Light Action in the Caribbean Page 4

  I caught up to my companions at the attendant’s house. As we turned together for the outer gate I said—if it would be permitted—I had one other question. How was it determined when a man was no longer fit to be a Lord of War? My elder host said that from time to time a woman in the Circle would visit a Lord and they would make love. The woman would sense a man’s interior land in this way. She would discern in the act of love whether the man was gentle or not, if he was passionate and curious, whether he was generous. These men, said my host, longed sometimes, like everyone, to be with children, to occupy a less strenuous station. When a woman detected a shudder of hesitation in the emotions of love, she knew it was time to open a path for a Lord to return. The choice was the man’s to make, but out of gratitude and simple respect the women did all they could to make this possible.

  When a Lord is ready to return to the city, I learned, the four attendants secure the grounds and depart. The other Lords prepare a meal they all then share, using vegetables and edible flowers from their personal gardens. Afterward the three Lords begin walking their longtime companion through the grounds, playing their stringed instruments and each singing the phrases he recalls from all the stories the man has told in his years there. They walk and sing through the night. Just at dawn, before the city is astir, the Lord sets forth, passing through the outer gate and returning to the house that once was his only home. It has been kept undisturbed and now has been readied for him. After this, no one may inquire of him what he has done or what he thinks or feels. He plays a lesser or greater role in the affairs of the city, as he sees fit.

  Some men, said my elder host, became again merely threads in the fabric of the community, and this, too, she thought, starved, angered, and humiliated the dogs of war.

  Emory Bear Hands’ Birds

  My name is Julio Sangremano. I was at the federal prison at Estamos, California, when the incident of the birds occurred, serving three to five for computer service theft, first offense. This story has been told many times, mostly by people who were not there that day, or by people who have issues about corruption in the prison system or class politics being behind the war on drugs, and so on. The well-known Mr. William Hanover of the Aryan Brotherhood, he was there, and also the person we called Judy Hendrix; but they sold their stories, so there you’re talking about what people want to buy.

  I didn’t leave that day, though I was one of Emory’s men. Why I stayed behind is another story, but partly it is because I could not leave the refuge of my hatred, the anger I feel toward people who flick men like me away, a crumb off the table. Sometimes I am angry at people everywhere for their stupidity, for their buying into the American way, going after so many products, selfish goals, and made-up desires. Whatever it was, I stayed behind in my cell and watched the others go. The only obligation I really felt was to the Indian, Emory Bear Hands. Wishako Taahne Tliskocho, that was his name, but everyone called him Emory and he didn’t mind. When I asked him once, he said that when he was born, his fists came out looking like bears. He was in for theft, stealing salmon. Guys who knew the history of what had happened to the Indians thought that was good; they said it with a knowing touch of irony. Emory, he didn’t see himself that way.

  I was put in his cell block in 1997 when I went in, a bit of luck, but I want to say I was one of the ones who convinced him to hold the classes, to begin teaching about the animals. Emory told us people running the country didn’t like wild animals. They believed they were always in the way and wanted them killed or put away in zoos, like they put the Indians away on reservations. If animals went on living in the countryside, Emory said, and had a right not to be disturbed, then that meant the land wouldn’t be available to the mining companies and the timber companies. What they wanted, he said, was to get the logs and the ore out and then get the land going again as different kinds of parks, with lots of deer and Canada geese, and lots of recreation, sport hunting and boating.

  I’d never heard anything like this, and in the beginning I didn’t listen. Wild animals had nothing to do with my life. Animals were dying all over the place, sure, and for no good reason, but people were also dying the same. I was going with the people. Two things, though, started working on my mind.

  One time, Emory was speaking to a little group of five or six of us, explaining how animals forgive people. He said this was an amazing thing to him, that no matter how much killing and cruelty animals endured—all the songbirds kids shot, all their homes plowed up for spring planting, being run over by cars—they forgave us. In the early history of people, he said, everyone made mistakes with the animals. They took their fur for clothing, ate their flesh, used their skins to make shelters, used their bones for tools, but back then they didn’t know to say any prayers of gratitude. Now people do—some of them. He said the animals even taught people how to talk, that they gave people language. I didn’t follow that part of the story, but I was familiar with people making mistakes—animals getting killed in oil spills, say. And if you looked at it the way Emory did, also their land being taken away by development companies. It caught my interest that Emory believed animals still forgave people. That takes some kind of generosity. I’d wonder, when would such a thing ever end? Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?

  The other thing that drew me in to Emory was what he said about totem animals. Every person, he told us, had an animal companion, a sort of guardian. Even if you never noticed it, the animal knew. Even when you’re in prison, he said, there’s an animal on the outside, living in the woods somewhere, who knows about you, and who will answer your prayers and come to you in a dream. But you have to make yourself worthy, he said. You have to make a door in yourself where the animal can get through, and you have to make sure that when the animal comes inside that way, in a dream, he sees something that will make him want to come back. “He has to feel comfortable in there,” Emory said.

