by Piper Kerman
SPRING WAS coming slowly to the Connecticut hills, and we were starting to shake off the cold. Being cooped up with so many “wackos” was affecting my worldview, and I feared that I would return to the outside world a bit cracked too. But I was learning something every day, resolving some new subtlety or mystery through observation or instruction.
The track by the field house gym was now mush, but I slogged determinedly around it, encouraged by the fact that I kept getting thinner and thinner and every visitor who came to see me said with astonishment, “You look fantastic!” I was making those mucky circles in silence, because the commissary was still out of the damn crappy headset radios that cost $42. Every week I put the radio on my shopping list before I turned it in, and every week, no radio. The commissary CO, who was a real prick in public and friendly in private, just barked, “No radios!” when I asked when they would get some. All the other new arrivals were in the same boat, and we commiserated bitterly. Movie night was all about reading lips for me, and my time on the track or in the gym left me with my thoughts echoing noisily in my skull. I had to have that radio!
Lionnel, the inmate consigliere of the warehouse, was one of my closest neighbors in our cramped quarters. Her bunkie had been the target of Lili Cabrales’s protest pee on my first morning in B Dorm, and it was she who had sopped up the puddle. Lionnel had a black name plaque like Natalie’s, indicating that she had been down the hill in the FCI and probably had a long sentence. She was formidable but still friendly, a no-nonsense player when it came to doing time, and a cheerful Christian who was quick with a wry observation. Lionnel was vocal about what you might call “community issues”—not stealing, “acting right” during count, treating other prisoners with respect. She wasn’t about to go out of her way to befriend a random white girl like me, but she would still say good morning and occasionally smile at my attempts at humor when we found ourselves side by side at the bathroom sinks.
One quiet afternoon as I was fixing lights in B Dorm, Lionnel materialized outside her cube. This was unusual, as she would normally be at work in the warehouse. I seized the opportunity to find out more about the mysterious radios.
“Lionnel, I hate to bother you, but I’ve got a question.” I quickly explained my radio problem. “I’m going crazy with no music. I just can’t get the CO to tell me when they’re coming in. What do you think?”
Lionnel gave me a skeptical, sidelong look. “You know you’re not supposed to ask warehouse folks about that, we’re not allowed to talk about any goods in the warehouse?”
I was taken aback. “No, Lionnel, I didn’t know that. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I’m sorry.”
“No problem.”
May was a week away. The sun was really starting to make itself known now, drying up the mud. There were leaves on the trees, migratory birds, and tons of baby bunnies all over the track. I realized that it wasn’t so bad to be listening to my own thoughts when there was so much to look at. I had made it three months, almost a quarter of my sentence. If I had to watch silent movies for the next ten, so be it. I almost didn’t bother putting the radio on my commissary list that week; someone who had already shopped was complaining that they were still out. So when a new radio headset came flying past the register to land in my grocery pile, I just stared at it.
“Is there something wrong with you, Kerman?” shouted the CO. “It’s true what they say about blondes, huh?”
I looked past him, into the glassed-in commissary, and spotted Lionnel. She didn’t meet my eye. I just smiled to myself as I signed my receipt and handed it back to him. It was funny how things worked around here, how other prisoners could make things happen. I wasn’t really sure what I had done right, but did it matter?
That week the entire population of the Camp was summoned into the main hallway for an impromptu meeting with the staff—a bunch of white men looking too bored to smirk. We were told:
Your sanitation is wanting! We will hold more inspections!
No smoking under the unit manager’s window! You have been warned!
No sex in the Camp! No exceptions! Zero tolerance! This means you!!
We were collectively unimpressed. All of us prisoners knew that Finn, the senior counselor, was way too lazy to bother inspecting the Dorms beyond the bare minimum and didn’t care enough to enforce most rules. The only thing Finn did appear to care about was hierarchy (as demonstrated to us by the nameplate fiasco). And the administrative unit manager didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything having to do with the Camp.
True to the staff’s charges against us, though, there had been quite an uptick in “sexin’” among the ladies since Butorsky’s departure, which led to some comical matchups. Big Mama was a cheerful leviathan who lived in A Dorm—quick with a play on words, generally benevolent, and prodigious in girth. She was slim on modesty, however, as was proven by her shameless sexin’ with a series of much younger, much skinnier girls in her open cubicle. I liked Big Mama and was fascinated by her romantic success. How did she do it? What were her tricks? Were they the same as those employed by fat middle-aged men to get young nubile girls to sleep with them? The girls didn’t then turn around and disrespect her, so was it curiosity on their part? I was curious, but I wasn’t quite brave enough to ask.
There was a constant dance between the prisoners and the staff around the rules. With a new rotation of officers on detail in the Camp, the dance would start anew. I was washed in relief to be rid of Gay Pornstar; it was amazing how much more bearable it was around the Camp with him gone.
