Read Online Fanon by John Edgar Wideman - Free Book Online Page A

Folds up for us, the visitors, anyway, though my brother remains behind, locked in a steel cage. The prison emptied of us folds up for storage in whatever compartment we allot for it, shrinking smaller and smaller once we're outside its walls, so small finally we don't see it except we're always aware that the prison sits like a wheelchair waiting to be filled or emptied, waiting for us to arrive again, lift or
squeeze my brother in again, ourselves in, a process far more difficult for him than for us, we come and go but with his legs cut out from under him, like my mother confined in her jail on wheels, he must depend on others.
    For the price of an airline ticket I can reduce the four hundred miles between New York City and Pittsburgh to three quarters of an hour, not counting driving time to and from airports. Hours saved, it seems. A magic erasure of space, it seems. Except while I'm beamed at
Star Trek
speed from one place to another, my brother's clock ticks at its usual pace, minutes, hours, days bearing good news—more time served, therefore less time remaining to serve, and bad news—more time passed in jail, therefore less time for a life after prison. As both of us age and the years register on our faces, on the face of the good news/bad news clock, I understand a little better what my brother feels when he thinks about time in prison. Inside prison it's hard to ignore how little time there is, how each beginning, if not exactly an ending, is also a diminishment. The hand giving also busy taking away. My life sentence not spelled out like my brother s, but like him I've become increasingly aware that each day alive is one day less of whatever time's coming to me. My brother's prison time not my time, no one can do his time for him, no one can begin to understand the meaning of time the state subtracts from his portion, but on my island I've learned to count like him, learned the weight of minutes that accumulate and exhaust themselves simultaneously. Never one truth without the other. The count's the count. Stretching. Contracting. Counting up, counting down. Unforgivingly less, always less, even as more appears.
    So what's the damned hurry. My brother ain't going nowhere. My flying carpet saves neither his time nor mine. I carry around the penitentiary walls everywhere I go, like a family snapshot in my wallet, those grimy, unmoving ramparts planted over a century ago alongside water that never stops flowing. What message did the state wish
to send by siting the prison on a riverbank. What does a river mean to an inmate who glimpses it through stone walls enclosing the island on which he's trapped. Thick, towering walls built to look like forever and last forever. I didn't know how to react when I heard the prison's going to be closed, maybe razed or maybe converted to a casino.
    How many black men in America's prisons. How many angels fit on the head of a pin. I once kept track of the number of prisoners—black, white, brown, male, female. Now I've lost count. Lots. Lots too many of us serving sentences lots too long, especially when one of the prisoners is your brother beside you, year after year, in the visiting room of the same facility where he's been locked up over a quarter century and counting, a count adding years, subtracting years, depending on where you start, how you figure what he owes the state, what the state owes him, time remaining, good time, suspended time, double time, you could get caught up in numbers, in reckoning, how many angels can dance on a pinhead, how many black men in prison for how long, you could get confused by numbers, staggeringly large numbers, outraged by dire probabilities and obvious disproportions. Ugly masses of brute statistics impossible to make sense of, but some days a single possibility's enough to overwhelm me—how likely, how easy, after all, it would be to be my brother. Our fortunes exchanged, his portion mine, mine his. I recall all those meals at the same