Sean Wilsey Reads a Diary Entry by Charles Patrick Norman
Sean Wilsey reads a diary entry by Charles Patrick Norman, a prisoner at the Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach, Florida, at the 2009 event Breakout: Voices from Inside. Read the entry below.
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Charles Patrick Norman
Tomoka Correctional Institution
Daytona Beach, Florida
Thursday, May 15, 2008 7:15 AM
Dear Diary,
I grow flowers. I’ve been doing this all my life, off and on. Some of my earliest memories are of holding onto my grandmother’s skirt as she tended her flower and vegetable garden in the country near Redwater, Texas.
At Railford, in late 1980, I finally got permission to order flower seeds, germinate them under lights and grow them around our housing area. Everyone loved the colorful blooms, with a few exceptions, and I got approval to extend the flower program.
Over the years, transfers came to many different prisons across Florida, and I continued growing flowers.
Years after I left Railford, an old man arrived on the transfer to Polk, where I’d been a couple of years. He told the admitting guards, “Charlie Norman must be here.”
They told him yes, he was right. How did he know?
He gestured to the flower beds in the visiting park, the lines of flowers along the sidewalks, and told them the instant he saw all those flowers, he knew I was here. No one else in the prison system did that.
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