed; and Madisonv.Alabama(2019) established that states cannot execute someone with dementia.

Part of the commitment to capital punishment in the deep South, as one PHADP member reminds us, is a commitment to slavery and its legacies. This PHADP member provides a long view of the death penalty’s entrenchment within the Black Codes by pointing us to the outcome of Beck v. the State of Alabama (1980), an unusually long legal opinion in which the court decides to “review [the state’s] own history of capital punishment” with regard to racial discrimination. The court’s review reads, in part:

3 Editor’s Note: The “manner of death” listed on death certificates for execution victims is “homicide.”

126 PPHADP and Owens Murphy defined as “a breakdown in, or departure from, the ‘protocol’ for a particular method of execution” (5). Its rate of failure: over 7%.2 This article explores execution methods from the perspective of those who are directly impacted. Members of the Alabama-based organization Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty (PHADP), the nation’s only 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded and run by people on death row, provide individual testimonials about their experiences with navigating execution methods, including a legal settlement in 2018 that gave them days to decide whether they wanted to die by lethal injection or by the state’s new method: asphyxiation by nitrogen gas. Not surprisingly, the decision-making process—itself psychologically perverse—was marred by the same inequalities faced by capital defendants under the death penalty writ large: lack of legal literacy, lack of access to adequate legal representation, the state’s own confusion about protocol, and the state’s indifference to people with disabilities. This material also provides a window into the depths of the US South’s investment in the death penalty and the extent to which this region is willing to tinker with any process, including execution methods and protocol, that prolongs the practice of state-sponsored homicide.3

A new subsection was added to the criminal code [in 1833] entitled Crimes and Misdemeanors by Persons of Color. This subsection recognized three new capitally punishable crimes, viz., any second conviction of any Negro or mulatto whatsoever (p. 113, § 75), accessory of any sort to a capital crime or maiming of any white person by a slave (p. 114, § 78), and any attempt to commit a rape on any free white female by any person of color (p. 114, § 80). Outside of this subsection, the only new capital crime found under the Code was circulating seditious papers for the

2 Editor’s Note: Sarat, Appendix A. These rates are from 1980–2010. Given the number of botched lethal injections in 2014 alone, that statistic is likely higher now.

The McCleskeyverdict is part of a larger shift in the Supreme Court’s logic regarding capital punishment following the Greggdecision: Craig Haney characterizes the modern era of the death penalty through the court’s disregard for both moral reasoning and empirical evidence, or “the social facts of capital punishment,” in favor of the “legal mechanics of denial” (11). Much like its dismissal of racial disparities in McCleskey, the Court has dismissed challenges to the constitutionality of execution methods in Hillv.McDonough(2006), Bazev.Rees(2008), and, most recently, in Glossipv.Gross (2015). To illustrate the indifference of federal courts even during breakdowns in execution protocol, PHADP members have collectively constructed the following timeline of botched executions in the state of Alabama:

Current statistics, however, tell a different story: the Death Penalty Information Center reports that Black defendants are grossly over-represented in capital cases, especially when the victim is white (“Executions by Race”). The Supreme Court has even acknowledged statistical evidence of racial bias in McCleskeyv.Kemp (1987) but shrugged its shoulders, arguing that “[racial] disparities in sentencing is an inevitable part of our justice system.”

Choose Your Own Homicide 127 purpose of inciting insurrection among the slaves (p. Ill, § 66). The penalty under these statutes was again mandatory. Here, the court admits that Black people were deliberately “singled out for different treatment,” though it goes on to claim that “these racially biased laws were abrogated over a century ago.”

