851 George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine- Adam Johnson

851 George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine- Adam Johnson

This is the powerful story of Hans Backer, the warden of a Stasi Prison in occupied East Germany. The prison was closed in 1990 when the wall came down and his life changed forever, as did the entire culture. It’s been eighteen years since reunification but Hans hasn’t changed a bit. He lived his life and his career with military precision and he thrived in communist East Germany. But the world has changed around him and like it or not he is about to be challenged from the past.

“I do not need to recall the past…I am certain of what it was.”

Although he has lived nearby the whole time, he hasn’t been inside the prison since he finished destroying all the inmate records. He is unaware that the prison is now a museum to the atrocities of the Stasi cruelty and the torture that happened inside its walls. His old office has even been memorialized. 

One day as he walks past, he overhears a tour guide talk about a famous writer interrogated and imprisoned under his charge. He confronts the guide with vehement rebuttals and apologist rhetoric. Not understanding the technology of the day, he doesn’t realize that he has been recorded via a cellphone. He will become a viral video by the next day.

The curator seeing his willingness to talk and shed light on the dark past (even though Hans doesn’t himself see it as a dark past) he invites Hans to give a tour of the prison and freely tell his side of history. The more he talks the worse he comes across and more entrenched he becomes in his own beliefs.

This is a simple man, who chooses to see the world in black and white. He refuses to acknowledge the evils of the past nor his significant role in it. He liked his work and now that his work is seen by the world as tyrannical, he falls back on the crutch of only being a cog in a larger machine. He repeats common refrains like:

“I only ran the prison…I was an administrator.”

This same stubbornness caused him to lose his wife and daughter. They have become ashamed of him as more and more truths about the past come to light. Imagine learning that the wonderful gift your father gave you as a child was stolen from a girl inmate at your father’s torture prison. His wife has taken to alcoholism and that is a sigh of weakness to Hans—not something to be supported or helped. He doesn’t understand how his daughter or his wife cant separate his career with his life:

“But it wasn’t us…I’m talking about family. You’re talking about work.”

This rigidity over what he sees as right and wrong, legal or illegal, even past and present is probably what made him a good prison warden to begin with—at least in communist East Berlin. Some things just can’t be forgiven, but when the perpetrators themselves refuse to admit culpability—phew, that must illicit rage beyond words.

This story is fantastic. Johnson deals with delicate topics by just diving in full force. I’m reminded of two others stories that in vastly different ways tells stories of survivors of prison torture from both sides. The first one is Stephen King's Apt Pupil. This deals with a former Nazi camp torturer living a life as someone else who decades later is confronted with his true identity. He faces his own indulgences from his evil past. That was, in a very King fashioned, over the top and sensational, although dealt with real evil. 

The second is Nathan Englander’s Free Fruit for Young Widows that confronts evil from the other side. How human reaction to confronting absolute evil changes not only the actions of peaceful people but their complete understanding of the world. All three stories stress the importance of history and education of the past. 

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#785 Remora, IL- Kevin Leahy

#785 Remora, IL- Kevin Leahy

The factory town of Remora, Illinois was on the brink of collapse. The car plant shut down and unemployment was skyrocketing. They turned to the only opportunity they saw, the private prison industry. It guaranteed construction jobs, guard jobs and a steady stream of visitors to fill shops, hotels, and restaurants. They accepted the change before knowing exactly what it would mean. At first they were relieved.

“Those first paychecks were intoxicating. We’d forgotten the feeling of having money, and were starving for it.”

As the prison opened, they got a sense of life as a prison town. New people, a caste system of society and although good paying jobs, they were jobs that changed the nature of a person. Rather than instilling pride they created anxiety and violence. And they also had to acknowledge the inmates themselves, most people don’t ever have to really think about what a prison was.

“To the extent that we thought about the men in those buses, we imagined them as one type, multiplied: sullen, dangerous, and deserving of punishment, but potentially redeemable, through faith and good works.”

And then there was the face-to-face encounter with the racism made apparent by locking up a large percentage of non-white Americans. Racism in the system, in the country, in themselves.

“It was true that among many of us, a mental short-hand had developed: if we saw white strangers, we assumed they were police or lawyers…If they weren’t white, we assumed they were visiting an incarcerated friend or family member.”

This story appears in the 2013 Best American Mystery Stories. I don’t find any mystery in this story. If you told me this was non-fiction I wouldn’t have a hard time believing it. This is a great, sobering view of just one of the thousands of effects the over-inflated prison industry has on this country.

