Each night, after I read some of Unbroken, Wynell would share parts of Maya Angelou’s memoir. “She don’t like white people, I’m warning you.”
“C’mon, Wynell, you can’t keep putting me in your categories. Not all white people fly Confederate flags and carry a noose in the trunk of their cars.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just . . .”
What she didn’t say hung in the air. I knew the words. In fact, Maya Angelou expressed them beautifully in her book.
“‘In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like,’” Wynell read from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. “‘Other than that they were different, to be dreaded, and in that dread was included the hostility of the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the worker against the worked for and the ragged against the well dressed. I remember never believing that whites were really real.’”
After Wynell read that, I sighed, but I couldn’t find any way to articulate how sad it was to hear those words. I have never been able to understand how people can enslave other people. Or kill them because of the way they look or the god they worship. It is not beyond my comprehension that there are Hitlers and Trumps in the world. Evil exists. I saw some of that in jail. But what I don’t understand is that evil has followers. That whites, for Angelou, were phantasmagorical, unreal, is a heartbreaking fallout of hatred. I couldn’t say anything to Wynell, because I feared it would just sound like empty words. What I thought was that even animals don’t hate each other. Only human beings hate.
I only had to look around me and see the reality of imprisonment. I was almost wholly surrounded by black and brown women, and of the few white women, most were uneducated and impoverished addicts. Why was that? It seemed to me that little had changed since slavery and indentured servitude; that it was only the rules of enslavement that had changed. The dominant culture—in our country that would be white males—just got smarter in its attempt to silence the critique of racism by hiding it better. Incarceration, homelessness, lack of health care, wage inequity, and bias and discrimination in education: these are the tenets of modern slavery. It lives on, but in an institutionalized way that people can choose not to see. It’s easy to turn away from reality when it hurts too much to see the truth of our own hatred. It pained me to see that I was in the strictest minority in jail, and yet I knew so many, many white people who never served time for crimes that were worse than Wynell’s, including the chronic criminal problem of white cops murdering unarmed black citizens. The seemingly endless injustice in our country and the helplessness I felt—that I could do little to change it—made me feel haunted and powerless.
I loved Wynell more for telling me what she felt through that book. We could speak plainly in ways that would never have worked on the outs. I was humbled that her faith in words, in language, and in the courage of Angelou to “tell so much truth” allowed us to shorten the distance between the colors of our skin and to find refuge in our similarities, rather than in our differences. This bond we carved out of our differences was a radical opening.
That opening, pried ajar by Wynell sharing her book with me, led to new and painful insights into my own life, to see the situations when as a teacher I had sometimes been condescending—throwing around my liberalism without really comprehending their suffering—or those rare times when I’d generalize, or laugh at someone’s racist joke just to be polite. That she trusted me and loved me allowed for a certain wisdom to peek around the darkness inside me. This wisdom had come at an enormous price. Propped open as such by being incarcerated with people of color, as a white woman, I had to look at things I once refused to see. And I wasn’t too happy about the contents of my heart.
Maybe paying the price that I paid for my incarceration was a gift, not a penalty, for a new courage that was allowing me to turn within. I was a stubborn and unyielding person in my addiction. Jail might have been a lucky break given the alternative—death. Or worse. What if I had injured or killed someone driving drunk? I don’t know what it was about Wynell reading to me, inviting me into her world, and trusting me with her rage and depression about the way white people treated her that opened me up to myself. A new knowledge took shape, a deeper peeling back of my complacency, ushered in on the spines of our books. I was floored again by the power books had to unite, to heal, and to reveal even the things that we don’t want to see. It wasn’t necessarily pleasant, the way I was beginning to feel, because it meant I had to acknowledge a certain level of ignorance, even as I had always considered myself tolerant and fair. It turned out I was being invited to go deeper, to understand more wisely the issues, the frustration, the anger that people of color experienced every single day of their lives. This was powerful. I felt myself changing as I began to see the things that would help me claim my authenticity as a human among humans. What amazed me, of course, and what I loved because I was a writer, was that these discoveries were, ironically, coming alive and finding their freedom by reading precious books behind a locked-down jail cell door.
* * *
One night, after Wynell and I exhausted recounting all the TV episodes we could, and read to each other till our eyes practically bled, she pulled out another small book.
“The pastor gave this to me.”
It was Psalm 91, her favorite psalm. She asked me to write it down and to pray it for her forever. So I wrote it on the inside cover of Unbroken. I felt all right about learning to love this psalm because it came from the Torah, and so somehow it was kosher to me to love it. Like me, Wynell was rightfully suspicious of organized forms of religion, but this prayer was beautiful, and we both acknowledged it. Her faith in this prayer alone opened my eyes. I began to soften toward the old God that I believed had betrayed me and imagine, maybe just a little, something new. Maybe the God that I thought had left me was actually a God I had to get rid of. Maybe, just maybe, there was divine wisdom out there, and I needed to find it in a different way, with different eyes and deeper yearning.
