TALES OF THE CITY The Visitors

In the gray twilight of downtown Dallas, an hour or so after the traffic has dispersed, the pilgrims are gathering on the seventh floor of the Dallas County Jail. They go about their business furtively, a crowd locked in reciprocal suspicion.

There is no excuse for this, the man is saying to his wife. He is standing in the middle of a blank, functional room. As he speaks, a young boy squirms and struggles helplessly, but he’s pinned firmly to his lather’s breast.

“Mama came up here and saw him last night.” he says.

The wife fishes in her purse for another Virginia Slims and sits down on a church pew that’s been provided by Dallas County for the comfort of loved ones.

“They say we ain’t on the card.”

The father, a beefy, red-cheeked country boy with that desperate look of lost time, motions over toward the sliding metal gates (“Warning: You are entering a jail facili- ty…”) where the deputy has set up his metal folding table. The deputy stands there, graying, avuncular, thumbing distractedly through a card file. You could imagine him getting the assignment {“You work well with the public, Mel, you give the department a good image”). He looks as if he’s never had a reflective moment in his life.

“You’re going to have to fill these cards out individually,” he is saying now. His voice is flat. “I can’t take two names on the same card.”

A tall black man in an open-necked pink shirt and a blue satin jacket stares at him blankly, then looks away. The girl with him has open-toed shoes and tired eyes. She picks up the cards and takes them over to the pew to start over again. The line approaching the desk and the card file creeps forward.

It is a silent process, this pageant in the concrete lobby. Whether from shame or fear, the visitors don’t choose to speak to one another. Some, like the brown-skinned family approaching now-father, two daughters, and a preschool girl-are so reticent that they seem in fear of arrest themselves. At every suggestion from the deputy (“Move back just a little, please”), they jump as one body. The father has filled out a card, but his ID card is not acceptable. The deputy points to a sign on the wall that lists the six accept- able forms of identification for jail visitors. His daughter translates it tor him, and then he speaks rapidly to her in Spanish. He pulls several limp, folded documents out of his hip pocket and offers them to her. She speaks again, scoldingly. in frustration. Then the family moves back toward the elevator, without protest.

More than half the would-be visitors are ! turned away. There can be a dozen reasons why permission to visit is denied. Perhaps the inmate has failed to fill out the proper card, or, in the case of one African with a strange lilting accent, his friend has simply vanished.

“He must not be in the jail any longer,” says the deputy. “I have no card.”

The visitor seeks further explanation, but there is none to be had. He suggests there might be someone else to speak with.

No, he’s told, but sometimes information is available by telephone.

But he doesn’t know the prisoner’s birth-date or full name.

That will be a problem.

“The next time you speak to him you should ask him these things,” says the deputy.

Next month, perhaps, the prisoner will remember to put the would-be visitor’s name on the card. Names must always be added on designated Mondays.

It’s a modern jail, as jails go, but this part of it seems ancient. Someone has dropped a cigarette on the floor and rubbed it flat with the toe of his shoe. The longer the waiting goes on, the more the cigarette seems a part of the jail, something to be kicked about like a totem, evidence of our common history. This feeling comes sometimes in hospital waiting rooms, too, after the trauma has passed, after the screaming or panic has subsided, when all that’s left is empty, dead time.

A tiny young woman wearing stretch pants with little white stirrups descending into her tennis shoes steps forward with her card and “photo ID” and waits while the deputy searches repeatedly through his file. While this is going on, the disembodied conversation of two jail guards floats into the lobby from beyond the iron gates. They are talking about guns and cartridges. The talk is good-natured and high-spirited. If any of the visitors are listening, it doesn’t register on their blank faces.

“It doesn’t have the firepower.”

“Have you used one?”



“I wouldn’t trust it as much as I do the old models.”

Down the echoing hall behind them comes (he sound of hard leather soles pounding an even cadence on the slick floor. We half expect to hear the voices of inmates, but they are too far away. Even their voices are quarantined.

“I don’t have your name on the card.”

“But that’s an El Paso address on my ID!” She shouts it out too quickly, and then seems embarrassed. Her eyes are filling up with water.

“It’s more than seventy-five miles from Dallas,” she says, referring to one of the rules.

The deputy chuckles to himself and grins. He pencils in her name. “Okay.”

She strides quickly through the open gate, proud of herself.



