Younger Jan: Lee and I found a leftie lawyer on the outside who agreed to help us pro bono, using Jane’s research and instructing us on next steps. I was pretty sure that Lee’s striking good looks played a part in his willingness. Lee and I contacted co-workers who knew that Lennie had not been at the crime scene and would attest to it, remembering him at work at the time it occurred. So, when the lawyer casually asked us, like an after-thought, “By the way, did Lennie do it?” I was shocked.
“Of course he didn’t do it,” I replied, flummoxed. “Why would we be fighting the charge if he did it?”
He said, “Don’t worry, I’m going to defend him either way. It just helps to know. But I’m a lawyer. My job, no matter what, is to prove my client’s innocence.”
I was horrified. His job was not to search for justice? To get to the truth of what happened and prove it?
It was great doing the legal work with Lee. We were both tireless and utterly committed. We more than once put aside a personal disagreement so we could appear as a united front with a lawyer or potential witness. Though Richard was sympathetic, he was busy with his own activities and did not offer much concrete support. Lee in fact became my partner. I was fascinated with her perspective on the different issues that came up, having grown up in the same family as Finn but then somehow going on to college.
My love for Finn extended into my relationship with Lee. It was great learning that I could be drawn to particular people, regardless of sexual categories. I was deeply attracted—intellectually, emotionally, and physically—to Finn and Lee.
Lee had a way of describing people who seemed to embrace an ideal but then interpreted what came down in a way that undermined it, as having the “right experience, wrong conclusion.” For example, Kate, a friend who I had brought to the workshop, fell in love with one of the overtly political inmates, Hakim. They were the exact same color–-what we called olive-skinned–-but he identified as Black and she as white, and they had lived their lives that way. They were emotionally, politically, and intellectually compatible, but after some months, because she was “white,” he ended the relationship. I believe that for him, loving a white woman was at odds with his core identity as a Black political prisoner.
There was a derogatory expression at the time, vanilla fever, meaning a Black person attracted to a white person, suggesting it was an illness—that Black people ought to give their attention to “their own.” Was how fellow Black radicals saw Hakim more important to him than the discovery that he could truly love a white woman? Kate accepted the break-up as politically necessary, and that was the end of it. But I felt it was an example of “right experience”— love initially undeterred by racial difference—“wrong conclusion”—that the political exigency to “support one’s own” meant a personally loving cross-racial relationship must be squelched.
I was having the right experience and making the wrong conclusion with Lee. I recently ran across an old journal entry about the instability of our relationship. I went on to write, “But how could I leave when I have so much to learn from her? Her actions come out of her freedom from social norms.” The prison had turned my world on its head, making me question every norm I’d grown up with. Right experience. But taking care of Lee, as I was increasingly doing, because I had had a more privileged upbringing, was the wrong conclusion.
I eventually learned that she had been the favorite child in the household, which caused its own kind of suffering and which she tried to escape by finding a well-to-do family to take her in while still in high school. It took me longer to recognize her manipulation, which I believe grew out of her neediness, like the times she tried to keep me home from visiting Finn, feigning chronic back pain and other ailments.
I was also caught up in the spirit of the times. The women’s movement was in full swing, challenging norms of gender behavior. I was uncertain how to express my own feminism and unsure how far to take political action in a world with so much injustice. My political confusion was epitomized in my mixed feelings about the kidnapping of Patti Hearst, the heiress to a newspaper fortune, by a group of people calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army– SLA. They were women and men, Blacks and whites, and anarchists and extremists from various walks of life who wanted to incite guerrilla war against the US government and destroy the “capitalist state.”
