All Day

by Liza Jessie Peterson

  “Oh shit, Grandma got the belt!” yells a kid named J.J., and damn if he doesn’t look like Jimmie Walker from the television show Good Times, except with more muscles. Running from Grandma is a game that the kids like to play; it gets their adrenaline flowing and has become a routine of cat and mouse, cops and robbers, inmate and CO, niggaz and Grandma. She doesn’t think it’s a bit of funny, which makes it that much more fun for the kids and raises the stakes.

  “Keep playing with me and see what fucking happens to your ass!” Jouju continues yelling as she slowly strolls toward J.J., swinging her belt. Other kids are egging her on.

  “Tear that ass up, Grandma,” a signifying rascal yells, trynna get her more hyped. But Ms. Jouju doesn’t need any help hyping up her morning show.

  “I’mma tear your ass up if you don’t shut the fuck up!” barks Jouju.

  “Damn, Grandma, I’m on your side,” the kid whines.

  Jouju has her sniper scope fixed on J.J. and, with nowhere else to run but into the hands of another CO at the other end of the hall, J.J. slips into my classroom.

  The kids are all laughing, slapping their knees. Everybody’s hyped. The drama is on and popping and in my class, prompting other kids from the hallway to run into my room behind Ms. Jouju, to see the show, which is now kicking into Act Two. Ms. Jouju strolls into my room. “Excuse me,” she says without looking at me, her eyes fixed on J.J. like a hawk.

  “Go right ahead, handle your business, Ms. Jouju,” I reply while backing up, positioning myself to watch Grandma open up a can of whoop-ass on J.J.

  J.J. jumps over several desks as Ms. Jouju is bull-knocking them out of her way, gunning for J.J., slow and steady.

  “You know I’mma get your ass sooner or later so you might as well get it over with now and not make it worse for yourself.”

  “Naw, fuck that, Grandma,” J.J. says, scrambling like a rat trapped in the corner, eyes shifting, looking for a clear opening to run past Jouju.

  “What! You getting smart? I’mma tear that ass up!” Jouju knocks over more desks, going in for the kill. She’s closing in on J.J. and he has nowhere else to go except to slip past her or through the brick wall he’s cornered himself into.

  J.J. starts pleading and nervously laughs. “I’m sorry, Grandma.”

  Now just one arm’s reach away, she goes for the execution and pushes a desk into J.J.’s legs to trap and hold him. Before the desk can meet his thigh, J.J. tries to jump like Jordan over the desk and misses, clumsily slipping between two other desks as Grandma swoops down on him with the belt. Wham! Wham!

  J.J. jumps up to run, but Grandma is faster and grabs him by the collar and, with the other hand, twists his ear, like a grandmother would do her badass, foulmouthed grandson. Grandmothers are the only ones who can get away with humiliating a teen-child in front of their peers like that.

  “Owww, Grandma, okay okay okay, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Owww!”

  Grandma gives his ear one more hard twist along with a verbal “umph” for emphasis and dramatic effect. J.J. wiggles out of her grip and she swats him one more time with her belt as he runs out the class. Wham!

  “Now take your ass to your class and don’t let me have to speak to you again! I mean what I fucking say!”

  I laughed along with the class because it was a straight-up jailhouse comedy routine, but Ms. Jouju never cracked a smile, never broke character. Why? ’Cause Ms. Jouju don’t p-l-a-y. Today she only has the belt. Some days, she walks up and down the hall swinging a big, black rubber mallet with a wooden handle, her signature tool for monitoring badass teenage bandits on the school floor. Ms. JoJou doles out tough grandma-style love. She’s from a generation when a good whooping was meant to rear you right and protect you from a society that fears Black boys and is unforgiving to their rebellious shenanigans. The kids know she cares. She feels familiar, reminding them of someone back home. Grandma.

