Volume 47 - Issue 5

THE MAGAZINE OF YA L E & N E W H AV E N

VOL 47 / ISS 5 / APR. 2015

T HE NEW JOU R N A L

THE U N C E R TA I N HOUR

[ CONVERSATIONS WITH NEW HAVEN’S EX-OFFENDERS IN THE FIRST MOMENTS OF FREEDOM ]

staff editor-in-chief Maya Averbuch executive editor & publisher Caroline Sydney managing editor Isabelle Taft senior editors Hayley Byrnes Caroline Durlacher Kendrick McDonald Lara Sokoloff associate editors Ruby Bilger Joyce Guo Libbie Katsev Elena Saavedra Buckley design editors Chris Paolini Ivy Sanders-Schneider Edward Wang illustrator Madeleine Witt

members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh advisors Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin supported by

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2015 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students,Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Four thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $50. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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THE NEW JOURNAL

Volume 47 Issue 5 April 2015

FEATURES

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www.thenewjournalatyale.com

Expect the Worst In an age of false security, preppers plan for disaster

by Isabelle Taft

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The Uncertain Hour Standing at the threshold of society, newly released inmates plan their next steps

by Edward Columbia

STANDARDS

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points of departure

9

snapshot An Urban Love Affair

by Sarah Holder, Catie Liu and Jacob Potash

by Elizabeth Miles

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essay Crumbs

by Katy Osborn

14

snapshot Evergreen’s Memory Upload

by Elena Saavedra Buckley

17

profile The Dream House

by Ruby Bilger

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critical angle Listening to Africa

by Coryna Ogunseitan

Cover design by Chris Paolini

APRIL 2015

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points of departure

BUY THE BOOK What happens when professors assign their own writing

by Sarah Holder

Illustration by Madeleine Witt

A

t the beginning of every semester, Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres stands at the front of the classroom and opens his wallet. He pulls out crisp bills and hands them out, one by one, to the passing law students. The students walk out not only with their casebooks, but also with ten dollars from the author himself.

In a 2005 New York Times opinion article titled “Just What the Professor Ordered,” Ayres sparked a national debate when he wrote, “Professors’ incentives in choosing textbooks are in some ways more distorted than doctors’ incentives in choosing drugs.”

On average, course book authors receive ten percent of the cover price in royalties for each book sold. Ayres argued that they could abuse their freedom to assign reading for financial gain.

Ayres finds this freedom particularly alarming given soaring textbook prices. In 2013, the National Association of College Stores, a campus retail group, estimated the cost of one new textbook to be seventy-nine dollars, bringing the average cost of a student’s required course materials to over six hundred dollars per semester.

The American Association of University Professors delegates responsibility to individual universities 4

to regulate this ethical quandary. Professors at Virginia State, the University of Minnesota, and Southern Utah University, for example, must have their syllabi screened by committees for potential conflicts of interest. After a November 2014 article published in the University of Buffalo’s newspaper, The Spectrum, exposed professors who assign their own books for profit, the university’s Faculty Senate instated a committee to draft a policy addressing the matter.

Yale, however, does not monitor the texts professors assign. When I scoured the new Faculty Standards of Conduct draft, I found no mention of the topic.

When I wrote Stephanie Spangler, head of the Ad Hoc Committee on Faculty Standards of Conduct, she confirmed its absence and directed me to the University’s policy on conflicts of interest, where, again, there was no explicit reference to assigning textbooks.

Regardless, some Yale professors have heard Ayres’s clarion call. Journalism professor Steven Brill promised to give his students a check if they purchased his book, America’s Bitter Pill, at the end of this past semester. Music professor Craig Wright puts a picture of a ten-dollar bill on the last slide of his presentations, prompting students to come forward and THE NEW JOURNAL

“retrieve the money that is rightly theirs.” But most Yale educators are reluctant to make such refunds.

I walk into American Studies professor Matthew Jacobson’s office to discuss one of twelve required texts on his “Formations of Modern American Culture” syllabus, What Have They Built You to Do, a book about Cold War America and the film The Manchurian Candidate. My questions, however, aren’t about McCarthyism or communist ideology. Instead, they are about present-day capitalism. The book, co-written

by Jacobson, costs $1.04 on Amazon for a used copy, $10.87 for a Kindle edition, and $17.96 for a new paperback. “None of us are in it for the money,” Jacobson tells me, “People don’t even think of it as income.

I can show you stubs from royalty checks that are, like, forty dollars.”

CAN—OR WILL— STUDENTS OBJECTIVELY DISCUSS AND CRITIQUE THE AUTHOR’S ARGUMENT WHEN THEIR GRADE DEPENDS ON THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH SAID AUTHOR? Professor Robyn Creswell assigns his own edition of That Smell and Notes from Prison for the course “Politics and Literature of the Middle East.” He, too, responds to my questions with a shrug. As a translator, his royalties are only one to two percent of the cover price, and only when the book is purchased new. Jacobson hasn’t negotiated for Kindle profits, and professor David Blight says he makes no royalties off A Slave No More “for complicated contractual reasons.”

I’ve been at Yale for four semesters and I’ve been assigned five books written by my professors, on everything from environmental law to poetry. I haven’t asked any professors for a refund. But inspired by Ayres’s insistence, I shyly ask professor Creswell whether he’d consider handing out cash if the profits were greater. “Maybe I would take students out for doughnuts,” he says.

As I speak to professor Ayres on the phone, I pace back and forth in Sterling’s nave, watching stuAPRIL 2015

dents thumb through thousands of dollars worth of readings. I’ve started viewing the books as their receipts, but Ayres snaps me out of it, reminding me that books, above all, are meant to teach students.

“I’m hired to transmit ideas I think are of value,” Ayres says. “Assigning a book you’ve written allows you to more officially profess ideas you created and believe in passionately.”

But there’s an inherent conflict of interest here, too. Can—or will—students objectively discuss and critique the author’s argument when their grade depends on their relationship with said author?

When professor Creswell asks my class what we think of his translation, we compliment the rawness of the language, the shortness of the sentences. We don’t find anything to criticize. But, Creswell says, “students certainly have to be made to feel that they are interlocutors,” empowered to participate and respond.

To that end, Jacobson asks his graduate students to write critical responses to the readings he assigns, including his own. “If they promise to be respectful, I promise not to be defensive,” he chuckles. Similarly, Brill assigns the forty-page article upon which America’s Bitter Pill was based, providing students with thick stacks of the photocopied pages. “I told them to find something badly sourced or badly written,” he says.

Some professors circumvent the question of textbook profits by allocating them to a charity related to their field. John Grim, who teaches courses on religion and ecology, donates to Native American groups.

George Chauncey, the instructor of “U.S. Lesbian and Gay History,” donates to groups advocating for LBGTQ rights and researching AIDS. But Ayres still implores Yale professors to consider returning the proceeds to the students who are there to learn. “I call upon students to ask their professors to join me in disgorging the profits,” he proclaims.

“Rather than there being a law, let’s start modestly by just politely asking.” Nowadays, he prefers to let his administrative assistant handle this “disgorgement,” as he calls it. Handing out cash himself has come to seem too dramatic, he says. And besides, he doesn’t always have exact change.

Sarah Holder is a sophomore in Saybrook College.

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FINDING ITS CENTER The Yale Center for British Art restores Louis Kahn’s vision

by Catie Liu

Illustration by Edward Wang.

T

he Yale Center for British Art is a shell of its former self. The once-open portico at the entrance has been sealed off and replaced by a single small door.

The lobby is a construction zone draped in blue tarp.

The museum, closed for renovations this past January, will not reopen until spring 2016. As I walk to the front desk, I feel I’m interrupting a work in progress.

Stripped down to its steel frame, the YCBA is ready for renewal. The conservation project is the Center’s largest refurbishment since 1998. It is a critical upgrade of the nearly 40-year-old infrastructure, but the plan goes beyond routine maintenance. The Center’s staff aspires to return to architect Louis I. Kahn’s original vision, using blueprints, sketches, and notes from the 1974 construction.

“You’ll have to wear a hardhat,” YCBA Deputy Director Constance Clement tells me, “and sign this release form.” The chaotic construction site is the culmination of more than a decade of planning by YCBA Director Amy Meyers and Clement. We climb the stairs to the fourth floor, holding railings wrapped in plastic. The Center’s installation team carefully moves the art to other floors before the construction proceeds, attentive to Paul Mellon’s request that works of art he donated be housed in the building. Much of the building has been torn out—the carpets, the linen walls, the insulation, the movable gallery walls, down to the tubes that drain condensation from the

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windows. The gruff world of construction has temporarily taken the place of delicate paintings.

Daphne Kalomiris, an architect with Knight Architecture LLC, explains the logistics as we walk through the Center. The exterior walls will be stuffed with a mineral wool for insulation. The moveable interior walls will be raised slightly off the floor, in keeping with a 1974 Kahn sketch.

The level of attention to the smallest functional detail is reminiscent of Kahn’s own obsessive care for design. “We’ve literally had to get inside of Kahn’s mind,” Kalomiris explains. She describes studying every scrap of planning that Kahn left behind. His vision was grand: a building that would provide the best possible viewing experience and still leave spaces for study, fulfilling the Center’s educational goals.

In a way, the building is the Center’s greatest work of art, a masterpiece whose original materials are part of its ethos. As we continue along the fourth floor, Clement and Kalomiris lift up a strip of wood from the floor to reveal travertine underneath. “It’s less expensive and less effort to replace travertine tiles than to repair them,” Kalomiris gestures to the cracks and worn edges, “but our entire mission is to conserve.”

This notion of conservation extends even to the layout of the galleries and their relationship to the art they contain. The 1998 renovation project divided the fourth floor’s Long Gallery, but the new renovations will reopen THE NEW JOURNAL

the space. It will be filled with salon-style hangings— dense, floor-to-ceiling painting displays, instead of the widely-spaced displays common in modern museums— and will no longer be subdivided. The change will allow the display of a greater number of works. The fact that so much of the Center’s collection has been destined to a life of sitting in storage is perhaps a fundamental pitfall of all art museums: art calls to be seen, yet buildings are inevitably constrained by size and contemporary standards of display. The renovations will allow the YCBA to escape some of those constraints. At the east end of the Long Gallery, a new Collections Seminar Room, similar to the current Study Room on the second floor, will allow students and visitors to work closely with individual prints, drawings, and rare books.

Even while closed, the Center remains dedicated to sharing its work with the public. It recently lent works to the Yale University Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. In conjunction with the release of its recent book

co-published with the School of Architecture, Louis Kahn in Conversation, the YCBA has also organized lectures at Yale and at the upcoming New Haven International Festival of Arts & Ideas this summer.

Linda Friedlaender, the Center’s curator of education, has continued to oversee Artism, a weekend art program for children on the autism spectrum. And the Center’s student guide program has kept up its weekly training sessions.

We descend the stairs and find ourselves once more in the lobby. Stepping over blue tarp, I think of director Amy Meyer’s words that the conservation plan the Center has published is a “living, breathing document.” Never before has it felt more appropriate to see the YCBA as a living, breathing building, one that has reached another critical point in its lifespan.

Catie Liu is a freshman in Ezra Stiles College.

