"Learning how to die ... is learning how to live” - Philip Seymour Hoffman. What is happiness? Can we ever truly be happy? Or does the past always creep in and drag us down? Those are the questions the late Philip Seymour Hoffman pondered during a conversation recorded at the Rubin Museum of Art back in 2012. Hoffman spoke on stage that night with philosopher Simon Critchley. What you hear is thought-provoking and eerie considering Hoffman died of a drug overdose just over two years later. He was 46 and had three children.

Here I Am and Here Be Danger was funded by the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council. 

How long could your relationship last without a kiss? Without more than a kiss? Could you last a year? Two? What about ten? Twenty? In prison, couples are forced to keep their relationships alive in visiting rooms, with 2 second hugs. One two. Let go. So they write letters and make phone calls. Many break up.

But there’s another option. If you’re married or in a domestic partnership, you might be eligible for something called a family visit, also known as a conjugal visit, or on the inside, a booty call. It means a couple can be together, inside prison, alone or with their children for extended visits. They can have privacy and they can have sex.

Back in the 90’s, 17 states allowed prisoners to have these conjugal visits. But things have changed. Earlier this year, Mississippi and New Mexico both ended conjugal visits in their prisons and today only three states, New York, Washington and California allow inmates to have this kind of intimacy.

I’m standing with Myesha Paul at the gate at San Quentin, the prison just north of San Francisco. Because her husband, Marcello Paul is locked up in a California prison, they still qualify for a conjugal visit and she’s letting me tag along.

Myesha is middle aged with short, bleached blond hair and a no-nonsense look in her eye. She’s wearing baggy red sweatpants and a sweatshirt that’s too big. She knows the spoken and unspoken rules to one of these visits. The officers guarding the prison have told another woman who’s come for a visit she has to go back to her car and change before she’ll be allowed inside.

“Her t-shirt is fitting real tight, so yeah, they’re gonna make her change all that,” Myesha says watching the woman walk away. “You go through a lot comin’ up her. It got to the point where I just come up in sweat pants. Baggy sweat pants. Too much of a hassle. I’m not puttin’ on anybody else’s clothes. Leggings are comfortable but they’re not for up in here.”

“Why not,” I ask.

“They’re a little too revealing. They don’t want you to have anything that’s form fitting and although we come with hips and all that, so it’s kinda hard to find that don’t fit around, you know?” Myesha laughs, looking down at her full body. “I just buy some men’s sweat pants and make it work.”

“So when you’re inside, do you bring different clothes to wear for when you’re alone?” I ask.

“Mostly just shorts or comfortable pajamas,” Myesha says. “I don’t usually get dressed.”

Even in California not all prisoners qualify for these intimate visits. Prisoners convicted of a sexual crime or a violent crime against a minor or a member of their family and those serving life sentences are denied conjugal visits. Except for what happens behind closed doors during these officially sanctioned private visits, sex is totally illegal in prison.  That means tens of thousands men and women locked up in prisons throughout in America may never be able to sleep next to their partner or have sex, ever again.

As Myesha waits outside the gate, I ask her to describe the process for going inside the prison for a conjugal visit. Looking at the door stamped VISITOR, Myesha says, “I’m waiting for the family visit coordinator to come. (Officer) Foster. He’ll come and he’ll take me in there,” she says looking past the door into a space where officers will check her belongings. “He’ll get my bags and go through them instead of the metal detector. Then I go through the metal detector. I also go inside and pick out some movies, dominoes, that type of thing. Then he’ll grab my stuff, put it in the trunk, and take me down to see my husband.”

Watching Myesha pass through security, I imagine this prison approved sex will happen someplace prison-like, in a tiny room with a bare mattress. They’ll give them an hour.

Turns out, it’s not like that at all.

After passing through a metal detector Officer Foster helps Myesha carry her duffle bag and personal things to the car. It’s his job to escort the previous visitor out, and turn right back around and drive Myesha, in. One in, one out.

It’s a long drive around the edge of the prison, through a big gated checkpoint and up to a small one-story building surrounded by chain-link fence that’s topped with razor wire. An officer looks down from a watchtower nearby.

