Hard Time Read Online Free

men kept completely quiet—deep in concentration or totally checked out, it was hard to say. Others were chatty, wanting to ask questions for no reason other than to talk to me. Usually to flirt.
    “Hey library lady,” one man cut in. “You a miss or a missus?”
    His buddy added, “Yeah. Who you be readin’ bedtime stories to when you at home?”
    “Shut your mouth,” a man in the front row swiveled to say. “Like you got a chance? Shit. Some of us is here to better ourselves, motherfucker.” That was another contingent, the hyper-earnest types with no patience for nonsense, quick to demand I explain something they hadn’t understood.
    No one was outright disrespectful or threatening, not in the way they spoke. I could sense what Karen had said was true—the chance to spend an hour with one’s attention locked on an unfamiliar woman was a coveted one. I hoped some of them truly cared about becoming literate, but failing that, their willingness to abide by the rules in exchange for an hour’s permission to mentally undress me would suffice. Though let’s be real—I wasn’t getting paid nearly enough for this.
    After Literacy Basics came Composition. I asked the attendees as they filed in to please sit in order of their writing proficiency, by those who found it “very challenging,” “somewhat challenging,” and “not too challenging.” A few nodded acknowledgment, but once again they sorted themselves at the tables strictly according to color.
    It was obvious that trying to lead them as three separate levels was a lost cause. Instead I handed out sheets of lined paper and golf pencils—the latter were provided by the prison—and read them a prompt.
    “Everyone please write for three minutes on the topic of ‘my favorite season.’ I just want to see where we all are with our writing skills.”
    I wandered around, my butt as yet untouched. Some men managed a couple of sentences, writing in the slow, mindful capitals of children, others a paragraph or two. As they set their pencils down, I gathered a few pages of varying length to read aloud. I’d be careful to praise what they’d done well before extracting usage or grammar mistakes to make lessons of.
    “‘My favorite season is summer,’” I read out, glossing over misspellings, “’cause as a kid we had no school and got to play all day and didn’t nobody tell me where to be ’til dinnertime. I hate winter it is too long here in Michigan not like it is in Virginia where I’m from.’ Right. This is very good. It addresses the prompt with strong, declarative statements. Now let’s have a quick lesson about using punctuation to show the rhythm of our words . . .”
    The remainder of the writing session went . . . not disastrously. It got hauled off track when I tried to impart some simple grammar tips. Perhaps sensing my unease, someone took the opportunity to spin it into a political debate on the topic of “the black man’s voice,” and how street slang was more authentic than what he called, “Your fancy white-people vernacular, you feel me?” Terrified of sparking a fight, I wussily let the inmates engage in a semi-civilized dissection of the subject, butting in with the odd, limp, “Yes, that’s an interesting point,” before things grew heated and Leland thumped the wall with his baton and told everyone to shut up.
    The session wrapped, and as the inmates filed out, my smile muscles hurt, and my shoulders were practically hugging my ears. I eyed Leland in the corner, pleading for a sign—any sign, good or bad—that might indicate how I’d handled that.
    He offered a thumbs-up, his showy, dismissive frown telling me,
Don’t sweat it, kid. You’re doing fine.
    I took the deepest breath I could manage, willing myself to believe him.
    The next session was Resources. Cousins had a strong—if not revolutionary—rehabilitation ethos, and they relied on the visiting librarians to teach inmates how to use the Internet