  There is a subtle family dynamic between the youth at Rikers and the Black and Latino correctional officers. A mother/son, father/son, aunt/nephew, uncle/nephew, grandma/grandson, grandfather/grandson dynamic plays out in any given moment, depending on the officer and depending on the student. I was not exempt from this subtextual, extended African village relationship. Some days I was the momma, the aunt, the big sister, and sometimes the crush. I doubt this plays out in the same manner with the adult inmates, but with the kids, our children, they represent our collective future. They remind us of a youngling in our family, reflections of a wayward nephew, brother, son, or grandson we love. They’re still impressionable enough to offer us some hope in being able to shape, influence, and guide them in a different direction and turn a productive corner. The stage of adolescence is a crazy time for all teenagers. It’s a temporary time of insanity where they take wild risks and feel invincible, experimenting with sex and drugs. Their prefrontal cortex in the brain is still developing and doesn’t stop growing until approximately age twenty-five. Their hormones are continually shifting and changing, so boundaries are tested, behavior is spontaneous and reckless, authority is challenged, and narcissism is at critical mass. They are experiencing the second phase of separation individuation which occurs during adolescence, where they tend to push their family away and their peers become everything. The first phase of separation individuation is when a child is two years old, aka the terrible twos. During both phases, the child is awkwardly defining their individuality and identity for themselves and will throw frequent tantrums. Black and Latino kids are criminalized for going through this normal adolescent stage of development while white kids get slapped on the wrist, sent to therapy, sternly warned, and given multiple second chances. Reckless and impulsive behavior is universal, but Black and Latino teens are held to a higher standard and treated like adults in the eyes of the law, while most white kids are allowed to be normal crazy teenagers without getting systematically warehoused into prison.

  Two white boys walk into my class and sit next to each other either because they’re friends who knew each other before they wound up in the den of wayward warriors or because being a white adolescent inmate in this place is so nonexistent that they instinctively gravitate to the familiar in each other. White youth rarely even make it to Rikers Island. Usually, the judges give them programs, probation, and slaps on the wrists. And while 34 percent of Black youth are sent to adult prison, only 5.5 percent of white youth are sent to adult prison. Seeing white kids here means their white privilege didn’t work in court because they must have fucked up really bad and the judge’s hands were tied, or the judge wanted to teach them a lesson, or they’re really, really poor (maybe even from the same neighborhood as the Black and Latino kids); perhaps all the above.

  The Bosses immediately start calling one of the new boys “white boy” and the other “Wonder Bread.” Kenneth, the lanky Gandalf-from-Lord-of-the-Rings-looking one, doesn’t talk, I sense, out of fear. Head hung low, he looks depressed and in a complete daze like he’s shell-shocked. Brandon, the chunky, potato-face white kid, has a little edge to him. He’s already talking and challenging the other guys for calling him white boy. “But yo, why I gotta be called white boy? I don’t call you Black boy.”

  “’Cause you white, nigga, that’s why. And if you call me ‘Black boy,’ you gonna get washed,”* Tyquan threatens.

  “Well my name is Brandon, my dude.”

  “Yeah, whatever, white boy… where you from?” Tyquan inquires, winning the short-lived power struggle over Brandon’s jailhouse name.

  “I’m from Staten Island.” Brandon gives up the fight and starts talking about how he knows one of the rappers from Staten Island–based Wu-Tang Clan, which starts a heated debate. Momentarily, he diverts attention away from his whiteness, holds court in the discussion, and even gets support from a couple of Wu-Tang fans and wannabe affiliates in the class. Brandon is gonna be all right; he can hang, looking like a gangster Russian anyway.

  Shahteik is quietly sizing them both up to choose his prey. He come
s from across the room to take the empty seat next to Kenneth. I sense an extortion is about to go down, so I intervene.

  “Shahteik, go take your seat. You have nothing to talk to him about.”

  “Ms. P…”

  “Shahteik, let’s go, take your seat, please.” I am firm, trying to shield Kenneth from the hunt.

  “All right, all right, I don’t want no problems with you today, Ms. P.” He turns to “Wonder Bread” and says under his breath, “I’mma talk to you about that later, ya heard?”