(1) April 22, 1983. John Evans, Alabama. Electrocution. After the first jolt of electricity, sparks and flames erupted from the electrode attached to Evans’s leg. The electrode burst from the strap holding it in place and caught fire. Smoke and sparks emerged from under the hood [placed over his head]. Two physicians entered the chamber and found a heartbeat. The electrode was reattached to his leg. More smoke and burning flesh. Again, the doctors found a heartbeat. Ignoring the pleas of Evans’s lawyer, a third jolt was applied. The execution lasted for fourteen minutes and left Evans’s body charred and smoldering. (2) July 14, 1989. Horace F. Dunkins, Alabama. Electrocution. It took two jolts, nine minutes apart, to kill this developmentally disabled inmate. The foul-up was caused by “human error”— faulty cable hookups resulting in an insufficient amount of current to cause death. Officials had to rewire the chair after the first jolt. (3) June 16, 2011. Eddie Powell, Alabama. Lethal injection. Witnesses to Mr. Powell’s execution were prevented from seeing when he was injected with pentobarbital. However, they report that after the warden read the execution order

(4) December 8, 2016. Ronald Bert Smith, Alabama. Lethal injection. Smith (a former Eagle Scout and army reservist) was convicted of a 1994 murder of a convenience store clerk, and his jury at trial voted 7-5 to recommend a punishment of life imprisonment without parole. Alabama, however, requires neither unanimity nor a majority jury vote before the trial judge can sentence a defendant to death. Smith heaved, gasped, and coughed while struggling for breath for thirteen minutes after the lethal drugs were administered. His death was pronounced thirty-four minutes after the execution began. He also clenched his fists and raised his head during the early part of the procedure. Alabama used the controversial sedative midazolam in the execution.

128 PPHADP and Owens Murphy at 6:00 pm and took Mr. Powell’s last words, the warden moved behind a wall where it is understood the injection controls are located. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Powell violently raised his head, grimaced, clenched his teeth, and looked around the chamber. His eyes were open and the veins on his neck, arms, and face were bulging. He appeared to be in severe pain. Mr. Powell remained in that condition for some time before a prison employee entered the chamber and touched Mr. Powell’s face and called his name. There was no response. These witnesses reported that the entire execution lasted approximately twenty-five minutes. Mr. Powell was officially pronounced dead at 6:30 pm.

(5) February 22, 2018. Doyle Lee Hamm, Alabama. Lethal injection. (Attempted and failed.) Despite warnings from defense counsel that it would be impossible to find a vein in which to insert the catheter, as Hamm suffered from advanced lymphatic cancer and carcinoma, the state went forward with the execution. Hamm endured a dozen puncture marks, including six near his groin and others that punctured his bladder and penetrated his femoral artery. Approaching a midnight deadline that prohibited further attempts, the execution was called off. On March 5, 2018, an attorney for Doyle Hamm submitted a preliminary report from an anesthesiologist who evaluated Hamm on February 25. These “botched” events are synecdoches for the fissures, errors, and cruelties inherent in the system of capital punishment itself. In what follows, individual PHADP members4 share their own experiences witnessing, challenging, navigating, and ultimately selecting execution methods during their time on Alabama’s death row. These vignettes describe a range of experiences with execution methods, beginning with descriptions of electrocutions and lethal injections before moving to the experience of “opting in” to nitrogen hypoxia—a complicated decision that made people on death row complicit in their own homicides. Each of these vignettes also offers a different insight and angle into execution methods and practices in a state that sentences more 4 Editor’s Note: The individual members who contributed to this essay wish to remain anonymous.

6 PHADP’s note: “Single walk” consists of showering alone and walking in a cage rather than with the group.

The first guy to be executed after my arrival here was Edward “Ed” Horsely. Ed was electrocuted on February 16, 1996. Just prior to my arrival, Varnell Weeks had been executed. The mood was somber. As I walked down the hall toward death row, I could feel the heaviness. The light was (and still is) dim, and there seemed to be shadows everywhere. As I situated myself in my cell, I kept noticing the quiet and stillness. It was not late; I knew everybody was not asleep. A hall runner appeared at my door.5 I asked him why it was so quiet. He told me that Varnell had just been executed several days prior and everyone was working to recover from it in their own ways. The reality of the situation set in for me. As time passed, I was let off single walk and allowed to be with the group.6 It was during that time that I got to know Ed Horsely. Ed was a nice guy—friendly, but quiet almost to the point of seeming shy. He was funny and always made me laugh. Then, word came down that an execution date had been set for Ed. It was the first time I would be here for the actual start of that whole process. Ed was called to the warden’s office and informed that he had a date set for February 16, 1996. He was then sent back to carry on with his day. Ed did not say a word at first, but the news followed him back. Ed’s whole demeanor changed. I did not know what to say or what to do. What do you say to a friend who receives this news? I kept my mouth closed and watched how the guys who had been around him for years reacted, as well as how they interacted with Ed. The days and weeks seemed to fly by, and the week of the execution approached. Back then, executions were scheduled to take place on Fridays right at midnight. Ed would get to visit with his family and friends the whole week leading up to his execution. Afterward, on Monday, they brought him back and moved him to the death