In Pornstar’s place we now had Mr. Maple, who seemed to be his predecessor’s exact opposite. Mr. Maple was young, recently out of the military after service in Afghanistan, and exaggeratedly courteous and friendly. He was instantly popular with the women of the Camp. I still considered all COs the enemy on principle, but I was beginning to understand a bit better why a prisoner might look at them with anything other than a baleful eye. Regardless of “gay for the stay,” the vast majority of female prisoners are heterosexual, and they miss male companionship, male perspective, and male attention. A fortunate minority have a husband or a boyfriend who visits regularly, but most are not so lucky. The only men they come in contact with are prison guards, and if the CO is a half-decent human being, he will find himself the object of crushes. If he is a cocky bastard, even more so.
It is hard to conceive of any relationship between two adults in America being less equal than that of prisoner and prison guard. The formal relationship, enforced by the institution, is that one person’s word means everything and the other’s means almost nothing; one person can command the other to do just about anything, and refusal can result in total physical restraint. That fact is like a slap in the face. Even in relation to the people who are anointed with power in the outside world—cops, elected officials, soldiers—we have rights within our interactions. We have a right to speak to power, though we may not exercise it. But when you step behind the walls of a prison as an inmate, you lose that right. It evaporates, and it’s terrifying. And pretty unsurprising when the extreme inequality of the daily relationship between prisoners and their jailers leads very naturally into abuses of many flavors, from small humiliations to hideous crimes. Every year guards at Danbury and other women’s prisons around the country are caught sexually abusing prisoners. Several years after I came home, one of Danbury’s lieutenants, a seventeen-year corrections veteran, was one of them. He was prosecuted and spent one month in jail.
When Mr. Maple was on duty in the evening, he constantly patrolled the Dorms. There was something unnerving to me about the male COs seeing me in nothing but my muu-muu, billowing though it was. It was more unnerving still when I would look up from changing after the gym, in shorts and a sports bra, to see the eyes of a prison guard. It wasn’t so much the idea of them seeing my body, although the thought made me recoil. It was more the idea that my intimate moments—changing clothes, lying in bed, reading, crying—were all in fact
public, available for observation by these strange men.
On one of his early days on duty, Maple was running through mail call. “Platte! Platte! Rivera! Montgomery! Platte! Esposito! Piper!”
I stepped up and he handed me my mail, and I turned back to the crowd to rejoin it. Some of the women were tittering and whispering. I stood next to Annette and looked at her quizzically.
“He called you Piper!” Other prisoners were looking at me with curiosity. It wasn’t done. I felt embarrassed and showed it by flushing deeply, which provoked more tittering.
“He just doesn’t know. He thinks it’s my last name,” I explained defensively. The next day at mail call, he did it again. “That’s her first name,” some wiseass said pointedly, as I blushed again.
“It is?” he asked. “That’s unusual.”
Still, he kept calling me Piper.
CHAPTER 9
Mothers and Daughters
Mother’s Day was off the chain at the Camp. From the moment we awoke, every woman wished another “Happy Mother’s Day”… repeatedly. I quickly gave up explaining that I had no children and just said, “Happy Mother’s Day to you!” About eighty percent of the women in U.S. prisons have children, so odds were I was right.
A lot of women had crocheted long-stem red roses for their “prison mamas” or friends. Some women organized themselves into somewhat formalized “family” relationships with other prisoners, especially mother-daughter pairs. There were a lot of little clans at Danbury. The younger women relied on their “moms” for advice, attention, food, commissary loans, affection, guidance, even discipline. If one of the young ones was misbehaving, she might get directed by another irritated prisoner, “Go talk to your mama and work your shit out!” Or if the kid was really out of control with her mouth or her radio or whatever, the mama might get the request, “You need to talk to your daughter, ’cause if she don’t get some act-right, I’ma knock her out!”
My de facto prison “family” revolved around Pop. It exemplified the complex ways that family trees grow behind bars, like topiaries trained into very odd shapes. My immediate “sibling” was Toni, the new town driver who had replaced Nina as Pop’s bunkie. By automatic extension Rosemarie, Toni’s best buddy, was another sibling—I thought of them as the Italian Twins. But Pop had many other “children,” including Big Boo Clemmons, the even bigger Angelina Lewis, and Yvonne who worked with Pop in the kitchen. I took a particular liking to Yvonne; we called each other “the sister I never wanted.” All of Pop’s black “daughters” called her Mama. All of the white ones called her Pop. She didn’t have any Spanish daughters, though she did have Spanish pals from her own peer group.
Motherhood in prison was revered but also complicated by separation, guilt, and shame. To my eye, my fellow prisoners were mostly ordinary poor or middle-class mommies, grandmas, and even great-grandmothers, and yet some of them were serving very long sentences—five years, seven years, twelve years, fifteen years. I knew that, by virtue of being in the minimum-security Camp, they were unlikely to have been convicted of violent crimes. As I watched my neighbors, young women who lacked even a high school education, with their children in the visiting room, I found myself asking again and again (in my head), What could she possibly have done to warrant being locked up here for so long? Criminal masterminds they were not.
In the three months since my arrival in Danbury I had seen a number of pregnant women become mothers; in February young Doris was the vessel of my first prison nativity. I had never seen a woman in labor before and was both mesmerized and horrified to watch Doris enter a zone in which her body and her baby were taking over, regardless of surroundings. To my fascination, the population of the Camp snapped to attention and stepped in to help her as much as anyone could. She had a half-dozen surrogate midwives hovering over her at any given moment, checking to see what she needed, coaching her on how to get more comfortable, relating stories of their own labors, and reporting on her progress to an anxious audience of prisoners. The staff certainly wasn’t paying much attention to what was happening; prison births were no big deal to them.
