In Stephen King’s It, the evil entity Pennywise adopts the form of a clown to terrorize a group of children by preying on their individual worries, fears, and nightmares. To the children, the villain’s power begins to separate and isolate them, and that, they realize, is the precise origin and explanation for its hateful existence. “Don’t you see what he is doing to us?” one girl yells to her friends, “It wants to divide us!” To Texas prisoner Bobby Delgado, the refrain and reason behind the villain’s power makes too much sense.
Raised in a small and segregated Texan town, Delgado considers the clown as representative of the distrust and violence that kept him and his friends apart, unable to access “white-only” spaces, and unable to sometimes stay together. A Chicano boy with Black friends, Delgado admits he accepted the clown’s tactics too easily. Sometimes, he relied on his light complexion to abandon his friends, to leave them outside as he sat at a restaurant or enjoyed a movie. Alienation and separation based on irrational fears did not end there. Even as a prisoner, Delgado understands how King’s nightmarish creation parallels the divisions one sees appear in prison. This is a world where individuals cannot band together, where they must accept partitions based on race and heritage, and worst of all, where the tactics of a villain like Pennywise win.
Stephen King is hardly the only piece of culture Bobby Delgado uses to communicate. A glance at Delgado’s essay reveals a person with remarkably wide cultural taste: Harry Potter, Tarzan, true crime about Samuel Little, histories of Atilla the Hun, newspapers, and reports on Emma Chamberlin and Greta Thunberg. What should surprise one is not this list of what prisoner Bobby Delgado reads or watches, or the simple fact that he reads or watches. After all, despite the prevalence of illiteracy in prisons—especially among Black and Latinx populations—it is reported that readers in prison use the library at far higher rates that non-prisoners.
No, what is fascinating and worth pausing on is something else entirely: how he reads. Delgado moves away from the conventional mode of reading for a morality lesson. He does not seek to understand meaning or symbols within a story, the way literature students often are taught to do in college classes. Rather, he adopts what Professor Peter Khost terms, in Rhetor Response, an “affordance”, otherwise known as the practice of embracing and using literature because it is integral or feels so to our lives. In this sense, literature and culture afford us and Delgado a way to embrace what is otherwise difficult or impossible to express. Stephen King’s killer clown encapsulates dangerous divisions in town and within prison. Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility evokes his hiding behind his being “light complected.” Atilla the Hun’s brutality equal the prison’s guards. When he gets away with passing for white as a child, Tarzan is how he feels, someone who, in a dangerous jungle called prison, capitulates to whiteness while wanting to help other Black and Chicano individuals.
Literature is a reference point to invite us in and make the most challenging truths known without Delgado always having to be explicit. It is most telling in a passage about violence and gangs inside the prison. In this story, inmates form gangs and become guards themselves. Brutal actions committed to one another force him to withdraw to the world of Tarzan. He is once again the titular character, stuck with a twisted and unfair question about race, where the guards make certain members “the lions in the jungle” who he must fight.
How Bobby Delgado reads is for connection. His “affordance” of literature is a force that contrast segregation and individualism, a force that can make known how those in power seek to divide so many. His cycling of titles is not to display his eclectic taste. Rather, it is an effort to reach out, to find common ground with any reader, a way to help the non-prisoner make sense of his life, and a way to bring us together.
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