THE PANTHEAN TEMPLE’S OCCULT COMMUNITY Apartment rituals with Connecticut Wiccans

by Jacob Potash

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othing seems to shock Alicia. The best anyone can manage is to make her laugh. She doesn’t emit a chuckle, exactly. It’s more a thrum, a trill, always drawn out a beat too long. It’s what I hear when I ask her on the phone if I can join any of the events at the Panthean Temple. Weekly rituals are open to the public, so she sends me a friend request on Facebook and tells me that next Saturday’s gathering will be an “Ostara.” But she offers no further explanation.

The sign outside Alicia’s door reads, “Witches Parking Only, All Others Will Be Toad.” When we meet, her overall effect is handsome: her tranquil gaze, her cascading reddish hair and her wide figure, clad in black velour.

We pass through a small kitchen and take a seat in a living room filled with paintings and pagan paraphernalia. To the world, she is the Reverend Alicia Lyon Folberth, president and priestess of Connecticut’s first Wiccan and pagan APRIL 2015

temple. Her website boasts of its certification: the Temple is a 501(c)3 organization. Alicia is now a neophyte, by oath, in what is called Odyssean Wicca. She is recognized as head clergy by the state, authorizing her to make hospital visitations and perform weddings and funerals. But she also gives psychic readings on a website run out of Luxembourg, and performs tarot readings at cafes.

I let Alicia steer the conversation. She loops in and out of anecdotes—a deluge of leads that I want to follow but can’t, because her stories run on. Soon it becomes clear that there is no temple. There is Alicia’s apartment in Derby, Connecticut. There is Panera Bread, a favorite meeting place. There was a Unitarian church, but only briefly. There was also Alicia’s bookstore in East Haven, but she lost it during the hard years when the recession struck, just as she was divorcing her husband.

I realize that the Temple exists wherever Alicia may be.

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Illustration by Madeleine Witt

Wicca is a religion that’s hard to pin down. Developed in mid-twentieth-century England, it draws on ancient and modern conceptions of the occult. Attending public classes is the first stage of commitment; once neophytes have sworn their oaths, membership in the Temple, the Outer Court, and the Inner Court, comes into reach. The Temple’s Articles of Faith could constitute a manifesto of modern liberalism: “Harm none”; religious tolerance; environmental consciousness; gender parity.

But the Panthean Temple’s congregants are not united by any particular tradition. Rather, they share a propensity for free religious thinking, since most having turned away from the strict faith in which they were raised. Asked to explain the difference between prayer and Wicca magic, Alicia tells that me that magic “is an active form of prayer. We’re working directly without deities, there’s not this kind of top-down structure.” Pagans, from what I gather, are people who see the status quo as corrupt. Before the ritual, the conversation winds from the danger of vaccines, to the menace of corporations, to the greediness of Christianity.

Looking back, Alicia tells me that she found divinity in the woods of North Salem, New York. One day, her father began to chop down her favorite tree, and from inside, she could hear her tree screaming.

Why couldn’t her parents hear it? In adolescence, she discovered that she was telekinetic, too. “It’s weird when things fall off the wall,” she says, “and you realize it’s because you’re angry.”

These experiences drove Alicia to seek a spiritual outlet. At the suggestion of a holistic veterinarian who had treated her ferret, she started studying Reiki, the Japanese energy-based healing practice. When a 8

guy she’d met on a high school production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show popped up years later at a comic book signing in Philadelphia in full medieval costume, the two began dating and frequenting Dungeons and Dragons gatherings, where she met a woman who became her first Wiccan teacher. She met another at the Department of Motor Vehicles, in the early years of her practice.

People eventually turn up to the apartment, and each offers another variation on Wicca. A man and woman in their sixties are followed by a young mother carrying a two-year-old. Pat, the young mother, says that, during her Catholic upbringing, she always felt troubled by phrases like “God-fearing,” but loved learning about Greek mythology in school. So when her family got Internet access in 1997 and she discovered paganism, she immediately felt it was right for her. It took a decade for her to work up the nerve to go to a festival. Today, she’s one of Alicia’s most committed students.

When we finally begin the ritual after hours of chitchat, it turns out to be a simple affair. We stand at the corners of a small table that holds incense and candles, and we chant, “We are a circle, we are moving together, we are one.” We chant, “Hail, and welcome!” to the north, south, east, and west. We invoke Greek gods and then read a version of the myth of Hades and Persephone. We finish with a sip of grape juice and a bite of cookie. Where was the sacrifice?

The spell conjuring? I look at my watch and note that, out of three hours together, we spent thirty minutes on the ritual.

These people have come together half out of a search for alternative religion, and half out of a desire for an accepting community. As Alicia’s wild life indicates, the Panthean Temple is far from just a space for witchcraft. As I look around the room, I remember the words of the older couple, erstwhile hippies who were present at the Panthean Temple’s first ritual in 1995. They are not open about their practice, so they suggest I call them Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And they insist they are not pagan, not really—they have their own nature-centric belief system. But they are here because, as Mrs. Smith mentions, “it gets a little lonely having a spirituality of just one.”

Jacob Potash is a freshman in Davenport College.

THE NEW JOURNAL

snapshot

AN URBAN LOVE AFFAIR How photogenic is New Haven?

by Elizabeth Miles

C

hris Randall spins around to stop a stoop-shoul- city through a glossy photo makeover. Whether this is dered elderly woman, moving so quickly that I grounded in residents’ true feelings about their city is have to duck his arm. “Hi, Miss, I love your face—may unclear. Who is the “I” in I Love New Haven?

I take your picture?”

Walking through Yale’s campus, we pass a tall “Sure, where’s it going?” couple. The man has stubble and neon-rimmed glass“I Love New Haven—it’s a website that celebrates es, so Randall jumps in. “Hi, I like you guys’ faces, can people, places, and things in New Haven, and I want I take your picture?” The woman just walks away, and to celebrate you!” the man shakes his head, “Oh no, no, n—” “Nah, that’s all right.”

“C’mon, I’m Chris.”

Randall shrugs off the rejection. “I always start “I know who you are, I do. I work for Market New out thinking, oh, no one’s going to let me do this, no Haven, so we repost a lot of your stuff—but no.” one’s going to want me to take their picture—but you “Why not?” just do it, you just ask anyway, and you end up with a “Because I’m behind the scenes like you are, man!” post. The rejection rate is about fifty-fifty.”

Randall laughs, and after pressing him once more His smile drops a little. “Maybe I’m weirding unsuccessfully, turns onto York Street. Stopping a stupeople out by saying, ‘I love your face.’” dent, he tells her he likes the contrast between her Randall, a professional photographer, has made hair and the leaves. “Can I ask you to make a funny a career out of such enthusiasm. Hard to miss with face?” She sticks out her tongue and half-closes her his blaring bike horn, he first met his I Love New Ha- eyes. A masterpiece, and Randall’s first “yes.” The fiftyven collaborator, Jeffrey Kerekes, near their homes in fifty rejection rate had to turn over sometime.

Wooster Square. He and Kerekes—a psychotherapist Whenever you see him on the street, Randall and amateur photographer—established the ILNH is chatting animatedly with strangers, or whirling site in 2012. Since then, five regular photographers abruptly to salute a friend half a block away. Kerhave joined the photography team, and ILNH has ac- ekes, a 35-year-old with glasses and greying brown crued over eight thousand Facebook followers. hair, is the quieter half of ILNH, the pragmatist Like Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York, to Randall’s dreamer.

ILNH often employs a candid plus caption forStill, Kerekes has been known to step from behind mat—except with a universally positive vibe. It has the lens into the public eye. In 2011, frustrated with highlighted Boxing in Faith, a nonprofit gym that high taxes, he ran for mayor of New Haven, challengtrains at-risk youth to box, and the Under 91 proj- ing the eighteen-year incumbent John DeStefano Jr. ect, which decorated the underpass below the high- Kerekes, a newcomer, lost by only ten percent, though way with public art. Yancey Hitt, a student at Wilbur DeStefano outspent him by over a half million dollars.

Cross High School, contributed a photo essay on Randall has political experience too: he worked New Haven Reads, the community book bank and for the New Haven Land Trust and co-chaired Ward 8 tutoring program. from 2003 to 2013. However, he made his name as While the oft-T-shirted and gift-mug’d phrase “I a photographer by sneaking into Mill River’s defunct Love New York,” is universally recognized, “I Love and contaminated English Station power plant, ignorNew Haven” is still catching on. The ILNH site is an ing warnings that the site was toxic and that he could evolving project, rather than a viral feel-good phe- be arrested for trespassing. nomenon, or a larger-scale tourism campaign. But Together, Randall and Kerekes see ILNH as a Randall dreams big: he wants to radically rebrand the way to—in the words of their website—“Promote APRIL 2015

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Self-portrait by Chris Randall

Community Engagement and Civic Pride.” Randall cited the Inside Out New Haven photo series as an example of what photography could accomplish. In 2012, he and other Inside Out photographers mounted four-by-six-foot black-and-white portraits of New Haven residents onto the underpasses that divide neighborhoods around State Street. Drivers would stop, meet each other, get their photo taken, and then continue on.

For Kerekes, ILNH is an effort to shift the media’s focus away from crime reports. “‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ seems to be the policy. When I was 30, I moved to New Haven, and its reputation just didn’t match the experience,” he says. A neighbor told him he shouldn’t go out after dark. “I laughed at him, but he was dead serious.”

We lapse into technical conversations about RAW files and Photoshop, how best to organize memory cards. Kerekes gives no gratuitous smiles. He talks with his eyebrows instead. When I ask whether or not he loves the Elm City more after founding ILNH, his eyebrows shoot up and then knit themselves together 10

as he considers his answer. He pauses, and then says he isn’t sure. But do his subjects? “Some do, some don’t,” he says.

He leans forward and whispers, “That’s why we chose the name, I Love New Haven. After a while, hopefully people feel that way.”

With Randall, New Haven seems like a smaller version of itself, one where a police officer on a bike waves to us in a quiet neighborhood. Randall photographs a security guard who worked with him at the Winchester factory when he made shotgun barrels from 1998 to 1999. He also runs into a law professor and a hot dog stand owner in a space of fifteen feet, and embraces them as close personal friends.

The Yale Security guard in front of Willoughby’s yells across York Street that Randall just missed the Ashley’s ice cream truck—he knows that Randall goes to Ashley’s almost every day.

But is the city cropped too narrowly through THE NEW JOURNAL

ILNH’s lens, the “Main Street” it represents an idyll Randall could have said the same. He, at least, constructed by a dreamer and a pragmatist? feels that ILNH has brought him closer to his neighAs I browsed the posts on ILNH’s website with bors across the city: “Maybe it’s just because I’ve taken Carlton Heath, a 20-year-old chemistry student at pictures so much…But I want us to feel like we’re all Gateway Community College and a friend of Kerekes’s, in this together, and this is a good place to be.” Afhe asked where the photos of Newhallville were. ter following his path through downtown, I feel like “Growing up there, I’ve seen everything. There’s I’ve observed an organic experiment in cross-city ina basketball court off Shelton Avenue, and once I was timacy. Randall is an optimist, undoubtedly, but as the just having fun, playing basketball, and four teenagers site’s popularity increases, feedback from residents on bicycles, in broad daylight—they started shooting like Heath has the potential to alter its direction, exat it. And they rode off so casually, like nothing hap- panding the edges of the frame. pened.” Heath smiles bitterly. “Every night they used ILNH is rooted in a love of photography, the to shoot, every single night. And that’s still the way it spontaneous connection of a street portrait. “Ultiis, it’s just not being put on the news as often.” mately, what I want to do is depict people as people.

