The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  So many years of working on her singing had taught Erin about voice modulation—how to control a crowd with the speed and tone of her voice. It was easier to achieve with music, because certain combinations of notes, dissonant chords, were as good as a hypnotist’s watch. It could be done with just words. It was harder, but possible. Pastors, mostly men, did it by increasing the pacing and speed of their voices until if one said jump, the crowd would jump. Erin had studied the women who knew how to use their voices, and they were always softer, gentler, but still with a firmness that didn’t allow anyone to escape. The women were better at extracting money, the men at extracting obedience. She needed the latter.

  “I’m a girl without a father. I’m a girl without a mother. I’m an orphan, but like Annie, I carry with me the hope that one day I’ll have a mother again, that one day she will come home and I can put my head in her lap and feel her hand brush over my hair, as if to tell me it’s going to be okay. I don’t have a locket or a letter promising my parents’ return, what I do have is the promise of the State of California that once it fixed my mother, rehabilitated her, that she could come home. I trusted that California would keep its promise—” She put her hands on the table and leaned across the space that separated her from the commissioners.

  “That you would keep your promise.”

  Erin let silence fill the room. She allowed the fan’s gentle whir to enter everyone’s ears to fill up the space in their minds, and then in the moment before their attention drifted, she raised her voice an octave, to make her sound younger, to make the commissioners fully weigh their authority. “I’m not going to ask you to let my mother go, but I want to tell you how much I need her”—she brought both hands to her belly and looked at the floor—“a girl’s bound to make mistakes without a mother around. I messed up and I need someone to tell me that my mistakes can be fixed, that there’s a light at the end of all this darkness. I need my mother to tell me so that I can tell my baby that falling down is part of learning how to get up. But right now I don’t believe that. I hear other people say it, but I’ve been waiting and waiting for my mother to get back up again, and she’s not been able to. I know she’s tried.”

  Erin wished she could touch one of the commissioners, lay a hand on a shoulder or an arm to make the connection, but she couldn’t cross the table, so she did as her teachers had taught her, she reached with her voice. “Amends. Isn’t that what you call it? She’s been here my whole life and she’s never been reprimanded, never written up for talking back or fighting. She started the young mothers program for women like herself who came here and left children behind. But you know all this, you know everything. Except how it feels to not have a mother. To have the idea of a mother, to have my mother’s mother.”

  She shook her head, as if this tangent wasn’t where she wanted to go. The last part of the speech was tricky, she had to make the commissioners believe that what Carl’s mother would say would be false, that her emotion, however theatrical, wouldn’t be genuine, couldn’t be real. She turned away from the commissioners and addressed Carl’s mother. Her head was lowered. “I know you lost your son, but I lost my father. You got to see him grow up, become a man, and you saw him as a father. I got none of that. Please don’t keep punishing me, your only grandchild, because your son is gone. I know there are no words to make up for that loss. I know this. But please. God please. She’s served her time.”

  Erin nearly sank into her seat, surprised by the exhaustion and how unlike a performance her plea for her mother’s life had become. She looked at Anna and saw that she was crying.

  She’d never seen Anna cry and felt an oppressive culpability. She wondered again if she was doing the right thing, this gambit to get her mother released. This idea, this desire to have her mother with her had come to her just after she found out she was pregnant, and the plan to achieve this had consumed her nearly the entire winter. Now that it was almost over, now that the hearing was almost over, she was no longer sure. She decided that God would give her a sign. If her mother wasn’t meant to be released, then Carl’s mother would give the speech of her lifetime, would find all the flaws in Erin’s argument, would make them see that to give Erin a mother who had killed her father was worse than to have no mother. She bowed her head and made the deal with God.

  Carl’s mother didn’t make it through her speech. She began crying uncontrollably after the first sentence and could only choke out “my son, my only son” before her daughter took the paper out of her mother’s hands and read the statement. Loraine, the daughter, read badly. She stumbled over the words and kept forgetting to replace the “I” with “my mother.” Erin watched as Ms. Rivera’s shoulders slumped, and then she looked closely at the commissioners and saw they’d stopped listening.

  GUEST COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE Washington Post IN MARCH 2007

  “The Silver Tsunami: Global Aging”

  by Amrit Hashmi

  We’re all getting older. Your knees aren’t what they used to be, and names that once came easily to mind are forever lost in the jumble of memories. This isn’t just a problem for the baby boomers in the United States. In every country, the population continues to age. The United Nations predicts that by 2050 the proportion of the world’s population age sixty-five and older will have doubled from 7.6 percent to 16.2 percent. That will account for nearly one billion people.

  So what, you might ask? Maybe you are young and can’t fathom what the problem is with getting old. Or maybe you’re old and have just come to accept aging as part of the natural life cycle. Although scientists can’t yet stop you from getting older, we do understand one important fact about the process—it isn’t natural. For most of the last century, people believed after a person became incapable of reproduction that their body essentially started the process of dying. That theory, born of evolutionary science, has turned out to be wrong. What we believe about aging today is that in many ways it mimics many other diseases we are currently in a war against, like cancer.