Kept in a closet and inculcated with radical ideas, Hearst befriended her kidnappers. Some months after her capture, her image was widely publicized wielding an assault weapon as part of a San Francisco bank robbery. The next day she released a taped eulogy for several SLA members who died in a shootout with police in Los Angeles. She had ostensibly renounced her family, fortune, fiancé, and past life to join the SLA, which she had come to believe was indeed an army of liberation. She served two years of a seven-year sentence before President Carter pardoned her. I still have an article about Hearst from back then entitled “Wild Women: No Inner Checks?” It was sensationalist, lumping women involved in a range of justice-seeking organizations into one category, albeit the SLA’s methods were misguided and also harmed people who were not their enemies.
It seems painfully naïve now, but I truly did not see how physically expressing love for Lee could be hurtful to Finn, or how she might feel jealous of him. Neither of them had let me into the complexities of their family history, in which she was raised to believe everything should be hers and not her siblings’.
Younger Finn: I was still adrift in the nervous breakdown in response to my mother’s suicide, in a newly discovered dimension of Dante’s Hell. I was lost in endless inner-space with no borders, intersecting nightmares, an inability to get stable inside any thought, idea, or purpose with the avalanche of information from the Abyss crashing into my mind every second.
It was then that I executed a major assault on the communal ideal. At that time a workshop member’s girlfriend was staying at the house, and she had a connection for China White, the purest form of heroin on the market. She agreed to purchase the heroin so I could sell it to cover our ongoing expenses on Lennie’s case.
I went blindly in and arranged for Jan and other workshop members to be involved in smuggling the high-grade heroin into prison. It would mean more time in prison than if busted for smuggling guns across state lines, which I had objected to with moral insistence when Kuwasi had approached Jan. I was now even worse. A Dylan refrain kept piercing my brain: “You see, you’re just like me—I hope you’re satisfied.”
This signified I was already preconsciously stepping away from the workshop ideal and into my own subjective pursuits as I perceived others doing inside the prescribed behavior and language of sexual revolution mandates—a world view I could not abide in—which is no excuse. For it is undeniable that the heroin escapade was a major assault on the drama workshop that could have easily destroyed it in an instant, an immoral act of the highest order.
Younger Jan: The possibility of Lennie dying in Trenton ate at Finn. Though Harold Jane and Finn were doing background work from the inside, and Lee and I were doing footwork, there were still plenty of expenses, with documents to obtain and filings to be done. Our pro-bono lawyer signed off on documents but did not cover our expenses. The way that Finn knew how to make a chunk of money fast was selling drugs, which he could do in prison.
During a private moment in workshop one day Finn said to me, “We’ve got a way to get the money for Lennie’s case but you’d have to do something that I don’t really want you to do. And you don’t have to—we could think of another way.” He looked ill and spoke low.
“What is it?”
“There’s a guy who could meet you at the train station in Trenton. He’d give you a package. You’d bring it in and pass it to me on a contact visit.”
“Don’t they check you pretty carefully at the end of those visits?”
“Yeah but there are ways around it.”
I was all-in.
I barely knew Lennie; Finn had arranged for us to meet once on a window visit, but he was not part of the workshop. My willingness to go out on a limb for him was a way to fight what I saw as the system’s injustice—the success rate for defendants with paid attorneys far exceeded the rate for those with court-appointed counsel. Plus, Lennie was Finn’s close friend. What better assessment of character did I need? And I wasn’t willing to compromise my commitment to Finn in any way. The answer to anything he asked of me, which was extremely rare, was yes. I said yes to this, too.
That was the moment I crossed over. I came to believe that people in prison are usually there because of circumstances impossible to remedy legally, so they do what they have to do illegally. This is not to justify such acts but to say how I came to believe that any of us might have ended up in prison given the circumstances that our lives presented us with. I nearly did.
Younger Finn: After I had settled into seeing my future with Jan and the theatre community by the beach, Harold Jane agreed to work on my case, which was riddled with constitutional violations including an arrest with no cause, no search warrant, and kidnapping. Just as he was ready to take the final step towards securing my release, he told me he wanted to engage in sex before he did that last filing. So I dropped the case. That was the first major sign that my life was about to fall apart. The second sign was Lee’s growing involvement in my life, and Jan’s.
