Depressed? “No.” Angry, sure.
“Are you hearing voices?”
“No.”
The questions went on. Her last period, how regular she was, bowel movements, followed by the same question about regularity, family medical history, and on and on.
Her breathing came shallowly and with surprise. Taneisha realized she was afraid. It was the boredom in the nurse’s voice that scared her. The nurse could have been counting cans of peas, instead of doing a psychiatric intake evaluation of a new inmate. She don’t give much of a damn one way or the other, Taneisha told herself.
When the interview was over, the blond guard said, “Stand up and face the wall, put your hands flat on the wall.”
“What for?”
“You’ll go to Seg—Segregation for three days while we get you processed. Warden holds orientation first thing tomorrow.”
Taneisha sat where she was. “Why do I have to face the wall?”
Another guard appeared at the door. The blond spoke patiently. “We have to put shackles on you going back and forth to Seg. It’s for everyone’s protection.”
The other guard was glaring at Taneisha. The first guard was a big Bohunk gal. Probably carried cows around for exercise at home. Taneisha could’ve run her into the dirt, but in this office, there was nowhere to run.
She stood slowly, reminding herself that these people hadn’t done anything to hurt her yet. They were just doing a job and they didn’t want any grief about it. As she felt the shackles snap around her ankles again, she had to bite her lip to keep from weeping. She would not cry in front of these crackers, she swore. Instead, she bit down on the inside of her cheek and walked quietly behind the Bohunk guard, across the commons area and into Segregation.
It was a squat building, set off from the rest of the place by its single-story construction. The walls were painted the color of fresh-baked bread crust. The guard halted outside another locked door—perhaps in a prison there were no other kind. Moving from Admissions to Segregation, she quickly began to pick up one of the givens of prison life: walk, wait in line or behind a line, paperwork, shuffle forward on command, and wait some more, before the walking started over.
She waited while the door was unlocked and both she and the guard were scrutinized. She walked forward. She waited while the door was locked behind her. She walked to another set of bars. She waited while paperwork was exchanged, reviewed. Finally, a barred door slid aside, and she was officially in Seg.
A short but thick-set black guard with frown lines around her mouth took responsibility for Taneisha in Seg. She read over the paperwork and nodded at the Bohunk. “I’ve got her.”
The Bohunk tipped her head at Taneisha. “I’ll be seeing you, Porter,” she said, using Taneisha’s hated family name. “You didn’t give me any static. Let’s keep it that way, and you can do good time here.”
Taneisha wasn’t sure how to react. Was she supposed to do some kind of house-negro routine, say, “Yes, boss?” like she’d seen in those old movies? She kept her head down, and muttered, “Sure.”
The Frowning Guard didn’t reply, just watched the Bohunk step clear of the door, and called out, “Closing!” There must have been another guard nearby, because the barred door clattered in a track and closed with a dull bang.
The Frowning Guard took Taneisha’s file and slid it into a slot in the wall. “I’m Ms. Darcy,” she said firmly. “You’re going to be in cell fourteen.”
Taneisha kept her head down. Somehow, it seemed too bright in here. Too real. She didn’t want to look at it, the hallway that was painted some kind of green, or the patched dents in the wall. The smell was hard, too. Real strong disinfectant, and under that, the odors of human sweat and waste.
Ms. Darcy took up a position to Taneisha’s right and about half a step behind. Ms. Darcy always oriented herself to new prisoners this way, Taneisha later learned, because most people are right-handed. If somebody got ambitious and began to get rowdy, the position wouldn’t allow them to generate a lot of force with manacled arms. More than one of those dents in the hall that Taneisha didn’t want to look at had been engineered by Ms. Darcy by grabbing the arm of a suddenly combative prisoner and pivoting, adding her own very dense bulk to their momentum and slamming the felon face-first into the wall. Prisoners tended to be more surprised than hurt by the experience and it usually kept them quiet enough to make it to their Seg cell without recourse to more unpleasant means of persuasion.
