Never considered this, then looked back at her poem, chewing her lip.
“I just need to find another word for ‘screwed up.’”
“You got the same pelican lawyer I got, Never? That guy Kaplan?” asked Baby Ain’t.
“Pelican?” I envisioned lawyers in conservative black-winged suits and ties flying overhead, their large scooplike beaks dripping torts.
They all looked at me.
“Oh wait, I get it,” I said. “Appellate lawyer. Pelican. Right.”
Polly looked thoughtful.
“I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey. Probably he got it backwards.”
Then she looked sweetly at Never.
“Couldn’t you say, instead of ‘screwed up,’ ‘discombobulated’?”
Akilah, incredibly, glanced kindly at Polly.
“You are filled with some pretty astonishing words, Polly,” she said.
“There’s a poem by Emily Dickinson,” I interrupted, “that I think you’d like, Akilah. It’s the poem I brought in to talk about today.”
I was taking a chance, but the poem seemed perfect for her. I opened my notebook.
“Here’s a part of it: ‘The soul has moments of Escape—/ When bursting all the doors—/ She dances like a Bomb, abroad, / And swings upon the Hours…” I stopped, unsure.
Akilah looked at me, light eyes level: a sphinx.
Polly said, “‘The soul has moments of Escape’—it’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” I said. “Each soul has moments of escape—even trapped as it is, within the body.”
“Yes,” said Polly Lyle. “I agree. In the Whorehouse Bible, they say: Blessed are the humpbacks and the clubfoots. Blessed are the twisted-in-the-brain and the brain-shakers like me—for we will all be straightened out by the Golden Hand.”
“Sure,” I said. “The Golden Hand.”
Sallie cranked around in her chair to look hard at Polly. “I got a question. How your hair turn so white, girl?”
Polly Lyle nodded at her.
“You’ll know when the Golden Hand tell my soul to tell you.”
“I think you all should know,” I interrupted—jumping in à la Baby Ain’t and changing the subject to relieve tension in the room—“that I’ve been using the library to look up things and borrow books. Reading? It’s called creative reading, and it’s as important as creative writing. Read every book you can get your hands on.”
Even as I exhorted them to read and made my soapbox stand, I pictured C.O. Hardringer, the corpulent brassy-haired officer who ran the Women’s House library, standing in the doorway of the little book room with its woefully understocked shelves behind her—its Reader’s Digest condensed volumes, its Dictionary of Facts, and its three or four legal tomes. I was standing before her, nervous. I’d just managed to persuade a famous poet or two to talk their publishers into donating poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—anything interesting from the publishing house catalogue—to the Women’s House. Box after box would be arriving soon. After close inspection and some “borrowing” by C.O.s along the way, the books would be delivered here to the prison library for shelving.
“It will be terrific,” I quacked at C.O. Hardringer. “Nothing will stand in the way of the women here at the library—they’ll be free to read!”
Hardringer snorted. “My library,” she cried, “this is my library, this is my assigned post—and they come at the hours I say, or—”
She paused. I picked up.
“You’re saying they’ll be stopped if they try to enter and read?”
“They’ll be stopped by my body in the doorway if it ain’t a time when I allow people in. I got my schedule. I got my lunchtime and my breaks, I got hall duty. They come when I say they can come. This library run the way the institution run, you payin’ attention?”
I was paying attention, that was the problem. The women always figured out a way not to pay attention and still solve the problem. For now, C.O. Hardringer owned the library, and shipments of books were about to arrive.
“It’s all right,” Baby Ain’t said to me later. “We can boost anything. She too fat to chase us far.”
In Court
I go to Important Court, special section—
Where I see the words In God We Trust
Up above the Judge’s big chair in letters of gold.
I must trust that there is a God and that this God
is Just. They call my name and the female officer
says, When you walk by the Bullpen, keep
your dignity, Lady. Don’t let them take that
away from you, Lady.
Those mouths shout at me, but
I keep walking. I end up in the
Chamber of Justice, past that
screwed-up (discombobbed) baying.
