I Remember is a haunting piece by Jeff Witt who is housed at Oregon State Penitentiary. An electrician by training, Jeff builds a circuit of memories that create a closed loop of self-discovery and understanding. The piece asks us to consider: Who do we protect? Who is the protector? The precision of language and the addition of each building block of memory leads us efficiently from a picture of boy, to man, to soldier and then to the next generation. The tenderness of detail coupled with restraint delivers these types of passages: “I remember steam rolling off of my hand-me-down clothes, damp after the long walk home from the bus stop in the rain. / I remember warming my pitch and dirt-stained hands near the fireplace.”
Darkness in Beauty by Mariel Brooke McCuiston from Coffee Creek Correctional Facility reveals how she was trained to put singular energy into her physical appearance. In this piece, she describes the unwanted attention of men (her mother’s boyfriends) and the almost inevitable consequence of being raised in an environment with adults who feel unsafe. As with many young women, this leads to an internal struggle of self-acceptance and identity.
In both pieces, a picture comes into focus that puts children in situations that are beyond their abilities. The adult writers — parents now themselves — reveal tremendous suffering in their own childhoods. I suggest through the activity of writing, they join forces with their lone mothers to produce a better template for caring for themselves. To make this effort more complex, their own children are relying on a lone parent at home, as each writer serves time. Let’s be clear. It is difficult work (faceted and raw) to travel back to the past. Jeff and Mariel manage to be direct and uncompromising — perhaps because they need to write forward a new future for themselves and the children in their worlds. | TDS