There were doors in the hall. Solid doors, with horizontal slots and heavily re-enforced windows at shoulder height. Segregation was used for two things: in-processing of new inmates and medical isolation of depressed prisoners. In other words, suicide watch rooms. Doors made of bars offered too many options for self-injury.
The guard was talking as they walked, more like a firm teacher than a jailor. “Good time is fast time,” she said as Taneisha plodded along, shackles clinking. “You want to get out of the system as fast as possible.”
“How do I do that?” Taneisha asked. The words leapt out of her throat in a kind of spasm.
“You follow the rules. You keep away from men and you keep away from the girls.” Taneisha almost snorted. She’d heard there was a men’s prison on the grounds. “I don’t want anything to do with men,” she said firmly. “And I don’t like girls.”
“Keep walking,” Ms. Darcy told her. “You remember what I said. Don’t get involved in the games or the scams. Don’t be anybody’s trick.”
“What’s a trick?” In spite of herself, Taneisha was interested. This was going to be her life, for a while at least. And that perverse mouthy imp inside her was nowhere to be felt, at least for now. Maybe it was because Ms. Darcy was also black. She seemed less like a representative of a mysterious Caucasian force, the way the Bohunk felt, and more like a stern teacher…one of those who had real love under their rhino-armored hides.
They stopped beside an empty cell. “Face the wall,” Ms. Darcy said flatly. This time, not even a thought of backtalk from Taneisha. “A trick is somebody who lets herself get conned by the scammers inside.” Ms. Darcy unlocked the shackles and stepped back. The cell door opened. “Go inside.”
Taneisha stepped into the dim room. Ms. Darcy looked her over. “Lights on at 5 am. First count at 6 in the morning. Your orientation is at 8.”
Taneisha nodded without replying. “Please look at me,” Ms. Darcy said. “I want to be sure you hear what I’m saying.”
She lifted her head, looked the older woman full in the eyes. “Maybe you made a mistake,” Ms. Darcy said. “Maybe you made a lot of mistakes and they got you here. Your life isn’t over, girl. You don’t have to make your whole life a mistake. Maybe God put you here to keep you alive.”
Surprise spread across the young woman’s face like ink dropping into water. “I’ve got five years in here. What kind of life is that?”
Ms. Darcy reached out and took Taneisha by the wrist, as gently as if she were lifting a butterfly. Her thumb and forefinger encircled the girl’s skinny wrist with a lot of daylight to spare. “What you were doing was killing you.” She let the girl’s arm drop, and stepped back into the middle of corridor. “I’ll see you tomorrow night.” She spoke into a small walkie-talkie. “Closing fourteen.”
Taneisha stood there as the door closed. She listened to the quiet squeak of Ms. Darcy’s shoes as the guard slowly walked back to her post. When she could no longer hear the woman’s shoes, the girl turned her face to the wall and wept. She was just twenty years old.
Taneisha first met Warden Gutierrez when she was in the Hole. “Protective Segregation” was the official term for the small, soundproofed rooms, but they were universally known as the Hole.
She was officially in for contraband. A search of her cell had turned up makeup, including a tube of eyeliner. Forbidden. The brush could be a weapon. Taneisha couldn’t argue that, she’d almost poked her own eyes out when she was a girl learning to make herself up. But once you we
re in prison, you had so little…little things took on a magnified importance. Clothes. Food. Makeup.
That bit of psychological reality didn’t make a difference. The guards had shackled her in chains for the infraction and dragged her down here.
It wasn’t really the makeup that put her in the Hole. One of the guards, Owens, had become interested in her. He’d started to find reasons to stop by her cell, to talk to her in the tiny library where she worked, making $5.45 a month. After two years in prison, she’d gotten her health back, and now she looked like the healthy young woman she had been. Some part of her was flattered by the attention; it was nice to remember she had her charms and that she wasn’t simply another drab in prison garb. Owens, who was a tall, good-looking athletic white guy of about thirty, slowly began to slip innuendo into his talk with her, finally moving from suggestion to blunt proposition. When she realized what she was hearing, sweat prickled between her shoulder blades, and she hurriedly excused herself, saying she had to sort some recently donated books.
