Typically, when I am asked about my experiences at Tranquility Bay, people want me to start at the beginning. I am expected to detail the exploits of my adolescence and testify to the outrageous nature of my behavior at the time; drug use should be acknowledged, sexual promiscuity should be confessed and violent acts should be catalogued. An adequate amount of guilt needs to be bestowed upon me for people to understand why I was forced to live in a place like The Caribbean Center for Change. This seems to be the case with pretty much everyone who speaks out about TB. The testimony needs to be presented in narrative form and the story needs to be one that begins in the depths of desperation. How else could we explain a place like Tranquility Bay? This, of course, is only human nature. The small picture is much easier to swallow than the big picture. Nobody wants to examine the larger issue: the fact that we live in a culture which profits from misery. It is easier to stomach the plight of the individual.
I viewed the slideshow on this website earlier today and I was shocked by what I saw. Initially, I failed to even recognize what I was seeing. After several moments, I was able to take in the skinny bodies, defeated postures and miserable expressions that made up a good chunk of my childhood. It had been a long time since I had seen those images and it was hard on the nerves, to say the least. “Why haven’t these photos led to somebody’s arrest?” That was the dominant thought running through my mind. The dominant emotion, however, was one of overwhelming sadness. It isn’t easy to forget how I once lived, but seeing it again in full color was a shock to the senses. The realization that at this moment there are still children living like that was also cause for strong feelings of anger.
There is no exaggeration in saying that what goes on at Tranquility Bay is a categorical violation of basic human rights. The mere fact that children are corralled in such living conditions negates any argument as to their guilt. Whether I was out of control or not before being shipped to Jamaica is irrelevant. There is no excuse for treating a human being that way, let alone a child.
That being said, I have no desire to explain why I was sent to Tranquility Bay. I am also not interested in rehashing sensational accounts of instances of sexual and physical abuse just because the public wants juicy details of specific events before it is willing to become outraged. The photographs on this website alone should suffice. In the past, when I have spoken with reporters and other interested parties, all they wanted to know was whether or not someone touched me, or if a big black man beat me bloody. I tried desperately to explain the dehumanizing living conditions – which were anchored in an overwhelming fear – and how every waking moment, saturated in anxiety and suspense, was far more painful than a few swift blows to the gut. I wish I had those photographs with me at the time. They tell the entire story.
But I didn’t. So the following is a story I wrote about TB when I was still a teenager. It tried to illustrate an average day at Tranquility Bay. In some ways, such as the restrained tone, lack of dialogue and hopeless attitude, the story was a success. In many other ways, such as the fumbling language, the lack of atmospheric description and the absence of character development, the story was a failure. I am not far enough removed my childhood to adequately write about it. Perhaps I never will be. But this is the only attempt in prose that I have produced and it will have to suffice.
Lessons in Obtaining Happiness and Inner Peace: A Typical Day in My Tropical Paradise. (An Audiotape) - (not accessible)
By habit, I was already awake before the screaming began. As soon as the wake up call started, I reminded myself that I had become a machine, and I wasn't really there. The silent commotion began immediately. Without a word, two hundred young boys spilled into the narrow hallway and outside into the courtyard to line up for headcount. We were followed by the roars of several large men in blue uniforms, urging us to make haste.
There was no talking; we were not allowed to speak during the daily schedule. We lined up by unit and the guards began to count us. The totals were shouted into the radios to the guard who was working sickbed, and he tallied the count. The guard working with my unit motioned for us to head to the shower area. The shower area consisted of an eighteen stall wooden shower with a single pipe running down the middle, spilling water out of eighteen separate holes. The water was cold. The guard let us know time was running, and he turned on the pipe. We had three minutes to shower. I washed my body quickly and mechanically.
When I was through, I stepped out of the shower and fell back in line. We headed towards the clothesline. We broke line to hang up our towels. Before I returned to line, I used the pipe by the ditch to brush my teeth and rinse the mud from my feet.
We went back to the dorm to do our room jobs. I was in charge of the floor in room 208, and I was good at it. I had mopped and swept every morning for the past eleven months. It was a small room, a few square feet, and I was done rather quickly. I had a few spare minutes before we had to leave, so I picked up my tattered copy of The Grapes of Wrath and read what I could. Most of my reading was done this way - only in bursts. I finished one page before we were called back into line.
We went to the classroom to listen to the morning audiotape. It was about the secrets of living a productive life. It was the same one we listened to the day before. I took notes as I always did; there would be a quiz tonight to make sure we paid attention. The tape lasted thirty minutes.
We lined up for breakfast and headed down to the cafeteria. The meals were laid out on the table and we filed past in an orderly fashion, grabbing our plates. Breakfast was boiled cabbage and fish. The food itself didn't depress me any longer. I was used to it. I just wished that there had been more. There was never enough and I was always hungry.
The guard put in the breakfast audiotape and we ate in silence, listening to the tape. I was not able to take notes in the cafeteria; taking a pen out of the classroom was dangerous. If caught with one, there would be trouble. So I did my best to memorize a few key points from the tape over the fifteen-minute meal. “Positive thinking is the first step towards self actualization.”
