Prison Novel

Not mine, but  Cebo Campbell's Sky Full of Elephants, which was excerpted on LitHub. In turn, I am quoting the opening paragraph.

He still wished for stability, which surprised him. Prison, for all its horrors, offered certainty as indisputable as the stone and metal. Hate it or love it, government had been there, giving structure, consequence, and a framework for living that one could either jibe with or not. This new world lacked such certainty. Indeed, even the event’s calculation determining who lived and who didn’t wasn’t so distinctly black and white. Best Charlie could deduce, the judgment, more or less, had something to do with identity in America. Didn’t matter what race box a person checked on a voting form. While not everyone checked white, none of them aspired to check black. Not in America. Not in a courtroom or a country club. Not on a back road or in a bank. Not in any of America’s serene places, sparkling and forbidden. No one else wanted to be a black person in America. And everyone knew that fact, however cruelly the result played itself out. No matter the worry in their lives, they could all but count on a voice, redemptive and default, whispering as a comfort to their hearts: At least I’m not them. And so they carried on, injustice as natural and inconvenient to their lives as a bit of rain.

I call that a very opening. The style is good. Even more interesting, the content is spot on with my experience. Prison is not the disruptor the law-and-order types sell to the public; it is a place of stability and order. I would point out - as I did with other inmates who were middle class and white - that this was the mirror image of the wider world, where blacks were the minority. A rough form of justice, I thought.

sch 9/13