“My favorite is Hamlet.”

Easy Waters, “One Day in the Life of a Jailhouse Lawyer,” Conundrums: Stories of Law & Justice

E knows the soliloquy by heart. On some nights, he paces his cell reciting it.

In “One Day in the Life of a Jailhouse Lawyer,” his copy of Shakespeare sits on a handmade bookcase above his desk. There are more books on the shelf than he is allowed. Most are legal. Alongside them are Cicero, a guide to Shakespeare, and the complete plays in a single volume.

Years earlier, another man in prison told E that if he was serious about writing, he should read Aristotle’s Poetics and all of Shakespeare. E remembers the advice without giving us the occasion for it. A reader made a recommendation. Another reader took it seriously enough to carry a passage in his head for years.

My favorite is Hamlet. The sentence sounds like something one reader might say to another while standing at a bookshelf. In E’s cell, it follows a list of books about law, trials, and rights. Then the scene moves from the shelf to the floor. He walks back and forth, speaking words he no longer needs the book to find.

Among the injuries Hamlet names is “the law’s delay.” The phrase takes only a moment to say. E can spend a night thinking about it.

Earlier in the story, E opens a law journal and finds that a motion he filed a year ago has been denied. He believes the decision barely addresses his arguments. A year appears in the record as the interval between filing and decision. The scene in the cell gives us something the dates cannot: a man walking a short distance, turning, and walking it again.

I am drawn to the difference between how E reads a ruling and how he reads the play. He needs to know what the court decided and which questions it left alone. With Shakespeare, he can linger over three words. He can hear the delay named among the things a person must endure. He brings a knowledge of waiting to those words that no editor’s footnote could supply.

There is a lesson here for those of us who teach literature in prison. A reader’s circumstances can change which words demand attention. Our work includes making room for that attention while allowing the reader to decide what, if anything, to say about their own life. E’s choice of a favorite is his to make. So is his choice of the words he returns to in the dark.

The law books will be there in the morning. He will need them. Tonight he has put the book down and kept the words. He walks the length of the cell again.

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About the Conundrums Quotations Project

CQ-046 reads a line from “One Day in the Life of a Jailhouse Lawyer,” in Easy Waters’s Conundrums: Stories of Law & Justice.

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