It was Doris’s first child, and all she wanted to do was curl up in her bunk, which apparently was not a good thing for her or the baby struggling to be born. Older women took turns walking with her up and down the long main hall of the Camp, talking to her gently, telling stories, and cracking jokes. Observing keenly was Doris’s roommate, also heavy with her first child and due any day. They both looked scared.
The next morning, as the contractions were growing closer, Doris was taken off to the hospital in handcuffs. In many places in the United States pregnant female prisoners are kept chained in shackles during their deliveries, a brutal and barbaric practice, though this was not the case for poor Doris. After many hours of labor she gave birth to a nine-pound baby boy in Danbury Hospital and was brought back to prison immediately, pale and drawn and sad. Her mother took the baby back to the rural outpost where she lived, eight hours away. There wasn’t much chance that the new arrival would see his father anytime soon—Doris told me that her baby’s daddy had just been picked up on three outstanding warrants. Fortunately she was due to go home within the year.
I hadn’t witnessed anything at Danbury to allay my fear of childbirth, but for the first time I had some tiny insight on the mother-child relationship. The single most reliable way to get another prisoner to smile was to ask her about her children. There were always families in the visiting room; this was both the best and the worst thing about the many hours I spent there. Young children were growing up while their mothers did time, trying to have a relationship via fifteen-minute phone calls and the hours spent in visitation. I never saw these women look happier than when they were with their children, playing with the small collection of plastic toys kept in the corner and sharing Fritos and Raisinets from the vending machine. When visiting hours were over, it was gut-wrenching to watch the goodbyes. In one year a child could change from a squirming baby to a boisterous talkative toddler and mothers would watch football championships and prom nights come and go from the distant sidelines, along with their children’s graduations, wedding days, and funerals.
As tough as it could be for a prisoner to visit with her children, it was also hard for parents to see their babies locked up. There were so many young girls among us, eighteen and nineteen years old. Some of these kids had been heading to a place like Danbury for some time, but one bad decision could suddenly land a young woman in a merciless and inflexible system. A lack of priors and a history of general good conduct didn’t matter at all—federal mandatory minimums dictated sentences, and if you were pleading guilty (the vast majority of us did), the only person with real leeway in determining what kind of time you would do was your prosecutor, not your judge. Consequently there were sad-looking parents visiting their kids—though not mine. My mother was like a ray of sunshine in that room.
For our visits every week my mother was always dressed immaculately in soft, cheerful colors, with her blond hair carefully styled, her makeup perfectly applied, wearing a piece of jewelry that I had given her for a distant Christmas or birthday. We would talk for hours about my brother, her students, my uncles and aunts, the family dog. I would fill her in on whatever new electrician’s skill I’d learned that week. She always seemed perfectly comfortable in the visiting room, and every time she visited, I got comments from other prisoners afterward. “Your mama is so nice, you’re a lucky girl,” or “That’s your mother? Get out! I thought it was your sister!”
I had been hearing that one most of my adult life. People would often say it to her as well, and even though she had received that compliment approximately three thousand times before, it always made her glow. In the past, this familiar exchange made me feel resentful. Do I look like I’m in my late forties or fifties? But now I enjoyed watching her pleasure when people drew a close comparison between us. Even with this disaster I had dragged us all into, she was still proud to be my mother.
It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother defeated, even when life presented difficulties and disappointments. I hoped that our resemblance extended beyond our blue eyes.
My father, more than a thousand miles away, was able to come visit me when the academic year was over. His relief when he saw me was palpable. I have always been a daddy’s girl, and I could tell how it pained him to see his baby, even a baby in her thirties, in a place like this. We still enjoyed our time, eating peanut M&Ms while I spun all the intrigues of the place out for him to absorb. The difference between our weekly phone calls and an actual in-person conversation was like a text message versus a weekend-long visit. If there was one silver lining to this whole mess, it was the reminder of my family’s greatness.
I had a lovely visit with my mother that Mother’s Day—although the visiting room was deranged. I had never seen it so crowded with large family groups. A lot of women in Danbury had families who lacked the resources to come and visit often, even though many of them lived in New York City. Tired grandmas and aunties, taking care of their daughter’s or sister’s children during their prison stays, had a very hard time marshaling toddlers and teenagers on the buses, trains, and taxis necessary to get to Danbury—the trip could take four hours each way from the city and cost money. But Mother’s Day was special, and children of every age swarmed the place, and a cacophony of conversations flowed in many languages and accents. In the midst of all of it was my mother, smiling happily when she spotted me walking into the madness.
TWO COPIES of The New Yorker arrived for me at mail call, to my horror. Someone out there had sent me a second subscription. Miss Esposito from C Dorm also got the magazine, and had been mad at me when my first copy showed up in March—she thought it was a waste of money for both of us to get it. The damn things were piling up all over the prison.