Doing Time

  Cakes was frowning, concentrating hard on a spot over Louise’s head, trying not to let her fury run wild. Keisha had stopped smiling, but the smirk was still in her eyes. Louise was almost crying. She had pulled her knees up to her chin and slid down in her chair, looking even thinner than usual. I looked at her and said, “Stop crying. He didn’t rape you, did he? He didn’t fuck you, right?”

  “No. But these men around here make me think of Jerry, He beat me up every time it rained. He said I was his and there was nothing I could do about it. When I got arrested, the first thing I thought was ‘Jerry can’t do me no more,’ and I was happy.”

  “Ain’t that some shit,” Cakes said. “You gotta go to prison to get away from your old man. I wouldn’t take that from any man. All you white girls are the same. Either you take it from your men, or you take ours.”

  My boss walked in and everyone shut up.

  “What’s going on, girls?”

  “Nothing,” everyone said almost at once.

  “There’s a special count. Everyone go back to your quarters. Come back at two P.M.”

  I was relieved. I wanted to talk to Keisha. If there’s anyone I can talk to, it’s Keisha. She reminds me of Tina, a woman I went to nursing school with who was always telling me to touch my patients. Tina said I’d never be a real nurse if I was afraid to touch, roll up my sleeves, and dive into their illnesses. One day in the emergency room a black woman who had overdosed was brought in. She had open wounds all over her arms and was lying in her own vomit. We had to clear the vomit from her throat, then pack her in ice and clean her sores. I hesitated, and Tina caught it. The shame burned as I turned red. It wasn’t the vomit or the sores that made me hesitate. It was because she was black. I’d never touched anyone black. Tina never said anything about it, but she knew. After that I thought a lot about how fucked up I was, how I was a racist and didn’t even know it.

  When I met Keisha, she asked me why I wasn’t in the white girls’ club. At first I would only say I didn’t want to be in any club, that I was a loner. But later I told her this story. She said at least I’d realized it. Most people would have let someone else treat the woman. I liked Keisha for saying that. But after that she told me about her life, and how white people didn’t know how racist they were, or they knew and enjoyed it. She told me about her father trying to organize the United Auto Workers union in Detroit, and how the whites fire-bombed her house. Keisha is really proud she’s black. She is BLACK, almost blue-black.

  She called us “the odd team,” and we hung out because we worked together. We didn’t need to talk all the time. We were comfortable with each other on some level I can’t explain. It’s just one of those friendships that happen in prison and wouldn’t happen anywhere else.

  We walked across the compound, past the rec field. Even though it was windy and the leaves were blowing, we walked slowly, because once we got inside it would be harder to talk.

  “You know you’re going to be called by the lieutenant,” Keisha said. “Security is going to deal with this one. Jane said he raped her, and she’s gonna go for it. The white girls’ club has already started talking. They’re talking to all the white girls who will listen. They’re saying it’s cop violence.”

  “Why me, damn it? I never talk to the police.”

  “Lee, don’t be a jerk. You live next door to her. You and Maria are part of their investigation for sure.”

  “I hate this shit. All I want to do is my time and get on.”

  “What will you tell them?”

  “It’s none of your business what I tell them.”

  “Yes it is. If you tell them you don’t know anything, they’ll put you in the hole until it’s over, and I’ll have to send you stuff. If you tell them he raped her, then you’ll be the white girl of the month. If you say it wasn’t rape, then you’ll be called a cop lover and a snitch. Any way you do it I’ll have to decide where I stand with you. It is my business.”

  “But it’s not my business. I don’t care about Jane or Wilson. They don’t care about me. They didn’t give a shit about me when they did it in her cell.”

  “It may not be your fault, but now you’re in it. So you have a problem.”

  The door to the unit was open and people were filing in. Half the unit was standing on the tiers or in the lobby. The count hadn’t been called yet. On the top tier there were two lieutenants and two other men in sports clothes standing at the rail, taking pictures of cells -— Jane’s, Maria’s, mine. Everyone was watching. I cursed Jane over and over.

  At five the next morning I heard officers opening Jane’s cell, telling her to get dressed. They took her out of the unit. The investigation had begun.

