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David Christopher Lane, Ph.D, is a Professor of Philosophy at Mt. San Antonio College and Founder of the MSAC Philosophy Group. He is the author of several books, including The Sound Current Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and the graphic novel, The Cult of the Seven Sages, translated into Tamil (Kannadhasan Pathippagam, 2024). His website is neuralsurfer.com

The Imprisoned Librarian

David Lane

Remembering Steve Morrow and the Story he Inspired.

I cannot quite pinpoint when I first began corresponding with Steve Morrow of Texas. It was sometime in the late 1970s, though the exact date, like much in memory, slips into that twilight zone where fact and myth hold hands. What is clear is that Steve had a backstory worthy of Dostoevsky—or at least of some grim Texas ballad. He was sent off to one of those penitentiaries that only Texas could design, those infernal warehouses of the unwanted where punishment masquerades as justice and the state takes pride in its capacity for cruelty.

Yet amid the iron bars and dust-choked yards, Steve was an avid reader. In one of our early exchanges—on cassette tape, mind you; we traded those along with sprawling handwritten letters, as if each of us were monks scratching out epistles in some obscure monastery—Steve told me about the peculiar ritual of the weekly book toss. A guard, whose literary taste was as haphazard as his aim, would fling random volumes to the inmates. You never knew what you'd get: it might be a dusty grammar manual, a Harlequin romance, a forgotten diet fad, a turgid tome on philosophy, or—if fortune smiled—a classic.

Steve's genius lay not in complaining about the randomness, but in seizing upon it as inspiration. Why not give prisoners the dignity of choice? Why not provide books that actually nourished rather than merely occupied the mind? From that simple question the Prison Book Project was born. He sketched the idea while still incarcerated, and once released, it grew into something resembling a full-time vocation. For Steve, literature was not mere pastime; it was emancipation by other means.

But Steve was more than a bibliophile in chains. He was an initiate of the late Sant Kirpal Singh and practiced shabd yoga with the quiet intensity of a man who had wrestled with both silence and despair. Even behind bars, he tuned into that “inner sound,” a kind of metaphysical shortwave that prison walls could not jam. Later, he became a liaison, arranging initiations on behalf of Ajaib Singh and others, smuggling mysticism into the very corridors designed to extinguish the soul.

His generosity extended well beyond prison walls. When I lived in El Cerrito, Steve nudged me toward contacting Robert Leverant, the photographer-turned-writer who produced both a haunting study of images and an evocative biography of Kirpal Singh under his own imprint, books that bore the mark of a fiercely individual aesthetic. Through Steve's encouragement, I came to know Robert, and together we would drift from one Bay Area guru to another, swapping notes on saints and sages like curious anthropologists in search of the authentic.

Steve's passion for books never waned. At one point, I entrusted him with a rare first edition of Shiv Brat Lal's Light on Anand Yog. He devoured it and was so enraptured that he persuaded the Sant Bani Press in New Hampshire to bring it back into print. Later, he entered into correspondence with Baba Faqir Chand—just as Robert had—nudged once again by my insistent prodding. In those exchanges one can glimpse Steve's spiritual hunger: equal parts intellectual curiosity and heartfelt devotion.

To call Steve merely a friend would be a disservice. He was a benefactor of spirits, a companion to the lonely, and a bridge-builder among seekers. He carried a knack for spotting those who had slipped between society's cracks and offering them not pity, but presence. Even when the details of his life story blur or bend, the essence shines through: Steve was, above all, charitable in the deepest sense of the word—not only generous with material things, but expansive with time, attention, and soul.

The following story, while partly rooted in his biography, departs from the literal arc of Steve's life. Yet in every imaginative flourish and narrative deviation, it reveals the heart of who he truly was: a man who believed that even in the bleakest of places, the right book—or the right act of kindness—could open a window onto eternity.

EPISODE I: SPINE

They took me in the early morning, the hour librarians like because it's quiet and the dust has time to settle before the doors swing open. I remember that: the stillness. The house off Manor Road was small and old, its bones creaking in summer, the windows thin as bookpaper. I'd been up late the night before, pruning what I'd convinced myself were just “plants,” not a crime, certainly not a life. When the battering ram hit, a shelf of paperbacks slid forward, spines yawning, and rained down like a sudden, frantic confession.

“Stephen Morrow?” an officer called, his voice steady, bored. “Hands where we can see them!”

