Confined for Life: Prison changes those on the outside, too

the San Jose Mercury News, August 1, 1999

Hadrian's Walls By Robert Draper
Publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, 325 pp., $23.00

The Prisoner's Wife By Asha Bandele
Publisher, Scribner, 219 pp., $23.00

Books written by, or about, prisoners are like phone sex or cheap dates—they can either bore us or surprise us. We pre-judge them in various ways before we read the first page.

My hopes for Hadrian's Walls , the novel by Robert Draper, were high. His protagonist, Hadrian Coleman, is an ex-con struggling with his place in the free world, trying to be one of “the good guys now.”

Like me. This month I celebrate my third year out of prison. And I recall that during my early days of freedom, the convulsions in my soul were so turbulent that even a hack novelist could have exploited them with success.

So you can understand my dismay when even the final page of Hadrian's Walls bored me.

Many of the writers in the genre of prison(er) literature are ex-cons whose work too easily turns preachy and slips into attacking the prison system with a moral vehemence that is almost papal. So we get prison stories that are parables or political tracts. Draper, who never served prison time, squanders his status as a prison outsider by falling into the same trap.

Hadrian's Walls is populated with people as figurines, little plasticine allegories. Giving an East Texas prison warden the name “Thunderball,” then making him dull and corrupt, is as predictable as making a serial killer a sadist as well. Lester Broom is the shady character who covers-up the money trails—get it? Mr. Broom who “sweeps” the dirty deals under the carpet. The bad guy is a pardoned ex-con who plans to go into the private prison business as revenge against his old warden. The character's presence in the story is the proverbial tempest brewing in a teapot, hence the name, Ricky Tempesta.

The prison town is named Shepherdsville. Bastille Systems, is a corrupt private-prison firm setting up business in a city named, of all things, Trust.

Imprisoned for 15 years for the murder of a judge, Hadrian escapes two weeks before his parole because he's afraid he will be implicated in the recent murder of an inmate. But Hadrian gets pardoned by the governor while on the lam, after Sonny Hope—Hadrian's boyhood friend and the latest director of the prison—pulls some strings.

The book begins with Hadrian returning to Shepherdsville after he learns that he'd been pardoned. And for the rest of the book Hadrian wanders around this prison town moping, as if branded with the stain of Cain. We are supposed to believe that he is haunted by society's long shadow.

But unlike heinous Cain, Hadrian was sent to prison as a 15 years old for what appear to be dubious reasons. Everybody in the story seems to know that the judge who Hadrian murdered was a pedophile who tried to kill a boy when the youngster rejected the judges advances.

Hadrian is haunted by his namesake, the great Roman emperor Publius Aelius Hadrianus, a man “without boundaries.” The Roman hero is most famous for his military defense line in Britain called “Hadrian's Wall.” In mocking irony, our Hadrian is a murderer doubly “confined” by his own guilt, first to his hometown Shepherdsville, then to the prison.

It is difficult to believe that Hadrian is a hard core convict—much less merciless killer. We learn that he was mostly assigned off prison grounds to work in Thunderball's kitchen from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. He has no time to become syncretized with the predation of the prison, so his obsession with guilt and innocence seems more hypothetical than menacing.

In fairness to the author, I understand that he had the rough task of turning a murderer into a protagonist that would, for the ambitious purposes of the novel, be both galling and gallant. (Hadrian the confused man who contemplates murdering again vs. Hadrian the good guy, trying to overcome his past by coming to the aid of his best friend.) Unfortunately, the paradox never catches, so the story meanders.

The book made the big mistake of hinting at characters who sound more interesting than the ones we are told to care about. The warden needed tutors for his son so he assembled “the finest minds the penal system had to offer…a mathematician who had butchered his wife, an advertising copy writer who'd kept preteen boys in his wine cellar, an astronomist-burglar, a philosopher-fraud and a tragic young woman…who knew American history but not her own, having succumbed to amnesia the moment she gently slid her newborn into Lake Whitney.”

We feel cheated, wanting one of these characters to become animated so we can follow where their souls might wander after parole.

Ultimately, the problem of the book was summed up by the description of Sonny Hope—Hadrian's boyhood friend: “He was never one to measure depths, much less comprehend them.” Robert Draper has got a prison book; but he got prisons wrong if he thought we'd care about Shepherdsville, the town where crime literally pays.

My dissatisfaction with contemporary prison(er) literature has to do with it's attraction to the political pampleteer whose prose tends to dispel the mystery of the human condition rather than deepen it.

That's why I wanted to hate The Prisoner's Wife , a memoir by the poet asha bandele. I expected flattened characters and abundant clichés. Instead I got a fleshy memoirist.

Literally. There is a sensual scene when bandele stands naked in front of her bedroom mirror, examining her blemishes. It's an apt metaphor for the book: A naked black woman staring hard in the mirror, then turning around to reveal to us white stretch marks on the skin of her thighs and buttocks.

Prisons are easily equated with sex agonies. Most men who ask me about prison sex wonder about the frequency of prison rape. bandele illustrates the wives sex agonies everytime she explores with Rashid the hardship of being a vital and sensual woman whose husband, serving a life sentence, can touch her naked body only 6 times a year.

Rashid murdered a man when he was 19. He was 10 years into his sentence, and a devout Muslim (the Iman of the prison), when bandele met him through a poetry reading she was involved with at the prison. She married him a few years later.

The Prisoner's Wife is her lyrical account of the travails of a prisoner's wife. Someone who must learn to dream smarter about her husbands release from prison. Who must hassle with $400-$800 phone bills because he can only call collect. Who serves the life sentence with her husband every time she must submit to a strip search if she wants to hug her husband.

But the book never segues into victim chic. Instead, bandele inadvertently preaches the hard Ben Franklin line of self-determination: “I know there are no simple answers, no one-line solutions to this question of prison love…I say there are no simple answers to most things in life…In prison, there is no place for the simplified, the redacted, the easy way out.” She is not waiting for a state of grace.

In the most emotionally grueling sections in the book, Rashid speaks truth to asha's sorrow. Rashid the Voice, a ghost most of the time, is a man trying to protect the precarious bond with his wife by calling and writing and urging her to speak to him. He tries valiantly to weave for asha a wordy cocoon from the empty spray of space between them.

But if in the beginning of their love was the word on a page—when letters to each other were like dates, “whispers on the slow, bluelight dance floor”—then an ending had to be foreshadowed by the long silences between them.

Redemption and remorse is the story of how one can steep so low yet reach so high. Because the ex-con in Hadrian's Walls never steeped very far, his redemption is a weak story.

In many ways, The Prisoner's Wife is an anti-redemption story. A complicated love story of how one woman reaches too high for love and stumbles to the depths of codependency and confusion in her soul. Hers is a story of inner desolation, and readers can be grateful that bandele learned to plumb so elegantly.

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