Yet, several months later, in March 2015, Heath To me, everybody has a story and everybody has an invited Kerekes to follow him through Newhall- interesting face,” Randall says. ville. They took dozens of pictures, including a porStick around New Haven long enough, and he’ll trait of Heath at a basketball court. Heath wrote in let you know in person. the ILNH.com post, “There may not be luxurious homes and buildings over here but there are many luxurious people with dreams and ideas for bettering Elizabeth Miles is a sophomore in this community.”

Jonathan Edwards College.

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APRIL 2015

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essay

CRUMBS A layered look at the human body

by Katy Osborn

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used to know two quarrelsome sisters, the younger of whom had a thing about skin cells. When they fought, the older sister’s coup de force would be to strip naked, run into the younger sister’s bedroom, and roll around in her sheets, yelling “SKIN CELLS SKIN CELLS!” It’s the first thing I think of in the Yale Mammalian Evolutionary Morphology Lab at 10 Sachem Street as Dr. Gary Aronsen, the lab manager, lifts a top-hinged cabinet door and wheels out a table. Much like a hospi-

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tal bed, the table is covered with a white sheet and has foot pedals at its base: one for tilt, one for height. Less like a hospital bed, its white sheet is weighted by—lo and behold—a corpse, around which is a sprinkling of strings and flecks not of skin but of dehydrated flesh.

Runaway specks of what was, in life, a short, elderly Chinese man. His crumbs.

Dr. Aronsen, who is in his tenth year of supervising Yale’s biological anthropology labs, has a mintTHE NEW JOURNAL

condition Jesus action figure in his basement office across the hall. A look at his website suggests he wears mostly cargo (sometimes camo-cargo) pants and muscle tees. His current research is primarily on extant primate ecology and behavior—“monkey business,” quite literally. But he’s very serious about the sacredness of this corpse, this human being, which the lab purchased several years ago as an anatomical teaching tool for classes like “Human Functional Anatomy” and “Mammology.” “I’m going to trust that you’re a good person,” he says before unlocking the laboratory door. Now I’m stuck between a shameful instinct to roll in the grossness of it all (“SKIN CELLS! SKIN CELLS!”) and the keen sense that I’ll be struck by lightning (or a flying mint-condition Jesus action figure) at any moment.

The man on the table has been plastinated; he has undergone a mummification of sorts. His body has been pumped with formalin to halt tissue decay, cut free of skin and connective tissues, dissolved of fat and water in an acetone bath, and, finally, stuck in a vacuum. Silicone rubber has replaced the water and fat formerly in his tissues and organs.

The 1,500-hour, $50,000 plastination procedure was first patented in 1977 by Dr. Gunther von Hagens, who has since gained infamy—and the nickname “Dr. Death”—for serving as the director of the international travelling corpse exhibition “Body Worlds.”

Beyond a basic conservative revulsion, critics of von Hagen cite transgressions including a 2009 exhibit in Berlin’s Postbahnhof featuring children, dead embryos, and—positioned in coitus—the bodies of two people who never knew each other in life.

The body on this table comes from a “cost-forservice” plastination lab at the University of Michigan Medical School, which opened after Hagens’s patent expired in 1989. For almost twenty-five years, the lab—one of the only plastination labs in the country—rendered ten to twenty donated cadavers each year into dry, odorless, three-dimensional models for anatomy education. In July 2014, it closed for reasons not publicized.

Looking to the man on the table, I worry that he gave his body to science to escape the grossness of decay. Now, sections of his corpse have been dissected to different depths, in a sort of violent capitalization of his deadness. A visceral cut to the left cheek exposes root-like nerve tangles. The left arm is a meaty hunk of fibrous muscle. A horseshoe-shaped flap in APRIL 2015

the chest has been sawed with a serrated blade and sits folded over his groin like an apron. The flap is topped with yellow fatty tissue and plastic-bag intestines that add new color and texture to a brown body that is alternatingly wax paper and string and splintered wood and cave rock and packing paper and rope and burnt poultry. And in an act of insufficient modesty, the flesh apron covering the groin interrupts a thigh-bones-connected-to-the-hip-bone rhythm that could otherwise lead a person from this man’s toenails (still attached, still dead), up the tendons of his feet, past a metal shin plate (“Property of Yale University Equipment #170463”) and all the way up to his face. Which is also in layers. One eye is closed and lined with a thin fuzz of short white lashes, and the other socket has been intricately excavated around an epicenter of macabreness: a shriveled eyeball.

Then there are the pieces that have been cut away entirely, and sit on the white sheet to the corpse’s side.

A lung. The heart. Half a kidney. Half a skull. The skull is cut at the brow line, its outside covered in peach fuzz and its inside cream-colored. A small cardboard box sits at the corpse’s feet. The box reads, “THIS SIDE UP.” His brain is in there, sitting on a paper towel.

It occurs to me that I could carry this box of brain across the room. I could put the brain on a graduation cap that Dr. Aronsen has positioned atop a steer skull, and I could place the kidney half inside a binder on Formaldehyde Spill Protocol. The skull bowl could go in the sink like a dirty dish, and the heart on one of the paper plates sitting above the cadaver cabinet. I could unpack the man and carry all the little pieces to corners of this lab—sprinkle the room with his crumbs. He’d grow vast with invisible tendons, until everything in the room was within him and between him. He’d be everywhere. A landscape. He’d take up the whole room, and he’d never even know.

He already does.

Katy Osborn is a senior in Branford College.

She is a former senior editor of The New Journal.

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snapshot

EVERGREEN’S MEMORY UPLOAD A cemetery app brings the dead to the cloud

by Elena Saavedra Buckley

Illustration by Madeleine Witt

T

he walk to New Haven’s Evergreen Cemetery prepares you for where you’re going. Yale New Haven Hospital, a nursing facility, and the Jewish Home for the Aged line Davenport Avenue leading up to the wrought iron gates. “RIP” is written in Sharpie on metal lampposts surrounding the grounds. Once, I saw the leathery face of a butchered pig lying in the street.

But on a Sunday morning, as I passed through Evergreen’s brick entrance, the words “Hello and Welcome…” appeared on my phone over a picture of bright, blossoming trees and well-kept grass. Tomb-

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stones—some as small as shoeboxes, some towering and ornate—catch the sunlight at the bottom of the photo. The scene is the homepage for the Evergreen Cemetery app, released last year by webCemeteries. com. When it came out, Evergreen’s newsletter, The Bough, declared, “We are on the cutting edge of the Cemetery industry.”

The app isn’t exactly Facebook for the dead, but it’s the closest thing. After opening the app, a user is offered three options: “Search,” “Nearby,” and “Tours,” all in modern, inviting sans serif. If you’re on Evergreen’s grounds, a tour places you on a satelTHE NEW JOURNAL

lite map of the cemetery as a pulsing grey dot. Blue feel them,” he said of personal memories, “until you markers appear on the screen around you, pointing tangibly go and touch the stone or see your loved out themed collections of graves. “The Ladies of Ev- one’s grave.” ergreen” tour highlights tombstones with female statues, many with faces turned down or covered by a stone hand. The “Governors and Lt. Governors During a March snowstorm, about twenty Tour” is, expectedly, pretty straightforward. women came to the cemetery on a field trip for their Much of the tech experience is far removed “Death and Dying” class at Albertus Magnus Colfrom Evergreen’s gravel paths. Within days of a new lege. They gathered in the crematorium in rows of burial, webCemeteries.com creates a profile of the folding chairs, and Fiore stood at the front to disdeceased on the app and Evergreen website. Relatives cuss the process of cremation before giving a tour can post photos, obituaries, life stories, and memo- of the machine. ries online. The most decorated profiles are those of Evie Lindemann, the professor, was eager to talk historical figures, such as Edward Bouchet, Yale’s first about the app, an idea “fraught with difficulties and black graduate, or William Chester Minor, who shot blessings,” she said. “The question I always ask mya man, entered an insane asylum, and wrote defi- self is, what’s the nature of these connections that nitions for the Oxford English Dictionary (in that we’re establishing? I think there’s something about order). A few recent burials have contributions. One the human connection that we’re always all going user, easily the most active, has uploaded eighty-six to need.” photos and more than forty memory posts on her The class went outside to sketch tombstones husband’s page since his death in 2013.

(Lindemann has a degree in art therapy). Two of Dale Fiore, who has been the general man- the students, Shironda and Tina, held umbrellas and ager of Evergreen Cemetery since 1986, monitors wandered among graves on a hill near the crematothe profiles and authored some of the tours. Fiore rium. They took photos of the engraved names and first encountered the idea for an app after seeing a webCemeteries.com demonstration at a trade show.

Fiore is a loud speaker with a gravelly voice, gesturing with full arms and leaning his broad shoulders I ASKED FIORE IF back in his chair. “We’re a very solid, progressive business,” he told me. He has been at the helm of HAVING A POSTHUMOUS the cemetery’s other modernization efforts, setONLINE PRESENCE MAKES ting up a new office location and a mausoleum for cremated remains.

IT EASIER TO THINK The app, his latest project, is part of his idea to ABOUT DYING. COULD build a “cemetery for the living.” After interrogating the company’s representative about the technology THE “ONLINE CEMETERY” (“I really want to kick the tires and make sure things REPLACE THE REAL ONE? work before I invest in them,” he said), he brought the app to Evergreen, where all records now sync automatically with webCemeteries’ database.

HE SEEMED I asked Fiore if having a posthumous online UNCOMFORTABLE presence makes it easier to think about dying. Could the “online cemetery” replace the real one? He WITH METAPHYSICAL seemed uncomfortable with metaphysical questions.

QUESTIONS. “I never really gave it much thought,” he said. “I want to make sure that in my time here I do the right things for sustaining the cemetery’s future, forever and ever.” For now, that means keeping technology at an involved but careful distance. “You really can’t APRIL 2015

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snowy grounds on their phones, and I could hear their laughter as I approached.

“This death and dying class is not something I’m into,” Tina told me, shaking her head. She’s become increasingly uncomfortable over the course of the semester, she said. “I don’t think you’re ever prepared to die.” I told them about the app and opened the home page. They raised their eyebrows, but Tina seemed to get it. “Online has become the physical for a lot of people,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “It’s like when you go into a wake and see pictures framed on a table.”

Shironda’s grandmother died three weeks before that day, and her family had just brought home the cremated remains. As we walked to her car, she talked about the process of accepting the loss. She would never use something like the Evergreen app, “but today answered a lot of questions,” she told me, getting into the driver’s seat. She headed back to school to finish class as the snow fell.

Driving down the Evergreen asphalt, Shironda reminded me of something important: she, along with Fiore, Lindemann, her classmates, and I, can leave the cemetery at any time. For the thousands lying still beneath the grass, though, the app might be the only to way to do that, to transcend a carved stone and fading memories. As family members create online resting places more personal than small plots of land, the “cemetery for the living” can extend beyond the fences of Evergreen. That’s good business for Fiore. But for someone like me, the user, meeting these people for the first time on the app, scrolling through profiles feels like peering into a private museum.

Elena Saavedra Buckley is a freshman in Silliman College.

She is an associate editor of The New Journal.

