The stranger

"Stanza" by sherman Alexie

The stranger

 

                                             
She’d left corporate law to teach a prison writing workshop. Her parents and friends thought she was a liberal fool. Her husband was afraid she’d be assaulted.

There are guards everywhere, she explained, and my students have earned the right to be there.

On august Wednesday, as she was reading a poem to her nine students, the riot began. She was trapped. She’d signed the waiver. She would not be rescued.

She tried not to scream as her students carried her into a supply closet. God, she thought, help me. But her students, laughing, bundled her into a large cardboard box, loosely it shut, and lifted her onto a high shelf.

Don’t move until the guards come looking, one voice said to her.

                                 When I first read the stanza that Sherman Alexie wrote I thought that she was going to get rapped since she was surrounded by prisoners. However after I finished reading I changed my mind. Many people think that prisoners are dangerous and horrible people. However that’s not always the case. Prisoners can be the most loyal people. When I was in high school I had a teacher who taught at a jail. She always said that the prisoners that she was teaching will have her back no matter what. She knew that if someone was messing with her she can call them and they will have some one defending her in a heart beat. Prisoners appreciate when people do nice stuff for them because they know that there is a bigg amount of other people that just criticize them and judge them just for the fact that they are in jail. The reason why the guys in jail were trying to protect her was because they had loyalty for her and appreciate how she was teaching them poetry, they know they won’t be having teachers in there with them all the time because they know not every one will like to teach at a jail. My best friends brother, who’s been in jail before and is a gang member, once told us that he will seriously take a bullet for anyone who helped him out when he most needed them and made a big impact in his life. The people that you expect the least from sometimes can be the most helpful and appreciated people and you can see this in the reading how the prisoners helped out their teacher. They hid her so she won’t be seen. She could’ve possibly been hurt but she wasn’t because of her students in jail.