a-new-spelling-of-our-names

A Painful Lesson Learned From an Absent Father

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:17:01 +0100

Imagine having a father who showed you everything you needed to know about hurting people, who showed you how to turn out your wife on dope. How about never coming in contact with you unless he was high or drunk? Man, my father was a real trooper. He never let his friends down nor did they have to be put off, because of his family. However, as his family we though of our father as this great big man who can kill anyone who ever crossed him. But for some reason he could never push himself to love us or me enough to raise me to be respectable childe who would in turn become man who love his family and community.

My father was a very hard worker and kept a smile on his face, but never once asked me where my mind was at or whether or not I finished school. He never asked me if I loved myself nor did he teach me how to love myself. He knew how to do one thing; break my heart and turn to dope for his best interests. My father was nothing like a true man, as I know one to be at this present time. My whole life is destroyed as a result of his disregard for nurturing me.

Through all the years of disrespect from my father, I realized one thing my father did not love shit, but that dope. He broke my mother down like a dog in a junkyard. My father didn’t even love himself, and showed it by not leaving drugs alone. He built another family and destroyed that too. What kind of father can be when there were not images to hold on to nor was there a house to remember. I never remember seeing my father sober.

My father never recovered from his dope habit and I never did recover from this heavy heart I walk with throughout life. I am crushed as a man because I never had my father as a child. When I thought there was a little bit of hope, I received a rude awakening. My father gave up his family and life for dope and I never got a chance to tell him I love him for being my father.

I am a father and I left my family for something I love more than them. I got stuck in my father’s image, to the point I wanted to be just like him. The only thing I did not do is turn out my wife, because I did not have one. My respect level for women is so low, because I was never in a good position to learn how to love a woman or anyone for that matter. Right now I feel like my love should be sent out to the world, because I now understand love is something to be exchanged in order to be maintained. Without love I have no hope. A man without hope is an unlearned man that will surely go to his grave empty hearted. Absentee fathers can destroy every son within a million mile radius and can stop the heartbeat of any community known to man. Mother’s cry everyday with the pain of losing a father of their child to drugs or guns, but when we walk away just to chase other women or money, we never realize the impact of our actions.

Having a father like mine was what it took to reach out to others who may consider turning his back on his family. I cry out for help, but it seems as though everyone has their own problems.

Mike Ashley

Visiting Room Correspondent

Son Recounts Father’s Significant Impact on Life

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:11:36 +0100

Timothy Powell

Visiting Room Correspondent

Trying to determine the most significant impact my father’s influence had on me is and always will be a work in progress. This is because I naturally incline my determination to good aspects of his life with good aspects of my life.

I should begin by telling you I was adopted. I have had very little contact with my biological father. I was a very ill infant, creating financial burden on my biological mother of three which she could not maintain. She sought the help of a childless couple asking them to take me in temporarily. Mr. and Mrs. Powell opted for a more permanent arrangement fearing the likelihood that they would become emotionally attached to me making separation overwhelming on them.

Both of my adoptive parents were hard workers who went to work everyday. My

mother’s employment record was very spotty almost entirely due to my repeated recalcitrant behavior in school, my father was at work most of the time. There was even a time when my father took on a second job as a janitor at a downtown (Boston) office building in order to stay ahead of the bills. I never went a day or evening hungry; I slept on a good and comfortable bed in a warm room.

There is nothing in my criminal history which is attributable to either of my parents. Though my father was from South Carolina and lived through Jim Crow, neither he nor my mother taught me to me to be racist.

My father died of cancer in 1982, while I was serving a lengthy sentence at MCI-Norfolk. In those days, inmates were allowed to attend the actual funeral service with an escorted furlough. The highlight for me was being asked by mother to deliver an eulogy for him. It was a proud moment for my mother and a relief for my father’s family whose major conflict was that I would embarrass the family. Despite the chain restraints the effort was well received when it was over and I think he would have been proud if he could have heard it.

Timothy Powell
Visiting Room Correspondent

The Visting Room - Coming in from the Outside

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:13:33 +0100

Five black buttons, smaller than dimes have pushed me to the edge of sanity.

