A Place to Stand Read online

  Praise for A Place to Stand:

  “A Place to Stand is about place in the largest, most flexible sense of the term: as home, but also as the soil of one’s roots and as the literary pantheon into which one fits. In that sense the book belongs to the subgenre of prison tales for which the twentieth century was fertile ground . . . from The Autobiography of Malcolm X to Vaclav Havel’s diaries . . . [Baca is a poet who] travels outward and inward as a Chicano in America, with all the complications that the identity entails . . . a poet in control of his craft . . . whose voice, brutal yet tender, is unique in America . . . one worth paying attention to. [A Place to Stand] is a luminous book that is at once brave and heartbreaking . . . a thunderous artifact.”

  —The Nation

  “Baca chronicles his brutal experiences with riveting exactitude and remarkable evenhandedness. An unwilling participant in the horrific warfare that rages within prison walls and a rebel who refused to be broken by a vicious and corrupt system, Baca taught himself to read and write, awoke to the voice of the soul, and converted ‘doing time’ into a profoundly spiritual pursuit. Poetry became a lifeline, and Baca’s harrowing story will stand among the world’s most moving testimonies to the profound value of literature.”

  —Booklist

  “As brawny and brilliant as its author, A Place to Stand is a triumph.”

  —Tucson Weekly

  “A Place to Stand is an astonishing narrative that affirms the triumph of the human spirit and for that reason alone it is an important story …. Executed in broad strokes and startling colors . . . [Baca’s memoir] is destined to become a benchmark of Southwestern prose.”

  —Arizona Daily Star

  “A family history, a personal voyage and a searing critique of America’s penal system, A Place to Stand is one of the most gripping memoirs in recent memory.”

  —Alibi

  “Baca enters [prison] rootless and illiterate, a child of abject poverty in southern New Mexico, having lived through an inexorable path of loss, abandonment, and violence. How he survived and became an internationally regarded poet and social activist is a gritty story unflinchingly told in A Place to Stand.”

  —The Santa Fe New Mexican

  “Poet Baca’s unflinching account of his incarceration, with its brutality and occasional benevolence, reveals the paradox of prison life. Ironically, his time in solitary confinement redeemed him, prompting lifesaving memories of his rural New Mexico childhood, which ignited his ability to use language to elevate himself above his immediate surroundings. The rustic imagery is beautiful, but beautiful too is the sun’s path down the dark prison corridor. . . . [A Place to Stand] is worth reading from both a literary and social perspective.”

  —Library Journal

  A PLACE TO STAND

  PREVIOUS WORKS BY THE AUTHOR:

  Black Mesa Poems

  Martin & Meditations on the South Valley

  Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems

  Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio

  A PLACE TO STAND

  The Making of a Poet

  Jimmy Santiago Baca

  Copyright © 2001 Jimmy Santiago Baca

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Special thanks go to Anton Mueller for his effort in making this book a reality.

  Names have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 1952–

  A place to stand: the making of a poet / Jimmy Santiago Baca.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-10: 0-8021-3908-6

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-3908-5

  1. Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 1952– 2. Poets, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Ex-convicts—United States—Biography. 4. Solitary confinement—United States. 5. Mexican American poets—Biography. 6. Prisons—United States. I. Title.

  PS3552.A254 Z473 2001

  811’.54—dc21

  [B]

  00-051400

  DESIGN BY LAURA HAMMOND HOUGH

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  09 10 11 12 15 14 13 12 11

  For Tones and Gabe

  PROLOGUE

  I was five years old the first time I ever set foot in prison. A policeman came to the door one night and told Mom she was needed at jail. She took me with her. When we arrived at the booking desk the captain asked, “You married to Damacio Baca?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was arrested for drunk driving. His bail’s a hundred. Sign here and make sure he appears for court.”

  “What are they?”

  “His release papers.”

  The captain studied her hesitation.

  “He stays till his appearance then.” The captain shrugged, surprised at her, and led us past holding cells to the drunk tank.

  It smelled like urine and whiskey vomit. I held tightly to Mother’s hand. The corridors were dark and gloomy, and the slightest sound echoed ominously in the hall. We stopped in front of a cell where men sat and stared at the wall in front of them. Some were crumpled on the floor where they had passed out.

  “¡Oye, Damacio, despierta!” the captain cried, and banged the bars with his baton.

  The inmates glanced at us with hung-over disinterest, and one shook my father awake. He rose in a groggy stupor. Cautiously stepping over bodies, losing and regaining his footing, he approached the bars. He rubbed his face and blinked his red eyes.

  “Did you have to bring him?” he asked accusingly. Then he added, clearly hurt that I was there, “I don’t want him seeing me like this. Get me out of here.”

  “No,” Mom said.

  He stared at her. “Listen, you, don’t—” Shaking with rage, he looked at me and made an effort to control himself.

