I was taken to a room on the other side of the hall where the status three’s were. Let me explain: Status 1 is what you call standard. You could be in a room by yourself without a staff member staring in your face to make sure you didn’t try to harm or possibly kill yourself. Now if you are a status three, then your crazy ass had to be isolated from the other minors, and staff sat in front of you twenty-four seven ’cause you were a danger to yourself and, sometimes, the institution. And that’s what I now was. You also had to wear an ugly-looking Velcro-like jumper.
I didn’t bother explaining that I had only cut myself too deep and had no intention of killing myself. But who gives a damn? So they stuffed me with meds so I would sleep, and took all my shit. I guess they figure that no one admits to trying to kill themself.
As soon as they took the handcuffs off of me, I lay on the bed and went right back to sleep. That became my salvation from all of this. Give me them meds and let me sleep.
“You can observe on Pierce. She ain’t gonna give you no trouble. She’ll probably sleep for the majority of the shift. All you really gotta worry about is getting relieved on time.”
I turned over in the bed, and my eyes opened just a slit, adjusting to the light. I stared at a black woman, who didn’t look much older than I was. She was dark brown with some pretty brown eyes.
“Hello, Ms. Pierce. My name is Ms. Hope, and I’ll be observing on you.”
I nodded, turned back over, and went right back to sleep.
I continued with the same routine—Sleeping, waking to take my meds, eating, and going right back to sleep. Nothing could get better than that. Didn’t have to deal with no bullshit, didn’t have to feel nothing, but my breath pumping in and out of me. I still didn’t bother to tell them that it wasn’t a suicide attempt. I had been cutting and scratching on myself for the longest and had never went that deep before. It just happened like that. Wasn’t nothing scarier than passing out, ’cause I didn’t know if I was going to really wake up from that shit. Still, I didn’t want nothing to fuck up what I had going now, not a gotdamn thing, and that’s just the way I liked it.
For the longest, I was placed on status three, and that staff they had observing me would not shut the hell up. Every time I turned around, she was asking me if I wanted to hear a poem.
I always shrugged, hoping she’d cop an attitude and just say forget it, but she always pulled out some shit she called, prose, sonnet, haiku, and whatnot. She usually started once I woke up to eat, and I would get out of bed, grab my tray of food—I had grown accustom to the nasty shit—stuff it down my throat. Then I would crawl right back in the bed, and she would still be rambling. I wanted to say, “Will you shut the fuck up!”
I’d be going out, and she would still be going with that bullshit.
Chapter 26
After what seemed like damn near forever but was only a few months, the psychologist bitch and the short-ass supervisor Ms. B came down the hallway to my room. They interrupted Ms. Hope from her daily quote of the day. I couldn’t even remember the first half of it because, as soon as she asked me if I wanted to hear it, I tuned her ass right out.
Ms. B said, “Pierce, you coming back to the world? It’s a fucked-up one, but you still gotta live in it like the rest of us, baby.”
I laughed but, really, was considering what she said.
“What the hell! Did you ladies see that?” Ms. B looked from Ms. Hope to the psych. She smiled wide. “Pierce laughed. All we been getting from her is, ‘Fuck you! I’m not doing shit! Fuck you, bitch! I’ll kill y’all!’ ”
I laughed again and shook my head. “Was I that bad?”
“Yes!”
Ms. Hope was shuffling her stack of poems.
“But we took into consideration the fact that you was coming down from drugs, and plus, you got issues, baby girl, issues your little ass needs to get out.”
I didn’t smile at that.
The psych bitch spoke in a soft voice. “Pierce, I talked to Ms. Hope and the Ms. B, and they feel you have been conditioned and fit to run your own program now. And a decent one. You’ve been on this side for almost six months. How do you feel about being moved to a status one?”
My first reaction was to tell her to kiss my ass, but I had to think. What would that do? Lead me right back to lockup.
Ms. Hope said, “Cashmere, she’s talking to you.”
Who asked your poem-reading, won’t-shut-the-fuck-up-soI-can-sleep ass, fake-ass Maya Angelou?