  Emory didn’t say all this at once, like you’d read in a book, everything there on the page. If someone asked him a question, he’d try to answer. That’s how it began, I think, before I got there, a few respectful questions. Emory conducted himself in such a way, even the guards showed him some respect. He wouldn’t visit with the same people every day; and when guys tried to hang with him all the time, he discouraged it. Instead, he’d tell people to pass on to others some of the animal stories he was telling. When someone was getting out, he’d remind them to be sure to take the stories along.

  The population at Estamos was changing in those days. It wasn’t quite like the mix you see on the cop shows. Most everybody, of course, was from the street—L.A., Fresno, Oakland—and, yeah, lot of Chicanos, blacks, and Asians in for the first time on drug charges. And we had hard-core, violent people who were never going to change, some difficult to deal with, some of them insane, people who should have been in a hospital. The new element was people in for different kinds of electronic fraud, stock manipulations, hacking. Paper crime. I divide this group into two types. One was people like me who believed the system was so corrupt they just wanted to jam it up, make it tear itself apart. I didn’t care, for example, about selling what I got once I broke into Northrup’s files. I just wanted to scare them. I wanted to hit them right in the face. The second group, I put them right in there with the child molesters, the Jeffrey Dahmers. Inside traders, savings and loan thieves who took money from people who had nothing, people who got together these dime-a-dozen dreams—Chivas Regal for lunch, you know, five cars, a condo in Florida. Every one of them I met was a coward, and the cons made their lives miserable. Of course, we didn’t see many of these real money guys at Estamos.

  We had the gangs there, the Aryan Brotherhood, Crips, Dragons, Bloods, all the rest. These could be very influential people, but the paper and electronic criminals, the educated guys, almost all white, they passed on it. If one of these guys, though, was a certain type of individual to start with, he might help a
gang member out. Even mean people. Even not your own race. Prepare their appeals, lead them through the different kinds of hell the legal system deals you.

  Emory, who was about fifty, was a little bit like those guys. He spoke the same way to everyone, stayed to himself. Even some of the Aryan brothers would come around when he talked. The only unusual thing I noticed was a few of the more educated whites made a point of ignoring Emory. They’d deliberately not connect with him. But there were very few jokes. Emory was the closest thing to a real spiritual person most of us had ever seen, and everybody knew, deep down, this was what was wrong with the whole country. Its spiritual life was gone.

  When I first asked Emory about teaching, he acted surprised, as though he thought the idea was strange, but he was just trying to be polite. My feeling was that by telling stories the way he could, he was giving people a way to deal with the numbness. And by identifying with these animal totems, people could imagine a way over the wall, a healing, a solid connection on the outside.

  Emory declined. He said people had been telling these stories for thousands of years, and he was just passing them on, keeping them going. Some of the others, though, talked to him about it, kept bringing it up, and we got him to start telling us, one animal at a time, everything he had heard about that animal, say grizzly bears or moose or even yellow jackets. Some guys wanted to learn about animals Emory didn’t know about, like hyenas or kangaroos. He said he could only talk about the ones he knew, so we learned about animals in northern Montana where he grew up.

  Emory spoke for about an hour every day. The guards weren’t supposed to let this go on, an organized event like this, but they did. Emory would talk about different kinds of animals and how they were all related and what they did and where they came from—as Emory understood it. Emory got pretty sophisticated about this, and we had some laughs too, even the guards. Sometimes Emory would imitate the way an animal behaved, and he ‘d have us pounding on the tables and crying with laughter, watching while he waddled along like a porcupine or pounced on a mouse like a coyote. One time he told us there was so much he didn’t know, but that he knew many of these things had been written down in books by white people, by people who had spoken to his ancestors or by people who had studied those animals. None of those books were in the prison library, but one of the guards had an outside library card, and he started bringing the books in so Emory could study them.

  For a couple of months, a long time, really, it went along like this. People wanted to tell their own stories in the beginning, about hunting deer or seeing a mountain lion once when they were camping. Emory would let them talk, but no one had the kind of knowledge he had, and that kind of story faded away. The warden knew what Emory was doing and he could have shut it right down, but sometimes they don’t go by the book in prison because nobody knows what reforms people. Sometimes an experiment like this works out, and the warden may get credit. So he left us alone, and once we knew he was going to leave Emory alone our wariness disappeared. We could pay attention without being afraid.

  That tension came back only once, when Emory asked if he could have a medicine pipe sent in, if he could share the pipe around and make that part of the ceremony. No way, they said.

  So Emory just talked.

  Two interesting things were going on now. First, Emory had drawn our attention to animals most of us felt were not very important. He talked about salamanders and prairie dogs the same way he talked about wolverine and buffalo. So some guys started to identify with these animals, like garter snakes or wood rats, and not with wolves. That didn’t make any difference to us now.

