Growing Up on Alcatraz

Summary

On a gray May morning — that’s to say a typical San Francisco May morning — in 2014, my mother, my wife, and I convened at Pier 33 to ride to Alcatraz, along with a literal boatload of tourists.But we were on a secret mission.Hours earlier, before leaving the Peninsula, I had opened the box containing my father’s ashes and portioned out perhaps a pint of the coarse, bone-white powder. I’m afraid we hadn’t planned with an eye for ceremony. There were no satin or fine linen sachets; just Ziplocs. My memories of that day are fragmentary — isolated impressions, really, which is, all too often, what little we retain of moments like those. I don’t even remember whose idea it was to leave a part of my father’s remains on Alcatraz. It certainly wasn’t my father’s expressed wish, but there was no question that he would’ve wanted to go home. My father was not a convict, but he nonetheless lived at Alcatraz for seventeen years of his life. In June 1934, his father Isaac Faulk, late of Grand Bay, Alabama, was a newly fledged member of the US Prison Service. He was assigned to live where he worked, arriving on Alcatraz with his wife, Esther, their nine-year-old son, Herb, who’d one day be my uncle, and little sister, Ruth, a girl who’d become my aunt. The four of them were the first guard’s family to settle into the newly opened prison complex for the nation’s most hardened criminals.Two years later, my father, Ed, was born. Until the day my grandfather retired from the prison service in 1954 and moved to San Francisco, Alcatraz was the only home my father would know. And he would have chosen no other. As he and many other children raised on the Island remembered it, Alcatraz was an idyllic small town, floating in the heart of San Francisco Bay. Despite the maximum security prison that shared the island, no one locked their doors. Indeed, as a toddler, my father used to call his neighbors yoo-hoos, because that’s how they’d announce themselves when they entered his house without...