Doing Time (35 page)

“Who was there?” I asked.

“I don't know — some lieutenants, that
pendejo
Jason, the captain, and two other guys who said they were from Washington, some agency I never heard of. They were the ones with the lie detector. Shit man, I didn't do anything.” She was breathing hard.

“How long were you in there?”

“Three hours.”

My heart dropped. Before I could stop myself, I said, “You were in there all that time? What did you say to them? I mean, that's a long time.”

Maria cut her eyes at me and froze. Just that fast, I had stopped being someone to comfort her, someone she could confide in. Now I was an immediate threat. I'd blown it before I could find out anything she'd said. Spending three hours with the police meant she'd told them lots of things. I tried to save the conversation by asking if my name had come up, but other than tell me that they'd called her because she lived next door, Maria had had nothing else to say. She stood up, wanting me to leave.

I went to my cell. Since my cell will never be my home or “house,” as the police like to call it, I don't keep a lot of things. But I do have a big, knitted blanket which I crawled under, trying to get warm and calm down so I could think. I was waking for the police to call me in for interrogation. I wasn't going to say one word, but I knew they'd physically keep me there and threaten me with new charges and more time.

From what Maria had said, I knew there was an outside investigation. It wasn't just the prison. Unlike all the other investigations I'd seen or heard about, this time they were going after the officer, not the prisoner. A few years ago, this other officer had been fucking every woman he could. Everyone knew it. He and a woman prisoner got busted in the shower by the night orderly. When the administration found out about it, the officer got transferred. A few months later we heard he'd gotten a promotion. All the women involved went to the hole for months. The difference: He was white.

“Chow line. Last call.” There was a rap on my door and Keisha barged in.

She stood over me, her arms crossed and her braid all messy. “No rest for the weary. GET UP!” she said. “I waited at dinner but I should've known you wouldn't show. We have work to do. You can't lie here like a vegetable. The whole compound is freaking out. Maria's wrists are black and blue and she's in the cafeteria crying. There are four extra cops on duty and the lieutenants are running around like there's gonna be a riot, and you're takin' a goddamned nap.” Keisha was barely controlling her voice.

“Tough shit,” I said. “I'm thinking.”

“You're not thinking,” Keisha said, her voice getting loud. “You're catatonic. You can't zone out now.”

“I'm trying to figure it out, okay? So leave it.” I could get loud too, if I wanted.

“No, I won't,” she said.

“It's none of your damn business. You're the one always telling me to stay away from the crap.”

“Listen here, and listen good. This isn't the same. One, this is about to become a lynching of one more black man, and two, you've been my friend and you're in it. So, it's a different case. Get it?” Keisha went on. “I know we always say you gotta do what you gotta do, but sometimes that just don't work. This is about race. A lynching. They're gonna take the word of that cracker Jane and screw Wilson to the wall. Don't you know that anytime a white girl says ‘rape by a black man,' the mob runs for a rope?”

“But he's a cop, Keisha.” My voice was catching.

“Yeh, he's a cop with a dick for brains. But he didn't rape her, did he?”

No he didn't, I thought. It got real silent. Then I said: “Look, I never told you about my case, and I don't really want to now, ‘cause I don't like to think about it. But I murdered this old guy. I pulled the plug on his life support because he begged me to. I did it because he was suffering and he couldn't stand it and I couldn't stand it either. He probably would've died in a couple of weeks, I don't know. But I'm the one who ended his life. As soon as the monitors went flat and I plugged them back in, I knew I was in deep shit. The heart machine alarm started buzzing, and I thought I'd go to prison for this. But I didn't. The hospital didn't want a scandal, so I lost my job and my license instead. And then I started selling drugs, which got me busted. But I'm still glad the old guy didn't have to keep suffering. So, I just get by in here. I just want to live through it and see the free light of day again. That's it. I'm afraid of more time, of a new case, of having to get into some shit that isn't mine, I'm in my own shit and I've fucked up my life and can barely manage that. You know I leave everyone alone, don't bother anyone, don't talk to the cops. I just do my time.”

