Read Online Fanon by John Edgar Wideman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Edgar Wideman
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table, sleeping for years under the same roof, sharing the same parents and siblings (almost), same grandparents uncles aunts nieces cousins nephews, the point being, the point the numbers reveal: it would be a less than startling outcome to find myself incarcerated. This scene I'm writing could be my brother visiting me, the two of us side by side just as we sit today, myself, my brother, one declared guilty, one declared innocent, variables in an invariant formula, but me in his place, him in mine, our fates
switched, each of us nailed in our separate compartment of this hardass bench.
The length of these bolted-to-the-floor, orangish benches varies. They are staggered in uneven rows, separate islands of seats with plastic cushioned backs, shared wooden armrests, rigid seats affixed to one another, aligned so they all open in the same direction, and in order to speak face to face with the person next to you, you must twist sideways in your slot, talk across the hard armrest, or if you wish to say anything to someone two places away, you must scoot to the front of your compartment and lean past the person next to you to meet the eyes of the person you're addressing, prisoners and visitors tilting up and back as if davening before an invisible Wailing Wall. You must work even harder to have a conversation including more than one person at a time. Shout past the person next to you to be heard up and down the line of seats your group occupies.
In this case the group consists of me, my brother, and our mother, whom I've positioned as close as I can to my brother, angling her wheelchair at the end of our four-holer bench. The mobility of her wheelchair could serve as an advantage, but it doesn t. Each unmovable orange bench fronted by a low table that poses as a convenience for holding snacks purchased from the vending machines, and since there's a rule against moving tables, they also function as barricades, so I must plant my mom's wheelchair at the end of a unit of bench and table, stranding her as each bench is stranded and isolated yet also an intrusion upon the others, all visitors in each other's way, a perverse outcome so finely, successfully calibrated it must be intentional, perhaps computer generated to maximize exposure of every seat in the room to the raised platform where a guard oversees the visiting area, but also an arrangement designed to minimize intimacy between prisoner and visitor, preventing comfort, touching, privacy. No room for maneuver down at the end of our module,
where I angle the wheels of my mother's chair as best I can to achieve a feeling of closeness, and there she is, stuck for the duration of our stay though her seat's the only one in the house, besides the guard's tall stool, not fastened to the floor. The clever floor plan has anticipated the variable of a visitor confined to a wheelchair and renders my mother's chair as useless as her flesh-and-blood limbs. Technology trumping technology. Her wheels immobilized, her poor hearing worse in this low-ceilinged, concrete-walled airplane hangar space where sound eats itself, everybody's words slamming into unforgiving surfaces, messages chewed up and spit out, mangled, transformed to a harsh, deafening collective din that frustrates listening or speaking when the visiting room crowds up on weekends. I doubt my brother hears much of what my mother says, and I catch almost none of his words when his back's to me. I can't tell if he's addressing her or both of us and that's probably much more sense than she can make out of my attempts to speak to her and I wonder if my mother actually hears Rob, though his mouth is only a couple feet from her ear.
Almost thirty years ago I tried to write a book I hoped might free my brother from a life sentence in the penitentiary. It didn't work. Everything written after that book worked even less. Now my brother's face is turned away from me because the three of us, me, him, our mother, sit lined up side by
switched, each of us nailed in our separate compartment of this hardass bench.
The length of these bolted-to-the-floor, orangish benches varies. They are staggered in uneven rows, separate islands of seats with plastic cushioned backs, shared wooden armrests, rigid seats affixed to one another, aligned so they all open in the same direction, and in order to speak face to face with the person next to you, you must twist sideways in your slot, talk across the hard armrest, or if you wish to say anything to someone two places away, you must scoot to the front of your compartment and lean past the person next to you to meet the eyes of the person you're addressing, prisoners and visitors tilting up and back as if davening before an invisible Wailing Wall. You must work even harder to have a conversation including more than one person at a time. Shout past the person next to you to be heard up and down the line of seats your group occupies.
In this case the group consists of me, my brother, and our mother, whom I've positioned as close as I can to my brother, angling her wheelchair at the end of our four-holer bench. The mobility of her wheelchair could serve as an advantage, but it doesn t. Each unmovable orange bench fronted by a low table that poses as a convenience for holding snacks purchased from the vending machines, and since there's a rule against moving tables, they also function as barricades, so I must plant my mom's wheelchair at the end of a unit of bench and table, stranding her as each bench is stranded and isolated yet also an intrusion upon the others, all visitors in each other's way, a perverse outcome so finely, successfully calibrated it must be intentional, perhaps computer generated to maximize exposure of every seat in the room to the raised platform where a guard oversees the visiting area, but also an arrangement designed to minimize intimacy between prisoner and visitor, preventing comfort, touching, privacy. No room for maneuver down at the end of our module,
where I angle the wheels of my mother's chair as best I can to achieve a feeling of closeness, and there she is, stuck for the duration of our stay though her seat's the only one in the house, besides the guard's tall stool, not fastened to the floor. The clever floor plan has anticipated the variable of a visitor confined to a wheelchair and renders my mother's chair as useless as her flesh-and-blood limbs. Technology trumping technology. Her wheels immobilized, her poor hearing worse in this low-ceilinged, concrete-walled airplane hangar space where sound eats itself, everybody's words slamming into unforgiving surfaces, messages chewed up and spit out, mangled, transformed to a harsh, deafening collective din that frustrates listening or speaking when the visiting room crowds up on weekends. I doubt my brother hears much of what my mother says, and I catch almost none of his words when his back's to me. I can't tell if he's addressing her or both of us and that's probably much more sense than she can make out of my attempts to speak to her and I wonder if my mother actually hears Rob, though his mouth is only a couple feet from her ear.
Almost thirty years ago I tried to write a book I hoped might free my brother from a life sentence in the penitentiary. It didn't work. Everything written after that book worked even less. Now my brother's face is turned away from me because the three of us, me, him, our mother, sit lined up side by
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