A Little Piece of Light

by Donna Hylton

  Her spirit makes me giggle. “Nuns aren’t supposed to lie,” I tell her. “Not even about candy.”

  “Well,” she scoffs playfully. “I’m sure I can be forgiven this, don’t you think?”

  That is her love. So human, and at the same time, so transcendent and divine.

  Sr. Mary is so thoughtful that to help us save the money we spend at the commissary, she brings greeting cards for us to send out to our loved ones for their birthdays, and cards that say thinking of you, or thank you. She updates us on the news in the world, what the conversation is in Albany, and the movements that are taking place. One day, as she’s speaking to me, I respond to her: “Thanks for filling me in, Mother.” Since I met her, I’ve contemplated doing this. When it comes out of my mouth, it’s the most natural thing in the world.

  She looks at me. I look at her.

  She looks at me. “Oh, stop,” she says, pretending to wave me away with her hand.

  “Why, Mother?”

  “Shh!” she laughs, looking at the guards standing nearby. “Don’t let anyone hear you say that!”

  “Ain’t nobody gonna pay us any mind… Mother.”

  She hides a coy smile until we both begin to laugh. In our friendship and our partnership until now, it has been as though something spiritual has indeed been gestating. Now, suddenly, our relationship solidifies. We don’t get to choose our birth mothers, nor did I choose my adoptive mother… but on this day with this one word, I’ve chosen the woman who will be my mother for the rest of my life. To me, Sr. Mary—Mother—is like a modern-day Joan of Arc: strong and fierce with passion for what she believes in. I’ll never forget how I was struck the first moment I saw her: she had skin so pure white it seemed almost translucent, a halo of short white hair, and the face of an angel. She stood tall and broad-shouldered, as though she was prepared to bear any burden. And she had a regal aura. My heart and spirit fell in love with her right away, as if I were her daughter and she were my rightful mother.

  After this, she no longer debates with me when I refer to her by the most intimate title I’ve ever called anyone: Mother. We begin to grow so close that at one point, she finally tells me: “Just call me Mom.” That word never felt so happy or so true on my lips.

  It so happens that it’s also the word that stirs a feeling of uneasiness inside me and reminds me of my greatest shortcoming. In spite of the strides and discoveries I’ve made in my life in the past few years, there’s one particular area in which I still ache for help. When my daughter is thirteen years old, it has been over five years since I last saw her during that fleeting hearing in family court. From the day she was born and even before that, when I carried Adrienne inside me, I vowed to her that we’d be bonded for life and that I would always be there to take care of her. Prison has shown me that in the majority of cases, we women have wound up here because the love in our lives has been deficient, defective, or deprived. Our relationships with our children are an opportunity for us to replenish the love that’s bled out of us in our traumas, not to mention the chance to make society a better place by raising and influencing our children with the insight we’ve gained. I’ve experienced very personally what it is not to have deeply loving guidance—how can our society expect us to succeed as parents when we can’t see our children? How can we even hope for the cycle of violence and bad choices to be broken when we have no influence? After more than five years inside prison, I’ve pursued trainings, earned certifications, and even made a little money with my job as an HIV counselor. I have friends—family—and a mission that we share. Ever so steadily, these pieces of my life have moved into place, just like a puzzle, and begun to make me whole. But there’s one aspect of my life, of my crime, that will never allow my life to be whole: no matter what I do to cultivate peace and growth, I cannot accept life without Adrienne. She’s almost a teenager now. Even if she weren’t preparing to enter the stage in her life that for me led to dangerous decisions from which I could never turn back, I can only ever be content with myself when I know I’m a part of her life.

  In 1992, I share this with Sr. Mary and her colleague, Sr. Elaine Roulet, who accompanied me to family court on that day five years ago. More and more, Sr. Elaine’s programs for families of the incarcerated are becoming models for many prisons around the country. Now I need her and Sr. Mary to provide me with wisdom that will become the model for my life.

