6

MACBETH

I first read Macbeth when I was thirteen. The edition of the play we were given at school was neither a hardback nor a paperback but a hybrid of the two, with a bendable red cover, published by J. Dent and Co. in 1906. Like most things about my school, it had seen better days. In the margins of my copy, students before me had scrawled obscenities, blaming Shakespeare for their boredom.

The reigning educational theory of the time was the principle of “mixed ability,” which meant no streaming or sorting. It was considered unfair to single out any student for their application or achievements. There was no honor roll, no grade point average; very few students at my school were expected to go to college, and even fewer wanted to. Most of the time, I was frustrated and depressed, but there were teachers who went out of their way to help me. My English teacher was among them—a good-natured, old-fashioned man who, when he realized how much I loved to read, gave me extra lessons to help prepare me for university entrance exams.

It’s strange, looking back, to realize how little I knew about Mr. Johnson. I had no idea where he was from, where he had gone to college, whether he had a wife or family. I didn’t even know his first name. At school he was known as an “anorak” or “boffin”—the British equivalent of “nerd” or “geek.” He was shortsighted and absentminded, with unkempt eyebrows, rosacea, and oversized glasses that would keep slipping down his nose, and he had a nervous habit of sniffing every time he pushed them up. None of this put me off, although I was slightly dismayed when, on leaving school one day, I caught sight of him furtively smoking a cigarette at the bus stop, looking a little seedy. Never mind. I admired him for his intelligence and his love of literature, not his looks or his hygiene. I was honored that he’d singled me out for special treatment. He thought I deserved better.

I wish I’d been more appreciative of the time and attention Mr. Johnson offered me. Like most teenagers, I was graceless and awkward, caught up in my own affairs; I probably didn’t even thank him. On the other hand, the school must have been even more frustrating for him than it was for me—after all, I was just passing through—and the time we spent reading Shakespeare may have been as rewarding for him as it was for me. I hope so.

When I read Macbeth for the first time, I understood almost nothing. The play’s immediate subjects (kingship, Scottish history, nations at war) did not engage me, nor did I have any interest in theater. I loved Macbeth not for its story but for its language. I was fascinated by the weight of the words, their sequence and rhythm, the way they made me feel, even though they were often incomprehensible. Reading them, whether aloud or in my head, was like listening to a religious service in an archaic language. Not knowing what they meant made my faith even stronger, and their darkness had a profound effect on my imagination.

At school in the 1970s, all you got was the text itself. Nothing came between you and the book. When I handed out copies of Macbeth at JCI, it felt like things had come full circle. Due to the restrictions of the prison, there was nothing between the men and Macbeth. There was, however, a major difference between the prison class and my own first encounter with the book. I’d chosen an edition with a modern translation opposite the original on each page, and although we mostly read aloud from the translation, we often went back over the original, as I wanted the men to get a sense and feel for Shakespeare’s language.

FEBRUARY 11, 2014

We reconvened after the holiday break on a chilly day in February. I’d had an awful winter. Grisby, my beloved French bulldog, died unexpectedly at the end of January while staying overnight at the vet’s. He’d been in decent health and was only eight years old. There’d been changes among the men too. Guy had been released. Kevin had been having so many seizures he’d been transferred to a different prison, with better medical resources.

Vincent, whose release date was also rumored to be coming up, had chosen two new men to replace them. A tall middle-aged lifer with receding hair and a boyish grin took the place left by Guy. This was Nick, who’d been convicted of a high-profile murder as a young man. He was enthusiastic, respectful, and polite, and fit right in, mainly because he already knew Steven and Sig and was a member of the Noble Hearth. A wiry, surly young African-American guy with dreadlocks took Kevin’s place. This was Day-Day.

Day-Day had been a student in my psychology class, and at the time, to be honest, I’d found him slightly scary. He had tattoos all over his body: flames climbed his legs; stars dotted his arms; his knuckles spelled out the words “God’s Gift”; and an ornate letter h was etched between his eyes. He’d told me that he suffered from bipolar disorder, and he often seemed on the verge of a violent explosion. At the time, I asked him if he’d had an outlet for his anger.