  I wanted time to think, bur I had to go to work. On my way, I saw Louise talking to Bonnie, this stone-cold racist. She and her bus-band had been part of some racist gang in Idaho that went on a terror rampage against Vietnamese immigrants. Now she’s “born again” and leads an all-white self-esteem group. Seeing her with Louise gave me the chills; I realized that Bonnie was trying to find out what I was going to do about Jane and Wilson. I was going to have to start watching my back if this was gonna be a gang thing. It could get physical and someone could get cut up.

  I got to Mechanical Services — out of the air, into the dungeon. Work was an overheated, dark basement office where I spent my days jockeying for a seat on the best of the torn-up trashed chairs we collected from the garbage to furnish our office. One of our jobs is to pick up broken furniture and equipment, but since there’s no place to store it, and it takes months to get anything fixed, most of it sits in the basement hall rotting.

  Keisha was going through work orders and pulling out the parts we’d need for each one. Louise came in right after me and walked to the desk in the middle of the room, looking more strung out than usual. I always thought all that whacking around and beating had made her dull. She was so skinny and she looked like she was scared to put food in her mouth.

  Louise’s jaw popped. “Everyone’s saying that Wilson did it. Jane is really afraid the guards are gonna set her up. Unless we support her, she may have to go into protective custody. This woman in a state prison had the same thing happen to her. She got pushed off a tier and broke her back. Now she’s paralyzed, I mean, a guard raped her and tried to kill her.”

  “Since when do you talk to Bonnie so much, Louise?” Keisha asked.

  Louise stuttered, surprised by Keisha’s challenge. “I, uh, that’s not it. It’s just that I believe Jane, and besides, he’s a cop and it’s her word against his. And we never win unless we stick together.”

  “Well, I don’t think he raped her,” Keisha said. “I think they were lovers. She was into him. I want to know why she’s doing this. First she fucks him, then yells rape. Just ‘cause she says it, don’t make it so.”

  I wanted to know why she was doing it too. I also wanted to jump out of my skin and run.

  Cakes walked in. “They just took Maria in handcuffs to the captain’s office,” she announced. “Four of them. ‘Come with us,’ they said. They didn’t even wait ‘til she was outside to put the cuffs on her.”

  When I got back to the unit, Jane was still gone and Maria was sitting on her bunk, staring at the wall. I knocked and went in. She didn’t look good. She’d been crying and her wrists were swollen from the cuffs. I asked her if she was okay.

  A long line of Spanish curses came out: pendejo this, pendejo that. “That was worse than all my talks with the U.S. Attorney, that cabrón. They were screaming at me and threatening me. They said I could get a new case for perjury, and no matter what, I’d go to a grand jury. I don’t even know where the grand jury is. Chingada. They made me take a lie detector test. I kept asking to call my lawyer and they said, ‘Fuck your lawyer!’ They said I’d go to segregation and do the rest of my time there. Six of ‘em kept saying, ‘He raped her.’ They said it over and over.”

  “Who was there?” I asked.

  “I don’t know �
� some lieutenants, that pendejo Jason, the captain, and two other guys who said they were from Washington, some agency I never heard of. They were the ones with the lie detector. Shit man, I didn’t do anything.” She was breathing hard.

  “How long were you in there?”

  “Three hours.”

  My heart dropped. Before I could stop myself, I said, “You were in there all that time? What did you say to them? I mean, that’s a long time.”

  Maria cut her eyes at me and froze. Just that fast, I had stopped being someone to comfort her, someone she could confide in. Now I was an immediate threat. I’d blown it before I could find out anything she’d said. Spending three hours with the police meant she’d told them lots of things. I tried to save the conversation by asking if my name had come up, but other than tell me that they’d called her because she lived next door, Maria had had nothing else to say. She stood up, wanting me to leave.

  I went to my cell. Since my cell will never be my home or “house,” as the police like to call it, I don’t keep a lot of things. But I do have a big, knitted blanket which I crawled under, trying to get warm and calm down so I could think. I was waking for the police to call me in for interrogation. I wasn’t going to say one word, but I knew they’d physically keep me there and threaten me with new charges and more time.