  Many conditions that were once considered part of the natural aging process have turned out to be a result of one’s lifestyle. Cataracts? They’re directly related to how much exposure your pupils had to direct sunlight. Experiencing heart disease? Look back and count up how many pounds of red meat you ate over your lifetime. You’ll find the correlation.

  I know what you’re thinking: I can prevent cataracts, but can I prevent my knees from hurting, or my hearing from going? And what about my brain? Can I prevent Alzheimer’s? The answer is yes. But more than that, we are close to uncovering the secret behind slowing the entire processes of aging. And if we can identify the specific environmental causes of aging, there is a strong possibility we can eradicate aging altogether. I predict that by the end of this century, we will be a world full of Methuselahs.

  Just this past year, I started working with an extraordinary group of women who seemed to have naturally, as part of their genetic makeup, slowed down the aging process. There are five generations—each more healthy than the next, and the youngest is expecting a child. A child who hasn’t been exposed to the environmental toxins we’ve all come to accept as part of our lives. This family and their genes hold the key to not only eternal life, but also life without aging.

  Yet recently, the federal government in a fit of austerity decided to cut funding to the National Institution on Aging, which administrates grants to research organizations across the United States to fund studies just like mine. These are the studies that have the potential to use the work I’m doing or others’ work to uncover the fountain of youth—to give you all a chance to drink from the holy grail.

  I understand there are more pressing concerns—we are fighting two wars and the economy is struggling. But consider this: The gains in life expectancy over the last thirty years alone added about $3.2 trillion dollars to national wealth, according to a study published this last month in the Journal of Political Economy. Want more proof? Consider that the cure for aging will in
all likelihood also lead to a cure for virtually all cancers, and that would be considered a $50 trillion boon to our economy.

  Without funding, we can’t reverse the tide of this so-called silver tsunami. Join me in supporting an increase in funding for the National Institution on Aging. If this trend is not reversed, it has the potential to cripple established researchers in the midst of crucial projects and will have the effect of keeping younger scientists out of the field. Our populations are aging—this is an epidemic that you don’t have to wait for your grandchildren to see. It is affecting your grandparents today, and soon it will affect you.

  Amrit Hashmi is on the board for the American Council on Aging. He serves as director of the Center for Aging Research at the University of Pittsburgh, where he holds the Lillian G. Moss Chair of Excellence in Biology. Dr. Hashmi, an endocrinologist, was the first researcher to link longevity to genetics and is currently working with the Human Genome Project to identify the specific genes linked to prolonged life in humans.

  Deborah in Spring

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Release

  She looked back. The girls who were in on short stays stood in their doorways—offering nods as she passed by. Anyone with a chance at parole ignored Deborah as the guard escorted her from her cell to Receiving and Release. It was how it had to be. There was never enough to go around in Chowchilla. If someone else had it, there wasn’t a prayer of you getting your hands on it. Deborah’s impending freedom very likely meant that some other woman on a fifteen-to-life with twenty years down was never leaving.

  It was now late March, having taken more than two months for the bureaucracy to cycle through its hoops and red tape. And nobody but her lawyer, who billed by the hour, seemed to be measuring the time. None of her family had been down to see her since the day of the hearing. It felt to Deborah like they had checked her off on their to-do lists and started looking ahead—to the baby’s birth, to Anna being the oldest, to that scientist making them famous. This realization that she was being left behind, or at the least left out, pissed her off.

  Careful. She felt the rage she kept coiled up in the pit of her stomach stir. It could be dangerous to get angry in Chowchilla—she’d seen girls sent to solitary, privileges revoked, and warnings put into files for as little as pounding on a wall, or shoving another inmate. The last time she let her anger overcome her, she’d lost her husband, her daughter, the whole of life, and now she had almost as much to lose. She wasn’t free yet. The guard had cuffed her too tightly. Her shoulders ached from being pulled back at an awkward angle. He’d dropped her off at the desk and then gone to retrieve the handful of other women who were also being paroled. Listening to his footsteps reverberating, she wondered at the leisure of his pace.

  By 9:15 A.M., there were three other women waiting to be loaded onto the parole van. Judging by their youth, none of them had been in Chowchilla for any length of time. Two of them were black, slightly heavyset, and they stood close to each other—Deborah figured it made them less nervous to stand by their own kind. That’s how it was in here. The only way to feel safe was to find a group of people who were like you. Kids that weren’t going to be in for that long segregated by race, but the old-timers, like Deborah, knew better.

  She watched the girls for a moment, approving of the way they kept their eyes locked on the ground and their bodies soft. They had a chance of making it in the real world. The other woman was young, too, but defiant. She stared at anyone who met her gaze and held her thin body taut. She was quite short, and because being in prison had taught Deborah to classify people, she decided this woman was Hispanic—probably from Guatemala based on the broad flatness of her cheekbones and her paper-straight black hair.