“Yeah,” he’d replied. “When I get stressed, I talk to my shrink. She put on this nice music and I just walk up and down and get out my rage.”

He’d served a nine-year sentence, then a five-year sentence, and four and a half years of his current thirty-year sentence for “armed robbery, assault, handgun, drugs, PCP, cocaine, E-pills, weed.” Day-Day was so skinny and young looking it was hard for me to believe he was over thirty. He addressed the other men in a low drawl, but with me he used a fast mumble; both were difficult for me to understand at first, especially since everything he said was laced with street talk and profanities. Yet, before long, I developed an ear for it.

Day-Day’s written work was fascinating. He used sheets torn from someone else’s notebook. His dotty scrawl slanted heavily to the right, with big spaces between the words and a thick margin. He used virtually no punctuation apart from the occasional smiley face, and his thoughts were unfettered by grammar and unfiltered by any internal censor. At first I was surprised Vincent had chosen him for the book club, but before long he became one of the most committed members of the group, and his responses to the books, though idiosyncratic, showed a sympathetic engagement that took me by surprise.

Most of the men were wearing heavyweight, long-sleeved thermals under their DPSCS blues. I asked them what had been going on since I’d last seen them. It was a tactless and insensitive question—nothing much happens in prison, and when it does, it’s almost always bad news.

“My sister passed away,” someone offered. “She was seventy-six. I just heard the news last night.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Was she your only sister?”

“No, I’ve got five.”

“In that case, I guess you can spare one.” I immediately cursed myself. It was a stupid joke, and not at all funny. No one even smiled. To atone for my gaffe, I told them about Grisby’s death. As I was speaking, I realized some people might think it insensitive of me to equate the two. I trailed off, feeling ridiculous.

“Anyone else have any news?” I tried again.

There was a long pause.

“I’ve been in the hospital,” said Charles. “I’ve been having problems with my eyes.”

For the first time, I noticed he looked drained. He was wearing dark glasses, and I could see the strain of a recent ordeal in his face.

“What happened?” I asked.

Charles gave a rusty chuckle. “It sounds kind of funny. I was having a bad dream, and I poked myself in the eye. It probably wouldn’t have done any serious damage, only I’ve had this cataract for the last two years. I’ve tried to get to see the eye doctor to get it removed, but they really don’t care. They said to me, ‘As long as you’ve got one eye that works, that’s all you need.’ Anyway, because of the cataract, when I injured myself, the retina and the iris got damaged, and they had to take me out to University of Maryland hospital for an emergency operation.”

“At least you got out of prison for a while,” I said. “That must have been a nice change.”

“No it wasn’t. They had me handcuffed to the hospital bed by an arm and a leg. After the operation, I had to wear this plastic shield over my head until the damage had healed. I couldn’t lie down or shift position because of the handcuffs. I was in so much pain I couldn’t sleep.”

“Didn’t they give you any medication?”

“They gave me something every six hours, but it wore off after four. Then they stopped giving me anything. They said it ran out. Said it was on back order. They’d put a catheter into my bladder because of the handcuffs—I couldn’t get up to go to take a piss—and it gave me a bladder infection. Felt like I needed to piss all day long.”

“That sounds awful. How are you doing now?”

“I’m feeling a little better every day.” He showed me his damaged eye underneath his glasses; it was bloodshot and badly swollen. “I need to keep it covered up to protect it. They said it’s going to take about two months for the eye to heal enough for them to do the follow-up surgery and insert the new lens. And that’s only if the surgery’s approved by the medical department.”

The other men were listening to Charles with sympathy, but without surprise. They’d all had similar experiences, or knew someone who had. Naïvely, I’d assumed that a trip out of the prison, even if it was to the hospital, must have been a pleasant change from the monotonous daily routine. Later, I came to realize how wrong I was. Trips “uptown,” whether to the hospital or the courtroom, meant the prisoner had to change into the requisite orange jumpsuit and “three-piece jewelry” (leg irons, waist chains, and handcuffs) and then sit in a hallway, often for hours at a time, waiting for paperwork to be filled out. If the paperwork wasn’t ready in time or if anything was missing, the appointment would be rescheduled, and another day would be spent the same way.

