Akeil Robertson
Artist
The Blues is a melodic language that came up from the Mississippi Delta and took the country by storm. It was music that sprung from the sadness and depression that Black folks experienced from living the life of poverty and segregation they were forced to endure for far too long. The commercial success of the music mirrors the continuous success of the marketing of Black pain.
In county jails all across this country, people are wearing cheap, thin, blue clothes that would ironically in other contexts be surgeon’s scrubs or nurse’s uniforms. In the county jail, these uniforms are often colloquially called Blues, an identifier and a metaphor, both calling out and naming the garments and the condition of the individual wearing them. To be “in Blues” is to have the Blues. There is no difference. During my time in the county jail, I wore these clothes like an ill-fitting suit, going months between getting a new set and washing them myself in the sink. My calloused hands were a testament to my struggle to maintain my dignity against the crushing weight of those cheap clothes and all they stood for. My judgment, my guilt, my pain, my sentence, my depression, my Blues.
Since my release, the Blues have stayed on my mind because they also represent the looming threat of being returned to prison.
People who are reincarcerated in Pennsylvania and other state prisons as parole violators also wear Blues. These poor folks are often looked at as failures and treated as if they’ve committed the ultimate faux pas by returning to prison, regardless of the conditions under which they’ve become reincarcerated. Their clothes mark them as less than in the color hierarchy of the prison. Judgments about their work ethic, intelligence, drive, and even sexuality all come down to the uniform they wear. A Blue uniform can reveal biases a prisoner might face and give hints about the status of those prisoners in the eyes of other incarcerated people in ways only legible to the people of the prison.
In Pennsylvania, Browns have the most rights and status. In other states, the colors change but the phenomenon is mostly the same. Browns are folks who have been sentenced and assigned to a “home jail,” or a prison where they reside and have been classified and remanded to live out their sentence. Blues are usually in a transitory position having to be reclassified to a home jail when they reenter the system. Eventually, many Blues also become Browns as they await or depart to their home jails and are integrated back into the institution, hoping to shed the stench of their recent criminality.
While I was in prison, I would hear folks who’d come back vow that things would be different next time. But during my stay, I saw folks come back again and again. My time inside coincided with the Black Lives Matter Movement and the media attention paid to Black victims of state violence. Death as the consequence of the state's capriciousness is the ultimate form of harm meted out in communities of color throughout the nation, but there are other consequences as well. Arrest is a violent act itself which often involves humiliation and assault and plays out in communities across the country far more than many other forms of state violence. It’s this that I fear. Arrest is the start of the tragic events that lead back to prison, a route that cannot categorically be said was deserved or not.
Many folks who were serving long sentences turned their backs on people who returned to prison, unable to reconcile the squandering of an opportunity a great many hoped for themselves. I saw that folks who returned were hurt, wounded, and treated as animals returned to the cage. I took pity on them and often overlooked their indiscretions, seeing their arrest as part of a larger narrative. But there were moments when I took pleasure in holding my nose up as some of them returned, happy to see that I was right in my negative opinions of them. Even as I did this, whether I took pity on them, or relished their return, I saw myself in all parole violators and I’ve never shaken that feeling that I might one day be them.
The color code of prison and jail plays a huge role in my daily thoughts because I’ve come to realize that I am not truly free but rather paying off the mortgage on my freedom. Let me explain: In Pennsylvania, parole is a privilege and a contract of conditional release. The conditions are long and expansive and spell out the loose terms and conditions under which one may be reincarcerated. A violation of parole, however mundane, triggers an additional penalty cost in Pennsylvania.
Our judicial system allows for the imposition of indeterminate sentencing. In layman's terms, our sentences aren’t flat time, so a 10-year sentence somewhere else might be a 10 to 20-year sentence in Pennsylvania. There’s always a front and back-end number. The first or front number is the earliest you can be paroled out of prison. The last or back number is the day you max out on your sentence and are guaranteed to be released. Most people try to make that front number their release date and go through the parole process to take a shot at getting out early. But in Pennsylvania, if you get out early and violate the terms of your parole, however many years you’ve spent living out your sentence as a free man will not be factored into the new punishment.
This means all of the time you served on the street will be returned to the state. For example, say you have a 10 to 20-year sentence and serve 10 years inside before serving 5 of the remaining 10 on parole. If you violate that contract for any reason, the state will not credit you the 5 years you did on the street as a “free person,” but instead will reinstate those last 10 years despite the five years served on parole.
I’ve been thinking of how to release the psychic weight of the fear of returning to lock-up into the public. Not just to unburden me but rather to start a larger conversation about the normalization of our criminal legal system and other systems of retribution,– largely through our continued fascination and use of retributive tropes of punishment, prison, and death in popular culture. These three poisoned pills, delivered through mediums like music and film, offer the palliative promise of what some term justice, making the right to sentence our fellow man/woman to misery an accepted part of society. Where would we be if we didn’t have the criminal legal system and the accrediting feedback loop of media narratives or the tools they've both created (indeterminate sentencing, mandatory minimums, prison, the parole system, death penalty, life without parole, solitary confinement)? How has all of this affected me and those who look like me? How can we attack it with the same vehemence it calls upon to destroy us? These thoughts terrify me and so I have sought the counsel of others doing the work.
