REMAKING ACHILLES: Poetry by Carol Tyx

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I’m sharing my deep admiration for Carol Tyx’s new collection of poetry, Remaking Achilles: Slicing Through Angola’s History (Hidden River Press).

The Backstory

Carol is one of my best friends, and until last year, when she retired, she was also my colleague in Mount Mercy University’s English Program. For a decade, she and I were co-facilitators of a service-learning project informally called Prison Book Club. Small groups of our students lead book club discussions with small groups of inmates at the Anamosa State Penitentiary.

The Prison Book Club impelled Carol to study the history of incarceration and criminal justice reform, so it was a key impetus for her new book. Remaking Achilles presents a series of poems about a controversial 1951 prison protest at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola), where 31 men cut their Achilles tendons.

Fueled by research that Carol completed at Angola, the collection is written mostly as persona poems in the voices of several people involved in the Heel-String Incident: the inmates themselves, the officials responsible for their brutal treatment, as well as the nurse and the journalists who worked with the inmates to create much-needed reform.

Carol dedicates her book to “the readers of the Anamosa State Penitentiary Book Club,” and before the pandemic hit, she and I and some of my students and Mount Mercy alumni were going to discuss the book with the Anamosa readers. When this Book Club finally happens, it will be the first time the group discusses a book with its actual author!

Fingers crossed that this conversation can occur in the fall—along with Carol’s reading and book signing at Mount Mercy. For now, here are my thoughts on her remarkable book.

The Book

Remaking Achilles is divided into five sections. The first two offer a history of Angola—the plantation and the prison—before the Heel-String Incident; the third depicts the incident itself; the fourth portrays the Citizen Committee Investigation; and the last explores the aftermath.

Throughout the poems, Carol sprinkles phrases from the historical record, signaling these borrowings in italic. Consider the persona poem “Warden Easterly Refuses to Meet the Press,” in which the warden sounds like a certain orange “leader”:

 You tell those reporters I’ve been nice to you
 and all you’ve done is cause me trouble. They have been running
 all around the place for the past sixty days, and my God
 they write up everything a rotten old inmate says . . .

Later in the poem, the warden sounds even more like POTUS:

These people printing all these fantastic stories about
Angola—

if they don’t quit there’s going to be some lawsuits.

Another poem that links past injustices with current ones is the collection’s first persona poem, in which Carol creates the voice of S.L. James:

 As a civil engineer, I knew how to manage—
 prisoners were just another project.
 Twenty-five years I organized cheap, dependable labor
 not just for my plantation—Angola—
 but for my friends and neighbors.
  
 I wanted to be part of making Louisiana
 great . . .

Five of Carol’s poems are found poems, created mostly out of the Citizen Committee’s reports and records. A pair of these poems reveals one of Carol’s key accomplishments in this collection: she shows the full range of what we human are capable of, our worst and our best.

Let’s start with the worst, “Found Poem 3: ‘Marse’ Clifford Leake Addresses the Committee on Day 1.” This poem is spoken by a longtime guard that many Heel-Stringers singled out for his brutality:

 I never cussed prisoners—it’s against the warden’s rules.
 I speak to them like a man.
 I never lost my temper and hit any of them. 
 I never had a prisoner resist me.
 I’m only a foreman.
 It would be against the rules for me to punish a prisoner.
 I report them to the captain and he takes care of the punishment.

I, I, I. Leake cares only about himself and his reputation. And although we readers know that he meted out plenty of punishment, what is more chilling than his dishonesty is the form it takes. He seems proud to be a cog in a cruel machine, not caring what happens after he makes his report. He depicts himself as someone who only follows rules and therefore bears no responsibility.

In stark and blessed contrast to Leake’s unfeeling evil is the passionate empathy in “Found Poem 4: Nurse Daughtry’s Statement to the Committee.” The sole medical professional at the prison, Mary Margaret Daughtry resisted the warden’s attempts to bribe and threaten her, and she offered key testimony on behalf of the Heel-Stringers. The poem’s final stanzas show why she made this courageous choice:

 I do not believe the Heel-String cutters mutilated themselves
 simply to escape being whipped or beaten. These acts
 were the culmination of many things joined together
 to destroy their morale and warp their minds.
  
 Governor Long said the penitentiary has been a cancer
 on the state treasury. I say that the penitentiary 
 is a cancer on the soul of every citizen in the state of Louisiana
 who knows of conditions at Angola
 and has made no effort to remedy them.

Unlike Leake, who dishonestly denies his own culpability, Daughtry reminds us that when it comes to battling injustice and easing the suffering of other human beings, we are all responsible.

This sense of responsibility can be overwhelming, but Carol’s book offers hope that we can meet the challenge. The story of the Heel-Stringers shows that we are all capable of resisting injustice and becoming heroes. Remaking Achilles remakes our understanding of heroism.

In contrast to the original Achilles, the Greek war hero celebrated in Homer’s Iliad, Carol offers us many unsung heroes, most notably the inmates who “had no hope / of immortality.” The heroism of the thirty-one heel-slashers was born of desperation. Interestingly, the first part of Achilles’ name, Achos, means sorrow, pain, and distress. The Heel-Stringers endured unspeakable pain, yet, still, they wanted to live. They cut their Achilles tendons in order to avoid going to the fields, where they knew they would be killed.

They did not intend to start a protest or launch reforms, but nevertheless they did. They spoke with the only voice they had—their abused bodies—and others, with more powerful voices, like Nurse Daughtry, were impelled to take up their cause.

Many of these other voices belonged to journalists who served on the Citizen Investigation Committee. The most prominent in Carol’s collection is Maggie Dixon, editor of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate.

The poems about Dixon are among my favorites in the collection. They reveal her relentless determination to expose the truth about Angola, and they honor the source of her tenacity: her deep love for other people, especially marginalized and mistreated people.

The poems about Dixon also reveal the ways in which one person’s heroism inspires that of others. In the book’s final section, there are four Dixon poems in a row, and they all demonstrate that she and her writing empowered other people even after the Angola investigation was finished. The first, titled “Tending,” traces her groundbreaking career as a female editor. It opens with these lines:

 I grew up taking care of people,
 first my stepsisters, because my mother had TB
 and then a long line of reporters who needed tending.

The other three Dixon poems also celebrate the ways in which she tended to other people and the stories they needed to tell. “Letters to Maggie Dixon” details the many requests for help inmates and their families sent her after the investigation. In Dixon’s voice, Carol writes,

 I both treasured and dreaded these letters
 always asking for more than I could do,
 always driving me to do what I could.

Maggie Dixon was indeed driven to do what she could to fight injustice. And it is this drive that I most want my students to take away from Carol’s collection. Yes, her found poems and persona poems will serve as lovely mentor texts. (You’ll find the study guide I made for my creative writing students here, and you’ll find a guide for other students here.) But most important, Carol Tyx and Maggie Dixon will themselves serve as mentors for my students’ lives.

Tyx and Dixon reveal the power and significance of writing: it is a beautiful means of resisting injustice and lifting others up. These two women show why writing matters.