Orange Is the New Black

by Piper Kerman

  I got into the habit of rising at five, checking carefully to be sure that the morning count was complete—boots thudding, flashlight beams bobbing, keys sometimes jangling if the CO didn’t care enough to hold them still. I’d stand silently in my cube, hoping to startle them and make them jump. Natalie would already be gone to the kitchen to bake. I would revel in the complete darkness of B Dorm, listening to forty-eight other women breathe in a polyrhythm of deep sleep as I prepared the right measures of instant coffee, sugar, and Cremora. It was warm and peaceful in B Dorm, as I slithered through the warren of cubicles to the hot water dispenser. Occasionally I would see someone else awake—we would nod or sometimes murmur to each other. Steaming mug in hand, I would slip out of the building into the bracing cold and down to the gym to commune with the VCR and Rodney. In the perfect privacy of the empty gym, my body would slowly awaken and warm on the cold rubber floor, my head and heart stayed calmer longer, and the value of Yoga Janet’s teaching became clearer every day. I missed her terribly, and yet she had given me a gift that allowed me to cope without her.

  In the last ten months I had found ways to carve out some sense of control of my world, seize some personal power within a setting in which I was supposed to have none. But my grandmother’s illness sent that sense spinning away, showed me how much my choices eleven years earlier and their consequences had put me in the power of a system that would be relentless in its efforts to take things away. I could choose to assign very little value to the physical comforts I had lost; I could find the juice and flair in who and what was precious in my current surroundings. But nothing here could substitute for my grandmother, and I was losing her.

  ON A gray afternoon I was whipping around the track, pushing myself to keep at a seven-minute-mile speed. Mrs. Jones had given me a digital wristwatch that she never used, and I paced myself relentlessly with it. The weather was crap, it was going to rain. Jae appeared at the top of the hill, gesturing to me urgently. I looked at the watch and saw that it was only 3:25, thirty-five minutes until count time. What did she want?

  I pulled off my earphones, annoyed. “What’s up?” I shouted into the wind.

  “Piper! Little Janet wants you!” She beckoned me up again.

  If Little Janet wanted something she should bring her young ass down here to the track to talk to me… unless something was wrong?

  Sudden panic pushed me up the stairs to Jae. “What is it? Where is she?”

  “She’s in her cube. Come on.” I strode along with Jae, tense. She didn’t look like disaster had struck, but Jae was so used to disaster that you couldn’t always tell. We got to A Dorm quickly.

  Little Janet was sitting on her bunkie’s bottom bed, and she looked okay. I looked around her cube. It was bare, and there was a box on the floor.

  “Are you okay?” I wanted to shake her for scaring me.

  “Piper? I’m going home.”

  I blinked. What the hell was she talking about?

  “What are you talking about, baby?” I sat down on the bed, pushing a pile of paper aside. I thought she might have lost her rabbit-ass mind.

  She grabbed my hand. “I got immediate release.”

  “What?” I looked at her, afraid to believe what she was saying. Nobody got immediate release. Prisoners put in motions that took months and months to wend their way through the legal system, and they always lost. Immediate release was like the Easter Bunny.

  “Are you sure, sweetie?” I grabbed both of her hands. “Did they confirm, did they say for you to pack out?” I looked at her pile of stuff, and I looked at Jae, who was smiling a huge smile.

  Toni appeared in the doorway of the now-crowded cube with her coat on, jingling the town driver keys in her hand. “Are you ready, Janet? Piper, can you believe this! It’s incredible!”

  I whooped, not a scream but more like a war whoop. And then I crushed Little Janet in a bear hug, squeezing her as hard as I could and laughing. She was laughing too, in joy and disbelief. When I finally let her go, I put both hands on my head to try to steady myself. I was staggered, as if it were me who was leaving. I stood up and sat down.

  “Tell me everything! But hurry, you have to go! Toni, are they waiting for her in R&D?”

  “Yeah, but we gotta get her down there before the count, or she’s gonna be stuck behind it.”

