“I don’t know. All I care about is protecting you two,” I replied. I knew it was the truest thing I’d ever said the moment the words left my mouth. Protecting them was what I wanted to do for the rest of their lives.
I was a fool for Diamond, but she took her sweet time to warm up to me. She had had her mama to herself for as long as a three-year-old can remember, and she was mad that I was trying to horn in on her territory. At first, she refused to come to me or let on that she was interested in any of the toys I showed her in the little play area set aside for prisoners’ kids. But once she decided I passed muster, she would reach out her little arms to greet me whenever she saw me and then spend most of our visit sitting on top of my shoulders. We’d color pictures together, and I tried to teach her numbers. She loved going down the little plastic slide in the play area.
Trena never missed a visit. It made my day when I knew she was coming. I would shower, then go to my cell and read a little for school until it was time to go down. Visiting hours were nine in the morning until three in the afternoon.
Trena was becoming part of my world. I wasn’t sure she understood what that meant, at first: my world was a prison. I never forgot that, much as I tried to pretend otherwise when we were together. I couldn’t always pull it off. One time, just as I was about to clear all the checkpoints and go into the visiting room for my shift as photographer, a newjack decided to throw his weight around and put me through the full cheek-baring routine. The rookie CO could see I was fuming and using every ounce of my willpower not to mouth off at him, so he pushed even harder: he decreed that the shirt I was wearing was in violation of the dress code somehow. I don’t even remember what the problem was—I always wore my nicest clothes when I was going to see Trena, and I knew she was going to be there to see her brother that day. I was ordered to go back to my cell and change.
Clothes were an easy way to jam everything up for an inmate on visiting days. Some of the female COs made it practically a team sport to harass the girlfriends or wives passing through security on the other side, turning them back because their pants were too tight or their blouses too sheer, or the bras they were wearing had hooks that set off the metal detector. The meaner COs took sadistic pleasure in fucking up your day, maybe even your relationship if they pushed hard enough. (“I don’t wanna visit you anyways. That bitch made me change twice!”) I wasn’t going to give up that easy, though. The trip to my cell and back just to put on a different shirt, plus the whole hassle of waiting in line and passing through security again, was going to cost me an hour of precious time at the least. If I made a big scene over it, I could get written up for disobeying a direct order and end up in keep-lock. I hurried back as fast as I could, but the whole episode left me agitated, and once I finally got through that orange door, I was in a dark-cloud mood. I spotted Trena but didn’t go up to greet her. Instead, I bustled around taking my pictures, all business, avoiding the anxious glances she was shooting my way. When she finally sought me out and gave me a hug, I was still in my mood, and barely acknowledged her. I could see she was upset and confused by the brush-off. I didn’t understand why I was pushing her away, either, just when our friendship was on the verge of becoming something more. I felt like a jerk. I caught her on her way out the door, bent down, and whispered in her ear.
“I love you.”
She smiled, and I knew all had been forgiven.
Once I fell in love, I felt like a man split into two. When I came into that visiting room, I could let go a little, and just breathe. I was nice. I was funny. I was positive and upbeat. I was the very best version I had of myself. But the minute I got on the other side of that door, it was like I had just passed through the gates of hell and knew full well what misery was awaiting me. I had to change into someone else. On that side of the door, I had to carry myself differently. I had to come off like a cold, vicious person, like someone you wouldn’t ever want to mess with, because the only way to make sure you didn’t get stabbed, beat down, or jumped on was to instill fear in anyone who might try. That was a possibility I had to deal with every single day. You had to be a rattlesnake always coiled to strike. There were so many times when I woke up angry and frustrated, but Trena would be visiting later in the day, and it would take every ounce of energy and willpower I had to summon forth my best self again for those few treasured hours that I’d be able to spend with the caramel-skinned woman and sweet baby girl I now considered my family.