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profile

THE DREAM HOUSE A lifetime of dolls under one roof

by Ruby Bilger

Photo by Ruby Bilger

W

hen you walk into Calling All Dolls, a doll shop and repair facility in Cobalt, Connecticut, the atmosphere feels tense. It’s as if you suddenly interrupted a group conversation and everyone looked in a different direction, trying to ignore the intrusion.

Dolls with moony eyes and plastic hair, porcelain dolls with tattered Victorian dresses, designer dolls with photo-realistic eyes sit across from each other, stuffed in a room and suspended in a disrupted moment.

They don’t frighten the shop’s owner, Renee Silvester.

She put them that way. She fixes them when they’re broken. She has been doing this for a long time.

Things last longer than people do; that’s the great romance of collecting. But the popularity of kitsch objects is much shorter than a human lifespan. And so the collector’s nostalgia is split between the longing for a time no one remembers and the wistful memory of one’s own life years ago—in a different world, full of different things. Silvester knows both impulses well, as the owner of a doll collection spanning the nineteenth century to the present day. But at heart, she is a child of the 1950s. This was the greatest era of American dolls, she says, when toy companies started using plastic instead of a wood-pulp material called composition. Suddenly, dolls were cheaper to manufacture and more durable, ushering in a new age APRIL 2015

of brand-name vinyl companions—Patti PlayPal, Toni, Boopsie, Lolly, Judy Splinters; the list goes on. (Barbie, who debuted in 1959, technically belongs to this era as well. This is irrelevant to Silvester. “Barbie doesn’t do it for me. I want a big doll,” she told me. “You can buy Barbie for five dollars in a drugstore. That’s not a doll in my mind.”)

Silvester has a deep and engrossing appreciation for her dolls as artifacts—both of their historical era and her own life. She seems to define her childhood in terms of dolls. Growing up in a lower-middle-class Italian family in Cromwell, Connecticut, “you’d get one doll a year, at Christmas, maybe one on your birthday.” Silvester’s older sister Maria (who owns a doll shop in Florida) sewed her doll clothes from fabric scraps. Silvester is proud and a little defensive of her upbringing. “I’m obsessed with high-quality doll clothes, I think, because we had to make all of our own when we were little girls,” she told me. But the skills came in handy—the wardrobe she sewed herself in high school won her “Best Dressed” in the yearbook’s senior superlatives.

Silvester wanted to open a doll hospital since she first successfully reunited a doll’s leg with its body as a teenager. But her financial savvy trumped her childhood fantasies, so, newly married at 22, she worked 17

administrative jobs at people hospitals and orthopedic practices. Travelling often for business, she started scouring antique shops for anything old and sentimental—mirrors, dolls, clothes. She even has a collection of fifties-era alligator purses, all made from real alligator skin, and topped off with a taxidermied baby alligator. All thirty-five of them filled the lobby of the orthopedic practice where she worked, until an antileather activist picketed for their removal.

Throughout the early seventies, Silvester and her husband flipped houses. They took out loans to acquire “handyman specials”—multi-family homes that needed major repairs—and renovated them on nights and weekends. They rented them out and Silvester managed the tenants, all the while working full time and raising two daughters and a son. It’s not clear how she managed such a huge workload. She has roundabout way of talking. Often she ends up at the logical opposite of where she started, despite finishing with a tone of finality. “Don’t forget—there’s no fun in my life. But that’s where I think I’m a little different. The fun stuff has always been work. What’s fun for you, going out partying on a Friday night? Well for me, when I was younger, I used to go out dancing at clubs. Ah, I was a maniac dancer. On tables, and that sort of thing.”

Regardless of how she did the work, it paid off.

In 1981 Silvester and her husband could finally afford the Captain Ralph Smith House, a 1780s-era building not far from Cobalt. “That was the Dream House,” Silvester recalls. Her plans changed four years later, when her husband died in a motorcycle accident. She moved out of the Dream House, but she came into a bit of inheritance money and was finally able to collect dolls seriously. She treats this tragedy-fortune complex matter-of-factly. “I just kept doing things without him. Never stopped.”

I first visited Calling All Dolls because its name sounded like an escort service. I was travelling with two male friends at the time, and we noticed a sign on the store’s front lawn that said “Meet Grace, Doll of the Year!” None of us had ever been inside a doll shop or an escort service, and we were eager to meet this mysterious “Doll of the Year.” We shuffled through deep snow to make it to the front door, where a small, hand-crank bell was situated at just the right 18

height for a little girl. I bent down and rang it. A short woman in a grandmotherly fleece answered. Her big eyes scanned us over and steadied—it was Silvester.

“Welcome,” she said. “You’re the first customers I’ve had all day.” She motioned us in and shook our hands.

“And you’re in a little harem!”

Once inside, we were in the company of a thousand un-blinking eyes. I quickly realized what surrounded us—American Girl dolls, their vacant faces all the same. Children are her main customer base, Silvester explained, and they don’t like vintage dolls.

But Silvester knows what they do like. Standing in the room felt like being inside of a birthday cake.

The smooth pink plaster had white crown moldings, the little chandelier cast the space in a honey glow, and American Girls sat on every wall, table, shelf, and crevice in sight. The Doll of the Year was one of them—her name was Grace, and her signature trait was “Francophile”. Around her, there dolls on a table poised for a sleepover. An ice skater doll in a victory pose. A group of cool doll friends having a camping trip by the window. And, confusingly, a doll on the counter with a waxen head and a legless torso, straw bleeding from the stumps.

Suddenly, a man with a hamster in each hand emerged from a door behind the cash register. Silvester introduced him as Jeff, her buddy that helps with repairs on weekends. “This is Peanut, and this is Princess,” he told me, as one of the vicious rodents wriggled out of his grip and clawed at his arm. “They’re usually asleep. You can hold them. Peanut’s a biter.”

“They used to be my grandchildren’s,” Silvester explained. “But they got bored of them, so they live here now.”

“Do you live here, too?” I asked her.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “I have a space in the back.

It’s also my repair room. And, of course, at night I pull out a sleeping bag and sleep with the dolls.” We made eye contact. She held it.

“What?” I said.

She paused for a second, with a wide, tepid smile.

Then replied, “I’m kidding.”

I returned to Silvester’s store a few months later, this time with a female friend who, Silvester noted, highly resembled a collection of red-haired artisan dolls in the store. Eager to talk, Silvester took us on a THE NEW JOURNAL

tour. In a side room, dolls clustered in little displays, organized by time period and country—a group of rosy-cheeked German dolls from the early nineteenhundreds in the corner; crazed, yarn-haired nineteensixties-era cloth dolls on the shelf; a subdued brunette in a blue dress, sitting alone. American doll companies really started in the twenties, Silvester told me.

The brunette was one of the only American antique dolls made in the early twentieth century, manufactured by a New Jersey company that operated from 1918 to 1921.

Nearby, dozens of shoddily painted Native American figurines populated a glass case. “Skookums!” said Silvester. “This company paid housewives to assemble the dolls from a kit. Now, none of them look the same—look, some are carrying little babies! Ah.” She clicked her tongue and tossed her head back, like a southern belle swooning at a pleasant thought.

“They’re my little Navajos.” They were all smiling and painted in with permanent side-eye, looking politely uncomfortable. Silvester said the right-side glance is a sign of good luck.

Next, Silvester took us to the infirmary in the back room. When she’s not selling American Girls to little children, she’s repairing their parents’ childhood companions, or their ancestors’ stately heirloom dolls.

She runs this part of the business in the middle of her kitchen, working from three shelves of convalescent doll beds whose occupants have all sorts of gruesome injuries. A forties-era baby doll with a smashed-in face lay beside twin boudoir dolls from the twenties, naked with no eyes. Underneath them, a teddy bear hemorrhaged stuffing. “I spend all my time in the doll hospital,” Silvester said. “I never cook. Women spend too much time in the kitchen, that’s what I think.”

Customers aren’t generally allowed in the hospital.

“When little girls see a broken doll, they scream!” she explained. “If they see an old doll, they say, ‘ewwww.’”

The doll market is peculiar nowadays. American Girls, with their look-like-me appeal and their strange, blank uniformity, by far outsell any other eighteeninch doll on the market for children. Meanwhile, a whole community of doll artists use glass eyes, human hair, and extremely lifelike molds, creating limited-release dolls for adult collectors.

Silvester’s favorite dolls come from one of these collections. They’re new, from 2005, designed by the German doll artist Annette Himstedt. Himstedt spent a year travelling the world and capturing the likenesses APRIL 2015

of the little girls she saw in eerily realistic vinyl. Silvester has ten of them and knows all of their names. “This one is Natiti, my little Aborigine,” she said, stroking her hair. “And Tawni, she’s another Navajo. She’s my favorite.” Tawni’s eyes were deep-set and fuzzy with lashes around the edges, so attentively detailed they were almost cartoonish. “Those are human prosthetic eyes,” Silvester said, then insisted, “They’re real eyes.”

She walked away from the doll and a little ironically, a little wistfully, smiled. “I paid one thousand a piece for them. Ah, I sometimes kiss them, I love them so much.”

Tawni and her friends stand stepwise on the stairwell, which is the first display customers see when they walk in. About eight people come into Calling All Dolls every day. The rest of the time Silvester is alone in the store, or her home, which doesn’t start or end anywhere distinct. She works constantly. She says she’s finally living her dream. Still, wandering around Calling All Dolls, it feels less like the realization of a long-held vision than a life’s retrospective, Silvester’s personal memory palace of dreams and experiences.

The orthopedic practices turned a doll hospital, the antique Dream House an overflowing doll shop, the childhood memories resurrected in the staring, ageless company of the rooms—I wonder how much Silvester works, and how much she just reflects.

Perhaps the reflection was always the point for Silvester. For someone who surrounds herself with little-girl-likenesses, she isn’t bursting with affection for the real ones.

“The kids now, they don’t just want dolls. They want the Kindles, the iPods, and all the technology,” she says. But she relishes the experience her shop gives young visitors. “When little girls walk in here, they must think it’s a palace. And that’s my reward— they’re going to remember that the rest of their lives.”

Given Silvester’s keen sense of objects and memory, she’s probably right. Even if some of those enchanted little girls will remember accidentally wandering nto Silvester’s kitchen, and running out screaming, “Ah! What did she do to that doll’s eyes!”

Ruby Bilger is a freshman in Branford College.

She is an associate editor of The New Journal.

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THE NEW JOURNAL

EXPECT THE

WORST In an age of false security, preppers plan for disaster

By Isabelle Taft Illustrations by Ivy Sanders-Schneider

APRIL 2015

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T

he walls of Nick Provost’s suburban Connecticut living room are decorated with a taxidermied deer head and a few grandmotherish tchotchkes in the colors of the American flag. A flat-screen television occupies one corner. Provost’s three blonde daughters, ages 9, 8, and 7, chase each other through the room.

About a dozen people sit around on couches, chairs, and stools.

Nick Provost, a boyish 28-year-old with a warm, crooked smile, lies on the floor. A black strap called a Hasty Harness is wrapped between his legs, behind his back and around his armpits. The people sitting in a semicircle around his prone body watch carefully as Jason Wyman, a barrel-chested former army medic whose beard looks long enough to reach his navel, holds the ends of the strap and pulls up. One of Wyman’s arms is covered in ornate gothic script that reads, “From the gates of hell.” On the other arm is printed “To the halls of Valhalla.” Wyman easily drags Provost’s muscular six-foot frame using the lightweight contraption. Provost groans as the straps tightens around his upper thighs.

