by Donna Hylton
4
INMATE #86G0206
Outside the courthouse as cameras snap and reporters shout their questions, Judge Torres refers to Mr. V’s death as “the crime of the century.” This will do all the more to bring me unwanted attention in the headlines, as well as in prison itself.
My new home will be the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the nation’s only maximum-security prison for women and known at Rikers Island as “Beddy’s House”—as in, “Look out: When you get to Beddy’s House, they rape you. They beat you up; they take your stuff from the commissary. You end up at Beddy’s House? Then you gotta be real careful.”
Two police vehicles escort the New York City van in which I’m transported an hour outside of the city to a facility with towers, fences, and barbed wires. As we pull inside the prison gates, some incarcerated women come out and stand behind the chain-link fences, watching the show as I’m ushered out of the vehicle in handcuffs. I’ve worn an outfit that a friend bought me—a little pale baby-yellow blouse and matching cotton capris with sandals. In my ears are tiny diamond studs, on my wrist, a small watch. I’m the only one who’s dressed in normal clothes… and because of this, as usual, I don’t fit in.
I subtly scan the crowd to see if I recognize anyone who might have been at Rikers Island with me. There’s not a familiar face among these women.
Twenty-five years to life, I think again. I’ve done the multiplication: that’s 9,130 days, counting leap years. When will Dorothy bring Adrienne to see me?
I’m taken into the reception building, where immediately one of the inmates working there takes me to shower with lye to treat any possible lice. The women instruct me to shampoo my hair, again on both areas of my body, and wash with the soap that they give me. “This soap takes scars away if you use it long enough,” one tells me. You don’t know my scars, I’m tempted to tell her.
Only a thin prison robe separates me from the cold bench, as I wait for officers to look me up and down and tell me what I’ll wear. I’ve heard that state greens are made for men, by men, to fit men, and that rolling the waistline of the pants down to make them fit can get you in trouble. Fortunately, they give me a green prison dress, which fits alright, at least for now. They also allow me to keep my own shoes on, since they’re sandals.
As I dress, I think of all the years I looked forward to choosing my own clothes, all the times when Daphne dressed me like a miniature professor and my shoulders sagged under the weight of her rule. The clothes we wear are an expression of the way we feel inside. Now, anything that ever made me an individual is taken away. This moment feels exactly the way I felt when I was seven years old, moving into the Hyltons’ home. As a child in Jamaica, I was on my own so often that I never had to fight to cultivate a sense of who I was—a child who was carefree and happy, who loved the water and the birds and the butterflies. Despite the lack of consistent parenting, I inherently understood my connection with God—that I was lovable, that I was loved… that I was love itself.
But in time, that inherent understanding diffused and eventually disappeared. I became nobody, not important to anybody. And now, that understanding is reinforced. I’m one of four hundred women in this place who has to follow other people’s rules. Right now I’m angry—at my co-defendants, at the people who never believed me when I tried to speak the truth, but mostly, at myself. Mr. V’s life has ended, but so has his family’s life, along with my daughter’s, along with mine. The worst part of all of this is that despite Dorothy’s promise, I really don’t know when I’ll ever get to see Adrienne. Alvin has a way of manipulating every situation and every person, including his mother.
If I had any sense of personhood left before I entered, any ability to manage the things in my life that are most important to me, that’s all gone now. I’m a ward of the state, deemed as unfit for making decisions for my life. From now on, the State of New York will determine what happens to me. I have to conform to everything that’s expected of every other individual in here.
For twenty-five years to life.
I work to adapt to the routines at Bedford Hills, hoping my baggy greens will help me blend in with the other women. Even though the correction officers conduct four body counts per day to keep constant track of where every single one of us is, I feel lost and invisible. Every morning, the doors of my cell spring open at 6 a.m., and every night they slam shut with a thunderous clang at 10 p.m. I’m trapped, smothered inside a metal coffin. Imagining years upon years of this makes me scream inside.