  The second thing was that another layer of personality began to take hold on the cell block. Of the one hundred and twenty of us, about sixty or sixty-five listened to Emory every day. We each had started to gravitate toward a different animal, all of them living in this place where Emory grew up in Montana. Even when we were locked up we had this sense of being a community, dependent on each other. Sometimes in our cells at night we would cry out in our dreams in those animal voices.

  I identified with the striped skunk, an animal Emory said was slow to learn and given to fits of anger and very independent in its ways. It is a nocturnal creature, like me. When I began dreaming about the striped skunk, these dreams were unlike any I had had before. They were long and vivid. The voices were sometimes very clear. In most of these dreams, I would just follow the skunk, watching him do things. I’d always thought animals like this were all the time looking for food, but that’s not what the skunk did. I remember one winter night (in the dream) I followed the skunk across hard crusted snow and along a frozen creek to a place near a small treeless hill where he just sat and watched the stars for a long time. In another dream, I followed the skunk into a burrow where a female had a den with two other females. It was spring, and there were more than a dozen small skunks there in the burrow. The male skunk had brought two mice with him. I asked Emory about this, describing the traveling and everything. Yes, he said, that’s what they did, and that’s what the country he grew up in looked like.

  After people started dreaming like this, about the animals that had chosen each of us (as we understood it now), our routine changed. All the maneuvering to hold positions of authority or safety on the cell block, the constant testing to see who was in control, who was the most dangerous, who had done the worst things, for many of us this was no longer important. We’d moved into another place.

  Emory himself didn’t make people nervous, but what was happening to the rest of us now did. The guards, just a little confused, tried to look tougher, figure it out. Any time you break down the tension in prison, people can find themselves. The gangs on our block, except for the Aryan Brotherhood, had unraveled a little by this time. People were getting together in these other groups called “Horned Lark” and “Fox” and “Jackrabbit.” Our daily schedule, of course, never changed—meals, lights out, showers—but all through it now was this thing that had gotten into us.

  What was happening was, people weren’t focused on the prison routine anymore, like the guards playing us off against one another, or driving each other’s hatred up every day with stories about how we’d been set up, who was really to blame, how hard we were going to hit back one day. We had taken on other identities, and the guards couldn’t get inside there. They began smacking people around for little things, stupid things. People like Judy Hendrix, who thrived on the sexual undercurrents and the brutality on our cell block, started getting violent with some of their clients. The Aryan brothers complained Emory had stirred up primitive feelings, “African feelings,” they called them. Their righteousness and the frustration of the guards and the threat of serious disruption from people like Judy Hendrix all made Emory’s situation precarious.

  One day the story sessions just ended. They moved Emory to another cell block and then, we heard, to Marion in Illinois. With him gone, most of us fell back into the daily routine again, drifting through, trying to keep the boredom at bay. But you could hear those dream calls in the night still, and people told stories, and about a month after Emory left one of the guards smuggled the letter in from him that everybody has heard about, but which only Emory’s people actually read. And then we destroyed it. He told us to hold on to our identities, to seek the counsel of our totem animals, to keep the stories going. We had started something and we had to finish it, he said. By the night of the full moon, June 20th, he wrote, each one of us had to choose some kind of bird—a sparrow, a thrush, a crow, a warbler—and on that night, wherever he was, Emory was going to pray each of us into those birds. We were going to become those birds. And they were going to fly away.

  There were some who accepted right away that this was going to happen and others who were afraid. I would like to say that I was skeptical, but I was one of those who was afraid, a person for whom fear was the emotion on which everything else turned. I could not believe.

  We got the letter on the fourteenth of June. The beat
ings from the guards, with people like Hanover and Judy Hendrix having a hand in it, none of that affected the hard-core believers, the guys they put in solitary. Especially not them. In solitary they’d turn themselves into the smallest birds, they said, and walk under the doors.

  In that week after the letter came, a clear line began to divide us, the ones who were leaving, the ones who were going to stay.

  The night of the twentieth, about eight o’clock, sitting around in the TV room, I was trying to stay with a game show when a blackbird landed on the table. It cocked its head and looked around the way they do. Then I saw a small flock of birds like finches out in the corridor, swooping up and landing on the hand railings on the second tier. A few seconds later the whole cell block was full of shouting and birdsong. The alarms started screaming and the guards stormed in. They beat us back into our cells, but by then birds were all over the place, flying up and down, calling out to the rest of us. My cellmate, Eddie Reethers, told me he was going to be a wild pigeon, a rock dove, and it was a pigeon that hopped through the bars and flew past me to the window of the cell. He kept shifting on his feet and gazing down at me, and then he stepped through the bars out onto the ledge and flew away. I ran to see. In the clear air, with all that moonlight, I could see twenty or so birds flying around. I jumped back to the cell door. As many were flying through the corridor, in and out of the cells. The guards were swinging away at them, missing every time.

  Five minutes and it was all over. They shut the alarms off. The guards stood around looking stupid. Seventy-eight of us were at the doors of our cells or squeezed up against the bars of the windows, watching the last few birds flying off in the moonlight, into the darkness.