Orange Is the New Black

by Piper Kerman

  Truthfully, I didn’t much care about the smoking ban. I would never have admitted it to Larry or my mother in the visiting room, but I’d have a social cigarette now and then with Allie B. or Little Janet or Jae. A pal from the electric shop had taught me how to make a lighter out of a scrap of tinsel, two AA batteries, bits of copper wire, and some black electricians’ tape. But I could do without it all easily. Cigarettes were killing the “real” smokers, though, and the long twice-daily pill line included not just the people getting psych meds but also women who desperately needed their heart or diabetes medication to stay standing. According to the CDC, cigarettes kill over 435,000 people a year in the United States. Most of us in Danbury were locked away for trading in illegal drugs. The annual death toll of illegal drug addicts, according to the same government study? Seventeen thousand. Heroin or coffin nails, you be the judge.

  When September rolled around, a lot of prisoners were flat-out depressed. They sneaked smokes in absurd spots, practically begging to be caught. Every time I rounded the track, I’d surprise a new group rustling in the bushes. Then the shakedowns began in earnest, and they started hauling people off to the SHU. The ever-canny Pop had negotiated with her work supervisor that she’d be allowed one protected smoke at the end of her shift and a safe hidey-hole in the kitchen.

  The Camp population continued to dwindle, with many empty beds. The place felt quiet, which was nice, but I missed my loud friends and neighbors who had departed: Allie B., Colleen, and Lili Cabrales. As soon as the “Martha moratorium” was lifted, the Camp would get dozens of freaks rushed in, ruining our temporarily placid prison lives. Per Larry’s instructions, I had been watching more television but not the news. The presidential campaign was barely noted on the inside. Instead, I joined the crowd for the much-anticipated Video Music Awards in August. “What up, B?” asked Jay-Z, and the visiting room filled with squeals. In prison, everyone sings along.

  SEPTEMBER 16 was the day of the prison Job Fair, an annual Danbury FCI event that paid lip service to the fact that its prisoners would rejoin the world. So far I had witnessed no meaningful effort to prepare inmates for successful reentry into society, other than the handful of women who had gone through the intensive drug treatment program. Maybe the Job Fair would impart some useful information to the crowd.

  I was lucky to have a job waiting for me when I went home: a generous friend had created a position for me at the company he ran. Every time he came to visit me, Dan would say, “Would you hurry up and get out of here? The marketing department needs you!”

  Hardly any of the women I knew in Danbury were as fortunate. The top three worries for women getting released from prison are usually: reuniting with their children (if they are a single mother, they have often lost their parental rights); housing (a huge problem for people with a record); and employment. I had written enough jailhouse résumés by now to know that a lot of the ladies had only worked in the (enormous) underground economy. Outside the mainstream, they didn’t have the first notion of how to break into it. So far, nothing about prison was changing that reality.

  A bald guy from the central BOP office in Washington, who seemed nervous, opened the Fair and welcomed us. Programs were handed out, folded photocopies with a drawing of an owl on the cover. Below the owl it read: BE WISE—Women In Secured Employment. On the back of the program were Andy Rooney quotes.

  Various companies had committed to participating in the event, many of them nonprofits. The day would include a panel discussion on “Emerging Jobs in the Workforce & How to Land One,” mock job interviews, and Mary Wilson, the legendary Motown singer from the Supremes, was going to deliver a motivational speech. That I had to see. But first, Professional Appareling!

  Professional Appareling was run by Dress for Success, the nonprofit that helps disadvantaged women get business-appropriate clothes. A jovial middle-aged woman briefed us on the dos and don’ts of outfits for job interviews, then asked for volunteers. Vanessa almost broke her seatmate’s nose waving her arm madly, so the woman had no choice but to pick her. And then in the blink of an eye I found myself standing at the front of the room with my Amazonian neighbor, Delicious, and Pom-Pom. “These lovely ladies are going to help us to demonstrate the dos and don’ts,” said the volunteer brightly.