“My primary rule: pain is the patient’s problem,” Wyman says.

The observers had come to learn, from a combat medic, how to care for the victims of countless violent scenarios: mall shootings, car accidents, pipe bomb explosions, home invasions, urban riots. The type of disaster that might require a Hasty Harness seemed far away from Provost’s living room on that grey Saturday in November. But for the people watching Provost squirm—members of a Facebook group he runs called the Community Rapid Response Team (CRRT)—planning for the worst is a way of life. Their group is a small part of the vast network of Americans interested in disaster preparedness and self-defense.

The “prepper” lifestyle was made famous by the Na-

THOSE “BAD SITUATIONS” RUN THE GAMUT FROM A MASSIVE SNOWSTORM TO A HOME INVASION.

22

tional Geographic show Doomsday Preppers—a lovechild of TLC’s Hoarders and MTV’s Cribs, with the addition of existential and often politicized dread. But many CRRT members, including Provost, reject that label, conscious of the stereotype that preppers are paranoid, irrational, or crazy.

“We’re not a militia, we’re not survivalist, we’re not preppers,” Provost says. “We go about our normal lives and we prepare to take action in bad situations.”

Those “bad situations” run the gamut from a massive snowstorm to a home invasion. The good news is that modernity offers up a host of useful gadgets and gizmos, approved by the U.S. military and available for purchase online or at particularly well-supplied outdoor equipment stores. With a little ingenuity and a bit of cash (the Hasty Harness costs just twenty-five dollars), the average American can feel ready to fight whatever Mother Nature or a fellow human being dishes out.

A former soldier now supervising shifts at a plant that manufactures nuts and bolts, Provost established CRRT in the summer of 2014. CRRT became the latest addition to a virtual world of disaster preparedness and self-sufficiency communities, joining the Connecticut Preppers group (“Preparation for when ‘IT’ happens!”) and the Connecticut Preppers Network page’s 900+ members. The CRRT group now has over 170 members, twelve of whom paid Wyman fifty dollars to attend the medical course. Twenty to thirty regularly attend events.

Jason Wyman, the medical instructor, spent four years as a military medic in Iraq. He was there in 2005, during the insurgency. When he came home to Maine, he brought with him stories of shrapnel-studded organs, jellied brains, exploded limbs, the comrades he had saved and those he hadn’t. Now, as an instructor at the self-defense training company Muzzle Front, he teaches civilians how to do what he did. But instead of gearing up for patrol in Fallujah, they’re protecting themselves for a trip to the mall.

The members of the CRRT focus on everyday disasters. I spoke with people who use downtime at work to browse the web for supplies and devote weekends to practicing marksmanship. For others, a trip to the grocery store is an occasion to pick up a few extra cans of beans to add to their stockpile. One man begins his daily commute by checking that the bag filled with medical supplies and enough food and water for 72 hours is still tucked safely in his car’s back THE NEW JOURNAL

seat. They rarely discuss such behavior with outsiders, who often dismiss these actions as paranoid. Quietly, methodically, they stock the basement shelves.

Driven in part by nostalgia, members of the CRRT ultimately advocate self-sufficiency. They invoke the lifestyles of their grandparents to explain why they do what they do. Two generations ago, they insist, every household in America stocked enough food to last a week without power or transportation. Kids learned basic survival skills on camping trips, everyone knew their neighbors, and journalists told the truth. The off-screen, Regular Joe disaster preparedness movement is rooted in the belief that Americans back then had less to fear, when the national lifestyle was one of communal sufficiency. Their behavior is a response to distinctly contemporary events. They’re often violent, and occasionally horrific: September 11, mass shootings, the financial meltdown. Responding to these events requires preppers, despite their nostalgia for a bygone way of life, to embrace the complex technology and grim outlook that pervade our times. I am not surprised, then, that Jason Wyman was teaching us how to conduct triage, not how to plant victory gardens.

The group in Provost’s living room reflects the demographics of the broader disaster preparedness crowd, estimated at three million Americans and growing: mostly male, mostly white, mostly middle-aged.

Wyman’s instruction takes up the better part of two hours, during which the audience asks many questions. Should you try to remove shrapnel from a patient? Where can you buy the equipment to set up an IV unit? Can a tampon be used to stop bleeding from bullet wounds?

When he finishes covering the material, Wyman pulls out a large brown pack and takes out its contents to show everyone what to consider purchasing for their own medical equipment kit.

“This is my fuckin’ murse,” he says. “Got multiple kinds of beard lotion because that shit’s important.”

There are also eye drops, bandages, Ace wrap, gloves, a bandage with a plastic closure apparatus, and a large holster called a “thigh rig” that allows the wearer to strap supplies around their hips and both legs.

After showing off his equipment, Wyman tells APRIL 2015

23

us to present our medical emergency kits so he can evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. On the couch beside me, a middle-aged man in a neat button-down shirt sets down the yellow legal pad and pen with which he’s been carefully taking notes.

“My kit’s in the car, but I’m not even going to go get it,” he says, seeming ashamed of and a little guilty about his substandard equipment.

He introduced himself as Frank. Frank now lives in the greater Hartford area and works in real estate, but he traces his prepper impulse back to the long gasoline lines he witnessed as a 6-year-old in Connecticut during the 1973 oil embargo. He learned then that basic assumptions of American life could be quickly and unpredictably undermined, though he didn’t start prepping in earnest until a few years ago.

He can’t pinpoint a specific event or experience that led him to begin stockpiling food, taking self-defense classes, and researching humanity’s long history of disasters, but he thinks the recession of 2008 made the world seem a more fragile place.

In the scores of credit card-carrying customers at the grocery store, Frank sees a contemporary insecurity. What will happen if the power goes out? Or if the computer systems that allow cashless transactions fail? The everyday technology that makes the modern American lifestyle so convenient, so easy, so comfortable, Frank says, is particularly vulnerable to attack or malfunction.

Frank can rattle off a cascading list of crises ending at the present: in 1859, a major coronal mass ejection—a burst of solar wind that caused electrical disturbances on earth; in the nineteen-seventies, the gasoline shortages; September 11; Hurricane Katrina; the Great Recession; Hurricane Sandy; the blizzard Nemo. His primary concerns are natural disasters, financial crises, and home invasion. He considers the more extreme potentialities only as a kind of enjoyable thought experiment on prepper forums and Facebook groups.

“We’ll discuss what we would do, like if you knew an asteroid was coming,” he explains. “Fun stuff.”

Frank is a generalist. Like others I meet, he prides himself on not wasting mental energy and resources seriously preparing for unlikely events such as the asteroid collision. His approach to general preparedness is systematic and disciplined. And though many of the disasters he fears are caused by modern technology, that same technology has enabled him to connect 24

with thousands of like-minded individuals to share thoughts on preparedness.

Robert Higgins, one of the CRRT’s most active members, owns Muzzle Front, the self-defense training business where Wyman works. Higgins thinks that the actions of American preppers now congregating en masse online would have seemed unremarkable a

THEY MIGHT RELISH A SHITHITS-THE-FAN MOMENT AS A KIND OF ADVENTURE, MAYBE EVEN AS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR HEROISM.

generation ago. He believes that contemporary Americans embrace convenience more than ever before. As American urbanization has continued, camping and outdoor activities interest people less than they once did. In earlier generations, when people lived farther from shopping centers and had stronger memories of hardship, they were sturdier. Higgins’s parents were born just after the Great Depression, and they grew vegetables and canned them for the winter in his childhood. Sometime in the nineteen-nineties, he realized that such behavior was increasingly unusual.

“The more people had easy access to things, the less they stored things in their home,” he says. “Fiscally that can make sense. Why have anything sitting on your shelf when you could go get it at any time and still have access to the capital should [a disaster] arrive?”

While Frank considers his online prepping research and socializing fun, others consider it deadly serious business. Higgins teaches a host of self-defense classes at Muzzle Front. The company’s courses offer “tactical” self-defense training, which means that instead of firing their pistols at a paper target or performing roundhouse kicks on a dummy, participants learn to deal with surprise attacks. “Attempting a particular punt or kick may reveal that a preexisting injury prevents the effective use of that particular THE NEW JOURNAL

movement,” Muzzle Front’s website explains. “Better to discover it in the dojo, than in some back alley with Pookie the Crackhead.”

Some of the people interested in his courses harbor fears that Higgins considers extreme. He doesn’t cater to such people, whom he describes as “on the brink of paranoia,” but rather to those who have what he considers legitimate concerns and reasonable plans to address them. Sitting in Blue State Coffee on Wall Street, he tells of his encounters with people on the fringe. Higgins once went to a meeting of the Connecticut State Militia, a group that prepares to fight back in the event of a government attack on the American people. Their Facebook group is closed but offers a description that includes the emphatic claim that “THIS IS AMERICA, NOT RUSSIA, NOT CUBA, NOT CHINA AND SURE AS HELL ISNT NAZI GERMANY!!!!”

When he arrived, Higgins found a group of peo-

APRIL 2015

ple who represented the sect of preppers from which he distances himself.

“I said to them, ‘You look like a bunch of white supremacists, you look like you’re ready to attack the world, and you look like a bunch of middle-to-oldaged white guys,’” Higgins says. “I offered to help steer them in the right direction, and leadership decided that they didn’t need that help. They were an interesting group of individuals.”

As Higgins explains the underground landscape of Connecticut’s radicals, a man near us in Blue State seems to be tilting his head in to listen.

“It’s not polite to eavesdrop,” Higgins rebukes him.

I don’t blame the man for listening. I, too, find it hard to understand how someone could see America on the road to becoming a new Third Reich.

Higgins views this extremism as a predictable outcome of the way we consume news and information today. Dark rumors spread rapidly across comput-

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er screens and televisions. When Frank says he believes today’s America faces a uniquely volatile economic and international relations landscape, referencing the crisis in Crimea, quantitative easing, ISIS, and cyber attacks, it’s hard to tell if we actually face more threats, or if we are simply more aware of them. Perhaps the past is appealing because back then we were less cognizant of danger.

The members of CRRT draw a sharp line between themselves and extremists. The CRRT doesn’t obsess over government plots like the Connecticut Militia.

“WE’RE NOT A MILITIA, WE’RE NOT SURVIVALIST, WE’RE NOT PREPPERS. WE GO ABOUT OUR NORMAL LIVES AND WE PREPARE TO TAKE ACTION IN BAD SITUATIONS.” — NICK PROVOST

Frank, who owns a pistol for self-defense and a rifle for hunting, seems to enjoy preparing for disasters in the same way other people enjoy crafting or training for triathlons. But when I ask how he spells his last name, he hesitates. He worried about giving away too many identifying details.

“We talk about this thing called op-sec, operational security,” he explains. “If something was to hit the fan, they would know where to get my supplies.”

Though the Internet plays a crucial role in connecting preparedness-minded Americans, the mission of the CRRT is to build community in person. In addition to the medical training class, the group has participated in hikes, a cold-weather pistol technique class, and overnight camping trips. Provost’s cousin, Adam Hummel, believes that what makes CRRT special is its rejection of the isolation instinct that leads 26

preppers to hoard knowledge and resources. He recently posted a message encouraging members to ask each other for help with spring cleaning projects and renovations.