When time ran out, we stood as a line and stacked our plates by the kitchen door. After breakfast we headed back up to the dorm to have a unit meeting with our case manager. There would be a few moments, maybe as much as a minute, when we could have a hushed conversation of sentence fragments before the case manager came into the room.
When the unit filled up the room, we took our seats against the wall. The guard sat outside the door, writing up his shift change report. The young man next to me asked - through motions and whispers - if I had heard Litho being restrained the night before. I nodded to let him know that I had heard the restraint. Another guy joined in the conversation of grunts and gestures saying that he had heard Litho's nose had been broken and he had been taken to the doctor in Kingston that morning. I hadn't heard anything of the sort.
The conversation ended abruptly when the guard stood up to come into the room. He wanted to know who was talking. We were silent, waiting for him to leave. His eyes scanned the room, moving from face to face, searching for a hint of guilt. All of us suddenly became very interested with things on the floor, or the back of our hands - avoiding all eye contact.
The guard stood in the center of the room until the case manager came in, carrying a plastic chair. She sat down, and for half an hour we were allowed to ask questions about our family and express medical concerns. We were not allowed to inquire about release dates. I told the case manager about my ringworm and the liver spots. A few more people complained about scabies and sprained muscles. She wrote everything down in her blue notebook and promised that it would all be taken care of. I knew she was lying.
When the meeting was over, we headed to room 204 for a bathroom run. This was the time to go if I needed to. I wouldn't get another opportunity – without jumping through hoops – until that evening. We stood in line outside the door and took turns in the restroom. The guard gave each of us eight squares of toilet paper before we entered the restroom. We had two minutes.
As soon as everyone was done using the restroom, we went back to the classroom for a period of school. There weren't enough teachers for every unit in the facility, so we were expected to teach ourselves out of the textbook - a rather hopeless task when dealing with subjects such as algebra or chemistry.
If I was careful, I could sneak a chapter from The Grapes of Wrath, but if I were caught I would be placed in Staff Watch and on my face for a few days. Staff Watch was the disciplinary unit of the facility. The average stay was around one to two weeks. Inmates in Staff Watch spent the day lying on their faces, not allowed to move. If someone were to move or speak repeatedly without permission, even to look up, he would be restrained. His arms would be twisted behind his back, and his ankles ground into the linoleum floor. This was not a restraint by definition, but more of a cowardly beating which left no marks or bruises.
I hid my Steinbeck novel in between the pages of my algebra textbook and read what I could while the guard strolled around the classroom. I was careful not to become so absorbed by the book that I lost track of the guard's position, yet I was also able to escape my reality as I read, if only for a few fleeting minutes. I found my redemption in a word on a page in a book about repression.
We stayed in the classroom for two hours before heading outside for P.E. This was one of the highpoints of the day. We could go outside the twenty-foot walls and play soccer in a large dirt field littered with rocks and garbage. There were four guards placed around the field observing us. They palmed their radios and looked on disinterested. We had to chase several goats off of the field before playing, which wasn’t nearly as bothersome as having to run the cows off. Luckily, they were grazing somewhere else.
We played a particularly violent sort of soccer on that field. All the anger, frustration, and hatred stained energy inside of us found its way out of our bodies and onto the soccer field. We bit, kicked, pushed, tripped, spit, and punched our way across the field. We fought our way through soccer games as if we were fighting for our lives. We were playing another unit and emotions were high. I was the goalie and I was good. I attacked the ball like a rabid pit-bull and if my head was kicked in the process, it was well worth it. Having a goal scored on me felt much worse than a swift kick in the teeth.
Our unit was a much better soccer team, so the game went slowly for me. The ball stayed on the other side of the field most of the match. I talked a friend who was playing forward into trading positions for a few minutes. When I jumped into the middle of everything, I became an animal. I never learned how to properly kick a soccer ball but I was an expert on running people over.
A hot shot guy from the other unit who used to play soccer in high school broke free with the ball and started down the field. Someone from our defense met him mid-field and ran his foot into the big shot’s knee. He immediately fell to the ground and grabbed at his leg. The defensive back passed me the ball and I ungracefully began to make my way up the field.
I didn't see anyone run up behind me; I only felt a hand grab a fistful of my hair as I was thrown to the ground. I fell forward onto the dirt and rocks below me. I slid on my face a few feet, and the stones on the ground sliced up my face. A brown cloud of dirt rose into the air and I was blinded as I picked myself up off the ground. I was trying to wipe my eyes out when I was hit again - this time from the side. I hit the ground and my elbow jammed into my ribs, knocking out what little breath I had left. I was bringing myself up to a kneeling position when the guards called for a line. I had to shake off the pain and make it to the line before I got into trouble for making the unit late. I wiped the blood from my lip, stood up, and limped across the field into the line.
It was lunchtime. We went to the cafeteria and grabbed our plates. The guard put the lunch audiotape on and we sat down to eat. Lunch was a bun and cheese. We had some powdered milk as well. The bun and cheese was my favorite meal. I slowly nibbled on my bun, savoring every last bit of flavor. The lunch audiotape was about the keys to effective problem solving. I had heard it before, so I disregarded it.