  She herded us into the bathroom, then passed out togs. She gave Delicious a sharp, almost Japanese-looking black suit; Pom-Pom, a pink suit that looked like she was going to church in the South. I got a hideously dowdy and itchy burgundy outfit. And for Vanessa? A fuchsia silk cocktail dress with beading on the chest. “Hurry up ladies!”

  We were like schoolgirls getting into costume for the senior show, giggling and fussing with the unfamiliar street clothes. “Is this right?” asked Delicious, and we fixed the long asymmetrical skirt on her. Pom-Pom looked pretty in pink—who knew?

  But Vanessa was in a state of distress. “Piper, I can’t zip this, help me!” My neighbor’s pride and joy were busting out of the too-small cocktail dress. She looked like she was going to cry if she didn’t get to wear it.

  “Oh, man, Vanessa, I don’t know. Okay, hold still… now suck it in!” I inched the zipper up. “Suck it in, bitch, it’s almost there!” She arched her back, sucked wind, and I got the back of the dress closed over the broad V of her shoulders. “Just don’t breathe, and you’ll be fine.”

  The four of us looked each other over. “P-I Piper, put your hair up. Be more professional and shit,” advised Delicious. I scraped my hair back into a quick bun. Now it was time to show off.

  We each got a turn on the catwalk, much to the glee of our fellow prisoners, who whooped and whistled. They went bananas when they caught sight of Vanessa, who basked in the glory, tossing her curls. Then we were lined up, and the volunteer explained who was a job-interview do, and who was a don’t. Delicious’s outfit was deemed too “edgy”; Pom-Pom’s was too “sweet.” Vanessa looked crestfallen when she heard that she was wearing “the last kind of thing you would want for an interview.”

  “What kind of job are we talking about?” she asked plaintively.

  My ugly tweed librarian outfit was lauded as the most work-appropriate.

  After the dress-up fun, a panel of businesswomen spoke seriously about growing sectors of the economy that had entry-level jobs for workers, like home health care. But there was nervous rumbling among the audience. When the Q&A time came, hands shot up.

  “How do we get trained for these kinds of jobs?”

  “How do we know the jobs that are open out there?”

  “How do we find out who will hire women with a record?”

  One of the panelists tried to answer several things at once. “I recommend you spend quite a bit of time on the computer researching these companies and industries, looking at online job listings, and trying to locate training opportunities. I hope you have some access to the Internet?”

  This caused a mild rumble. “We don’t even have any computers!”

  The panelists looked at each other and frowned. “I’m surprised to hear that. You don’t have a computer lab, or any kind of computer training here?”

  The bald BOP representative spoke up nervously. “Of course they do, all units are supposed to—”

  This elicited outright shouts from the ladies. Rochelle from B Dorm stood up. “We do not have any computers up in that Camp! No sir!”

  Sensing that he might have a situation on his hands, the BOP suit tried to be conciliatory. “I’m not sure why that would be, miss, but I promise I’ll look into it!”

  Mary Wilson turned out to be a lovely petite woman in an immaculate soft brown pantsuit. Right from the jump she held the room in the palm of her hand. She didn’t really talk about work. She talked about life, and a couple times she burst into snippets of song. She mostly told stories of trials and tribulations and battling adversity and Diana Ross. But what was striking about Ms. Wilson, and was also true of the other outsiders who volunteered their time that day, was that she spoke
to us prisoners with great respect, as if our lives ahead had hope and meaning and possibility. After all these months at Danbury, this was a shocking novelty.

  MARTHA STEWART was still on everyone’s mind. Hysteria had been building on the outside and the inside as to where she would serve her short sentence, and what would happen to her. She had asked her judge to be sent to Danbury, so that her ninety-year-old mother in Connecticut could easily visit her. Her judge had no say over it at all, however. The Danbury (or Washington) powers-that-be in the Bureau of Prisons didn’t want her here, perhaps because they didn’t want close media scrutiny on the facility. The Camp had been “closed” to new inmates since her conviction, allegedly “full,” although we had more empty beds as every week passed.