I did as I was told. My hands smelled like potting soil and lemon oil from polishing the old desk I'd found on the curb. Beyond the window, the slope down to Boggy Creek was pale with summer, the live oaks still, as if even the trees held their breath for the inventory of my mistakes.

Why I grew? People always think it's one thing—greed, recklessness, some outlaw streak. It wasn't. I worked at the Carver Branch of the Austin Public Library, a clerk with a name tag and a lanyard that smelled like the glue of old labels. I loved that place. Loved the morning ritual of unlocking the glass door and feeling the cool manuscript air slide out into the heat. Loved the way a child's face changed when her library card slid across the counter for the first time, that small square of plastic a passport to anywhere. Loved repairs: a touch of PVA glue along a cracked gutter, mending tape pressed like a bandage. A book is a body, you learn that early. It holds a spine for a reason.

But I was also the kind of reader whose appetite made rent feel insulting. Books taught me to want more than I could afford. I read Walden, where Thoreau pretends that living alone with a hoe is freedom. I read the Bhagavad Gita in a translation so clean it sliced me open, a battlefield inside me suddenly clear. I read books on the physiology of attention, on how jolts of novelty train the brain to crave, and thought I could train mine into not wanting. Then my mom's implants—the cheap ones—started failing. Her shoulder seized up in tiny clutches of pain, nothing epic, just constant. I started the grow for her medicine, for my friends too, and then because it worked. Because watching something sprout and leaf and reach is its own scripture. Because I am good with my hands and the world does not pay that gift much attention unless you are making something it wants.

A friend of a friend needed ounces, then pounds. I should have said no. I didn't. I was not a kingpin, not some shadow lord with a ledger. I was a librarian with a hobby that became a business that became a charge sheet. Excess heat from the lamps drew the energy company's notice. A neighbor smelled it in the hall. Maybe someone I trusted said something. There are so many ways a story breaks its spine.

At booking, they took my clothes and gave me state white. My body, which had contained me easily, suddenly felt like an unproofed manuscript with red slashes all over it—errors, corrections, stamps. I spent a week in Travis County jail, watching the sliver of sky carve its color into the day, before they sent me to the unit. The State of Texas said fifteen years. They said it in a tone a judge might use to order lunch, and why not? The law is a ledger, not a heart.

What I loved most about the library wasn't just the books. It was the ritual: opening and closing, stamps and dates, the thwock of the demagnetizer. Every job is a devotional if you give it your attention. Long before I was arrested, I'd been initiated into shabd yoga by a visiting teacher in a rented room at a church off South Lamar. I sat on a thin carpet and learned how to hold a mantra quietly under my breath, how to close my eyes and attend to the ringing electricity under all the other noise, the small bell that seems like it could be the universe clearing its throat. I wasn't good at it, not then. I fell asleep or followed my thoughts down the aisles, flitting from title to title like a clerk shelving in a rush. But I believed—no, I knew—that the inner sound was not a metaphor. It was a thing you could notice and follow home.

There were books that felt like stepping stones across a flood. The Upanishads and a beat-up copy of Be Here Now, yes, but also a textbook on Euclidean geometry that made thinking feel like stacking clear blocks, and a children's book called The Velveteen Rabbit that reminded me that becoming real hurts. Every book gave me a way to pay attention. Attention is a vote for what matters.

When the steel door closed on the first night in, the bunk above me trembling to the rhythm of another man's breath, I felt something crack. It was not my heart. It was the belief that my life would go more or less as I'd plotted it, that a good man with quiet habits could steer himself past the reefs. Prison felt like an erratum slipped into the middle of my book. “The author regrets the following errors.”

I slept anyway. It is one of the few strengths of the human animal. We can sleep next to anything—fear, regret, another man's sadness—and the body will heal as best it can. In the morning, I woke to a noise like a cart rolling over tile.

“Books,” a voice called, bored. “Books, fools. Who wants 'em?”

EPISODE II: MARGINS

The guard's name was McKinney, though no one said it to his face. He wore his uniform like it was on loan, which it was, from the state, but he also wore his boredom like a badge he'd earned. Every Thursday, he pushed a cart down our tier, a rattling stack of spines and dust jackets and paperbacks swollen with damp. He didn't stop at every cell. He didn't ask. He'd pitch one, a quick bored throw, and you could catch it or it would clatter and slide and you'd fish it up from under the bunk. No selections. No swaps. You got what you got.

“Yo, officer, lemme pick,” a guy named Tino said one morning, his hair shaved so close his skull shone.

