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. 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, inspire someone, 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 in this life or any other. He knows my name by now, seen me every week for the last year and a half, but he still makes me wait, still scrutinizes my credentials like I might be smuggling contraband in my twenty white sheets of paper.
The first day I met her was May 11, 2015. She’d just come back from Bolinas, where she’d spent Mother’s Day weekend with her father and brother, the three of them gathered close to the anniversary of her mother’s death on May 8th. That same first day was the anniversary of my father’s death. We figured it out standing there in front of Wood’s window, two people who had each lost a parent in the same week of the calendar, now waiting together to be let into a prison. You don’t recover from a coincidence like that. You don’t even try. You just decide what to do with it. We decided to keep talking.
In that liminal space between the free world and the locked one, while Wood took his sweet time, we started a conversation that continues to this day. Small talk at first, bullshit about traffic, about the reading list, about nothing. Day after day, the waiting became ritual, and the ritual became something closer to intimacy than I knew how to name. Then comes the walk. That long, impossible walk from the outer gate past the lactation shack 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, which is a hell of a thing because most of us just keep thinking about it. 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 and not look away when the looking gets ugly. 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 and most people would pay good money to forget.
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 and total lack of performance, that makes everyone else in the room look like they’re acting, including me, especially me.
Maybe it’s because she knows something about death that most people her age don’t or shouldn’t have to. Her mom, cancer. Her uncle, AIDS, back when that was still a death sentence wrapped in stigma and silence and the kind of social abandonment that should’ve been a crime. She doesn’t talk about it like tragedy porn. Doesn’t wear her grief like some badge of authenticity at a literary cocktail party. It’s there in the way she listens to the students, 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, like a man trying to claw his way back to being human through the only door left open to him.
Then after class, we walk it all back, through the yard again, past death row, through the checkpoints, but we don’t stop talking, we can’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 built by people who had forgotten what cathedrals were for, 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 book chapters that are due and 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.
We still have two months of teaching together to go.
This is where it really happens, not in the classroom, but in these in-between spaces nobody bothers to map. 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 to god knows how long, neither of us willing to be the first to say goodbye, to get in the car, to drive back to whatever was waiting for us on the outside. The cell phones we’d left in our cars would already be lit up and buzzing by the time we made it back to them. Three hours of missed messages from people who knew we’d been unreachable inside, anxious to know we’d made it out safe. Awkward, intrusive, jarring every time. Like the world we’d briefly stepped out of was reaching back in to claim us, and every time we ignored them. Both of us. Without discussion. The danger wasn’t in there. For me, my life out there had started to feel like the intermission of a play, lively enough, full of charming and entertaining people, but I was restless the whole time, anxious to get back inside and see what would happen next between me and Lindsey.
Then on Monday, July 20, Lindsey came to class with her eyes already red. A family friend was dying. Her father had flown up to see him, and she’d dropped her dad at the airport that afternoon on her way to the prison. She taught anyway. Stood at the front of that room and worked through the reading like nothing was happening, because that’s what she does, that’s who she is.
I recognized it because I’d done it myself. My father in 1999, my mother in 2013, just two years before I met her. Grief teaches you that, if it teaches you anything worth knowing. How to run two channels at once, sometimes three. How to be present in the room and somewhere else entirely at the same time, performing competence while another part of you is at an airport, at a hospital, at every other goodbye you’ve ever had to say and the ones you haven’t said yet but know are coming. You get good at it. You have to. But the compartments only hold for so long before the seal breaks and the whole thing spills out at once.
After class, in the parking lot, her wall cracked. She leaned against her car and cried, and told me quietly: “I always get sad taking my dad to the airport. Saying goodbye is hard when you love someone so much.” Then she explained the rest, the family friend at the other end of the visit, dying, her father flying back to be there for whatever came next.
She was talking about her father. The dying friend. But underneath: her mother, maybe her uncle. Every loss already accumulated and every loss still ahead. She wasn’t talking about me. But standing there under those sodium lights with the prison lit up behind us like an industrial cathedral, I felt it land in places she didn’t intend. I heard it as a sentence about us before there was an us to say goodbye to. About the semester ending. About Santa Cruz waiting for her the following year. About the fact that these walks and these parking lots and these debriefs would end in a few short weeks.
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 shit about institutional guidelines. It just keeps hammering away in my chest every time she laughs at something I say, 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 or hand accidentally brushes mine and the whole damn world contracts to that single point of contact, like the rest of the universe just up and quit on us for a second.
She’s this brilliant fucking force, postdoc mapping poison in poor neighborhoods, teaching Baldwin to lifers, surviving losses that would break most people and probably should have broken her, 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, or maybe ever could.