  A guard came around to the front of the desk and looked each of them up and down, as if they were naked. He poked each of the two young black women in the shoulder and called them by their last names. “Ferris and Sutton, you got people waiting on you in the visitors’ lot.” He turned toward Deborah and the other woman. “Ripplinger and Serna, you’re getting dropped off at the Greyhound in Fresno. Make sure you take a bus that gets you to your paroled county in the next twenty-four hours.”

  Deborah froze. Her mind raced with possible scenarios to explain Erin’s absence from that parking lot.

  He uncuffed Deborah second to last. She tried in her least confrontational way to tell him that he’d been mistaken. “I’m sure my daughter is waiting for me in the visitors’ lot. I just spoke with her yesterday and she knows I’m getting out today. She may just be running late—Kidron’s a long way from here and she’s pregnant—”

  “She’s not there.”

  “No. I’m sure she’s there. If you could just call—”

  “Rules say she has to check into the gatehouse by nine. She didn’t. You’ll be going with Serna to Fresno.”

  He grabbed Serna roughly by the shoulders and turned her around to unfasten the cuffs. “Don’t even think about it,” he said as Serna’s lips pursed, as if she were going to spit in his face.

  He tossed the women their parole boxes, which contained a change of clothing sent by the parolee’s family or friends. The Guatemalan woman didn’t have a box. Next, the guard shoved a manila folder containing the $200 in release money provided by the state, a simple photo ID, and any pertinent papers about the terms and conditions of their parole into each of their outstretched hands. Deborah clutched at hers, calming her outrage by crumpling the envelope satisfactorily in her hands. The Guatemalan woman put a hand on Deborah’s shoulder and squeezed gently. Her eyes seemed to say, “Don’t let the bastards get to you.”

  The two black women entered and then emerged from the bathroom in their street clothing and were escorted to the waiting van. The guard nodded his approval for Deborah to change. Alone in the bathroom, she let some of the frustration she felt finally show. How could Erin let her down like this? How could she be so irresponsible? Deborah had told her a dozen times over the last two weeks that she had to be at the gatehouse before 9:00 A.M. She pulled on the baggy linen pants she was sure Bets had picked out, and tried to work up worry over her daughter’s absence. She supposed there could have been a situation with the pregnancy, or an emergency with Anna or Frank, but it didn’t feel that way to her.

  They were ashamed of her. They’d always been ashamed of her. Embarrassed that she got knocked up at seventeen, horrified about the situation with Carl, and now uncomfortable with the reality of how her freedom would alter their own little, precious lives. She stuffed her prison jumpsuit into her mouth and screamed.

  A softly accented voice echoed around the nearly empty bathroom. “At least you don’t have to wear this.” Serna stood by the sinks, holding up a shapeless flower-printed muumuu. “They made me give them forty dollars for it and then asked for five more to cover the cost of the underwear. I said I didn’t wear panties, but they insisted.”

  “That sucks,” Deborah said, and then splashed water on her face from the sink before putting on the yellow T-shirt that had been in her parole box.

  “It all sucks,” said Serna. “What were you in for?”

  “Shot my husband.”

  Serna raised her thin eyebrows. “Did you now. I would have thought it was something less ugly, like kiting.”

  “You?”

  “Got me nailed as a predator.” Serna shrugged off the last of her prison clothing and pulled the voluminous dress over her head.

  Deborah backed up against the wall.

  Serna laughed bitterly. “It wasn’t nothing like you’re thinking. I got high with a bunch of boys and they all thought it would be funny if I popped his little brother’s cherry. Kid was thirteen, but I’ll tell you he knew what he was doing. Got charged with all sorts of nasty, but pleaded down to felony child endangerment. Still had to do six years.”

  Deborah flinched. The last twenty years she’d spent in Chowchilla had taught her to be wary of certain women. To protect herself, she needed to offer Serna a reas
on for respect. “I took my chances with a jury. Turns out they don’t like it when you empty a gun into a man.”

  “Cuidado con lo que dices,” Serna said as she walked out of the bathroom.

  Deborah understood just enough Spanish to know that she’d have no trouble from the girl during the hour-long drive to the bus station.

  Fresno was south of where she wanted to go. She occupied herself during the drive by making more excuses for Erin. There could have been traffic, or a power outage that stopped her alarm from going off. Of course, everyone’s life existed on their phones now. That was something Deborah would have to get used to. When she’d gone into jail, cordless house phones were rare. So, even if the power had gone out, Erin would have been relying on her phone to wake her. As they neared the downtown area of Fresno, Deborah gave up on the excuses. She banged her head rhythmically against the window of the van.

  The guard escorted them off the bus and into the station. They were in a shitty part of town—it looked like it had boomed in the 1960s and then been summarily abandoned. There was a light smattering of clouds in the sky, and the wind had a chill that made Deborah think of the winter in the yard at Chowchilla. Two bearded, smelly men were asleep in Day-Glo orange sleeping bags outside the terminal. The blue h in Greyhound was missing from the sign above the institutional Plexiglas doors of the station. The handful of passengers waiting in the blue and gray plastic chairs looked poor. For a moment she thought about the last time she’d been at such a bus station.