Leather seats. The Court Clerk the Judge
and the Pelican. I look up and see
In God We Trust. I pray hard to this
God. Why don’t these people look in my eyes?
—MISS NEVER DELGADO, POET
eight
Twin cities: Dark and Light. But the river was dammed…. I was on the bus to Rikers Island. I was writing the poem in my head at the same time as I was making my plan to see the warden about Lily Baye’s furlough—I’d ask to see her as soon as I arrived and checked in at the Social Services office. On the bus, I thought about the women’s discussion of whether an escaped soul could swim against the tidal rips of the river—whether one could swim from Rikers Island to another island in the river, to freedom. Billie Dee piping up about sharks in the river made me think of Virginia Woolf likening the impulse to write to being harnessed to a shark. Then I thought of Polly Lyle’s exhortation: Ride what’s trying to ride you! That was it—that was writing itself: Ride the current that’s riding you.
The inmates were in a line that snaked out of the auditorium into the chapel area. It was ten in the morning and I was headed up to the Social Services office when I saw Baby Ain’t and Never in the line, gesturing to me.
“Wow,” I said. “They must be giving away three-day passes in there.”
“You close,” said Baby Ain’t. “Near just as fine. They got the Miss Candy Craydon Charm School giving beauty lessons inside.”
“And how to walk like a model,” added Never, sucking in her cheeks and mincing back and forth. Then she crossed her eyes and walked pigeon-toed.
I laughed.
“Hey,” Baby Ain’t said. “You talked to that new flatback—what’s her name? Baye? About her poem?”
“Lily Baye? That little girl who just came in?”
“That’s right. She in the Bing.”
The line began to move forward more quickly and I trotted along beside the two of them to keep up.
“What the hell is she in the Bing for?”
“She in for her poem she wrote.”
I stopped, stock-still, not sure I’d heard correctly. I felt a charge of excitement suddenly in my veins—because of a poem?—as the line chugged along toward the auditorium door. There were two C.O.s stationed at the doors, checking for contraband, stolen medication, pocketed food. I caught up to the two of them again.
“What do you mean, she’s in the Bing for her poem?”
They were almost to the auditorium doors and moving fast. Baby Ain’t turned around to call back to me. She jumped up and yelled over the shoulders of the crowd. One of the C.O.s glanced at her.
“She put it on the drum and it went all out Inside—the Cap got heard of it and she went to Disciplinary—then they lock her in PSA.”
“When we come back out we be so charming!” cried Never over her shoulder as the crowd pushed them through the doors. “You won’t know us, girl!”
They were swept inside the auditorium. I turned away, charged up, then saw Polly Lyle coming along in line, watching me. I waved to her and she waved back. Then she called to me.
“Don’t do what you t
hinking of doing, Miss Teacher!” she shouted. “That child been in the hands of hell.”
“What are you talking about?” I shouted back. “What are you saying to me?”
“What I already said—don’t do what you up to do.”
“You lost me,” I cried. “I’m not doing anything.”
I waved again, impatiently, as if I were waving her away—and turned my back on her blazing solicitous face, shadowed as she was absorbed back into the line.
But I was doing something. I was doing something I’d never done before at the Women’s House. I went straight to the superintendent’s office, without an appointment, to see the warden. On my way there, a line from W. H. Auden’s famous elegy for W. B. Yeats, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” kept repeating in my head. “Yet it does make something happen,” I murmured aloud to myself as I strode down the halls, deserted now because of charm school. Poetry brings down the walls—for poetry we are taken to jail, for poetry we die. But with the words that keep us human on our lips as we wait on the gallows. I tried to remember anything about the poem that would have made it threatening to the administration—the fact that I could not neither encouraged nor deterred me—all my earlier anxiety fell away as I hurried toward the office of the oppressor.
