Read Online The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley - Free Book Online

to ask himself whether he would have that courage under those circumstances. “It’s the same thing with grace,” said Hill. “I mean there’s something to be said for people who keep their dignity, even when all hell is breaking out around them and they’re enduring really horrible things and they keep their dignity and don’t forget that they’re just as human as everybody else.” He was answering Ben’s question but he appeared to be slipping in a stealth message to every one of the guys in the room: that he admired their courage and their humanity in how they were enduring prison. I felt the power of his words. And his comments affected the men too. A muscle twitched in Graham’s cheek and Ben smiled his slow smile. Many of the others sat rapt.
    Juan, an inmate who was vocal about his writing ambitions, wanted to talk about the writing process for such a long book. He was wearing a yellow White Sox cap, sunglasses and, hanging on his chest, a huge wooden cross. He asked his question in a staccato delivery, at high volume.
    Hill told Juan that he generally started in the middle of the book and waited for something interesting to come to him. “You have to have a lot of faith,” Hill said. “I’m not a religious person, personally, but I guess I have my own sort of faith—a non-religious spirituality that you have something beautiful to say, something worthwhile to say and I think every person has something worthwhile about them, something inherently dignified about them and you want to reach down and find that piece of beauty inside yourself and bring it out. And you don’t necessarily even know what’s down there. So writing is about pulling out secrets inside your own soul and spilling them out onto the page. It’s kind of like mining. You don’t know what you’re going to pull up.” Perhaps he had observed Juan’s cross and mentioned religion as a means of finding common ground. But the subtext of his statement crept up on all of us—that even guys in prison have something beautiful inside worth mining.
    â€œDo you decide the characters first?” asked a burly inmate with a sun and moon tattoo on his arm. His name tag read STAN.
    â€œI think of a person in a difficult situation,” Hill responded. “Story happens when a character’s under pressure and we, the readers, are watching them cope. In this case I talk about a girl stolen from a village in Africa. What if this were my own daughter? I think of this novel as a road trip. She’s on the move her whole life. I think about the longing she might have.” The answer seemed to resonate for the men whose own lives had been stolen and whose own journeys were still uncertain. One of the guys nudged the man next to him and nodded.
    Dread, who had been reading Hill’s autobiography, Black Berry, Sweet Juice , about his childhood in a predominantly white suburb of Toronto, said, “You really opened up my mind to the experiences you had as a child. Like you’re so divided—you’re not really accepted by the black people and the white people saw you as a black person.”
    â€œYou’ve said it so succinctly,” said Hill. “I had to find my way in a culture that was pretty much entirely white, and the only blackness I had access to was in the United States, when we went to visit my family there. So I found my way through reading and writing and travelling. I started reading black literature and all the books that my parents had on their bookshelves. And I started travelling to Africa. And I went to live, as you know, in the States.”
    Carol asked Hill to read a couple of passages from The Book of Negroes. He read two of the most memorable passages of the book: when Aminata has just disembarked from the slave ship and is frightened by the “smoke” coming from her mouth as her breath condenses in the cold morning