by Donna Hylton
But that summer, Sr. Elaine provides me with something even better. Thanks to the ways women like her and Jean Harris have pushed for us to be able to care for our children from inside, Adrienne is invited to spend the summer at the home of a local family in the town of Bedford, making it possible for my daughter and me to see each other every day. This time, Alvin can do nothing about it: for the first time since I arrived at prison, the judge has decided that this arrangement will be beneficial to Adrienne and is simply part of my rights as her mother.
The kindness of her host family further softens my heart as Adrienne reports how friendly they are. They’ve taken her on a couple of family outings, they take care of her meals, they buy her books and face paints that she brings to the prison for us to have fun with together. As she begins to visit me daily, a side of my daughter emerges that I haven’t gotten to witness since she was a baby: no longer between us are there downcast eyes, sadness, and a sense of estrangement. Instead, she comes to me smiling, gradually more comfortable. The prison staff welcomes her, the nuns provide us with lunch and cakes, and most days, my daughter and I have hours of uninterrupted time together. We stay entertained putting makeup on each other and making snacks, like microwaveable mini-burgers and pizzas, with the makeshift ingredients we can find from the prison vending machines, like cheese sticks and smoked sausage.
Adrienne tells me about her friends at school, her interests, her favorite subjects, how her grandmother Dorothy encourages her learning and achievement. I begin to see how my little girl has a mind for science and technology (Dorothy has even bought her a microscope), as well as an unfiltered honesty that comes with a kind of courage that I’m only learning to cultivate now, as an adult. Adrienne’s strength and focus in the face of what she’s lived through, without having me as her mother constantly present, stun me.
Together we participate in the talent show the prison puts on, dressing up in costume. As we sing and dance for the audience that claps and cheers us on, I can sense we both feel free from the everyday worries of both our lives. Every day we’re together, Adrienne makes me laugh, as her silly side emerges more and more. She is my light. From the time she arrived early in the summer, it takes very little time for her to melt from the coldness of Alvin’s oversight. She tells me, “Thank you, Mommy,” and “Yes, please, Mommy.” My child is kind and gentle-spirited, and seems to accept my doting on her with pleasure.
In very private moments, Adrienne opens up to share with me what goes on inside Alvin’s home. My insides clench at the disturbance of it and my heart sears with hurt. His tendencies toward physical and emotional abuse play out differently to Adrienne than they did toward me, but they are just as mean and damaging.
Alvin has married a woman whom he demands that Adrienne call Mommy. “But I won’t do it,” Adrienne says, with her arms crossed.
“Why’s that?”
She looks at me with sincerity in her eyes. “Because I already have a mother.”
I have to keep a strong expression on my face to avoid weeping in appreciation of her loyalty to me.
She tells me about her half siblings now that Alvin’s had more children, and how her father and stepmother sometimes force Adrienne to sit in the corner of the kitchen with no plate in front of her while the rest of the family passes dishes of food right past her. I make note of all these offenses to share with Sr. Elaine, though by now I’m tragically aware of how limited my influence is on what happens when Adrienne is not with me.
When September arrives and it’s time for her to return to the city, neither of us can hide our tears. It’s a twisted combination of distress for Adrienne’s safety with the reality that we’ll be separated for an amount of time we can’t predict. We’ve grown so close this summer; for the first time, we’re both certain of how much each loves the other. Now, it’s likely Alvin will make Adrienne pay a price for what should be the safest, most natural thing in the world: this love between a mother and daughter.
With my degree in hand and a summer with my daughter, this has been the brightest time I’ve known in years, but indeed the darkness sets in swiftly again and complicates life in many ways. In September 1994, President Clinton signs the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, known more commonly as “the Crime Bill,” whose main pillars are to offer billions of dollars of increased funding for the operation of prisons, to increase the number of law enforcement officers nationally, and fund programs for the prevention of violent crime. To the public, it all sounds very utopian, but there’s a lesser-known aspect of the bill that makes it an unfortunate event for many women I know here: inmates are no longer permitted to receive government funding through the Pell Grant to pursue a higher education while they’re in prison.
I am one of the very fortunate ones, as I’ve just recently graduated. However, there are many women at Bedford who have just started to pursue their education, or, even worse, they’re just a few credits away from attaining their degrees. I know how so many of them must feel: that the one chance they’ve been given in life has just been ripped away. Many of us are women, working for a chance in life—but it feels like in the eyes of the rest of the world, we’re nothing.
The response at Bedford is one of hopelessness, the feeling that the education program gave us a chance to be better, but now there’s nothing for us to work toward. Learning fills the mind with understanding, new awakenings, and awareness about the self, the environment, and the world an individual lives in. To someone hearing about this controversy on the news, it might sound as though an inmate in a prison shouldn’t have a right to a higher education, or even need an education. But President Clinton’s signing of the Crime Bill calls attention to the fact that as a society, we need to understand justice much differently: very often, when a crime is committed, it’s because a marginalized person is really just looking for an opportunity to improve his or her life. The problem in our country is that black people, brown people, many Asians, and poor white people typically don’t find access to something better in life, or readily available contacts to mentor them, guide them, or help them make valuable connections or even productive decisions. My situation is a case in point, and my studies toward my bachelor degree taught me a great deal about how I was affected growing up and the behavior patterns and reactions that led to my involvement with the crime that ultimately ended Mr. V’s life.