The First Execution I Witnessed

5 PHADP’s note: A hall runner is someone who is allowed out of his cell to keep their tier clean, pass out hot water and ice, pass out food trays, and cook the food guys purchased from the prison canteen. There are seven tiers, and each tier consists of twenty-eight calls, fourteen cells up and fourteen cells down.

Choose Your Own Homicide 129 people to death per capita than any other state in the nation. As one member writes, “Among the 170 people on Alabama’s death row, each and every one of our perspectives is different.” Here are their stories.

“LethalLethalInjection”injection came about after numerous botched executions while states were using the electric chair. Out of fear that the United States Supreme Court would rule electrocution unconstitutional, many states quickly adopted lethal injection as their primary method of statesponsored murder. Many variants of lethal injection came into being. There were one-, two-, and three-drug protocols. Alabama decided to go with a three-drug lethal injection protocol. Lethal injection was 7 PHADP’s note: People are moved to the “death cell” prior to their execution so they can be placed on suicide watch.

130 PPHADP and Owens Murphy cell.7 Things slowed down after that. It seemed like everyone was on autopilot. They moved like zombies. Our walk yard at the time was right outside the windows of the death cell and execution chamber. But once they moved Ed there, they put dark blue blankets across each window. We could still talk with him, but we could not see him. Every day that week, they ran their execution protocol and tested the electric chair. When they tested the electric chair it would cause the lights in our cells and in the hallway to flicker. I did not know why that was happening until one of the guys told me, “They are around there messing with that damn electric chair.” The night of the execution—Thursday—it was quiet, and the air was so thick it seemed as if you could reach out and touch it. I did not know what to do with myself. I prayed. Then, I lay still in the dark, listening. At around 11:45 pm I could hear men rattling their doors. It became louder and louder until it reached my tier, and my tier joined in. I followed them and began to shake my door with all my might. I did not know how long this went on, but after a while, the beating, banging, and door shaking tapered off until it stopped. Out of the stillness, I heard someone yell out, “We love you, Ed; rest in peace, man.” My thoughts and emotions were jumbled, but eventually sleep found me. In the morning, I heard officers laughing about how Ed had squirmed and fought when they were packing his butt with cotton and putting a diaper on him. On the way out the door to the walk yard that morning, we saw a pile of hair. It was Ed’s hair. They shave all of the hair off of the body before executing them in the electric chair. Then, there was the smell. The smell of a human being cooked from the inside out was still in the air.

Choose Your Own Homicide 131 supposed to be a more humane way for states to commit murder. An inmate would receive three injections of drugs: (1) a sedative, (2) a paralytic, and (3) the final drug would stop the heart, and it would be all done while the inmate was strapped to a gurney in a sterile environment to make it look clinical and like the inmate just went to sleep. Here’s the problem: anything and everything manmade will have its flaws, and the botched executions during lethal injections continue to pile up. Turns out, the last drug given during a lethal injection is like shooting liquid fire into a person’s veins. No one could tell when an inmate was suffering due to the sedative and paralytic. However, there were times when the sedative wore off or just did not work from the start, leaving the inmate conscious but trapped in his or her own body because of the paralytic. Other times, neither the sedative nor the paralytic worked, and the inmate was left screaming in pain that it felt like they were on fire.8 Not much different from the electric chair, huh? The world started to take notice of these permitted atrocities, and a movement began to persuade pharmaceutical companies to stop selling their drugs to states for use in their death chambers. Now, the states are having to resort to nefarious means to acquire the drugs to carry out their state-sanctioned murders.9 There is no humanity in lethal injection. There is no humanity in capital punishment. There can be no humanity when a state condones, sponsors, advertises, and carries out the murder of another human being under the guise of justice.

