One of my clearest and earliest memories is watching Disney’s Return to Oz in a penitentiary visiting room. I witnessed the claylike nightmare the Nome King harass Dorothy Gale and her friends across the fantastic and frightening Land of Oz At some point, my mom would call my brother and me over to a white screen, where we would have a Polaroid taken of us and our incarcerated uncle. Sometimes Santa was involved. If the weather was nice we would exit the meeting room – which had vending machines with frozen pizza, my favorite – and into the barbed wire encircled playground. I was told my uncle was in the hospital, which ironically is probably where he should have been, not locked up in nowhere land Pennsylvania cutting down trees for ten years.
Eventually, my uncle was released. He would break his parole a handful of times, usually driving erratically or while drinking. He crashed his new car into a pole or the curb. He was sent back to jail for yearlong stints three times. My mother would muse about that first time my uncle was in trouble with the authorities was when he was 13 and was smoking a jay in the local Catholic high school’s parking lot with some football players. He was sent to the public school’s third track while the other kids were suspended. My uncle never recovered from being forced to transfer schools. He got into harder and harder drugs and into a harder and harder crowd. Eventually he was busted for selling something; maybe crack or meth, it was never innumerate for me. No matter what, his life was effectively over as a free man. From his late twenties until his fifties he would be in and out of jail for almost a cumulative twenty years. By the end. he was injured from his state mandated lumberjack career; contracted MRSA and destroyed his back. When he went home he quickly became dependent on painkillers. He still struggles with this today.
I am not sure what prison did for my uncle; it surely did not rehabilitate him, improve his life, or guide him to the narrow path. It broke his body, spirit, and mind. It also damaged my family and his potential family he never had. I look back to the beginning of the movie, Return to Oz. It is a strange film; obviously not really a sequel to the Julie Garland original. It is darker, disturbing, and revels in the macabre. The first scenes portray Dorothy as clinically ill. Her parents ship her to a mental institute where they attempt to administer electroshock therapy. Before this occurs she is whisked away to Oz. It is never clear if Oz is real, or if her mental illness is real, or if the ‘therapy’ induces these visions. The central thing I could tell when I was five was that the hospital did nothing but drive one to jump into a river to escape.
My uncle is still alive, comes to our family events, and does what he can to survive. The system that should have held him up when he struggled failed him, and as consequence, reverberated like ripples in a pool across our family. I cannot imagine the countless other families who were visiting relatives, parents, and brothers in that waiting room and the suffering what was unleashed by the War on Drugs and carceral punishments that were dealt to the ill and dependent, especially those in the black and brown communities of America. Hopefully there is an end to this, somewhere over the rainbow.
The Nome King, the titular villian of The Return to Oz, is inseparably linked to my memory of Rock View State Correctional Facility; its always watching presence, its hard exterior, its fear of change. I wish there was as simple a solution as talking hen’s egg to destroy the American carceral state, a system tied to racism, classism, and our relation to the original inhabitants of this continent. There is no place but home, but what is a home when a segment of your neighbors are denied justice, healthcare, and the means to live a good life? I’m still working on it.