“Lemme win Powerball while we at it,” McKinney said, and tossed him Charlotte's Web. We laughed, because he'd been bragging about plans for his girl when he got out, and Tino took it, shrugged. “I can read to my inner child,” he said, and we laughed again, softer.

The first book McKinney threw me was Euclid's Elements, Book I through IV, Dover edition, paper dry as toast, margins scribbled with pencil proofs. It hit my palm and I felt something like home. I'd taught myself the propositions years ago, for fun. That's who I am: the kind of man who teaches himself proofs the way other men learn to throw a curveball. I lay on my bunk and followed the steps with a fingertip, the geometry both austere and generous: given these, one can find those. The logic soothed me, the way a good index soothes: you can find what you need if you know the word for it.

“Whatchu got?” my celly asked. His name was Ray. He had a rattlesnake tattooed around his forearm, its mouth open over the crook of his elbow, permanent attempt at a bite.

“Triangles,” I said. “Triangles and lines.”

“Like gang signs,” he said. “But nerdy.”

I read all day, the way a pinned animal licks its paw: not because it solves anything, but because it gives the body a task. I read the margin notes, too, the crumb-trail of some other man's mind, little proofs about what can be done given this much space, this much constraint. Prison is a geometry problem, I came to believe. Given two fixed points—here and now—construct a life.

The next week, McKinney tossed me a children's book, Blueberries for Sal, the corners of the pages rounded by five-year-old hands somewhere. I read it anyway, watched Sal drop her blueberries one by one into a tin pail, kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk, the sound of attention given weight. It made me think of shelving picture-books at Carver, the hum of the air system, the way the evening sun fell in bars across the little table where kids colored. A memory can pick a lock, you learn that too.

The prison yard was an anvil of heat. August made the concrete throw back the sky. I walked the track with Ray, counting laps. “Fifteen years?” he said when he finally asked. We didn't pry at first; it's a quiet etiquette, like not reading someone else's mail.

“Growing,” I said.

He nodded. “My cousin got eight just for holding it. Texas don't play.” He spit, a neat arc that evaporated before it landed. “You regret it?”

“I regret being stupid,” I said.

He nodded again. “Different from regret for the plant, huh?”

“Yeah.”

He looked at me sideways. “I could tell you was a book dude. The way you look at things. My uncle used to say I got eyes like a stickup. You got eyes like a�a quiet room.”

“Like a library,” I said, and we both smiled, because we knew I was a little ridiculous, and also we knew men become what they love if given enough time.

Sometimes the books McKinney threw were prison-predictable: Tom Clancy, Stephen King, a paperback of The Art of War with a shiv-mark in the back. Sometimes they were odd: a manual for small-engine repair from 1979; a history of the Comanches that read like galloping; a poetry collection by Mary Oliver, whose gentleness felt like a scandal. I read all of it. I made a meal out of whatever landed in my cell. The act of reading, more than the content, was what I craved. Pages slow you to a human pace.

But boredom is cunning. It learns your tricks and walks past them to tap you on the shoulder. Days extended and folded and extended again like pages printed on both sides, and I wondered what to do with myself besides read and sweat and count. At mail call, I got a postcard from my mother, yellow with sunflowers, her cursive small and painful: I am okay. I miss you. I forgive you. Love, Mom. That “I forgive you” turned in my chest like a key in a lock I didn't know I'd been wearing. Forgiveness does not erase the sentence, but it can soften the bed.

That night, Ray asked, “What you be muttering sometimes?” He'd seen my lips move in the top bunk, the mantra that shabd yoga gave like a gentle rope to hold onto in a flooded river.

“Just a prayer,” I said. “Words to keep my head where my body is.”

“You can pray in here,” he said, skeptical. “Where God at in here?”

“Wherever we are,” I said.

He snorted, not mocking, exactly. “Then he doing time like us.”

“Maybe he's the time,” I said, and we both let that hang between us like a paper lantern, too delicate to poke.

They counted us again, the end of day's ritual. Count, lights, the endless sentence of a sentence. I lay there, fingers over my eyes, noticing the small sound that lives under noise. I'd found it sometimes in Austin, sitting on my carpet, the AC humming, my landlord's old fridge coughing to life. Here, in this concrete box, with steel singing to itself and men snoring and farting and whispering both threats and tenderness, I found it easier. The inner bell doesn't mind company.

I fell asleep, holding the rope of the mantra like a child's hand in a crowd.

