Somehow word had flown around the yard that something was going down. The word spread like maggots on a wound. All the Crooks Street boys crowded in behind me as we moved across the marble-shooting dirt area, under a big maple tree, near the large windows of the first and second grade classrooms. We swept down the tetherball circle and then rumbled through the kickball arena and all the players joined in the march. The girls jumping rope and playing jacks under two shade trees bounded up and fell in stride. All the kids stood a few meters behind me. I did not look back until after I slammed the open twin door of the basement shut and locked it.
Mouths opened wide and eyes were as big as king-sized marbles. There were deep sighs, whispers, laughs, and ahs. Some of the kids scrambled away and others stood in silence for a long time. I felt neither joy or sadness at first, and then some kind of shift and hardness in my heart. Gloria did not say anything to me that day, but I saw her young cheetah-like smile. Mr. Williams started banging on the door, crying out to be released, yelling and whelping like a puppy. He had a fear of darkness and closed-in spaces.
A yard monitor finally contacted the principal, who released Mr. Williams. He was all red, sweaty, and frightened—like a kangaroo rat that had narrowly escaped a coyote. For the first time, Mr. Williams came out of the basement as a human being. Such a heart-warming feeling!
I was so pleased with the moment, I threw the yard monitor a finger. The principal and a couple of teachers had a paddling party on my behind. I stopped counting at twenty swats. Both Mr. Williamses were there. Yet, still, there were no tears. If the school had only known to tell my mom and dad, the whipping I would have received at home—one with a water hose, tree branch, or extension cord—would have brought streams of tears even from Samson.
Paddling parties were what school meant to me, so when Judith announced that she had been given permission to meet individually with students, and that the first consultation would be with me, I was jazzed and also anxious. What would it be to meet alone with a teacher without negativity, hostility, or abuse? With no slapping, paddling, hitting, or put downs?
Judith and I have never talked one-on-one, never shared a real conversation. She has not seen any of my writing except for one or two tiny jottings, nor have I asked any questions in class. I don’t know what to expect; Judith and I might end up watching walls for an hour or so. Still, I look forward to this meeting as a skinny honeybee looks forward to spring.
Judith is surprised when, after she complains about the heat, I say, “Ninety degrees hotter, I’d be warm.” She asks where I grew up. I have no idea where this question-and-answer time will lead. But I feel open and without any blocks. Judith must be shocked, as words flow freely from me.
We walk into the education building and pass the small guard station with the huge window that overlooks the prison’s lower yard. We descend to the bottom floor, the one called the dungeon floor because at the end of the hall is a banned, barred door that leads to very old red brick chambers. One can look through the door and see the clasps and shackles that once chained prisoners to the walls.
When we make it to the classroom, I note that Judith jots down all I tell her about the heart of the high desert, Crooks Street, the heat, the red clay mountains that appeared to be my whole world, and the desert wildflowers after a rainfall. I think: Wow! Who is this educator, this poet, writing down something I say? She isn’t writing a bad report. She isn’t being an authority figure trying to put me down.
I brought with me bits and pieces, thoughts and feelings, that I’d written during the poetry classes. These jottings were inspired by class discussions, model poems, visiting guest artists, and fellow students, as well as by some book I had read while I sat out in front of the prison chapels overlooking the garden plaza, the only place in San Quentin where trees, flowers, and grasses grew and where butterflies, sparrows, and other small creatures hung out. The class enabled me to bring together and understand the subjects, philosophies, and wise sayings I had been studying for nearly ten years, gave me a way, even in my silence, to link and express ideas, vibes, thoughts, and feelings in my own way.
Sitting in the dungeon room, I see the interested smile on Judith’s face and the curious flow of her voice that seem to welcome the words I have to say and the bits and pieces of writing I show her. There is a lot going on inside me, like the underground waters in the dry Mohave River that no one could see.
During all of my years in school and on the streets, I never went inside myself. Even now, in this classroom with Judith—my first positive exchange with a teacher—I do not believe my writing is poetry, or even complete sentences. On this hot September afternoon, I still do not believe that anything written by me is worthy, or that anything inside me is beautiful.
3
Mirrors
IN MY FAMILY, September was apples and honey, the start of the new year. Rosh Hashanah, followed ten days later by Yom Kippur. Holy days which I remember mostly as walking the blocks from my grandparents’ house to the synagogue on Fairfax. Los Angeles was hot, red at the edges, windy and dry. I walked home with my mother and aunts. The men were still davening at shul; the women left early to get food onto the table by sundown. My aunts talked: Aunt Nora was learning to drive, there would soon be a sale at Bullocks. The sound of their words was one song, the crunch of fallen sycamore leaves under my shoes was another.
Around the mahogany table, in the evening, sat my bubbe and zadie; my mother; my great-aunts, Ida, Riva and Sadie; aunts, uncles, and cousins from all over L.A. My father. The babies—my sister, Debbie, and cousin, Beth—sat in high chairs. Even without the family in St. Louis and Detroit, every leaf was added to the dining room table. Uncle Aaron, stuck at this table’s foot, sat almost into the hallway. Abie, Izzie, Moishe, Zelig, Icki, ′Fraim. Aunty Emma was the oldest of my mother’s siblings, and when they were children in Detroit, she rounded them up at supper time by singing their names.
The first September I remember is before these Septembers. September 1949, and I’m not at my grandparents’, but five houses north, 1322 Ridgley Drive, the house my father, mother, and I are about to move into. What I see when I remember is my father dismantling a crib in the corner of a small bedroom and light pouring through two south-facing windows. September light, red and gold, low light that steeps more than blazes. My father is bent to his task and he’s talking to me. I don’t remember his words but know he’s telling me that the baby my mother has been carrying was born dead; he’s telling me there is no more baby.
Judith (age four, leaning on table) with her grandparents,Aunt Nora, and a few of her cousins.
FAMILY ALBUM
I remember a whoosh, almost like the light from the windows entering my body. A whoosh that fills me or wakes me or somehow lets me know I have skin and that this skin contains me. I—the one everyone calls Judy—is suddenly on one side of this skin and everything on the other side is not me, not Judy. I must not have known this before, though I don’t remember what I did know. Before, was Judy not distinct from wallpaper, wood floor, double-hung windows, Daddy Bob, kewpie doll, Bubbe? I don’t know, but with that whoosh I was separate. My father was across the room, the closet door was behind me, a tall tree stood outside the west window, and my brother was dead.
My mother came home from the hospital, we moved into our new house, my father was gone all day teaching. And? And where was this baby, this brother? No one mentioned him to me again. I felt restless, so suddenly a self, so suddenly separate. Something hovered. Light? A whisper? My father’s words still in the bedroom? My brother? Wasn’t any adult going to provide that barely-born spirit a place he could settle? Apparently not.
So I did. I scooped my brother into my heart and made him a home.
I don’t remember my brother inside me, don’t remember if his presence