When lunch was over, we went to the dorms to get our clothes for laundry and headed to the clothesline. We each grabbed a bucket and filled it up with water from the pipe by the ditch. The guard poured a handful of soap into each one of our buckets and we swished the water around to make the soapsuds thick. I didn't have a brush to wash my clothes, so I scrubbed the opposite sides of the clothing together. When I was through, I rinsed my clothes and hung them up on the clothesline.
The sewage pipe that ran out of the facility was broken and sewage leaked out of the pump and under the clothesline. If a strong wind came, my clothes would fall into the sewage. It was a risky situation.
When we were finished with our laundry, we headed back up to the classroom for another period of school. I was able to pull off a few more pages from the Grapes of Wrath, but the guard was eyeing me suspiciously so I put the novel away and stared at my algebra book. Making sense of the language of mathematics without some kind of instruction was a futile endeavor.
Screams broke out from Staff Watch. Someone was being restrained. Other than one of the new guys, none of us looked up from our desks. This was a normal thing.
I stared at the pages in my textbook and listened to the screams. He was begging for them to stop. I could hear them laughing. I wanted to cry but I knew there would be trouble if I did. I reminded myself that I was a machine and that I was not really there. I cleared my face of any emotion and waited for dinner.
Dinner was pork and pork was dangerous. The day after a pork meal always left me feeling as if I had swallowed a cup full of nails and glass. There was never any meat in the pork, only fat and bone, and I could see hairs on the thick brown hide sticking out. I ate all of it and if I could have had more, I would have. I didn't care about tomorrow's pain; I was hungry now.
I listened to the dinner audiotape - A Guide for Building Healthy and Productive Relationships - and memorized a few key points for the quiz. “It is always fashionable to wear a smile on one's face.” I could already feel the pork in my stomach begin to cause problems.
After dinner came music time. For half an hour we were allowed to sing, one person at a time. I sang as much as I could. It was one of the few times I could allow myself that type of freedom. I left that dirty room and all of the loneliness when I was singing. I was home when I was singing. The guys in my unit liked it when I sang. My voice would fill the room with songs of freedom and redemption, songs about home, and songs about love, songs that could make us forget where we were - and just for that moment we were safe. We were home.
Half an hour later, I found myself back in my tropical paradise, standing in line. It was evening. We had one more audiotape and the quiz left. We went back to the classroom and listened to the audiotape: Lessons in Obtaining Serenity through Effective Problem Solving. The evening tape was always the longest and hardest to listen to. It went on forever, pounding its lessons into my head. I was tired and just wanted to go to sleep.
When the tape was over, we wrote what we learned from each tape and turned the paper into the guard, who would give it to the case manager tomorrow morning. She would review my regurgitation of obsolete ideas and mark down in her book: "Student is making significant progress."
We lined up back in the courtyard for evening headcount. The guards counted us and yelled the totals into the radio to the guard working sickbed. We went back upstairs to our rooms and into our beds. Someone in Staff Watch began to scream. I held back the tears and reminded myself that I had become a machine and I was not really there. I thumbed through the pages of a bible before sticking it back on the shelf next to my head. Faith was dead weight. I rolled over as a sigh escaped past my lips. I hated to go to sleep because I always woke up again in the morning. It was only a disappearing act and there was a hole in the floor behind the curtain.
Here, as something of a conclusion, I would like to state that perhaps the most troublesome aspect of TB has to do with the manner in which the faculty and staff of Tranquility Bay blindly adhere to a program that has little or no proof of being effective in a positive manner. In reality, throughout history the effects of behavior modification programs and total institutions have proven to be harmful and destructive. What is even more bothersome is that what we know about the effects of such institutions, we learned from adults’ experiences. There has been very little study on the effects of such programs on the adolescent.
The adolescent brain, to this day, remains a great mystery to us. We have made monumental advances in understanding the brain of the adult and the prepubescent child, but the volatile and ever-changing nature of the adolescent brain prevents us from obtaining a firm grasp on what makes it tick. Why then, does a group of businessmen, who posses very little, if any, knowledge of adolescent psychiatry, feel competent in their decision to expose adolescents to such conditions? It is irresponsible at best.
For example, we know that one of the most important periods in a person’s life when it comes to developing the skills needed to interact with the opposite sex is adolescence. What effect does it have, I must ask, for a person to spend his adolescence in an environment that views merely looking at someone of the opposite sex a serious violation of code? The same goes for peer group interaction. How does a person raised in a place that frowned on social interaction learn to operate in a world of people who spent their adolescence in communities that urged social activity?
There are many more important questions that this WWASP experiment has sparked and I do not have the answers. Sadly, however, those of us who were there will find out someday. For me at least, I know that in the four years I have been out, the only friends I have had are people I was in Jamaica with or the men I went through army basic training with. I think that says something.
References:
Datasheet about the boarding school from Secret Prisons for Teens
The original story (Cached version of tbfight.com - may take a while to load)
WHERE IS YOUR MASTERPIECE?, kata rokkar blog
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