EPISODE III: ERRATA

One of the older men on our tier, they called him Pops, had a scar like a river drawn from the corner of his mouth to his jaw. He'd been in and out longer than I'd been alive. He read westerns with covers so lurid you could almost hear the gunshots. He finished one and wrote in pencil on the first page: “Good. Horses talk like men.” He'd then hand it off, his hand cracked with kitchen work.

“Where you get all these?” I asked McKinney once, when the cart stopped near our cell because a wheel had jammed.

“People mail 'em,” he said. “And the chapel tosses what nobody wants. And my brother's wife cleans houses in Westlake, so she brings me a box sometimes. Rich kids assign a book, rich kids don't read it, rich kids throw it away. I am the river Styx for paper, Morrow. I ferry souls.”

“You could ask us what we want,” I said, too quick.

He fixed me with a look that was not unkind, exactly, but it had the hard glint of a fact. “Want is above my pay grade.”

After he trundled on, Ray said, “He ain't wrong.”

“I know,” I said. “But it wouldn't be impossible, would it? To ask.”

“Ask who? Him? The warden? God?” He grinned. “You already ask God.”

“Publishers,” I said, the word lighting a corner of my mind I hadn't visited since the day of the battering ram. “Libraries. People who've got books stacked in garages. Interlibrary loan,” I said, and the phrase itself felt like a bridge, one I'd crossed a thousand times in Austin, form filled, stamp smacked down, an obscure volume shuttling branch to branch. “What if I wrote?”

Ray shrugged. “You like writing letters. Better than writing kites to laundry about why they lost your socks again.”

I wrote. That night I sat at the tiny metal desk bolted to the wall and wrote letters that felt like shelving a new section inside my chest.

Dear Publisher, I wrote. You don't know me. I'm Steve Morrow, inmate #____, currently at a state unit in Texas. Before this, I was a library clerk at the Carver Branch in Austin. I loved books before I knew better words for gratitude. We receive a weekly cart, and the selection is as random as weather. I'm writing to ask: would you be willing to donate books appropriate for adults who are hungry to read? They must be new, sent from the publisher or retailer directly, per policy. If you can help, please address them to�

I wrote to university presses, to the big names and the small houses that print poetry like a promise. I wrote to BookPeople, the downtown store where I used to linger on my off mornings. I wrote to Mrs. Escamilla, my former branch manager, whose earrings always matched her lipstick and whose laugh in staff meetings made the fluorescent light feel less cruel. I wrote to the chaplain, too, an I-60 request, a formal petition to the warden, with the language I'd learned from forms: This will aid rehabilitation. This will occupy minds. This will reduce disciplinary incidents. This will not cost the state a dime.

Ray read over my shoulder and whistled. “You writing Scripture,” he said. “Like Paul's letters from prison.”

“Less holy,” I said.

“Less, but maybe not none,” he said, and I heard in his voice the thing men seldom say outright: I believe in you.

Then there was the waiting, which in prison is the bulk of any plan. Days stacked up like remaindered hardcovers, their edges marked with black felt-tip to obscure the remainder mark. I kept reading what came. A battered Rumi with someone's sticky thumbprints in the margins; an out-of-date paleontology text with plates of bones that made me feel like time is the best archivist; a romance novel with a cowboy on the cover and writing inside so sincere it bruised me. Men laughed when they saw me with that last one. “Steve reading love in here,” they said, and I held the book up and said, “It's what we got.”

Two weeks later, at mail call, my name came up so many times it started to sound like a story being told. Packages. One from a university press in Illinois: a box of slim poetry titles, gray covers with small photos of light on walls. “They said a professor took up a collection,” the officer announced like she couldn't help herself; kindness had snuck into her voice and she shook it off. One from a Texas nonprofit that put brand-new paperbacks into prisons, spines uncracked, that new-book smell like a promise from a different life. One from BookPeople, a stack of remaindered trade paperbacks—Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, Luis Alberto Urrea. One from a yoga studio in South Austin, all books on breathing and posture and the way attention can be placed like a hand on a shoulder.

“Damn, librarian,” Ray said, helping me carry the boxes like we were smuggling treasure. “You did a heist.”

We brought the boxes to the chapel because the chaplain had said we could. He was a small man with a careful mustache named Reverend Ellis, who had eyes like an old dog—tired, but not unhopeful.

“You really did it,” he said, like it surprised him not in a bad way. “You got the wrong man a job—me.” He smiled. “Let's make a sign-up sheet.”