“Hello, Cashmere. You going deaf?”
I took a deep breath. That smart-ass Ms. B sure could talk some shit for someone the size of an elf. “I can’t say that I’m ready. Really, I’m in a place where I’ve never been before. All I can say is, if nobody fucks with me, I won’t fuck with them.”
Ms. B narrowed her eyes at me then turned to Ms. Hope. “What do you think? You been sitting on her for a minute?”
If I didn’t know, how in the hell was Maya Angelou’s impersonator going to know?
Ms. Hope studied my face, as if in serious concentration.
Boo, bitch. I frowned and stared at the wall. Why was I having so much trouble locking eyes with Ms. Hope?
“Yes, I think Cashmere is ready to be a status one.”
I was knocked out on meds when my seventeenth birthday passed on by. Now I was in a regular program like everybody else. All the bitches now wanted to be cool with me, which was nowhere near what I expected, so I ate in that rec-room (where we ate our meals, went to school, and did programs) surrounded by all of them. My eyes kept scanning the room, and none of them seemed to be tripping off of me.
Ms. Hope surprised me by coming into the rec-room and relieving Ms. Clark of being the unit leader, the person responsible for all the minors in the unit. They tell you when to enter a room, exit a room, when to eat, talk, and shit. It was synonymous with a babysitter, if you were to ask me. They also talked to us about different topics, and every day they gave us a “word of the day.” We were supposed to shut up while we ate, so they could do their lecture. Then they told us about their expectations of us. Which meant no gang-banging, fighting, fucking, disrespect to minors or staff, and to go to school and get your schoolwork done.
Since I had been on the other side, I had yet to really run a program, let alone a good one. And even though two years had passed, I was yet to be sentenced, ’cause I had pissed off the judge so much.
“Okay, ladies, I’ll be the unit leader this week.”
Oh shit. Now I’d have to be up and hear that shit she talk?
Somebody mumbled, “Awww shit! Not this new-booty bitch.”
Now if Ms. Hope had heard the comment, she pretended she didn’t.
We ate our lousy breakfast while she talked.
“Ladies, your word of the day is change. Pretty much, the word speaks for itself. It means to do something different, modifications, rearranging. Ladies, something that I’m gonna propose to you every day is to think about the word and know that, despite what you have done in the past, you can make a change, whether it be the way you see things, changing your attitudes, behavior, lifestyle. At any given moment, you can change it. Any second that goes by is the opportunity. You just gotta take it. But keep in mind that seconds become minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and the moment to make a change passes you by.
“Now I brought a poem in for you, ladies. It’s by Maya Angelou. Keep in mind, ladies, that some of you don’t want to hear this, some of you do, and some of you don’t know what you wanna hear. So I ask that, if you don’t want to hear it, you sit quietly and keep your opinion to yourself, or you could sway the one confused about what they wanna hear to feel the way you feel.”
Why the fuck am I not surprised? Maya Angelou had a stalker for sure.
She surprised me because her voice was powerful. She read it like she was on a stage and not in front of some juvenile inmates. It was so loud that I had a hard time tuning her ass out like all the times before. And I also noticed tha
t through all her talking I had barely touched my food.
Why was I so damn eager to step back into the rec-room when the food tasted like shit? Reason was, I wanted to hear some more of what Ms. Hope had to say, now that I wasn’t drugged out on meds.
“Ladies, I think we have a lot of issues between us as females. But those issues stem from one thing in particular. How we see ourselves. Chances are that if you are not happy with who you are, you’re not gonna be happy, period. And you are more likely to pick on somebody else. The reason being, ladies, is that if you can find flaws in other people, it forces you to take the attention off yourself, and you don’t have to acknowledge your issues. But what you have to understand is that type of thing is self-destructive. So if you are constantly putting others down, chances are, ladies, you need to stop and check yourself. Ladies, know that self-esteem is connected to so much. How we feel about ourselves, why we make some of the choices we make, deal with the people we deal with. Why we sell our bodies, engage in drugs, be around people that are no damn good for us. But, ladies, what it takes to get out of this is changing the way you think . . . your logic, your reasoning.”
