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

air; and when another slave inoculates Aminata against smallpox by implanting a lesion under the girl’s skin.
    Then it was time for the men to come forward to have their books signed. I was moved to see how eager they were—how precious this opportunity was for them. All toughness was gone, their respect for Lawrence Hill palpable. I was also disappointed that I hadn’t heard their reactions to the novel. But I wasn’t surprised. When my London book club had organized author visits by William Dalrymple and Esther Freud, the members’ curiosity about the writing process dominated and we often refrained from asking tough questions about the book itself.
    Sitting beside Hill, I had the opportunity to hear him talk to each man. Dread was second in line and asked for his book to be signed to his wife and daughter. Hill asked him how old his daughter was.
    â€œTen,” Dread said. The mood between them was warm and Dread lingered, asking him about the subject of his next novel. Hill confided that it was a book about an illegal immigrant. Dread smiled broadly and left abruptly. I watched him walk away and wondered what could have affected him so much about what Hill had said.
    When Ben came forward with his book, they chatted about the other novel that Ben had read, Some Great Thing , which draws on Hill’s years as a reporter for a Winnipeg newspaper.
    â€œDid you like the part where the guy got arrested for putting a vacuum cleaner down a mailbox?” asked Hill. “I had a lot of fun writing that.”
    â€œI liked his character,” said Ben.
    â€œI met a guy in court one time who got arrested for vacuuming letters out of a mailbox. That gave me the idea for that scene,” said Hill. He’d been a reporter covering the court beat that day.
    When it was his turn, Graham asked Hill to sign the book to him and thanked him for coming, in a way that communicated thanks from all the men. Carol told Hill that Graham hoped to work with youth once he was granted parole. I had a feeling that she would try to get them together “on the outs,” prison slang for “on the outside.”
    Juan engaged Hill in a conversation in Spanish, knowing that the author had lived in Spain for a year.
    As the lineup gradually shortened, I noticed that Carol had stepped out of the room and left her orange leather purse sitting open on her chair. “Nothing is ever taken,” she told me when I remarked on her trust at the prison. Indeed, according to protocol, she would have left any valuables, like her wallet, keys and cellphone, in a lockbox at reception. However, the black markers for writing name tags disappeared from the name tag table by the end of the meeting that day. As we learned soon afterward, the ink was valued for tattooing. We realized that it would be better to print out name tags in advance.
    An hour later, over lunch in downtown Kingston, Lawrence Hill told me there had been one question from the men this time that he had never considered before. “When Ben asked me about grace—nobody’s ever put that to me,” he said. “It was an utterly fascinating thing to hear my own books reflected back to me in that line.
    â€œThose guys are likely taking a lot more from books than other people because they have more time and they have more energy and they’re able to focus on it and they have more need.” He said that he was particularly attuned to those who had lived on the margins due to race and that some of the books that had affected him most profoundly had come from the prison experience, which was one reason why he had felt compelled to visit the book club, despite his busy schedule.
    He had also engaged with people inside before, it turned out—a few years earlier. When a secure-custody facility for juveniles in Ontario was frustrated with its inability to get a small group of young men to read, the corrections authorities called Hill and