We hit our first serious bump in the road a few months into our relationship when I felt like the time had come to explain my case to her. I had told her at the outset how much time I was doing, but I hadn’t said why or laid out the specifics. I didn’t know that she had asked her brother to ask around about me already, or that he had reported back to her that I had been convicted of murdering an old woman. That Trena didn’t judge me should tell you a lot about her character and her Christianity. On the day I decided it was time to share my whole story, I felt excited as I put all my news clippings and some of my legal casework into a fresh new file folder for her. I wanted her to understand what I was going through and what I was fighting for. And yes, I wanted her to do what she could do to help me, to feel outraged by what had happened and join my fight. It wasn’t Trena’s money I wanted. It was her devotion. I wanted her to make phone calls, to make contact with whatever potentially useful organizations or individuals she could reach more easily than I could. Most of all, I wanted to know she believed me.
Trena pushed the file back across the table. She wanted no part of it.
To her, our relationship existed separately from my legal dilemma. She knew I was doing twenty to life and wouldn’t even come up for parole for the first time for another eight years, that I was trying to prove my innocence in the meantime, but she considered all that a matter best handled by me, God, and the State of New York. She didn’t want to deal with my past. Her lack of interest stung, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Did she think deep down that I might be guilty? I was too scared to ask her point-blank. And if that were the case, why would she even want to be around me? There is a whole raft of control-freak women out there who actually prefer men in prison just so they can call all the shots, and never have to deal with the complicated business of living together, but Trena did not fit that bill at all. I was baffled. I took back my folder and tried to convince myself that it was just too soon, and I had overwhelmed her. We didn’t mention it again. I prayed that the day would come when she would ask to see it.
TRENA AND I HAD KNOWN EACH OTHER JUST SHY OF A YEAR when I leaned in close during one of our visits and whispered in her ear: “Would you marry me?”
Trena pulled back and looked at me like I was crazy.
“I have to think about that,” she said carefully.
The next two weeks were agony for me. I knew Trena cared about me, but my sentence was twenty years to life. To life. There was a possibility that I would never walk out the gates of Sing Sing, that I would die behind bars. Trena’s brother, serving his own fifteen-year sentence a few cells down from me, urged her not to become a prisoner’s wife. “Yo, I heard him on the phone with her,” a friend of mine reported. “He was saying don’t do it.”
Trena continued to write and visit me while she was mulling over my proposal, and when I saw her again, I tried to bolster my case.
“I know what your brother is saying, and I understand,” I argued. “I wouldn’t want this for my sister, either. But I love you. I know I can’t prove who I am as a man in here, but if God lets me out, I’ll show you. I’ll take care of you.”
Trena had girlfriends whose men had been locked up then got out, and she knew that there was no such thing as a storybook ending. Being released from prison doesn’t necessarily mean you are freed from prison. Prison can follow you into the real world, box you in mentally just as surely as it did physically.
“All you guys say that crap,” Trena challenged me, “and then you walk out and treat your women like dir
t.”
“But I’m not them,” I insisted.
“I don’t know that, Dewey.”
“That’s why you gotta trust me.”
The next time I wrote her, I asked her to go buy a certain tape by Babyface, one of my favorite artists. “Please listen to all those songs,” I implored her. Even the titles—“Given a Chance,” “Sunshine,” and “I’ll Give the World to You”—had special meaning to me. Trena did as I asked.
“Why did you tell me to listen to those songs?” she wanted to know the next visiting day.
“Because that’s me,” I said. “That’s me talking to you.”
Trena fell quiet.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” she finally asked.
“No,” I corrected her, “are you sure this is what you can do?”
“The only way I’ll marry you is if you ask my dad,” Trena said. She was a grown woman of nearly thirty, with a child of her own, but Trena had an old-school way to her that I found not only charming, but reassuring. The way she stuck by her jailed brother and looked after her ailing father proved to me that when Trena made a commitment, she stood by it. Now she wanted to do everything properly, and if having me ask her father for her hand in marriage was important to her, then it was important to me. She brought him with her the next time she came. We had spoken on the phone before, talked sports and such, but I had never seen him face-to-face. He was a serious, older gentleman who knew what was coming. He was friendly but reserved, and I could tell he was sizing me up—how I dressed and how I was groomed, how I carried myself, how I sounded.
