teaching and learning at the county jail

Breezy, kind of cloudy, warm. I rode over to Amy's house, a new friend, and spent two hours being blessed by her presence and hospitality. Well-made food made thoughtfully. All-organic blueberry-chocolate cake. Breeze through the windows on a quiet street, her grey cat Calvin, and great conversation. Though I hadn't known it beforehand, it was just what my soul needed.

My Grandma's death isn't what I want to write about, and yet I feel disrespectful in writing about anything else. It's different, what strikes each of us as too personal, too close to the bone, to write about at any given time, eh? There's been discussion lately about how a lot of blogging women don't write much about their partners, but they write a lot about their children. Some people write about the details of their sex lives, but would be loathe to write about the details of their financial lives. Some write about the death of beloved loved ones; others write solely about ideas and don't mention the life of the body much at all.

For me, I want to keep quiet on grief, at least for now. Though I may write some about my Grandma herself. Her lifelong love of music, for example, was passed down to me as a very important value, and I cherish that heritage.

I've been continuing to teach at the county jail. I really love it, though it's an exercise in keeping my wits about me in the midst of unpredictability and chaos. For example. I hold both classes in the chapel, which is the only real meeting space the jail has. We sit at long tables surrounded by doors that can only be opened electronically by guards outside the room. The walls are grey cinderblock, the ceilings probably 30 feet high. The chapel is the most colorful room in the jail; there are two huge murals. One mural is a colorful rendering of Jesus crucified, screaming in agony; the other mural, at the front of the chapel, is of a man robed in a prisoner's striped jumpsuit suffering in the fires of hell but reaching a hand toward a doorway that leads to heaven.

Between these two murals we sit and try to learn us some literacy. Meanwhile, the cell blocks on either side of us are full of rowdy men watching TV, yelling, and often, banging on the walls trying to get our attention. My students yell at them through the walls, and they yell back, and somehow I have to devise ways to turn our attention to the subtleties of the well-written word. Yesterday I had to explain what "punctuation" is. I had said, "some of you don't use much punctuation in what you're writing," and a man said--not sarcastically--"what's punctuation?" Trying not to miss a beat, I drew a large exclamation mark on a piece of paper and next to it a large question mark. Which was kind of how I felt: !?

I asked them what they had been reading during the week. A couple are reading through the Left Behind series. My most cocky/talented/handsome student said he'd been reading Maxim's secrets to being good in bed. "Quality literature," I said. They laughed. I do wonder what they think of me. They laugh behind their hands in my class, I know sometimes at my expense, and no doubt some of that's sexual. Then they turn in essays about their childhood dreams, their dreams at night, and how scary it was the first time they did heroin. They act so much like boys who weren't given the chance to grow up. And then some of them act so tired, and so wanting.

Whenever I bring books (my own, until I can find some donated ones) several of the guys handle them like treasures. Yesterday I brought in The Alchemist, and asked one of the new students (a young man who has the guts to speak his mind even if it brings ridicule) if he would take care of it and make sure to get it back to me. He eagerly promised to, and held the book close. Last week I brought in A Sand County Almanac for a middle-aged man who has written in loving detail about growing up on a farm and tending vegetables. This week he brought me in torn sheet of paper, with the title "What this book is about." He'd listed things like "sand, weather, birds." The heart breaks, and hope can't help but get through. I don't want to be too eager. I suppose because I don't want to get hurt.

And then there are the women. Oh, the things they write about! I feel like teaching this class is one long experience of my jaw dropping to my toes. Of course I know sad things happen. This really isn't news to me. But when the sad things are reported in such spare, straight-forward, transparent language, by the real people sitting in front of you breathing the same air as you asking you earnest questions--well. Well.

Yesterday I read both classes (I have two classes, one for men, one for women; 28 students total) a poem written by a poet named Bud Osborne. He grew up in one of the roughest childhoods I've ever heard of; tried to kill himself twice by the time he was five. A long-time heroin addict, among other things. He got clean, and became an advocate for drug-users, prostitutes, and the poor. He wrote a poem called "The Passion of the Downtown Eastside," which I will type up here when I get time later today, and I read it to both classes. They were, like, riveted. I asked them if the poem had value, because I was trying to get them to think about the value of reading and writing, beyond passing the GED, beyond jumping through middle-class-made hoops. And they were all like, "that guy understands what it's like. He knows, he's been there. If people haven't been there, man, they just don't know, but he knows." I asked both classes if the poem had value. There was universal agreement that it did. He was their voice. A bunch of people asked me to either borrow the book or to bring them a copy. Lord. How am I going to get a bunch of copies of a $15 book of poems published in Vancouver? But these people need those poems.

When I was in South Africa, I realized suddenly, like my mind had been rubbed suddenly clean, that the artists are the important ones in poor communities. The singers, rappers, muralists, poets. The ones who voice what it's like, the ones who locate hope not outside the poor communities but smack-dab in the middle of them. If I can be so arrogant as to speak on their behalf for one moment, the white working-class in America need more artists to voice their experience, and to shine a light on all the hope within those communities. God damn it. Ahhhh!!!!

One beautiful thing about this experience is that it's highlighting to me my own prejudices against working-class America (you know, the ones we call "white trash," "hillbillies," "trailer people"), and giving me the chance to get to know these people as individual human beings, as full of light and life and complications as everybody else.

That's the jail so far. I really need books! They need something to read besides The Left Behind series, and Danielle Steele. Call me elitist, I don't care. It's the truth.

Pray for the prisoners of the world, my friends. For the strippers, the KKK members, the meth addicts, the theives. The cubicle-sitters, the prison guards, the corporate swindlers. Because we all have worth, we are all precious, we are all children of God, though we seem to do everything we can to live in stoic denial of our inherent beauty and divinity.

Peace.