Let me way this. I was 22 when I came to prison and of course I have changed tremendously over the years. But I had always had a strong sense of myself and in the last few years I felt i was losing my identity. There was a deadness in my body that eluded me, as though I could not exactly locate its site. I would be aware of this numbness, this feeling of atrophy, and it haunted the back of my mind. Because of this numb spot, I felt peculiarly off balance, the awareness of something missing, of a blank spot, a certain intimation of emptiness. Now I know what it was. and since encountering you, I feel life strength flowing back into that spot. My step, the tread of my stride, which was becoming tentative and uncertain, has begun to recover and take on a new definiteness, a confidence, a boldness which makes me want to kick over a few tables. I may even swagger a little, and, as I read in a book somewhere, “push myself forward like a train.”
Eldridge Cleaver to Beverly Axelrod
Soul on Ice, 1968
I’m not going to bullshit you about what happens when you walk into San Quentin once a week with a lesson plan and good intentions, because good intentions are exactly the kind of currency that gets you nowhere in a place where time itself has been weaponized against human dignity. You show up thinking you’re going to make a difference, maybe save someone, and what actually happens is you realize you’re the one who needs saving from your own comfortable delusions about how the world works.
But first, I wait. I wait at the gate with my co-teacher while Officer Wood checks my IDs with the speed and enthusiasm of a man who’s figured out that minor cruelty is the only power he’ll ever have. He knows my names by now, seen me every week for the last year, but he still makes me wait, still scrutinizes my credentials like I might be smuggling contraband in my twenty white sheets of paper.
In that liminal space between the free world and the locked one, while Wood takes his sweet time, we start talking. Small talk at first, bullshit about traffic, about the reading list, about nothing. But day after day, waiting becomes ritual, and ritual becomes intimacy. Then comes the walk. That long, impossible walk from the outer gate through the yard to the education building, and this is where it happens. This is where I learn that she’s from San Diego, an Oberlin grad who thought she could change the world and then actually went out and tried. Geography PhD from Berkeley studying environmental racism in cities, the kind of work that requires you to look directly at how America poisons its own people along carefully drawn racial lines. She tells me about mapping toxic sites in San Francisco neighborhoods, about chemical biomonitoring, and I realize she’s spent years documenting the slow violence nobody wants to talk about.
The yard stretches out around us, men in blue moving through their circumscribed lives, and we’re both just passing through, but together.
She’s at the front of the room explaining James Baldwin to a guy doing twenty-to-life like it’s the most natural conversation in the world, and I’m supposed to be teaching but instead I’m watching the way she pushes her hair back when she’s thinking, the way she doesn’t flinch when someone tells her about the violence they’ve done. She’s got this thing, this complete lack of performance, that makes everyone else in the room look like they’re acting, including me.
Maybe it’s because she knows something about death that most people her age don’t or shouldn’t. Her mom, cancer. Her uncle, AIDS, back when that was still a death sentence wrapped in stigma and silence. She doesn’t talk about it like tragedy porn, doesn’t wear her grief like some badge of authenticity. But it’s there in the way she listens to the students, in how she refuses to look away from hard truths, in her absolute intolerance for bullshit that pretends suffering is an abstraction. Inside San Quentin, you can’t hide behind your degrees or your theories about rehabilitation. You’re just there, present, vulnerable in ways that make you understand why Cleaver wrote those letters to Beverly Axelrod with such desperate honesty.
And then after class, we walk it all back, through the yard again, through the checkpoints, but we don’t stop talking. We end up in the parking lot under those cold sodium lights, the prison lit up behind us like some industrial cathedral, and we’re still going, still processing what just happened in there, what’s always happening in there. She’s leaning against her car talking about moving to UC Santa Cruz next year, about her book manuscript on environmental inequalities, about the California Studies Association board she serves on, and I should be congratulating her but all I can think is that she’s leaving, that these walks are numbered, that the parking lot conversations have an expiration date.
This is where it really happens, not in the classroom, but in these in-between spaces. The waiting while Wood makes me feel like a criminal for trying to teach. The walking. The refusing to leave even when we should. These cold parking lot debriefs that stretch from fifteen minutes to an hour, neither of us willing to be the first to say goodbye, to get in the car, to drive back to our separate lives that suddenly feel like lies we tell ourselves about who we are.
I’m falling for her in the worst possible place, the most complicated circumstances, and every rational part of my brain is screaming about ethics and boundaries and power dynamics. But the heart doesn’t give a damn about institutional guidelines. It just keeps hammering away in my chest every time she laughs at something one of the students says, every time we debrief after class and she sees right through whatever intellectual posturing I’m doing that day, every time we’re walking through that yard and her shoulder accidentally brushes mine and the whole damn world contracts to that single point of contact.
She’s this brilliant fucking force, postdoc mapping poison in poor neighborhoods, teaching Baldwin to lifers, surviving losses that would break most people, and somehow she’s chosen to spend her evenings in a prison parking lot talking to me about Gramsci and grief and the impossibility of justice in a country built on inequality.
This isn’t romance. It’s recognition. Two people trying to do difficult work in an impossible place, and somewhere in the fluorescent-lit margins, in the waiting and the walking and the standing in cold parking lots talking about everything except what’s actually happening between us, finding something that feels more real than anything on the outside ever did.