by asha bandele
Poetry and words can transform a soul, a person. I believed that then and I believe it now. They had done so for me and I was watching them do so for Rashid, who already had a voracious reading appetite. The longer I knew Rashid, the more I believed in him, and then one day, about a year after we’d met, he called me.
I had given Rashid my phone number after one of the poets in our group read a poem aloud that provoked the guards and we were put out of the prison. I told Rashid to call me when he could so that I knew he and all the other men did not get in trouble for any of our actions. A week, maybe two weeks later, he rang me and said that, no there had been no more problems with the guards, but yes he was reaching out anyway because he wanted me to come visit him. And he was very specific. He did not want to see me as a volunteer or as a poet, but as a friend. I hesitated. I said no. I rebuffed the request several times over. But finally I gave in. The truth was, I liked him.
The first time I visited Rashid in a personal rather than a professional capacity, it was the day after Christmas. This was when he told me everything about his crime. He brought down the transcripts and he encouraged me to read them carefully. He wanted me to know who he had been so I could trust who he had become, who he was still trying to become.
He spoke to me of his shame, and he spoke to me of his desire to do better, to be better. He showed me pictures of his son, born when Rashid was eighteen years old and, as it turned out, would be headed to prison less than two months later. At the end of the visit, we kissed, perhaps a little awkwardly, but certainly intimately. It was a kiss that began a romance.
For five years we courted. We wrote letters, two and three times a week. We spoke on the phone weekly at first, but later, daily. We did our best to shed our fears about vulnerability and trust, and as much as two people can do this, we revealed ourselves to ourselves wholly and without arrogance.
Rashid would be the first person with whom I discussed in depth the molestations that punctured my childhood, that sent me reeling headlong into the world as a girl who by twelve, had no sense of my own youth, and certainly no sense of my own value.
I told him that despite the privileged and in some ways rarefied life that my parents, academics both of them, provided my sister and me, childhood was dangerous. Home for me had been a safe place, but out in the world of schoolteachers, camp counselors, and after-school jobs, danger was a dark cloud that seemed never to lift, never to blow away. And I had ne’er a skill to blow them away myself.
Because I grew up in the years before sexual abuse was discussed openly—or at all—I did not understand even basic things. I did not understand, for example, that the thirty-something-year-old man who claimed me as “his girl” when I was fourteen was a predator. I did not understand anything that happened to me any of the times they happened. I only knew that I felt dirty, wrong, and misplaced in the world.
Rashid encouraged me to seek counseling and supported me when I did. He read books about survivors of sexual violence, and he read books about the partners of survivors of sexual violence so that he could better understand the way I moved in the world, the fears that kept me internally bound. But more than anything else, Rashid listened to me. He refused to minimize my hurt or make judgments about the choices I had made as a girl who had fashioned a life based on hurt. Rashid held me close in every meaningful way a person can hold a person close. I tried to hold him in the very same way. I tried to understand what his life had been.
He told me that he had been a boy who had been abandoned in Guyana. His mother left for the United States when he was an infant, and his father followed some eleven years later. Rashid and his brother, who was a year older, were, for all intents and purposes, left alone to raise themselves during the critical years between twelve and sixteen. And even once he arrived in this new nation, his mother was simply not equipped to parent the child she had left as an infant with an angry and frustrated father who beat his son so badly that at ten years old, Rashid tried to commit suicide.
“I swallowed turpentine,” he admitted to me during one painful visit, even as he added that beating children with canes until they bled was the norm in the world where he grew up.
“No one, including my father, probably including me, would have understood this is abuse. It was the way things were. But still, I was tired of hurting so much.”
After months of intense discussions, we fell deeply in love.
For me it was incredible, the very definition of love, because we loved without distraction. All the other loves of my life were fueled and supported by myriad—and sporadic—intimacy: walks in the park, sex, laughter over a dinner, trips to faraway lands.
Rashid and I had none of these experiences to drive our desire or love or relationship. We only had ourselves, our hearts on the table. What other love, I said to him once, could be more pure? After five years of our self-made, self-powered intimacy, we did what most who are in love are wont—and able—to do. We got married. In a corner of a prison visiting room, as vending machines provided the background noise, we exchanged our vows, and then I went home and then he went back to his cell.
An interminable five months after we were married, we qualified for conjugal visits, or trailers, in jailhouse vernacular. Eventually the prison issued us a date, a private forty-four hours together in a small two-bedroom trailer in a yard on the prison compound. The trailers themselves were sparse in their furnishings, funded as they were by the limited monies prisoners cobbled together. But they were clean and they were neat and for those hours, they were home.
I was nervous that first time, afraid even. How do you rise up and meet the years of fantasy we had created about what it would be like the first time we were together? But in the end, all that talk, all those years, all that friendship, superseded my hesitations and we made love, again and again. No place was off-limits. We made love in the bathroom, on the sheets I bought just for the occasion, in the bedroom, in the kitchenette while I was trying to make coffee.
