by Tayari Jones
Roy, I know that we had a choice, but really, we didn’t have a choice. I mourned as though I had miscarried. My body apparently was fertile soil, but my life was not. You may feel that you’re carrying a burden, but I shoulder a load as well.
So now you know. We are bearing two different crosses.
And can we please please please stop talking about it. If you care for me at all, you will never bring this up again.
Yours,
Celestial
Dear Georgia,
Two years down and ten to go. (This is my idea of a joke.)
Finally, Banks will go forward with the appeal. I hate thinking about how much money your parents are shelling out for this. They are getting a “friends & family” rate, but still, I imagine the number clicking by like an odometer. But if things go well with the state appellate court, I’ll be out of here and I’ll take whatever job I can find and pay your daddy back. Seriously. I don’t care if I have to bag groceries.
See, this is why I like letters better than email. Anything I write down is a promissory note and a paper receipt, signed, sealed, delivered. We can only get email in the library for sixty-five minutes a week and there is always someone waiting or someone looking over your shoulder. Besides, I like to use that time to write emails for hire. You know what I got paid with last week? An onion. I know you’re going to think this is crazy, but onion is rare to come by in here and prison cuisine tastes better with a little bit of flavoring. To get it, I wrote a long email for this guy; it was part mash note and part fund-raising pitch. If it yielded the cash he was hoping for, he was going to get me an onion. Of course I split the onion with Walter, since he acted as a broker for the whole exchange. You should have seen it. If the hunchback of Notre Dame could be a vegetable, it would be that funky little onion. You don’t want to know what we cooked up in our cell that night, but I know you’re curious, so I’ll try and explain. It’s a casserole that you make out of ramen noodles, crunched-up Doritos, onion, and Vienna sausages. Everybody chips in what they have, and when it’s done, you divide it up. Walter is the chef. I promise that it tastes better than it sounds.
Another thing about paper letters is that I can write them at night. I wish more folks were in the market for old-fashioned mail, because it could be a little cottage industry. The problem is that people on the outside don’t write back and the whole point of sending a letter is to get something in return. Email is different. Most anyone will at least shoot back a response, no matter how short. You always answer my letters and you know I appreciate it.
Can you send me some pictures? I want some photos from before and a couple of new ones.
Love,
Roy
Dear Roy,
I got your letter yesterday—did you get mine? As promised, here are a few photos. The snapshots from back in the day, you will recognize. I can’t believe how thin I was. Since you asked for them, here are some new ones. Andre is into photography these days, so that’s why they look so artsy and serious. He’s not about to quit his day job, but I think he’s good. I think this is all due to his girlfriend—a twenty-one-year-old who thinks she can make a living making documentaries. (But who am I to talk? I’m in my thirties and I earn my living doll making!) Besides, if Dre likes it, I dig it, and Dre is smitten. But twenty-one? She makes me feel like a senior citizen.
Speaking of old: these pictures. You can see that I have put on some weight. My parents are both so slim, but it’s like some recessive gene snuck up on me and smacked me on my behind. It’s my own fault. I’ve been sewing like crazy, which means I spend the whole day sitting down. But I have so many orders to fill!
Things have reached critical mass and I’ve taken steps to secure a retail space. It’s not quite like you imagined—more boutique than toy store. Think of it as high end for toys but low end for art. I have to say that it’s rewarding to give a pretty brown doll to a pretty brown girl and watch her squeeze and kiss it. It’s different from watching a collector take it away in a wooden crate.
I wonder if maybe I’m compromising. It’s art but not Art.
Look at me, worried about selling out before I even hang out my shingle.
And speaking of money, I think you know what I’m going to say next. I have exactly one investor, and it is my father. Because he is sinking so much capital into it, we put everything in his name. I had to remind him that a silent partner is supposed to be quiet. He wanted the sign to say “Pou-Pays” so people would know how to pronounce it. (Ha! No.)
