There is No Name For This Thing You Become

I’m reading Felon (W.W. Norton, 2019), Reginald Dwayne Betts’s newest collection of poems, trying to remember what someone once told me about how to read poetry: deeply, feeling it, celebrating its ideas. A PA blares, inmates yell, gates slam—and the din snaps me out of my head and back into my humid, cramped cell at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. 

Felon is a testament to Betts’s years in prison—and after. He did time in Virginia for a carjacking; he was sentenced in 1997 and released almost nine years later. He then went to college, earned an MFA before age 30, and became a poet. Underemployed, he forged on, received fellowships, wrote a memoir and two acclaimed books of poems, and then was accepted to Yale Law and became a lawyer in Connecticut. It’s the moments between these successes—living as a felon, remembering life as a convict—that shape the poetry in his new book.

According to an essay in the New York Times Magazine, Betts learned from the Oxford English Dictionary that the word felon “once meant a vile or wicked person, a villain, wretch, or monster, and was sometimes applied to the devil or an evil spirit.” All that could be said to ground his themes here: prison and redaction, Blackness and reentry, alcoholism and fatherhood, fatherlessness and intimacy, identity, and more prison. What haunts me most about Betts’s poems is the realization that the effects of prison will likely stay with me just as they have stayed with him, even after I’ve served my time. As Betts writes in “Essay on Reentry”:

Of prison, no one tells you the time
will steal your memories—until there’s
nothing left but strip searches & the hole
 
the flights & hidden shanks the spade games.

Including the year I did in juvie for assault, between 1992 and 1993, and the year I spent on the Rikers Island adolescent unit for packing a pistol (1995 to 1996), I’ve been locked up half my life. In December 2001, at age 24, deep into the drug-dealing lifestyle, I shot and killed a man on a Brooklyn street. Soon after, I was scooped up and dumped on Rikers Island. For the next two and a half years, it was Bloods and black eyes, shanks and razors, smoking weed and sniffing heroin, caged bus rides, sitting chained in crowded courthouse bullpens, eating bologna sandwiches. I dreamed about getting away with murder, but it never happened. I was convicted and sentenced to an aggregate term of 28 years to life. In 2010, at Attica, New York’s most notorious maximum security prison, I joined a creative writing workshop. Being where I was, I knew I had access to pretty rich and wild tales, but I needed to learn how to tell them. So I picked up some tools and started building a career as a freelance writer and journalist.

In December of 1996, a few months after I was released from Rikers, 16-year-old Betts was hanging out with four friends, riding around in a sedan, smoking weed, a gun in the car. Soon it was in Betts’s hand, and he and a friend slid through a mall parking lot in Virginia, looking for a victim. They spotted a white guy dozing in a parked car. Betts tapped on the window, told the guy to get out, stole his wallet and his car, and then went shopping with the man’s credit card. Betts and his friend were booked the next day. He pleaded guilty. “Living in one jail and five prisons,” he wrote in the aforementioned essay for the New York Times Magazine (a piece that won a 2019 National Magazine Award), “I was never offered a single opportunity to further my formal education. I came home with far more sense than I had the night a pistol nearly ruined my life, but not a single thing to put on a résumé.”

At this point, it’s worth acknowledging that I am white, and Betts is black. Our experiences in prison—and after prison—aren’t the same. Black people are incarcerated at a rate five times more than white people, and white men with criminal records have higher employment rates than black men with no records. There are things that as a white man, even one in prison, I simply won’t see, or relate to, that are clear for a black man. It’s also worth noting that I’m a convict reading Felon, which is to say that I am currently living the trauma that informs Betts’s poems. Oddly, I look forward to the day when I will just be a felon, not a convict. I look forward to someday being recognized as Betts truly is: an accomplished writer. By then, I will have served my debt to society.

The poems in Felon were first dreamed up more than 20 years ago, when Betts was a Black boy in a box (solitary confinement) reading how Etheridge Knight weaved prison’s hurt into poetry. In that moment, Betts “wanted to write a poem that wasn’t for women,” he says in his memoir A Question of Freedom (2009). He wanted to write “a poem that was for dudes around me, carrying time like the heaviest albatross around their necks.”

Betts’s poetry is sometimes soul-crushing for me because it spoils my romanticized visions of life after prison. “Ghazal,” the first poem in the collection, sets the tone:

Titus Kaphar painted my portrait, then dipped it in black tar.
He knows redaction is a dialect after prison.
 
From inside a cell, the night sky isn’t the measure—
That’s why it’s prison’s vastness your eyes reflect after prison.

When we think of redaction, we think of something taken out, removed, blacked out, censored. The artist Titus Kaphar is known for his portraits in which all or part of the face—whether of a celebrity or someone unknown—is obscured, often by tar. Kaphar’s art appears on the dust jacket of Felon, four portraits dipped in tar, redacting identity and calling into question the whole experiment of portraiture as a way of understanding who someone is. Betts also creates blackout art in this collection, redacting legal motions and leaving just enough language to convey the inequities of the criminal justice system. If lineated regularly without redactions, part of “In Alabama” would read:

Plaintiffs seek
fundamental rights                   they suffered
the
City's       unlawful
It is the policy        of the City      to jail people
It is the policy        of the City      to jail people
It is the policy        of the City to hold prisoners
until extinguished

Another line, from “In Missouri,” would simply read “[D]evastated the City’s poor trapping them in /debts extortion and cruel jailings.” For the convict reader, the meaning is even more powerful, walled off as we are from society, redacted from intimacy, from employment, from the voting booth, from control over our own lives.