Keisha sat down on the bed and put her arms around me. Sometime during that stream of words I'd started to cry.

“It's cool, Lee, it's okay. You're okay. What I'm trying to say is that I can't let it go down again. Every second of every day the shit I have to eat because I'm black . . . sometimes I just feel like choking someone. To me this whole thing is a black-white thing. And ‘cause I know you see it, even if you don't feel it, I thought you'd understand.” Her braid had come undone and she had tears in the corners of her eyes. We sat there a while. Then she got up and said, “I'll see you later, okay?” She walked out before I could say anything.

I cried until I couldn't breathe and my chest hurt. Then something cracked. I felt light. I could catch my breath. A really deep breath. I hadn't breathed that deep in years. I lay there feeling calm, looking at the early evening light coming into my cell. Keisha was right; I couldn't ride this one out, I wasn't going to be part of a lynch mob. Most of the time it's all so twisted and sick, but sometimes there's right and wrong, even in here.

Lucky for me they came before I lost my nerve. Four guards hustled me out of the cell, cuffed my hands behind my back, and almost carried me out of the unit. But I was ready. I was even sort of looking forward to it.

Segregation. The hole. There was very little light and the air was dank. The walls oozed. It had become cold outside, and the water pipes upstairs froze, then exploded, and when I put my hand to the wall it came away wet. I was trying to read the time away, holding my book open toward the light that came through the food slot in the door.

After they'd brought in the fifth Harlequin Romance, I'd thrown a fit. Then this cop came to the door with four thick paperbacks and tossed them through the slot. Now I was trying to read
Hawaii,
by James Michener, but all I kept thinking about was how much I wanted to be in Hawaii.

We call the hole “three hots and a cot.” Actually it's three of everything: cold food, cold water, cold weather; three hours a week outside and three showers a week. What I hate the most is never being able to get hot coffee.

Every time they come for me to go outside for recreation, I'm ready. Segregation's rec yard is the size of a basketball court, and it's chopped up into six little cages, each with a basketball hoop at the end. Sometimes, there's even a basketball. You walk into the cage one at a time, then the gate is locked. You put your hands through a slot and they take the cuffs off. Then you have sixty minutes. Beyond the cage is an open, grassy space, but it's off limits except for prisoners on landscape detail.

Keisha and Cakes appeared in that grassy area pushing an old hand lawnmower. They were hoping they wouldn't be stopped, but here it was forty degrees out and the snow was still on the ground. I could see my breath and had to jump up and down to stop my teeth from chattering. I had no coat. They came to about five yards from the fence.

“What's happening, my non-Nubian sister?” Cakes asked.

I smiled. “I feel like a fucking corpse, but what else is new?” I hoped they knew what was happening. Cakes said something to Keisha, then started stamping her feet. She took a cigarette and tried to light it, but couldn't because of the wind.

“I'd really like to get that whore,” Cakes said. “I really would. Lee, it's all fucked up,”

“They lynched him, Lee. They lynched him.” Keisha sounded hoarse, “Jane got transferred to some cushy joint, Maria got parole, and your poor ass is lying down for a year. But Wilson, they gave him twenty years. It was on the news. We saw it on TV. His wife and kids were in the courtroom and they all came out crying.” Keisha kicked the ground.

Cakes hollered: “What really pisses me off is watching all those happy crackers running around here like they won a prize or something.”

Then Keisha said something, but I couldn't hear her because the wind ate her words.

“What?” I yelled at her.

“Oh shit, I feel like I should be there instead of you. My advice sure didn't help anyone.”

Keys. I heard keys rattling behind me.

“Time's up, McMann,” the officer barked

“Damn,” I thought. “Okay,” I told the cop. “Just let me tie my shoes.” I turned back around.

“Keisha,” I yelled. “Cut it out. I'm all right with it. I really am. It's cool. It's Wilson who got destroyed.”

“Thank you,” Cakes said. “You hear that, Keisha? I told you she'd say that. She's all right. Lee is all right.”

