18 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
PROFILES
COMING HOME
Getting out of prison is just the start. The right guide can help you stay out.
BY ADAM GOPNIK
PHOTOGRAPH BY LUIS MANUEL DIAZ
“
D
on’t answer! When you come
home and someone says, ‘How
ya doing?’ it’s not a question. You just
say fine. Every New Yorker knows that.
If someone says, ‘How ya doing?’ and
you start telling someone how you are,
you might as well be wearing a big sign
saying ‘I Have No Idea Where I Am.’
So. How ya doing?” Sam Rivera laughed,
and his audience wasn’t quite sure
whether to laugh with him or not. It
was six o’clock on a Thursday evening
last fall at the Castle, at 140th Street
and Riverside Drive, and the weekly
meeting was just beginning.
The Castle is the main residential
wing of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit
organization that has been helping peo-
ple cope with the aftermath of incarcer-
ation since its founding, by the Broad-
way press agent David Rothenberg, more
than fifty years ago. “Thursday meeting”
is a mandatory, semi-sacred gathering
of the Castle’s eighty or so residents, all
of whom have been incarcerated, some
as recently as earlier in the week, along
with people who once lived there or who
would like to live there. Various guests
may appear, too, ranging from John Ed-
ward Wetzel, the secretary of corrections
for the State of Pennsylvania, to Luann
de Lesseps, the “Real Housewives of
New York” star who once spent a night
in jail. (Lesseps arranged a beauty day
for the women of the Castle, which was
broadcast on “Housewives.”)
Much of the language of the meet-
ing is specific to the world of those who
have been locked up. “I’m a reluctant
veteran of the short bid,” someone might
say gloomily—a short bid being a brief
sentence. A language of elaborate indi-
rection fills the room. “Justice involved”
means that someone was arrested for
or convicted of a crime; “been upstate”
means imprisoned at northern-county
places like Attica or Auburn (where li-
cense plates are made) or at Sing Sing
(where the electric chair Old Sparky
once stood). The catchall phrase for the
totality is “lived experience,” the term
having migrated here to mean, simply,
“I’ve done time.” Either people have
lived experience or they don’t.
Partly through the osmosis that
teaches all of us our dialects—nobody
has to tell a quarterback to say “It was
a team victory”; he absorbs the words
when he starts playing football—the
residents use many cautious voices
and tenses to narrate their movement
through a hostile world. “I got involved
in a bad situation” or “I found myself in
a circumstance in which someone got
hurt” segues into the first-person active:
“I’m putting my life together and re-
connecting with my family now.”
Sooner or later, though, the compli-
cated language settles, for a newcomer,
into a basic formula of introduction:
“I’ve been away. I’ve come home.” At
the Thursday meeting last fall, when
a recent arrival said that he had been
away—perhaps for ten or twenty or thirty
years—there was a round of applause,
and Rivera, officially the associate vice-
president of housing at Fortune but in
truth its resident guru and presiding de-
miurge, was there to say, gently, “Wel-
come home, brother.”
Rivera is a big man. Of Native Amer-
ican and Puerto Rican parentage, he
has the build of the fullback he once
was. With a shaved head and an ear-
ring in each ear, he had led the meet-
ing for about two years, with good
humor and discipline—like one’s ideal
of a staff sergeant, who creates maxi-
mum morale but with minimal oppor-
tunity for goofing off. As a young man,
in the eighties, he was arrested on gun
and drug charges, and acknowledges
Sam Rivera outside the Castle, a residence for the formerly incarcerated. significant lived experience himself.
