“Old Boys, Old Girls” was first published in the May 3, 2004, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected and is currently most readily available in All Aunt Hagar's Children (HarperCollins).

The students filed into the class wearing blue jumpsuits. There were three of them, black men in their late teens and early twenties—youthful off enders in the parlance of the prison system. They took seats in chairs designed to be too flimsy to do any damage if thrown, around a table too heavy to be lifted by a single person, and thus unable to be used as a weapon.

I was a guest in their class, in their house. My first time inside a prison. Two of the students immediately expressed their enchantment with the mechanics of writing, but more so the magic of becoming taken with a story while reading— “movies for your mind” one student dubbed it.

The third student—let's call him K.—was a quieter sort, avoiding eye contact lest he be called on. Later I found out he signed up for classes mainly to get out of his cell, for something to do amidst the monotony of prison. He rarely completed the work, and that was fine.

After we talked some, I opened a book of my stories to read a bit. When I glanced up between sentences, I could see K. smiling and laughing at the story's humorous turns. K.'s teacher sat to the right of me, also smiling, amused by K.'s change in demeanor. K. locked eyes with his teacher and without a second thought, righted his face, turning his smile not into a scowl exactly, but into something steelier than a grin.

Inside the prison, I imagine, a smile isn't very rich currency. In Edward P. Jones's short story “Old Boys, Old Girls” from his second collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children, one of the first lessons Caesar Matthews learns upon entering prison for a murder charge is not to avoid smiling—he knows this from the brutal life he's lived to this point—it's that to survive in the prison environment one must practice total domination.