Prison Years

Afterwards

The scoured tub and toilet bowl remind me that my hope in surrendering and going to prison was that when I got out, I would be able to hold a job and keep my house clean. Three months now, and I have no job to hold and no house to keep clean. The tub and toilet belong to my friends Tony and Marie. I live on largesse, my tuition a gift from my uncle. I am paying money to study because I found a teacher who sounds wise and true to me, and because maybe there is something for me to say or do, something more right now than bureaucracy or commerce.

But I live in a recurring panic that I will have to sell my hours and my energy to someone who will use me like a machine, someone who will have me baking muffins for $8 an hour. That’s the kind of job you find when you’re a fifty-year-old ex-con with a Bachelor of Liberal Studies degree and no network. Friends who left their poverty behind years ago suggest that perhaps I am being a snob when I cry to them on the phone about this prospect. They say, “You can just get a job, you know, something that will keep you living while you go to graduate school or whatever.” Here is the math: full time, $8 an hour is $320 a week, $1,400 a month, gross. Budget $500 a month for phone calls from the two women dearest to me in prison, $300 for gas and food….

In prison I had an adequacy of clothes, but not enough to worry about which ones to wear on what day. I had enough calories from the serving room and enough canteen money for V-8 juice and instant coffee. When there was a stove in my housing unit, I cooked candied orange peel. When the stoves were replaced with microwaves, I made rice and fish that I would have been proud to serve in a restaurant. With rocks and our bare hands, a couple of friends and I gardened a sandy slope of a patch with saved lettuce seed, edible weeds, and whatever the Recreation Department threw our way. I had work that challenged me and rendered service. My commuting time was zero, car payments, danger of breaking down on the road, taxes—all zip.

I called what I was living in poverty, even though, when I lost a tooth, I dreamed of implants. I vowed to live in poverty, meaning to have something that I thought of as faith instead of an IRA.

I spent an evening recently with several of the nuns who taught me in high school. As Franciscans, they are serious about their vow of poverty. Their life is what I imagined when I thought of my own vow. Their parlour is warm and functionally, if sparely, furnished. They wear jeans and sneakers or khakis and oxfords, no makeup, simple hair. They had all their teeth. They passed trays of fresh vegetables and fruits, home baked cookies. When Marie Therese, once a reservation girl, had a crisis of faith over the history of Catholic-Indian relations, she took a leave of absence. But she came back, studied in Rome for two years, and now teaches Lakota spirituality at the state university. Sister Sheila has retired from her career in campus ministry. Sister Regina is artist in residence at the convent, and Sister Liz still does some kind of social work. I cannot imagine them having to abandon their true selves to bake muffins for less money than it takes to live on. I tell them I imagine myself as a mendicant preacher, and they agree that this is a Franciscan tradition, but have no tips to offer me. I wonder when was the last time any one of them had to beg friends for cash enough to pay the phone bill.
Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker movement, used to challenge the comfortable to stand truly with the poor by taking up poverty. She did not mean the kind I experienced in prison or the kind the Franciscan nuns live. I think she meant the kind of poverty I am facing now: living on the margin, no net. It’s scary. I want to get inside, safe, in a hurry. I want to dust off my old resume and try for a food service management job and a car payment on a Toyota. Dorothy Day hovers over my shoulder and reminds me. Reminds me that maybe I once knew something true about how to live that had more to it than brand name business suits and the illusion of security. Maybe I still do. Maybe this is just how hard it is.

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About Katherine Power

I didn’t set out to be a terrorist. As a student activist, I moved from protesting the war in Viet Nam to waging guerrilla war to overthrow the government….

Recent and Upcoming Appearances & Publications
3/12/19 Peace, Justice and Transformation, Parallel Conference to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, 777 United Nations Plaza, NYC
11/13/18 A Journey from Guerrilla to Grandmother, Lifelong Learners: An Independent Collaborative, Temple Shir Tikva, 141 Boston Post Road, Wayland, MA 01778
10/10/18 Provincetown Women’s Week Reading from Doing Time:Papers from Framingham Prison, AMP, 432 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA
4/6-9/2018 The Nature of Change, Radical Imagination Conference, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
1/15/2014 Complexity and Social Change, Occupy Radio
10/31/2013 Surrender, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
10/25/2013 Surrender, Taos Community Theater, Taos, NM

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