I started to see what I had done, unleashing Lee’s bottomless propensity towards destroying everything around her out of jealousy, convinced she should be receiving everything, including Jan. I realized I had cowardly committed a horrible act against Jan when I succumbed to Lee’s manipulation.
What got me most, and drove me into endless guilt, is how I would plead with Jan to help Lee, honestly seeing it as Lee’s only hope in life—finding a creative way out of the family hell by committing to writing her poetry, the best and only way out for her. The house could provide space for her to do that. Jan was smart but young and naïve. She became a victim inside our familial nightmare. Many years later, in her forties, long after Jan had freed herself from Lee, Lee finally destroyed herself when, like mom at that age, she committed suicide.
Younger Jan: When Finn shared with me in 2022 that he’d had a nervous breakdown after his mother died, I felt terrible that I hadn’t known it at the time. Did he hide it so well? Did we see each other so seldom that I had not recognized his distress? Was the depth of understanding between us more limited than I realized? Was his habit of solitude that impenetrable, with the closeness we had experienced up to that moment the extent to which he could let down his guard? Only seeing each other in such contained periods we could control what we shared of ourselves, unlike relationships in the messy outside world. I doubt that I looked closely enough at his pain at his mother’s suicide, having no clue of how to help him handle it.
The boundless love I felt that year, released through my relationship with Finn, extended to another workshop member, Kareem, expressed sensually, never sexually. I only later thought about the fact that neither he, Finn, nor Lee had the same desire to enter into multiple amorous relationships as I did. So, the same beautiful love that was motivating Finn to want to get out of prison, and the two of us to live together as part of an alternative, beloved community, was also generating jealousy and pain. This was complicated by Finn and my commitment to an abstract idea of “freedom.” Wanting me to be “free,” Finn did not tell me what he in fact needed, which was threatened by the situation I created. I believed that Finn was glad Lee was part of our love.
Younger Finn: The principles of the sex revolution were now an ideal in the workshop, and I was totally outside that matrix without Jan being aware of it. I had no confidence in what I was feeling, being so uncomfortable with most everything being promulgated, which is why I didn’t discuss those feelings, a cowardly response.
Then one day Jan arranged a meeting in a classroom with just her, Kareem, and me. She explained she had deep affection for Kareem and wanted a sensual relationship with him. She truly and rightly saw this as no problem in the context we were living in and agreeing to, myself included, with the counterculture also in accord, so I couldn’t make judgments. I just retreated into my coil position and began drifting away from what turned out to be a delusion. Not the love. That was real. It was just that the communal world that I had committed to was falling apart. I thought of a reflection I wrote down when workshop first began, titling it Misquoted Fragment: “The whole world’s a stage, and everyone is a principal actor as well as a playwright and director, and, most especially, one’s own editor.”
Drifting away I began to hear that familiar call from Thanatos. I’m in or out with life and death. There was only myself to blame, my cowardliness. Now late in life I’m still amazed at a remarkable gift among many I got from the workshop: losing all desire for heroin, what had sustained me from age sixteen to twenty, always a blessing because it was the most potent force removing from my nervous system the relentless view of suffering all around me and within. This loss of desire for heroin was not founded in fear; I had just found something better to addict myself to.
There was an assumption that the love expressed by the group must be romantic and must be inappropriate. It was a total side swipe and a confidence crisis for me.
Younger Jan: It’s excruciating to see now that I was still flying high with the workshop and my fantasy of boundless love while Finn was going deeper into the depression that began with his mother’s suicide and worsened as I embraced the sexual revolution and he perceived the workshop falling apart.
Jan: Here’s Jess–
Jess Thorpe: There was a particular time, a congratulatory moment after a particular play, when I talked about love. Not just me—one participant gave a speech to the audience, and as part of it, he talked about how we had really bonded as a group and had connected through making theatre and that I was a leader they had liked and who had shown them love and consideration.