  A lot of nasty things had been written in the press about us. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised, but the women around me were upset, especially the middle-class ones. An article came out in People calling us “the scum of the earth” and speculating about the beat-downs and abuse Martha might suffer.

  Annette turned to me after mail call, anguished by her copy. “I have been subscribing to People magazine for over thirty-five years. And now I’m the scum of the earth? Are you the scum of the earth, Piper?”

  I said I didn’t think so. But the angst over People was nothing compared to the shock waves that rocked the Camp on September 20. I came up from the track in the early evening to find a cluster of A Dorm residents around Pop, cursing and shaking their heads over a newspaper. “What’s up?” I asked.

  “You’re not going to believe this, Piper,” said Pop. “You remember that crazy French bitch?”

  On September 19 the Sunday Hartford Courant had published a front-page story—we always got newspapers a day behind, so the institution could “control the flow of information.” Staff writer Lynne Tuohy had gotten an exclusive with a recently released Camper, “Barbara,” whom Martha had contacted for the inside scoop on life in the Danbury Camp. And “Barbara” had some interesting things to say.

  “Once the shock of being in jail was over, it became a holiday,” Barbara said in an interview after her talk with Stewart. “I didn’t have to cook. I didn’t have to clean. I didn’t have to shop. I didn’t have to drive. I didn’t have to buy gas. They have an ice machine, ironing boards. It was like a big hotel.”

  It was Levy, all right. After being whisked away to testify against her chiseler ex-boyfriend, she had reappeared in the Camp for one short week in June, and then she was released, her six-month sentence over. Apparently her stay had been far more enjoyable than she had let on when we had the pleasure of her company. She was singing the prison’s praises in the paper, going on about how much she had enjoyed the “wide range of classes” on offer plus:

  “two libraries with a wide array of books and magazines, including Town and Country and People.” The food, Barbara said, was nothing short of “amazing.”

  “This is a place that is so magnificent,” she said.

  I pictured Levy, swollen with hives, looking like the Elephant Man, crying every single day over her six-month sentence and sneering at anyone she thought was not “classy.”

  “I had my hair done every week,” Barbara said. “At home I don’t take care of me. I take care of my kids. I take care of my house. I had time there to take care of me. When I came home, I raised my standard of living a little bit.”

  She hastened to add that the massages “are on the up-and-up,” and laughs when friends ask whether she was “attacked”—sexually assaulted—during her stay. “I’d say, ‘Are you kidding? Most people there were so classy.’”

  The reporter got many minor facts wrong, such as that there were four nuns resident, and that we could buy CD players at the commissary. Women were outraged by the false claim that we could buy Häagen-Dazs ice cream. The Camp freaked out, issuing loud threats against the now-free Levy. Boo Clemmons was beside herself.

  “Häagen-motherfuckin-Dazs! Hotel! That lying little bitch better hope she don’t violate, because if I get hold of her, she’s going to think she checked into Motel Hell!”

  “I think Martha will be assigned to the kitchen and she will cook and she will be happy,” Barbara ventured.

  I imagined Martha Stewart trying to take over Pop’s kitchen. That would be better than Godzilla vs. Mothra.

  Pop was really upset, but not about the prospect of Martha in the mess hall. “Piper, I just don’t understand it. Why would she lie? You have the opportunity to get the truth out there about this place, and instead she makes up these lies? We have nothing here, and she makes it sound like a picnic, with her fucking six-month sentence. Try living here ten years!”

  I thought I knew why Levy had lied. She didn’t want to admit to herself, let alone to the outside world, that she had been placed in a ghetto, just as ghetto as they had once had in Poland. Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the world, a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient—people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled. Meanwhile the ghetto in the outside world is a prison as well, and a much more difficult one to escape from than this correctional compound. In fact, there is basically a revolving door between our urban and rural ghettos and the formal ghetto of our prison system.

  It was too painful, I thought, for Levy and others (especially the middle-class prisoners) to admit that they had been classed as undesirables, compelled against their will into containment, and forced into scarcity without even the dignity of chosen austerity. So instead she said it was Club Fed.

