He Was a Star Student—He Had Also Committed a Grisly Murder. One Teacher Tries to Make Sense Of It.
Twenty years ago, Matt W. Miller found himself teaching a man who was responsible for an unimaginably horrific crime. He turned his back on him just when he needed him and has regretted it ever since.
We are so pleased to get to share with you this moving story, “One of My Babies,” from 2024 Narratively Memoir Prize finalist Matt W. Miller, an acclaimed poet who has recently taken up essay writing. Here’s what Matt said about working on this piece: “I’ve been thinking about and trying to write about, in poetry and prose, this experience for over 20 years now. I never quite arrived at what I was trying to say. I think only now, in middle age, with years of teaching behind me, was I able to really understand this moment. In many ways, this essay is a letter to a student, to any of my students, that I may have failed along the way.” Buckle up for this one, which asks the big questions and takes your emotions on a serious ride, leaving you with all the feels. Kleenex recommended.
One of My Babies
What I recall about the prison is the smell. Not some dirty or rotting smell or even the fleshy old cheese odor of people who worked too hard and lacked proper access to deodorant. It was not that at all, even if that was what I expected when I was first buzzed into New Hampshire State Prison for Men to teach a class in literature and creative writing. No, the smell was clean. Too clean. Even beyond the antiseptic clean of a hospital. This was a scrubbed-too-hard-with-rendered-animal-fat-soap clean. This was a rub-the-skin-raw kind of clean. As I walked into the prison, it was everywhere. It was the kind of clean that made you feel filthy, like you could never be clean enough, scrub hard enough to be right. You could see it on the men too — their skin was dry and tough-looking, ruddy from scrubbing with the fierce, heavy waters that came out of the old pipes in this place. The correctional officers carried it on them too, but it was mixed with whatever they brought with them from the outside: a wife’s perfume, cigarette smoke or the meat sweat of some steak and cheese sub they’d eaten at a pizza place right before their shift.
It's not too late to reconnect with him. It's really the least you can do since you took the time to use his situation and that of his victims to get attention for yourself 🤷