  We stood in silence for a few seconds. Then Mom cried, “Stay away from us!”

  He reached his hand through the bars to me but Mom yanked me away, her hand painfully gripping mine. I wanted to tell her not to leave Father in there. I feared he might be hurt or be swallowed up by the darkness, and we would never see him again. The green painted bars, the guards with guns and keys and surly attitudes, the caked grime on the walls and floor, the unshaven men with no teeth and swollen red eyes and scratched faces—these filled me with terror. I tried to free my hand from Mother’s to go back to him, but she squeezed harder and dragged me along.

  “Get back here!” My father’s voice was strained by both aggression and self-pity, but Mom opened the door and we left. I wanted to tell him I was sorry. I didn’t want to keep him in jail. Only when he was drinking did he threaten to beat Mom up, wreck the car, lose his paycheck gambling, or sometimes not show up for days. He was not drinking now. We should have let him come home with us. When he would stagger in drunk, Mieyo and Martina would hide under the bed or in the closet, but I wasn’t afraid of him. I would hold his hand and guide him to his chair, and he’d put me on h
is lap and moan drunkenly about how sorry he was for drinking and not being a better father. Even as scared as I was by the jail, I wanted to sit on the floor outside the cell bars and hold his hand because he needed me.

  For weeks afterward my father’s voice from behind bars echoed in my head as I moped around our yard or slept at my mother’s side in our narrow bed. I had nightmares of violent forces hurling my father through the air; I tossed and turned but could never reach him. When I woke and lay still in bed, smelling my mother’s skin, putting my face against my brother’s hair, clutching my sister’s hand, I curled in closer, fearing that a strange official-looking person would come and take my sister and brother and me away. There had been conspiratorial whispers between aunts and uncles in Grandma’s kitchen. With Father in jail, I thought maybe Mother might be thinking of moving us. I no longer trusted that my brother and sister and I were safe.

  Outside the thin walls of our shack, howling winds swept the New Mexico prairie with violent moans that reminded me of the misery of the jail, its dark gloom and the faces that stared at me from behind the bars. Again and again I recalled the wasted features of the prisoners, the faraway eyes, pleading to be let out, gazing at me as if from a distant place.

  In time I would become all too familiar with such places, not only with those very same cells down on Garcia Street but with a long string of others as well, on different if equally dusty streets, with different but similar jailers, different but similar men. That initial encounter, however, never left me. It remained a fixed, haunting reference point to which I would return to time and again. Whether I was approaching it or seeking escape from it, jail always defined in some way the measure of my life.

  As I grew up, my own eyes came to reflect those of these drunks, addicts, and beggars, those grieving men, women, and children and their stories. It was the same despair I had seen through the bars in my father’s eyes, the same story. Over the years, I encountered all of them: eyes filled with raging despair, with weary despair, with insane despair; eyes with the despair of an old man who can no longer fight injustice; eyes filled with the dark despair of terror or mental illness; the anguished eyes of a child weeping in a corner. In time, my own eyes would show all these emotions. My own voice, calling through another set of bars, would merge with distant echoes of my father’s voice and permit some final but forever insufficient understanding, love, and forgiveness to pass between us.

  The last time I was in prison it was for five years. It was serious time in a serious place—Florence, a maximum-security state prison in Arizona. I landed there as I had landed in the others, by being a poor kid with too much anger and the wrong skin color and by fucking up again, though this time I was innocent of the specific charges against me. I was only twenty-one years old, still young, but by then I had already served a long apprenticeship in jail time. Some men measure their lives in terms of basketball games, fishing trips, school friends, movies, sleep-overs; these things, if they happened to me at all, were brief moments compared to the times I sat staring at cell walls for hours, days, and months at a stretch.

  No, prison was not new to me when I arrived at Florence; I had been preparing for it from an early age. I had visited it a thousand times in the screams of my father and my drunken uncles, in the tight-lipped scolding of my mother, in the shrill reprimands of the nuns at Saint Anthony’s orphanage; in all the finger-pointing adults who told me I didn’t belong, I didn’t fit in, I was a deviant. Security guards and managers followed me in store aisles; Anglo housewives walking toward me clutched their purses as I passed. I felt socially censured whenever I was in public, prohibited from entering certain neighborhoods or restaurants, mistrusted by government officials, treated as a flunky by schoolteachers, profiled by counselors as a troublemaker, taunted by police, and disdained by judges, because I had a Spanish accent and my skin was brown. Feeling inferior in a white world, alien and ashamed, I longed for another place to live, outside of society. By the time I arrived at Florence, a part of me felt I belonged there.

  But if prison was the place of my downfall, a place where my humanity was cloaked by the rough fabric of the most primitive manhood, it was also the place of my ascent. I became a different man, not because prison was good for me, but in spite of its destructive forces. In prison I learned to believe in myself and to dream for a better life.