Provost sometimes gets into virtual arguments, defending cooperation within families and communities as key to survival. In response to preppers who insist that, come the Big One, they will barricade themselves inside their homes with their weapons and stockpiled food, Provost always poses the same question: “What happens when I come burn your house down?” he asks. “You have to come out of the house.”

Provost’s disdain for aggressive individualism is a far cry from the blunt self-interest prevalent on other prepper forums. Alex Kingsbury, a self-described moderate prepper I met on the Connecticut forum of the American Prepper Network site, said he doubted many people would want to be interviewed because they fear compromising their identity, location and supplies.

“I don’t know you, but I think it’s probably pretty unlikely that you’ll show up at my house with a gun to steal my beans,” Kingsbury says.

Given their emphasis on amassing supplies and equipment, catering to preppers is big business across the country. Companies offer everything from fairly standard camping supplies to vast quantities of dehydrated food to ready-to-use nuclear bunkers.

“There’s a whole industry out there,” Hummel says.

Hummel, who serves as the group’s IT specialist, established a program on Amazon that allows equipment vendors to sell their products to his members at discounted prices. Sitting at his office desk, he pulls up the group’s Amazon page and lists off items members have bought: water bottle holders, fishing kits, emergency blankets, and a physician’s desk reference.

Within this community, as in many American communities, the act of consumption bonds people together. The CRRT members in Provost’s living room ooh and aah at the disaster gear Wyman shows off the way I imagine Greenwich matriarchs admire expensive clothing at trunk shows.

Some companies marketed to preppers focus on a particular genre of disaster. Based in Gonzales, Texas, a company called Ki4u.com sells items to help people survive nuclear disaster. An $815 “Radiation THE NEW JOURNAL

Safety Combo Package” includes radiation detection devices, KI tablets and facemasks to minimize contamination, as well as several books and pamphlets produced by the company. One is entitled “The Good News About Nuclear Destruction!”

Other companies profit by selling “situational awareness,” according to Stephen Austakalnis, who founded AlertsUSA in the aftermath of September 11 to help people access immediate information about threats emanating from all over the globe. His team of six spends all day monitoring news outlets around the world. When they notice a potentially troubling development—say, the murder of a Mexican politician by a drug cartel or an announcement that American troops will be sent to battle Ebola in West Africa—they send an alert to twenty thousand subscribers. The subscription is ninety-nine dollars per year.

The American Preppers Network offers users the opportunity to become “Gold Members.” For sixty dollars annually, the Gold Member gains access to an exclusive newsletter, special discounts at shops that offer survival APRIL 2015

food and supplies, and a private Facebook page to connect with others similarly dedicated to surviving disaster.

For five hundred dollars, one can obtain “Platinum Lifetime Membership” and receive these benefits for life.

In Connecticut, the Old Saybrook storefront of Harris Outdoors began as an Amazon vendor account.

Bob Harris, the owner, bought and resold outdoor supplies he considered high quality, and soon local customers were filling his driveway, eager to pick up equipment instead of paying for shipping. Now, he does almost all his sales out of the shop he opened three years ago and recently doubled in size. He sees about twenty to thirty customers a week, estimating that at least half are preppers.

“Our more reliable customers seem to be a fairly tight-knit community,” Harris tells me over the phone.

“As far as our success story, the biggest thing has been word of mouth.”

Harris considers himself a “common-sense prepper.” He stocks his home with extra food and practices his outdoor survival skills through backpacking trips.

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When I visit his shop in March, the inside looks similar to an REI. There are sleeping bags, water filtration devices, shoes, backpacks, and first aid kits. A couple spends at least half an hour chatting with Harris about his collection of duck decoys, set up in the back corner of the store.

Harris admits there is a good deal of overlap between backpackers and preppers, and it can be hard to tell them apart based on their purchases. Many outdoor enthusiasts read the shop’s slogan, “Prepared for every adventure,” and don’t recognize the range of meanings the words “prepared” and “adventure” can assume. Talking to Frank, Higgins, and others, I get the impression that they might relish a shit-hits-the-fan moment as a kind of adventure,

IT’S IMPORTANT THAT PARTICIPANTS FEEL A REAL SENSE OF DANGER AND POTENTIAL PAIN, BECAUSE OTHERWISE THE EXPERIENCE WON’T MIMIC REAL LIFE, WHEN THE MAN TRYING TO HOLD YOU HOSTAGE IN YOUR OWN HOME WON’T BE SHOOTING RUBBER BULLETS.

maybe even as an opportunity for heroism. But they still bear little resemblance to the Doomsday Preppers who are morbidly convinced of imminent destruction. I ask Harris what he thinks about the show and its depiction of excessive consumption of niche products as the route to salvation. He says the people on Doomsday Preppers just aren’t very good at prepping.

“Honestly, I think they’re stupid to be on that show, because they’re disclosing all the things you shouldn’t be disclosing,” he says, referencing their exhibition of their bunkers, food supplies, and back28

up generators, now vulnerable to attack or theft.

“They sold themselves to the devil.”

Harris’s response to Doomsday Preppers points to the eventual limits of some preppers’ desire to help one another in crisis situations. A certain degree of secrecy is crucial to survive in a world of scarcity and competition. Even when the catastrophic event is a natural disaster, the use of physical force against other people must be on the table. As Frank puts it, New Orleans descended into anarchy within a few days of Hurricane Katrina. Stockpiled food is only as good as your ability to defend it. No one at the medical training class mentioned it, but the hotdogs and potato chips in Provost’s kitchen were secure; after one woman had to remove her pistol holster to try on Wyman’s thigh rig, I looked around the room and realized nearly every adult was carrying a weapon.

At Wyman’s course, someone’s box of bullets spills over a coffee table in the Provosts’ living room. One of Provost’s daughters wanders through.

She leans over the coffee table and rolls the bullets under her tiny fingers. Their cold metal casing slides across the wooden surface. The potential for violence is omnipresent, even casual, but there’s not much discussion about how to take down the gunman or the home invader. The class is all about what to do once the fighting stops.

Because self-defense seems to be a crucial component of prepping, I wanted to talk with people as they actively work on their ability to fight. In February, I learned from the CRRT Facebook group about a course taking place one weekend at King 33, a “public safety training” center in Southington. The class was a two-day home-defense course taught by a special forces veteran named Larry Vickers. Participants would learn how to use firearms to defend their homes and businesses from attack. Topics to be covered included “weapons manipulation, movement and approaches, room entry and domination, family member rescues, safe room set-up and defense, low light encounters, surgical shooting exercises, etc.” The course cost six hundred dollars. There would be actual shooting.

The King 33 facility is located off Highway 84 in a complex of former warehouses. King 33’s door is tiny, unremarkable relative to the enormous warehouse behind it. At least fifty cars sprawl across the THE NEW JOURNAL

parking lot, bearing license plates from Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware.

I step inside a small foyer with a television, a few chairs, and a desk with a nearly emptied box of Dunkin’ Donuts doughnut holes. A man and woman who look to be in their 70s stand up from the desk.

They are Pat and John Michaels, friends of King 33’s owner Chris Fields, a special operations veteran. The couple greets me with expressions first of concern, because the door is opening twenty minutes late, and then confusion. I don’t look like their typical client.

After I explain that I’d like to meet participants in the course, John leaves through a door across the room to search for someone to ask about my request, leaving Pat and me to chat. A television is set to Fox News. On screen, a boat is being pummeled by violent waves somewhere in the Atlantic, waiting for rescue.

Pat tells me about the courses King 33 offers: pistol safety, marksmanship, self-defense, women-only self-defense, and a slew of courses designed for law enforcement personnel. The self-defense classes don’t require participants to use firearms, she says. “You should take it. Especially living in New Haven.”

After a few minutes, John Michaels returns and leads me through the other door into a much larger space—so large a car is parked inside. John explains that students use the car to practice defending themselves from an attacker waiting for shoppers incapacitated by their bounteous purchases.

A higher-up comes in and apologizes: the course isn’t run by King 33 but by Larry Vickers, so they can’t give me permission to go inside the training facility or meet participants.

“They’re good people, but they’re private people,” Michaels says.

Besides, it’s a live-fire course with bullets that can draw blood, and I don’t have proper protective gear.

It’s important that participants feel a real sense of danger and potential pain, because otherwise the experience won’t mimic real life, when the man trying to hold you hostage in your own home won’t be shooting rubber bullets.

I say goodbye to John and Pat and walk back out into the snow, past the dozens of cars, empty storage units and a rusting water tower. I start walking down the road, trudging away from King 33. I’ve only gone a few hundred feet before a car pulls up beside me and the driver rolls down her window. She smiles at me and asks if I need a ride. I tell her no, thank you.

APRIL 2015

“Are you sure?” she nods her head at the toddler in the back seat. “We’re just headed up the road to Stop and Shop. It’s no trouble.”

That’s all right, I say.

“Oh, are you staying at the park?” she gestures behind her. I turn and look down the long, empty road, which must stretch onward to a place where young people camp even in the winter. It strikes me that she is probably not aware that close by, dozens of people are running around a warehouse in bulletproof vests, shooting at each other, diligently preparing to protect their families. She does not realize the risk she takes in driving through the snow without an emergency supply of food and medicine. She’s not thinking about how vulnerable she makes herself simply by living in America today—talking to strangers, paying for her groceries with a credit card, trusting that it will all be O.K. I think about Frank, who seems as typical as the woman now offering me a ride. He told me, at the end of the medical disaster class, “You just never know what’s going to happen.”

He’s right, of course. The woman and her child drive away to the Stop and Shop, where the fluorescent lights are always bright, the number of cereal brands dazzles, and the imported vegetables shine. I keep walking through the snow.

Isabelle Taft is a sophomore in Silliman College.

She is the managing editor of The New Journal.

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THE NEW JOURNAL

T H E U N C E RTA I N H O U R

Standing at the threshold of society, newly released inmates plan their next steps

Story and photos by Edward Columbia

APRIL 2015

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H

udson Street, just off of Whalley Avenue, looks like any other street after a hard winter. The asphalt is pocked with fresh potholes, the sidewalks cracked from months of ice. Debris litters the edges of the road—stray tires, plastic bottles, scraps of clothing, a discarded pair of shoes. The shoes look like black-and-white low-top Converse, but their rubber soles are thinner and flimsier, and the ripped canvas bears no insignia. They are state-issued prison sneakers, given to inmates by the Department of Correction On one side of the street is a row of houses with small front yards; on the other is a row of cellblocks behind barbed wire. This is the New Haven Community Correctional Center, commonly known as Whalley Jail.

Roughly eighty male prisoners are released each month at the jail’s back gate on Hudson Street. On average, twenty-five of these men are released directly from the county jail. The rest are dropped there from prisons all over Connecticut. They walk out in the early morning hours, quietly and inconspicuously.

At around 6:30 a.m., a white minibus with gold and blue trim pulls into the gate’s entryway. A correctional officer sits in the driver’s seat holding a clipboard. The passenger windows are tinted and reinforced with metal mesh. The gate slides open, and the bus drives through. After a moment, the gate closes.