I squint up at the tiny window in my cell to find some hope of life outside, but I can barely find a patch of sky. Mr. V twists my thoughts, visits my dreams and doesn’t let up, begging me with pleading eyes: “You’re different. Will you help me?”
Look at me, Mr. V! I can’t even help myself!
I’m also haunted incessantly by agonizing worries about my little girl. The one solace, the little piece of hope that I cling to, is of one day seeing Adrienne, and the dream that prison will not be where I will live the rest of my life. I pray that I’ll get out, and Adrienne and I will have a home together.
Night after night, sometimes multiple times in one night, I wake up with dreams that now consist of events that I’ve forgotten. After finding a caterpillar in my salad in the mess hall one evening, I’ve stopped eating. My stomach rumbles in hunger through the night, and for the first time in years, I’m left alone with moments from my childhood that are surfacing out of nowhere. As if it happened yesterday, I remember how my birth mother loved to prepare big breakfasts and dinners. I remember how she would hum as she stood over the stove to whatever songs played on the jukebox at the pub or through the radio in our home and from the street vendors: songs like “No Woman, No Cry” by Bob Marley, Dennis Brown’s “No Man Is an Island,” and “The Harder They Come” by Jimmy Cliff.
And then I remember something I haven’t thought of since around the time I came to the United States. One day, my birth mother took me to visit a mansion on a bluff overlooking the sea. She held my hand as we approached the house with its white pillars, walking carefully past two big dogs sitting like sentries outside. A black maid opened the front door and stared at me with pity in her eyes. “Come in, child,” she said, watching my mother closely as I walked with dirty feet across the polished wood foyer floor. The maid went to fetch my mummy’s boss, whose hurried expression softened when he looked out from his library to see us. He went back inside his library, and then a minute later emerged to hand my mother a piece of paper. Then he knelt down to look me in the eye, placing his hand gently on my shoulder. “I’m sorry that I haven’t been here,” he told me, “and that I haven’t seen you.”
All I’ve ever known about this man is his name, and that during my childhood, he was an attorney who employed my mother. At this point, I crave connection so acutely that I decide I’ll reach out to anyone in my past who cared about me, for a chance they’ll help me stay connected to what’s going on in the outside world. Another inmate’s daughter is said to have a knack for locating long-lost relatives, and within a few weeks, she’s been able to find the phone number for the law office of my mother’s long-ago employer. Because the number is long-distance, an inmate arranges for us to have a three-way phone call—a violation in the prison, but one that I’m desperate enough to risk. When I hear a man’s British-Jamaican accent come on the line, my voice is as small as a child’s. “Mr. James Adamson?”
“Yes?”
“My name is Donna. My mother worked for you in the early sixties as a secretary… and she used to bring me there as a child…”
With every detail, he responds, “Yes… yes…?”
I recall to him a time when I was a toddler accompanying my mother to his home. The vision is still vivid: the waves that washed up at the bottom of the cliff behind the mansion, its massive pillars out front, the dogs that stood guard beneath the veranda. “Yes…” he says.
I’ve never forgotten thinking back then how strange it
was that my mother’s boss would relate to me so personally, but in the years since, I think maybe I’ve put it together. Now, twenty years later and two thousand miles away, I ask him: “Mr. Adamson… am I your daughter?”
He’s so quiet on the other line that for a moment I’m sure the line’s been cut off. But then, he answers with a stutter: “I… I don’t—no!” he exclaims. “You are not my daughter!”
I’m left with a dead tone on the line.
If no one wants you, then you belong to no one. You fit in nowhere. In the bottom of my heart, I’d begun to grip this hope like a tiny fistful of sand. Maybe if he knew how badly I’ve been harmed, he would come straight here and save me. Could James Adamson be my father?
I think of everything I’d do for Adrienne—the only person in the world who really loves me.
