I stumble through the security protocols without a hitch. My back is better, and except for the fact that I feel like I could sleep until the next Ice Age, all is relatively well. I have a new nickname.

"Yo, John Lennon." Well, it beats El Kabong, but I can live without the handle of a dead rock star who spent the better part of his basket case life in various hard dope stupors. Nevertheless, I look up and smile at my addresser, who is about six feet tall, 190 pounds, athletic, and wielding a large mop.

I cross the now routine gates asking myself what went wrong last night. Where is all this anxiety coming from? It no longer has anything to do with dealing with prison protocol. There is something much more latent. Something I am trying to deny with about as much success as Ronald Reagan's budget cutting.

I have lost an innocence I never knew I had. It has nothing to do with any abstraction. I have never expected much of any institutions, and tend to keep a healthy distance from any of them, if at all possible. Life as a renegade has had its costs. Years without medical or dental benefits. Got a toothache? Yes? Got the money? No? Live with it, knowing it will only get worse until you do. Well, look on the bright side, I know a hell of a lot of first rate herbal cures. I did not even need this job as badly as I do until that idiot hack blew a root canal. But now I do. And I am feeding on this apparatus as surely as the industrious ant feeds on a stranded earthworm on a concrete sidewalk. Am I what I eat?

Lois and Naima have put out a terrific spread. The inmates are in for a treat, and I think that's nice. I do not envy those who can eat solid food, although I look forward to returning to their ranks.

We go through the usual routines of getting the Officers to call the students down from their various dormitories. It is the expected game. We triple check to make sure that the right inmates have been called. My boss and I move the desks in the library area into something resembling a rectangular array. The Officers are offered to help themselves to the food, which they do. They especially like sweets. After about ten minutes the inmates start to trickle in. One in particular has had a genuine transformational process. I remember our first contact.

On that morning I immediately noticed his hostility. I had seen him before, but only in passing. He attended another class. He was slouched in his desk with the posture of a dead fish. His head was propped against strong, prison-muscled arms, and it was decorated with numerous scars. Nevertheless the deepest scar was represented by his lips, which were like a downward pointed horned moon. My entrance was unacknowledged except for a shark-eyed tracking of my passage to a desk.

As I prepared my ever growing paperwork, Daphne began to engage in yet another insightful Rikers discussion of racial relations in America.

"I think it's no coincidence that most of the people here are either black or Latino. It's a white man's system." I bite my tongue, restrain my anger, and prepare for the usual worst. As usual, I am the Invisible (with a Scanlon tip of the hat to Ralph Ellison) Man. And Oh God help me, it has to be a teacher. The same one who had given me that lecture about our need to put up a "united front." All the inmate does is respond with a knowing, bitter smile.

Not satisfied with this response she begins to baiting him. "What's the matter today, not feeling very good, Mr. Vector?

"Uggh."

"We don't feel like learning anything this morning." A sentence full of more oily condescension than I heard in a year at Columbia Graduate School. I can't wait to see where we go from here. I would like to think that we can't dig any lower, but then the shovels come out.

"Why don't you go into MY classroom, and study the historical map of Africa which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that if it weren't for the European Ice people's destruction, the mother continent would be a heaven on earth. Never forget that we are the Sun people, and that is your glorious heritage. It's not your fault you're here, it's the White Man's system."

"You're damn right." I did not think it possible, but Vector goes into an even deeper slouch. His posture is so Pretzel-like, he could put a master Yogi to shame.

Naimia enters, also feeling very "African-American" this morning, and she's on a political tear about the election. She simply ignores the inmate and slaps her newspaper on a nearby desk. Let the tirade begin.

"There is no way a black man can get a fair shake in this society."

I have learned to hate the phrase "this society" because nobody who uses it has ever mentioned their idea of a better one. I am in the mood to scream. "This society" is to society, as "dysfunctional family" is to family. They are both based upon fictions, no, hallucinations as to what a society or family really is. Get your eyes out of the TV sets and your noses out of your Howdy-Doody fantasy troughs, and maybe we can get something done around here. Let's begin by calling "this society" "our society." Then maybe WE can start asking OURSELVES what OUR responsibilities are.

As for "African-American," the kind of thinking that informs a phrase like this is no better than the Neanderthal mentality of the southern racist who regards anyone with "a taste of the tar brush," to be a "nigger." Perhaps we could repair some of the brain damage caused by ethnic categorization if we inverted the syntactic sequence. American-Irish and American-African would be a couple of examples. Unfortunately that probably pulls one down into the same snare that the linguists of the seventies and their PC dilutions fell into. The assumption that linguistic usage can inform human phenomenology at all.

One can change words and usage, but that will not extirpate prejudice, ignorance, and hatred. It is a cosmetic approach to a mental infrastructural problem. This is much like the current Subway station painting program. Even as the transit system is falling apart, you can be assured that those fumes you are breathing are those of fresh paint on the rusting steel support columns. Perhaps it will keep you just stupefied enough to keep from looking at the problem directly. Vector grunts assent.