“Listen,” I began, hoping I didn’t sound as nervous as I felt. “I was wondering if you would mind if I asked for your daughter’s hand in marriage.” What else could I say? I had nothing else to offer. I couldn’t promise a beautiful life.
“No, I don’t mind,” he answered. “Just make sure you take care of her. Be a man of your word.”
“That’s not something you have to worry about,” I vowed. Trena came back, and I kissed her before walking away. It was all pretty awkward, but nothing had ever felt so right in my life.
We put in the paperwork to get married, and we were assigned a date a few months down the road: March 30, 1996.
Sing Sing held weddings in the main building, in what had been the original visiting room. There was nothing romantic about it—it was just another dingy room to shuffle inmates into and out of. We were married by the prison chaplain, with two friends from the outside and COs serving as witnesses. Trena wore a beige dress and held Diamond in her arms. I wore my state-issued best. Trena bought us both rings—the first of three I would end up going through in the course of our marriage thanks to a strong left jab I have on the heavy punching bag.
We had to wait a year for our honeymoon.
Sing Sing had six trailers for conjugal visits, parked side by side in a sort of makeshift campground on an isolated patch of land up a little hill from the cellblocks. Each trailer had a little kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, and two bedrooms—one for a child, the other for the parents. You had to show a CO all the knives, forks, and spoons before you left. If you broke anything, you had to report it. In prison, a shard of glass can become deadly. Homemade shivs and spears could be buried in the recreation yard or the old baseball field. When the COs found out, the prison tore up all the grass and made it hardscape from then on.
Our honeymoon was two days in one of the trailers. It had been so long since I had been with a woman, years upon years. Damn, is this really going to happen? I thought as I helped Trena put away the lasagna she had made—my favorite dish. I ate as much as my stomach could hold, relishing every rich bite. Just being able to open a refrigerator door and help myself—to have a soda or orange juice when I wanted to—was more gratifying than you would ever expect such an ordinary thing to be. Just being in the little trailer with this beautiful woman who was now my wife—my wife—felt shocking to me. During our courtship in the visiting room, I would walk right up to Trena and give her a kiss. But here, I felt strange. Cuddling with Trena on the sofa, all my boldness was gone, replaced by a shyness I’d never experienced before. She finally made a move on me, and we made our way into the bedroom. Our first time together as husband and wife was full of unspoken emotion, compassionate and tender.
I couldn’t stay in bed, though. As night fell, I started hearing noises. I didn’t feel comfortable being in the trailer. It wasn’t like a cell, locked tight at night, with bars you could see through to know if someone was approaching. The trailer felt exposed and vulnerable. Anyone could get in, sneak up on you. The darkness was darker than the cellblock, the silence deeper. Every sound made me jump. The knives in the kitchen were attached to the wall with a wire, but I grabbed one and put it on the table, as close to the door as it would reach. I had to defend my family. I didn’t trust anybody, not even the COs.
“Dewey, what’s wrong?” Trena whispered. I paced back and forth to the dirty little window, peering out. Adrenaline pulsed through my body as if I were about to step into the ring, and my subconscious put me through the same mental paces it did during a fight: Keep moving, keep moving, don’t let your guard down, anticipate, anticipate. I sat and stared at the door, listening and waiting. I couldn’t sleep in the soft bed, anyway, after a decade on the hard iron bed in my cell. I wished I could sleep on the floor. The refrigerator thumped, and I was up like a shot, convinced someone was in the living room.
It was then that I knew just how institutionalized I had become, and how deeply prison had wounded me. I realized that Trena was the only person left in the world I trusted. I held her tight, and when daylight came, I was able to pretend again that everything was all right.