I bit into my banana and chewed quickly.
“Confidence and self-esteem are vital to your livelihood. And I think there are a lot of women in here that need to work on those two areas, but again, it’s about your logic and your reasoning. I brought another poem in I’m sure a few of you have heard. It is pretty popular. It’s called ‘Phenomenal Woman’. I listened intently as she read the poem to us.
When she finished, she said, “Now, ladies, I’m not going to go over the whole poem line for line. We don’t have time. But think about this first stanza. ‘Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size.’ She is saying she is not perfect. But yet and still women wonder what it is about her. It’s her confidence. How she sees herself as a powerful woman and the women see it also. And the men trying to find her ‘mystery.’ It’s her embracing herself. It’s in her conscience, ladies. She has a certain ‘umph’ about her strut.” Her head high in the air, Ms. Hope switched around the room, making us laugh.
“And the men see that umph and they want some of that. And then, ladies, the line in the next stanza that says ‘Now you understand just why my head’s not bowed. I don’t shout or jump about or have to talk real loud.’ She’s proud of herself. She can be who she is and still be appealing. Ladies, before we go back down, I wanna show you something. It’s a triangle I came up with.” She drew a triangle on the board with a marker “I call it the levels of steps to self-confidence. The first step is understanding. Ladies, understand that no one is perfect.” She drew a line in the triangle. As perfect as we think Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, or Jessica Simpson are, ladies, they don’t see themselves as perfect. Nobody is. That’s the logic no one is perfect. Now here is where your reasoning comes in, ladies. Ask yourself, If no one is perfect, why in the hell would I be? Ladies, once you get there, you have mastered the first step. Now the next step is acceptance.” She drew another line. “Here, once you passed the understanding stage, you start to accept yourself for what and how you are. Then you start waking up and being happy with the person you see in the mirror.” She drew another line. “That is where you boost your self-esteem and you now, ladies, have self-confidence. And remember this—Once you realize this, you realize what your worth is, and no one can ever say or do anything to change how you see yourself. And what you ladies are gonna realize is that your worth is a lot higher than you think. It’s at a level that not fifty of them fools on them tracks can measure up to. Ladies, you can’t put a price on it because, ladies, your worth is priceless.” She turned and looked directly at me.
I closed my eyes and tried my best not to let any tears drop.
Chapter 27
The next morning I ate my food quickly so I didn’t have to look up and down. I didn’t want to miss nothing.
Ms. Hope began, “Ladies, last night when I was at home, I was trying to think of something I could bring in. I didn’t want to burn you out on poems. I thought about all the things you ladies have shared with me. All lot of you have been raped, molested, abused physically or mentally, robbed, and sadly maybe all of these things happened to you. So, ladies, when we say move forward, don’t think we’re being insensitive to what you’ve been through. I’m not. We are all victims at one point. We all start out as victims, but it’s better to be a survivor. A survivor is someone who was once a victim like you and through time and healing was able to move forward. Ladies, if you are doing drugs or in here because of what has happened to you, chances are that you are still a victim, because what you are doing is defining yourself by your pain. I don’t know about y’all, but I wanna be a survivor, so I can pull somebody else up with me. So again as I thought about you ladies last night, all the sad stories I heard, it reminded me of one thing: baggage. So I brought in this song by Erykah Badu, it’s called Baglady.”
She lost me there, but once I kept listening, it made sense.
