Interlude: Grafton Prison

He must be about sixty years old, an African American man of average height with a neat, grizzled beard.  He has glasses perched on his nose and speaks quietly but with assurance, and there's no mistaking the immense power in his frame, his voice, and his mind.

He looks to the circle of other inmates, all seated in a (sort of) cheery, be-muraled cinderblock room in Grafton Prison.  It is late July in Ohio, it is not air conditioned, and it is hot.  We munch on popcorn and drink lemonade (-flavored Kool-Aid).

He says, "All you new guys have heard the rest of us talk a lot about brotherhood and trust and joy.  About this being a safe space away from the yard, and a place where you can be yourself, or someone else if you want.  About a place where you're not alone.  And all that is true, but I'm going to say something else now:  it's hard work.  It is more hard work than you can even think it is, Tuesdays and Thursdays, memorizing lines, being reliable.  Phyllis -- " (here he breaks off and gestures towards my godmother-figure Phyllis, the retired English professor and founding director of Oberlin Drama at Grafton, who brought me with her today) " -- carries a big stick, and it's wrapped in velvet, but she'll whup you with it."

The group of men who already know Phyllis laugh, as do I, as does Phyllis.  Phyl is possibly the nicest person on the planet, but she's also a teacher, after all.  Disappointing her would feel approximately as guilt-inducing as running over a Pixar character with your 4x4.

"And it's worth it," the man continues.  "It's worth it becuase when you're up there?  When we were up there performing The Tempest?  There's no other feeling.  That's my high."  With the first three fingers on his right hand, he slaps the inside of his left elbow for emphasis, hard, the smack cracking through the room.

 "But it's hard work.  You've got to commit to it and you've got to be reliable and you've got to be ready, or don't come in at all."

The other members of ODAG nod.  So do a few of the new faces at this meet and greet.  That seems like a good sign; maybe they'll stay.

Later, Phyllis directs an icebreaker called "The Wind Blows", which is all about a) figuring out what you have in common with others in a safe way, and b) running around like a damn fool trying to steal seats from people.

"The wind blows for anyone wearing the Nike logo."  About ten of the men switch seats.

"The wind blows for anyone who has kids."  Half of the men dart across the circle, laughing as they try not to run into each other.

"The wind blows for anyone who has over three years of combined time."  About two thirds of the men move this time.

"The wind blows for anyone who likes dogs."  This time the entire circle has to get up and run, including me (who doesn't like dogs?).  I go for a chair on the far side of the circle, nearly run smack into the inmate who's beaten me to it, slam my flip-flopped foot down firmly on the floor to keep from sliding into him, and jink backwards into another seat.

"Damn," laughs the inmate into whom I nearly collided, "girl's got some brakes on her!"

Oberlin Drama at Grafton was formed a few years ago by Phyllis Gorfain, who used to read Shakespeare with me when I was seven years old.  My mother made me love stories and my father is the reason I teach high school, but Phyllis is the reason I'm an English teacher.  Because she assumed that I'd be able to understand Shakespeare at age seven, I never understood that it was supposed to be out of my reach.  Because she was an excellent storyteller, able to connect the books to things happening in the world and make the characters seem like real people, I considered literature an essential reflection of reality, not a thing separate from it, and always wanted to keep reading.  And because she was able to find the key that would unlock each play for me, personally -- the mischievous Moth in Love's Labours Lost, the scene where Juliet tries to sweet-talk her nurse in true fourteen year-old fashion in Romeo and Juliet -- I connected with each tale emotionally.

Through this, I learned the essence of what teaching English is all about, at least to me:  literature that belongs to all of us, not one age group or gender or social class or education level; words and sentences and metaphors that loop us into the emotional lives of characters, honing our empathy in our own lives; and stories that twine inextricably with the world in which they're written.

Now she's doing for the inmates of Grafton what she once did for me.  All year long, every Tuesday and Thursday, she works with a group of prisoners from five to seven in the evening.  Each year they give a performance; the most recent was The Tempest.  I don't know what most of these men did to be incarcerated, and I really don't want to know.  I know from growing up in Oberlin that some of them are likely to be in Grafton for good reason, and others because of a failure of the justice system.  Some of them will be in jail for drug-related crimes, some violent crimes, and some for rape.

(I really don't want to know if any of these guys raped anyone.)

That said, regardless of who they were before they were imprisoned, right now these are respectful, funny, wise, and  mature men.  They are men who -- in their own words -- want to stay out of prison once they get out.  During the whole group discussion, one man mentions that the ultimate goal for all of them is not just to get out of prison, it's to become reliable.

And, he goes on, "We all had different ways of being reliable and taking care of our families out on the streets, but that landed us in here.  So we have to learn to be reliable in a good way, a way that's going to keep us out of here after this.  Going to every rehearsal, making props, learning lines -- that's a part of it."

Obviously, a grubby seven year-old girl with her hair in pigtails and an inmate who's been incarcerated for over forty years have little in common on the surface, but that's the beauty of literature in general, Shakespeare in particular, and Phyllis's approach especially:  through reading and performing, we discover ourselves and others, no matter who we are when we begin.

Or, as one of the inmates (who played Ariel in their production of The Tempest) told prospective ODAG members:  "When I knew the other guys were counting on me to know my lines, and I had to think about how something I could do might hurt them by accident, and when I had to try to figure out how my character was supposed to think and move and feel, to really understand them -- well, then I started doing that outside of ODAG too.  I started being more aware of people and empathizing with them on the yard, and hopefully I'll be also able to do that when I get out in the world."

I wish I could bring these guys to my students, or my students to them.  I wish they could see that everything I'm telling them is true, that if a seven year-old can connect to Love's Labours Lost and inmates of a diverse range of ages and personalities can connect to Tempest, fourteen year-olds can totally connect to Romeo and Juliet or Othello.  And more:  I wish they could see that wisdom, intelligence, and emotional acuity aren't limited to the wealthy, well-educated, or otherwise privileged.   I wish they could really understand that all humans are humans, an idea so enormous that the best of us can only hope to grasp it for short periods at a time.

But the other thing that Phyllis showed me is that in a classroom, everyone is a teacher.  When seven year-old me had an idea about Moth or Juliet, she really made me feel like I'd shown her something new about them.  I can only imagine that she does the same with the inmates; she lets them teach her, and that exchange of knowledge, ideas and wisdom is what makes teaching the most joyous profession in the world.

So no matter what I do, I can't make my students know any of those things.  I can only show them these ideas, if they want to look.  I can hope.  They're good kids, smart and empathetic.  Some of them will get it now, and some will get it later.  And after all, there's a lot I can learn from them, too.

The returns on teaching can take forever -- I've always loved Phyllis with abandon, but it's only in the past few years that I've truly understood all of what she was teaching me when I was seven.  I'm glad that those she's working with now are mature enough to realize how wonderful she is even as she's working with them ("facilitating," she would protest).

Because literature matters, is the thing.  The man with the grizzled beard -- in for forty years, with little hope of parole -- played Caliban in Tempest.  In his program bio was written the following:  "I could relate to Caliban because he was other.  I wanted to play him in a way other than Shakespeare had intended.

"I wanted to give him agency."