Hidden Literacies

Congregate Literacy

John Maroney was one of the first inmates to publish a narrative based on his experience of incarceration in an American penitentiary. Sentenced to ten years’ hard labor in 1821 for what he confesses was a drunken assault, Maroney spent a decade in two influential sites of early prison reform: the New York State Prison at Greenwich and Auburn Penitentiary in upstate New York. Published a year after his release, The Narrative of the Imprisonment of John Maroney (Newburgh, 1832) innovatively blends the conversion genre—an established genre of life writing that traced a convert’s religious awakening—with the prison exposé, a genre barely legible in 1820s that would more fully emerge by the 1850s to expose the horrors inside the nation’s supposedly benevolent penitentiary system. Maroney likens his literacy endeavor to Shakespearean tragedy on the title page inscription, casting himself as Hamlet’s ghost, revealer of forbidden truths, “To tell the secrets of my prison-house / I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul” [Citation Needed]. As such, the text demonstrates how both religious conversion and incarceration could occasion a radical kind of literacy project, one that gave prisoners an opportunity for self-making. By penning his story, Maroney imagined a way to reshape his identity from someone “so unworthy, in a civil point of view” (3) to a prophetic voice of authority.
This is not a literacy acquisition narrative, but literacy is its recurring theme: Maroney, a farmer turned businessman by trade, could read and write before he was imprisoned. But Maroney takes a keen interest in prisoners’ illicit communication networks, contrasts prison schools in two influential early national penitentiaries, and increasingly documents his own reading practices. With its detailed focus on prison discipline and prisoners’ efforts to circumvent authority, Maroney’s Narrative usefully demonstrates how prison reform practices, especially those that restricted inmate writing and reading, generated creative literacy responses by inmates, from reading smuggled texts to composing poems and committing verse to memory to circumvent writing bans. And by emphasizing the impact of a former inmate’s published exposé upon his own fate, Maroney’s Narrative usefully demonstrates a practice I name “congregate literacy”—the process by which one inmate’s literacy acts inspire other prisoners’ literacy acts. Ultimately, my reading cautions us not to draw too fine a line between hidden literacy and public print culture.
 

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