  Little Janet hadn’t told a soul that she had a motion entered in court—typical jailhouse circumspection. But she had won, and her sixty-month sentence had been cut to the time served, two years. Her parents were on their way to pick up their little girl and bring her home to New York. We hustled her out of her cube and out the back door to where the white van was parked next to the chow hall. It was almost dusk. There were just a few of us, everything was happening so fast no one else knew what was up.

  “Janet, I am so happy for you.”

  She hugged me, hugged Jae, and kissed her bunkie Miss Mimi, a tiny old Spanish mami. Then she climbed in next to Toni, and the van pulled away, up the incline to the main road that circled the FCI. We waved wildly. Little Janet was turned around in her seat, calling goodbye to us out the window, until the van crested the hill and turned right, out of sight.

  I kept watching for what seemed like many minutes after she had disappeared. Then I looked at Jae—Jae who had seven more years to do of a ten-year sentence. She put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “You okay?” she said. I nodded. I was more than okay. Then we turned back and helped Miss Mimi into the Camp.

  I TRIED to share the indescribable miracle of Little Janet’s freedom with Larry, and he tried to cheer me up with news of our new home in Brooklyn. Larry had been house-hunting while I was away, and many people on the outside found it astonishing that I was comfortable with him picking out a new home for me sight unseen. But not only was I grateful, I also trusted completely that he would find a great place for us to live. He bought an apartment for us in a lovely, tree-shaded neighborhood.

  Still, at the moment it was a little difficult for either of us to grasp the other’s good news. I was having trouble imagining owning anything more than a bottle of shampoo, or living anywhere other than B Dorm, and I stared rather stupidly at the floor plan and paint chips he brought with him. I assured Larry that when I came home to him, I would be Ms. Fixit in our new apartment with all my prison-acquired skills.

  On the way out I scowled at the guard on duty; he was a pig, all hands. Before you could enter the visiting room, the guard stepped out to frisk you, to ensure that you were not bringing anything out with you to pass to your visitor. (In fact, a guard could pat you down at any time if they suspected you had contraband on you.) These pat-downs were delivered by both male and female guards and ran the gamut from perfunctory to full-out inappropriate.

  Most of the male guards made a great show of performing the absolute minimal frisk necessary, skimming their fingertips along your arms, legs, and waist in such a way that said “Not touching! Not touching! Not really touching!” They didn’t want any suggestion of impropriety raised against them. But a handful of the male guards apparently felt no fear about grabbing whatever they wanted. They were allowed to touch the lower edge of our bras, to make sure we weren’t smuggling goodies in there—but were they really allowed to squeeze our breasts? Sometimes it was shocking who would grope you—like polite, fair, and otherwise upstanding Mr. Black, who did it in a businesslike way. Other male COs were brazen, like the short, red-faced young bigmouth who asked me loudly and repeatedly, “Where are the weapons of mass destruction?” while he fondled my ass and I gritted my teeth.

  There was absolutely no payoff for filing a complaint. A female prisoner who alleges sexual misconduct on the part of a guard is invariably locked in the SHU in “protective custody,” losing her housing assignment, program activities (if there are any), work assignment, and a host of other prison privileges, not to mention the comfort of her routine and friends.

  Guards were not supposed to ask us personal questions, but this r
ule got broken all the time. Some of them were completely matter-of-fact about it. One day, while I was learning how to solder in the greenhouse with one of the cheerful plumbing officers, he posited a friendly “What the hell are you here for?”

  But for the guards who knew me better, I could tell, this was a more disturbing question, one that some of them brooded over. One afternoon alone in a pickup truck, another CMS officer turned to me intensely and said, “I just don’t understand it, Piper. What is a woman like you doing here? This is crazy.” I had already told him that I was doing time on a ten-year-old drug charge. He wanted the story badly, but it was more than clear to me that intimacy with a guard would be ruinous for me—or for any prisoner. It made no sense to share any of my secrets with him.

