Contraband Marginalia
I promised to keep track of my pen, lest it become a tattoo kit. As a treat to end security training, the sergeant showed me the Wall of Fame. Flanked by photos of sheriff deputies recognized for outstanding service, a glass case contained the best arts and crafts confiscated during shakedowns: an elaborate board game, intricate carvings on bars of soap, and a garrote made from toilet paper. “It doesn’t seem like it would work, but if you know how to twist the paper, you could kill someone,” he told me. “There’s a lot of creativity locked up in here.” I was not scared as intended. I wanted to know everything.
* * *
The chain of command valued the jail library where I worked as a civilian staff member and issued us a generous budget. People with an outlet for their imaginations are less likely to get into fights or make toilet wine. I hoped the sergeant did not hear about the group who made gallons of high-proof green sludge and called the operation “Book Club.” A deputy showed me the concoction, which looked like Ecto Cooler brewed in stolen trash bags. I felt buzzed from the smell alone.
The deputies who kept the daily schedule and oversaw security were less enthusiastic about the library. They liked us, but supervising our services was a chore. When they did shakedowns, some haphazardly seized books, ignoring due dates stamped in the back.
As the first in the door, many days I found an avalanche overflowing from the return slot: notes, pictures, and art taken in confiscated paperbacks. When I checked in the books, I was supposed to look for notes or objects hidden inside. I threw away a lot of combs and napkins, but over the years, I also accumulated a lost and found. It was hard to tell what would be valuable to individuals stuck in jail—some things were obviously sentimental, others just amused me. I had to say no so often; I tried to get to a yes when I could. I saved these lost articles, just in case someone asked for them, until my desk drawer demanded purging.
Some items responded to literature—lists of verses, journals, a key to characters in A Clockwork Orange. Others were scraps from passing time—score tallies, stamps, drawings, handmade tarot cards. We did not keep detailed circulation information and incarcerated people shared books off the record, so I usually could not deduce whom these treasures belonged to. Mementos languished, waiting for someone to send a frantic message over the electronic kiosk, hoping to recover the photo of their little girl. I could not help with many of the problems people face in jail, but I could provide small kindnesses that made me feel lighter amidst the heaviness of the place.
* * *
After visiting a block that contained a volatile combination of max-security housing, protective custody, and those with fragile mental health, I found a document tucked into a dust jacket, addressed to the cops, titled “People who are bad-and-or-dangerous (very),” full of pseudonyms invented by the author. My coworkers and I studied the list but could not identify anyone based on its cryptic observations. I showed the deputies, who rolled their eyes. They were probably right, but I kept it, just in case.
* * *
I spent the preceding five years teaching 100-level English classes, coaxing students to ask questions that interested them. I tried to teach them how to annotate a text. They resisted. I burned out. I felt unsure of how to have authority in the classroom when I could barely speak in my graduate seminars, choked by shyness, so overwhelmed that all I could scribble in the margins of my assignments was “help me.” My students wanted me to tell them the answers, but I wanted to show them how to find them.
For a long time, I thought I had failed when I left academia, but I discovered that I am a librarian, not a professor. Teased for my bookishness, but a trusted ally in the quest for information, I fit better in the controlled chaos of this library on wheels, helping as many people as possible in ten-minute blitzes. I met a person just out of federal prison with “bookworm” tattooed across his knuckles, and I knew there was no going back.
How could I tell the professors who had invested so much in my education that I was giving up on the academic job market for jail? Not only had I felt misplaced in the classroom, but in cover letters I could not explain why I wanted to be there at all. I felt animated by delivering library access to incarcerated people, who are among the most marginalized. My intuition and empathy were assets here. My research training transferred, and I felt magical when I could quickly locate just what someone needed. A good book provided distraction; information, a lifeline.
Once, an old man approached my book cart with Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. He turned the hefty book toward me, tapping a word underlined in pencil, immediatism. “I have looked this up in three dictionaries and can’t find it,” he said, looking at me expectantly.
“What do you think it means?” I asked.
“I think it means that slavery was such a bad problem that it needed to be dealt with immediately,” he said.
I examined the passage. “I think you’re exactly right,” I said. He couldn’t find the word because it was coined by 19th-century abolitionists and had fallen out of common usage.
His dictionary, full of circled words and dog-eared pages, reminded me of my own, in which I dated each word I looked up. Such marginalia provided an extra glimpse of the people I discussed books with in raised voices over the commotion of exuberant readers. The best days were those when I could help someone answer a question that nagged them out of necessity or curiosity.
The paraphernalia lost in the library was sometimes a liability, but more often it was evidence of the imagination, anguish, and humor that connects people with literature and each other. I tidied the books so they could go back on the shelves, but I kept scraps in my lost and found out of respect, and maybe even out of love, for these misfits and bookworms who took comfort in the library as I did.