It’s difficult to walk in leg irons, so the CO accompanying the prisoner is supposed to hold his arm or waist chain to keep him from falling if he loses his balance. One of the men told me that once, when he was coming back from court, the CO who was supposed to be guiding him literally dropped him on his face, causing him to break his nose and lose most of his teeth. Later, when reading Macbeth, I wondered if the men found the play’s violence so engaging because, compared to the pointless, undignified brutality of prison life, it’s always important and purposeful, which may be why Shakespeare lingers on it so deliberately. We agreed that these descriptions of bloodshed provided some of the best lines in the play.

I asked the men whether any of them had heard of Macbeth. Most of them recognized the title but knew nothing about it, not even that it was a play by Shakespeare, which surprised me, since literature is usually more a part of school experience than art or music. But then, I recalled, many of these men hadn’t had much schooling, or hadn’t paid much attention if they had.

“I’d always assumed Macbeth was a girl,” said Charles.

“I never heard of Macbeth, but I heard of this cat Shakespeare,” said Turk.

I told them the play was written sometime between 1604 and 1606, when England and Scotland had just been united under the Scottish king James. I said some people thought Shakespeare wrote the play specifically to please the king, who was interested in witches and demons. I also told them about the superstition surrounding the play. I said some people thought if you pronounced the title in the theater, you’d be cursed.

“Like Bloody Mary,” said Day-Day.

“Right,” I said. “So who wants to read?”

At first, it was a little crazy. The men were confused by the layout of the lines on the page. Every so often, one of them would start reading the original lines on the facing page rather than the translation. Another would read the stage directions as part of the text, and someone else would forget who they were supposed to be. Everyone struggled with the names, especially Glamis and Cawdor. Still, we managed to wrestle our way through the first few scenes before the CO came in to take the count.

“So what did you make of your first day of Shakespeare?” I asked them when the CO had left.

“I love it,” said Steven. Others weren’t so easily satisfied. Charles said he was having trouble reading aloud and understanding what was happening at the same time. “I’m going to have to read it again back in my cell,” he said. His damaged eye can’t have helped. Donald said he guessed he could get used to it. Sig, who had on a black knitted cap with a silver snowflake design, said he liked the history—the Scottish lords, their wars, and the violence.

“And the witches,” added Steven. “Gotta love those witches.”

“Do you think they’re lying?” I asked him.

“Sure,” said Steven. “Witches are always bad, right? That’s what makes them witches.”

“Uh-uh,” disagreed Donald. “What about Glinda the Good Witch?”

“Yeah,” Turk joined in. “What about that chick Samantha in Bewitched?”

“What about Jeannie in I Dream of Jeannie?” added Vincent. “I dreamed about her a lot, I can tell you.”

“Why do you think they chose Macbeth?” I asked.

“They know he’s ambitious,” suggested Sig. “They probably know he secretly wants to be king.”

“Or maybe they know he’s susceptible,” I said. “It’s possible they know he’ll twist what they say to match what he wants to believe. Look at Banquo’s lines in Act I, Scene III, where he warns Macbeth about the witches’ prophecies. ‘Oftentimes, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s / In deepest consequence.’”

“That’s an old courtroom trick,” said Donald. “They say something that you agree with and you start nodding, then they add a lie to the end of it, and before you realize it you’re agreeing to some bullshit they’ve loaded on you.”

“I think you’ve got it,” I said, impressed.

As I drove home that day, I figured most of the men hadn’t really been able to follow much of the text, but I wasn’t worried. When I’d first read the play myself, I remember being fascinated by the images conjured up by the strange words on the page. I had the feeling I was somehow reading through the language to the direct emotion beneath. In a way, my lack of understanding served to fire my half-formed imagination, making the words even more evocative than they rightly should have been. For example, in Act III, Scene IV, Macbeth refers to “maggot-pies.” When I first read this phrase, I pictured a worm-encrusted pastry in an old-fashioned chafing dish, with a gravy boat full of blood on the side. Now I know that “maggot-pie” is an archaic term for a magpie; the “correct” meaning, when I learned it, was disappointing compared to the one I’d made up in my head.

