SENSORIUM .Always Great Notions 805 N.W. 21 st Ave., Portland Reed Opera House, Salem Francis at St. Augustine By Nancy Hoffman Heat, like a kind of tourists’ sauce, basted all the naked limbs of people ambling in the Florida sun into the Castillo de St. Marco outside St. Augustine. Earlier that morning, we had been visiting the elegant city squares of St. Augustine, making our way from one to the next, admiring the graceful wrought iron, the idyllic peacefulness that each square made in each neighborhood. It was curious to proceed to the Castillo, this lumpen, rather foolish looking fort. It is very like a lump of gray clay that someone has molded in a big hand and set down and put a thumb in to shape the fort’s center. Francis went a little way ahead, his camera swinging against his chest. He was enormous in the diminutive fort, the little fort, the silent space inside it. Francis peering delightedly through cannon holes aimed at the sea — Francis waving to me from around great barrels, filled now with nothing. And when we stood before the small dark hole where prisoners were kept, and where the old chains still hung from the walls, and where severe soldiers once kept watch, Francis seemed a soldier, too, but of a different sort, with his yellow hair glinting like some helmet, and his camera, a weapon of joy. It occurred to me that this defunct little prison room was but a chapel in relation to the real cathedrals of incarceration. I thought of Dachau, and of Auschwitz, and of Bergen-Belsen, and knowing these gone and knowing these, like the little Castillo, are now but visiting sites for tourists, I thought of other prisons which still stand. They hold, not the killers and the thieves alone, but men and women whose crime was but a thought, was but a whole sentence voiced in a public place. I thought of the beautiful and intriguing names of the prisons of the world: of Hermanice in Czechoslovakia of Christopol in Russia Bugando Hill, Tanzania LaPlata, Argentina Fort Dimanche, Haiti Ndolo, Kinshasha, Zaire El Sepa, in the Amazon jungle, Peru Cabana, Cuba Sudaemoon, Seoul, Korea Moon Crescent, Singapore Jilava, Romania lioanniana, Greece the prison of Manizales, Caldas, Columbia, Kober, Khartoum, The Sudan Matawhan and Attica and their names made a chant within the fort, a chant accentuated by the hushed voices of the tourists who seemed reticent on this morning in St. Augustine, Florida, who seemed reticent to shout or to laugh too loud in the eerie emptiness of the Castillo de St. Marco. But Francis was laughing. He was somewhere around a corner, laughing. It caught me, brought me back — a voice faintly Irish, faintly British, definitely Francis and I pursued it, more than willing that the chanting and those prisons, too, should cease. Nancy Hoffman is a Portland poet and human rights activist. , , , , Lotions , , Oils , , Soaps , , Moisture Creams n Cards , , , , Clinton St. Quarterly 15
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz