America's Lost Children
by Jarvis Masters
P.O. Box C-35169, 3-AC-56, Death Row, San Quentin, CA 94974
I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME my eyes witnessed the scars on
the bodies of almost every one of my fellow prisoners. I was outside on
a maximum custody exercise yard. I stood along a fence, praising the air
that the yard gave to my lungs that my prison cell didn't. I wasn't in a
rush to pick up a basketball or do anything. I just stood in my own silence.
I looked at the other prisoners on the yard playing basketball, handball,
showering and talking to one another. I saw the inmates I felt closest to,
John and Pete and David, lifting weights in one corner of the yard.
I noticed the unbelievable similarity of the whip-like scars on their bare
skin, shining with sweat from pumping iron in the hot sun.
A deep sense of sadness came over me as I watched these strong and powerful
men lift hundreds of pounds of weights over their heads. I looked around
the yard to see if other prisoners besides John, Pete, and David had the
same types of scars. Sadly enough, they did! There were men on the handball
and basketball courts, in the shower, and elsewhere that had whip marks
and deep gashes all over their bodies. It shocked me silent to look behind
their legs, on their backs, all over their ribs and see the gruesome discovery
of this entire yard of men with evidence of the violence in our lives.
Here, hidden, were America's lost children-surviving in rage and in refuge
from society. Most of us were born in the fifties and sixties when there
were few laws protecting us from the child abuse that victimized us.
Then, as sudden as a shock, a terrible sense of sadness come over me. I
thought of my mother, who had died within that year. "Wow," I
thought, "I still wish I had been there when she died." Suddenly,
all the acts of abuse that had taken place in my childhood just came to
the surface. I remembered being beaten and whipped by my stepfather and
all the silent and lonely nights and days of abandonment by my mother, who
was a heroin addict.
Only recently, in the '80s, has this society come to know and realize with
some understanding the alarming rate of child abuse in this country.
Yet, what is lost and given up on by society are the men who walk the prison
exercise yards throughout the country for crimes often related to the horrible
violence done to them as children. No such connection is seen by either
the adult in prison who was abused as a child or by American society at
large.
An inmate will not use the term "child abuse" as his own. But
because our histories were so connected, it was as if we had all had the
same parents. I made up my mind that sometime that day, I would bring John
and Pete and David together. I wanted to talk about the scars I had noticed
and see if I could open them up to think about their abuse as children.
I was a trusted comrade to most of these men and to a few of them I was
their only family. But even so, to dare myself to go into their remembered
pain and to convince them that they, like me, had been physically abused
by our parents was something out of the ordinary for me.
"Am I crazy?" I wondered, to have this idea of wanting to open
up these men who probably had never spoken openly of their horrible experiences
of child abuse. "None of these men will ever say that their parents
have physically abused them," I thought. They looked hardened to the
core as they stood around a weight lifting bench, proud of their bodies
and the images they projected standing there.
It occurred to me, as I was approaching them, that such a posture of pride
symbolized the battle wounds that they had "made their bones"
with. This is prison talk for "prove your manhood." Yet my own
denials had at one time been similar in kind, when I had been hardened and
never wanted to see my parents as the cause and source of the mental and
physical scars I wore. The difficulty in speaking with these men would be
to somehow interpret the usual prison language of all of us in sharing our
histories. Shucking and jiving is the usual way to talk to cover up sensitive
matters with prison humor.
This was how John, a 28-year-old, bulky, 6'3" tall man serving 25-to-life
for murder, started when I asked him, while others listened, about the scars
on his face. He said. "These scars came from kicking ass and in the
process getting my ass kicked, which was rare and few. My father taught
me how to fight when I was maybe five or six, and I had to learn from him
beating on me."
John explained that his father had loved him enough to have taught him how
to fight when he was only five years old. In a sense, he said, he grew up
with a loving fear of his father. He pointed out to me a very noticeable
and nasty scar on his upper shoulder. He laughingly went on to say that
his father had hit him with a steel rod when John had tried to protect his
mother form being beaten by his father.
Most of us had seen this scar but never had the nerve to ask about it. As
we stared, looking at the imprinted gash, John seemed to feel ashamed. Avoiding
me with his eyes, he mumbled a few words before he went on to show us many
other scars. I noticed that John had total recall of the smallest details
surrounding these violent events. I realized, as I should have known, that
these experiences in John's childhood haunted him, as many abuse memories
do. His detailed accounts somehow told us what he must have really suffered
as a child.
Yet John, as he went on explaining to us, became very rational in his words.
He had spent more than half his life in one institutional setting or another,
and as a result he projected a very cold and fearsome, even boastful smile
on his face. None of what John was sharing did he want us to see, even remotely,
as child abuse. He tried with smiles, jokes and jive-talk to hide what he
himself was feeling in his heart. To him, none of what he had been through
was child abuse. And I was afraid to say to him that he was wrong. This
was especially so when he showed us all a gash on his back that was hidden
by a tattoo of a dragon. It was a very ugly scar-like I imagined those of
a slave who had been whipped.
As John directed me closer to see it, he said, "Rub your finger down
the dragon's spine." As I did so, I felt a thick tight string that
moved nastily like a worm beneath the layer of his skin.
"Damn, John, what in the hell happened to you?" I asked.