  ON THE weekend when the New York Marathon took place, I completed thirteen miles on the quarter-mile track, my own private prison half-marathon. The following weekend was unusually warm, beautiful really, and I was enjoying my sabbath ritual, Little Steven’s Underground Garage, a two-hour radio program devoted to garage rock and hosted by Steven Van Zandt from the E Street Band and The Sopranos that was broadcast on a local radio station at eight every Sunday morning.

  Best of all was listening to Little Steven, whether he was riffing on film noir, women, religion, rock rebellion, or the fate of the legendary CBGB’s back home in New York. I never missed the show. I felt like it was keeping a part of my brain alive that would otherwise lie completely dormant—even in prison you had to work at being a nonconformist. I was a freak and an outcast, but in the Underground Garage I always had a home out in the ether. Unless the weather was awful, I would usually listen while chugging around the track for the full two hours, often laughing out loud. It was like a lifeline that went straight into my ears.

  Just one thing marred my ritual today, and that was LaRue, the nasty plastic surgery casualty from B Dorm. LaRue was the only woman in the Camp whom I flat-out loathed. I did not hide my revulsion well, which was considered odd by my friends. “She’s a freak for sure, Piper, but no more so than some of these other wackos. It’s weird how she gets to you.”

  She was getting to me now. She was walking around the track in the center of the path, listening to what I assumed must be one of her fundamentalist radio shows, with her arms extended, Christ-like, and singing tunelessly in her high-pitched squeak about Jesus. Every time I lapped her, she remained smack in the middle of the gravel strip, arms spread wide. She was doing it on purpose, I was sure, to aggravate me and to force me off of the path. By the tenth time I passed her, my vision had stained red and I was boiling with focused fury. She was ruining Little Steven, she was ruining my run. I ground my teeth with hatred.

  On my eleventh circuit, I watched her from across the oval, fantasizing her own crucifixion. I zoomed around the curve into the straightaway, gaining on her quickly. Her weird ass, fat with implants, remained in the center of the track; her arms stayed pinned to her imaginary cross. And as I closed the distance between us, I raised my own hand and smacked one of hers down as I passed her.

  LaRue squawked in surprise and dove to the edge of the track, dropping her radio headset. A stream of Spanish invective followed me around the track. My heart soared for one moment and then immediately crashed. What the hell was wrong with me? What had I allowed this place to do to me? I couldn’t believe I had raised my hand in aggression against another prisoner, especially this pathetic nutjob. Shame washed over me. I stopped running, sick to my stomach.

  When I got around the track, LaRue was by the gym, with one of the Spanish mamis I knew from work.

  I apologized awkwardly. “Francesca, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. Are you all right?”

  This was answered with another stream of irate Spanish. I got the gist.

  “Francesca, she said she was sorry. Let it go, mami,” advised my coworker. “She’s fine. Just keep running, Piper.”

  IF YOU are a relatively small woman, and a man at least twice your size is bellowing at you in anger, and you’re wearing a prisoner’s uniform, and he has a pair of handcuffs on his belt, I don’t care how much of a badass you think you are, you’ll be fucking scared.

  One of the lieutenants was doing the bellowing, his mouth grim under his bristling mustache and crew cut. It had nothing to do with my smacking LaRue’s imaginary stigmata on the track. I had been caught out of bounds in A Dorm by a renegade, off-duty Mr. Finn, who turned up out of the blue on a night he wasn’t even working and wrote shots for me and seven other out-of-bounds women, lining us up outside his office. This, in turn, earned each of us private face time with the senior officer, who demanded to know if I disputed the charge, shot number 316 in the prison rule book. I said quietly that I did not and offered no excuse.

  This did not make him happy, and he growled. “Do you think this is funny, Kerman?”

  I sat perfectly still, not smiling. No, I didn’t think any of this was the least bit funny; nor was I interested in jailhouse irony anymore. In the back of my mind I knew he wasn’t going to do shit to me. He wasn’t going to put me in the SHU, he wasn’t going to lay a hand on me, I wasn’t going to lose my good time. It wasn’t worth it to them to do the paperwork that that would require. And he knew that I knew. Which was why he was screaming at me, and scaring me, even though we both knew it was a totally pointless exercise. No, I didn’t think it was funny.