Poetry and politics—at last, I thought, they’ve come together, here at the Women’s House. All the smuggled-in radical newspapers, the cryptic messages from Inside, the fight to be heard, the pens and paper—finally connect to the battered seething consciousness of the women themselves. Above my head an invisible banner unfurled: LIBERTé, EGALITé, SORORITé—I envisioned the goddess standing, spotlit, on the ramparts, Justice: her long hair blowing, her fierce blind gaze implacable as she lifted the dazzling sword. Lily Baye, in solitary confinement, had spoken the words that had called her into being.
Distracted, hurrying along, I sensed something strange about my own reaction. I was, on one hand, appalled that Lily had been locked up in solitary—and on the other, I had begun to feel weirdly thrilled, perhaps because of the unexpected power of poetry to threaten the status quo, the uniforms.
Shades of the wild mad girl, the Maid of Orleans, born in Domrémy, born in Lorraine. Burnt for heresy, burnt for witchcraft, burnt for sorcery—the Warrior Saint, Joan of Arc. Out of the flames, her proclamation of independence and war. Righteousness, under whose accelerating demands History bends, Law bends. (Watch your mouth, Holly Ann—I heard my mother’s voice suddenly—watch that mouth, but why would I listen? Pride goeth before a fall, Holly.) Nor did I remember till later what Shaw had said in his preface to his great play, Saint Joan—how there were two opinions of her heroic martyrdom. One that she, the upstart dreamer, was miraculous; the other that she was perfectly unbearable.
Superintendent Ross, the warden, looked up as I marched into her office. I was suddenly aware of two C.O.s trailing me. Ross looked beyond me at them, nodded once, and waved them away.
I stood in front of her, my hands clasped, realizing that I hadn’t prepared anything to say.
“Where is Lily Baye?”
The warden smiled. She was a slim woman in her fifties, military-pretty, with light skin and straightened copper-colored hair. Little about her suggested a medium-security keeper—she looked more like a flight attendant in her slim navy uniform.
“Lily Baye is in Punitive Segregration.”
“I demand to see her.”
I was ready to list my reasons, I was ready to launch into a full-scale impassioned argument on Lily’s behalf. But the feeling in the room was so strange that I stopped for a second, stepped back.
Superintendent Ross paused, looking me up and down. Then she sat back in her chair, looking a little bored. To my utter amazement, she reached over and touched an intercom button on her desk.
“Josie,” she said. “Could you check to see if Captain Amarillo is in the Watch Commander’s office? Tell her I’d like her to accompany Miss Mattox here up to the Bing to see Lily Baye, the inmate from 4 Upper who is in lock.”
For a heartbeat, I was terrified. Not once had I been afraid within the prison walls. Now, for one panicked second, I suspected that they were taking me away too—they would lock me up in solitary, I would die there. It was a smooth dropping sensation, absolute terror—then it vanished as fast as it had surfaced.
“And I’d like to request,” I said, “some time with you after I visit Lily.”
She nodded at me, still smiling.
“I’m not planning to go anywhere, Miss Mattox. I’ll be waiting.”
The Bing was an architectural migraine: a long straight corridor, bulb-lit, with steel doors on either side. Each door had an eye-level opening the size and shape of a mail slot. As the captain and I passed, the doors on either side shook with resounding blows and kicks, the hall rang with garbled shouts and accusations.
Captain Amarillo stopped at a door midway down the corridor, shook out the waterfall of keys hung next to the nightstick on her belt, and opened it.
The cell was so small there was barely room to enter. A bald overhead bulb in its claw-socket burned with all-day-all-night energy. Lily lay on her back on a thin mattress, her arms and legs thrown out casually, like a sun-worshipper on a floating raft. She pulled herself up to a sitting position. Her hair was wild, the cornrows half unraveled and sticking straight up. She didn’t appear to recognize me. I glanced around: a sink, a lidless toilet, the mattress.
“Baye,” said the captain. “The poetry teacher is here to see you.”
Lily looked idly at Amarillo, then spat at her. Captain Amarillo glanced down at the string of saliva which swayed, lengthening, from her skirt, then fell. I watched her face grow very calm. She moved to the door and stood there.