The officer walks into the building and returns a few minutes later. He opens the door of the bus, and three men file out. They wear DOC-issued clothing—long-sleeved white shirts and loose white or tan pants. Each man’s wrists are bound by metal cuffs that connect to a chain around his waist. They rattle as they walk through the sally port, the controlled release area at the back of Whalley Jail.

At 7:00 a.m., the three men reemerge. The cuffs are gone. In place of prison tans, one man now wears a pair of blue jeans. Another wears a checkered flannel shirt. Each man holds a brown paper bag full of his possessions.

They stand behind the gate, waiting for it to open.

The man in the middle bounces up and down.

“I fuckin’ hate this place,” he says, as much to himself as to the two men beside him, who nod in agreement.

The gate begins to open. As soon as it slides wide enough to fit through, the three men rush out onto the sidewalk, smiling. Two of them take a left out of the gate and begin walking toward Whalley Avenue.

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“You got any smokes?” one man asks me as he passes by.

“Nah man, sorry.”

The third man, still in full prison clothes, turns right out of the gate. He is practically running, but he stops when he sees the pair of shoes on the sidewalk.

“Somebody left they skippies,” he says, laughing.

He pauses, then continues down the street. He rounds the corner. Only moments have passed since the gate opened, and already all three men have disappeared from view. But where are they going?

An inmate in the Connecticut DOC can arrange to be picked up at the end of his sentence from the facility where he has served his time.

He also has the option of requesting DOC transport to one of four drop-off sites: Middletown Courthouse, Hartford Courthouse, Bridgeport Correctional Center, or New Haven Correctional Center. If there is no one to pick him up from the drop-off site he chooses, the DOC provides a 90-minute bus pass upon release.

Men who choose to be dropped off at Whalley Jail typically return to New Haven or to a nearby town.

The same is true for women, who are let out near the police department headquarters on Union Avenue.

I went to Whalley Jail each morning for two weeks to meet men as they were released. Even those who had been incarcerated for a short time—less than a year—spoke of the anxiety of reintegration and the uncertainty of what lay ahead. After a long period of living under prison conditions, the first steps back into society can be overwhelming. The world they return to is neither fully prepared nor totally willing to support men coming out of prison. Employment is hard to come by, especially while many ex-offenders grapple with housing instability or chronic health problems. Returning to high-risk areas can trigger relapse, into substance abuse or crime.

A 2008 study by the Connecticut Department of Corrections found that forty-seven percent of exoffenders return to prison within two years of release, twenty-one percent within the first six months.

Yet many New Haven residents regard ex-offenders as a threat, rather than a population in need. Several years ago, the local community protested the release of the men directly onto the busy thoroughfare of Whalley Avenue. For that reason, they now walk onto sleepy Hudson Street, out of sight and out of mind.

THE NEW JOURNAL

“YOU’RE NOT FREE WHEN YOU GET OUTTA JAIL.” — PAUL

APRIL 2015

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I follow the two men who turned left out of the gate. I find them sitting in a booth at the McDonald’s across Whalley Avenue.

“How you guys doing?” I ask “Doin’ good man.”

“Better than yesterday.”

The man in blue jeans who asked me for cigarettes outside the jail gate tells me his name is Steven.

The correctional officer at the sally port gave him the jeans, left behind by another inmate. He wears them in place of the tans he arrived in. His off-white, longsleeved T-shirt and white sneakers are his from before his stint inside.

His salt-and-pepper hair is buzz cut, and his clean-shaven cheeks are nicked with small scars. He has a wheezy laugh and a wry smile that curls up on one side of his mouth. He is 49 years old.

Paul, the other man, is muscular, with a handsome, chiseled face and short brown hair. He takes off his checkered flannel shirt (also given to him at the sally port) to reveal a blue Catholic cross tattooed along the side of his right bicep. He is 34. He wears black-and-white canvas “skippies,” like the ones left on the sidewalk, and he tells me his feet are still freezing from the cold walk.

Paul picks up the flannel shirt and walks over to a table where an old man in a raggedy winter jacket sits watching television. He drapes the shirt over the back of the man’s chair and comes back to our booth.

“He needs it more than I do,” Paul says, gesturing with his thumb to the man, who has put the shirt on his lap.

“Damn straight,” Steven replies.

Paul pulls on a gray sweatshirt with “NHCC” written under the collar in black block letters. He hunches over, his elbows on the table. He drums his fingers and taps his feet, before opening up his crinkled brown bag. Paul spreads some of the letters, notebooks, paperwork, and pamphlets he collected while in prison out on the table. He fiddles with a folder labeled “Reentry and Transitions.” Steven sets his bag on the table but leaves it rolled up.

Steven has just done eight months in the Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center, a combined level three and four high-security prison in Uncasville, where he served time for a domestic violence charge after he threatened his wife—in his case, a 34

Class A misdemeanor. He was originally sentenced to nine months, but he was released one month early for good behavior. He now has two years of probation.

Paul was charged with domestic violence for threatening his ex-girlfriend. He spent three months of his six-month sentence in Radgowski before transferring to a lower-security section of Niantic Annex, where he completed his time. He, too, will be on probation for two years.

Neither of the men is from New Haven, but they chose to be dropped off at Whalley Jail because it is the facility closest to their homes. Steven is from Meriden, Paul from Northford. Steven’s sister should arrive at 8:30 a.m., so he has an hour-and-a-half to kill. Paul uses my phone to call his girlfriend, due to arrive any minute.

“It always feels weird to be coming outta there into society,” Steven says. “We don’t even got normal clothes to wear, so people can spot us easy and tell where we come from. Feels like people are looking at us like we’re crazy. But really they don’t know.”

He smiles and looks at me as though I and everyone else in the McDonald’s are missing an inside joke.

Steven has spent fifteen years of his life behind bars for various charges. He was out for four years before his most recent bid. When I ask him how it feels to be out this time, he shrugs.

“When you’re outta society for so long it just seems like a different world. I mean, I’m just dying to see a twenty-dollar bill. Just the simplest things in life are big right now,” he says.

The men speak with bitterness about the prison conditions they just left, focusing on the difficulty of living without privacy.

“Niantic Annex is a fuckin’ nightmare. It’s level two security, so you think it’s supposed to be better, but it’s fuckin’ terrible,” Paul says.

He tells me that sixty men slept in the bunks on either side of him.

“They’d roll over in their sleep and knock me in the head,” he continues. “There’s nowhere to go.

You’re trapped in this little room with no air. You either sit on your bunk or you sit next to your bunk.

For months. There’s no movement. You’re depressed ’cause you can’t even walk.”

The men focus on the small details of daily life: the uncomfortable sleep, the cold food, the placement of the toilets.

“I was in a room with fourteen people,” Steven THE NEW JOURNAL

says of the Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center.

“Living shoulder to shoulder. All of us using one bathroom. They don’t give you no supplies neither. When you get in they give you a little piece of soap”—he measures a two-inch bar of soap with his fingers— “and the state deodorant, which is like water. When you go to the counselor to ask for something, they say they don’t have nothing. Tell you to bum it off of one of the other inmates.”

Steven tells me there is no hot water allowed in the cells, as hot water can be used as a weapon. To heat food from the commissary, inmates improvise by making a “stinger.” You take an extension cord and cut it open with a pair of nail-clippers, he explains. You pull out the exposed wires, the neutral and the hot, and put a plastic spoon between them. The wires can’t touch. You wrap a scrap of metal around the spoon and wires, stick the end in a tub of water, and plug in the cord. It’s essentially a dead short circuit. Then you wrap your food in a garbage bag and put it in to warm.

Steven and Paul agree, though, that in many ways reentry is much more intimidating than prison.

“When we come out, it’s not over,” Steven says.

“This is the bad part. Jail’s easy. Inside you got no responsibility. You get up, you eat, you shit, you take a shower, you go back to sleep. They tell you when to do everything. This is the real life out here. You gotta figure out which way to turn.”

Paul nods in agreement. The six-month sentence that ended today has been his only time served since a five-year stint after he left the Navy in 2002. He shifts in his seat and fidgets with his belongings. Whenever a car pulls into the parking lot, he hoists himself up to peer through the window, asking, “Is that my girl?”

Joseph Roach, who works as a counselor at Whalley Jail, says that the DOC cannot control the circumstances before or after an inmate’s sentence. A softspoken, middle-aged man with round-framed glasses, Roach tells me they can only help an inmate while he is incarcerated.

“If you don’t take the time to take advantage of [what’s offered] until the last minute desperation, you’re gonna struggle. And then you’ll say it was the system that messed you up,” he says.

But there is sometimes a disconnect between the APRIL 2015

WHILE SOME PROGRAMS SEND REPRESENTATIVES TO SPEAK WITH INMATES AND INITIATE PERSONALIZED PLANS WITH CLIENTS BEFORE RELEASE, MOST RELY ON WORD OF MOUTH TO DRAW EX-OFFENDERS TO THEIR OFFICES. perceptions of prison staff and inmates who believe the system is set up solely to punish them. Both Steve and Paul enrolled in reentry classes to improve their chances of getting out on parole, but both were denied. Steven is convinced that the DOC offers the classes only to receive funding from the state and federal governments. He says his instructor did not care whether the inmates participated, only that they showed up. Paul relates a similar experience.

“The classes they offer are ridiculous,” Paul says, shaking his head. “It’s a scam. The whole thing in there is money.”

Paul says he wrote to the counselor supervisor and the reentry counselor at Radgowski asking for help finding reentry programs and employment options after release. In the McDonald’s, he flattens two formal request sheets, one for each counselor, out on the table and points to their responses under his notes.

One told him to consult with his probation officer after getting out, and the other said that what Paul asked for was not under the counselor’s authority.

It is difficult to ascribe blame in a situation like Paul’s without full knowledge of the facts. Just as there are prisoners who do not make the effort to engage with resources, there are counselors who do not care and simply go through the motions of their job. The real issue emerges when jaded prisoners stop seeking out resources and stumble along without support.

Paul reaches into his paper bag and pulls out a laminated rectangular card, which reads DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS: DISCHARGE RESOURCE CARD. “They give you this and basically tell you to kick rocks,” he says dismissively. “A list of shelters. I’m not going to a shelter.”

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I look at the card. It isn’t a list of shelters. It’s a list of phone numbers that access a general reentry assistance line, housing authority, The Salvation Army, low-income adult medical benefits, food stamps, the employment-assistance organization, and childcare services.

New Haven’s city government works to keep the formerly incarcerated informed about all available resources. Project Fresh Start, a reentry service the mayor’s office launched in January, assists anyone with a criminal record. The program serves as a bridge between ex-offenders and specialized resources: sober houses, job training, mental health care providers, adult education centers, health clinics, the housing authority, and more. Chance Jackson, one of the program’s coordinators, tells me Project Fresh Start should be a “mecca” for ex-offenders, with ties to every reentry resource in New Haven.

Around 260 people walk into Project Fresh Start’s office at City Hall each month, but lack of awareness persists in the larger ex-offender community. Every reentry service I spoke to, from Project Fresh Start to CT Works to Project MORE (an ex-offender reintegration organization) to Transitions Clinic—a free health clinic for ex-offenders with chronic ailments—told me there needs to be more outreach before release, so that men in prison have a sense of what options await them when they get out and can prepare accordingly.

While some programs send representatives to speak with inmates and initiate personalized plans with clients before release, most rely on word of mouth to draw ex-offenders to their offices. Jackson explained that he often meets people who have been out of prison for months and have struggled on the streets before finally connecting with Project Fresh Start.