For this reason, I like to stay open to misreadings. My own misapprehensions often give me what I need at the time. They become a tool, a way for me to get somewhere I need to go. Unconsciously, perhaps, I often misread for my own purposes. When I first read Macbeth, it was my ignorance that stirred my dormant consciousness, like a spell being cast. I was hoping some of the same magic that worked on me might also work on the men.

FEBRUARY 18, 2014

When I arrived at the prison for our second session on Macbeth, the sky was clear, banks of dirty snow were piled up against the fence, and four seagulls were perched on the roof of the administration building. Outside the schoolroom door, Charles was waiting for me, slouched against the wall like a wayward teenager. He complained that the CO on duty wouldn’t let him in until it was time for our group to start, which the CO claimed was 2:15. Charles said it was supposed to begin at 2:00. I thought so, too, but, afraid to contradict the officer, I asked if he’d mind letting Charles in early so we could “go over his homework.”

In the classroom, Charles told me his eyes were still bothering him. He was supposed to have another operation but it had been difficult for him to get an appointment with the eye doctor, and all the waiting around had been taking its toll. He was able to read today, however, so I asked him if he’d mind reading the part of Macbeth. I wanted a good reader for the buildup to the murder scene, and I knew Charles wouldn’t let me down. I asked Turk, with his sonorous voice, if he’d mind reading the part of Lady Macbeth, whom we’d yet to meet. I liked to watch Turk read as much as I liked to listen to him. He’d run his finger along the lines, repeating things he didn’t grasp completely, affirming sentiments he liked with the occasional “Mm-hmmm!” His energy more than made up for his errors in pronunciation.

“So what do you make of Lady Macbeth?” I asked, when we came to the end of the scene.

Day-Day’s eyes lit up. “She strong,” he said. “She know her man.”

“Why does she keep making pokes at his manhood?” asked Charles.

“She hard,” explained Day-Day. “She know him. She know he just a child. She, like, ‘Are you gonna have a crown and be a coward? I rather kill my own child than go back on my word,’ you feel me? You can tell she killed before, and he know it. He seen it.”

“But he’s killed too,” I pointed out. “He’s just been honored for it.”

“He killed, but he only killed in war,” argued Day-Day.

When we came to the murder scene, I was surprised how engrossed the men were. Each of them followed closely, many running their fingers along the lines like Turk, some of them mouthing the words silently as the readers spoke their parts. The room was unusually quiet and tense as the scene unfolded, the silence outside disturbed only by the occasional raised voices and laughter coming from the classroom next door, where a group was studying The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? by Rick Warren. During the murder scene itself, the men were alarmed by Macbeth’s jittery behavior and annoyed with him for forgetting to leave the bloody daggers in Duncan’s chamber with the grooms. As I listened to them, I realized that although I’d read Macbeth many times in many places with lots of different kinds of students, I’d never read it with people who knew what it felt like to commit murder.

After we’d finished reading, Day-Day looked up, his eyes gleaming. “See, when you got a man like that,” he said, “he need a woman to take charge. She need to take control. She know he too scared to get what he want. She know he don’t do nothing but talk.”

“So she gives him the courage to kill the king,” I said, “but he regrets it the very moment he’s done it.”

“Because now he lost,” said Day-Day. “She make him kill outside of war. She make him step off his path. Before, he follow his king, he knew his path, you feel me? You step off your path, you lost.”

“You wouldn’t have done the same thing?” Turk asked him.

“I’d have killed the king, for sure, but I wouldn’t have been no coward about it,” said Day-Day. “I wouldn’t have let her call me no child.”

Day-Day seemed to understand Macbeth’s mind better than anyone else. In fact, the more time I spent in his company, the more fascinating I found this young man, with his hard, skinny limbs and dirty mouth. I’d never met anyone like him. He was a curious mixture of loose (the lazy way he slouched in his seat, the big holes in his pants, the way he seemed to speak almost without moving his mouth) and tightly wound, although I no longer had the feeling he was a bomb about to go off. That day he had an orange elastic band wrapped around his wrist (orange, I later learned, was his gang color). He’d taken it out of his dreadlocks, which he was constantly twisting and stroking. I could sense the addictive pleasure it gave him.

