News
Page 10
Street Roots • Oct. Oct. 30-Nòv. 5, 2015
MARY BOWERS
A link to the outside world
BY VICTORIA LEWIS
■ C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
Teachers love to stop and catch up with former students they run into in the grocery store or on
the street. B u t how many teachers would drive 425 miles across the state to visit
a former student serving a life sentence in prison?
ary Frances Bowers, a petite,
elegant, retired college professor
with a soft voice and an air of calm
assurance, has been calling, .writing and
visiting one of her former students in prison
for the past 23 years, ever since he was
incarcerated for aggravated rape and
murder.
“He’s been in every medium and
maximum security prison in Oregon,” said
Mary, who taught for years in some of
Portland’s toughest schools and, until 12
years ago, was a professor of Education at
Lewis and Clark College. She taught her
M
stu,dent, w hom w e’ll call David, in eighth
■yr a il t .
................................
“I’m not his mother,” Mary said. “He has
a mother. I’m not his teacher. I’m his
friend.”
But from the beginning, Mary recalled,
he’d been a challenge. “He was skipping
school, writing gang signs. He was, at heart,
a good boy, but he was angry.” She’d taught
his brother and had a relationship with their
mother, a hard-working woman raising
seven children. Mary learned over the years
that rather than criticizing the parent of a
troubled child, it’s better to build an
alliance. She proposed to David’s mother
that he make up for skipping by spending
time with her after school. His mother'
agreed.
David came in to do make-up work and
ended up helping Mary clean desks and
■ talking. “He asked what I thought about
rap music. He could
sing. He was creative,”
Mary said. “From that
day washing desks, we
were two friends
makes me
talking.”
After he went on to
high school Mary lost
track of David. “I didn’t
stay in touch with him,”
she says. “There were
than discovering
some big issues. I
another human being to admire.
didn’t understand his
life. He outstripped my
---------- '■--------- i
ALICE WALKER --------------
limits.”
Then his brother was
killed in a gang shootout Mary went to the
funeral and what she saw worried her. “I
approached David and asked if we could get
together because the look on his face was
truly murderous.”
He agreed to meet her but then he called
and said he couldn’t come. She didn’t hear
NOTHING
VWE?
MORE
HOPEFUL
PHOTO BY BEN BRINK
from him again until she got a letter from
him addressed to her at school. He was
locked up in the Multnomah County Justice
Center. He had just turned 18 and was
facing the possibility of the death sentence.
His court appointed lawyer advised him to
take the deal, life in prison. As in more than
97 percent of criminal cases, there was no
jury trial.
Since that day, almost a quarter of a
century ago, Mary has been visiting David,
now 41, in prison, writing letters and talking
with him on the phone about once a week.
“He called on Christmas Day,” she said.
“That was a nice surprise.” The Christmas
before that she’d gone to visit him. “He was
in the mental health infirmary. Seeing the
look on his face when he saw me was well
worth the trip.”
Sometimes David can’t call; he’s in
isolation. “If you are in prison, especially if
there are no college courses and you don’t
have work, you bedevil each other all day.
You are so bored you just get ugly, you have
no friends. You masturbate in someone’s
food, you spit in it, you go into their cell and
take their little glass they like. He went
over the edge with the games,” Mary said.
After serving 20 years, David came up for
parole. “He thought he’d get it,” she said.
“He had worked very hard for th a t He
attended classes, he attended therapy and
he had taken whatever course work they
offered.”
But David’s parole was turned down, and
the boy Mary had known in middle school
seemed to disappear. “He fragmented,” she
said of that time. “He was full of stories and
illusions of fearful things.”
By then David had been diagnosed with
three mental illnesses. It got so bad, Mary
hardly recognized him anymore. She sensed
she was losing him, but Mary wasn’t about
to give up.
“People think I’m harmless because I’m
small and white,” she said.
But there is a steeliness to this quiet,
cultured educator. Whether teaching
See HOPEFUL page 11
The Nothing
More Hopeful series
originates from a
workshop taught by
Martha Gies to
highlight the
unseen acts o f good
all around us. Gies
resolved to enlist
some writers who
would hunt down
and write those
stories.