After prison, I don’t necessarily expect my depression to disappear, although I hope it will. I once told a mental health counselor that I was depressed and thinking about taking meds. He told me most people are depressed in prison, that it’s situational, and that I should soldier through. I experience depression in my chest and gut; it makes my forehead heavy, and prison’s noise and stupidity only make it worse. Betts tells me all this will be reflected in my eyes after prison. Of course it will.

Indeed, one of Felon’s themes is the notion that you can leave prison, but prison never quite leaves you. Prison damages your ability to connect. In “Night,” Betts reveals this:

What she
tells me: prison killed you my love, killed you so dead
 
that you’re not here now, you’re never here, you’re always.

This is hard for me to read. In prison, I’ve failed at love. I’ve been married twice. My ex-wives describe me as self-absorbed, subdued, stuck in my head, the wordsmith who is nonetheless unable to express the words they needed to feel fulfilled. When I get out, I tell myself, things will be better. I’ll find compatible love, real love. But Betts tells me, through his poetry and his experiences, that prison will fuck me up more than I can imagine. I don’t want him to be right, but I’m afraid he is.

Betts and I share so much, even though we are worlds apart. The complexities of race affect me, although I’m white. I am the minority on the inside, which isn’t a privileged position. I am often alone. Over the years, particularly when I was in juvie and the adolescent unit, I felt I was viewed as soft and weak by others, always cloaking my fear. They tried me a lot. But I experienced empathy in an Attica classroom surrounded by my Black peers, learning about American history, about Dred Scott and Reconstruction and sharecropping.

And so, when reading “On Voting for Barack Obama in a Nat Turner T-Shirt,” written in second person, it’s as if Betts is whispering in my ear, telling me it’s OK to imagine myself as him on that day in 2008: “You are wearing a Nat Turner T-shirt / as if to make a statement at the family / reunion,” Betts writes. “Everyone around you is Black, / which is a thing you notice.” He continues:

You cast a ballot for a Black man in
America while holding a Black baby.
Name a dream more American than
that, especially with your three felonies
serving as beacons to alert anybody
of your reckless ambition.

Unfortunately, my memories of Election Day are overshadowed by being stabbed in the exercise yard and nursing a punctured lung in my cell on a secure tier, feeling angry and hopeless, hating this life of mine in prison. When it came over the radio that Barack Obama had been elected 44th president of the United States, the Green Haven cell blocks rumbled and roared. I snapped out of my self-pity. We all felt it, for ourselves, for our nation—we felt hope. A Black man was our president, and he and his family were going to live in the White House. It was a triumphant moment, one that can never be redacted.

Betts evokes a more harrowing reality of the Black experience in “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving.” The narrator is Betts (or someone much like him), warning his boys about toy pistols and noting that guns have haunted him since he first gripped one. The Second Amendment, he writes, worries him, as “cold, cruel,/ a constitutional violence.”

This
is how misery sounds: my boys
 
playing in the backseat juxtaposed against
a twelve-year-old’s murder playing
in my head.

It should be a mundane scene, a father driving his sons to school, but Betts seethes with anger and fears for the safety of his sons. In Between the World and Me (2015), Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about similar “what if” fears, which are sadly commonplace in a nation that too often shoots first and asks questions later, if at all. Unlike Coates, Betts, while still a kid, did stick a gun in a white man’s face, and in some ways, furthered the stereotype that makes cops uneasy—or violent or deadly—toward young black men in America. It appears Betts grapples with this guilt too:

A confession begins
When that nigga & the pistol he carries like a dick walked
Into that parking lot. A confession begins when everything you
See him  doing is seen as sex. A confession begins when
That nigga walked into a parking lot & drove away with everything
Belonging to that white man.

Here, I sense both frustration and anger as Betts gestures toward the historic racist tropes with which Black Americans still contend. (Dictating this edit over the prison phone to my colleague on the other end, with guys next to me, was quite uncomfortable.) It’s complicated and risky, of course, that Betts pursues this theme in the parking lot where he committed his crime. But as a poet and as an intellectual, Betts understands that this issue has many layers. The black arrest rate for murder is seven to eight times higher than the white arrest rate, according to Yale Law Professor James Foreman Jr., and the black arrest rate for robbery is 10 times higher than the white arrest rate. “But, statistics ain’t prophecy,” Betts writes.

Get this: I started my career with a piece in the Atlantic, writing about how easy it is for criminals like me to get guns and then went on to offer some ideas for gun control. I published more articles on gun control, but the writings were less about me rationalizing and more about me in prison, thinking “What if I lived in a society with fewer killing machines? Would I still be a killer? Would the man I shot still be dead?”