Marcello Paul, a big man with dreadlocks, gold capped teeth and a beaming smile walks to the opposite side of the locked gate and waits.

When it’s opened, Marcello and Myesha give each other a quick hug, and help carry the bags and pre-ordered food into the apartment.

While Myesha puts the food into the refrigerator, Marcello gives me a tour of the two-bedroom apartment.

There are cabinets with dishes, cups, bowls and plates, a microwave, sink and stove. There’s a table where Marcello says they say grace and play games. In the living room is a puffy black couch and chair. Marcello says it’s black leather. It’s not really leather, but it’s nice.

There are two bedrooms. The first has a worn double mattress on a metal frame. Marcello says he does a pre-clean to make sure everything is intact and washed, and then two days later, when it’s time to go, he cleans everything again, so it’s just the same as when they came in.

Turning from the first bedroom, is a bathroom with a door on it. That’s no small thing inside prison where toilets are public.

Looking into the spare room, a portable baby crib leans against the wall. Some couples bring their children along on a family visit. Myseha and Marcello don’t have any shared children so they spend their weekends alone.

In the middle of the room is a double bed, metal springs sticking out the edge of the mattress. But it’s the large round wet spot in the middle of the mattress we’re both looking at. Marcello says he’ll turn the mattress over and lay down a lot of blankets on top of the mattress.

Standing with Marcello, looking around, if it weren’t for the two officers standing in the middle of the room, it’d seem like a pretty normal apartment.

The officer tells me it’s time to go. Marcello and Myesha get just 48 hours together in the apartment. Once a month.

Myesha says they’ve been together 14 years. They met and fell in love while Myesha, a home health care worker, was taking care of Marcello’s mom. Marcello had committed a robbery before they met and gotten away with it. But eventually, it caught up with him and he was sentenced to 10 years. He’s done five of them.

I think about them all weekend.

Monday morning, I go back and meet up with Myesha as she’s coming out. We sit in her car and talk. She says the weekend with Marcello, “was good. It’s always good. Just don’t like going home.”

“Why?” I ask.

“I’m leaving my husband behind,” Myesha says. “We sat outside and played dominoes on Saturday. After that we went in and watched TV, watched movies.” She says they started with The Wire.

She tells me they pulled the bed into the living room so they could lie together while they watched. They cooked burgers and tacos. They listened to music. And sure, she says, they had sex. I ask if they ever have a conjugal visit when they don’t have sex. Myesha pauses, then says, “No. I mean we might have a conjugal visit where we don’t have as much sex as the one before. But no.”

But she says, for her a conjugal visit really isn’t about the sex. It’s about the smaller, quieter things, like Marcello waking her up in the morning, “It feels good,” she says, “because I don’t get that at home. Ya know. At home I’m sleeping by myself, unless my grandbaby or one of my kids wanna sleep with me. But they’re grown. But they still do sleep with me sometimes. But other than that, ya know, I’m waking myself up in the morning, or the alarm clock is waking me up, or my grandson comes and wakes me up. It’s good to have my husband waking me up.

“It’s the nicest thing about being married,” I say, “isn’t it? Waking up?”

“Yeah,” Myesha says, “Together.”

“Not alone,” I say, “You look up and there’s that person.”

“Yeah. I think he watches me through the night,” Myesha says, “ I know he do cause sometimes I wake up and he’s looking at me. And I do the same to him. Sometimes he’s sleeping and he wakes up and I’m watching him.”

While we’re sitting in her car, talking, her cell phone rings. It’s Marcello calling to make sure Myesha gets home safe.

Even though conjugal visits aren’t allowed in most US prisons, in many countries they’re common. Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Russia, Spain, and Saudi Arabia all allow inmates and their partners to have conjugal visits. Mexico considers them a universal privilege and even allows families to move into prisons and live with their imprisoned relative.

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All photos courtesy Nancy Mullane.

Edited By: Sally Herships

Produced By: Kaitlin Prest

Advisory Panel Scholar: Hadar Aviram

Music Composed by: Lawrence English

When Jairo started 10th grade, his mom asked him to stay home from school to watch his younger siblings while she went to work. He failed all of his classes that year.