Editor’s Note: These are the last words of Charles Warner, who was executed by Oklahoma in 2015.

9 Editor’s Note: Compounding pharmacies “combine, mix, or alter drugs . . . to meet the specific needs of an individual patient” but have become de facto manufacturers for drugs that are used during lethal injections in the US. Compounding pharmacies are not subject to the same regulation and oversight as other pharmacies. See Death Penalty Information Center, “Compounding Pharmacies and Lethal Injection.”

10 Editor’s Note: Clayton Lockett’s botched execution in 2014 made national headlines. In 2015, the state legislature passed HB 1879. They were the first state to legalize

“How Were We Supposed to Know?”

Challenges to execution protocol across the nation had placed a strain on lethal injection due to several botched executions. Oklahoma, seeing the writing on the wall, adopted nitrogen hypoxia as an alternative method.10 They were soon followed by Alabama.

SB 272, which was passed on March 20, 2018, requires the state of Alabama to provide people on death row with a thirty-day period to opt in to nitrogen hypoxia. But how were we supposed to know when this window of time began? We were never informed of an opt-in period by the state. The first any of us ever heard about nitrogen hypoxia was from our attorneys. In fact, the election form for opting in was composed by one of the Federal Defenders attorneys ten days before the election period expired. We did not receive it until Wednesday. The end of the election period was Saturday.

Editor’s Note: Holman Correctional Facility, AL, where executions are performed and those awaiting execution are incarcerated. See Equal Justice Initiative, “Andrew Lackey Execution Raises Questions about the Death Penalty.”

12 PHADP’s note: The exceptions were those represented by the Federal Defenders who made sure they were fully informed as to know what was at stake.

132 PPHADP and Owens Murphy

The Federal Defenders were representing people on death row who were challenging the state’s lethal injection protocol in federal court. The lawsuit was about to be dismissed as moot because there was now an alternative method. But in order for it to be dismissed, we would have to have an opportunity to opt in to the alternative method. That window was closing fast. Lawyers scrambled to meet with their clients at Holman. Meanwhile, at Donaldson, the twenty or so guys there are completely in the dark.11 None of them opted for nitrogen because the state did not notify them, and they did not have attorneys who notified them, either.12

Editor’s Note: Donaldson CF is a maximum-security state prison that served as a second death row facility for those awaiting execution in Alabama.

“I Can Clearly Recall the Commotion and Confusion”

Just before I arrived at Holman, the State of Alabama had executed Andrew Lackey. His execution led to a two year de facto moratorium.13 The first execution I witnessed here at Holman was that of Christopher Brooks. I hadn’t known him for long. We lived on the side tier together but I had recently moved to that cell. We both read books, so our conversation usually started and ended there. Chris’s execution was the reality check I needed to fight for myself and for the lives of those on nitrogen hypoxia. In fact, the method was devised by lawmakers, not medical professionals (Hager).

Choose Your Own Homicide 133 death row. Awareness must be realized, and the machinery of death must be Whenstopped.fighting to abolish the death penalty, we must consider every possible angle. An example of this was the pressure applied to drug companies to stop supplying the states using their products for statesanctioned murder under lethal injection.14 Consequently, compounding pharmacies have often tried to take up the slack and supply states with their own concoctions.15 States have scrambled to find new drug sources for their killing machine while others like Alabama are creating new protocols and methods of execution. Because of the pressure on drug companies, Alabama has created its newest method: nitrogen hypoxia.Ican clearly recall the commotion and confusion the day we were given forms prepared by the Federal Defenders that gave us the opportunity to sign on to the new execution method. This may not sound like a good thing, but for inmates who are out of appeals, a change in method and protocol gives them a two-year cushion where they cannot be executed, and even longer if the new method isn’t readily available. Personally, this opportunity was not for me. I was nowhere close to being out of appeals. In fact, in the first appellate court my case went to, my sentence was reversed. Among the 170 people on Alabama’s death row, each and every one of our perspectives is different, even if our experience was the same. What’s right for one person may not be right for another.

