T. E. James

This Little Light of Mine

Many years ago, I got involved with middle school students and prison inmates. Or perhaps I should say, I worked with the students and volunteered with the inmates. It was quite complicated: the school was Quaker, the prison had no religion, and I was in charge of discipline, which the middle school students and the prison inmates had feelings about. Who doesn’t have feelings about discipline? I attended Quaker Meeting with both groups—students and inmates—and sometimes feelings came out during the silence. I was a Quaker back then, though a flawed one, and I wondered a lot about discipline.

My first visit to the prison took place in September 1994. Tim Putnam and Veronica Whalen, members of my local Friends Meeting, met me in the parking lot. Tim was in his late seventies, with silver hair and perfect posture. Veronica was barely five feet tall and looked even older than Tim. She wore a black wool jacket and a red beret that covered her gray hair at a jaunty angle.

Minimum security was a 1960s brick structure, not unlike a school, with two older wings on each side. The guard on duty, who wore no uniform, said hello to Tim and Veronica and waved us through the lobby. Upstairs, in the visitors’ room, vending machines crowded one wall, inmates and families talked at tables, and none of the doors were locked.

The prison chapel, which smelled of lemon wax, was the size of a classroom, with a wooden altar, five heavy oak pews, and a crucifix attached to the wall. The windows had no bars and white cloth curtains that looked hand made. A minute after we entered, the first inmate came in. He was white, in his late thirties, and had a short dark beard trimmed so neatly at his neck that it resembled a boundary on a map. He wore a khaki uniform, hi-top sneakers, and a ID card clipped to his belt loop. He shook Tim’s hand with great warmth and said: “It’s so good to see you!”

“Kurt!” Tim said. “How are you?” He shook Kurt’s hand as if he were an old acquaintance.

My first impression, having never been in a prison before, was: What a friendly man.

Second impression: What crime did he commit?

Third: He doesn’t look like a convicted criminal, though I had no idea what a convicted criminal looked like.

Another inmate, about sixty, entered. He seemed alert and yet weary, as if he spent his waking hours in a state of constant vigilance, and his potbelly was so small and defined as to look like a cantaloupe. He wore the same khaki, sneaker, and plastic ID ensemble as Kurt, but he’d untucked his shirt and rolled his pant legs up an inch. He said his name was Benedict and we shook hands.

Tim and I turned the front pew around so it faced the second pew. Now the two benches faced each other, which was how a Quaker Meeting was conducted. Three more men came in and Tim and Veronica welcomed them warmly. Quaker Meeting, they’d explained in the parking lot, attracted both regulars and first-timers.

“Benedict had his arteries enlarged earlier this week,” Tim said to Veronica and me. He looked at Benedict. “How do you feel?” Tim was a former surgeon, a father of three, and a birthright Quaker.

“Much better.” Benedict nodded at me and said in a friendly voice: “Have I seen you in medium?”

I shook my head. “This is my first time.” I had no experience with prisons, nor any family members or friends who’d been in jail, and I was still undecided about prison ministry. My job as a middle school principal kept me busy, my wife and I were raising three young children, and the health of our parents had started to decline. But discipline interested me. Quakerism did too.

Tim nodded at Veronica. “Shall we begin?”

She closed her eyes, held her weathered hands on her knees with her palms facing up, as if to catch something. Her face was wrinkled and yet soft, like chamois cloth. Tim leaned back and closed his eyes, making his mouth relax and his forehead lose its furrows. After a few moments, the inmates settled, or tried to. Outside, a truck labored up a hill.

Nothing happens in a Quaker Meeting, at least on the outside, and for forty-five minutes we sat in silence. I closed my eyes and tried to “center down,” but I kept glancing at the inmates. I couldn’t believe we’d be left in the chapel without a guard and I didn’t know how these men would handle so much silence, since I’d been told that prison life was an endless litany of clanging doors and raised voices.

Afterwards, Kurt held up a pamphlet. “Did you see the Quaker newsletter? They put us on the front page. ‘Quaker Meeting. Minimum security. Monday.’” He looked proud. “That’s us.”

“Do our visits help?” I said.

“It means a lot,” Kurt said. “You can’t imagine.”

Tim and Veronica directed us to form a circle and we held hands. Kurt closed his eyes and said: “I’d like to offer a prayer for all those coming up before the parole board.” He held my hand loosely.

“That’s nice,” Veronica said. “They need that.” She held the hands of the inmates on either side of her while our group became briefly silent again. Her bony ankles looked like twigs, the men dwarfed her, and her tiny hands disappeared in their grip.

The telephone in my office rang. “Perry’s a wreck,” the father of a sixth grade boy said. “Don’t you think suspension is extreme?”