I begin to accept with gratitude any opportunity for connection, eventually finding companionship with a woman named Yolanda, known here as “Ya-Ya,” who’s in for assault and selling drugs. I don’t consider myself gay, but at a certain point, prison makes you desperate for friendship, love, protection, and above all else, it makes you desperate to feel something—anything—that’s life-affirming and human. Ya-Ya and I begin to meet in the recreation yard and the gym, where we sing together and steal kisses.
Unfortunately, this newfound security soon becomes a problem. Ya-Ya is young, fun, good-looking, and gay. And she has an admirer—an ogre of a woman who’s known to be a fighter and who confronts me one afternoon during recreation break in the yard. “Uh-oh,” one of the women says to me, her eyes monitoring something over my shoulder. “It looks like somebody’s coming for you.”
I turn to find Ursula towering over me. When we’re nose to nose, I realize I’ve never seen her this close: the scars on her face, her bloodshot eyes, her jaw clamped in aggression. I square my shoulders, trying to look brave… and in response, Ursula breaks into crazy laughter. Just as she pulls her chin back to spit on me, I clench my fist tight, haul it back, and nail her—hard.
She falls onto her knees and grips the side of her head with both hands, then pulls one away and looks at it: there’s blood. In this instant, I’m staring at Roy’s clawed cheek in my bedroom back at Boynton the day that I went to the school counselor for help. You made me bleed, you little bitch!
She looks up at me with crazy eyes, and suddenly I’m filled with all the strength I lost in the decade and a half of my life since Roy began to molest me. My body spews rage as I rail on Ursula, fighting like I’ve never fought before, until my fist loosens enough for her to catch part of my hand in her mouth. The jaggedness of her broken teeth locks around my finger, which is quickly going purple with pressure. An officer races toward us from the reception building, followed by several others, who work to yank me off of her and put cuffs on us both. Several of them escort me immediately to see the doctor, who advises me that I’ll require a tetanus shot.
“I think it’ll heal on its own, though,” I tell him.
The doctor turns to me. “Your opponent in the fight has a virus that’s very serious, and very contagious,” he says.
“How serious?”
“Deadly.” My stomach collapses. “We don’t know whether it can be passed on through saliva, but I believe this shot is the least we should do. It’s not worth taking a chance.”
I turn the top of my forearm to him. My mind aches with worry about the virus he mentioned for weeks longer than it takes the pain of the tetanus shot to leave my arm.
At the disciplinary hearing they hold, Ursula cradles the side of her head in pain as I learn that I busted her eardrum with my punch. It was a means not to allow myself to appear weak here, but I’m learning that in prison, the truth doesn’t matter so much. The system on the inside is a lot like the system on the outside: unless you have a good ally in a powerful position to speak up for you, you’re at its mercy. At Bedford, like at Boynton and in every place in my life, it doesn’t matter that I was simply trying to stand up for myself.
It’s here, less than a year into my sentence, that I’m locked up for the first time in the SHU—segregated housing unit—better known as solitary, or, as the women here call it… the Box. As I enter the Box for a sentence of three years, my relationship with Ya-Ya extinguishes… and I’m disturbingly aware that the next 1,095 days will be the loneliest period I have faced so far. The only interaction I have with another human is the gloved hand that passes me moldy bread and spoiled milk through a slot in the steel door, and as I look around at the six-foot-by-ten-foot cinder block room with a slab of metal for a bed and no clock to tell me the time, I face my worst nightmare: myself, my memories, and my mind.
Going to the Box is like being buried alive in a coffin within a coffin. This is the pinnacle of all the anxiety, loneliness, and dark closets I’ve experienced in my life. I’ve heard of women who have hung themselves with bedsheets while they were in the Box.
This I don’t know if I can survive.
5
JAIL SISTERS
I hear screams coming from the other boxes, and I scream out, too. Even in summer, this place is an icebox, and there are dozens of tiny black bugs that scatter among each other on the window with no rhythm or pattern. The longer I watch them, the less sure I am that they actually exist. Even in the first few days here, I’m sure I’m losing my mind.