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total= 35

#662 House Heart- Amelia Gray

#662 House Heart- Amelia Gray

A couple engage in a human pseudo-sexual experiment. They hire a prostitute who they convince to squeeze inside a vent in their home. The prostitute is skeptical but reluctantly agrees after being promised more money. Inside the walls they built a series of ducts where the prostitute can move around, kind of like a human-sized series of gerbil tubes. She is now trapped and frightened, but the couple tells her it is of her own choosing:

“I pointed out that she had made all the choices that brought her to that moment, that if she had been forced to do anything in her life, it had not been in our presence and we would not be held accountable.”

Days pass, with each person falling into a routine; the prostitute in the ducts, the woman in her house and the man going to work each day. Each with their own limitations, boundaries, and freedoms. It is in how we embrace these things that we label them, and if we don’t see them as boundaries, are they?

“…it was only natural that the girl had become comfortable with her surroundings. He reminded me that I had not challenged the boundaries of my own life in many years, nor had he challenged his own. Even though we feel quite free, he remarked, every life has its surrounding wall.”

This is a very dark, and provocative story, intriguing and scary. Thinking about walls and enclosures we build for ourselves, I am reminded of Hamlet’s statement: 

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” 

You may argue that Hamlet’s prison was a mental one, and one of his own doing; the woman here is being physically imprisoned by others. True, but we all make choices that allow others to effect us. If we look at it with a wider angle lens, those lines seem smaller and less distinct. If we all live in a prison of ANY making, by denying it as a prison, or refusing to see it as a limitation, we take that power away. I guess the lesson here is: Either challenge the walls around you, or learn to live within them.

The more I think about this story, the more I love it. 

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#547 Misprision of Felony- O’Neil De Noux

#547 Misprision of Felony- O’Neil De Noux

A murder happens in New Orleans. The owner of a corner store was shot and killed in an armed robbery. Unfortunately this has happened more now than it used to.

“Things were different now, AK—after Katrina. The hardcore criminals, who were some of the first to return, had reestablished themselves with a killing vengeance. The murder rate was back up top as new blood carved out drug territories, and the police department, as devastated as the neighborhoods, reeled in turmoil.”

Det. Savary is on the case, but is getting nowhere. He is being stonewalled by the neighborhood, meaning only one thing:

“A local boy did this, but no one was giving him up to the police. It didn’t even matter if Savary was raised three blocks away on Erato Street. The day he started the police academy was the day he’d left the neighborhood—permanently.”

With the help of his FBI friend, Savary tracks down the murderer, and it was a local criminal. Now that the murder is taken care of, he’s going after the culture of silence. Misprision of Felony goes back to English common law. It makes it illegal to knowingly conceal the details of a felony, even if you, yourself are not involved. In other words, rat or rot.

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total= 24

#424 Young Man Blues- Luis Alberto Urrea

#424 Young Man Blues- Luis Alberto Urrea

The sins of the father fall on the son’s shoulders. Joey takes care of his drunken mother while his father is in prison. I laughed at the first line of this one:

“It sounded like a vacation spot: Pelican Bay.”

Of course it isn’t really funny at all. It’s tragic. His father was in the most notorious, maximum-security prison this country has. He was a gangbanger. His motorcycle gang, The Visigoths, were trying to take territory that wasn’t theirs. There were shootings, now Joey is left in its wake. He looks through his father’s gear including Nazi paraphernalia and club jackets.

“He knew that if he stepped outside wearing the vest, he’d be dead in an hour. It gave the colors a weird sense of power.”

He didn’t want any of that, but he held onto it because it was his fathers. Butchie, a member of his dad’s club wants Joey to hand over a gun, but he won’t.  Now he’s in trouble. He can get out of trouble if he helps Butchie rob Joey’s employer. He won’t do that either. Now he’s really in trouble. Salvation might have come too late.

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30

#268 Mines- Susan Straight

#268 Mines- Susan Straight

Clarette works at the juvenile prison. She sees her community locked up in there, she sees her family locked up in there. But she works there anyway, because somebody has to and she needs a job. She needs a job so she can keep her own son out of prison. She’s there so he won't be.

She resents the people outside with opinions about here working there. She resents her family telling her to look out for her nephew who’s inside. They had 17 years to look out for him, and now it’s her responsibility?

For some, the issue of prisons and the racial realities of the prison system is an abstract talking point, for some it’s more personal, and Clarette doesn’t care about the concepts, she cares about keeping her son safe. She does what she has to. As her nephew points out, “I’ve got to get mines.”

Notable Passage: “The old days, the men go off to the army. Hard time, let me tell you. They go off to die, or they come back. But if they die, we get some money from the army. If they come back, they get a job on the base. Now them little boys, they go off to the prison just like the army. Like they have to. To be a man. They go off to die, or to come back. But they aint got nothing. Nothing either way.”

Rating: 7-7-8-8 Total= 30