“I did wrong in making you stay, but I didn't have an option,” his mom said. “At the time I sacrificed you. It was either good grades for you and you’d go to school, or we were going to suffer and lack necessities...it’s a balance.”

Jairo learned that the odds would be stacked against him if he didn't start focusing on his education.

LISTEN to Jairo's intimate first-person account of the very real choices about education and work that kids growing up in poverty have to make every day.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

How Jairo’s family has changed:

There are nine of us in my family and we live in a one-bedroom apartment. I share a bunk bed with my sister Judy. I used to think of my family as middle class – we’d go out to eat a lot and I could ask for clothes sometimes. But after my parents split up, my mom had four more kids and that all stopped.

How Jairo calculated his socioeconomic status:

I asked my mom to do the math, and she said right now my family makes $30,000 a year – according to the federal government we’re $15,000 below the poverty line. That kind of scares me. 

Jairo reflects on class difference:

It gets me mad that my mom works so hard. And there are people out there who are just born into it, they make money like nothing, they don’t have to clean houses, wake up early, drain themselves.

Jairo on his future:

I know I should be thinking about going to college when I graduate if I don’t want that life. But I’d have to stay at home to afford it. Nine of us in a one bedroom apartment, no privacy, one bathroom, and toys everywhere—I don’t know if I can make myself do it.

 

The series is part of American Graduate, a public media initiative addressing the dropout crisis, supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In 1914, the government of New York City took ownership of a Manhattan apartment building belonging to one David Hess. The city used a legal power called eminent domain, allowing governments to seize private property for public use—in this case they wanted to expand the subway system. Hess fought them and lost, and when all was said and done, his building was torn down, and he was left with a triangle shaped piece of property. It was about the size of a large slice of pizza.

[Hess's triangle is still there, at corner of Christopher St and 7th avenue in the west village. Credit: Sam Greenspan]

Later, the city tried to get him to donate his pizza-shaped property so that they could build a sidewalk. He refused again. They built the sidewalk anyway, and in the middle of the sidewalk is Hess’s triangle, with a tile mosaic that reads: “Property of the Hess Estate Which Has Never Been Dedicated For Public Purposes.”

People such as David Hess, who refuse to sell their properties, are called holdouts. Eminent domain generally only comes into play when the government wants private property for public use (though there have been some exceptions).  If it’s a private development that wants your place and you refuse to sell, there’s often not much they can do. In China, where there’s been development boom in recent years, they call their holdout houses “nail houses.”

["Nail house" in China Credit: Zhou Shuguang]

Around 2005, a Seattle neighborhood called Ballard started to see unprecedented growth. Condominiums and apartment buildings were sprouting up all over the community which had once been mostly single family homes and small businesses. Around this time, developers offered a woman named Edith Macefield $750,000 dollars for her small house, which was appraised at around $120,000. They wanted to build a shopping mall on the block where Macefield had lived for the last 50 years.

Macefield turned down the money. Developers went forward with the shopping mall anyway. The mall enveloped her house on three sides.

[Edith Macefield's house. Credit: Ben Tesch]

The architects designed the building in such a way that if Mrs. Macefield ever decided to move, they could easily incorporate the space where her had been into the building. The developers eventually increased their offer to one million dollars, plus they offered to find her a similar home somewhere else, and pay for a home health-care work for Macefield who was elderly and in poor health.

Again, Edit Macefield turned them down.

[Aerial view of Edith Macefield's house (left of the green crane). Credit: Barry Martin]

The press loved Edith Macefield’s “David and Goliath” story of an old woman versus the big, bad developers. But even though the press was clamoring to talk to Macefield, she wanted nothing to do with talking to them (as evidenced in this CBS segment).

Slowly, Macefield warmed to some of the construction workers on the project, especially Barry Martin, the project superintendent who would check in on her occasionally and drop off business cards, telling her to call if she needed anything.

She eventually asked Martin to take her to a hair appointment.

[Edith Macefield and Barry Martin on their way to get her hair done. Photo courtesy of Barry Martin]

Soon thereafter, Barry Martin began taking Edith Macefield to all of her appointments—and then, because it was easier to coordinate with his schedule, he started making them.