The Crime Bill is a huge source of discouragement for those of us inside—especially those of us who are in fact rehabilitating, working to improve ourselves and learning to gain some perspective on why a crime might have taken place and what our role was in it. An education, a chance to learn and improve ourselves, is critical. Ninety-seven percent of incarcerated people return home. Doesn’t society want them to transition back to the world as better people than they were before they were incarcerated?
Inside prison, I’m one of a group of women who decide to take education into our own hands. While there were four hundred women at Bedford when I arrived here, in the past decade the number has doubled. In many cases the new inmates are very young women, even teens. I develop a curriculum to help build responsibility, coping skills, and self-esteem among sixteen- to twenty-five-year-olds. The program is designed to give them what I never had: a voice and a safe space to grow and learn and overcome difficult childhoods. Again, at a rate of twenty-five cents per hour, I love helping these young women accomplish this goal and feel hope for a better future—somehow, somewhere. Helping them to identify and draw out their strengths also deepens my own inner healing, as though I’m nurturing the troubled teen who still lives inside of me.
After this program is fully established, Pamela Smart becomes instrumentally involved. She and I both work to help other women get their high school equivalency certificates and prepare them to go on to college. Pam’s patience for the women never fails to touch me. She has the heart for helping other women, and because of her personal strength, she’s uniquely able to reemphasize and reinforce their
intelligence and potential. They behold her so thankfully, and it’s visibly possible to witness many of them realizing for the first time: Oh my God. I am smart. My mind is actually worth something. When you’ve been told as far back as childhood that you’re worthless, you’re stupid, or nobody ever wanted you, there will come a point when you start to believe it. But an individual’s self-perception can change when someone tells them for the first time: You’re better than that. You’re not who they’ve said you are. Many times, we see women begin to form an identity of their own—one that’s positive. Helping these women accomplish their academic goals makes me believe in a better future. Their hope is my hope, and my hope is theirs. We’re sisters.
These triumphs bring us together and affect many women at Bedford powerfully… until a trauma strikes for the most important young woman in my life that will cause me to tumble down into an intense, pained isolation.
In August 1995, a year after the summer she spent with me, I receive a call with news that rocks me: Adrienne has gone missing from her father’s house. She’s now fourteen years old, the very same age I was when I could no longer endure the rapes I experienced routinely inside Roy and Daphne’s home. My daughter has lived through a great deal of pain, but I fear that only the worst would make her run away. I call around to a few friends who go out on a search. This time, no one is able to find her.
I’m sick, sleepless, panicked for days. Finally, within a week, Adrienne shows up at the only place she knew she would feel safe: here at Bedford. Together we sit in the visiting room, and I know in my gut what she’s about to tell me. Her face drops. “Mommy,” she says quietly, “you’re the only one who will believe me…”
No. Please, not this.
Adrienne goes on to tell me that the boyfriend of one of Alvin’s sisters has raped her. Her words knock the air out of me—and then, it gets worse: she describes it happening many times.
Since my childhood, I’ve become an expert at detaching from my own pain—but hearing about my daughter’s pain causes me to double over, trying to fully catch my breath as my mind spins with chaos and my heart goes sick. I can’t see clearly through the emotions I feel, but as I get my fingers around an iota of composure, one thing is certain: I’m going to do what my mother never did. I calm myself long enough to move in and put my arms around my daughter. “I believe you,” I tell her, and as I hold her, both of us cry together. “I promise you,” I tell her. “You are not going back to that house!”
She wipes her eyes with her fists and locks her gaze in mine. “You really promise?” she says.
And I do. When she was born, I promised that I would protect her, and now is the time to fight. I don’t want Adrienne’s life to follow the way mine went. It’s taken me almost thirty-one years to begin to overcome the life I was born with. I have to stop the cycle of violence against women and girls. The futures of our daughters depend on this.
I usually turn to women in the prison for support and advice in times like this, but for Adrienne’s sake, I want to keep the situation private. In the days to follow, I work closely with Superintendent Lord and Sharon Smolick to call the child abuse hotline and child protective services to file a report and arrange medical attention for Adrienne through the court. A team of healthcare professionals runs some testing, and a doctor diagnoses Adrienne with a venereal disease that could render her unable to have children in the future. Whether she wants to have children or not, I am momentarily paralyzed in my distress. My daughter’s health, safety, and well-being have been totally compromised, and her innocence—that little light inside her heart—has been stolen.
I arrange for protective custody for Adrienne and pursue criminal charges against the perpetrator. I stay strong for my daughter, being her voice and her advocate, and most importantly, making sure she knows that she did nothing wrong. I speak out for her. I make noise. I want her to know that she doesn’t have to be silent when anyone hurts her, even if—especially if—it’s a relative. Being family doesn’t mean we’re obligated to keep it a secret when someone takes advantage of us.