We started a reading group that week. We posted a list on the bulletin board outside the chow hall: Reading Circle. Thursday afternoons. All are welcome. Titles chosen by draw. The first meeting drew fifteen guys, then twenty-five. Pops brought his western and tried to argue for it as literature. A kid barely eighteen brought a graphic novel and sat with it upright in his lap like it was both shield and invitation. We passed the books around, each man choosing from the boxes, and I could feel something shift. Want, which had always been above McKinney's pay grade, became something we could talk about without it burning us.

McKinney showed up and leaned in the doorway. “You're making me obsolete, Morrow,” he said. He didn't sound mad. “A man needs a cart to push.”

“You can push this one,” I said.

He snorted. “I don't do God.”

“This isn't God,” I said. “It's books.”

“Same thing to some folks,” he said, and he wasn't wrong.

After the meeting, a man named Marcus pulled me aside. He was big, the kind of big that made other big men wary, his forearms tattooed with names and dates like a calendar of a life that went sideways. “You wrote those letters,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“I ain't wrote a letter in ten years,” he said. “Help me write one to my daughter.”

We sat at the chapel's little table and we wrote. He told me what to say and I wrote it in his voice because that's part of reading too: learning the shape of another man's mouth when it makes the words. When he signed his name, his hand shook, just a little, and then it steadied.

The following Thursday, we met again. Rumi on one bench. A book on Tai Chi on another. Euclid, which I'd kept, on my lap like an anchor. We read and then we talked, the way people do when given the slight safety of a text as a middleman. “I don't get this,” Tino said, holding up a poem. “This is like trying to read smoke.”

“Sometimes smoke is the point,” I said. “Sometimes seeing something you can't hold is its own kind of holding.”

“I like what it does in my head,” he said, surprised.

“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”

EPISODE IV: INTERLIBRARY LOAN

If you want to keep anything in prison—shoes, sanity, a small library—you have to secure allies. The chaplain was one. The officer in the mailroom was another; she read romance novels and trusted me because I didn't laugh at her when she admitted it. “The scariest thing,” she said once, “is when men think they know what other people should be ashamed of.”

McKinney, oddly, became an ally, too. He had that bored shell, but he also had a brother recently out who'd come home shaky and quiet. “He sits on the porch and watches cars,” he told me one afternoon when the chapel was empty. “Like maybe a right car will come and something inside him will unknot.”

“Sometimes you need someone to show you how to unknot,” I said.

“That you?” he said, a little mocking but not much.

“I don't know,” I said. “I'm trying to be that for myself.”

The warden gave formal permission to accept certain donations. He liked numbers, so I gave him numbers: how many men attended; how many books circulated; how many fights had been avoided during reading hours; how many thank-you letters we'd sent out in response to boxes received. When he smiled, it was like a stamp in the corner of a page. Approved.

Pops donated a bookplate: a scribble on an index card that said, in block letters, This Book Belongs to the Men of H-Block. We ran with it. Every book got stamped with a variation: Belongs to the men; belongs to the quiet hour; belongs to the mind that opens it. We wrote to donors and included those bookplate photos, and more boxes came. It wasn't perfect. Sometimes the wrong things arrived—diet manuals, a self-help book so scolding we hid it on a high shelf, Bibles in the hundred when we needed just a few. We gave extras to the chapel. We learned to ask more clearly. People want to give. If you make it easy for them to do the right thing, many will.

“Group tonight?” Ray asked one Thursday.

“Yeah. You coming?”

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Because?”

He rolled his shoulder where the rattlesnake's fangs were permanently arrested. “I don't like sitting still in a group. Makes me�antsy.”

“I get that,” I said. “But you can leave any time.”

He nodded, not convinced.

We'd slipped in a new component: an hour after the reading circle ended, I offered a session on simple practices. I told them I wasn't a teacher, just a man with a way that had helped him. I talked about breath, not as a mystical thing but as a fact. I talked about attention, the way it's like a skittish dog that will eventually sit if you stop yelling at it. I talked about the inner sound, which I called the ringing—too sectarian a word would make the chaplain nervous, too specific a claim would make men wary.

Marcus came. Tino came. Pops came and snored for five minutes and then woke up like he'd apologized to someone in a dream. We sat on the chapel floor and I said: put your attention here, just above where your eyes would meet if they could turn around. Repeat something you love in your head. Wait. Don't be mad when it doesn't work. It's not a vending machine.

The first time we did it, the room felt like a library at closing. Everyone is quieter than they need to be because quiet is the point. Afterward, a man I didn't know well, with a scar that looked like an erased word on his cheek, said, “I thought I heard something. Like a wire. I sat up to listen and it was gone.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It's shy.”