  With Sr. Mary behind me, Sr. Elaine and I begin to develop a strategy for her to work with the court and set up a real visit with my little girl. In turn, Sr. Elaine partners closely with my attorney to make it clear to the court that Bedford has a proven program for children visiting their mothers. The visits will be supervised, she states, and Sr. Elaine and her colleagues will even provide us with lunch. Then she drives the point home that I’m not in prison for any crime that was child-related. Did you tell them I love my child? More than five years ago when I was arrested, my adoptive father dismissed his single opportunity to help me succeed in my most important role, as a mother, by refusing to vouch for my parenting. This folly and so many committed by others have stacked the odds against us. But Sr. Elaine returns from court with a lightness in her face: the court has granted me the right to see Adrienne.

  Alone in the visitation room, I don’t look at the clock. The minutes before her arrival creep slowly, and I know the hours together will fly. Memories of Adrienne’s childhood begin to light up in my mind, how the neighbor ladies in Harlem would insist on handing me money to buy her toys at the drugstore and ruffled little dresses. I remember a time on the train during the holiday season shortly before the crime happened. I worked a lot and lived downstairs with Rita and Theresa, but I remember how I mothered Adrienne with every chance I got. I never felt as fulfilled as I did when it was just the two of us against the world. I remember I was wearing my old blue puffy winter coat, and Adrienne, then just a toddler, sat next to me on the subway. I was watching the city go by through the subway window, and when I looked down at her, she was staring up at me with her big brown eyes. In that moment was the seal of permanent love. I’ve referenced that exchange on occasion in my mind. It was as if, in some way, we both knew that something was coming that would threaten to tear us apart and that we were locking the love of this moment to live inside our hearts forever.

  Then she walks through the door. Alvin slowly enters behind her. I race to my little girl, wrap my arms around her shoulders, and breathe deeply; she’s carried in the scent of fresh air. When I release her from my embrace and stand her back for a good look, I can’t help but study everything about her: the innocence in her posture, the pure honesty in her eyes, the unassuming way she tucks her hands inside her pockets. Three words I’ve wanted to say for five years swell inside me until I can no longer keep them from crossing my lips: “I love you!” She has a way of dropping her gaze that suggests she feels ashamed, confused… torn.

  Alvin waits silently at the edge of the visitation room for a full six hours while Adrienne and I spend time nearby in the Children’s Center playroom. I use the activities as a way to ease into conversation, though her answers to my questions are brief and her glances toward me are tentative… but in the brief flash of a second, she tells me with her eyes that she’s yearning for something—more time together, more affection, more of me?

  From conception, a mother is supposed to be able to feed her little one, and a deep gratitude fills me when the nuns deliver lunch to us on trays. There’s a politeness between us as Adrienne and I eat together, slowly and carefully—despite how hungry our souls are. For this one afternoon, I will be totally nourished. I can only pray that this time together will sustain Adrienne, too.

  When it’s time for her to leave, again I take Adrienne in my arms. I glance only for a split second at Alvin, who’s glaring over my daughter’s shoulder. With our cheeks pressed together, a hint of my little girl’s voice comes muffled through my ear, which at first I think is from a gentle effort to push me away… until I real
ize that she’s crying. I squeeze a little tighter, and tell her once more: “I love you.”

  In my ear, so that Alvin can’t hear her, she whispers sweetly: “Bye-bye, Mommy.”

  With this, I know I have to let go. Judy Clark’s words chime in my head as I watch Adrienne walk to her father: the inevitable goodbye makes each preceding minute of the visit so sorely difficult.

  But now I have something to hold on to. My mother has helped me to mother. She and her sister in faith have helped me show my daughter that my love for her is real. I’ve seen her. I’ve held her. I’ve smelled her scent and touched her skin.

  And my little girl just called me Mommy.

  8

  AN EDUCATION

  Affirming my life in such a way that they would help make a reality of my need to see my child, women like Sr. Mary and the rest of my Jail Sisters have made me believe for the first time that I can succeed at the dreams that have been most important to me. When the door closes on a wish we hold for our future, a light in our soul is snuffed out. But I’m beginning to see that our lives don’t have to end when we come to prison. It takes a fierce optimism and unshaking commitment, but even while we’re inside, we can in fact grow into the best we can be.

