Hate's Unkind Counsel
A COOL AUTUMN WIND blew through the chain-link fence and razor-wire cages. Rog, a brilliant jailhouse lawyer, and I were running around in leftist circles warming up for a few games of cage handball. We had scarcely hit twenty laps when a mustached man in a sweater appeared. My counselor. We threw some words at each other, but I kept running. My jogging back faced him, moving away step by step.
"Jamal! Anything you wanna talk about! No rap, huh?"
He walked away, scribbling pro forma notes on his clipboard. Rog stopped running.
"What's up, man?"
"Did you see that shit, man?"
"What! Whatchu talking 'bout, Rog?"
"How that dude was lookin' atcha!"
"Whatchu mean, man?"
"Jeezus H. Kee-rist! Didn't ya see how your counselor was lookin' atchu' Talkin' to ya, Mu?"
"Hey, look, man. I don't pay that guy no mind, man."
"That's your counselor!"
"That's his title, but what can he do? Can he help me even get a phone call?"
"No, but -- "
"See?"
"But that's not the point."
"What is the point, then?"
"How that dude was lookin' at you!"
"Whachu sayin', Rog?"
"That dude hates your guts, Jamal!"
"And --?"
"I jus' never saw a counselor treat a man like that. How's it make you feel?"
"To be honest, Rog, I never really thought about it. It's jus' normal, I guess."
"Normal? My counselor don't talk to me like that! I looked at that dude's face, and it made my skin crawl, Mu!"
"Really?"
"No shit, man."
I flashed in memory at his visage, and saw -- really saw -- what upset Roger so. Here was a face of naked hatred. Why hadn't I seen it before? How had I ignored it?
Roger, a man with three first-degree murder convictions, three death sentences and ages beyond of time, was no Pollyanna. How could he be so profoundly shocked at what I couldn't even see without his help?
It dawned on me then that I had seen my counselor's tight mask of hatred before, when he wore his gray guard's uniform, wooden club gripped in a tight white fist, a leather thong stretched across its back.
Now that he was a counselor, his uniform had changed, but his face hadn't.
I remembered him escorting naked men to the shower, weapon in hand.
To me, he was hardly a man from whom one sought counsel, for his weapon had merely been transformed into an ink pen and a clipboard; he was an agent, albeit with another function, of the same State that fought to steal my life. And even if I had not recognized his hatred at first, I knew intuitively that there was a profound distinction between the way he saw Rog, and saw me -- one I couldn't allow myself to see, but which a white death row prisoner couldn't ignore. Both of us were sentenced to death (one of us thrice!), yet one of us he treated as a man; the other as a non-human beast.
Perhaps I had subconsciously chosen to ignore the distinction before; chosen not to see what there was to see every day: a psychic spittle of hatred, fear, and alienation splashed against my inner person. More than choice, though, my willed blindness, pretended invisibility, and psychological self-distortion were mechanisms of self-defense: a survival stratagem in a House of Death.