  My out-of-bounds infraction was a minor one, a 300-series shot, along the same lines of: refusing to obey a direct order, participating in an unauthorized meeting or gathering, failing to stand for count, giving or accepting anything of value to or from another inmate, possession of nonhazardous contraband; and indecent exposure. Even lower on the list were the 400-series: faking sick, tattooing or self-mutilation, conducting a business, or unauthorized physical contact (like hugging someone who was crying).

  More serious by far were the 200-series shots: fighting; extortion, blackmail, protection rackets; wearing a disguise; engaging in or encouraging a group demonstration; work stoppage; bribery; stealing; demonstrating, practicing, or using martial arts, boxing, wrestling, or other forms of physical encounters, military exercises or drills; and the best-known of all shots, the 205—engaging in sexual acts.

  The 100-series were the worst of all; you could catch another charge for them. Murder, assault, escape, possession of a weapon, inciting a riot, drug possession, and one perfect catch-all: “conduct which disrupts or interferes with the orderly running of the institution or the BOP.”

  Eventually the lieutenant stopped glaring at me and cast his eyes over to the bald man in the corner of the room. “Is there anything you’d like to add, Mr. Richards?”

  Certain prison guards relish the power and control that they wield over other human beings. It oozes from their pores. They believe it is their privilege, their right, and their duty to make prison as miserable as possible by threatening, withholding, or abusing at every opportunity. In my experience, these creatures weren’t the sleazeballs who’d act sexually toward prisoners; in fact, they would never fraternize with lower life-forms like us, and they reserved their most withering scorn for their colleagues who treated us humanely.

  Richards, also an enormous man, was a permanent shade of florid pink and kept his shaved head shiny. He looked like Mr. Clean’s evil twin.

  “Yeah. There is.” Richards leaned forward. “I don’t know what the hell has been going on up there, but we all know that the Camp is off the chain. Well, you go back up there and you tell your friends that I’m headed up there this new quarter, and things are going to be completely different. You make sure you pass the word.” He leaned back in his chair, satisfied.

  All eight of us got the same speech—of course we compared notes. My punishment was ten hours of extra duty.

  I volunteered to work on the special overnight kitchen crew that was needed to produce Thanksgiving dinner. That way I would get all ten hours over in one fell swoop. Pop and the prison foreman she w
orked for, a well-liked guy whose office was full of plants, took holiday meals seriously. An extra-large team of women prepared turkey, sweet potatoes, collard greens, mashed potatoes, and stuffing, plus Natalie’s pies. I was on pots detail, clad in a rubber apron, giant rubber gloves, and a hairnet. We played the radio, I got a few tastes as we went, and everything was finished despite Pop’s nervousness. (She had only done it for ten years in a row.)

  We worked all night until the sun came up, and I felt pleasantly exhausted. This was the best way to be penitent, to pour my energy into the communal meal that we would all be sharing soon, even though most of us would rather be someplace else. Thanksgiving Day I slept, had a visit with Larry and our friend David, and then ate my fill with Toni and Rosemarie—it was easily the best meal of the year. The feast was somewhat marred when the quiet Spanish mami sitting next to me burst into tears in the middle of dinner and proved inconsolable.

  I ALWAYS thought I was an Episcopalian. I didn’t realize it, but I had really been raised to follow the ethos of Stoicism—the Greco-Roman answer to Zen. Many people on the outside (especially men) had admired my stoicism when I was on my way to prison. According to Bertrand Russell, the virtuous stoic was one whose will was in agreement with the natural order. He described the basic idea like this:

  In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man’s life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires.

  Stoicism sure comes in handy when they take away your underpants. But how to reconcile it with one’s insatiable need for other people? Surely my desire for connection, for intimacy, for human touch was not “mundane”? The very worst punishment that we can come up with short of death is total isolation from other humans, the Supermax, Seg, solitary, the Hole, the SHU.