DONALD AND DAY-DAY

Photo of Donald and Day-Day by Mark Hejnar.

Day-Day seemed to have a visceral sense of just how pissed off Macbeth was about Malcolm being named prince of Cumberland. Yet he also believed that, if it hadn’t been for his wife, Macbeth would have gone on feeling frustrated and rejected. He wouldn’t have attempted to alter the course of fate. After the murder, Day-Day was convinced that, under his wife’s pressure, Macbeth was going to crack and turn her in.

“He gonna turn state’s evidence,” he predicted.

MARCH 4, 2014

Sig was missing.

“He won’t be coming today,” said Donald. “He may not be here for a while.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“He’s on lockup.”

“What for?”

“It’s one of these nonsense charges.”

“Was he in a fight?” I asked. Mostly, when men got sent to the lockup, it was either for a dirty urine test or for getting in a fight. Sig told me he didn’t do drugs and I believed him, so I thought he must have been in a fight.

“Nope,” sighed Donald. “You know how fucked-up things are around here, Mikita. Well, there was this new female CO taking the count on the tier, and she didn’t really know how things are supposed to work. See, any female officer is supposed to announce that she’s coming when she takes the count, so you got some privacy. Well, this new CO, she didn’t know the rules. She caught Sig in a private moment and wrote him up on a charge.”

“But if she didn’t announce herself, wasn’t it her fault?”

“You’d think so. You’d think she’d learn pretty quick, but no. She wrote up a whole lot of other guys for the same thing.”

Later, when Turk arrived, Donald gave his friend some uncensored commentary on the same incident.

“Which one was it?” asked Turk. “The new one? Short girl? Kind of heavyset? Light-skinned?”

“No, no, no,” said Donald. “You’re thinking of a different girl. This is a different new one. She’s short, real dark, and fat.”

“They should have charged her with being a Peeping Tom,” protested Turk. “Put her in the lockup!”

“You know what I do when they come to take the count?” said Donald. “I always do the same thing. The officer always gets to the tier at the same time, right? I always make sure I’m taking a shit, sitting right there on the pot, naked. If he’s late, I just sit there with the newspaper. You don’t want to give us our privacy, fine. I say, here I am. Right here. Take a good, long look.”

By now I’d learned the difference between lockup, lockdown, and solitary confinement. During a lockdown, the whole prison—or part of it—comes to a standstill, and the men aren’t allowed to leave their cells. Solitary confinement cells are used for men placed on protective custody (by their own request or by that of the administration), men on suicide watch, and men who’ve demonstrated violent behavior. Lockup, known officially as segregation, is the prison’s most commonly used form of punishment. Cells in the lockup fit two men, but most of the time, if you’re on lockup, you’re on your own, and this can have devastating consequences. You might think there’d be some relief in getting private time for a change, but the truth is sudden isolation can be traumatic for men accustomed to constant human company and a predictable routine.

Yet Sig, when he returned to class, seemed stoical about the matter. He’d spent three weeks in segregation before finally getting a hearing, at which he claimed he’d been fast asleep when the offense was supposed to have occurred. According to the documentation, the CO claimed that, when she looked through the window of Sig’s cell to take the count, “he rubbed his penis at me.” Questioned further, she admitted his penis was “not fully exposed.” The hearing officer concluded that whatever Sig had done or hadn’t done, it hadn’t been a deliberate act of indecent exposure. The fact that Sig was found not guilty seemed redundant, however, since he’d already spent three weeks on lockup. Apparently, situations like this aren’t unusual. Men who are found innocent of infractions they’re currently being punished for are simply switched from disciplinary to administrative segregation; the authorities assume they’re probably guilty of some misdemeanor or other. They’re in prison, after all.

Despite Sig’s absence, the men were in a playful mood. When I allocated roles, Steven begged to be the drunken porter, which was fine by me. I asked Nick if he’d mind reading the part of Lady Macbeth.

