The Story of Buzz and Janie and Danny
It has been clear for some time that completing our series of planned posts on “Education in a Time of Pandemic” has become difficult, painful even. The final planned post, on the many well-funded efforts to privatize American public education by stealth, will have to wait for a bit as we go on holiday from the darkness enveloping our world to seek out the light.
We woke up this morning determined to find a more uplifting topic to use as a launching-pad. It took several hours, but we found one, on a site we visit occasionally when we’ve a mind to read in-depth, reflective writing on a wide variety of subjects. Appropriately enough, the site is called “longreads.” The piece we chose, “Raphael Couldn’t Have Painted Something More Beautiful,” was published in an online magazine called The Atavist, which we weren’t familiar with – one of the pleasures of longreads is that its selections come from all sorts of out-of-the-way sources.
The story is set in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and concerns only three people – Buzz Alexander and Janie Paul (Buzz was a Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan; Janie, an artist who taught color theory at the University’s School of Art & Design) and a man named Danny Valentine, and of how Buzz and Janie first saved Danny’s life (literally and metaphorically), and of how Danny subsequently saved theirs.
Here’s what happened: Buzz and Janie met at an artists’ residency in 1992 (“Like Buzz, Janie believed in art as politics, art as liberation, art as a means of building bridges. By the end of the canoe trip, they were friends. By the end of the residency, they were in love”) ; Buzz spent his 1993 sabbatical year in NYC with Janie, and when the year was over, she managed to land a job in Ann Arbor and moved there.
Before meeting Janie, Buzz had become involved in art outreach for prisoners (Michigan’s prison population had gone from under 10,000 to over 30,000 in the 20 years he’d been living in Ann Arbor). Once Janie became his life partner, that outreach expanded, and grew to include the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), a University of Michigan program “dedicated to promoting the arts behind bars.” ([Both Janie and Buzz] “thought academia was too conservative, a stodgy bubble where people indulged in niche pursuits. They preferred to invest their energy in civic engagement, and especially in making art more accessible.”)
One of the program’s features became a yearly exhibition of artwork by prisoners, hosted by one of the University’s art galleries. Works were for sale, with proceeds to go to the artists themselves. In order to gather ideas about possible artist-exhibitors, Buzz wrote to a number of the prisons PCAP was already working with. This was in 1995. And here’s where Danny enters their lives.
The director of a prison in Jackson proposed a man who, in his words, “could do anything.” He could sculpt, he could model, he could paint, he could draw – an all-round master of every technique available to him. And so, Buzz wrote a letter to prisoner number 156689. His name was Danny Valentine.
Danny’s story was light-years apart from those of Buzz (Harvard, Cambridge, Harvard, Michigan) and Janie (Hunter College, NYU, Michigan). He’d grown up as the second of five children in a blue-collar family in Ann Arbor. There was a fair amount of violence in the family; Danny had found solace by teaching himself to draw at the age of six.
He first ran away from home when he was 12; his father called the police, and thus began Danny’s long carceral career – he was in and out of jails and prisons until, as so often happens with young men who’ve had an early acquaintance with the injustice system, he was accused of rape (he claimed he was innocent) and sentenced to 20-30 years in prison.
During his first years in prison – not long before his path crosses that of Buzz and Janie – he married his girlfriend, Diane, who served as his lifeline for a short period. But she moved to another town, began seeing someone else, and served him with divorce papers not long after. He signed them. Here’s Danny in the fall of 1995:
Danny was just shy of 35. He had served four years of his sentence and didn’t think he could last even one more day. He planned to kill himself one evening at chow time, and he had two backup plans in case jumping from the rafters of his cell block’s atrium didn’t work: a noose and a fatal shot of heroin.
The way Danny would later tell it, as he was contemplating the last hours of his life, a guard tossed a letter through the bars of his cell. He told himself he had no interest in what it said—anything that threatened to get between him and his impending oblivion felt meaningless. He tried to ignore the envelope on his bunk, but some force compelled him to open it.
Inside, printed on University of Michigan letterhead was an invitation. Danny would read it countless times in the coming hours and days and years. Dear Daniel Valentine, he remembers it saying. I am Buzz Alexander, professor of English literature at the University of Michigan. My colleague Janie Paul and I are organizing our first annual show of art by Michigan prisoners next spring. I have heard you are a terrific artist and would like to know if you would be represented in our exhibition.
Danny decided to keep on living, and participated in PCAP art exhibitions for 20 years.
The first PCAP exhibition Danny took part in (with two works) was in spring 1996; he didn’t meet Buzz and Janie, however, until 2004, eight years after he’d begun exhibiting with the program.
Janie on that first meeting:
I remember looking into his face and grabbing his hands between my hands. I could feel his presence as I had felt his presence in his drawings. The intensity of the work comes partly from the content, which is often about loving relationships between mother and child, man and woman, but also from the intensity of the labor that goes into the drawing.
Danny’s memory of that same moment:
I felt the same kindred connection as when I opened that letter from Buzz the first time. I felt like I had met the other half.
