From a Silence Like Stone . . .

ou have the haunting sense of this huge, factory-like building," Gura says. "But in utter contrast to the noise and bustle of people working in a factory, this would have been a place virtually silent except perhaps for the orders of the turnkeys or the overseers who were in charge of the prisoners." This tomb-like silence, Gura says, inspired the title, Buried from the World.

Gura imagines the vast relief a prisoner must have felt, after having been sealed in his silence for months or for years, when at last it was his turn to tell the story of his life. The lives issued forth in astonishing detail. There was Jacob Richmond, a free black man from Wilmington, North Carolina, a whaler convicted of perjury. There were educated men such as G. F. Weems, a landed Virginian and aspiring clergyman whose dissipation as a "gentleman at large" led him at last into thievery. There was the "wild & vicious" John Jourdan, who discovered in prison a talent for art. There were adventure stories, such as the tale of Melzar Hatch, whose long list of captors included Barbary pirates and a British man-of-war. And there was a measure of comedy, as well, as when Alexander Palmer, an inmate working as an upholsterer, escaped, briefly, by concealing himself in a sofa.

Through this tapestry run several common threads. In most of the cases, prison seems to have been the inevitable destination of people handicapped by intemperance, little or no education, and difficult childhoods. In the notebooks, Curtis frequently selects the same poignant phrase to describe the prisoner’s youth—a child "thrown unprotected upon the world."

But Gura detects another theme that neither Curtis nor the reformers of his time had discerned. For one reason or another, the prisoners were aliens in the new economy, an economy of commerce and manufacturing. "Rather than awakening to the American dream," he writes, "they languished in the sepulchral silence of Charlestown and other state prisons where they presumably would be made more fit to assume their places in the outside world." The notebooks "provide a casualty list of those falling by the way as America was transformed into a successful industrial and mercantile power."

Gura sees some parallels today, as the age of information piles up a casualty list of its own. "I suspect a lot of the frustrations that we see in our current prison population have to do with this same sense of having been left behind, of not having had the opportunity," he says.

hatever the book’s implications for the present, its real value, Gura says, is what it reveals about the past. He has indexed each name that appears in the notebooks because his publisher believes that genealogists will use the book to fill in the branches of family trees. Historians and social scientists will mine the notebook entries for data. And the rest of us will discover the voyeuristic thrill of eavesdropping on the lives of men who had failed or refused to conform.

"You really do have a sense of seeing individual faces emerge from what was once this faceless mass of incarcerated individuals," Gura says. "And that’s why the book attracted me so much."

While the notebooks reveal the lives of the prisoners, they say very little about Jared Curtis himself. Fortunately, Gura found much of what he needed to know about Curtis from another source—a source here at home.

"I finally realized that Jared Curtis was the father of Moses Ashley Curtis, who was a very famous botanist who lived in Hillsborough," Gura says.

The papers of Moses Ashley Curtis were ready and waiting in the archives of Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection, just a few yards from Gura’s office. The papers included a great number of letters from Moses Ashley Curtis to his father, a lesser number of letters from father to son, and also Moses Ashley’s journals during the years when he was visiting his father at the prisons where he worked.

"The day I found those documents at the Southern Historical Collection I couldn’t believe my good fortune," Gura says.

The Jared Curtis depicted in these documents is a remarkable man, Gura says. At Charlestown, Curtis organized a school for the inmates and recruited local citizens to teach in it. Over the life of this school, hundreds of prominent citizens volunteered their time, getting to know the prisoners and increasing sympathy for them in the communities nearby.

Did the system work? From various sources, Gura finds evidence that Charlestown may have accomplished, in modest measure, some of its goals. Rates of incarceration and recidivism (men returning to prison) apparently declined, and after a few years of operation the prison contained fewer prisoners than it did when it opened. But however one might judge the merits of the prison itself, Jared Curtis emerges as a man both earnest and sincere, a man steadfast in his allegiance to the ideals of prison reform, to the belief that education and spiritual guidance would help to recover the value of men.

"One of the things I like to do in my work," Gura says, "is to resurrect people from the ‘dustbin of history,’ as the phrase goes. And I think people like Jared Curtis should be recognized for their work. So while this book is a monument to those who used to be nameless prisoners, it’s also a monument to the sincerity of this particular man."