  From what Maria had said, I knew there was an outside investigation. It wasn’t just the prison. Unlike all the other investigations I’d seen or heard about, this time they were going after the officer, not the prisoner. A few years ago, this other officer had been fucking every woman he could. Everyone knew it. He and a woman prisoner got busted in the shower by the night orderly. When the administration found out about it, the officer got transferred. A few months later we heard he’d gotten a promotion. All the women involved went to the hole for months. The difference: He was white.

  “Chow line. Last call.” There was a rap on my door and Keisha barged in.

  She stood over me, her arms crossed and her braid all messy. “No rest for the weary. GET UP!” she said. “I waited at dinner but I should’ve known you wouldn’t show. We have work to do. You can’t lie here like a vegetable. The whole compound is freaking out. Maria’s wrists are black and blue and she’s in the cafeteria crying. There are four extra cops on duty and the lieutenants are running around like there’s gonna be a riot, and you’re takin’ a goddamned nap.” Keisha was barely controlling her voice.

  “Tough shit,” I said. “I’m thinking.”

  “You’re not thinking,” Keisha said, her voice getting loud. “You’re catatonic. You can’t zone out now.”

  “I’m trying to figure it out, okay? So leave it.” I could get loud too, if I wanted.

  “No, I won’t,” she said.

  “It’s none of your damn business. You’re the one always telling me to stay away from the crap.”

  “Listen here, and listen good. This isn’t the same. One, this is about to become a lynching of one more black man, and two, you’ve been my friend and you’re in it. So, it’s a different case. Get it?” Keisha went on. “I know we always say you gotta do what you gotta do, but sometimes that just don’t work. This is about race. A lynching. They’re gonna take the word of that cracker Jane and screw Wilson to the wall. Don’t you know that anytime a white girl says ‘rape by a black man,’ the mob runs for a rope?”

  “But he’s a cop, Keisha.” My voice was catching.

  “Yeh, he’s a cop with a dick for brains. But he didn’t rape her, did he?”

  No he didn’t, I thought. It got real silent. Then I said: “Look, I never told you about my case, and I don’t really want to now, ‘cause I don’t like to think about it. But I murdered this old guy. I pulled the plug on his life support because he begged me to. I did it because he was suffering and he couldn’t stand it and I couldn’t stand it either. He probably would’ve died in a couple of weeks, I don’t know. But I’m the one who ended his life. As soon as the monitors went flat and I plugged them back in, I knew I was in deep shit. The heart machine alarm started buzzing, and I thought I’d go to prison for this. But I didn’t. The hospital didn’t want a scandal, so I lost my job and my license instead. And then I started selling drugs, which got me busted. But I’m still glad the old guy didn’t have to keep suffering. So, I just get by in here. I just want to live through it and see the free light of day again. That’s it. I’m afraid of more time, of a new case, of having to get into some shit that isn’t mine, I’m in my own shit and I’ve fucked up my life and can barely manage that. You know I leave everyone alone, don’t bother anyone, don’t talk to the cops. I just do my time.”

  Keisha sat down on the bed and put her arms around me. Sometime during that stream of words I’d started to cry.

  “It’s cool, Lee, it’s okay. You’re okay. What I’m trying to say is that I can’t let it go down again. Every second of every day the shit I have to eat because I’m black . . . sometimes I just feel like choking someone. To me this whole thing is a black-white thing. And ‘cause I know you see it, even if you don’t feel it, I thought you’d understand.” Her braid had come undone and she had tears in the corners of her eyes. We sat there a while. Then she got up and said, “I’ll see you later, okay?” She walked out before I could say anything.

  I cried until I couldn’t breathe and my chest hurt. Then something cracked. I felt light. I could catch my breath. A really deep breath. I hadn’t breathed that deep in years. I lay there feeling calm, looking at the early evening light coming into my cell. Keisha was right; I couldn’t ride this one out, I wasn’t going to be part of a lynch mob. Most of the time it’s all so twisted and sick, but sometimes there’s right and wrong, even in here.