As a result of this speech, a prison officer raised concerns about me. There was a question of appropriate behavior, a question of whether I as a young woman was perhaps doing some kind of witchcraft with the theatre classes and leading everybody on some kind of romantic dance. Why else would they talk about connection? Because I was a young female, there was an assumption that the love expressed by the group must be romantic and must be inappropriate. It was a total side swipe and a confidence crisis for me. It was a story that followed me around for ages to the point where I once heard, “Is it true you had a relationship with a guy in prison?” Of course it wasn’t true.
It made me sad for ages, and nervous of framing the work I did as love. It gave me a sort of hard edge in relationship to how I introduced what I was doing because I felt that in order to be taken seriously, I needed not to talk about love in any way. So I feel now as a woman in my forties, doing it for seventeen years, I’m fierce in a different way, unapologetic about the work I am doing, and clear about the importance of connection and care. I feel I’ve earned it but also feel angry on behalf of myself at that age, that I couldn’t just talk about love as a radical and critical pedagogical tool. It was infantilizing. And I was reading bell hooks. So that’s a slightly different perspective on the love thread.
Kathy Randels: And while for you, Jess—
Jan: Responded Kathy—
Kathy: love in prison has not been romantic, for Jan it was, in the seventies. It’s so interesting how times have changed and what is and isn’t acceptable. That’s one of the things I love so much about Jan and Finn’s exchange. I was a child in the seventies—being raised in a white southern Baptist preacher’s home in New Orleans. And I’ve heard that the seventies were an amazing time for all of our movements. Freedom was contagious and palpable. Jan and Finn’s piece, and hearing Jess’s struggles in another country, look how far we’ve come; and look how much we’ve regressed. We now have a movement in the US called Pleasure Activism—because our society has made pleasure a negative aspect of life to be eradicated! So, we have to fight for pleasure. To me it comes back to humanity. Why have we decided that people who are in prison can’t love and be loved? Sex has always been a punishable offence inside LCIW. Why? You’d have a lot healthier people if they were allowed to make love to one another!
Jan: Thanks, Kathy. And although my love with Finn began romantically, over the years it has morphed into something else. It brings to mind Martin Luther King, Jr.’s idea of the “beloved community,” which he says is not eros, or romantic love, nor philia, a reciprocal love between friends, but “agape”— an overflowing love that seeks nothing in return, understood as goodwill for all. I think the kind of work we all did or are doing in prisons demands a great reaching out to everyone we encounter there, which seems akin to King’s idea of love as agape. And also, what Finn emailed me recently—that even back at Trenton, what was most important between us was being able to truly see each other. What about you, Ausettua?
Ausettua Amor Amenkum: I started going to prisons when I was in my twenties as well. I’m not formerly incarcerated; I went in through dance. Although the acts that I was performing was love to the tenth power, I never thought of it as that. I never walked in it as that. Listening to you speak, Jess, was very interesting. I believe it was love but I never framed it that way.
The first years I was working with men, and the staff was always afraid something was going to kick off. You can’t touch them. You can’t hug them…In the women’s prison it’s the same way. You can’t hug them; you can’t show any kind of emotion or compassion. Well, Kathy and I just ignored that. Because you can’t come into this work with people for over twenty years and not have some level of compassion. And if they want to treat them subhuman, they’re not gonna make me do the same thing. It was pretty easy to just ignore them.
And to this day, the women and men who have gotten out who were lifers, who got pardoned, when I run across them, what they say to me is, “the love you showed me…the love you and Kathy showed us.” Wow. That concept of what love should be and is, and allowing yourself to be a vehicle—to manifest it through the work. You see, I’m an optimist. So we gotta keep with this love—it’s the greatest force in the world. So thank you, Jess. And I’m sorry they made you feel bad when you were twenty, because hate is going to be hate….
Jess: I think it was a mistrust or a kind of fear, and I don’t know if maybe that’s a British thing, but maybe not, what with what you are saying.