And I was.

1993, Federal Correctional Institution Marianna
Marianna, Florida

Although men and, to a greater degree, women create surrogate families behind bars, in this section prisoners write of blood relations. Reconstructing childhood on paper is the consolation of hundreds. Tender mothers and grandmothers — the last to give up on prisoners — are everywhere in prison writing. Sometimes even evanescent fathers are honored, as in Jimmy Santiago Baca's “Ancestor.” Diane Hamill Metzger recalls a great-uncle who doubled as her grandfather.

To comb through the wreckage buried with their youth, some writers, like Barbara Saunders, choose indirection. Increasingly, men take on such themes. Alejo Dao'ud Rodriguez's narrator hears out another prisoner's story of damage untold in court and barely understood by the teller. Though Rodriguez himself has not sat on death row, his poem draws on the fact that the majority of persons there had been abused. Others begin to restore themselves by confronting in verse those who betrayed their trust. In “You Wanted to Be My Protector” (1995),* Delores Hornkk narrates the battering experience that drove her to seek protection orders against a lover.

Writers register mixed feelings about sustaining family ties. Clay Downing's “Jailin'Man” (1974)* stops opening letters from home in order to “get busy bein' where I was, forget where I wasn't.” Some fear what they may become in prison. In the story “Hey, you, our holes aren't working” (1979),* Roger Jaco's narrator says that, despite longing, he is thankful that he may never again see his wife and son: “Who knows what these years of punishment, rejection, and having 40 ccs. of bitterness injected into me daily might do to my loved ones if I were to let it escape from me in large doses. I care too much for them even to contact them.” Sinking deeper into trouble in prison and despairing of winning his appeal, Jesse Lopez, in “Arrival at MacNeil Island” (1978),* begs his wife to find someone else to help raise the kids. Other long-termers describe electing to cut their women loose rather than risk almost inevitable pain later.

Relatives who stay the course and visit win songs of praise. “ Our Skirt” is Kathy Boudin's subtle evocation of her enduring bond with her mother. The loss of parents is particularly hard to bear behind bars. Even if one is furloughed, like Henry Johnson in “Funeral Parlor,”* grief may be locked away: “the watery eyed women / Soaked his collar in tears,” and “he burned that dead black face deep / Into his memory,” and “tried his best / To shed a tear. He tried real hard, but failed.” In “The Ball Park,” Johnson's narrator recalls a lost brother while celebrating the liveliness of that man's son.

More typically single parents than men, women are more preoccupied with sustaining meaningful bonds with their children. (Yet Anthony La Barca Falcone's poem testifies to one father's poignant longing.) More often than not, children must travel great distances to see their parents. Prison rules — and arbitrary manipulation of them — can thwart meetings, as in Judee Norton's story. But some prison administrators are beginning to see the long-term wisdom of teaching inmates parenting skills. At Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, courses on childcare and parenting from a distance help inmates heal themselves and become responsible resources for their children, thus breaking the cycles of abuse and criminal activity. Judith Clark's ongoing contact with her daughter enhances the growth of each. The struggle of all mothers with the necessity of separating from their children as they mature is in prison particularly acute. In “A Trilogy of Journeys,” Kathy Boudin delineates the peculiar pains and pleasures of an incarcerated mother experiencing her child's coming of age.

Long-termers sometimes get a chance to work through family regrets. In an essay called “Doing Time” (1995),”‘ J. C. Amberchele says that for some “the shock of prison is so great as to propel them in a new direction.” When his children visit, they bring him news that his father has died years before. He regrets missing his father's funeral and, more, not having told his reserved parent at least once that he loved him. “But I was also thinking,” he says, that “prison, with its rigid conformity and structured regularity, has taught me that time is cyclical, not linear. I see time now as a great spiral, corkscrewing out of the past and carrying with it all the complex moments of history, and always coming around, coming around. The world, I have realized, allows for second chances, but only if you create them.” As he looks into his son's face, so like his own and his father's, he is suddenly able to tell him how much he loves him.