  MY NEIGHBOR Vanessa had given me an in-depth account of how, as young Richard, she had been banned from her high school prom for planning to wear a dress (she whipped up some sequined palazzo pants, found a sympathetic PTA mom to approve them, and attended in triumph). But I never knew what had landed her in federal prison, or why she’d first been designated to a high-security facility. I was pretty sure she wasn’t in prison for a drug crime, and I had a suspicion or intimation that she’d given the feds a bit of a chase before being taken into custody, which is probably why she’d ended up down the hill. She reminded me of the gay males and freshly females I had known in San Francisco and New York—smart, snappy, witty, curious about the world.

  I was more curious about Vanessa’s history than about most of my fellow inmates, particularly after she made an unusual appearance in the visiting room one weekend. There she was, hair and makeup perfect, uniform pressed, towering over her visitor, a tiny, beautifully dressed white woman with snow-white hair. They stood together at the vending machines, their backs to me, the old lady in soft periwinkle blue, Vanessa displaying broad shoulders and narrow hips that any man would have envied.

  “Did you have a nice visit?” I asked afterward, not hiding my curiosity.

  “Oh yes! That was my grandmother!” she replied, lighting up. I was further intrigued, but not enlightened.

  I was definitely going to miss her—she was going home in a few weeks. As her release date neared, Vanessa got increasingly anxious, with a decided uptick in religious observance. Many women grow very, very nervous before they go back to the outside world—they face uncertain futures. I think that Vanessa felt this way. But her nerves did nothing to stop our enthusiastic planning for her surprise going-home party, spearheaded by Wainwright and Lionnel.

  It was a grand affair. Many cooks contributed microwave treats, and it resembled a church picnic, with all of the attendant food rivalries over who prepared the best dishes. There were chilaquiles, fried noodles, and prison cheesecake—my specialty. Best of all, there was a platter of deviled eggs—a really challenging contraband item to produce.

  We all huddled in one of the empty classrooms, waiting for the Diva. “Shhhhhhhhh!! I hear her!” someone said, dousing the light. When we all shouted “Surprise!” she feigned astonishment graciously, although her fresh makeup had been applied with extra care. At this point the ent
ire prison choir launched into song, led by Wainwright, who soloed beautifully on “Take Me to the Rock.” Tops in the singing department was Delicious, who had shaved for the occasion—Delicious had a voice that could really give you goosebumps, in a good way. She had to turn and face the wall while she sang for Vanessa so she wouldn’t break down and cry. After the singing and the eating, the guest of honor got up and called out to each person by name, cheerfully reminding us that Jesus was watching over everyone and had brought her to us. She said thank you, with beautiful sincerity, for helping her through her time at Danbury.

  “I had to come here,” she said, drawing herself up to her full height, “to become a real woman.”

  SATURDAY NIGHT, movie night, was special, in an old-fashioned let’s-go-to-the-picture-show way. But this particular Saturday was extra, extra special. Tonight the lucky ladies of Danbury were going to get a tremendous treat. The institutional movie this week was the remake of Walking Tall, the classic vigilante revenge fantasy, starring Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock.

  I am confident that someday in the future The Rock, who was once a professional wrestler, will run for president of the United States, and I think that he will win. I have seen with my own eyes the power of The Rock. The Rock is a uniter, not a divider. When the BOP showed Walking Tall, the turnout for every screening all weekend long was unprecedented. The Rock has an effect on women that transcends divisions of race, age, cultural background—even social class, the most impenetrable barrier in America. Black, white, Spanish, old, young, all women are hot for The Rock. Even the lesbians agreed that he was mighty easy on the eyes.

  In preparation for The Rock, we observed our usual Saturday-night rituals. After visiting hours and chow were over, Pop and her crew finished cleanup in the dining hall, and I was handed our special movie snacks—nachos tonight, my favorite. Then it was on me, the runner, to whisk the food out of the kitchen to safety without getting busted by a CO. I usually slipped through C Dorm, dropped my Tupperware bowl and Pop’s in my cube, and delivered bowls to Toni and Rosemarie, our movie companions.