The Pages of Life

It lies between a sewage disposal plant and La Guardia Airport. "It" is Riker's Island—a dreaded name to New Yorkers, synonymous with maximum security; isolation; bleak, barred buildings; 12-foot mesh fences topped with razor-edged curlicues of steel that can slice a hand to bits.

Riker's Island is the jail of New York City. It houses 10,000 prisoners. One out of four has been sentenced; three out of four await trial or some other disposition of their cases. Relatively few people know where the island lies or have ever seen it because access to it—a lone, long causeway—is heavily guarded.

I never go there without reflecting on its symbolic location: between a sewage disposal plant of a society that perceives the inmates of Riker's as the trash of the city, and the airport, scene of unceasing mobility, escape, freedom. I never go there without frustration at a system that makes it almost as hard for a volunteer to get in as for an inmate to get out. I never go there without realizing that, given any one of innumerable scenarios quite out of my control, I could be inside instead of outside.

I am sitting now in a room with 20 women inmates as Maureen McCormack conducts a journaling workshop. One woman weeps often. She is older than most, in her 40s, I'd say, and this is her first incarceration. It has interrupted a long-deferred course in nursing, and who knows whether she can ever pick it up again.

The woman to my right has those badly scarred, swollen hands which indicate a long history of drug use. One woman limps heavily, her right leg being several inches shorter than her left. Corrective surgery would have undoubtedly remedied this condition had she been born into other circumstances. Most of the women have been in and out of jails and prisons. All have hopes and dreams. All have people dear to them "on the outside."

Maureen stands before them, professional, attractive, competent, self-assured—all the things they feel they are not. She is serene, and she tells the women how to become serene themselves. She directs them on how to center their attention, to be attentive to their breathing, to retreat into those private and quiet spaces inside themselves. She tells them how to lay out the content of their lives so as to draw wisdom from everything that has happened to them.

All at once their lives, chaotic as they may have been, when described by Maureen as worthy of serious attention, seem to be fertile and precious ground. Every experience has some value of its own. When she invites the women to read, long pent-up feelings spill out. Even these emotions are to be captured and cherished, Maureen says, and are to be noted in the journal.

"I thought this would be boring," someone ventures, "but it's not!" "So," Maureen quips, "what is more interesting than ourselves?" As one after another volunteers to read, confidence grows. Mumbling voices become stronger and more articulate. Women have the courage to stand and face the group as they read, while Maureen lays a steadying and reassuring arm around them.

"I feel so pent up," one woman writes, "that I think I will explode like a volcano. My brain will pour out like lava through a great gaping hole in the top of my head." She writes this as a comment after having read to the group a sorry tale, now all too common, of sexual abuse foisted on her again and again as a child.

TODAY IS THE second day of the workshop, the day when the promised journals are given out. Each one takes her book and inserts the pages already written into their color-coded sections. Maureen has forewarned the women to safeguard their privacy, so the journal is guarded and hugged. The life it contains is no longer a throw-away object but a precious, unique, and esteemed journey.

I wonder about the future of the other participants. One is going home tomorrow, after six months at Riker's, to her seven children who do not know that their mother has been incarcerated. She records in her journal the apprehension she feels about how they will greet her.

Two young women, a Russian and a Pole, are in protective custody and have joined the larger general population to take this workshop. Whatever it may be that has put them here, they seem timid and isolated in the group. The Polish woman has a stubborn rash, and is as pale as death and visibly tense. Her face is wreathed in smiles when she learns that she can write in Polish.

Another young woman has just delivered twins. Although the new nursery—the pride of Riker's—will open in just two days and can house five mothers with their newborns, it is not yet settled whether this young mother can be with her babies. She has a history of child abuse.

Several of the women have not read any of their writing aloud, but they have persisted in the workshop. They have covered pages and pages and carefully inserted them into the proper slots. Some have wept silent tears; some have never smiled. All smoke and smoke a great deal. Who knows what awaits them? The journal may be for some a place to work out a hoped-for conversation, to try to put dreams into words and, ultimately, by trusting the journal, to trust a friend.

I sit here with these women, my sisters, and reflect how like them I am. I too am diffident about reading aloud what I have written. I too have long-buried memories too painful to resurrect. I share their uncertainty, their need for approval, their self-hatred, their dissatisfaction with their bodies.

I think how unlike them I am, with my tendency to intellectualize everything, with my careful, controlled speech, and my world of books and art, drama and music.

What sisterhood is it that we share, they on the "inside," me on the "outside"? Whatever it is, it is not built on neatly categorized relationships of giver and receiver, pitier and pitied, teacher and taught, free and incarcerated. For all of us are all of these.

Ann Patrick Ware, a Sister of Loretto, worked for Church Women United and was coordinator of the Institute of Women Today in New York City when this article appeared.