Nitrogen Hypoxia Transition

15 See Equal Justice Initiative, “Andrew Lackey Execution Raises Questions about the Death Penalty.”

14 Editor’s Note: The European Union prohibits participating nations from contributing drugs to lethal injection in the US (European Parliamentary Research Service, “The death penalty and the EU’s fight against it”). The sole US company approved to manufacture sodium thiopental, Hospira, stopped manufacturing the drug in 2017.

In 2018, the Alabama Republican legislature passed a bill that added nitrogen hypoxia to Alabama’s arsenal of methods for murdering its own citizens. Nitrogen hypoxia amounts to smothering or suffocating a human being to death. The reason for this legislation was that the lethal injection protocol in Alabama was facing a strong challenge in the Middle District Federal Court over its lethal injection protocol. Alabama

16 Editor’s Note: See Bernard E. Harcourt, “The Barbarism of Alabama’s Botched Execution.”17PHADP’s note: Inmates are always required to sign and date a log when receiving legal mail or pertinent information from the Department of Corrections.

In 2002, Alabama switched its primary method of execution from the electric chair to lethal injection. When that was done, the inmates were notified immediately. They were given the chance to “opt in” from the very start. Prison administrators came around with papers in an envelope with each inmate’s name on the envelope, and the officer would not give it to the inmate until he signed the log for it.17 Inside the envelope were papers informing the inmate of Alabama’s transition from the electric chair to lethal injection, and that the electric chair was still an option if they chose it; but if the inmate had not chosen within the allotted thirty-day time period, the choice would be made for them, with their method of execution automatically becoming lethal injection. Everyone was notified.

134 PPHADP and Owens Murphy had recently tortured Doyle Lee Hamm until he was a punctured and bloody mess.16 SB 272 proposed nitrogen hypoxia instead, and of course, it passed. Meanwhile, regarding the challenge to the constitutionality of Alabama’s lethal injection protocol, something of a deal was struck between the Attorney General’s office and the lawyers representing the men listed in the challenge. The men, as well as anyone else made privy to this concession, would be allowed to “opt in” to the new method of execution, therefore sparing those who were out of appeals from immediate execution attempts; in return, the challenge to the unconstitutionality of Alabama’s lethal injection protocol would be tabled. The transition led to chaos and confusion, and the men who remained unaware of this choice lost their lives. The Attorney General’s office made their bloodlust clear in a statement that anyone who had run out of appeals and who did not opt in to nitrogen hypoxia would be the next to be executed, but nobody delivered this information to those who were directly impacted.

In 2016, Dunn v. Dunn was litigated. The ruling fell in the inmates’ favor, therefore ensuring that the DOC follows the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines for inmates. A few weeks later, a captain came around, passing out envelopes that we all had to sign for before we even knew what was in the envelope. The envelopes contained

Note: In a public statement following her signing of the Alabama Human Life Protection Act (HB 314), Governor Ivey stated that “every life is precious” (“Governor Ivey Issues Statement After Signing the Alabama Human Life Protection Act”).

It is said that we had thirty days from the time the governor signed SB 272 into law to “opt in” to nitrogen hypoxia, but we were never notified. The majority of attorneys representing those of us on Alabama’s death row are not defense attorneys, nor do they reside in the state of Alabama. Most of our attorneys were not even aware of the bill’s passage. When we finally learned about our situation with days to spare, those of us who were able to reach our attorneys were told to get the papers signed and sent to the warden. The Federal Defenders of Montgomery came to visit with their clients to get them to sign the papers with permission from the Federal Middle District Judge handling the lethal injection protocol challenge. However, the wardens here at Holman would not let them into the building. They had to go back to the judge and get a court order to see their clients about a life and death situation. They got the court order that Tuesday and were allowed into the prison on Wednesday, leaving four scheduled days, but two actual business days, before the “opt-in” time limit expired.

Choose Your Own Homicide 135 information about the Dunn v. Dunn ruling, and how we would be or could be affected by the ruling. Again, we were notified.