But more than that, so much more, we had a period of semi-normalcy. We made curried chicken and roti together. We danced slowly to Al Green and Bob Marley. We watched the news together, we showered together. And yes, at times during that first visit—and others that followed it—we cried together.
Even now, a decade later, I remember our first trailer visit as though we had recorded it, as though I had watched a videotape every night thereafter, meticulously memorizing each movement, each pause, each laugh, all the things we talked about, all the things we didn’t—like birth control and what we would do if I became pregnant.
Had we discussed it back then, I would have told Rashid that I would never have a baby with him while he was locked up. I knew many, many other women with incarcerated husbands chose to do so, and while I did not disparage their decisions, I was sure it wasn’t for me. As much as I wanted a child, and I desperately did, I could not see being a single parent. My own mother and father, married for decades, for decades working together as a team, working together in love, left me no template for a household that did not include two functioning and healthy adults.
And more, I certainly could not imagine bringing a baby into a prison. I may have made the choice to enter prisons weekly for myself, but I was all the way grown, willingly taking on the emotional slop that loving a person who is imprisoned can create. A child was an innocent, unable to weigh both sides of the equation. I could not do it to a baby.
But on that final weekend in September of 1995, I hadn’t made such grand pronouncements to Rashid because I didn’t believe then that I could get pregnant. I had had so much sex in my life. I had twice lived with men. I had been married once before and yet I had never gotten pregnant. I assumed it was impossible. I went up to the facility and made love with and to my husband and I did not worry.
Three weeks later I discovered I was pregnant.
I never considered keeping the baby. Even as I wept, rubbed my abdomen, claimed my child, listened to Rashid’s pleadi
ng that I not have an abortion, I never once really considered carrying that baby to term. How could I? It wasn’t just the prison or my unwillingness to be a single parent. It was also financial. I wasn’t working. I was living in a room in someone else’s home, barely eking out an income as a writer and poet.
I had just returned to school to finally finish my bachelor’s degree. What did I have to offer a child, save for anxiety and instability? Any child I raised, I told Rashid this, would have everything he or she needed to make it into adulthood safely and sanely.
Still, we argued bitterly—something we’d never really done before—about the decision, but all he could offer me were religious platitudes about life being sacred. But if life was sacred, I would argue back, shouldn’t every life be honored with all that it needs, all it deserves? And besides, what about my life? Was my life sacred? I didn’t need commandments, I said to my husband. “I need cash. I needed physical support,” I told Rashid.
Against my husband’s wishes and against the love I felt for that baby who had barely begun to take shape inside of me, and against the desperate need inside of me to be a mother, on a cold Thursday in November of 1995, I had an abortion. In a clinic that felt less like a medical facility than it did a factory, I sat in a hard plastic chair with rows and rows of other women, some far younger than I, some shockingly older. When my name was finally called and I had dispensed with the routine tests—blood work and such—I was led into an ice-cold room where the procedure would take place.
Despite the two doctors and the two nurses who were there, and despite all those women waiting just outside for their turn on the table, it may have been the most alone I have ever felt in my life. I withered into hysteria, crying so hard that the anesthesiologist worried my breathing would be impaired. Later I realized that I probably should have been sent home that day and told to think my decision through some more. But that didn’t happen and fifteen minutes later I woke up in the recovery area no longer pregnant.
Regardless of my resolve, my choice to have an abortion—something I knew was absolutely the right thing to do at that time in my life—it caused me guilt and pain for years. Terminating my pregnancy—I felt this then and I feel it now—was against the natural order of things. Had Rashid not been in prison and had we been married under “normal” circumstances, I surely would have had my baby. Or, if we lived a “normal life,” if Rashid was home and we discovered we were pregnant but things were such that we did not have the financial wherewithal to begin a family, at the very least I would have done much greater soul-searching before choosing termination. The choice, in other words, would not have seemed so obvious.
But I knew, lying on that examination table in November of 1995, that no matter what the difficulty, I could not go through an abortion with my husband again. The weight of destroying something that was created from a place of great love, destroying something that was part of me, part of us, was unbearable. I carried the weight once. To do it a second time would, literally, destroy me. I told Rashid this. In those raw, ragged days following the procedure, I promised Rashid that if I ever, ever became pregnant again, even if he was still in prison, I would have the baby.
Four years later, in 1999, I would have to stand by those words.
In July of that 1999 I was in the midst of a book tour when Rashid and I were issued a date for a trailer visit. In California at the time, I booked a flight, flew right home, and went immediately into the routine. I packed everything we would need—food, sheets, towels, juice. And, yes, birth control. I wanted to remain careful, as I had since the abortion, although it was less than a week before my period was due. But in truth, I had no fears or even thoughts about pregnancy. I was pretty much thinking only about me, about my career, and what was next up on my literary horizon.
