Relation of My Imprisonment by Russell Banks Read Free Book Online

solely as a nexus after that, a mere contingency, a crossroads without a place name.
    So it began to appear to me that I was utterly dependent upon the nature and character of whomever I met, before I could reveal any particular nature or character of my own. Unless I could locate clues and hints as to the forms a person used to present himself and deal with other people, which clues and hints would lead me to design appropriate forms for me to present myself back to him, then I trembled all over my body, I whimpered and spoke with an uncontrollable stammer, I fairly well wept with terror. For I had become the man of time. I had lost myself, and lost, I moved in a found world, a very real place that was stuffed to brimming with very real and threatening human beings, animals, plants, powerful objects of all possible descriptions. Nothing there was then that did not fill me with terror and confusion. Though you are seen, you cannot see, and though you are heard, you cannot hear, and though others will walk along with you, you may not walk along with them. For such is the punishment made for the man who has exchanged what is absent for what he cannot avoid. (The Book of Discipline, iii, 30-31.)
    Every day I left my cell at dawn, and affecting gaiety, strolled to the dining hall, there to sit among my fellow prisoners and exchange views and idle thoughts while eating our usual breakfast of bread and porridge. To be sure, my stance and affect were those of a game man, a courageous fellow full of wit and intelligence, yet all the while I trembled inside, all the while I guessed and hoped and tried on faces and phrases rapidly, one after the other, eagerly awaiting the click of recognition in the eyes of the man sitting at table across from me or the sleepy eyes of the bland steward handing me my meager meal across the counter or the eyes of the guard at the door as I passed out of the dining hall to the corridor and, desperate for confirmation, found myself rushing down the stairs to the office of the man I tried to think of as my brother, for he was a man I had come to know solely by means of and in the terms of my fall from faith, and it had come to me in my moral confusion of that period that if I could love my jailor, I could perhaps learn to love myself, or what at that time claimed to be myself.
    Fortunately, however, this feat was not to be accomplished. Jacob Moon was a grim man and also, as I have said, most characteristically a pragmatic man. He did not smile so much as, at moments of gaiety or high mirth, he grimaced. As, for instance, when once a donkey wandered into the prison from the street and soon had lost itself in the maze of corridors and common rooms and stairways, and as it was encountered suddenly and all out of any familiar context by one prisoner after another and one guard after another, discoveries that brought one prisoner and guard after another to the chief jailor’s office to report its, the donkey’s, presence, soon there had gathered at the office nearly all the prisoners and all the guards and assistant jailors and staff and even a few visitors, and still one or two more prisoners trickling in to file the identical report, that there was a donkey in the prison. The atmosphere of the gathering was jovial and easy, almost that of a holiday (for it was a particularly wintry day and the event was doubtless more diverting than if the prisoners had not felt quite so confined by the snow and cold), when at once the door to the street swung open and the chief of administration for all prisons entered, and he naturally demanded to know why the entire population of the prison had gathered here before him, to which Jacob Moon in all sincerity answered that it was because an ass had come in off the street, which statement caused a long, hearty chorus of laughter from all, even from the chief of administration himself, once it had been given him to trust that no one had intended any slight to his