Wynell’s favorite part of the psalm was this:
You will not fear the terror of the night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,
nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,
nor the plague that destroys at midday.
A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
but it will not come near you.
You will only observe with your eyes
and see the punishment of the wicked.
If you say, “The Lord is my refuge,”
and you make the Most High your dwelling,
no harm will overtake you,
no disaster will come near your tent.
We spent a lot of time extracting meaning from the verses. It was like a mini Midrash study—which is the Hebrew word for seek or study; the process that Jews use when interpreting the Torah. But for Wynell it was the promise of peace in the home, that “no disaster will come near your tent,” which enabled her to sleep at night. And it comforted me, too, because I had developed a near-panic fear that something would happen to my husband and daughter while I was locked up. That our house would burn down, that they would die in a car wreck. Often I would worry that Greg would get sick and there would be no one to take care of my daughter. So I took Wynell’s advice to read it every day upon awakening, and I fell in love with the promise of safety the psalm evoked, even if I could not locate a narrative for a God in my life then.
That night after the deputy turned the lights down, Wynell and I were unable to sleep. In the sad, amber glow of our cell, I remember feeling stirred up, despite the fact that the jail seemed quieter than usual. It was into that tense, hushed place that Wynell began to tell her story, first softly, then in a torrent. Somehow this confession, as it were, was different than anything she’d told me before. It was with
out bravado, and carried the badge of truth and the profundity of lamentation. She wept but didn’t make a sound, tears streaming down her cheeks. As with Duckie before her, it was a story about poverty, deprivation, sexual violence, police brutality, and fear, just like Angelou’s story. I remained still and quiet. I didn’t want to spoil her story with my words. I knew she just wanted to be listened to, like everyone does.
Afterward, she asked me if she could move her mattress to the floor next to me and sleep beside me that night. I thought of Melissa crawling in beside me that first night I was locked up in a cell.
“Yes,” I said. “Here, take my extra blanket.” I gave her the blanket that Duckie had given me.
We slept like that, not just that night, but almost every night afterward. We both had a bad case of the fears. We had both known spiritual drought and failure. We had both made hard work of sorrow. In each other, to our mutual surprise, we found solace and comfort.
CHAPTER FIVE
EBI Module: Dayroom
In the process of discovering bodhichitta, the journey goes down, not up . . . It’s as if the mountain pointed toward the center of the earth instead of reaching into the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward the turbulence and doubt. We jump into it. We slide into it. We tiptoe into it. We move toward it however we can.
—Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart
Every act of resistance, however small, was a victory. Wynell was a master at getting away with shit. In addition to the “falls” she took from her upper bunk, which allowed her up to eight hours in medical, a change of scenery, extra lunch, and maybe some good meds, she took full advantage of the fact that our sink broke and remained that way for days. She managed to convince the deputy to leave our door open so she could refill her water when it emptied. The bottle seemed to empty with astonishing swiftness.
“You’re filling that an awful lot,” the deputy screamed at her. She called him Bologna because once she’d seen him pick the rubberized, imitation bologna from a sandwich and throw it at an inmate in medical.
“Bladder infection,” she said. You could get a male deputy to do anything for you if you used the words “blood,” “vagina,” “bladder,” “ovaries,” or anything else related to the female body.
Almost every time she went out there to fill up the bottle, she hung around and chatted with her “ho” friends in Dayroom who sat under the stairs laughing at everything. When the deputy would shout at her to get back to her cell, she would calmly finish filling her water—this would take surprisingly much longer than the drinking part—and then saunter majestically up the stairs, that crown I imagined on her head sparkling under the grim lights.
I didn’t have the same courage. Or at least I thought I didn’t until one day, during program, I saw the usual twenty or so inmates line up for Life Skills class. I’d been watching this lineup occur every day, wondering what the criteria was for the privilege of going to class. I was envious that they were allowed to leave the module for hours at a time. One of the students told me that on Fridays their teacher, Ms. Kiara (an aspiring comedian on the outs), let them watch movies.
When the deputy called out, “Life Skills, line up,” she accidently popped our door and I was suddenly outside, walking down the stairs and into Dayroom where, without a thought, I lined up. I can’t explain why I did it. It was almost as if I were being pulled into that line by an invisible hand. Somehow—perhaps legitimized by my association and friendship with Wynell—the trustees, who were all black and noticed that Wynell trusted me, were “distracted” as I slipped in while they checked people off. I remember one of them nodding at me to hurry up, keep my head down, just go.
My heart raced, but amazingly, I managed to slip in and landed a coveted spot in EBI. EBI stands for education-based incarceration, a strange and ironic name. Why wasn’t it incarceration-based education? The answer to that is because everything in jail is such incredible bullshit. You could never look around Lynwood and say with a straight face that it was an education-based facility. I would guess less than 1 percent of inmates were getting an education there.