“That’s one count, Baye. One more time and you got an infraction on your hands. And then you got a cell extraction.”
Benny Mathison had told me what a cell extraction was. At the failure of what they called IPC (Interpersonal Communications), Bing officers performed cell extractions by entering the cell, forcing the prisoner facedown on the floor, handcuffing her behind her back, then hauling her out. Injuries often were incurred. OC (oleoresin capsicum), or pepper spray, was often used. Benny said the pepper spray was the least of it. There were broken bones, fractured skulls, multiple contusions—all in the process of performing an extraction. And in the process of beating the shit out of the extractee once extracted.
Without asking permission, I sat down on the edge of the mattress and touched Lily’s hand.
“Do you remember me, Lily? Have they hurt you?”
“Hurt me? ’Course I remember you! And ’course they hurt me! I’m in here, right?”
“What happened with the poem you wrote?”
“You told me to put it on the drum—you told me everybody should hear it. Then they jump me on it, take it all away. Stuff I write down there they don’t like to hear! They had to fight me though, girl. I best near iced two screw bitches.”
She laughed, then glared up at Captain Amarillo, and Amarillo glared back.
I felt momentarily confused. Had I actually told her to put the poem “on the drum”? This meant making copies, passing them hand to hand, floor to floor, or reciting the poem aloud, then, as others learned it by heart, letting it circulate throughout the institution. Had I told her to do that?
I decided not to ask her.
“Tell me what you need. I’m going to help you.”
“I need a furlough by tomorrow—to hold my baby one last time? You forget what I told you? And I don’t see I’m gonna get it! Look what’s been done to me!”
She cried out and then laid her head on my shoulder like an ill, exhausted child.
I followed her gaze to the wall. Graffiti was scratched on the cement—how? Hairpins, a bent spoon, bones? There were the names—the universal graffiti names—Sweet Duchess and Cola, Death Mamba, La Reina de Dolorosa, Cruise Top, Shudder Honey, a cobweb of names. Fresh scratches below: Lil Bit, Lil Bit.
; Lily drew an audible breath.
“I need something to write with. I need a pen. I need paper. I bleedin’ poems.”
“Captain Amarillo,” I said. “Could you please see that Lily has some pencils and paper?”
“You just go on ahead and take that matter up with the superintendent, Miss Mattox.”
“Captain—what are you afraid of?”
“Time’s way up.”
“The truth?” I asked.
I pulled gently away from Lily and faced Captain Amarillo. She offered me an “Are you for real?” look and stepped a fraction of an inch closer.
“I like to tell you, Miss Mattox, that I’m not afraid of anything in this here area,” she said. She put her hand on her hip, just above the belt with the nightstick, and waited.
I stood up.
“I’m on my way to Ross. I’m going to make them let you go, Lily.”
Lily’s smile turned to a grimace. She grasped my hand as I stood up and I bowed awkwardly to her, my arm pulled out in a kind of downward salute.
Lily looked at me at last.
“I’m gonna write a book, Holly. I want to write all this down for the whole world to see.”
The warden looked up as I walked in. She indicated a chair in front of her desk and I sat down. I began shaking suddenly—I tried to control my hands by folding them in my lap. I’d never seen human beings in locked boxes before, never smelled the stench of solitary confinement: dead air, terror-sweat, the sour pitch rebreathed fetid smell of animal rage. I knew that most of the women in solitary were there because of bad behavior in the larger boxes in which they’d been stored. There, too, the soul knew no moments of escape. I looked at my hands and willed them to stop shaking.
“I’m not sure where to start,” I said. “But I will begin by asking you what the reason is for Lily Baye’s confinement in the Bing and then I want to know what has to be done to get her released. And home for her daughter’s funeral. In the meantime, I’m requesting that she be given writing materials.”
The warden laughed.
“So that she can write more poems?”
Channeling Mark Twain Page 14