We're Going

I just got a call from the East Mississippi Correctional Facility.  Lloyd "Blackie" Cork has added my name to his visitor list.

This post is called "We're Going" because I was too afraid to go alone.  I have a good friend, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, who has actually spent a lot of time in prisons working with inmates on creative writing.  Sometime in October she and I will go to this prison for the mentally ill and we will sit across a table from the man who murdered my grandfather.

The visiting room is one in which physical touch is allowed.  I'll be able to shake his hand, if I want to.

A Prison for the Insane

Freaking out just a little bit, okay A LOT!  I was talking to a friend of mine and he mentioned that Cork is in a hospital for the mentally ill.  I checked on wikipedia and it turns out that the East Mississippi Corrections Facility, where Cork is housed, is the place where all of the prisoners in their system are sent when they have a mental illness.

I called the woman who runs Cork's floor and I said, "So, is your facility a prison for the criminally insane?"

She said, "Basically.  Especially on this floor, we have the worst cases here.  Many of them are patients," I guess she meant as opposed to prisoners.  She may be referring to people who are legally labeled as criminally insane.  Her floor, Cork's floor, is the worst one.  He lives on the floor that houses the most severe, most dangerous prisoners.

I am physically ill.  I want to face him and I will not back down, but I am really nervous.  Flashbacks of the movie Shutter Island keep racing through my mind.

I figured that he'd be a little off, simply because he's been incarcerated for so long. I was trying to prepare for that.  But this, this new revelation, I don't know how to prepare for it.  Is he schizophrenic?  Does he have multiple personalities?  Is he violent?

I find myself wondering whether or not he can tell me anything useful.  What if he just sits there in a puddle of his own drool?  Is the Cork of 1973 who killed my grandfather even inside of the Cork of 2012?  I picture myself sitting across from him, using words, body language, and facial expressions to try to delve deeper into his mind, to try to get to the truth.  Will he be able to help me or will I just get lost in there?

Sometimes I wonder whether or not he has Internet access and, if so, if he has read this blog.  Does he know what I wrote about him here?  Does he know that I'm afraid?

Meeting a Murderer

I wrote this a few weeks ago:

Sometimes writing it like being lost.  Not turned around or momentarily confused.  It is like being seriously, frighteningly lost, uncertain of which is way is up, how to get out, how far or how deep or wide the thing is that I’m inside of.  Sentences don’t do this to me, although, a paragraph has been known to leave me stumped.  A chapter can definitely make me feel lost.  Sometimes, however, I am lost in an entire book.  What once seemed like the perfect layout now feels sophomoric.  The story itself can start to feel thin and pointless.

When I’m lost I’m usually also exhausted, physically and mentally.  I can’t remember why I started and I just want to stop.  For lots of reasons, I can’t.  

At some point, I’ll usually remember the last time that I was lost, and the time before that, and the time before that.  With relief, I’ll recall that each time I was lost before I didn’t find my way out, the way out found me.  Sometimes a person will make a comment in passing about the weather or life in general and I’ll realize that their statement is the answer to my writing challenge.  Sometimes someone will read my work and make a simple statement that changes everything.  Other times, I just wake up one morning and know what needs to be done.

Today, I am lost and tired.  1% of my brain knows that it won’t last.  Change is on the horizon and I will find a way out.  99% of my brain is convinced that there is no way out.  Like being locked in a coffin I am anxious, sweating, desperate, and unable to remain calm.  I want to move, act, talk, eat, change my clothes, anything, I just have to keep going because the weight of being lost is heaviest when I am still and silent. 

I am fried and late and lost. 

I wrote the above piece because the ending of my book was lame.  In the first half of my book I learn about my grandfather and all about Greenwood, and then the second half  of the book is about me trying to uncover the story of his murder.  Then the book switches gears and sort of ends.  In the final chapter I write my theory about the murder and talk about how I’ll continue to research it.  Blah, blah, blah.  

Last year I was supposed to go visit Cork, the man who murdered my grandfather (I think).  I chickened out.  Read this and this.  Recently though, out of the fog of confusion I've felt about the ending to my book I realized something.

My book is unfinished because the story is unfinished.

In an excel file I have a list of chapters and the other day I added a new one called “Meeting a Murderer,” then I put a certified letter in the mail to Cork, asking him if I can meet with him.

Part of me doesn’t want to meet him because Cork may say or do something that marks the end of the road.  It's like I've been racing down a freeway that doesn't have a speed limit and meeting Cork is a brick wall falling into my path.  My work to understand my grandfather’s life and the murky circumstances surrounding his death may stop on a dime with the words of a man who could be insane.  Was he hired?  Did he do it for no reason or the oldest reason?  All of my questions might get answered when I sit across from a murderer.

But pushing that meeting off into infinity is not fair to the readers who will follow my quest.  It’s also not fair to Booker Wright.

In October I'm traveling to Mississippi and, if Cork agrees to it, I am meeting with a murderer.  Typing that feels profound.  I’m setting my plans in stone and this time, I will not turn back.  

Untethered

During the past year I've spent a lot of time thinking about family.  One of the early ideas that was floated around about the documentary, "Booker's Place: A Misssissippi Story", was focusing the doc on the reason I was searching for Booker Wright in the first place, the answers to which were buried deep in a host of family memories.

In an early draft of my book I wrote:
Family is the cord that keeps us tethered to the earth.  Its memories, habits and secrets are woven together to form a thick rope that both anchors us and makes us relevant.  Everything we do eventually floats away on aimless currents, but maybe there is something in us, impossible to name or pinpoint that renders us inexplicably unforgettable to family. 

"Family is the cord that keeps us tethered to the earth."  Looking back I realize that, growing up while feeling so disconnected from family left me with the belief that, if I could construct a sense of family or if I could I find a place to belong, "where everybody knows your name," that I would somehow be complete.

Many of my life choices were governed by a quest to find family.  My choice of friends, where to worship, who to marry, what groups to join were all determined by the level of family I hoped to build with strangers.  I didn't allow these relationships or choices to happen organically.  I was always thinking of the long term, always looking down the line 10 or 20 years into the relationship.  I was planning, calculating, even scheming to win hearts and find a place so that I wouldn't have to float, untethered.

At 37, I am finally realizing that this doesn't work.  Yes, I need to make choices for myself, but not based on a fear that I will one day be alone.  I have to spend a little time in my life, truly being untethered, to prove to myself that I can.  It's like I'm running from loneliness, but I always end up lonely because I chose my crowd for the wrong reasons.  I heard someone say once that, in life, it's just me, God, and the dirt.  I'm trying on that life for awhile.