Spending all of this time together, Martin got to know Macefield well. He learned that she wasn’t mad about the way her community was changing. She wasn’t even mad about the mall they were building more or less on top of her house. On the contrary, she seemed happy to have the company.

[Edith Macefield. Credit: Barry Martin]

Macefield was an avid reader and loved to talk about books, listen to old music (a lot of opera and big-band music, according to Martin) and watch old movies. She was also a writer. Her longest work was a 1,138 page work of fiction entitled, Where Yesterday Began. She paid to have the book published in 1994 under the pen name “Domilini”.

[Domilini was Edith Macefield's nome de plume. Image courtesy of Barry Martin]

As Martin got to know Macefield, she told him stories about her past that were so incredible that he found them hard to believe. For example, she said that she’d been a spy for the British during World War II, and that she’d been captured spying and spent time in the German concentration camp of Dachau. She also said she’d taken care of a number of war orphans in England after the war with her then-husband, James Macefield.  And on top of all of that, she claimed that Benny Goodman was her cousin and that she had played music with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey.

Macefield played both saxophone and clarinet.

[Macefield as a young woman with her saxophone. Photo courtesy of Barry Martin]

Barry Martin eventually became Edith Macefield’s main care-giver — making most of her meals, visiting with her on weekends and even attending to her in the middle of the night if she called and said she needed him. She finally agreed to live-in nurse when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but even then, Martin became her power of attorney—the person whom she put in charge of her final decisions.

Edith Macefield died in her house on June 15, 2008, at age 86.

She left her house to Barry Martin—the construction superintendent who became her friend while simultaneously sandwiching her house between a Trader Joes and an LA Fitness.

After she died, Martin began packing up Macefield’s house and looking for things that would confirm the crazy stories she told about her past. He never found anything about her escaping Dachau or caring for any war orphans. But he did find a Benny Goodman record with a written inscription that said “To my cousin Edith, with love, Benny.” He also found the below correspondence:

[Correspondence from Benny Goodman to Edith. Courtesy of Barry Martin]

After people found out that Edith Macefield had  left her house to Barry Martin, there were some who called him an opportunist. Ultimately it’s hard for anyone other than Martin to know what his motivations were, but we did talk to a couple of the healthcare workers who took care of Mrs. Macefield before she died and they both had a very high opinion of him – said that he was there every day when no one else was and that he seemed to care deeply for Macefield.

Martin eventually sold Edith Macefield’s house to an investor who had various plansfor it, none of which have materialized, and recently that same investor asked Martin if he’d be interested in buying it back.

The house is all boarded up now, and no one’s sure what will happen to it, which is sad to some people but Martin says that Macefield didn’t care what happened to the house after she died—that she never really cared about the bigger story that the outside world had created about her. She had her own personal reasons for staying in her house and they had nothing to do with that narrative.

[Macefield's house in 2014. Credit: Kathy Mulady]

Whatever her reasons were for doing it, she stood her ground. And she became a symbol, whether she wanted to or not. There’s even a tattoo shop in Seattle that does a special tattoo to honor the legacy of Edith Macefield. It’s a picture of her little house, and underneath it—the word “Steadfast”.

Producer Katie Mingle spoke with project superintendent, Barry Martin, journalist Kathy Mulady, and home health-care workers Karen Smith and Cathy Bailey for this story. . Featured image by Flickr user Milo Tobin.

Barry Martin wrote a book about his experience with Edith Macefield called Under One Roof.

Historian David Wallace Adams tells the story of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School football team, who were successful on the field - but not always at dispelling stereotypes. This piece is an excerpt from the BackStory episode "Imagined Nations: Depictions of American Indians."

An film without pictures, about a veteran who hears voices.

Performed by Christian Paluck, Carly Monardo, Tom Stephens, Louis Kornfeld, Jon Keller, Kerry Kastin, Nick Mykins, Aina Rapoza, and Ashley Wilson.

With special musical guest Elizabeth Ziman (of Elizabeth and the Catapult), singing "True Love Will Find You in the End" by Daniel Johnston.

Written by Louis Kornfeld and developed collaboratively by The Truth, with dialogue improvised by the actors.

Produced and directed by Jonathan Mitchell.