When I finally reached my attorney, he said: “This is your life, but I would sign the paper.” I signed the paper, had it notarized, and had it walked directly to the warden as instructed by my attorney. I called my attorney afterward, and he had the warden fax him a copy. Others around me were still scrambling to get copies of the opt-in paperwork made for them. Thursday came and went with people still trying to get more information and still trying to reach their attorneys. None of the three wardens were in the building to receive any signed opt-in forms. The guys who are developmentally delayed suffered the most. No one could explain the stakes of this decision in a way that made sense to them. They force human beings to make a choice about how they want to be killed by the state, and they don’t explain it to the developmentally delayed. But, in the words of our governor, “every life is . . . sacred.”1818Editor’s

I was back in the county jail for my Rule 32 hearing when the Federal Defenders were granted access through a court order issued by the Federal District Court Judge presiding over the lawsuit and subsequent settlement. In place of my hearing, I was told by my attorneys that the judge had recused himself from the case and was recommending to the 19 Editor’s Note: Baze v. Rees (2008).

In 2008, a brief moratorium was declared by the United States Supreme Court pending the outcome of a case out of Kentucky challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection.19 Other than one execution in Texas, no other executions were carried out in the United States. Guys slated for execution in Alabama were relieved—until 2009, when executions in the state resumed.

“I Signed the Document Opting In”

136 PPHADP and Owens Murphy

In June 2011, Eddie Powell was executed. His execution became the foundation for a de facto moratorium here in Alabama. It exposed complications with the drugs that were administered. Eddie was supposed to be unconscious and paralyzed, but he was able to raise his head and look around the execution chamber as his life slipped away. In late 2011, Thomas Arthur was scheduled to be executed, but he was granted a stay based on the lack of efficiency of the drugs used for lethal injection. He was then able to challenge this method, which created another de facto moratorium in the state. Many joined Arthur’s challenge. The Federal Defenders Office for the Middle District of Alabama filed a class action civil suit on behalf of their clients who were out of appeals and facing imminent execution. By September 2018, the suit was heading for trial, but the State of Alabama was afraid of disclosing its secret drug cocktail. It agreed to a settlement with the plaintiffs, as the governor had just signed into law a bill that added a new method of execution to Alabama’s death penalty. The settlement allowed as many death row prisoners as possible to opt in to nitrogen hypoxia as their chosen method of execution. By doing so, they reserved the right to challenge the method at a later date. On June 1, 2018, the new law went into effect. The Federal Defender’s Office of the Middle District of Alabama was permitted, pursuant to the settlement, to come down to Holman prison to have their clients sign on before June 30, 2018. The Alabama Department of Corrections prevented them from doing so until the last week of June 2018.

21 Editor’s Note: See n8.

chief judge to recuse all county judges from the case. This news came after I was informed of the settlement of the lawsuit and why it was necessary for me to opt in. I inquired about the ability of the other guys at Holman to opt in. If they were not going to have the opportunity, then I wouldn’t, either. I signed the document opting in.

“Roulette”October 10, 2000, is the day that changed the way I valued my life: it was the day I was sentenced by Alabama to die in the electric chair. The year I arrived on Alabama’s death row, four people had been electrocuted. The last person was a woman named Lynda Lyon Block. The day was a somber event. We (PHADP) had a peaceful protest for her. Our protests consist of refraining from all outside activities, and we all wear our visitation uniforms. We have a moment of reflection and prayer; then, we share an update on recent filings and rulings in the condemned person’s case. When they were killing by electrocution, they carried it out at midnight. The night leading up to the execution was filled with a quiet that’s deafening. Then, at about 11:45 pm, you heard the sounds of guys rattling the cell doors and beating on their sinks and toilets. This is done so that the condemned can hear the noise and our pain and frustration of them killing one of us. After the execution takes place, the quiet returns. It takes a few days for the climate of the prison to return to somewhat normal. In 2002, a change in execution protocol from electrocution to lethal injection brought a sense of calmness to death row. Some of the men believed the hype of lethal injection being a more humane way of killing people. So over the years, the climate and culture of the row became somewhat passive. The time of execution was moved up from midnight to 6:00 pm Thursday evening. A series of botched executions exposed the reality of lethal injection. Some of the autopsies of executed men showed signs of drowning, with some of the men talking or screaming while the drugs were being administered.20 One of the men screamed, “My body is on fire!”21 The

20 Editor’s Note: For a partial list of recent botched executions during lethal injections, see Sarat’s new preface, vii-viii.