Ausettua: No, it’s not just British. Like when Kathy and I were trying to arrange Wellness Days for the women and bring in alternative holistic teachings for them, we had wardens tell us, “Ya’ll must have nothing else to do with your time.” In other words, why would we even consider doing this? Because the people that they hire—not all of them—but a great majority of them do feel that the inmates are not worthy, that they are subhuman. So it’s not just a British thing. I’m from Louisiana, the number one incarcerated state in the world.
We found that love for one another in our theatre work. We were able to see each other’s humanity.
Jan: This is John—
John Bergman: Sometimes we are an important influence, but a lot of times we really aren’t. We’d like to believe that we are because we love what we do and the people we do it with love what we do, and the work is a passion all of its own. But the reality often is that unless we have a relationship like you, Jess, have with George, which is very special, oftentimes, we didn’t have that.
We had it in one place, where they actually said, “We need this.” They converted all the therapeutic strategies they were using in that jail into theatre-based therapeutic strategies, which was quite fabulous. It was a remarkable place, and we learned a lot. Some years later I did a three-day training with all the prison staff in the state of Victoria, Australia, and it lasted eighteen months. How effective were we? I have no idea. Because we couldn’t figure out how to measure it. Because the times of measures we needed were day to day, minute to minute, hour to hour. Were they giving them grief? Stopping the men from proper visits? Putting guys in isolation? All that stuff that they’re capable of doing without us being able to stop it, unless we have more of a voice than at the time we had. And oftentimes our voices were so marginalized; that was really a problem.
Eventually we said, how is there anything we can do to influence it?
I’ve gone far from the thing about love—apologies—I’m a boy. We don’t talk about love publicly. But the reality was, we went on to create places that were often far more peaceful and gentle, set against a backdrop of men and women doing time or working in these institutions whose emotions were blunted by day to day being in this infernal baffle that was going on, but sometime made better and of course sometimes made worse.
We all know people who went into prison very romantically and saw the staff who were there as their enemies. Sometimes they were; they’d do any damn thing they could to impede us from doing any real work based on gender or race so anything, whatever the hell they wanted. But they would send officers in with us who they knew didn’t fit in, and we’d say, that’s why they were sent in to be with us. And we’d start relationships which were so important because, for an outsider, all a prison is is relationships.
This thing you said, Jess, about losing your reputation—I’ve lost my reputation so many times in prisons—they’d say to Saul, you’re all right, but Mr. Bergman—because Saul is an incredibly decent man that people just love and I am not, and people get so pissed off at the sight of me. The issue about it being about relationships and losing your rep. It’s very hard to let that shit just fly by. You can think to yourself, there’s no truth in any of it. The moment we touch real emotions, hell breaks out. Nobody wants to go close to that. The closer you get to that, the more uncomfortable everybody is going to be.
Kevin McCray: My partner Alex and I truly do love one another. I don’t think we’d have gone through this whole process of writing together if our relationship wasn’t important enough. To get through the dehumanizing ways that we were taught by this society to see one another, going in both directions. We found that love for one another in our theatre work. We were able to see each other’s humanity.
Gloria “Mama Glo” Williams: Very good. And the system I spent fifty-one years in was built to dehumanize people, make you have a whole lot of anger. But because of some of the volunteers that were allowed to come into the system—they wouldn’t let us go into that place. They were very supportive, they brought you things to think about, building a character to express yourself and no one ever knew that you were talking about yourself. That within itself kept me sane for fifty-one years. Drama and other people coming in, sharing with us. And I was a fighter; I never allowed them to incarcerate my mind. You can physically incarcerate me, but I have control of my own mind, and if I had stayed there ‘til I took my last breath, that would have never happened.
Kathy: The drama club wrote a song called “Love is My Medicine.” [singing] Love, love, love, love; it’s my medicine.
That was during COVID, wasn’t it?