It’s not solely our access to guns. I know, I know. It’s fatherless homes and broken hearts, among myriad other things. Betts’s father was out of the picture when he was growing up (as mine was), a fact Betts acknowledges in “Blood History”:

drinking & smoking with buddies, a friend asked if
I’d longed for a father. Had he said wanted, I would have
dismissed him in the way that youngins dismissed it all:
a shrug, sarcasm, a jab to his stomach, laughter.
But he said longing & in a different place, I might
have wept.

I was 10 when my mother told me my father, who had left us when I was a year old, had died of a heart attack. The next day, Mom walked in on me listening to Sinead O’Connor and weeping. She asked why I was crying for someone I never knew. Betts knows why: It was me longing for my father. Sometime later, Mom admitted that my father, an alcoholic, had actually committed suicide with a shotgun.

Felon also takes up one of the most common tropes of male prison life: how the place is the last frontier for gay rights. Homos, faggots, mooks—all the pejoratives are still game in the joint. “Temptation of the Rope” describes a young gay prisoner who doesn’t hide who he is:

all of twenty & gay &, maybe, more
free than any of us might ever be,
& this is one way of telling the story,
 
another one is aphorism, or threat:
blood on my knife or blood on my dick;

Prison’s not like the classic HBO show Oz. “Booty bandits” are mostly a thing of the past, at least in the single-bunk cells in which I’ve done time in New York State. Still, gay men are ostracized behind bars and live on the margins. There is a sense of danger for pretty boys: sex kites (folded notes) appear on their bunks from men on the down low. Seeing someone, especially a gay kid, embrace his true identity is admirable in prison, where everyone postures and wears a mask. The masked man behind bars is rarely vulnerable and often loud and aggressive; he basses up from his diaphragm and feigns toughness. So I understand how Betts, or the poem’s speaker anyway, was almost envious of the man for being himself. “One day I watched him,” Betts writes, “[F]ull of fear for / my own fragility & wondered how he dared // own so much of himself, openly.”

Years ago, at Attica, I was reporting about gay men in prison. One interview was with a petite twentysomething who called himself June. He had long, curly black hair and a delicate face. He told me how he was raped at seven, lived in group homes, and then started doing burglaries, which was how he wound up doing time. At Protestant church services, the reverend shamed him during a sermon, telling June to pray away his desires. June never went back. Betts captures the dilemma of life in prison for men like June: “But how can a man ever / be safe like that, when you are so / beautiful the straight ones believe it.”

In “& Even When There Is Something to Complain About,” Betts writes on the “mythic kind of joy” that is love and all its complications for incarcerated men:

& yes, this is the fantasy, wanting
to be wanted. She called me hers
as if the state didn’t already have claim
to most of me. So sincere, that kind
of want, when talk verges on orgasm.

When I went to conjugals with my wives, the experiences were not quite what I expected nor were they what my wives expected. I thought the problem was them, but, no, it was me. My dreams of intimacy and love all those years, in a cold and hard place, were really just fantasies. So were the love letters and the lust-filled whispers in the visiting room. When we were alone, I felt like an imposter. In the prison’s modular home, at the dinner table, on the couch, making love, I was unable to be fully present and express the affection that I felt for them. Betts understands this situation, too:

I was uncomfortable with my own
hunger, & how it cascaded into
this thing that left me empty & her wanting.

If there is one thing that eludes me most, and perhaps Betts too, it’s joy. In “Confession,” the narrator’s mother-in-law wants to know why he doesn’t just let it go and be happy. “But how do I explain that outside / On nights like this, is where I first / Learned just how violent I might be?”

In “House of Unending,” the highlight of the book for me, Betts offers another profound insight on intimacy:

Unaccustomed to touch,
I knew only dream & fantasy. Try to see through
That mire & find intimacy. It was just so much.

It depresses me that Betts talks here about getting out but still has these intimacy issues. This career of mine, all this writing about prison, my work in archives that are just a finger swipe away, will surely inform my identity out there—but it’s an identity I may want to forget. “That’s the thing that gets you,” Betts writes. “Holding on to memories like they’re your archives.” Earlier in the same poem, Betts ends with a similar insight on identity and the labels with which men like us contend:

To become drunk on count-time & chow-call logic.
There is no name for this thing you become:
Convict, prisoner, inmate, lifer, yardbird, all fail.

Poetry conveys the kind of abstract emotions and experiences that prose often cannot. The convict will always envy the felon, the one who used to be inside and is now out there, free. He’s paid his debt and is now able to thrive in the criminal-justice-reform-friendly society we live in today. The felon’s plight is now the convict’s fantasy. But like those other fantasies, I know they don’t fully play out in reality.

Betts is a hero to men on the inside, the marginalized men who see his success but feel unseen. He’s a hero to anyone who believes redemption can be had and is not some abstract idea. Felon is a testament to Betts’s talent and success, but when you read it deeply and feel it and celebrate its ideas, the layers peel back. I imagine it will leave you not only informed but saddened, as it did me.