Choose Your Own Homicide 137

“This Paper is Going to Save My Life” It was about 7:30 in the morning when, as I sipped my first cup of coffee, I was told by an officer to prepare for a legal visit. These were rare, and I had not scheduled a visit. My attorney, one of the Federal Defenders, handed me a handful of paperwork. As I look down and read the form, I realize that this piece of paperwork is as good as gold. My attorneys and I had been working on this for the past year or so and it’s

138 PPHADP and Owens Murphy idea that lethal injection was somehow more humane was a dog and pony show for the public. June 2018 was a chaotic summer here on the row. There were a string of execution dates pending, and a lot of guys were out of appeals, myself included. A group of men were a part of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection in violation of the Eighth Amendment barring the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment. In my opinion, the State of Alabama saw the writing on the wall of an impending loss, so a deal was struck that allowed for the guys to be able to choose nitrogen hypoxia. When the deal was brought to the men, not everyone was afforded the opportunity and time to consider this option. I learned about this option on a Wednesday during a call with my lawyers who work for the Federal Defenders in Montgomery. I had to decide over the weekend how I wanted the State of Alabama to murderTheme.mental torture was intense. I prayed about it, talked to my family, and at first, I had decided not to sign on to nitrogen hypoxia. The following week, a group of lawyers came to the prison to visit with their clients, and at first I refused to even go out to visit, but my lawyers requested that I at least come out to talk to them. So I went out and signed the necessary paperwork and that decision to do so has spared me from execution so far. The State of Alabama played a game of roulette with the lives of all these men, culminating in the execution of some of the men who refused to sign on to nitrogen hypoxia. Now the climate here is one of unsteady relief. There is a sense of the unknown that plays in our minds. This is a form of torture in and of itself. Capital punishment is a racially biased system that inflicts cruel and unusual punishment on the condemned, their families, even the families of the victims. It will never be a just or humane way to murder someone.

“SS men escorted the men, women, and children selected for death to the gas chambers. . . . Trucks carried those too infirm to walk, and the rest marched” (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum).

looking like our work has paid off. This paper is going to save my life, and everyone else’s life who signs it.

“They Took Advantage”

That summer, the warden stopped in our dayroom at Donaldson with papers in his hand. He explained that he had just received these papers and that we had one hour to decide if we wanted to change our execution method from lethal injection to nitrogen gas. This was the first time I had ever heard of this. We didn’t have time to consult our attorneys. They brought this to us at the last minute as if they had forgotten that Donaldson houses twenty-four people on death row. My lawyers are from out of state and didn’t know anything about it. We were truly blindsided, and we later found out that it could have saved our lives. They took advantage of the fact that we didn’t have much knowledge on the issue and they knew our first thought was to go against the state. I guess it was the trick they anticipated.

Choose Your Own Homicide 139

“I Don’t Have a Suicide Plan”

I remember one morning being asked by the warden at Donaldson if I wanted to sign a paper that would change my method of execution. This was one of the most confusing, difficult decisions I have ever made. I felt that this was a decision for my lawyers to make. How could I make this choice? I don’t have a suicide plan. I don’t know or understand how this gas is going to be administered. My right to consult with my attorney for their opinion on this matter has not been granted. Our state representatives did a terrible job in attempting to allow all death row inmates equal opportunity in the decision making process that could have saved his or her life. There are more emotions I am juggling right now because I have decided not to sign this paper without legal assistance, which means I have given the state exactly what it wanted.

History Repeats Itself

140 and Owens Murphy

What we are presenting here are primarily first-hand accounts from us about our experiences of having those close to us killed in the most premeditated way possible, of botched executions, of the changes and litigation regarding execution methods and protocols, of innocent men who have lost their lives to the state, and of the haunting specter of nitrogen hypoxia.