Together in that sterile trailer we’d learned to call home, Rashid and I talked about my dreams. We talked about his dreams, the work he wanted to one day do with young people who were at risk. We talked, as we always did, about life on the outside, life together, and we made love and celebrated the book and we made love some more, and when it was over we parted, sad, but unbroken.
A week later, when my period was a couple of days late, it didn’t even occur to me that I might be pregnant. When I noticed I was carrying extra water weight, I blamed it on my nonfunctioning thyroid and intensified my routine at the gym. But after another six or seven days had gone by, I decided, reluctantly, to buy a test. Fast as I could pee on a stick, the thing was turning into dark pink double lines that could not be misread or denied. When Rashid called the next day, I told him directly.
We’re having a baby, I said.
Unlike our first pregnancy, I never thought not to have this baby. First of all, that she could create herself in spite of spermicides and a low-probability ovulation moment indicated to me that her presence was beyond any choice I had to make. And then too, I was getting older; I was thirty-two years old when Nisa was conceived. Perhaps I would not have another chance to be the one thing I knew I always wanted to be: a mother. Still, there were fears.
Some were evident. I was an author and freelance writer when I became pregnant. Would I find a real job, decent child care, and be able to survive the predicted sleep deprivation alone? For that matter, would I be able to go through labor without my husband? And though I knew it was ultimately self-defeating, I worried a lot about what people would think. As the child of parents who have been married now for over fifty years, what did I look like, appearing as I did, a single mother?
So okay, yes, being a Black woman factored into the image piece: I mean, did I look like some kind of statistic walking around pregnant with no man in sight? The excoriation of primarily single mothers of color—from the mean-spirited Reaganite notion of the welfare queen, to the pop-culture/hip-hop redaction of women into bitches, golddiggas, and baby mamas—haunted me. They pursued me like angry spirits, hissing through too many of the days, too many of the nights of my pregnancy.
What the world thought of me mattered, perhaps more than it should have. But it did and I wanted it known that I was loved and I was claimed, and that my child was too. I didn’t want to be viewed as a woman somebody just got some ass from and then left. I didn’t want my child to be seen as a person whose father could leave her. After all those experiences, those real, lived experiences of not being chosen by a man except when I was chosen for violence, yes, I wanted it known that I could be chosen for something more. I was worth something more. I was worth being loved. And more, my baby was too.
Walking these New York City streets alone, I wanted a T-shirt, a placard, anything that would declare to the world once and for all that I was not the discarded woman, perhaps the hated woman, the bad girl, the nasty girl, the girl who could be fucked, impregnated, tossed aside, and dismissed. And then there were the larger political concerns, the ones beyond my own personal demons.
For as long as I have been conscious of it, I have done what I could to refuse at every turn slipping on a jacket some racist or misogynist had sewn.
But in what real way could I fight back against my fears, the ones inside of me, the ones looming everywhere outside? My attempts were, at best, pathetic: painfully, with the aid of lotion, water, and soap, I squeezed my wedding rings onto my fingers long after they had swollen into things that looked more like fat little sausages. In doctors’ offices and later at the midwifery center where I gave birth, I looked at no one, sat up proudly, made calls on my cell phone to girlfriends, figuring Rashid or “my husband,” as I proclaimed a little too loudly, into the conversation. When the time came, I paid for private birthing classes so I would not have to sit with other women as their loving partners caressed their bellies.
But I worried most of all, though, about protection. Would I be able to raise a Black girl safely in a world that seems only to expand in its ability to hate and destroy? In a culture whose practices—from health care to policing—tip toward death, with Black people and women more
often than not the stand-ins for the bull’s-eye, would the life of one Black girl be honored by anyone other than me?
Would my love and honor for her be enough to sustain her through to maturity? The constant reports of drug and alcohol abuse among young people; the sexual and physical violence that has become integrated into pop culture as though it’s a sexy goddamn courting ritual; the girls who at eight years old are giving blowjobs to boys in the schoolhouse stairwells and coming home with STDs in their mouths; and the seeming tidal wave of so-called good girls out on the stroll in Brooklyn, Atlanta, and the suburbs, simply put, scared the shit out of me.
Not because I judged or disliked any of these kids, but because I’d been my own ’80s version of them. I knew how that slippery slope could be a challenge to circumvent. Would my little girl be able to do what I could not?
When my child reached an age when she too would have to negotiate streets and sex and perhaps even simple fucking survival, would she know how to speak to me, as I did not know how to speak to my parents? Would I know how to listen to her, hear what she was telling me, read between her lines? My parents, in all of their brilliance and commitment, were unable to do that for me. During my adolescence, teenage angst became the nomenclature for what eventually revealed itself as a clinical depression that at its worst spiraled down into suicidal ideation.
It would be years, so many, before I could name the hurt, try to heal it. Would I repeat a vile pattern with my daughter? After all, I had both of my parents present, loving me. My daughter only had me. These questions, more than the physical challenges of pregnancy, kept me awake through the nights, staring at everything and nothing, and wondering, worrying, where could I go, where could I live and raise my child safely?