I feel like I’m fighting on behalf of us both, decades of fury radiating from my core. I’ve heard that anger is a powerful stimulus toward change, but shortly, in its place begin to spill those longer practiced and far less empowering feelings: guilt, pain… shame. The truth of this is that I feel like the one who deserves blame for my daughter’s rape. I wasn’t there, and I allowed it to happen.
The nightmares begin again. It’s Selma, looking down at me through the window of my cell, trying to get to me. It’s Alvin, urinating on me in the corner of a bare apartment. It’s Roy, and the smell of moth balls combined with shoe leather and Daphne’s perfume inside that dark closet.
It’s Mr. V:
Will you help me?
I often wake to the sound of my own cry: HELP HIM!
My incapacity to help, over and over, has ruined lives. I curl up and think of my daughter, tears soaking my pillow until it’s time to rise and report to breakfast.
And in a way I couldn’t have anticipated, I’ll serve time for the way I’ve failed Adrienne. Trying to be a voice for her vulnerability is about to put me in a position that creates yet another prison that, in some ways, is more complex than anything I’ve experienced yet.
10
FINDING OUR VOICES
Adrienne is placed in a psychiatric hospital to deal with the emotional difficulties that have built up throughout the course of her life and come to a head with this routine sexual assault. I pray that my little girl is safe, and that this will be a chance for her to heal… though I know very well that rape is a prison that comes with a life sentence of inner conflict—a lesson that I’m about to learn yet another time too many.
Up to now, prison has been the first place in my life where I’m safe from day-to-day abuse and protected by authority figures in my life who care. When I learn what Adrienne has experienced, I report it to the administrators at the prison and inform them that I intend to pursue criminal charges. Because they know how passionate I am about the programs I’m involved in for women, they’re supportive of the fight that I’ll face as I work to ensure that Adrienne’s rapist sees consequences for what he’s done to my child. Superintendent Lord assures me that she and her colleagues will accommodate my phone calls and court appearances when the case against him gets under way.
To facilitate this, she puts an officer who I will call CO Brown in charge of my case. CO Brown is known around the prison as a volatile, intimidating brute of a man. He gets respect, but it’s not genuine—it’s only due to the fear he instills in us women. He wouldn’t be the first choice for my go-to whenever I need to return a phone call about Adrienne’s incident, but I have to take the support that Superintendent Lord has offered to me.
Even in the moments when I’m not dealing with Adrienne’s case, CO Brown begins to follow me around the prison as though he’s growing fixated on me. Soon, he begins to corner me in isolated areas and force himself on me. He says that if I report this, he won’t permit me to communicate with all the necessary parties for Adrienne’s case. If I won’t do what he wants, my daughter won’t get the help she needs—the worst possible way anyone could hurt me right now.
I’m already heartbroken as I’m trying to save my little girl from the hell she’s been living without me, but being cornered like this becomes too much. I find myself slipping into that lost, defenseless child inside Roy’s closet… then Alvin’s motel room… then the police officer’s car. Years after I’ve put my last instance of abuse behind me—after I’ve gotten an education and come into my own, feeling like a worthwhile individual and an adult who knows who she is—even after all this, I’m back to living the same tormented, lonely, damaged story of my past.
The strength and self-esteem that I’ve built up over the last decade disappear. Every time CO Brown grabs me, my mind wants to go numb. I begin to black out. The little girl inside wants to escape again, but this time, I have to ha
ng on to my mind and my emotions. I need to stay present for my daughter’s sake. No, no, I tell myself. I can’t fall. I can’t sink into his horror, his craziness. Adrienne needs me!
Because he has the same problem staying hard that Roy used to have, CO Brown doesn’t actually penetrate me. Forms of sexual abuse aren’t about sex or gratification: they’re about power and control. Domination of any kind hurts and manipulates the mind more than anything. Predators target the most vulnerable, and CO Brown knows that as desperately as I need to help Adrienne, I fit in that category.
I fight depression over the course of the months that the sexual abuse endures: Everything bad has happened because of me. Just like in the days of my childhood, I own this. Though I manage to continue to stand up for Adrienne, I don’t feel that I deserve to stand up for myself. On a deep, visceral level, I believe that this mistreatment from the officer is my punishment for having failed to protect Adrienne in the first place.
Finding myself again inside a dark trap, I finally build the courage to pull aside an officer whom I trust and share that CO Brown has been threatening me, but this quickly backfires. On Christmas Eve in 1995, four months after Adrienne first came to me about her own rape, a team of officers enters my cell and tackles me to the ground. CO Brown steps in, clearly having ordered this, blocking me with his shin across my chest, placing one hand on my forehead and using his other hand to stick his pen inside my mouth. As I writhe and struggle to get my breath, one of my teeth breaks against CO Brown’s pen. The inside of my mouth bleeds for several days, and CO Brown writes up a report that I assaulted staff.