the shrieking blizzard, I am singing, very, very happy.
The snow slams at me everywhere, this world I was born into, and in the white darkness I see again the Cypress Hills as I left them behind, an immense herd of shot horses crumpled and heaped down dark on the horizon as I drove west, very fast into red sunset, towards the rising wall of storm clouds, into the cold, coming brilliance of prairie snow.
2
My Eyes Became My Voice
I’ve learned so much about myself, I can’t write it all, or fast enough, I can’t write it the way it should be said. It is sometimes easier to say thoughts than to write them because saying something is living it, feeling it, connecting with it again. No writing can capture that fully. In a way, speaking is alive, writing makes it become dead. What is written is not really a thought put to memory, as why remember what you can go back to and look up, if need be?
–Yvonne,
Journal
9, 20 February 1994
T HE FIRST TIME Yvonne Johnson and I meet to talk face to face is on Thursday, 10 June 1993, in a windowless room deep inside the limestone walls of the federal Prison for Women (P4W) in Kingston, Ontario. The Psychology Department’s small interview room is crammed with a sofa and chairs, a coffee table, and tall, locked cupboards; Yvonne’s counsellor and her Elizabeth Fry Society advisor have arranged that we meet here without direct supervision.
“We can talk here,” Yvonne says, and adds lightly, ironically, “I think … it’s not supposed to be bugged. At least there’s nothing posted ‘This Area Is Subject to Monitoring,’ like everywhere else.”
Her words are slightly blurred, drawn out but intense—is it her Montana drawl or the exact physical control of breathing she must maintain in order to speak, the lingering “s’s” she cannot say quite precisely because she was born with a bilateral cleft palate and lip?
When the barred door slid aside on the dark, sounding corridors and stairs of P4W and I saw her for the first time, it seemed that, despite our long telephone conversations, she was materializing out of prison blankness, that she was coming towards me contained in a kind of silence that would surely be indecipherable to me. But she strode without hesitation towards me in the small lobby between the electronic doors, a tall, slim woman with her face set in wary expectation, a bandanna holding back black hair hanging to her waist; dark skin; brown, almost black, eyes. And she reached her hand out; our right thumbs locked and our fingers brushed each other’s wrists, her right hand holding me at that slight distance of a careful, formal greeting. Then her left arm came up and hugged me almost without touching, a few pats of warmth on my back.
“Hi, I’m Yvonne,” she said, “but my family calls me Vonnie. You can call me anything …”—and she laughed a little—“except late for supper!”
Prison is a very tough place to meet; a woman and a man who’ve corresponded intensely but never seen each other, inside this stone place designed for lifetimes of confinement, where blurred shouts boom and echo along grey corridors and barred steel seems to be slamming continuously. Everything is so loud, controlled, balancing—no, teetering on an edge. No glance is merely a glance; it is a body search. The entire building seems to heave, Yvonne will tell me, breathing hard and blowing away the spirits of all the women it has sucked up.
But she makes camaraderie happen immediately between us, despite the female guard at the electronic doors peering at us, despite the two even larger guards who have brought her here from her cell; she starts it with her deliberate Montana drawl and flat, country joke.
Now we are alone, door closed, and we’re seated in easy chairs kitty-corner at the coffee table; she opens her bundle and lays out a small sweetgrass ceremony. When we and the room are cleansed, I give her my gift of cigarettes, she gives me a long braid of
The snow slams at me everywhere, this world I was born into, and in the white darkness I see again the Cypress Hills as I left them behind, an immense herd of shot horses crumpled and heaped down dark on the horizon as I drove west, very fast into red sunset, towards the rising wall of storm clouds, into the cold, coming brilliance of prairie snow.
2
My Eyes Became My Voice
I’ve learned so much about myself, I can’t write it all, or fast enough, I can’t write it the way it should be said. It is sometimes easier to say thoughts than to write them because saying something is living it, feeling it, connecting with it again. No writing can capture that fully. In a way, speaking is alive, writing makes it become dead. What is written is not really a thought put to memory, as why remember what you can go back to and look up, if need be?
–Yvonne,
Journal
9, 20 February 1994
T HE FIRST TIME Yvonne Johnson and I meet to talk face to face is on Thursday, 10 June 1993, in a windowless room deep inside the limestone walls of the federal Prison for Women (P4W) in Kingston, Ontario. The Psychology Department’s small interview room is crammed with a sofa and chairs, a coffee table, and tall, locked cupboards; Yvonne’s counsellor and her Elizabeth Fry Society advisor have arranged that we meet here without direct supervision.
“We can talk here,” Yvonne says, and adds lightly, ironically, “I think … it’s not supposed to be bugged. At least there’s nothing posted ‘This Area Is Subject to Monitoring,’ like everywhere else.”
Her words are slightly blurred, drawn out but intense—is it her Montana drawl or the exact physical control of breathing she must maintain in order to speak, the lingering “s’s” she cannot say quite precisely because she was born with a bilateral cleft palate and lip?
When the barred door slid aside on the dark, sounding corridors and stairs of P4W and I saw her for the first time, it seemed that, despite our long telephone conversations, she was materializing out of prison blankness, that she was coming towards me contained in a kind of silence that would surely be indecipherable to me. But she strode without hesitation towards me in the small lobby between the electronic doors, a tall, slim woman with her face set in wary expectation, a bandanna holding back black hair hanging to her waist; dark skin; brown, almost black, eyes. And she reached her hand out; our right thumbs locked and our fingers brushed each other’s wrists, her right hand holding me at that slight distance of a careful, formal greeting. Then her left arm came up and hugged me almost without touching, a few pats of warmth on my back.
“Hi, I’m Yvonne,” she said, “but my family calls me Vonnie. You can call me anything …”—and she laughed a little—“except late for supper!”
Prison is a very tough place to meet; a woman and a man who’ve corresponded intensely but never seen each other, inside this stone place designed for lifetimes of confinement, where blurred shouts boom and echo along grey corridors and barred steel seems to be slamming continuously. Everything is so loud, controlled, balancing—no, teetering on an edge. No glance is merely a glance; it is a body search. The entire building seems to heave, Yvonne will tell me, breathing hard and blowing away the spirits of all the women it has sucked up.
But she makes camaraderie happen immediately between us, despite the female guard at the electronic doors peering at us, despite the two even larger guards who have brought her here from her cell; she starts it with her deliberate Montana drawl and flat, country joke.
Now we are alone, door closed, and we’re seated in easy chairs kitty-corner at the coffee table; she opens her bundle and lays out a small sweetgrass ceremony. When we and the room are cleansed, I give her my gift of cigarettes, she gives me a long braid of
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