She avoided him after that, claiming work or illness or other duties. Anything to keep from being alone with him. One night, after lights out, he stood by her cell door as she lay in her bunk, barely breathing. He didn’t say anything. She felt as if were a test of some kind, as if he were willing her to swing her feet over the side of her bunk and crawl over to him. She forced herself to be still, remembering what Ms. Darcy had said to her. “Stay away from men.”
And she had. She had followed the rules, or, most of them, anyway. Any opportunity to improve herself, she took. One prisoner, a former dancer, started an aerobics class, an hour a day in the afternoon. Taneisha went for the music, at first, but then this dancer, named Vivian (“the Vixen” was her professional name, she’d admitted), had also began offering informal seminars on how to eat healthy in spite of the poor, starch-heavy prison food. Taneisha found herself regularly doing aerobics, discovering long-forgotten muscles while recovering equally long-lost muscle tone. Soon thereafter, she was engaging in food barter…swapping prepackaged desserts (there was a brisk market in Twinkies) for vending machine tuna fish and wheat crackers.
Somehow, she managed to work her way into the library, a deeply coveted position. The librarian could move about the prison with a relative degree of freedom. For years entrepreneurs with guts and guile had used the library position to create mercantile empires, trading and transporting contraband as they trundled books from cell to cell. Taneisha suspected her dark fairy godmother, Ms. Darcy, had a hand in her unexpected elevation to the position, although the formidable guard had never made mention of it. The only thing she’d said, one late night escorting Taneisha back from the library, was, “Lot of college books in there. A smart girl might do a little reading.”
A prison volunteer, an aging nun everyone called “Sister” who in another lifetime had been a sixties firebrand, heard about this comment. Sister reviewed the prison’s meager stock of non-fiction, then typed up a recommended reading list and lugged in the first twenty books on the list herself. As she explained when she gave the list to Taneisha, “’Neisha, you have to walk before you can run. I put down the easy books first. That’s not an insult. I want to be sure you have the basics, the fundamentals, before you tackle the harder work.” Taneisha, who always wanted to run, shrugged and started reading.
It was slow, it was painful, and it was frustrating. There was a lot in the texts that the writers took for granted, something Sister called “cultural capital.” But Taneisha persevered. She realized she’d worked really hard to get here, and it was time to work hard to get out.
And now, all of that was jeopardized by this silent figure standing outside her cell door. Good Lord, didn’t the man have any kind of life that he had to get his jollies bothering prisoners? Taneisha knew if she had a choice she wouldn’t be hanging around a prison cell looking for a good time. But she also knew that if she turned him away, she could lose more than her self-respect. Her fists knotted in the blankets. Damn it, she’d earned everything she had. She’d earned her status as a prisoner by a series of incredibly stupid decisions, and she was now earning her own self-respect by working hard and playing by the rules. She wouldn’t throw her self-respect away because she was afraid of a man.
Owens stood at her cell door for another half an hour, and then he walked away.
The searches had started after that.
Taneisha was working out, running in place, keeping her knees pumping high, when the slot in the door opened. Even if she was in the Hole, she wasn’t going to lose a step on her own progress. The Hole had crummy ventilation and any exercise brought on a heavy sweat. To keep her few garments from being gummy with perspiration, she was only wearing her bra and panties. She stepped to one side, into the shadows.
She’d lost track of the time. In the Hole, you did twenty-three hours in solitary, with one hour for a shower and a walk around a treeless, grassless yard. She wasn’t sure if it was night or day, or whether it was a weekday or weekend.