“What's the point?” he said.

“The point is how you feel when you stop,” I said. “Take that to the yard, to chow, to when someone bumps you on purpose.”

He looked at me and then away. “I might come back,” he said.

The hard part wasn't the practice. The hard part was being seen practicing. Factions rule a unit like species rule a wilderness: invisible lines, silent compacts. Men asked me if this was a Christian thing, a Muslim thing, a Buddhist thing. I said it was an attention thing. The chaplain, cautious, said, “Keep it open. Keep it voluntary. Keep it therapeutic.” I kept it exactly that.

“Once you sit, it's like you got a little bench in your head,” Marcus said one day in chow, stirring mashed potatoes that contained the nutritional idea of butter. “Like a park bench nobody else can sit on 'less you say so.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I like that.”

After group one night, Marcus lingered. “You said you had some initiation thing, right? Back before. You got a teacher?”

“I do,” I said. “I write to him. He writes back to anyone who writes. Sometimes a representative visits prisons. Sometimes.”

“You think—”

“I can ask,” I said.

He nodded, jaw tight in the way men's jaws get when hope is too big to be safe. “Ask, then.”

I asked. I wrote a letter that detailed our practice, our permission, the fact that we were not a cult, that we were reading widely, that our favorite book at the moment was a tattered Tao Te Ching that had changed Pops' whole posture. I explained the rules of the unit and the stubborn dignity of the chaplain and the unpredictable kindness of Officer McKinney, and I asked: would a representative consider visiting? If they said no, nothing changed. If yes, a door might open further than any of us had expected.

The reply took a month. In prison time, a month is both a blink and a season. When it came, the envelope was thin and plain. Inside, a letter written in the neutral calm of a person who's lived with a lot of yearning: We will send someone. Please coordinate with your chaplain.

Reverend Ellis took off his glasses and wiped them with a corner of his shirt. “Is this safe?” he asked finally, which meant: Is this safe for my job, my unit, my men?

“I think so,” I said.

“This is you,” he said, with a small smile. “I've been doing this awhile, and I know the look. This is your book.”

EPISODE V: QUIET HOURS

The representative came in November, when the air in the yard felt briefly like the inside of a church: cooler, blue, something like hush. The oaks browned and held their leaves, stubborn. The chaplain's office, which usually smelled like coffee and carpet cleaner, smelled instead like incense from the interfaith shelf and pencil shavings from sacrament paperwork.

He was an older man with a gentle Texas drawl and a wrist wrapped in a woven bracelet. He wore no clerical badge, just clothes that wanted to pass unremarked. “Call me Dan,” he said. “Everybody does.”

We sat in a small circle: me, Marcus, two others who'd stuck with the practice long enough to form a little habit around it—Tino and a man named Arif who'd come because the word “sound” made him think of the call to prayer. Dan talked less than I expected. He asked how we practiced. He asked what got in our way. He asked what had helped us not hit back when hit, what had helped us sit five minutes longer than our pride wanted. Then he said, “I can share a mantra, a way to hold your attention when it wants to run. If I do, it's not a toy. It's a tool. It'll work if you work.”

He didn't say the name of the teacher he represented, not the way preachers say a name to light a crowd on fire. He didn't promise anything but practice and the practice he described was not magic. It was repetition. It was listening. It was patience. It was the willingness to attend to something so quiet that you had to quiet down to meet it.

We sat together. He gave us phrases. He gave us a way to imagine our attention not as a spotlight or a hawk but as a book we could open to the right page if we kept the place. We didn't levitate. No trumpets blew. But afterward, the room felt washed. I don't know what else to call it. Not purer. Just more itself.

“Thank you,” Marcus said to Dan, not a big man's thank you, not grudging. An ordinary thank you that contained the surprise of someone who recognizes their own voice.

Afterward, the repercussions were small in the way a seed is small. Marcus stopped bragging quite as loud in the dayroom; his jokes got subtler, which made them funnier. Tino, who could go from calm to coiled in a second if someone brushed him wrong, learned to hold himself still a heartbeat longer. Arif laughed more, for reasons I could not trace but did not need to.

For me, the practice settled into a daily rite like I'd had back at Carver: open, stamp, shelve, breathe. I woke before count and sat on the edge of my bunk, the concrete cool under my feet, and watched for the ringing. It's not always there. Or it is and I'm not. On the days I found it, count went easier, chow line felt like a slow river instead of a clogged drain, the yard like a radio station I could tune to a frequency I could live with. On the days I didn't, I still left the bench in my head where I could find it when the day tried to move me like a piece on a board.