After two hours of trying on one dress after another- five, nondescript buttons threaten to ruin my resolve to document life behind bars. I am frustrated and anxious that the wrong garment choice could set back this project yet another week in what has become a year long nightmare of bureaucratic nitpicking and delays. I have grown weary of the process of trading one pair of dress pants for another identical pair that may or may not hug my hips a little too provocatively. The decision on what to wear is not usually so difficult for me– but today it is. I have decided against my oldie but goodie “interview” black dress. The dress would be considered by most to be conservative and appropriate for just about any occasion – weddings, funerals, bat mitzvahs, you name it – but today, because of the five buttons trailing from the neckline to waist on the dress, it is not the right dress to wear to prison. I have also decided against jeans and a printed t-shirt: the jeans are too tight and shirts with writing are not allowed. I don’t automatically know these rules – I am being educated by Joanna Marinova, Co-director of Press Pass Television who has arranged a meeting between me and a prison activist, Derrell Jones.

“I know this sounds silly but I have to tell you,” Joanna informs me over the phone. “But be sure to wear a bra, they wont let you in without underwear.”

Joanna and I have never met but we are connected by a cause: The desire – no, the need to “break the silence” in prisons. I initially began this journey alone – thinking I could enter the prisons as a writer teaching other women to document their narratives that would later be introduced into the media landscape via a web site. I was wrong and pitifully naïve. After a year long battle with the administration at MCI-Framingham, I had just about given up on seeing the project come to fruition. Now the project has been given new breath or it may be – at least this is what I gather from Joanna who tells me she knows of a person on the inside who is interested.

“It is a men’s prison,” she says knowing that my original intention was to work with women – but this was never written in stone and I am more than elated to have an opportunity to breathe new life in this project.

We agree that I will meet Joanna’s colleague, Cara Lisa Berg-Powers in Norfolk, Massachusetts – the home of the MCI-Norfolk, an all men’s correctional facility. Cara meets me at the train station on a cold, blustery Thursday. I finally decided on khaki pants and a black turtleneck. I have been careful to pull my dreadlocks into a neat, non-threatening bun without using hairpins. I have been educated that hairpins are not allowed. Later I will learn neither are earrings, necklaces without religious symbols and any other jewelry except wedding rings. Cara is exuberant and motivated about our meeting with Jones. She tells me Jones works with men to prepare them for life on the outside. “He does the prison officials job of making these men better,” Cara tells me confidently. “If anyone can get these men to write, it is Derrell.”

This is not my first time visiting my prison. In fact, I have visited various prisons as a reporter in North Carolina. I have been to death row in North Carolina’s Central Prison and I have even been allowed within the death chamber with a photographer. This would never happen in Massachusetts I am told by Cara, Massachusetts has banned the media from its prisons since the 1990’s.

“How the hell are we supposed to know what happens in there?” I ask as we approach a large foreboding building with an iron gate. Cara looks at me with sky blue eyes and smiles slightly – to this question, the answers do not come easily.

Once inside we join a line of women, some with children, who are eager to see their loved ones. They stand checking one another’s hair and outfits for appropriateness. The children are restless – everyone is anxious. These women discuss more than clothes – they speak to one another about isolation, justice and the conditions of prisons.

One woman with mournful eyes wearing a St. Christopher’s medallion tells me and Cara, “I have been coming for three years. It is like I am locked up to.”

After a brief wait in the front lobby of the prison, we are ushered into another room with a metal detector and then finally we can enter the visiting room. It looks like a 1980’s day room for a summer camp with the blue plastic chairs arranged in a semi-circle. It is impossible for privacy in this room. Children visit with their fathers and some become paradoxically bored and hyper at the same time, perhaps it is the combination of junk food they are fed from the vending machines and the lack of activities to engage them. The women seem tired – worn. The process of ‘visiting” is not for the weak or faint-hearted.

What happens in the visiting room? What are the ties binding one person to another through years of separation? Are they reinforced or weakened by the stressors of prison? This is the purpose of this project. What are we missing when humanity is forcibly silenced? How do we as a society collectively respond? Is it our duty to listen? And finally, what is it these men and their families have to share?

The Visiting Room is a forum for incarcerated men, their partners, children and their friends to share their perspectives on living and loving from behind bars. There are no restrictions on what can be shared – there are no censors, no guards hovering, and no time restrictions. This is real talk and real emotion – please come in write, read, learn. Welcome to The Visiting Room.

A New Spelling of Our Names: Reconceptualizing Identity Behind Bars

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:38:34 +0100

Stories to be Posted by April 16