The parameters for enrolling in EBI were that you had to have at least six months left to serve, you had not earned a high school diploma, and you had a felony and were thus going to prison. So I did not qualify in any way with twenty days left to serve; misdemeanors, not felonies; and a graduate degree. Once in the classroom, Ms. Kiara told those whose names she hadn’t called from the official roll sheet to sign a piece of paper and she would officially add us to the class. I couldn’t believe it: I was miraculously a member of EBI Life Skills class. Over the next few days, though, I came to see that this time away from the module was a draw. As with church, I wasn’t sure which was worse, being locked up all day long, or sitting around talking about the ways people expressed their anger.
In Life Skills, we did “thinking reports” every day. These were supposed to help us deal with our anger. The thinking report contained four categories that you filled out with the two-inch golf pencil they gave you: Situation, Thoughts, Feelings, and Attitudes & Beliefs. In order to make it even semi-effective, Ms. Kiara had to add two categories: Old Behavior and New Behavior. It seemed like the purpose of the thinking report was to show us how to manage our anger and our problems, but it lacked a crucial part of any problem-solving process—finding a solution. The fact that the handout ignored this was typical of just about everything in jail.
One day, a new student offered to share her thinking report with the class. Linda was a large black woman with a handsome freckled face and a deep and melodious voice. She read off her entries while Ms. Kiara wrote them on the board. Because they were hilarious, I kept all of the thinking reports we did together in class and brought them home.
Thinking Report
Name: Linda
Situation: My bunkie stinks.
Thoughts:
What the fuck is that smell?
How is she fucking men and they didn’t smell her?
How is she taking a shower and she still smells?
Positive Thoughts:
Maybe she don’t know.
Maybe she sick or has an infection in her vajayjay.
She might be kicking.
Feelings:
Disgusted, angry, puzzled, overwhelmed, curious, pity (I want to cut that bitch—is that a feeling?)
Old Behaviors: Ignore her. Be rude to her. Clean the room when she gone. Find any way to get out of my cell. Talk about her to my homegirls.
Attitudes & Beliefs: Bitches who stink are dirty. She lazy with her hygiene. She slow.
New Behavior: Talk to a deputy.
This went on for an hour, then further devolved into a half-hour discussion of how to clean your vagina.
“Don’t douche,” Ms. Kiara said, pronouncing it “dowsh.”
We were told not to use products like Summer’s Eve, not to use sprays or soaps. I concurred. The cooch knows how to take care of itself, even though Procter & Gamble would have you believe otherwise.
* * *
Between EBI and church, I now had a lot of time out of lockdown. The Protestants, of the Pentecostal variety, did church two times a week, and I also went to Catholic services after the Protestant one on Sundays. Once I went to the Christian Science services, but I had to draw the line somewhere. In the parlance of jail, that was “wack.” There were no services for Jews. And I didn’t mention that I was a Jew, because the church ladies were punitive. Maybe like the rabbi who had taken the kosher meal from a Christian inmate, the Christian pastors would take away my seat in their services.
All totaled, when the “po-lice” didn’t withhold program, I was able to get out of my cell for five or six hours a day. With Wynell and me telling jokes, reading books, and sharing our lives when we were stuck in o
ur cell, time began to move faster and I started to feel better by increments. I started doing yoga in the “yard,” an eight-hundred-square-foot patio that shared a wall with the 105 Freeway. This wall was two stories high, topped by razor wire and an opening through which you could occasionally see a bird fly by. The sound of the freeway was thunderous; the smell of exhaust overpowering. But I made sure to get out there every day after my shower and walk around and around and around, or practice yoga.
I had only recently returned to yoga, motivated mostly by the pain in my body that likely came from the “physical exertion” of my last arrest. I wasn’t sure how much a man stepping on my back had to do with it, but I experienced back spasms on a daily basis. Instead of looking at yoga as an extreme sport, the way they do in Los Angeles, I began to try to understand how it could change my posture, lengthen my spine, and calm my nerves. I became interested in how to breathe with every asana, trying to determine at what point you breathed in and when you breathed out. I knew it made a difference. After my return from rehab and before Lynwood, I still thought I had to compete with the twenty-year-olds in an LA yoga class. I was usually the oldest person in there and no one talked to me, because once you turn fifty, you’re invisible. I tried handstands and arm balances to show off, probably ruining my back even more. At Lynwood, though, I came to yoga for the first time in my life simply to heal my body. Once the stratospheric depression in lockup began to come back down to an earthly tolerance, I did jail yoga to breathe and to ease my physical maladies: creaky joints, hamstring pain, shooting nerve pain.
To my joy, a few days into Exit Dorm, the next three books arrived, and with them, the feeling that since my relapse I’d finally, indisputably, found my way back home to literature. I had made it through the first three weeks of my sentence, and looking back, I saw that reading had been arduous, that my brain had been pickled and was not used to words. Now, it seemed easier, less encumbered by fear and the illness of early sobriety.
The Lost Chapters Page 10