Danny was up for parole in 2011, and Buzz and Janie wrote a letter in support of his release. But his request was rejected, and he vowed never to apply again – he’d serve out his full term.
Then in 2013, Danny was released without prior notification (perhaps the prison needed to free up beds). He’d served 23 years – by that time, he was in his early fifties. He was taken by his brother to a halfway house, where he’d have six months to get his life together. With an inheritance from his father, he bought a Dodge Caravan – if he became homeless, he’d be able to live in his car. He’d never had a bank account, never used a cell phone, and his prospects for regular employment as a registered sex offender were slim to nil. He ended up moving to northern Michigan, a long drive from Ann Arbor and Buzz and Janie’s beautiful, book- and art-filled home, where they’d hosted him for a blueberry pancake breakfast following his release.
After he left the halfway house, Danny moved in with his ex-wife and her boyfriend; eventually, she found him a trailer home located in the Upper Peninsula (six+ hours from Ann Arbor); the owner said he could live there rent-free if he fixed it up. He was alone, without friends, without colleagues, and had once again begun contemplating suicide.
On Christmas Eve 2016, Danny got a call from Janie – they’d stayed in touch since his release, and he would occasionally drove down to Ann Arbor to visit them – asking him to come and stay with them. Buzz had been diagnosed with frontotemporal degeneration (FTD) in 2014, and Janie was desperate; she could no longer care for him on her own.
Danny arrived at their home on Christmas Day 2016 after a 12-hour drive in a driving snowstorm, and not long after this he determined that he would stay “until the end.”
Caring for those in the latter stages of dementia is exhausting and psychically stressful – Danny had had no previous experience with caregiving, but he became Buzz’s full-time caregiver in the final years of his life. The title of the essay is taken from this brief anecdote, relayed by Gillian Eaton, Buzz and Janie’s best friend:
Eaton recalled coming into the house once to find Danny hunched over Buzz’s feet, clipping his toenails. “Raphael couldn’t have painted something more beautiful,” she said.
As the disease progressed, Buzz lost more and more cognitive and motor functions, along with the ability to express his thoughts in words, an academic and intellectual’s foremost connection with reality. Danny seemed to sense, intuitively, what Buzz needed on any given day, and he devised ingenious methods of adjusting to his declining skills – for example, when he lost the ability to use eating utensils, Danny devised an entire menu made up of finger foods.
Dementia is both terrifying and puzzling as cognitive functions drop away in no particular order for any given individual – there’s no cure for FTD, it’s fatal, but there is oddness about its progression:
There were days when Danny took Buzz on long drives. They loved these outings. Their first stop was McDonald’s. “We’d order chocolate milkshakes, and he’d suck his right down and reach over and grab mine,” Danny said. Buzz still had his sense of direction, and he’d point Danny here or there, to a house where he once lived or the place on campus where his office used to be. One time, Danny recalled, “he started crying a little bit. He pointed, he tried to tell me something, and it sounded like speaking in tongues.”
“Yeah, Buzz, I know,” Danny said. “You worked there for 47 years.”
Buzz just shook his head
In early September 2019, Buzz stopped eating and drinking – he could no longer swallow. A hospice nurse was called in, but Janie and Danny were always near him as well. Buzz passed away on September 19, twelve days after he’d stopped eating.
Now, Danny and Janie are together – theirs is not a conventional story, or even a romance, but perhaps it is something more precious, more profound. Their relationship seems to us to be a real-life example of a form of love we touched on in our Valentine’s Day post:
“Even now, with Buzz no longer here, Danny and I still feel like there’s this circle of love,” Janie explained. “I want to maintain my connection to Buzz through Danny and me taking care of each other.” Danny described himself and Janie as “bound by memories of Buzz.” He’d taken to wearing a bracelet and a watch of Buzz’s. He often cried when he talked about his friend, about what three years of being by his side as he died had meant. “I wish him back every day,” Danny said.
Danny and Janie, Janie and Danny—now they were a pair, a package deal, born of necessity and intimacy. “They filled each other’s loneliness in a way I don’t think anyone else could,” Eaton said. “They needed each other to look after Buzz, but now they need each other to look after each other.
This exceptional piece, by Kelly Loudenberg, opens with a quotation from 1 Cor. 4-8:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”
The Greek word, of course, is agape / αγάπη.
The Michigan Daily published a long appreciation of Buzz Alexander following his death which includes reminiscences by friends and former students who’d taken his classes and become involved with the PCAP. One of the testimonials:
Sara Falls, a high school English teacher in California, took Alexander’s “What is Literature?” and “Theater and Social Change” classes at the University, the latter involving improvisational theater in prisons. Alexander’s readings and discussions on prison justice got her thinking more deeply about how the education system can create a pipeline to prison, eventually compelling her to become a teacher herself.
“He started to get me to think about what it means to be a teacher,” Falls said. “This is my 20th year teaching, and I don’t think I’d be a teacher if it wasn’t for him. It’s my life’s work, and I feel deeply called to it, because it’s about finding the power in young people and helping them to use their voices and helping them feel powerful in themselves to make change.”
Can there be a more eloquent description of the mission of a teacher? We think not.