8
HUMANITY CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT HOPE, and there is nothing sadder than watching a man lose both.
In prison, a soul can get scraped away methodically, like a piece of metal sharpened against a concrete cell floor night after night. Other times, it happens in a shocked instant, like a force of nature, the way a tornado strips the bark right off a tree then leaves it standing, leafless and raw. I knew the day I callously stepped over the bleeding body of that inmate who had just been stabbed that my humanity had deserted me. I remember just as vividly the day it returned.
There was a guy on my cellblock who had given up. The guy just stayed in his cell all the time. He never came out to shower or to get some fresh air in the yard. After a while, he began to smell, the stink of sickness and surrender coming off him so bad that people started complaining about having to even walk past his cell. The other inmates shunned him like a leper, and even the COs kept their distance. He was like some pathetic animal that had crawled off to just wait for death to hurry up and come. His cell looked like an overturned Dumpster, filled with trash and God only knows what. One day when I was hurrying past, trying not to breathe, I saw him stir in his cot, and the pity rose up and hit me out of nowhere. The loneliness and cruelty of his situation made me stop in my tracks and call out to him.
“How you doing?” I asked. “Can I talk to you a minute?” He came up to the bars.
“Yo, I don’t want to be rude, but can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“Why you don’t care for yourself anymore? Why you let yourself go like that? Why you live like this?” I wanted to know.
He opened up his shirt so I could see the purple marks on his skin, telling me without a word that life didn’t mean anything anymore.
Damn, I thought. AIDS. His misery was ten times, a hundred times, my own.
“Well, if I was to do something for you, would you be a man and take care of yourself?” I heard myself cajoling him. He looked wary, not sure what to make of me. We didn’t even know each other’s name.
“No one cares, no one really gives a damn,” he countered.
“If I was to offer you a shower, if I was to clean your cell, would you take care of yourself?” I pressed. He studied me for a moment before deciding.<
br />
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I got you then. Go get ready.”
I went to the officers on gallery duty, told them about the deal I had struck, and asked them to give the inmate permission to take a shower and me the go-ahead to clean out his cell while he was gone.
“Really?” the sergeant said, surprised by the prospect of such community service. “Why you want to bother with that motherfucker?”
“Yo, man, the man is dying, let me help him out.”
Permission was instantly granted, and while the man showered, I filled bags with all the trash and carried it out, swept out his cell, then mopped it and swabbed down every surface with Ajax. He came back, and I got permission to get fresh sheets and a clean blanket for his fetid bed, which he made up himself. I went and got his filthy clothes washed. He didn’t have a whole lot more time left in this world, and I won’t lie and say we became great friends, but as I scrubbed out his cell that day, I felt something I had been missing for a good long time: I felt connected, by however fragile a thread, to another human being.
A couple of mornings later, his cell was empty. I don’t know whether he died or was finally sent to the hospital, or if something else happened.
I never did know his name.
CRIMINALS WEREN’T THE ONLY ONES TO LOSE THEIR SOULS IN SING SING. There were COs every bit as inhuman as the worst baby killers and rapists in the place. One officer was known for ordering inmates down on the ground during cell searches so he could accidentally grind his boot down on a man’s hand until the bones crunched. Applause broke out when news traveled through the galleries that he had died in a car crash one weekend while off duty.
One of the worst incidents happened when a sadistic sergeant named Ronald Hunlock discovered a litter of kittens in a box an inmate had hidden in his cell. Like many prisons, Sing Sing had a colony of stray cats roaming the grounds; their presence was tolerated because they were cheap exterminators when it came to trying to control the vermin. Some animal-loving inmates tamed the wild cats to keep as pets, and most COs just looked the other way. On this particular afternoon, though, Hunlock ordered the inmate to take his box of kittens outside and dump them in the prison trash compactor.
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