There was something in how I questioned him that made John laugh and the
others joined in with him. For that moment, I didn't understand the humor
of something so terrible. I forced myself to smile just the same to avoid
the sad stare that would have appeared on my face, John explained that when
he was nine or ten, his father chased him with a cord. John ran and tried
to hide under a bed. He grabbed the springs under the bed and held on as
his father pulled him by the legs and hit his back repeatedly with the cord
until he fell unconscious and woke later with a very deep flesh wound. John,
again with a cold smile on his face. admitted jokingly that that was the
last time he ever ran from his father.
I first met John when we were both in youth homes in Southern California.
We were only eleven years old. Throughout the years we traveled together
through the juvenile system until the penitentiary became our final stop.
David and Pete told very similar stories of beatings which occurred at early
ages. All of these stories of how they had been abused as children spoke
of a life that had a very telling side of how we all came to be in one of
the worst prisons in the country. These were all stories that I thought
society could learn a great deal from. It scares me to realize that most
prisoners will eventually re-enter society and father children and repeat
on their own children what has happened to them. With no programs in most
prisons that speak to childhood abuse, a high percentage of the prisoners
abused as children will ultimately do this. Thus the cycle of abuse and
crime will continue.
Not all the scars I saw on men were inflicted in a home setting of abusive
parents. Some of them had been put on in gruesome institutions that further
embedded our upbringing, callously embittering our hearts.
I believe that institutionalization is a kind of refuge for many of the
men from the devastation of child abuse in their lives. Most prisoners who
were abused as children were taken out of the custody of their natural parents
at very early ages. The authority figures placed them in foster homes, youth
homes or juvenile halls to protect the children from further abuses. These
settings in most cases were adopted by the children, becoming their protective
shield that kept them safe. For most prisoners abused as children, prisons
are a continuation of this same process of living in a state of painful
refuge.
This was the case with many men in prison that I have spoken with over a
number of years. This was equally my own attitude that I unconsciously carried
during my more than 15 years of being institutionalized.
Not until I read a series of books on adults who had been abused as children
and about healing the shame that binds persons to their pasts, did I truly
become committed to the self-examination of my own childhood abuse. I began
to unfold and unravel all the hidden causes behind why I just expected to
go from one youth institution to the next. I never really tried to stay
out of these places and neither did my friends.
What I heard from these men on the exercise yard that day showed me how
each of them deeply sought refuge in their denial. They could not allow
themselves to openly admit the hidden truth of what they felt of the pain
and hurt they've lived with. As for me, I spoke to them very openly about
my parents physically and mentally abusing me. I told how I had been neglected
and abandoned by them when I was only five years old. I shared some of the
horrors of my -past, telling how my mother had left me and my sisters alone
for days with our newborn twin brother and sister when I was only four years
old. The baby boy died from a crib death which I always believed was my
own fault, since I had been made responsible for him. I spoke to them of
the pain and hurt that I carried through more than a dozen institutions
I had been in. And I told how it was that all of these events ultimately
entrapped me in a cycle of lashing out against everything. I never wanted
to look inward to face the fact that I was hurting, crying out for help
long after the abuse, neglect and abandonment by my parents.
These men were not able to tell, as I had, of their mothers and fathers
physically and mentally abusing them. To hear me face something like that
openly seemed to sadden them. I think they saw that I was able to accept
a truth from my heart they could not. Hearing me express my own pain and
hurt, they all seemed to avoid linking my experiences with theirs. It was
as if I had suffered more than they. That wasn't true. What they heard was
the voice of their own unspoken stories. This term "abuse" spoke
of a hidden truth: we had all been victims of child abuse. This was something
that hurt them to agree with and sadly, they never did.
Instead, we all just fell silent around the weight-lifting bench as each
one of us squatted down and thought. We all stared across the yard at the
other men exercising. The feeling I had was that we were all looking and
seeing something that was clear and sad to us all. John and I spoke again
privately later that day, walking together along the fence. Surprisingly
he said to me. "You know something, the day I got used to getting beaten
up by my father and by counselors in all those group homes was the day that
I knew nothing would ever hurt me again. Everything that I thought could
hurt me, I saw as a game. I had nothing to lose and just about everything
to gain. A prison cell to me is something that will always be here for me."
I looked at John as he said all this to me and I didn't know what to say.
Then it occurred to me that John was speaking for most of the men I had
met in prison. Secretly we all like it here. This place welcomes a man who
is full of rage and violence. Here he is not abnormal, not different. Here,
his rage is nothing new. Prison lifestyle is an extension of his inner life.
We have learned to abuse and re-abuse ourselves by coming in and out of
places like this.
"Look around," I told him. "Look at all these men. Don't
we all say that we are men out here on this exercise yard? This prison defines
us as such. But there would be much greater power in what you and I can
see out here if we could all see ourselves as human beings, first. I bet
if you truly thought of yourself as one human being and of me as another
and others out there as more human beings, you would gradually begin to
wonder freely and openly about the nature of your life. Try to replace your
false manhood impressions with your human existence and all those old experiences
you had as a child will seek to come out. Human beings cry," I said
to John, "and don't be surprised that you will cry in confronting your
past with your human love."
Finally, I confided to John what I had thought earlier that morning, that
I wished I had been there when my mother died. He asked, "Hey, didn't
you say she neglected you?"
John was right. She did. But am I to neglect myself as well by wishing that
I wasn't there, that she wasn't my mother, that I didn't still feel a love
for her?