In my reflections and conversations with Larry Cook, he encouraged me to dive into this unsettling work. And eventually I decided it might be a good idea to wear the Blues of my days in prison in some of the places I moved through as a free man. I took on the task hoping to unsettle people into thinking about their comfort with punishment. What does it mean for our society that we eradicate bad behavior with a form of socially acceptable exclusion culminating in death? If one doesn’t die in prison, the collateral consequences of years spent there very often kills the spirit. This slow death is being carried out on millions of people every day, an extended hanging we all co-sign and watch with the expectation that there is no alternative.
As I conceived of the work, I thought it might be interesting to don the Blues in places like Haverford College, a small wealthy school in suburban Philadelphia where I work as a creative director building an archive of the State Correctional Institution at Graterford, the prison where I spent most of my time. While the work I do is aligned with my experience, Haverford College is about as far as one can get from it. The area is dotted with coffee shops, Japanese French bakeries, and trappings of wealth. When I came for the artist residency that led to the project, I was awestruck at the idyllic campus and felt very out of place. The more I thought about wearing Blues there, the more the idea scared me. I knew I had to chase that fear and the chase led me to a nurses’ supply store where I purchased blue scrubs in a similar color to what I wore inside the county jail, dark blue pants and a light blue top.
As I went to try them on, a man passed me and said, “I remember those,” with an air of sadness and irony in his voice. He went on to tell me he did some time before his partner called him away, back into the rows of scrubs she was searching. We exchanged a nod of recognition as he departed, sharing a moment to see in each other a common experience born of a not so noble brotherhood. In the short interaction I had with that man, the color of my clothing told him all he needed to know. Those clothes transported him back to another place, a place of sadness, a place of Blues.
After that, I knew the pairing would work, but there were still some things that weren’t right. The scrubs had pockets and labels that weren’t present on Blues in the county jail, so I took them to my dry cleaner for alterations that amounted to destruction. When I explained what I wanted done, the Asian woman at the cleaners looked baffled and asked me to repeat what I wanted done, probably never having had such an odd request. She brought her own cultural context to the work and I’m not sure if she saw the clothes I was presenting her as others from my experience would have. After a little more questioning, I explained that I was an artist who had weird ideas and that seemed to satisfy her.
A couple of days later I came back to pick up the garments, still not sure if I could find the courage to wear them in public. What I saw when I got back to the cleaners totally changed the direction of the work.
After paying the same woman at the front of the cleaners a modest sum, for the work. She presented me with a pressed blue scrub shirt on the back of which hung a pair of blue pants on their own hanger. Both pieces were enclosed in a dry cleaners bag and the shirt was hung on a hanger with a white paper curtain that read “we love our customers” in blue letters. I was floored. I saw an effigy representing the deferment of the dreams of my forefathers who fled the violence and depravity of the Jim Crow South to make a better life. Instead, their dreams were quickly dashed in their children's generation as the criminal legal system picked up the slack, claiming its first two victims, my cousins Ricky and Topper. In my generation, all of the grandchildren on my mother’s side, save two, have felt the lash of the judge.
A smile crept across my face as I tried to excitedly explain the irony of what I saw to the dry cleaner. Just as before, she smiled and tried to be caught up in my excitement, but what the presentation of these clothes meant to me was lost on her.
For the dry cleaner, the action of bagging clothes had become commonplace and devoid of any awareness of how extraordinary the tableau she presented me was. Perhaps that tunnel vision is what allows us to build any system, dry cleaners or the empires of prison. Incarceration did not begin as a system to throw so many millions of brown people into cages. It started for white men and women and was gradually grafted onto traditional chattel slavery, ceding many of its white inhabitants to other rehabilitative systems. But to make that jump, it had to go through many iterations, slowly becoming the intractable thing we know today. Like the dry cleaner, it started small before it became so big that we couldn't see how exceptional it is.
I saw this story and more in the clothes she handed me.
I took the Blues home, in this sterile, crisp and clean plastic bag and stared at them, not sure what to do with this odd thing but knowing that I shouldn’t disturb them until I did. Eventually, I thought the pants and shirt should be bound together.
Using safety pins and wire, I began to join the pants and the shirt together so that they might hang on the same hanger. Playing with different distances between the garments, eventually I decided that some room should be allowed between the top and bottom to allow the viewer to see into the negative space, giving the bodily form a careful window to the other side and what would have been a torso. This could be read as a disembowelment, a cleaving forsaking redress. Hanging the Blues on the door in my hallway, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Instead of entrails spewing out of its abdomen, the negative space gave way to the world beyond the Blues and into the past as a powerful effigy of the history of lynching.