I know that we planned to start a business ourselves, without assistance, but things happen, and besides, my parents want to do this for me. All this hardheaded independence isn’t helping me or anyone else. Daddy and I went to the bank; we talked to a real-estate broker. Assuming there are no hiccoughs, Poupées will open up in about six months. It’s not our dream, but it’s dream-adjacent. Like Daddy says, I “could make some real money.”
Okay, back to the pictures. I keep changing the subject because I don’t really like the way that they came out. I feel like they show too much. Maybe you know what I mean? This is what I appreciate about Dre’s work, as long as the photos are of other people. He took a picture of my father and you could see the last fifty years in the lines of his forehead. Everything was there, Alabama, fatherhood, his whole black Horatio Alger thing. (He doesn’t like his portrait either, but I think it’s stunning.)
The pictures I chose are all rated PG so you can pass them around, but when I look at them, I really hope you will keep them to yourself. Show your friends the old pictures.
Please tell your friend Walter that I said hello and I hope to meet him. He sounds like a good guy. Does he have family? If you want me to, I can send some money for his books. I don’t like to think about folks in there without any little creature comforts. I can do it under Andre’s name if you want it to be anonymous. I know how proud people can be. Tell me what you think is best.
Yours,
Celestial
Dear Georgia,
You are the greatest gift of my life. I miss everything about you, even your sleeping bonnet that I used to complain about. I miss your cooking. I miss your perfect shape. I miss your natural hair. More than anything, I miss your singing.
The one thing I don’t miss is how we fought so much. I can’t believe we wasted so much time fussing over nothing. I think about every time I hurt you. I think about the times when I could have made you feel secure, but I let you worry simply because I liked being worried about. I think about that and I feel like a damn fool. A damn lonesome fool.
Please forgive and please keep loving me.
You don’t know how demoralizing it is to be a man with nothing to offer a woman. I think of you out there and there are so many dudes in Atlanta with their Atlanta briefcases and Atlanta jobs and Atlanta degrees. Trapped in here, I can’t give you anything. But I can offer up my soul and that’s the realest thing.
At night, if I concentrate, I can touch your body with my mind. I wonder if you can feel it in your sleep. It’s a shame that it took me being locked up, stripped of everything that I ever cared about, for me to realize that it is possible to touch someone without touching them. I can make myself feel closer to you than I felt when we were actually lying in bed next to each other. I wake up in the morning exhausted because it takes a lot out of me to leave my body like that.
I know it sounds crazy, but I’m asking you to try it. Please try to touch me with your mind. Let me see how it feels.
Love,
Roy
Dear Georgia,
Please forgive me if my last letter was a little “out there.” I didn’t mean to freak you out (ha). Please write me back.
Roy
Dear Roy,
I’m not freaked out. I’m just really busy these last few weeks. Things are really looking up for my career. I hate using that word, career. It always feels like the word bitch is hiding out between the letters. But I know that I’m being paranoid. The point
is that things are really heating up. There is talk about a solo show. I didn’t want to tell you about it until things were set in stone, but now they are set in, say, Play-Doh. But here is my news: Remember my Man Moving series? Now it’s called I AM a Man. The show is all of the portraits I have made of you over the years, starting with the marble. They might give me a show in New York. The key word is might, but I’m very excited and very busy. Andre’s doing all my slides and graphic design stuff. Everything looks perfect, but I wish he would accept a real payment. I know we are like family, but I don’t want to take advantage of him.
It has been demanding, but working all day with images of you makes me feel like I’m spending time with you and sometimes I forget to write. Please forgive. And know that you’re on my mind.
Yours,
C
Dear Georgia,
My mother says you’re famous. Confirm or deny.
Love,
Roy
Dear Roy,
I must be famous if word has made it to Eloe, Louisiana. I guess the entire Negro Nation subscribes to Ebony. I don’t know if you have seen the article, but even if you have, let me explain. Even if you haven’t, I want you to understand exactly what happened.