A familiar voice said, “You have a visitor.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Taneisha answered Ms. Darcy. “Just one minute, please.” The imp, that smart-mouthed demon…well, she’d kicked him to the curb a year ago. Sister had got her to writing about her life and breaking the events down into columns. One of the columns had been about what had happened, another about what people had done to her. The third column had been what she had done to contribute to what had happened. Taneisha had fought and raged against this: didn’t Sister know what those people did to her? The nun’s wrinkled face was kind, understanding, and patient as a mountain. After a while, Taneisha could see how much abuse she’d volunteered for. How much of it was instigated by that mouthy imp. What had he ever done for her? Not a hell of a lot, it would seem. The nun had even performed an exorcism on her. Taneisha took it as a joke, but Sister seemed deadly serious. Whatever it was, something had worked to still the reckless and self-justifying voice, and she was now able to think about what she was going to say before she spoke.
She wiped the sweat off quickly with her single towel and climbed into her clothes. She stood back by the wall, in full sight of the slot in the door and called out, “I’m ready, Ms. Darcy.”
The door opened and Taneisha blinked in the bright light from the corridor. Two figures stood there, Ms. Darcy and someone she didn’t know. For a moment, the silhouettes looked comical, one shorter and round, the other taller and thin. Who were those guys from the old movies? Abbott and Costello. The thinner silhouette stepped forward…and Taneisha remembered that she never liked the thin guy in the movies. He was mean to the chubby guy.
Ms. Darcy reached along the outside wall and the light in the isolation cell brightened. Now Taneisha could see the skinny guy. He was an older man, maybe in his late fifties. She was terrible with ages, and, besides, all old white men looked alike to her: old and white. He was smiling, at least. It felt like a real smile. She couldn’t say what made it seem like a real smile. His expression seemed to lack malice or trickery, or any motive other than to be friendly.
“How do you do, Ms. Porter,” the old white man said, extending his hand. “I’m Eli Gutierrez.”
Taneisha did what she did now whenever she didn’t know what to do: she froze for a moment, thinking. Ms. Darcy helped her out. “This is our new Warden,” she said, bringing a plastic chair in from the corridor. She spoke into her walkie-talkie. “Closing Seg Seven.” The door rolled shut behind the guard as she settled into the chair.
The new Warden. Taneisha wondered what had happened to the other one. She reached out, took the old man’s offered hand. “Hi,” she said carefully, hiding her surprise. He might look old, but his hand was solid. No soft old-person flesh loose and floppy around the bones. She felt a lot of power there. She might have been shaking hands with a mechanic.
The Warden gestured at the bunk. “Do you mind if we sit down?” Taneisha nodded. The Warden waited. She realized he was waiting for her to sit down. I
t was a kind of courtesy she’d run into only a few times in her life. She lowered herself to the bunk and he sat on the opposite end, well away from her.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve asked Ms. Darcy here as an official witness. I feel that her word can be trusted. Do you agree?”
She was starting to feel a little trapped. “Yes. I mean, I trust her.”
“Good,” the Warden replied. “Why are you here?”
“I had some contraband in my cell,” she said carefully.
“Is that the only reason?”
She nodded. Ms. Darcy may have sniffed, or Taneisha may just have imagined it.
The Warden looked at her and clasped his hands across his stomach. “I’ve spent the last three weeks reading the file of every prisoner here. I’ve walked through the prison a lot. I’ve watched how the prisoners respond to the guards.”
“They aren’t all like Ms. Darcy,” Taneisha added.
“They are not,” the Warden agreed. “Now, I want to ask you again. Why are you in here?”
“Officer Owens wanted to…wanted me to be his girlfriend. His punch. Whatever you want to call it. I didn’t want to.”
The Warden continued to look at her intently. “You realize not all of the guards are like that.”
“Enough of them are.”
The Warden’s lips got tight and his eyes narrowed. “Not in my prison.” He stood, paced. The Warden turned to her. “Would you be willing to make a formal complaint?”
Now he was getting into crazy talk. Taneisha had heard about what had happened to one girl who’d charged a guard with sexual harassment. One night, three male prisoners had found her alone (and you had to wonder how that was arranged) and raped her. They’d even told the girl it was retaliation for filing a complaint. But…if the Warden was behind her, maybe something could happen. They might be in jail, her and these women, but they weren’t just disposable trash. Taneisha cut her eyes over to Ms. Darcy, who merely nodded solemnly.
The Big Bang Page 11