“Sure. I’m secure in my masculinity,” he said, and proceeded to read the queen as a nagging wife with a high-pitched voice.

Turk, reading Macbeth, turned into a ham. “Please don’t step on my lines, sir,” he said to Day-Day, who’d started reading Turk’s part by mistake.

“My bad, my bad,” said Day-Day.

We were reading about the discovery of the murder, and the sounds of the prison made an appropriate backdrop. No sooner had Macduff declared, “Walk like ghosts to face this horror! Ring the bell” than a real bell rang in the hallway outside, making us almost jump out of our skin. When we came to the more difficult scenes, however, the men grew quiet and paid close attention to the text. At one point I glanced up from the book to see the CO looking in the classroom window from the hallway, gazing at us suspiciously, as if we were the ones who’d been plotting a murder.

We read from the discovery of Duncan’s dead body to the scene in which Ross informs Macduff that his wife and family have been “savagely slaughtered” by Macbeth’s executioners. Donald was reading the part of Ross, and after all the horror he returned to the playful mood that had reigned earlier in the afternoon.

“My children, too?” asks Macduff.

Donald couldn’t help laying it on extra thick. “Wife, children, servants, dogs, cats, goats, you name it,” Donald ad-libbed, turning one of the play’s darkest moments into a joke. We all laughed with relief.

APRIL 1, 2014

I promised the men I’d bring in a film adaptation when we got to the end of Macbeth, and when the time came, I brought a copy of Roman Polanski’s 1971 version, which is highly rated today, although at the time it was considered tastelessly brutal. For this reason if no other, I thought the men would enjoy it, although screening conditions were far from ideal. We had the TV with a twenty-inch screen again; we had to keep the lights on and the door open; and for the first time in many weeks, there was a lot of noise in the hall. Still, the men arrived prepared for a treat. J.D. brought his new training dog, Falcon. Steven had a new haircut, shaved on one side and flattened down at the front. There was candy from the commissary to share. Turk had brought mints and butterscotch; Charles brought a pack of Twizzlers. Nick had brought jelly beans to pass around. Like all other U.S. prisons today, JCI is smoke-free, and to some degree candy has replaced cigarettes as a sanctioned, legitimate treat. (I was told that contraband cigarettes were still sold; each one was cut into four or five hand-rolled smokes that went for two dollars apiece.)

The Polanski movie is my favorite Shakespeare adaptation, although I hadn’t seen it for years and was worried it might not hold up. As it turned out, I found it as engaging as I’d remembered it and was soon deeply engrossed, despite the fact that the dialogue was hard to decipher in the noisy room and I really had to focus to hear properly. Over an hour had passed before I first became aware of the noises behind me. When I turned around, the first man I saw was Turk, slumped in his chair with his head on his chest. He was snoring rhythmically. Then I saw Day-Day, also asleep, his head down on his tray table. Steven, Sig, and Nick were all slumped down in their seats, snoozing. Vincent was yawning. J.D. and his dog had both nodded off. From what I could see, Charles and Donald were the only men still focused on the screen. I tried to get absorbed in the movie again, but now that I was aware of them, I couldn’t block out the snores and yawns.

At the end of Act III, I stood up and paused the movie. The men stretched and roused themselves.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“It’s so boring,” said Steven, standing up and stretching.

“We all know what’s going to happen,” said Sig with a huge yawn.

“What you don’t understand, Mikita,” explained Vincent, “is that these guys are used to watching fast action movies. They’re all spoiled. They’re not used to watching movies this old.”

“Old? It’s not old!”

“It’s old,” said J.D.

“Fine,” I said. “You don’t have to watch the rest of it. We can stop it here. Even though in the next scene Lady Macbeth sleepwalks in the nude.”

This was enough to keep most of them awake for a while, and we made it through the rest of the movie.

Before I left that day, I had some news. Next session, I told them, a reporter from the Baltimore City Paper would be coming to the class with me. He was planning to write an article about the prison college program and about the reading group in particular. Vincent thought it would be a good idea if we planned an exercise to do in class, so I chose one from our textbook, which listed a number of projects in the back. The men would put themselves in the place of Macduff as he goes off to fight, and write a letter to Lady Macduff explaining why he felt the need to do so.