* * *
Someone filled the endpapers of a novel with a letter that started:
To the people I love:
I’m going to make this short and sweet and I hope you can read it and understand the intention with which it was written. I’m sorry for being a fuck up!
I wondered if they planned to remove the pages and send them home or if this confession was purposely returned to circulation like a letter in a bottle.
* * *
I thought of the man and his mystery word again when a notecard fell from a book with “jeremiad” on it in my handwriting. Months before, I jotted down the definition for a smart guy who spent his days trying to beat serious charges by declaring himself a sovereign citizen in lengthy handmade documents. He was determined to give me a hard time whenever he needed photocopies or had to share books. When I handed him the word, he looked at me sideways. We both knew—everyone knew—that he was a real pain, but he was also a gang member toward the top of the jail’s pecking order. He was charming and used to getting what he wanted. I suspect he thought of me as part of the system, beneath his notice, and was surprised when I playfully alluded to his complaining. Used as a bookmark, shuffled around, the card found its way back to me. I wondered how many people received my vocabulary lesson in the interim.
* * *
Marginalia were usually harmless but could also serve as communication between people housed separately—enemies, codefendants, or lovers—perhaps violating protection orders. As with my notecard, a letter could travel via the library, provided it escaped detection. Once, we found a book in which letters were almost imperceptibly shaded, revealing a code we could not decipher.
Most notes were less subtle. A man assigned to work in the library scrawled hidden messages on hold slips while he collected requested books. The library staff and I almost found his blazons—complimenting eyebrows and tattoos—romantic, but then we found letters addressed to four different women. He was moved to kitchen duty.
Elsewhere, a young woman repeatedly requested a book about Bonnie and Clyde. “There’s a waitlist,” I explained, “But you’re on the list.”
“Who else is waiting?” she asked, her tone revealing suspicious urgency. I felt a jolt of adrenaline but smiled as I told her truthfully that I didn’t know, concealing that I did know she was up to something.
A few days later, a man returned Bonnie & Clyde, and I hid it beneath my clipboard. While my team was at lunch, I sorted through the mess created by library services, making notes about who couldn’t find what they wanted and who refused to locate overdue materials. I retrieved the book and confirmed my hunch, finding love letters composed in the margins, the correspondents addressing each other as Bonnie and Clyde.
Now that I knew they used the library as their postal service, my job required me to stop them. Any evidence I had that they wrote the letters was circumstantial, but if I brought attention to them, there was a chance they would catch new charges for destruction of county property or violating a no-contact order. At best, they would get written up and temporarily lose library privileges. Losing the letters seemed like punishment enough.
The notes were sweet, but their method could also be used to dangerous ends. We feared that passed information could put a hit on someone or jeopardize a trial. Partly, I was skeptical of jailhouse romances; we saw enough abusive codefendants. But my husband and I wrote letters to each other when we dated long distance, and I also kept his handwritten letters. “Bonnie” wrote paragraphs, expressing her wishes that she could have taken the fall for “Clyde” and her desire to be together forever. His response was perfunctory: “Te amo.” I wondered if she would have been hurt or if reading that would have been just enough to encourage her.
I could not make an exception for them. There was too much I did not know, and the rules meant I had to be a secret, reluctant impediment to their romance. If I handled it myself—just made the book disappear—I could keep them out of this new trouble and protect the trust placed in the library by both the incarcerated and the sheriff. I hoped it would stop the behavior before it escalated.
I removed the marked-up book from circulation and ordered a replacement. In a few weeks, the woman received the clean copy of Bonnie & Clyde and looked at me, confused and disappointed, through big eyes rimmed in black liner. I held her gaze for a moment before looking away. Even if she suspected that I found her letters, she would not confess by asking about them. I would not admit that I had not yet disposed of the old book, and it was still locked in my drawer, with other evidence of lives I could only read the CliffsNotes of. I cared about the people who used the jail library, but maintaining safe boundaries required keeping so much of myself similarly filed away. My lost and found usually represented the fleeting, funny, bittersweet interactions we had over books, but I kept this artifact out of guilt. I had fudged a rule but also hurt “Bonnie.”
Later, feeling like a heartless footnote in this true crime story, I pulled The Odyssey from the shelf, looking for a bit of marginalia that always made me laugh. Inside the cover, someone wrote a review in block letters, still legible after erasing: “This Book Fucking Sucks.”
Kasey Butcher Santana (@solhomestead) is a writer and caretaker of a small alpaca farm where she and her husband also raise chickens, bees, and their daughter. Kasey earned a Ph.D. in American literature and has worked as an English teacher and a jail librarian. Recently, her work appeared in Superstition Review, Archetype, Passengers, and The Hopper. She is a Nonfiction Editor for Kitchen Table Quarterly.