  Superintendent Lord, Kathy, Judy, and a few other women recently have gotten a grassroots school initiative going to bring fully accredited college degree programs and professors to the prison through Mercy College, a formal higher education institution. Almost twenty years have passed since my days as “the Golden Child” who was destined for an Ivy League education, but now I do something I thought I might miss out on forever: I enroll to work toward a bachelor’s degree in behavioral sciences with a concentration in social psychology.

  Our “campus” is surrounded by barbed wire and armed prison guards—but when the classroom doors shut and I look up at our professor working on the blackboard, I’m no longer in prison. I’m like the hummingbirds I remember from my childhood, drinking in the juice of life—

  In the classroom, I’m free.

  When I was a little girl reading Dibs in Search of Self, I dreamed about the possibility of one day earning a doctorate degree and becoming an academic just like my adoptive mother. (I know that was her dream for me, too.) I try to think back to the moment when my life changed so pivotally that I gave up on that dream… then it hits me: it was when Alvin took me away.

  But now I can feel possibility tapping on my shoulder ever so gently. I grab ahold of it, and I absorb every idea our professors share with us. I begin to spend my free minutes in quiet study or reading textbooks and some classic works of fiction whose names I remember from when I was a child.

  Like my soul mother, Sr. Mary, I want to understand why women like me end up convicted criminals and what we can do to prevent it from happening to other women. My confidence and self-awareness grow as I find myself able to engage with Sr. Mary in conversations about her work as a professional in psychology, spirituality, and human behavior. I write essays and take quizzes and exams, but the astonishment of my new reality never wanes: after all the awards and accolades I’d earned in school as a teenager, my first-rate education has turned out to be at a maximum-security prison.

  In my psychology classes, my mind opens in a way that helps me deepen some of my prison relationships in a healthy way… and to be discerning about some others. In the early 1990s, a group of women has recently arrived to my unit at Bedford that includes Carolyn Warmus and Pamela Smart, who live in the “high profile” unit. Carolyn is a Detroit heiress and schoolteacher sentenced to twenty-five years to life for the 1989 murder of her lover’s wife, which was a crime that drew national attention for its similarity to the film Fatal Attraction. Pam is a former high school media coordinator from New Hampshire convicted of conspiring with her fifteen-year-old lover and his friends to kill her husband. She’s serving a sentence of life in prison without the chance of parole.

  Carolyn is usually cool and elusive with random spurts of emotion. When anyone brings up the murder of her ex-lover’s wife, she denies that she was the one who did it. Pam Smart is just the opposite. She grows tearful when she speaks of her husband and the pain she carries for having gotten involved with her teen lover. Even here, her love knows no bounds, but in the best way. Pam is a woman of great intellect and emotional intelligence, and she gives her time to others when they need legal insight, or some help studying.

  Our unit is quite the motley crew of backgrounds and temperaments, especially when we congregate together in the unit’s small kitchen. Anyone who’s been here for any amount of time knows to be suspicious of the prison’s mess hall, so with coolers and hot plates, we each set out and forage for provisions to improvise our own meals: a can of tuna, some seasoning from the commissary, mayonnaise from someone’s family care package. With some bread we sneak out of the mess hall, and we do what women do when circumstances throw us together: we talk, argue, prepare food, sit down together, and share meals.

  And we open up—about our children, our studies, our futures… and about the crimes of which we’ve been convicted. Kathy and Judy begin to challenge me in a way that sets me on edge when they both suggest I might want to go about my participation in the college program in a more mature way. I’m one of the youngest in the program, and apparently, even though I’m intelligent, I’ve been acting young. At this, I feel like they’re teaming up against me, and instantly I’m transported back in time to my childhood when Daphne told me that I wasn’t quite as bright as the other children I’d meet at boarding school. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” I ask the two of them one day. Nobody gets to tell me how and who I should be!