“Does it make you weak?” Ray asked me one evening, eyes on the TV where a football game poured men across a field like punctuation.

“What?”

“Sitting. Not hitting back. In here, you look weak, they crowd you.”

“Sometimes you gotta look weak to be strong,” I said, surprising myself with how much like a brochure it sounded.

He snorted. “Now you doing posters.”

“I mean—” I tried again. “If I'm acting to prove something to someone else, I'm not free. If I'm acting because it's the right thing given what I want to be, that's different.”

He stared at the TV and then at me. “You too calm,” he said, which wasn't a criticism, just a diagnosis.

“You could come,” I said. “To the group.”

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

Men drifted in and out like patrons at a library who want to ask a question but pretend they're just browsing. “Hey, librarian,” they'd say, peering at the book list, “you got any war stuff?” “You got any of them Zen books?” “You got that one with the guy who turns into a roach?” (We did.) McKinney stopped by and tried to act like he was there to turn off the lights. “You got Sudoku?” he asked. We gave him a puzzle book, and he looked almost shy.

When fights broke out, which they will in a place where men are compressed like atoms, I saw something I didn't expect. A handful of the men who'd been sitting often stepped in earlier—not to break it up, not to play hero—but to stand so near the heat of it that it edged back toward control. It wasn't a technique we taught, nothing you could write into a warden's handout. It was a way a body holds itself when inside is steadier than out.

We had bad days too. A book went missing and showed up two tiers over with its cover torn like a mouth. A CO decided we were “meditation weirdos” and gave us grief in the line for the chapel. “You wanna sit in quiet?” he said. “Go to your cell.” The chaplain wore that thin smile people wear when they intend to survive their job. “Keep it small,” he told me. “Keep it faithful.”

Marcus laughed at the word “faithful.” He said, “We're dogs now.”

“Better than coyotes,” I said.

One afternoon, after a group, McKinney lingered. “My brother,” he said, as if the two words were a test he was giving me.

“Yeah?”

“He might sit with you sometime. If he's sober enough to sign the list.” He scratched his jaw. “You think it makes a difference? Really?”

“I think it makes a difference,” I said. “So far as a book can make a difference. So far as a breath can. Which is to say—some. Not all.”

“Not all,” he repeated. “That's the part people never like.”

“Me neither,” I said.

He nodded. “Okay.”

He looked toward the chapel's thin windows where the oaks moved a little in a wind no one down on the ground felt. “You shoulda worked at BookPeople or something,” he said. “Oh wait, you did.”

“I worked at the library,” I said.

“Same thing, better,” he said, and I didn't argue.

EPISODE VI: COLOPHON

Books have their colophons, their little statements at the back about how they were made: the typeface, the paper, the press. A life ought to have one too, I think—a quiet note at the end that says: set in the font of your mother's spare love and your own dumb luck, printed on days thinned by regret, bound by the hands of men you sat with on the floor and asked to try again.

Year five, I woke up on my bunk and realized I had gone three weeks without a fight, two months without raising my voice, an hour without checking the clock. Time hadn't gotten kinder, but I had stopped arguing with it. I wrote to my mother every Sunday. She wrote back every third week with an update on her shoulder and the garden she'd begun in white plastic buckets that had once held joint compound. Her tomatoes were never more than a handful at a time, but she photographed each one like it was an event. Books arrived, more irregularly now that the novelty of giving had faded, but steady enough to keep us reading. We learned how to triage. We learned to make lists like collection development librarians do: more memoirs, fewer diet books; more poetry, fewer quick-fix business titles. We learned to say thank you in ways that made donors feel like they were part of something instead of tossing coins over a wall.

A state auditor came through and asked for numbers. The chaplain handed him a printout and then handed it to me to double-check because he trusted numbers less than men. I ran my finger down the columns: 276 books circulated this quarter. 41 distinct participants. 17 in the meditation hour three times a week. 3 disciplinary incidents reduced to warnings after a reading circle. These are not miracles. They are not redemption. They are the sort of small math that allows a human to keep going.

I sometimes dream of the Carver Branch. In the dream, the light comes in at five o'clock and lays itself down on the tables, and I am at the repair desk, brush in hand, touching glue to a split case. A child laughs because something in a book is funnier when it's read out loud. Mrs. Escamilla says my name and I turn and the book in my hand becomes the one I'm reading now, which is always the same one: the one called This Day.

