Then there followed several more waves of fever, and no longer were the dead presenting themselves to me. In their stead came the faces of the living. First there came my second jailor Jacob Moon, who was wearing now a handsome pin-striped business suit instead of his old gray uniform, and he too tried to comfort me, but his words were of a different order than had been those of the dead, for he kept telling me that I should not fall into despair, for soon I would no longer be among the living. And my wife’s cousin Gina, in the company of my five children, all of whom looked upon me with great sympathy and said that I had suffered enough and should give myself over from this penance. Mingled with these were the faces of my present jailor, and sometimes his assistants, and even sometimes that of my physician, and they were all saying to me the same thing, that I should let myself die now, for my sufferings had gone on long enough for many normal life times. There even came to me one of my own brethren in the faith, my friend of long ago who had counseled me to leave off the making of coffins and turn my skills to the manufacture of glass-fronted cabinets, and he once again gave me his sympathetic counsel, because of his love for me, and again it was counsel that denied my understanding of my own love of the dead, for he urged me to leave off my determination not to resist life.
Until there came at last the waves of fever in which there appeared to me the faces of both the living and the dead, and I could not tell one from the other, the living from the dead, although I knew them all, and they all counseled me and cajoled me and showed me great sympathy, and I loved them all for it and was grateful to them, even to those among them who said nothing, some living and some dead, who merely with their presence showed a concern for me, the Justices Bester and Twisdom of long ago, and certain of my brethren, and the infant born dead to my second wife, and many of my fellow prisoners, the party boys and the athletes and the philosophers, and even the knife boys and madmen who had wanted to do so much violence. Some among these were dead, and some were yet living, and the dead among them urged me not to come among them, to hold fast to my penance, and the living among them urged me to depart from them now, to join the eternal dead. And their voices were like a chorus that harmonized their differences and sent up a song of such precise beauty that I wept uncontrollably, for I loved them all so very much.
~ ~ ~
THOUGH MY IMPRISONMENT continues, my relation of it cannot. I must bring it to a close. I have composed it during the interludes between the attacks of the undulant fever. My strength for this composition, despite the effects of my illnesses, has been given to me by my coffin, which was presented to me at last by the prison authorities when it seemed to them that I would soon die of a disease that could be spread chiefly by handling an infected corpse. For this reason, they came into my cell during one of my attacks, when I was not aware of their presence, and placed my body into a simple but adequate wood coffin, so that when the wave of fever had passed over me and I knew again where I was, I found myself lying in my coffin. My joy was great at this, and to the astonishment of my physician and the jailor, I was immediately given sufficient strength to use the periods of lucidity that followed each new attack of fever for the purpose of composing this relation. I asked for pen and paper that very day, and also a board to prop against the sides of my coffin, and as I lay there, I began to write. In no other way during my life time have I been able to tender this much mercy to the dead, as I do now, with this relation of my imprisonment, for it has been composed expressly for the use of the living, to whom I must now say Farewell.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RUSSELL BANKS was born in New Hampshire, in 1940, to a blue-collar family. His tumultuous relationship with his father led him to steal a car and briefly run away from home at age sixteen. He later enrolled in Colgate College on a full scholarship, the first in his family to attain higher education, but dropped out a few months later in a case of what he calls “turbulence.” He headed south, resolving to join Castro’s Cuban revolution. “It seemed like a noble thing to do. In the late 1950s we had very few political heroes, us young folk, us kids … We could project romantic, altruistic, idealistic, political feelings onto [Castro and Che Guevara]. I was running off to try to make it real.” He hitchhiked as far as Florida, but soon ran out of money. “Then I’m moving furniture in a hotel and trying to survive, and pretty soon I forget about Castro.” Banks later ended up dressing mannequins at a Maas Brothers department store.
By age nineteen he had married, and by twenty he had fathered a child. By age twenty-one, he was already divorced. Living in a trailer park in Florida in the 1960s, pumping gas and doing odd jobs, Banks, inspired by Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, first contemplated being a painter. “Writing isn’t one of those things, in a literate culture, like music or painting, where the gift is obvious at a young age. My obvious gift as a boy was in painting. I could draw well; I had the gift genetically. I didn’t know whether I had any particular writing talent at all. I set out to be a painter in my late teens and gradually discovered that I was writing, as one discovers one is breathing — and so you feel you must be alive! The discovery, the definition, came after the activity.” But his new identity didn’t come easily. “I was doing something that seemed a self-destructive kind of compulsion. Wanting to be a writer seemed to be a terrible waste of a life to my family and to me.” At a writers’ conference, he met migrant worker-turned-novelist Nelson Algren, who “gave me permission. He never told me how to write. But he said, ‘You can do it, kid, and it’s worth doing.’ ”
For a time, Banks returned to New Hampshire and followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps: he became a plumber. A few years later, he attended the University of North Carolina and graduated Phi Beta Kappa at age twenty-seven. He taught writing at the University of New Hampshire and had several short stories published in literary reviews, but it was not until age thirty-five that he published his first book, a story collection titled Searching for Survivors.
His pursuit of literature removed from Banks a nasty appetite for barroom brawls. “There are certain things that writing has done for me that if I hadn’t had them, I probably would have killed myself or somebody else,” he told Salon. “Some magazine was asking writers what they would have become if they hadn’t become a writer, and I said what would have happened to me is that I would have been stabbed to death in the parking lot outside a bar in Florida at twenty-four, or something like that. I really believe that, actually. I think writing saved my life. I was so self-destructive, so angry and turbulent, that I don’t think I could have become a useful citizen in any other way. So I don’t think it worked as exorcism, or therapy, but I think it saved my life.”
During his thirties, Banks developed a passionate interest in Jamaica. “I had been to the Caribbean, like most Americans who can swing it, a week here, a week there in the wintertime. I became deeply attracted to the culture, the people, and fell in love with the place.” When awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book, he took his family to Jamaica and stayed there a year and a half. He spent much of his time “up in the back country” of the island, absorbing the local traditions and idiom. Drawing on his experiences in both Jamaica and Florida, Banks next published Trailerpark, a collection of short stories, and The Book of Jamaica, a novel.