When we went to Alcatraz two summers ago, O was excited.
Why does she want to go THERE? My mom had asked (since I booked the tickets for her visit to SF). Because she DOES, I said, wanting never to question my daughter’s impulses the way mine were questioned. So we took the ferry, along with all kinds of people, and arrived at the docks where it smelled like actual death. I looked around and wondered why nobody else seemed to notice the smell. O pulled her shirt over her face.
The crowd of people coming off the ferry mixed with the people going onto the ferry, and it all felt disorganized. Someone with a megaphone was announcing instructions amidst all the chaos.
We stepped to the side of some bad-smelling picnic benches and ate some of the lunch we had brought. No one was hungry for it. After that, we walked up a big hill to the prison and got our audio guides. We lined up with everyone else, in a single file, in the big, cold building. We took the wires and headphones from teenagers who probably shouldn’t have been spending time in jail for any reason at all.
At first, it was interesting to try to match the audio file with the actual space around us, lining up the numbers on the displays to the numbers we were hearing. Then quickly it wasn’t.
We walked around in the space until we descended into the room that was for cells for solitary confinement. That was when it finally hit me that this wasn’t a display of what a jail was like. This was the actual jail. Real bodies of people had been in these same rooms. I think you, as a visitor, were invited to step in. The room held a few of these rooms set next to each other. Above them were high ceilings and more light than there was in the rest of the space.
It’s just as horrible as I could have imagined solitary confinement to be, and also the space had an austerity that seemed familiar to me: Concrete. Cold. Somewhat…modern? The room seemed to have, architecturally, some kind of glory.
It had high ceilings, the only place in the prison with light. My mind tried to grasp this contrast, this of church made for torture, like somebody knew how bad this was and felt that it was somehow exquisite. It makes me feel revolted to write that. I think about all the times that I’ve been alone and how bad that was.
As we walked upstairs from this space, we were back in the main prison area, which was a network of hallways, all dark, with cells and bars next to each other.
The audio file suggested we look into one while it told us the story of how a prisoner planned with other prisoners to dig themselves out of the concrete rooms, somehow, and then swim to freedom through freezing water. In the bed in the cell, there was a dummy body stuffed under the wool blankets.
It’s not a real body, I told O, it’s just a doll of a person, when I noticed how scared she looked. That was it for her; she wanted to leave right away. We took off the headphones and walked toward the exit, and my mom, who was with us, was probably happy because she had asked why we had gone to this place during her visit to SF to begin with.
As we walked down the hill, O’s normal calm began to unravel. It was like the whole facade was falling apart - the way people talked about this place as a place we should visit versus what it felt like to actually be there.
She processed out loud, almost like a whisper. Why do we have this place? Why have we not replaced this with something else, like an art project, something beautiful? She was asking the wind, which blew through her questions, and took them out to the sea.
I didn’t try to explain anything to her. On the one hand, I suddenly felt that it had been important to have gone. I felt that I had never really thought about what it was like to be a body in a true cell, and that now that I knew it, I couldn’t unknow it. I also felt that, of course, she was right. The idea of a prison crumbles under the weight of a child.
In our own world right now, activists have to argue that fake jails on playgrounds should not be allowed because this normalizes a part of society that is not in line with children’s imaginations. It is progressive to argue that children may play cops and robbers, but that is not congruent with their imagining that they would lock one another up. That comes from adults. We’ve given them that.
I’m so excited about the possibilities, someone was quoted as saying last week, in an article that noted President Trump’s site visit and vision to reopen the prison.
Who gets to imagine? Whose imagination do we fund? Why is the place we visited a relic of the past being held in our present? Who the fuck wants to bring this past back to life? A kid who has been alive for six years has more clarity on the value of human existence than all of these men put together. Just sit with that.
There’s one other moment that glistens with terror.
After we rounded one corner, we passed the tiniest window that looked out toward San Francisco. The audio tour told us that this was the window through which the prisoners celebrated the Fourth of July. Along with the tiny view of the fireworks across the water, there was one night when people were allowed to make music. That night, they were allowed to have instruments. To celebrate the country that had systematically locked them up there. America.