One night, Ray climbed down from his bunk and stood by the door of our cell, hands in his pockets like a boy outside a store he's not sure he's welcome in. “I'll come,” he said.

“Come where?”

“To your thing,” he said, rolling his eyes so I wouldn't mistake it for a plea. “You got room for one more bench?”

“Always,” I said.

He sat like he was on watch. He didn't close his eyes for five minutes, then he did, then he opened them and stared at his hands like they were new. Afterward, he didn't talk about it. Not for days. Then at chow he said, ultra-casual, “You ever hear something that sounds like—like bugs? But nice?”

“Crickets,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” he said, and smiled to himself, small and private.

I told Dan, when he wrote to ask how we were doing. He wrote back, “Crickets count.” I showed Ray. He huffed a laugh and ate his potatoes and didn't say more. He didn't need to.

Once, years in, I got a package I didn't expect. It was from a woman I'd never met. Inside was a slim book, hand-bound, a chapbook with rough edges. The title was The Sound the Book Makes When You Close It. She'd dedicated it to “the men of H-Block,” and the first poem was about a librarian who grew apples on a windowsill because he wasn't allowed to plant trees. I read it to the group, and we all laughed at the parts where we recognized our own silly selves, and then we were quiet for the last lines, which were too true to clap for. Pops wiped his eyes with his sleeve and said, “Damn, she roasting us gently.”

There were days when it didn't work. When the yard turned into a sun-anvil and our thoughts melted into something mean, when a book we'd waited for got sent back at the gate for being hardcover, when a man we loved was transferred without warning and our little constellation lost a star. There were days when I hated the bench in my head because sitting on it made me feel how much I didn't want to be here. There were days when men forgot what they'd promised themselves on the chapel floor and took a swing that added weeks to their time. There were days I remembered the plants in the room off Manor Road and thought: if I had said no then, if I had been stronger, this book would not contain so many blank pages.

But most days, I got to be two things at once: an inmate and a clerk. I kept a ledger. I stamped due dates. I repaired spines with tape the mailroom let us order, and I showed men how to fold a tear back on itself and press a patch so neat you'd never know there had been a rip. They taught me things too: how to fight without touching, which is mostly about walking away before you need to go; how to tell a joke with your face in a yard where laughing too loud makes you a target; how to take care of someone without making them feel like they're being looked after.

On a Thursday much like any other, McKinney pushed his cart down the tier. It still rattled. He still tossed. But there was less demand for it now; more men came to the chapel, more men put their names on our list. He stopped at our cell and didn't throw. He handed me a book through the slot.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You'll see,” he said.

It was Walden, the same edition I'd read in college, its cover blue and plain, the pages soft with other people's fingers. I opened it expecting the anger I used to have for Thoreau, his easy sermonizing from the edge of town and his mother doing his laundry. Instead, I read it and felt a different thing: a man trying to stare down want with attention. He failed. Everyone fails. But in the trying, he wrote a map. Maps don't tell you where you are. They tell you how to get somewhere if you know where you want to go.

That night at group, I told the men a story I didn't know I'd tell: how I'd sat in a church off South Lamar and been given a simple practice by a serious man and how I'd ignored it for days and then tried it and then ignored it and then, years later, on the edge of a bunk in a concrete box, it had become the one thing that made other things possible. “I am not a teacher,” I said. “I am a clerk. I stamp and shelve. I can show you where things are and tell you what I loved and what I couldn't get through and what made me feel like I had a chance. If there is a teacher, he is inside you, and he's not stingy.”

Marcus, who had started to keep a little notebook where he wrote things down he wanted to remember—quotes, addresses, the names of birds he'd seen from the yard—wrote that down. “He ain't stingy,” he said, then laughed. “Neither are you.”

I'm five years into fifteen as I tell you this. I don't know what the remaining ten contain. Maybe parole; maybe not. Maybe my mother's shoulder will hold; maybe it won't. Maybe a book will arrive tomorrow that will make all the other books look like a ladder I won't need anymore. Maybe I will sit and hear crickets; maybe I will sit and hear nothing and learn to be okay with that.

What I know is that each Thursday, when McKinney's cart rattles, I listen for the tiny bell under the noise. If a book thumps through the slot, I catch it. If I miss and it falls, I pick it up and dust it off and check it in. I sign my name. I stamp the date. I turn to the first page, and I begin.