  Kenneth looks at Shahteik and quickly directs his gaze back to the floor. Defeat. He is afraid and weak. I can smell the fear, a mild scent of sweat and mildew seeping from his pores. I can’t protect him from being food back in the housing area, but I won’t let it happen in my class, not on my watch. I give him a notebook, folder, and pencil and tell him to write in his journal and, if inspired, write a poem about what he sees. He looks at me with distant, sad eyes that say, “Okay,” and immediately begins writing with nonstop flow. The pencil is a paddle moving him through the deep river of words gushing onto the page as he tries to make sense of this haunted twenty-first-century middle passage boat he’s wound up in.

  Dear journal, I see inmates around me. We all want to go home. I see pain in the prisoners’ eyes, but they don’t want it to show. I dream that their dreams they follow are dreams of a bright tomorrow. I see myself going home one day. I see nasty food. I see depression. I see tears, judges, lawyers. I dream of being free. I dream that I will get a job and my mother will be proud of me. I dream of not breaking the law. I see people who conceal their emotions because they have an image 2 live up 2. They throw up gang signs and find a crew that they can fit into, and their lives are based around the music they listen to. I see kids treat their weapons as friends, and try to live the life of gangsters from the messages rappers send. They hide who they are and all lean on the same image. They do as the rappers do and their emotions are hidden. They all do the same thing, like being unique is forbidden. You have to find new role models and engage your craft, because you can write your future but you can’t erase your past.

  I keep Kenneth writing every chance I get. It’s his prescription to heal and find freedom. He thanks me for giving him the extra work. I like this kid. My spidey-senses detect a wounded soul, a poet.

  I’m getting so tired of yelling at Shahteik. I have to come up with something innovative to deal with his badass behavior. Sending him out of class to take a walk isn’t sufficient and it doesn’t faze him one bit. I want to come up with something that will get under his skin and feel like a pinch. He’s driven me to custom-design a “spank,” which I believe to be a brilliant strategy: a ONE, TWO… POOF composition notebook. In it, I’ll keep a record of my verbal warnings to students, primarily Shahteik, of course. First warning will get documented in my book. Second warning will get documented in my book. By the time I get to the third, there will be no warning, just straight, “Poof!”’ That means out of my class for good, no coming back, accompanied by an orange infraction slip. Poof is the last straw and my Poof logbook means I will have the transgressions well documented to justify putting Shahteik, I mean, a student, out of my class forever, should I be questioned. It’s my way of keeping a paper trail of their shenanigans and my ploy to get rug rat #1 out of my space and face once and for all. I’m sure he’ll One… Two… Poof in one day, easy. And Captain Blackwell has literally just informed me that there are 350 adolescents in their housing areas but only enough classroom seats for 250 students, which means there are literally a hundred kids waiting in the wings to come up to the school floor. Therefore it’s a privilege to be sitting in class, which definitely beats sitting in a cell. This is great leverage for me.

  “They wanna cut up and create problems, not do work and distract the kids who want to work and behave? Well, Ms. P, they can simply go. Vamoose! They’re taking up a valuable seat for a kid who wants to learn,” Captain Blackwell tells me. She’s a six-foot-tall, statuesque, very well put together Black woman with immaculate hair worn in a bone-straight bob. Back in Philly we’d call her “shitty sharp,” with her manicured nails, shiny black uniform shoes, and Prada glasses that sit on the tip of her nose. All Department of Corrections top brass—captains, deputies, wardens, and chiefs—wear crisp white shirts with a gold badge, decorated with an array of gold stars, stripes, clovers, and eagles on the shirt collar depending on their rank. Their crisp white shirts and shiny ornaments are a sharp contrast to the masses of dark-blue-uniformed, regular-rank correctional officers.

  She tells me, “I like working with the adolescents because there’s still a chance they might change their life and you never know what kind of a positive influence you could have on them. Some of them are never going to change and will wind up being in and out of prison for the rest of their life. But I believe if you can touch one life then you’ve done God’s work.” Captain Blackwell cares. I think she’s taken a liking to me partly because I, too, am an Amazon woman she can look eye-to-eye with (which we’ve joked about), but also because my Ancestor Wall of History resonates with her. During one of her first visits to the school floor, she stopped in my room, studied the details of ancestral majesty posted on my walls, nodded her head in approval, and complimented me on it. She turned to the boys. “Gentlemen, you clearly have a teacher who wants you to learn your history; I hope you realize what an opportunity this is to be in her class.” She senses I care about the rug rats and can tell that I want to make a difference. We’re on different teams, but on the same page.