I told you that my doll won a contest at the National Portrait Museum. What I didn’t tell you was that the portrait was of you. Your mother asked for a doll based on your baby picture, the black-and-white studio portrait in your bedroom. I promised it to her and I worked on it for three months to get the chin right. She even provided your original outfit. It was surreal, dressing the doll in the clothes your mother had intended for her grandson to wear. (The whole thing was deep.) I promise that I was going to give it to her, but I left it at home. Just a stupid mistake. So I was going to send it to her for Valentine’s, but I couldn’t let it go. You know how I am, a perfectionist on the commissions. Something about it was too easy, too on the nose. She asked me about it a thousand times and I kept telling her it was coming.
What’s next is complicated, so let me back up.
Since you’ve been away, my mother and I have been spending more time together. At first, it was just so I wouldn’t be alone in the house, but now we visit like girlfriends, talking and drinking wine. Sometimes she even sleeps over. One night, she told me how she and her family came to live in Atlanta. It was a long story, and I was tired, but every time I drifted asleep she tapped me awake.
The story starts when my mother was a baby in a pram. Nana had taken her grocery shopping, which was always stressful because my grandparents had a lot of needs and not a lot of money. Sometimes they took credit at the general store and that hurt my grandmother’s dignity, and you know how debt can spiral out of control. While Nana was in the store trying to calculate the least amount of food she could buy to take care of the whole family, they crossed the path of a white woman and her child. (My mother talks bad about these white people and she talks about them in detail, as if she could actually remember them. She says that they were trashy, smelled of camphor, and the little girl didn’t even have shoes.)
But anyway, the little girl pointed at my mother and said, “Look, Mommy! A baby maid!” And for my grandmother, this was the last straw. By the end of the month the family packed up and moved to Atlanta, living with my grandfather’s brother until my granddaddy found a job. But the whole point is that in that instant in that store, my mama was a baby maid, and this is what made my grandparents move, just that inevitability.
Kind of remember that, okay? It’s important.
I never told you this, but about a year ago I had an incident. Not a breakdown, just an incident. I didn’t tell you because you have enough to think about. Don’t get mad about that. I’m okay.
Andre and I were walking nearby to Peeples Street because we had installed my show at the Hammonds House—these dolls are very ornate, almost baroque, lots of raw silk and tulle. The process was grueling because the topsy-turvy dolls were displayed on movable platforms that I built myself. Andre helped me, but it was hard work and I was about cross-eyed by the time we got it all set up. So the main thing is that I was exhausted.
We were on Abernathy on our way to buy fish sandwiches from the Muslims, which is another factor. I was hungry.
Near an intersection, we passed a little boy walking with his mother. He was teensy and adorable. Kids that size always get my attention. If things were different, maybe we would have a boy that age. His mother looked young, maybe twenty-one, but you could tell she was conscientious, just from the way she held his hand and chatted with him while they walked. Clear as water, I could imagine myself in her position, feeling his sweet little hand, answering his bright-eyed questions. When they got closer, he smiled—those little straight teeth—and I felt a jolt of recognition. That little boy looked like you. A voice in my head that was not my own said, A baby prisoner. I clamped my hands over my mouth and looked to Andre who seemed confused. “Did you see him? Was it Roy?” Dre said, “What?” I feel embarrassed even writing this. But I’m trying to explain what happened. Next thing I knew I was on my knees on the sidewalk in front of a water hydrant, embracing it like a small stout child.
Andre knelt beside me and we probably looked like we were having some sort of domestic dispute. He peeled my hands off the hydrant, one finger at a time. Somehow we made it to the fish place. He called Gloria, then he grabbed me by the shoulders. “You cannot let this destroy you,” he said. Finally Gloria showed up and gave me one of those “nerve pills” that all mothers stash in their pocketbooks. Long story short: I slept it off, whatever possessed me. I recovered and went to my opening at the Hammonds House the next day. I can’t really explain it, but the idea got inside me like a hookworm.
So I dolled it. I stripped the doll out of the john-johns and used waxed cotton to make a diminutive pair of prison blues. Dressing the doll in these clothes was just as difficult, but it felt more purposeful. In the baby clothes, it was only a toy. In the new way, it was art. That’s the doll that won the contest. I hate that you had to hear it from your mother and not from me.