Mama Glo: Yes, it was. A lot of people in the workshop were losing people. Drama was where we could throw our pain and our ugly things in the middle of the floor and didn’t have to worry about it becoming a topic of gossip. What came up in drama, stayed in drama. For many of us, it became our favorite place. We protected drama. If you didn’t do the right thing you had to get out of drama.
Jan: This is Alex.
Alexander Anderson: I like that we are talking about love because I consider myself a lover of humanity. So, I do this work from a lover’s perspective like you, Jess, that has nothing to do with kissing, hugging, holding, or squeezing. But to get people to understand that!
As a lover of humanity I’m often getting my heart broken. My lover often abandons me, cheats on me, lies to me. Then there’s the time when my lover is gracious, beautiful, and attentive. Love is where I come in at—people that I was working with didn’t know that I wasn’t getting paid and that I looked at it as a work of love. How I give back for the things that got me incarcerated, the things that I’ve done in my community, the pain that I’ve caused my mother, being in the streets and running in gangs, how I hurt and disappointed her. Family members having to live with that—you’re the sister or brother of that crazy guy who’s doing that crazy stuff.
I’m the youngest of my mother’s six children and I have three older brothers who were Black Panthers or Malcolm X followers. They always gave me that speech about not being offenders but being defenders of the Black community. So I always knew it, but there were two forces in my neighborhood, and I sided with the street.
Once I got incarcerated and got that moment of clarity, separated from drugs, money, gangs—it all started to come back to me. Meeting some of those political prisoners when I was incarcerated that I’d heard about. They’re the ones that actually taught me about being a revolutionary. And I said “Yeah, give me that gun,” and they said “No, a revolutionary is a lover of humanity. You don’t get a gun! You got what you need—compassion, love—to do this work.”
So my love, coming back to my community after doing time in prison, was to do this work to help others, the individuals who came from my community and were caught up in this mass incarceration. It was not to help “humanity.” And while I was incarcerated, I kept seeing them coming in and out of prison like some kind of merry-go-round, and I really wanted to do something about that.
Younger Jan: At least we got Lennie out. He was paroled to the care of his mother, who gratefully invited Lee and me to Christmas dinner. Lee and I got to the house, dressed in our holiday finest, at the designated time in the early afternoon, and rang the doorbell. No one answered. We must have eventually woken Lennie’s mom because finally she came to the door in her bathrobe and apologized profusely, welcoming us in. But Lennie did not appear. His mom warmed up food and sat with us while the two of us ate, keeping up a steady stream of conversation. Lennie’s step-father stuck his head in to thank us, but we never saw Lennie or anyone else from his family, that day or ever.
Alex: I went on my own and got my degrees in college and all of that. But even then, it was always in me, I didn’t even need this. I was working with social workers who didn’t know what to do. We were working with the homeless population in New York, which was really bad at the time. And no educated person wanted to go into the camp. I just went in. I even said to myself, we don’t need degrees. We need lovers of humanity. To support you, Jess, we always get our hearts broke and hurt when we are lovers of humanity. Some humanity are great lovers but not all of it.
In some instances when I came into a space with people who just got out, I wanted to share with them what I knew about the power of using theatre to change narratives. And I got my heart broke. I got, ‘We don’t want to hear from you. We want to hear from the white guy”—Kevin. So that’s where I was coming from—doing this work from a love perspective, to engage with people, have relationships with people, out of love of humanity and to heal humanity. I’m glad we are talking about love.
Jan: I’m glad we’ve been talking about love, too, even though the next episode, number eight, is entitled Collapse. Because for Finn and me and, for a while, Kevin and Alex too, everything did.
The theme music you are hearing was composed by Sasha Paris-Carter. The musicians are Daniel Knapp on cello, Dionisio Cruz on percussion, Joanna Lu on viola, Mary Knapp on accordion, and Rene Ferrer on bass guitar. Wade in the Water featured Kenny Butler on piano and vocalist Haja Worley.
This is Jan, signing out.