  She turns to me and says quietly, without whispering, “So remember, the seats in your class are gold, Ms. Peterson. You need a kid out, you just let me know and I’ll fill it with a kid who will appreciate it. I usually give them three strikes. You give them two warnings but, by the third time, you send them directly to me.” I was already ahead of her and that’s all she needed to say. I have her blessing to “Poof” Shahteik. I grab an empty black-and-white composition book and write on the front of it, Ms. P’s ONE, TWO… POOF Book! It’s official.

  Even if a kid doesn’t want to do schoolwork, they all want to be on the school floor since they get to see their buddies and get out of the housing area they’re restricted to all day and night. It gives them something else to do during the day and breaks up the monotony of their confinement.

  Shahteik has long positioned himself to be the first casualty of my Poof initiative. He’s hell-bent on not doing a lick of work, loves coming to class to gossip and talk shit, loves to instigate and talk more shit, is constantly disruptive, and loves to argue and stir up conflama (confusion and drama) in my class all day like it’s the barbershop/pool hall. He’s a leader, so he sets the tone in class and it’s not a good one. I remember what Ms. G said: “The first sign of a troublemaker, make an example out of him ASAP.” Shahteik, aka Lil’ Rumbles, has got to go.

  Shahteik manages to cut up and tear his ass faster than I can write him up, sending him from One straight to Poof (skipping number Two) all in the same day, just as I predicted. But Shahteik is like a bad penny. I Poof him and he comes right back. He seems to have some magical, rug rat–gangster pull with the COs and happens to be a favorite of Ms. Collins, the CO in his housing area, who sits in my classroom from time to time. The first time I Poofed Shahteik, Ms. Collins assured me that she’d have a stern talk with him and I wouldn’t have any more problems. For some reason, she adopted motherly nurturing feelings toward him and advocated for him to stay in school and in my class. I give him a pass only on the strength of Ms. Collins’s favor because she’s cool and helpful whenever she sits in my classroom. Once she realized that I was actually demanding the guys do work and pushing them to learn, and because I maintain an unwavering standard of high expectation for the boys, she became engaged in the class and supported me. She helps to keep the guys on task and focused on doing their work. She keeps the chatter to a minimum whereas most other COs couldn’t care less. Her classroom participation is
a rare exception to the rule.

  Getting a student to do their work is not the CO’s job; all they’re supposed to do is make sure no fights break out and no infractions occur. Their sole focus is safety. Care, custody, and control. Classroom management is the teacher’s job. If you suck at your job and your classroom is a zoo, then that chaos is on you. But Ms. Collins is different. She’s earned respect from the Bosses and they listen to her because she’s fair and balanced in her approach. Ms. Collins gives them rewards and privileges for good behavior, looks out for them in the housing area, and gets them to the barbershop, commissary, and the gym regularly, along with other perks like extra blankets, two mattresses, and extra lockout time that can be easily taken away for the slightest infraction. She looks out for “her boys” and, in return, they give her little to no trouble. Whenever I’m teaching Black history, she chimes in to drop a jewel or two about the subject. The Bosses like when she participates. It’s like she’s taking a personal interest in what they’re learning and, by extension, in them. I almost never have to have a correctional officer stationed in my class, but when I do, I always wind up with the cool ones, like Ms. Collins.

  My class is low behavioral management not because they’re angels but because I move around the classroom; I stay on my toes and keep the students engaged. I hold it down, making it easier on the officer to not have to babysit. The COs who sit in my class enjoy my weekly vocabulary lists, the poetry assignments (some of them even join in to write poems), and, hands down, they all love my Black history lessons. My class isn’t a zoo. Maybe a circus, but not a zoo.