  You make use of what is available and near at hand, no matter what your circumstances. I did what I had to do to survive. But I was also determined not to become what in my heart I knew I was not: I was not going to let them make me into a ward of the state. I was lucky, too. For in that place where life and death are waging war every day and the right choice is often the most difficult one, I was able to reach out and find a finger hold on the fragile ledge of hope. Hope didn’t support me all the time, and wouldn’t have supported others in quite the same way, but it served well enough for me to slowly pull myself up. Very simply, I learned to read and write.

  Language gave me a way to keep the chaos of prison at bay and prevent it from devouring me; it was a resource that allowed me to confront and understand my past, even to wring from it some compelling truths, and it opened the way toward a future that was based not on fear or bitterness or apathy but on compassionate involvement and a belief that I belonged.

  I have been a writer ever since, a poet. Poetry became something to aspire to, to live up to. It informed how I saw the world and my purpose in it. It was never the answer to everything and could not become so. At times, I had to put my pen down and fight with my fists, and sometimes when I yearned for answers to allay the excruciating pain of merely surviving, there were none. But poetry helped make me the person I am today, awakening creative elements that had long lain dormant in me, opening my mind to ideas, and enabling my intellect to nourish itself on alternative ways of being. Poetry enhanced my self-respect. It provided me with a path for exploring possibilities for my life’s enrichment that I follow to this day.

  The person I have become, who sits writing in this chair at this desk, has been forged by enormous struggle and unexpected blessings, despite the dehumanizing environment of a prison intended to destroy me. Prison was the most frightening nightmare I ever experienced. It stripped me down to nothing, until I huddled in the dark corner of a cell, sometimes shivering with fear, other times filled with so much anger and self-loathing that it would have been better to die. I have never told the full story of my transformation, a story I now believe is important, especially for my sons, playing in their room. I want them to know my heart and not be confused by conflicting rumors and gossip, wondering which ones are true. When I asked my father about his history, he would never answer. When I asked my grandmother about her history, she didn’t want to talk about it. My sons won’t have to ask. I want them to know their father’s story, good parts and bad. I want to share with them what I have gone through, so they can make wiser choices where I did not and be invigorated with the courage and honor to live better lives.

  It is also important for my father, who was never blessed with the good fortune I had in discovering a new path. I believe his death was hastened from the heartbreak of knowing I was in prison. But his failure as a father gave me a determined strength in my struggle for a better life that helped me be a better human being, even in a place like Florence. This maximum-security prison was a frightening and pain-racked place, but perhaps not as painful as other prisons I visited on my way there. I must tell you about them as well.

  ONE

  When I was a boy, my father always wore a pained expression and kept his head down, as if he couldn’t shake what was bothering him. He snapped irritably at the slightest infraction of his rules and argued continuously with Mother. He drank every day and she sank deeper into sadness and anger. To escape their fighting, and the gossiping of villagers in my Grandma Baca’s kitchen, I often bellied into the crawl space under our shack to be alone in my own world. I felt safe in this peaceful refuge. The air was moist and smelle
d like apples withering in a gunnysack in the cellar at my Uncle Max’s ranch in Willard. A stray dog might be waiting when I entered. Happy to see me, he would roll on the cool earth, panting, his tail wagging, and lick my face. After playing with him, I’d lie on the dirt and close my eyes and float out of my skin into stories my grandfather, Pedro Baca, told me—about those of our people who rode horses across the night prairie on raiding parties, wearing cloth over their heads, as they burned outsiders’ barns, cut fences, and poisoned wells, trying to expel the gringo intruders and recover the land stolen from our people. This happened on prairie ranches all over New Mexico, from the late 1800s to the 1940s, when my grandfather was a young man herding sheep on the range.

  I don’t remember much before the age of five; my memories are of Grandma and Grandpa Baca in the kitchen, whispering sleepily as the coffee pot percolates on the woodstove; at night, their voices become guarded, talking about Father’s drinking, concerned by Mother’s absence, and worried that there’s never enough money. People come and go; behind their conversations, a Motorola radio under the cupboards by the sink drones Mexican corridos or mass rosaries. Then tensions rupture in a night of rebukes. Uncle Santiago cuffs his younger brother, Uncle Refugio, for coming home drunk again, and Grandpa scolds Father for his drunkenness. I remember wondering if those fights had something to do with what I saw one hot summer afternoon.

  I was six years old, in my crawl space under the shack—or La Casita, as we called it—where it was cool and quiet. I was drifting in a reverie when I was jolted back to the present by a door creaking open above me. I scooted to a dark corner and peeked up through a crack in the floorboards. A strange man entered La Casita and sat on the bed. Mother came in behind him, and he embraced her. His shiny wingtip shoes scraped grit into my eyes. They watered painfully, but I forced myself to watch as he raised her skirt and ran his hands along her thighs.