APRIL 15, 2014

I arrived at the prison with the Baltimore City Paper reporter, Baynard Woods; the photographer, J.M. Giordano; and Gerard Shields, the media relations officer from the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, whose job was to ascertain which men Woods could interview and—I imagine—to ensure nothing inappropriate was said. A tall man in worn white tennis shoes that clashed with his suit, Shields was a former reporter for the New York Post who’d only been with the DPSCS for three months. He’d covered Baltimore ex-mayor Martin O’Malley’s first campaign for the Baltimore Sun, he told us, and after getting laid off from the Post he’d called in a favor from O’Malley’s administration. He seemed a little uneasy in his new role.

Day-Day, who Woods describes in his article as “the young guy with the tattooed face,” was the first to read his letter from Macduff.

“Hi, Babe,” it began. “I miss you so much . . . You got me strung out. Whole time I’m out here, I’m thinking about that pretty body and that good pussy . . .”

I felt myself cringing and noticed some of the other men looking uncomfortable too. Shields was grimacing. Still, I know Day-Day was just completing the assignment as well as he knew how. Later, Donald told me he’d been trying to “groom” Day-Day in regard to how he should conduct himself in polite company. “He’s got a big heart,” said Donald. “He’s just not there yet.”

Eager to put the “good pussy” behind us, I asked Day-Day why, if Macduff misses his wife so much, he goes off and leaves her behind.

“Some things you gotta do,” he said. “You know, being a gang member, for me, I would leave everybody for my gang. I could get married tomorrow, but if they call me, I got to go.”

Gang membership, like “good pussy,” was also taboo. I moved hastily on to the other men, who were, as Charles put it later, “playing their A game.” Donald’s letter was fabulous. “My sudden departure wasn’t relative to you or family matters,” he wrote. “You were made aware of the fact that, if you married me, you’d have to share my loyalties with king and country. I’m truly saddened because of our separation because duty calls.”

There was a general murmur of approval. Everyone was impressed.

“Personally,” said Donald, “I’ve written a thousand letters of that nature. I had a lot of explaining to do, just like Macduff.”

“Did you ever leave voluntarily?” I asked him.

“Hell no.”

I asked the men at what point they lost sympathy for Macbeth, if they did so at all.

“I was with him the whole time,” said Day-Day. “Sometimes, when you fucked up, it’s fucked.”

“But he stays with it,” I added.

“He stays with it,” Day-Day agreed. “He take it the whole way through, fuck it. Even when they kill him at the end, his name still gonna ring.”

The way he said it, you could tell that, in the future, Day-Day wanted his own name to ring.

Sig and Steven both said they had sympathy with Macbeth until he started taking things into his own hands. The moment Charles lost sympathy was when MacBeth started to lose his mind. Vincent lost sympathy when he realized Macbeth wasn’t ready to be king.

“The man had no code,” said Sig. “I have no respect for a man without a code.”

“I respect him,” said Turk, “but I have some reservations about the things that he did.”

I felt proud of the men. They’d been eager to demonstrate to Woods the kind of thing we talked about each week in the reading group, including complex questions about law and loyalty. And they’d succeeded. In the car on the way home, Woods told me how much he’d enjoyed the discussion and how surprised he was by the men’s enthusiasm and dedication.

“Would you say that was a typical meeting of the group?” he asked. His tape recorder was still running.

“Pretty much,” I said. Then I remembered that we’d prepared an exercise, which wasn’t something we’d ever done before. And the men hadn’t had the chance to chat among themselves before class. That was usually when I got to hear them let off steam about everything going on in the prison.

“Though I guess I’d say they were on their best behavior,” I added. “Most of the time, there’s a lot more talk about . . .” I hesitated, unsure how to phrase it. “You know the guy with all the tattoos?” I asked.

Woods nodded.

“Well, more of his kind of talk,” I said. I was struggling to come up with a shorthand description of Day-Day’s style. “More talk about, you know, ‘pussy.’”

Looking back, I want to tear my hair out.