Justice Notes: Origins of A Memoir Part IV
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
One of the earliest versions of A Prison of My Own wasn't written as a conventional memoir. Before it became the book my agent is now submitting to publishers, it began as a hybrid manuscript—part memoir, part prose poem, part journal, part meditation. Rather than simply recounting events, I was trying to capture the emotional landscape of entering prison. Looking back, I can see this opening was searching for a truth that later drafts expressed in a different way.
DRIVING TO PRISON
My brother said it would be an hour. But it was longer. I’m not sure how much longer, but it was longer. And it shouldn’t have felt longer. I was driving to prison after all. My brother was driving, my wife in the back, my nephew also in the back. Not sure how we did that. It didn’t really matter as everything was going to be awkward, just nobody wanted to say it. The weather met the mood. Rain. Heavy rain most of the way. My brother’s driving a bit fragile, his age showing, his discomfort too, even more so, evidenced by the silence, and long silences. I could feel my wife’s discomfort the most because only she knows and she knows they don’t want to know. If they could turn the car around and pretend, they would gladly do it. The desperate palpable call for laughter; and there was. I said something funny, intentionally so. And it was funny but not that funny. It didn’t matter; my brother and nephew responded heartily. I couldn’t see my wife but I didn’t have to. I’m sure she wasn’t laughing, probably not even smiling. Her husband on the way to prison, what’s there to laugh about: the dreadful arrival looming, the awkward goodbyes in everyone’s mind, each planning their own. But you can’t really plan for a goodbye like this. You think you can and in fact you do but then something else comes out and it’s never right because there is nothing right to say because there is nothing to say. And at the end of the day, all everyone wants is for it to be over: the arrival, the goodbye, the drive there, the drive home and maybe tomorrow it will be over.
There were many roads, changes of routes, exits to manage, a pause in the GPS, lost for a while and the rain relentless. In some ways, welcome distractions and finally the false relief to find the right exit and manage the confusing entrance only to realize we were there and there it was, the steel building right in front of us like it moved there in front of us instead of driving up to it. Nothing like you imagined but everything you feared. There was no plan nor rehearsal for the drop off: would it be a walk-in or should we stay in the car or come in or just my wife or all of them or none of them and what parting words, hopeful or sad or encouraging or preachful or humorous (certainly not that) and what about my words: steely or brave or resigned or clueless (nobody would believe that one, denial yes, but not clueless) or no words, just the embrace, the wave or tears maybe. No tears. Numb more like it. But numb with fear. I’ve always been good at hiding that.
“Are you as brave as you seem?”, my wife asked me at the prison door. I don’t remember what I said, something reassuring. But I wasn’t being brave and she knew it. She just was kind and let me pose it. There were no tears. Embraces yes. But no tears. I left them all at the car and walked through the door alone. I wasn’t brave.
Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.
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