When I was interviewed on stage, I didn’t tell them about you. They asked about the inspiration and I talked about my mother being a baby maid and I spoke about Angela Davis and the prison-industrial complex. What is happening with you is so personal that I didn’t want to see it in the newspaper. I know you will understand what I mean.
Yours,
Celestial
Dear Georgia,
A few months ago, you said you were dream-adjacent, but it looks like you have been living your real dream behind my back. The shop, that was my idea, but your fantasy involved galleries, museums, and white-glove installations. Don’t treat me like someone who doesn’t know you.
I understand what you’re saying and I understand what you’re not saying. Are you ashamed of me? You are, aren’t you? You can’t go to the National Portrait Museum and tell them that your husband is in prison. You could, actually, but you won’t. I empathize — it’s a lot to get used to. Before, we were living that Huxtable life. But now where are we? I know where you are and I know where I am, but where are WE?
Send me a picture of the doll. Maybe I’ll like it better when I can actually see what it looks like, but I must tell you that I don’t care much for the concept. And even if what you said in the article is true, about how you “want to raise consciousness about mass incarceration”—let’s say this wasn’t bullshit—please explain to me what a baby doll is going to do to help anybody in here. Yesterday, a dude died because nobody would give him his insulin. I hate to break it to you, but no amount of poupées is going to bring him back.
Look, you know I have always supported you in your art. Nobody believes in you more than me, but don’t you think you crossed a line here? And to not even tell me or mention me? I hope that prize from the National Portrait Gallery means a lot to you. That’s all I’ll say.
You know, if you’re not comfortable telling people that your husband, an innocent
man, is incarcerated, instead you can tell them what I do for a living. I’ve been given a promotion. I push a trash can around Mars, picking up garbage with giant tongs. It’s a sweet gig because Parson prison is also an agri-business site; before, I was picking soybeans. Now I work inside, and although I’m not wearing a white shirt and tie, I do have a white jumpsuit. Everything is relative, Celestial. You still have your upwardly mobile husband. In here, I’m white collar. No need to be ashamed.
Your husband (I think),
Roy
PS: Was Andre there? Were the two of you going around telling everybody how you have been best friends since you were two little babies taking a bath in the sink? Was everybody saying how cute that is? Celestial, I may have been born yesterday but not last night.
Dear Roy,
Your last letter upset me so much. What can I say to make you see that this isn’t about shame? Our story is too tender to explain to strangers. Don’t you see? If I say that my husband is in prison, that’s all anyone can focus on, not me or my dolls. Even when I explain that you’re innocent, all they remember is the fact that you’re incarcerated. Even when I tell the truth about you, the truth doesn’t get delivered. So what’s the point of bringing it up? This was a special occasion for me, Roy. My mentor flew in from California, and even Johnnetta B. Cole showed up. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about something this painful on the microphone during the Q&A. Maybe it was selfish, but I wanted to have my moment to be an artist, not the prisoner’s wife. Please write me back.
Yours,
Celestial
PS: As for your remarks about Andre, I will not even dignify that silliness with a response. I’m sure by now you have come to your senses and I am accepting your apology in advance.
Dear Georgia,
According to Walter, I am being a jackass for not looking at things from your side of the bed. He says it’s unreasonable for me to expect that you would constantly reiterate that your husband is incarcerated. He said, “This ain’t The Fugitive. You want her to go running after the one-legged man?” (See why we call him the Ghetto Yoda?) He says that your potential for advancement in your profession will be greatly diminished by having your brand associated with incarceration, which evokes troubling stereotypes of African American life. Except he said it like this: “She is a black woman and everybody already thinks she got fifty-eleven babies with fifty-eleven daddies; that she got welfare checks coming in fifty-eleven people’s names. She got that already to deal with, but she got the white folks to believe that she is some kind of Houdini doll maker and she even got them thinking that this is an actual job. She is working her hustle. You think she supposed to get up there talking about her man is in the hoosegow? Soon as she say that, everybody will start looking at her and thinking about the fifty-eleven everythings and she might as well go on back home and work for the phone company.” (Again, these are his exact words.)