What to do in solitary confinement? Be a hieroglyph scholar, of course
UNITED STATES: The letter to the editor of a prestigious archaeology magazine came from inmate No J81961 at Tehachapi State Prison.
Prisoner Timothy Fenstermacher, a high-school dropout, disagreed with an article by an archaeologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Archaeologist Orly Goldwasser had based her story on the birth of the alphabet in part on the appearance of the rare ‘‘Sinai hieroglyph’’, which she said was used in the Sinai during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom.
Fenstermacher thought otherwise. ‘‘I believe the rarity of this hieroglyph has been overstated,’’ he wrote to Biblical Archaeology Review.
Drawing on expertise gleaned from books sent to him in prison, improvised flash-card drills and correspondence with scholars, Fenstermacher gave examples of the hieroglyph’s appearance outside the Sinai.
The magazine published his letter, just as it has others from prisoner J81961.
‘‘The extent of this guy’s selftaught scholarship is mindboggling,’’ said the review’s editor, Hershel Shanks, adding that his staff had grown ‘‘quite fond’’ of Fenstermacher. ‘‘I wonder how a man could come from such difficulty and achieve such heights of scholarship.’’
Many prisoners pass time building up their bodies, studying law or writing bitter letters. Inspired by a chance reading of the Biblical Archaeology Review in a prison waiting room, Fenstermacher focused on learning. He began studying Egyptian history and language, and writing to scholars.
His knowledge does not approach that of archaeologists who have spent years in formal training, but those he writes to say he is special.
‘‘He is a natural for linguistics, working out on his own the mechanics of grammar, etcetera,’’ re- tired Egyptologist Joyce Bartels, of Lombard, Illinois, said. She has sent Fenstermacher books from her library and printouts from the internet and elsewhere.
Goldwasser also sends him copies of her recent papers and books on Egyptian grammar and other research topics.
Few would have predicted two decades ago that Fenstermacher’s life would go this way. He was a wild young man running with the wrong group, say people who know him. His escapades culminated with his stabbing a man during a fight in the San Diego County community of Lakeside.
In 1996, Fenstermacher, then 24, was sentenced to 16 years in prison for felony assault, a period extended by three years after an altercation with a prison guard.
The prison confrontation landed him in solitary confinement, where he thrived because he could focus on Egyptology. When time came to return to the general prison population, he sought and won permission to remain in solitary.
Using the cartons from his allotment of morning milk, Fenstermacher made flash-cards, each bearing a single hieroglyph – four a day for a decade. He read the cards while he worked out, forcing himself to get five right before switching exercises.
‘‘Fortunately, I’ve been blessed with a phenomenal memory,’’ he said. He now has what he calls ‘‘a small dictionary in my head’’. He asked the couple who once had been his legal guardians, Mary and Richard Dinnen, of El Cajon, to buy him a subscription to Biblical Archaeology Review. Mary responded that ‘‘I was wasting my time’’, Fenstermacher said. But they still got him the subscription.
Relatives and friends began buying him books: The History and Geography of Human Genes, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel and others.
A cousin in Minneapolis, David Sweet, sent him several books. Fenstermacher has no access to a telephone or the internet, so Sweet also prints out and sends scientific articles.
‘‘He has not let the situation defeat him and make him bitter or hopeless or angry,’’ said Sweet, who has travelled to California twice to visit Fenstermacher in prison. ‘‘I am very proud of him.’’
Fenstermacher’s path to prison was similar to that of many inmates, his sister, Julia Simonson, said. Their father abandoned the family when both children were very young.
Their mother remarried, but their stepfather ‘‘was physically abusive to mum and verbally and physically said.
When her brother was 4, their mother developed cancer ‘‘and couldn’t really protect us’’, Simonson said. ‘‘When we lost her, Tim was lost. He never replaced that love.’’ The mother had arranged for her cousins, the Dinnens, to become her children’s guardians upon her death.
Mary Dinnen said Fenstermacher suffered from attention deficit disorder and struggled in school. If he found something that interested him, however, he could focus.
He once took a strong interest in bugs and other critters. ‘‘Every day, he was catching frogs, crawdads, spiders, snakes, lizards and frogs,’’ she said. ‘‘He knew every fact about every insect.’’
On Simonson’s 15th birthday, the Dinnens sent the children to live with their biological father, a man they did not know well.
After six months, their father put them out on the street. Fenstermacher became a ward of the court. He was sent to foster homes and continually ran away.
His grandmother ultimately took him in, but she lived in a poor, high-crime neighbourhood and he fell in with the wrong crowd, Simonson said.
Fenstermacher had a couple of minor run-ins with the law. Then, in 1995, court records in San Diego show, he went to Lindo Lake Park,
abusive
to
Tim,’’
she in Lakeside, to retaliate against Latinos for an earlier fight. Fenstermacher, who is white, stabbed a Latino in the back.
The man survived, but the attack was considered a hate crime, which pushed Fenstermacher’s sentence higher.
Fenstermacher, now 40, said prison life is what finally set him straight. ‘‘I had a potential for life in prison,’’ he said. His turning point came in 2000. That is when he started reading extensively about the early history of humans – agriculture, animal husbandry, civilisation-building. He started writing down hieroglyphs and accumulating transliterations, and asked Richard Dinnen to find more material on the internet.
Fenstermacher can now count his remaining prison time in months instead of years. He is scheduled for release in March 2013, two years early because of good behaviour.
He has no firm plans for life after prison, he says, other than: ‘‘I’m not coming back. This is done.’’ He has thought about driving a truck. He has thought about writing a book, ‘‘perhaps about the biological diversity of the Nile, or paintings from tombs’’. He has even thought about teaching a class in hieroglyphics.
‘‘I would love to go to school,’’ he said. ‘‘I would jump on it in a heartbeat.’’