"Look at the election last week. A black man running with two, two white boys still couldn't get elected!"

I want to shout, "Wrong! Re-elected, you idiot. The man was in for four years, and his greatest accomplishment as far as my quality of life is concerned has been that his tennis game has improved. Although in all fairness, I doubt that I could have done any better. Oh, and by the way why don't you watch your own use of racial slurs and bear in mind that that kind of thinking can only attract more of itself?"

What has prompted this outburst is the front page of the newspaper which shows the ingoing and outgoing mayors smiling and shaking hands. Hell, if I were elected mayor I sure would have nothing to smile about. If I took any public position seriously at any time, the only time I would be smiling would be on the way out. Like that final picture of outgoing president George Bush in his little motor boat, "I'm goin' fishing, see you later."

The room fills with a miasmic chorus of assenting oinks. Of course she is right. My stomach knots in anticipation of further cogent analysis.

"And I'll tell you one thing, they'll never elect an intelligent black man president!"

More grunts at the trough of ethnic paranoia. Hey, "they" will never elect an intelligent white man president either. They are we.

Black or white has nothing to do with it, cunning and shilling is all. If the asians thought this way, I would be in here teaching a bunch of Kung Fu artists. It is undeniably true that we have government by the boobs, for the boobs, and over the boobs (a tip of the Scanlon hat to Phillip Wylie's à Generation of Vipers). If we want to improve this situation we will have to start thinking beyond racial categories(a point which the outgoing mayor made quite well, alas he did little more than articulate the point through his pursed Sotsman‘s lips).

Burying my anger, or perhaps sublimating it, I decide to target this inmate. This morning is one where my students are supposed to tutor other teachers' students. I want to see what happens if this man is treated like a man, and gets the chance to learn something.

Some of my students are now coming in. I scope out the group as a whole with an eye towards matching them up, a process informed more by guesswork and intuition than anything else. Several of the members of my ever changing group have been coming down regularly, and either have developed or already had reasonably strong teaching and academic skills by Rikers standards(read eighth grade, I'm sorry to have to reiterate). Some are better with ESL and reading, while others are better at mathematics.

On a guess I decide to match the targeted inmate with my best math person. Technically this is against the rules because the "program" does not consider mathematics to be a significant "job skill." Hey, we have calculators to do that garbage! And hey! None of the instructors could hack ninth grade algebra.

However, I show a mule-like frowardness in this respect. The best job skill of all is a confidence in one's overall ability to learn and think critically. This demands a well-rounded understanding and command of more than the immediately utile.

It turns out that he cannot long divide, and has not even the slightest confidence that he ever will. Ironically enough, nothing could be further from the truth. Within an hour and a half the inmate with whom I have paired him has him doing it. No problem. This is due to the fact that simply in order to survive, an average street level dope retailer has internalized more sophisticated math than our instructors, who refuse to recognize this. That would subvert their power subtext.

I wish I had a sufficient command of the language to completely convey the metamorphosis this brought about. Vector smiled for the first time in my presence, and it was a kind one, rather than the usual scornful smirkone so common among inmates. His posture changed. He had a mien of hope.

I start seeing him on a very consistent basis. He drops in on my classes, although he is not obligated to. I put him on my roster. The paranoia is gone. It was that frighteningly easy. No million dollar pork barrel sociological studies necessary. A human needs the right shove in the right direction at the right time. Fallen animals though we be, we are trainable towards the positive by means of the pleasure principle.

He completes the cycle, and wants to continue onward. I do not know whether this will get him a job or not, but at least his probabilities are improving.

While everybody is oohing and ahing over the impending graduation nosh I see him enter. He comes over to me.

"Niall, I really want to thank you for what you and the other teachers have done for me. I don't know what the future holds, but I really do feel like something has changed inside me. I never felt like anyone believed in me except my mother, and I know I really let her down."

"Well, man, no matter where you are, you can either go up or down. Nothing ever stays the same."

"Is it okay if I keep coming to school?"

"Listen man, my door is always open. I'll make sure you get called down, as long as you want. Hell, I can always use help myself. You can see how much cooperation I‘ve been getting form my wonderful esteemed collauges."

He smiles. "At least they an cook. Anyway, someday I hope I can do something like this for someone else."

"If you really want to, you will. We have no shortage of people who need to learn."

When he goes up to receive his ersatz diploma he is beaming and walking like a real man. I cannot help but reflect upon how much money has been spent on a process which may be far simpler than the professional educators and sociologists would lead us to believe.

The key to self image is learning something, anything, for the sake of learning. I suppose I can dress it up and call it applied heuristics.

There are rewards for virtue. (I've always thought the expression "virtue is its own reward" to have sinister connotations.) This cycle has had a much more consistent group than ever before. It appears that if you really teach, you really will attract students. Perhaps there is hope. BACK TO THE CONTENTS