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Jerry Smart, a community health worker at Transitions Clinic, which aims to serve the roughly eighty percent of ex-offenders who come out of prison dealing with chronic illness, put it plainly: “I’d like to see us connect with prisoners at least three to six months prior to their coming home, to build a rapport with them and come up with an action plan,” Smart said. “If you’ve got this dream of getting a job and house, and you don’t have no skills and no résumé and basically no contacts, how you gonna make that work without a support system?”

Ryan, another ex-offender, had just completed a nine-month sentence when we met on the morning of his release. He was in an intensive drug rehabilitation program at Carl Robinson Correctional Institution in Enfield, where he said he spent his days filling notebooks with plans for the future. He had been incarcerated twice for violating his probation through drug use, but was determined to stay clean through Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. His past incarcerations caused two “false starts” with community college, but he planned to enroll in Middlesex Community College in Middletown as soon as possible.

“People who get out of jail and say, ‘I don’t know what to do or where to go,’ they just didn’t try,” Ryan tells me. “Some people do fall through the cracks, and sometimes it’s on the DOC, but if you put in a little bit of work, they’re gonna help you out.”

Paul’s and Steven’s greatest advantage, even if they deny the help of nonprofits, is that they have families waiting for them. The support of relatives can ease the transition back to the rhythms of daily life.

THE NEW JOURNAL

Steven’s sister helped him develop a clear plan for the coming days. She is going to pick him up, and she has an apartment ready for him back in Meriden, as long as he can get a job and pay rent. He’s planning to go back to tree removal, his old line of work.

“Without her, I’d have to go to a shelter,” he says.

“I wouldn’t even be here right now. I’d be walking down Whalley Avenue blind, not knowing where I’m gonna pick up a dollar bill.”

But negotiating family relationships can also be fraught with difficulty. Steven tells me his biggest concern is reconnecting with his wife of fifteen years, with whom he has two sons. She has a protective order against him and did not write him during his sentence.

Easter weekend is coming up, and Steven believes that his wife will contact him when he returns to Meriden. “I want to be with my wife and kids for the holiday, eating ham,” he says. “But I’m on thin ice.”

Because of the protective order, any reports of abusive or threatening behavior on his part will likely be a violation of Steven’s probation, which could send him back to prison for up to three-and-a-half years. This is a common problem for ex-offenders with histories of abuse. William “June Boy” Outlaw, a community advocate at Easter Seals Goodwill Reentry, a New Haven program that serves high- to moderate-risk ex-offenders in New Haven, explains to me that a record of domestic violence raises an immediate red flag.

“If I see domestic violence on a client’s record I wanna get into that,” Outlaw tells me. “I wanna know do he intend to reconcile the dispute. Because those never reconcile. The woman he was with knows the button to put him back in jail. She can call the police and say your name”—he snaps his fingers— “and that’s it. If you don’t go back, you take yourself out of that high-risk situation, which is usually better for everybody.”

Paul tells Steven he should cut ties altogether.

That is what Paul has decided to do with his exgirlfriend, with whom he has three-year-old twins.

His only tie to her now is the child support he owes.

“You’re not free when you get outta jail,” Paul says. “I owe four grand and counting in child support. I gotta go to probation meetings and domestic violence classes. I gotta get a job.”

Paul clenches his hands together and grits his teeth. He has none of Steven’s coolness, perhaps beAPRIL 2015

cause he has been in and out of prison less often than the older man.

“I got anxiety bad,” he says. “I been planning this shit for two months and I don’t know what the fuck to do with myself. My heart’s racing, man.”

Steven laughs. Paul doesn’t.

Paul’s biggest concern is that he won’t be able to land a job. He is required to attend a domestic violence class once a week and meet with his probation officer three times a month, which he believes could make him miss work seven times a month. He does not know how he will afford child support.

Paul stands up from the McDonald’s booth and looks out the window. The woman who is picking him up has pulled into the parking lot. He sits back down and repacks his bag.

“I’m shittin’ my pants, man,” Paul says to Steven and me. “I’m thinking of leaving the state. I wanna go to New Mexico. I been there once. It’s beautiful.”

Going to New Mexico without permission would be a violation of Paul’s probation, which could lead to a five-year prison sentence.

Steven chuckles as Paul walks to the door to meet a young woman, whom he greets with a “My girl!”

They embrace, and Paul follows the woman to her car.

A man walks over to where Steven and I are sitting and offers him a cigarette. Steven takes it. He borrows the man’s lighter to walk outside and smoke.

Steven hasn’t had a cigarette in eight months. He takes a slow drag and blows smoke toward Whalley Jail across the avenue.

He remains calm as he speaks of reentry, though he cannot know exactly where he’s headed. “It’s scary when you come out,” he says. “You feel like you lost everything. There’s obstacles, but I think positive. You can’t let things overwhelm you. That kid, he was getting overwhelmed. You just gotta wait it out. Like my mother always said, ‘You don’t get things overnight, and when you do you don’t appreciate them.’ When I get something I wanna appreciate it.”

I thank Steven for speaking with me. He nods.

I leave him standing outside the McDonald’s. The morning is still cold and raw. He cups the cigarette in the palm of his hand, out of the wind.

Edward Columbia is a freshman in Morse College.

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critical angle

LISTENING TO AFRICA Behind the scenes of Yale’s first Africa Salon

by Coryna Ogunseitan

E

arly on a Saturday morning in March, I found myself surrounded by African artists, speakers, and performers in the basement of the Afro-American Cultural Center. We ate Egyptian salad and South African banana bread for breakfast, and we didn’t talk much. I assumed that the others were nervous, like me, and thinking over what they were going to say. We were preparing to participate in the Africa Salon, billed as “Yale’s first-ever contemporary African arts fest.”

A month or so before the event, I’d received an email from Ifeanyi Awachie, a Woodbridge Fellow with the Yale Africa Initiative and the organizer of the Salon. She asked me to perform a poem I’d written about visiting my father’s country, Nigeria, for the first time as a child. I felt nervous when I saw that the program listed me as a “Yale artist to watch”: an African audience could disagree with my experience, or assume that I, an American citizen, was too unfamiliar with the continent to voice my opinion. A first-generation Nigerian American, Awachie assured me that my transnational viewpoint was valuable to the Salon, which aimed to expose audiences to the perspectives of Africans from all over the diaspora.

Africa Salon is a much-needed step forward in Yale’s Africa Initiative, which formed in response to President Salovey’s statement in his inaugural address to have “a greater focus on Africa.” Awachie became involved with the Africa Initiative because she wanted the University’s new concentration to be “something

with soul and content, not an institutional gimmick.”

Too often, the continent is thought of as static, in need of development and with few contributions for the Western world. The Salon provided an important counterpart to this perspective, exposing the Yale community to contemporary art that few Yalies were likely to recognize. Visiting artists from Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and the U.S. discussed their work—literature, visual arts, and music—alongside Yale’s a cappella group Asempa!, the dance group Dzana, and African student photographers and writers.

The Salon added to an ongoing conversation among African students at Yale. Comprising just over one percent of Yale’s student population, many feel like they are forced to become the sole voice and image of the continent’s many countries. Opelo Matome, a freshman from Botswana, said that in classes, “I’m called upon to speak as an African student—not representative of just my country, but the whole continent.”

But the visitors at the Africa Salon could all comment on their complicated relationship with the West, adding nuance to the conversation.

At times, debate turned into disagreement: when Nigerian journalist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani asserted that African authors had to publish off the continent in order to be really successful, Nigerian publisher Bibi Bakare-Yusuf arched her eyebrows. She glanced at the audience, inviting them to share in her shock and disbelief. When Bakare-Yusuf finally spoke, she pushed back against misconceptions. She addressed

Photo by Eno Inyangete

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THE NEW JOURNAL

three points neatly and rapidly: yes, African publishers were capable of producing manuscripts without typos, yes, there was literary work emerging outside of the U.S. and Europe, and no, she did not consider herself to be an idealist. This connected to the Salon’s project to “rebrand Africa,” as Awachie said, by presenting African art to Americans not because the artists needed Western validation, but because Americans need to be better informed.

Nodumo Ncomazi, a Zimbabwean sophomore who sat behind me, periodically snapped her fingers to indicate agreement with the panelists, or groaned loudly to voice her dissent. Later, Nodumo told me that she felt that as an African student, she was constantly observing white American culture. At the Salon, she felt that she was finally being observed, her culture considered valuable enough to warrant outsiders’ attention.

But how can the students at Yale carry on the discussions started at Africa Salon? Yale has created the Young African Scholars Program to recruit more African students, since they now make up only one percent of the student body. YYAS prioritizes teaching in remote areas of the continent, free of charge. The program’s project manager, Helinna Ayalew, networks with Yale affiliates in Africa to ensure that students from low-income areas hear about the program, allowing for a more diverse population of international students at Yale. Ayalew, who received her doctorate in African Studies last year, helped organize the first YYAS program in her home country of Ethiopia in the summer of 2014. “There are so many students who would be great at a school like this, but who have no idea how to begin the application process,” she said.

“Going to college in the U.S. would be like going to the moon.”

Rachel Adams, Yale’s associate director for Africa, lauds YYAS as one of the most effective steps Yale has taken in outreach to Africa. As a native of Zimbabwe who did not attend a privileged school, she uses her personal network to help recruit students. She’s proud of the progress the Africa Initiative has made—the class of 2018 has the highest enrollment of African international students to date.

But the Africa Salon showed that even a few students can start a conversation. At the concert, the manager of a musical guest called Awachie onstage, presented her with a Maasai cloth—a bright, striped purple blanket—and tied it around her shoulders.

APRIL 2015

“Every superwoman needs a super cape,” the manager said. Awachie replied with modest relief: “It’s like it was another version of me that did all this,” she said.

I delivered my piece, forgot a couple of insignificant lines and stuttered once. The audience applauded politely. I was still unsure whether I deserved to be at an event celebrating contemporary Africa and all its complexities. Admittedly, I’ve only been to the continent four times. I worried that I sounded naïve and, by depicting Nigeria through a child’s eyes, romanticized it in some way. I wrote about hearing Yoruba for the first time and thinking it was a song-language.

But the poem was a sincere account of my experience: Later my cousins will interlace their fingers with mine and compare, saying Chocolate and cinnamon Copper and coconut shell Even though I have grown dark here and I can walk with my father and no one asks him where he got me— this is not my home but I know that it is his I hear him speak this tonal language and his tongue does not twist around last names, has no lilt, does not curl back on itself when it knows it has mispronounced and betrayed its employer and for the first time his speech hides nothing.

My Nigerian friend Fadeke and I talked after the Salon, and we decided we were considering African art the same way some people consider charity: if it’s not on your mind at least some of the time, it should weigh on your conscience. We felt guilty for not thinking of these African conversations more often. To comfort each other, we said: it’s not all serious.

African students, myself included, so often complain about Yale parties—no one dances! Why isn’t anyone dancing? But Battell Chapel was nearly full when the Kenyan funk group Just a Band came onstage, and during the performance of U.S.-South African rapper Jean Grae, most of the audience went to the front of the concert hall to dance. Here, at Yale, they gave us clips of so many sounds that are missing, so many voices that are waiting to be heard.

Coryna Ogunseitan is a sophomore in Trumbull College.

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