  I’m fuming, ready to turn to other women to take my side, until I remember that I have a resource I’ve never had before: Mother. She invites me to think their intentions through, to reflect, to pray that in time I’ll be able to have enough perspective to see their point. I listen to Mother humbly, knowing there are parts of me that are still very hurt and broken.

  Back in our unit, I ask myself whether I can see Judy and Kathy through the lens of knowing the positive change they’re trying to make in a war-torn country and world. That’s when it dawns on me that Judy and Kathy are speaking from their place of seeing potential in me.

  I open up to this group of women about the remorse that I continue to carry about not helping Mr. V when I had the chance. I’m not sure I’ll ever know how to forgive myself for that, or for the fact that I still harbor anger toward people in my past. I feel empathy for the women who surround me, knowing that for many of us, it was circumstances in our lives that have brought us here.

  Periodically there are peers going before us who carry a torch and light the way for us to try and follow. Jean Harris is an incarcerated woman at Bedford who has played an instrumental role for many women inside. She’s a natural leader for women and children as the former longtime headmistress of a prominent school for girls outside of Washington, D.C., before her 1981 conviction for killing her love interest—a case that made national headlines due in part to her professional position and also to the fact that her lover was Herman Tarnower, a cardiologist who had authored the best-selling 1970s diet book, The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. Jean is polished and poised, and some women at Bedford have claimed she has an upper-class air about her… but with her intellect, perseverance, and openness to share herself, she inspires me.

  During Jean’s time in prison, she has established an academically rigorous scholarship program for the children of incarcerated women. This program enables some of the brightest of these kids to attend prestigious boarding schools, encouraging them to optimize their opportunities to be educated well. This route is a far better option than falling between the cracks in their public schools, their communities, and in society with the prospect of getting involved in crimes themselves.

  Jean Harris has also assisted Sr. Elaine in teaching a parenting class to inmates, as well as a nursery program for women who entered prison wh
ile they were pregnant.

  By 1992, she has served twelve years of a fifteen-year-to-life sentence. The women band around Jean as she fights in her fourth bout for clemency—a decision from the court that a sentence has been sufficiently served with no remaining requirements. Anytime this is a possibility for one of the women here, a feeling of possibility elevates the hope of the entire prison. Clemency is an idea that I can’t yet imagine for myself. I still carry too much guilt and shame, feeling as though I don’t deserve compassion. But oh, how I want it for my sisters.

  Jean’s fight is emotional for all of us. In the midst of it, she suffers a heart attack: the third time this has happened to her in prison. It’s always been obvious that Jean regrets what she did, and the crime has taken a toll on her in every way. Many women at Bedford hope and pray fervently for her to heal and get out before her sentence is up. In 1993, two years earlier than her minimum sentence, Jean Harris is released from prison.

  For me, this is the first small ray of light shining potential onto what I have feared would be impossible in my case. Now, I see: maybe we “lifers” really will have a chance to live to see our children succeed from the outside. Jean’s legacy is powerful. For me personally, she’s proven that even while we’re here, there’s hope for the futures of incarcerated women and our children.

  A few correctional officers react to Jean’s parole with open scoffs, calling it typical white privilege. But for us women, she has made important progress. We embrace Jean Harris’s departure as a symbol that there is in fact increasing humanity in our society. How can we change the present and the future without proof that humanity exists?

  9

  DAUGHTERS AND A CIRCLE OF ABUSE

  On a sunny June afternoon in 1994, my life has begun to surge with the feeling that possibility abounds when I don a secondhand, donated cap and gown and celebrate my graduation inside the prison’s gym. In pride, I grip my diploma—a bachelor of science in the behavioral sciences. I’ve always wanted an advanced education, but for so long I was afraid I’d messed it up by running away from home at age fourteen. Unlike some of the other women, I don’t have family there to celebrate with me. Seeing Adrienne in the audience would be, as I like to say, the candle on the icing on the cake.