negotiated the maze of dead ends, one-ways, and anonymous streets and all that’s left is a straight shot out the boulevard to the prison.
*
Western Penitentiary sprouts like a giant wart from the bare, flat stretches of concrete surrounding it. The prison should be dark and forbidding, but either its stone walls have been sandblasted or they’ve somehow escaped the decades of industrial soot raining from the sky.
Western is a direct descendant of the world’s first penitentiary, Philadelphia’s Quaker-inspired Walnut Street Jail, chartered in 1773. The good intentions built into the Walnut Street Jail—the attempt to substitute an enforced regime of solitary confinement, labor, and moral rehabilitation, for the whipping post, pillory, fines, and executions of the British penal code—did not exempt that humane experiment from the ills that beset all societies of caged men. Walnut Street Jail became a cesspool, overcrowded, impossible to maintain, wracked by violence, disease, and corruption. By the second decade of the nineteenth century it was clear that the reforms instituted in the jail had not procured the results its zealous supporters had envisioned, and two new prisons, one for the east, one for the western half of the state, were mandated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. From the ashes of the Walnut Street experiment rose the first Western penitentiary. The architect, a William Strickland known for revivals of classic Greek models and his engineering skill, created a classic of a different sort on a plain just west of Allegheny City. With massive, forbidding bulwarks, crenellated parapets, watchtowers buttressing the corners of the walls, his notion of a prison recapitulated the forms of medieval fear and paranoia.
The immediate successor of Strickland’s Norman castle was constructed sporadically over a period of seventeen years. This new Western, grandson of the world’s first penitentiary, received its first contingent of prisoners in 1886, and predictably black men made up a disproportionate percentage of these pioneers, who were marched in singing. Today, nearly a hundred years later, having survived floods, riots, scandals, fires, and blue-ribboned panels of inquiry, Western remains in working order.
Approaching the prison from Ohio River Boulevard, you can see coils of barbed wire and armed guards atop the ramparts. The steepled towers that, like dunce caps, once graced its forty-foot walls have been lopped off. There’s a visitors’ parking lot below the wall facing the boulevard. I ignore it and pull into the fenced lot beside the river, the one marked Official Business Only. I save everybody a quarter-mile walk by parking in the inner lot. Whether it’s summer or winter, that last quarter mile can be brutal. Sun blazing down on your head or icy wind off the river, or snow or rain or damp fog creeping off the water, and nothing but one high, gritty wall that you don’t want to hug no matter how much protection it might afford. I drive through the tall gate into the official business lot because even if the weather’s summery pleasant, I want to start the visit with a small victory, be one up on the keepers. Because that’s the name of the game and chances are I won’t score again. I’ll be playing on their turf, with their ball and their rules, which are nothing if not one-sided, capricious, cruel, and corrupting. What’s written says one thing. But that’s not really the way things are. Always a catch. Always an angle so the published rules don’t literally apply. What counts are the unwritten rules. The now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t-sleight-of-hand rules whose function is to humiliate visitors and preserve the absolute, arbitrary power of the keepers.
Onto whose lot we trespass. Pulling as close to the visitors’ building as possible. Not too close because the guard on duty in the kiosk adjacent to the stairs of the visitors’ annex might feel compelled to turn us back if we break into the narrow compass of his alertness. Close but far enough away so he’d have to poke out his head and shout to get our attention.
I find a space and the kids scoot out of their seats. Tish’s girls are with us so we used the way back of the station wagon. For safety the rear hatch unlocks only from outside, so I insert the key and lift the lid and Danny and Jake and Tameka scramble out to join the others.
“We’re in a parking lot, so watch for cars!” I shout after them as they race down the broad center lane of the parking area. What else can I say? Cramped in the car for the past half hour, they’re doing now what they need to do. Long-legged, snake-hipped, brown children. They had tried to walk in an orderly fashion, smallest one grabbing largest one’s hand, lock step, slowly, circumspectly, progressing in that fashion for approximately three steps before one tore away and another followed and they’re all skipping and scampering now, polished by the sun. Nobody sprints toward the prison full tilt, they know better than that, but they get loose, flinging limbs and noise every which way. They crunch over a patch of gravel. Shorts and T-shirts make their bodies appear vulnerable, older and younger at the same time. Their high-pitched cries bounce off the looming wall. I keep my eyes on them as I lock the car. No real danger here but lessons, lessons everywhere, all the time. Every step and the way you take it here on enemy ground is a lesson.
*
Mom and Judy walk side by side, a black woman and a white woman, the white one tanned darker than the black. They add their two cents’ worth of admonitions to the kids. Walk, don’t run. Get Jamila’s hand. Be careful. Slow down, youall. I fall in behind them. Far enough away to be alone. To be separate from the women and separate from the children. I need to say to whoever’s watching—guards, prisoners invisible behind the barred three-story windows partitioning the walls, These are my people. They’re with me. I’m responsible. I need to say that, to hang back and preside, to stroll, almost saunter, aware of the weight, the necessity of vigilance because here I am, on alien turf, a black man, and I’m in charge. For a moment at least these women, these children have me to turn to. And I’m one hundred percent behind them, prepared to make anyone who threatens them answer to me. And that posture, that prerogative remains rare for a black man in American society. Rare today, over 120 years after slavery and second-class citizenship have been abolished by law. The guards know that. The prisoners know. It’s for their benefit as well as my own and my family’s that I must carry myself in a certain way, make certain rules clear even though we are entering a hostile world, even though the bars exist to cut off the possibility of the prisoners seeing themselves as I must see myself, striding free, in charge of women and children, across the official lot.
Grass grows in the margin between the spiked fence paralleling the river and the asphalt lot. Grass clipped harshly, uniformly as the bristle heads of convicts in old movies about prison. Plots of manicured green define a path leading to steps we must climb to enter the visitors’ building. Prisoner trustees in ill-fitting blue uniforms—loose tunics, baggy, string-tied trousers a shade darker—putter at various make-work jobs near the visitors’ entrance. Another prisoner, farther away, near the river edge of the parking lot sidles into a slate-gray Mercedes sedan. A pudgy, bull-necked white guy. When he plops into the driver’s seat the car shudders. First thing he does is lower the driver’s side window and hang out his ham arm. Then full throttle he races the Mercedes engine, obviously relishing the roar, as pleased with himself as he’d been when the precise, solid slam of the door sealed him in. If the driver is hot shit, big shot for a few seconds behind the wheel, he’ll pay for the privilege soon enough when he adds the Mercedes to the row of Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles, and Buicks he must scrub and spit shine for the bosses.
Another prisoner leans on a push broom. The asphalt walks are spotless, but every minute or so he advances the broom another foot, punching its bristles into the gray surface as if his job is not to keep the path clean but punish it for unmentionable crimes against humanity. Others sweep, rake, and supervise. Two or three trustees have no apparent duties. They are at their ease, talking and smoking. A lethargy, a stilted slow-motion heaviness stylizes their gestures. It’s as if they inhabit a different element, as if their bodies are enfolded in a dreamy ether or trapped at the bottom of the sea. I watch the prisoners watch the kids mount the steps. No outward signs betray what the men are thinking but I can feel them appraising, measuring. Through the prisoners’ eyes I see the kids as sexual objects. Clean, sleek bodies. Young, smooth, and supple. The coltish legs and high, muscley