“Ladies, ‘Bag Lady’ is a metaphor for baggage, issues, all this weight on this lady’s shoulders. ‘Bag lady, bag lady, you gon’ miss your bus.’ Ladies, the writer of this song is saying the baggage or issues is holding the lady up. ‘You can’t hurry up ’cause you got too much stuff,’ meaning that this baggage she is carrying is slowing up her progress. The line, ‘I guess nobody ever told you all you must hold on to is you’—If you don’t have anyone else, know that you’ll always have you. Ladies, we talk about steps all the time, and the first step is facing your demons. Ladies, a lot of you engage in drug use to forget the issues you have, but when your high comes down, you still have those issues, or you self-destruct, sell your body, your soul. Ladies, I know why you hate being in that room on lockup.” She raised her voice as she scanned our faces. “Ladies, you get in that room and you have nothing but time, time to think about choices you made or the thing that happened to you. Then you start cutting, to avoid that mental pain, I know. But, ladies, all you doing when you engage in stuff like that is, again, prolonging your progress.”
My eyes watered. The room was quiet.
“Jay-Z has this really powerful line in one of his songs. He said, ‘Don’t run from the pain, run toward it; things can be explained what caused it.’ Ladies, it takes you facing it, getting it out. You need to cry, cry! If you need to scream, scream! If you need to beat the wall, beat the wall! But you have to grieve. You have to hurt, ladies, so that you can move to the next step. And the next step is being strong enough to let go so that you can move forward, ’cause if you don’t, what you find is that you in the same spot. Ladies, tap into that strength you never thought you had, but first you gotta handle the unfinished business of what’s going on in here.” Ms. Hope tapped her chest.
Before I knew it, I broke down crying. Me! I cried like I hadn’t cried in a while. Cried over Mama, Daddy, losing my sister, being raped, selling my body. I screamed as I fell out of my chair and hit the ground with my fist.
Ms. Hope helped me to my feet, and we walked out of the rec-room. I continued to sob.
“Ms. Hope.”
“Yes, Cashmere?”
I rubbed my snotty nose and followed her to my room. “I wanna see the psychologist.”
“I’ll put in a request for you.”
I sniffed again. “Ms. Hope.”
“Yes, Cashmere?”
“Thank you.”
I continued my crying and screaming till I couldn’t cry or scream any more. Once I was done, I lay on my bed shivering, yet feeling like my strength was really being restored.
I heard Ms. B yell, “What’s wrong with Pierce?”
Ms. Hope said, “Nothing. She’s grieving . . . finally.”
I never thought it was possible to love a woman more than I loved Mama, but I loved Ms. Hope just as much. She always had these stories to tell us. I always went to bed thinking of the stuff she said and woke up wanting to hear more. A
nd it seemed like everyone else did. They didn’t start on shit on her watch because they admired and respected her so much. Sometimes even staff would come in the rec-room and listen to what she had to say.
She had us all laughing today, telling us this crazy story. “Ladies, we got to stop hating on one another.”
I smiled as I looked at Ms. Hope trying to get hip.
“It causes so much animosity. And awkwardness. Ladies, one day I went on this date with this handsome guy to this play.”
She was sitting next to Ms. Rino.
“And, ladies, we were able to find our seats and once we did, I was to sit next to a black girl who looked like she was the same age as me. As soon as she saw me, she shifted her body the other way and turned her head, and not once during the play or during the break did she turn back around because she was sitting next to me. Anyhow, there was a part in the play where the singer said turn to your neighbors and give her a big hug, so I turned to her and she wouldn’t look at me. So, ladies, I”—she scooted next to Ms. Rino and hugged her—“threw my hands around her, and you know what she did?”
“What?” a few minors asked.
“She laughed and hugged me right back. Ladies, sometimes it has to start with us. Imagine, if you picked a different person every day and said something nice to them, what good that would do. When you see another minor who is homesick, stressed about their court date, or just came back from court, just a nod or telling them it’s gonna be okay will do. We gotta start looking out for each other, and we gotta show each other more love.”
When Ms. Hope was sending us down to our room, I reached out and hugged her tight, like I didn’t want to let her go.
She just laughed and hugged me right back. “Cashmere, you so silly.”
I had made a lot of progress. I didn’t get into fights or disrespect staff anymore. I also learned from Ms. Hope how to get out what was in my head, and once I was able to do this, I no longer felt the need to scratch or cut myself.
The People vs. Cashmere Page 16