There’s a kind of comfort here, in this cold granite fortress. Nothing can touch you here, in the limbo between freedom and captivity. It has the aura of a border crossing, where the place itself engenders distrust and temptation. When lines are drawn, the mind won’t cease wondering what lies beyond the lines.

Most visitors are women, children, and old folks-dependents. They have come to see their young men. They are closer now to their husbands, sons, fathers. Jail has done that.

“He’s not here,” the deputy is saying. “James Gill Jefferson?” He looks at the cards again. “I have a James William, but not a James Gill. There’s a possibility that he would be over at Sterrett, but I should have a card anyway. Do you think maybe he was released today?”

But the wife doesn’t know. The wives never know.

“It can take six hours sometimes to get the paperwork put through.”

This makes no impression on her. She’s wondering where her husband is, and even though she is accustomed to these bureaucratic mysteries, his words send a quick little panic through her.

“Try over at Lew Sterrett. Do you know where that is? Try over there.”

More are turned away. There has been a fight, the deputy explains, and so all the inmates in one cell block had to be separated and scattered far and wide through the pens Dallas County provides for the accused.

“He’s at the old facility. It’s one and a half blocks- from here. Have you been there?”

She”s a young black woman, tidy and intense, a single ribbon bound tightly around her hair, pushing it up and back from her forehead.

“Could you give me an address please? I’m not from Dallas.”

The deputy turns and calls back into the bowels of the jail. “Do you guys know what | the address of the old jail is?”

Another deputy strides out and gives an approximate address. She looks at him skep- tically. accusingly. Finally he gives her more specific instructions. She leaves, unconvinced.

The time is escaping. Much of the daily visiting period is gone, and the families are still searching.



Strangely, there are no tears. The tears came earlier, perhaps when another deputy came to the door with warrant and cuffs. Now there is a different kind of fear, that somehow they will make a blunder, step outside a set of rules only vaguely understood, and there will be more suffering. Some arrive very late, no doubt after following a trail from Lew Sterrett to “the old facility” to here, and then look nervously at the clock as their allotted ninety minutes wane. Most of them struggle with the official form, even though all it demands is name, address, and other basics.

“Don’t make him mad. honey.”

The father clutching his son is thinking about making another run through the line, but the chain-smoking mother is skeptical.

“I ain’t gonna say anything to the man. but he could look in there again. He might’ve made a mistake.”

“He might’ve.”

“How could Mama get in here last night, if he says nobody’s on the card?”

The man returns to the rear of the line, holding on to this faint hope.

There is a mental illness here-not the clinical type, nothing external. but the quick hot breath of the isolated and the cut off, pressed beyond their endurance. Their mouths are twisted and puckered, but only slightly. When anyone speaks, it is these blessed souls, and their very conversation is a kind of mourning.

“You don’t wanna be in here ever.”

The “you” is undirected.

“There’s all kind of evil in here.”

The early arrivers have started to leave now. the veterans, those with the placid, beyond-caring faces. One of them comes out telling a friend about the fifteen-year-old Vietnamese boy inside. When he was arrested, he told police he was eighteen, thinking they would be more inclined to respect him if he were older. Once in jail, other inmates told him he would have been released had he given his true age. Now he was trying to change his story, but no one was listening.

There’s never any listening, someone remarks.

No one is paid to listen.

A family has returned for the second time. They’ve been combing the jail facilities, and they can’t locate a relative. Surely he must be here. They spoke to him by telephone only yesterday.

“No, ma’m, I’m sorry, but if I don’t have a card on him, then there’s nothing I can do.”

Why do they never protest? Why do they listen to words like that and then act like it’s their fault?

What did the judge think when it was time to pronounce the sentence and these people were staring at him? Did he see their faces at all? Does he know what suffering exists in the lobby?

“Could we use a phone here?” a woman asks.

The deputy gives her directions to the downstairs pay phone. He advises her to let it ring a long time if she’s calling the jail.

Outside the streets are vacant and the John F. Kennedy cenotaph looms unbearably on the courthouse square. There is a kind of solace in touching the open night air.

There are birds somewhere. You can’t see them but you can hear them. They don’t belong here.

There is a palsied, cockeyed lady out here in the new freedom. She is looking at me and I’m still thinking about the story of the Vietnamese boy. She didn’t get in tonight. She didn’t get to see whoever it was she came to see. She would be back tomorrow.

“We must pray,” she says. “We must pray for the falsely accused and the little idiot children.”

She says it so gently. She knows.