One of our main goals at PHADP is to inform the public about the death penalty. We believe that, if people only knew about the practice of capital punishment, they would feel motivated to join us in the fight for abolition. We are grateful for every opportunity to expose capital punishment for what it is: barbaric, cruel, antiquated, inherently unjust, racist, dehumanizing, and completely pointless. No amount of “tinkering” with execution methods will ever correct its unjust underpinnings.Formore information about our organization, please visit phadp.org.

I would like to commend each of my fellow PHADP members who contributed to this essay. The memories recounted here are traumatic for us, but we have stepped up to the plate. As the nation’s only antideath penalty organization founded and run by people on death row, PHADP is uniquely situated to gather and share experiences, reflections, and perspectives from those closest to the issue. We have much to say on a wide variety of topics concerning capital punishment, mass incarceration, and the “justice” system overall. For this project, we have focused on Alabama’s “tinkering with the machinery of death” from the gruesome spectacle of electrocution to the medicalized barbarism of lethal injection to the untested torture of nitrogen asphyxiation.22

PPHADP

22 Editor’s Note: For more on the “medicalization” of capital punishment rituals, see Zivot.

“We Have Much to Say”

Choose Your Own Homicide 141 Works Cited Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. “The extermination procedure in the gas chambers.” GreggCokerCallinsBeckBazethe-extermination-procedure-in-the-gas-chambers.auschwitz.org/en/history/auschwitz-and-shoah/v.Rees.553U.S.35(2008).v.State.396So.2d645(1980).v.Collins.510U.S.1141(1994).v.Georgia.433U.S.584(1977).DeathPenaltyInformationCenter.“CompoundingPharmaciesandLethalInjection.”deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/lethal-injection/compounding-pharmacies.Accessed26May2021.DeathPenaltyInformationCenter.“ExecutionsbyRaceandRaceofVictim.”deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/executions-overview/ex-ecutions-by-race-and-race-of-victim.Accessed22April2021.Dunnv.Dunn.163F.Supp.3d1196(M.D.Ala.2016)EqualJusticeInitiative.“AndrewLackeyExecutionRaisesQuestionsabouttheDeathPenalty.”26July2013,eji.org/news/andrew-lackey-execution-raises-questions-about-death-penalty.Accessed24April2021.EuropeanParliamentaryResearchService.“ThedeathpenaltyandtheEU’sfightagainstit.”Feb.2019,www.europarl.europa.eu/Reg-Data/etudes/ATAG/2019/635516/EPRS_ATA(2019)635516_EN.pdf.Glossipv.Gross.576U.S.863(2015).“GovernorIveyIssuesStatementAfterSigningtheAlabamaHumanLifeProtectionAct.”TheOfficeofAlabamaGovernor,15May2019,governor.alabama.gov/newsroom/2019/05/governor-ivey-issues-statement-after-signing-the-alabama-human-life-protection-act/.v.Georgia.428U.S.153(1976).Hager,Eli.“WhyOklahomaPlanstoExecutePeoplewithNitrogen.”TheMarshallProject,www.themarshallproject.org/2018/03/15/why-oklahoma-plans-to-execute-people-with-nitrogen.Accessed22April2021.Haney,Craig.DeathbyDesign:CapitalPunishmentasaSocialPsycho-logicalSystem.OxfordUP,2005.

142 PPHADP and Owens Murphy Harcourt, Bernard E. “The Barbarism of Alabama’s Botched Execution.” The New York Review, 13 March 2018, McCleskeyHill242018/03/13/the-barbarism-of-alabamas-botched-execution.www.nybooks.com/daily/AccessedApril2021.v.McDonough.547U.S.573(2006).Madisonv.Alabama.586U.S.___(2019).v.Kemp.481U.S.279(1987).Roperv.Simmons.543U.S.551(2005).Sarat,Austin.GruesomeSpectacles:BotchedExecutionsandAmerica’sDeathPenalty.StanfordUP,2016.Zivot,JoelB.“LethalInjections:StatesMedicalizeExecution.”Rich-mondLawReview,vol.49,no.3,2015,pp.711–30.