  Lucky for me they came before I lost my nerve. Four guards hustled me out of the cell, cuffed my hands behind my back, and almost carried me out of the unit. But I was ready. I was even sort of looking forward to it.

  Segregation. The hole. There was very little light and the air was dank. The walls oozed. It had become cold outside, and the water pipes upstairs froze, then exploded, and when I put my hand to the wall it came away wet. I was trying to read the time away, holding my book open toward the light that came through the food slot in the door.

  After they’d brought in the fifth Harlequin Romance, I’d thrown a fit. Then this cop came to the door with four thick paperbacks and tossed them through the slot. Now I was trying to read Hawaii, by James Michener, but all I kept thinking about was how much I wanted to be in Hawaii.

  We call the hole “three hots and a cot.” Actually it’s three of everything: cold food, cold water, cold weather; three hours a week outside and three showers a week. What I hate the most is never being able to get hot coffee.

  Every time they come for me to go outside for recreation, I’m ready. Segregation’s rec yard is the size of a basketball court, and it’s chopped up into six little cages, each with a basketball hoop at the end. Sometimes, there’s even a basketball. You walk into the cage one at a time, then the gate is locked. You put your hands through a slot and they take the cuffs off. Then you have sixty minutes. Beyond the cage is an open, grassy space, but it’s off limits except for prisoners on landscape detail.

  Keisha and Cakes appeared in that grassy area pushing an old hand lawnmower. They were hoping they wouldn’t be stopped, but here it was forty degrees out and the snow was still on the ground. I could see my breath and had to jump up and down to stop my teeth from chattering. I had no coat. They came to about five yards from the fence.

  “What’s happening, my non-Nubian sister?” Cakes asked.

  I smiled. “I feel like a fucking corpse, but what else is new?” I hoped they knew what was happening. Cakes said something to Keisha, then started stamping her feet. She took a cigarette and tried to light it, but couldn’t because of the wind.

  “I’d really like to get that whore,” Cakes said. “I really would. Lee, it’s all fucked up,”

  “They lynched him, Lee. They lynch
ed him.” Keisha sounded hoarse, “Jane got transferred to some cushy joint, Maria got parole, and your poor ass is lying down for a year. But Wilson, they gave him twenty years. It was on the news. We saw it on TV. His wife and kids were in the courtroom and they all came out crying.” Keisha kicked the ground.

  Cakes hollered: “What really pisses me off is watching all those happy crackers running around here like they won a prize or something.”

  Then Keisha said something, but I couldn’t hear her because the wind ate her words.

  “What?” I yelled at her.

  “Oh shit, I feel like I should be there instead of you. My advice sure didn’t help anyone.”

  Keys. I heard keys rattling behind me.

  “Time’s up, McMann,” the officer barked

  “Damn,” I thought. “Okay,” I told the cop. “Just let me tie my shoes.” I turned back around.

  “Keisha,” I yelled. “Cut it out. I’m all right with it. I really am. It’s cool. It’s Wilson who got destroyed.”

  “Thank you,” Cakes said. “You hear that, Keisha? I told you she’d say that. She’s all right. Lee is all right.”

  And I was.

  1993, Federal Correctional Institution Marianna

  Marianna, Florida

  Family

  Although men and, to a greater degree, women create surrogate families behind bars, in this section prisoners write of blood relations. Reconstructing childhood on paper is the consolation of hundreds. Tender mothers and grandmothers — the last to give up on prisoners — are everywhere in prison writing. Sometimes even evanescent fathers are honored, as in Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “Ancestor.” Diane Hamill Metzger recalls a great-uncle who doubled as her grandfather.

  To comb through the wreckage buried with their youth, some writers, like Barbara Saunders, choose indirection. Increasingly, men take on such themes. Alejo Dao’ud Rodriguez’s narrator hears out another prisoner’s story of damage untold in court and barely understood by the teller. Though Rodriguez himself has not sat on death row, his poem draws on the fact that the majority of persons there had been abused. Others begin to restore themselves by confronting in verse those who betrayed their trust. In “You Wanted to Be My Protector” (1995),* Delores Hornkk narrates the battering experience that drove her to seek protection orders against a lover.