Perry had brought a bullet to school. Not a sleek, modern bullet; an ancient, hoary one. The teacher who’d discovered the bullet had walked Perry down to my office, the three of us had sat at my round table, and we’d stared at the slug. It was an inch long, the bottom had a slight nick in it, like a chip in a tooth, and the brass had faded to a dull gray. Despite its dullness, it had a buttery sheen, probably from all the sixth grade fingers that had admired it.

“Am I in trouble?” Perry said. He sat on the last three inches of his chair, ready to flee when released. Students in my office always wanted to flee. The garish fluorescent light from the two overhead rectangles gave his face a bluish tint. The bullet looked a bit blue as well.

“Where did you find that?” I pointed at the slug.

“In a trunk in my attic.”

“Whose trunk is it?”

“My grandfather’s.”

“Why did you bring it to school?”

“I wanted to show my friends.”

Donald and I looked at each other. Donald was one of the few Quakers on the faculty, so he could help me determine whether bringing a bullet to school was serious. Colburn Academy was a Quaker school. Quakers believed that everyone had “a light within,” or “an inner good.” This made the parents and students think that we’d be lenient about mistakes.

“I know it’s difficult,” I said to Perry’s father, “but bringing a bullet to school is a serious offense.”

“He’s only eleven, for crying out loud.”

 Above me, a water pipe made a muffled splash. Colburn was founded in the 1800s and my office was located below an old kitchen.

“I felt suspension was the right response,” I said. Mistakes reminded me of a grinding wheel: sparks everywhere. You had the facts, which were sometimes in dispute; the witnesses, if they dared come forth; the parents, who were embarrassed, protective, and often angry; the faculty, who had their own views about the proper way to correct a mistake; the school, which wanted to send a stern but fair-minded warning to future mistake makers; those few students who’d been punished for a similar mistake and were waiting to criticize the school if it appeared inconsistent; and of course, rising above it all, the idealism of a Quaker school.

The father cleared his throat. “Why didn’t you and Mr. McBride talk to Perry? A good talk and he would’ve learned his lesson.”

“We did.”

“If you ask me, a suspension isn’t Quakerly.” He paused.  “Are you a Quaker?”

“Yes I am.”

I was a “convinced” Friend, which was different from someone born into the religion. Tim Putnam and Veronica Whalen were birthright Quakers.

Perry’s father snorted on the other end of the line. “Maybe you need help seeing the light.”

Prison ministry had an important rule: Never, under any circumstances, could we ask an inmate about his crime.

Only one volunteer, to my knowledge, broke the rule: Per Bykstra. He was a Dutch gentleman in his sixties, an addiction counselor, and a member of a nearby Friends Meeting. He had a stocky build, bulbous lips, and a thick shock of silver blond hair that fell across the right side of his forehead like a heavy curtain. Per ran Quaker services in men’s maximum security every Wednesday night for ten years, which comes out to more than five hundred visits.

Per had looked into an inmate’s record and learned that the man had murdered two people in a bar fight. He told me this one Sunday after Quaker services and after the prison ministry committee had disbanded. It went for ten years, from 1993 to 2003, and then it stopped. I never learned the reason why.

My prison colleagues were hopeful about finding the inner light, but they weren’t naïve. They knew crimes had been committed. I didn’t consider myself naïve either. I’d lived in Manhattan in my twenties and once walked into the middle of a bank robbery. When I told this story to a friend, whose father was a New York City police officer, she said: “You’re lucky you didn’t get shot.”

My prison ministry period went from 1994 to 1997. I’m still not sure why discipline and Quakerism interested me so much during those three years. I attended Quaker Meeting in minimum security three times, maximum six times, and medium thirty-three times. I’m not sure why I gravitated toward medium security either. Maybe it was because I worked in a middle school.

When I first started, a fellow Quaker game me a brochure. It was printed on a 9” x 14” sheet of yellow paper, folded into quarters, and entitled:

QUERIES FOR

QUAKER WORSHIP

AT … PRISON

·      Do you try to be open and friendly to all the inmates who come to worship? Do you try to welcome newcomers and to answer questions as directly as possible?

·      Have you thought about how you can “direct” the meeting without “domineering” it? Do you remember that part of your role as a facilitator is to gently “elder” the meeting if it becomes too “noisy” or irreverent?

·      Do you enter the meeting without an “agenda,” open to where the Spirit may lead, and prepared to be moved and changed as way opens?

I share these queries because 1) the comment about a noisy meeting prepared me for maximum, even though nothing could completely prepare me; 2) a good teacher tries to direct a class without domineering it, and I assumed my teaching experience would help me in prison; and 3) the terms “as way opens” and “elder” are common Quaker expressions. I found many Friends sayings evocative, such as “holding someone in the light” or waiting until “way opens.” I tried to imagine what “a way opening” would look like at the prison and the school, but I could never quite see it. Perhaps I didn’t try hard enough.

T. E. James lives in Rhode Island. For most of his career, he has worked in education: teacher, principal, community college professor, and ESOL instructor. He writes fiction, nonfiction, and drama.