When an officer pulls me out for my first chance to spend an hour in recreation, I look into the window of the cell that neighbors mine. Lying on her metal bed is a small, white woman who’s reading a book, which she slowly moves away from her face, perhaps as curious about her new neighbor as I am about mine. Our eyes meet. Oh, no. Here’s what I get for not minding my own business. Before the officer moves me along, this neighbor’s face softens… and opens into a big smile.
From this point, every time I’m escorted past her cell, she takes a moment’s break from reading to smile at me.
The screams and cries might happen more sparsely in the night, but they never fully stop. Segregated housing is a prison of the self and of the system. On the occasion when the self softens enough to ask for mercy from its pain, the system never forgives or forgets. One night, in this dismal hellhole, I hear a voice: “Hello? Are you there?”
I rise briskly from my bed, scared that I’m hallucinating. As I move to the wall, as if it could somehow defend me from insanity, I hear it again: the voice coming from an air vent. Slowly, I move underneath it. “Hello?” I ask softly.
“Hi, I’m Judy—Judy Clark.”
I have no idea who she is, but this connection feels like it was sent from God. From the first moment I saw her smile, and now as I hear her voice, it’s been clear that Judy’s presence might be the only thing to get me through prison.
Some days, we’re allowed to go to our one-hour recreation together, where we walk along the paved asphalt area—twenty feet by twenty feet, with two concrete tables, a barbed razor-wire fence, and a gun tower. This space is even higher security than the rest of the jail, but as I spend time with Judy, my anguish to get out of this place somehow lessens in urgency. Before I came to segregated housing, I heard her name mentioned around the prison—she’s one of the higher-profile women at Bedford. Women seemed to talk about her with appreciation, but as young and new as I was, I didn’t really get why she mattered.
Now, as Judy and I spend time together each day, I’m beginning to learn why she’s widely known, not only here but in larger society. Raised by parents who were part of the American Communist Party, Judy was a passionate political activist in the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. Along with another incarcerated woman here named Kathy Boudin, Judy participated in the radical political activist group called the Weather Underground Organization. Throughout the sixties and seventies, they worked with extremist groups that included the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. Judy was captured during the infamous Brink’s robbery of 1981 that left two police officers and two security guards dead. She w
as sentenced to prison because she was part of a movement that challenged the injustices happening against women and people of color. It’s easy to witness Judy’s commitment to creating a more just world for everyone. While she denounced the way some humans treat one another, she’s stated that she has regrets for the role she played in her crime. Judy Clark might be locked up in prison, but she tells me she still feels the responsibility to do something.
On days when our recreation breaks take place at different times, we talk for hours through the wall vent that separates our cells. She starts out curious about my age, where I’m from, whether I keep in touch with my family. As our conversations through the vent progress, I learn that Judy and I both have daughters who are in first grade. When Judy was arrested, she said goodbye to an infant. I listen, in awe of her strength. When I tell her that I had my daughter at age sixteen by an older man, even though there’s a thick cement division between us, I can feel that she sympathizes with me.
Judy tells me she’s doing her best to parent from prison, but she faces her most difficult challenge every time she has to say goodbye to her daughter. “I feel like I’m no good,” I tell her. “I can’t even see or hold my little girl, and I definitely don’t think I’m doing a good job of parenting her from inside this place.”
“Can I tell you something?” she says.
I rest my head on the wall under the vent to listen.
As though she can sense this, Judy tells me: “Just loving your daughter is parenting.”
The safety of her friendship seems to allow more memories that I’d buried to surface. For the first time in more than fifteen years, I remember a teenage girl who came to live with me at Roy and Daphne’s home shortly after I arrived there. For a short time, maybe a few months, I had a companion to eat dinner with me in the shush of the evening and someone who was allowed to take me to the playground or to walk down the block.