A Little Piece of Light

by Donna Hylton

  As punishment, I’m sent back into the Box.

  Alone, again, I go nearly out of my mind. After all the positive changes I’ve made here, I have slid back down to the bottom. Now I’m completely disempowered from helping Adrienne. I can’t even communicate with her.

  I agonize with worry. The nightmares are constant. In my loneliness, I seek out the voice of a woman living next to me, but this time there is no Judy Clark. I try to imagine the feeling of having that friend close by, but I’m suddenly haunted relentlessly by a memory from the month before I ran away to Philadelphia with Alvin.

  It started when Mr. Harris invited a few of my classmates to come to his house for a pool party and go out for pizza one of the afternoons during my stay with him and his wife. With Karen, a friend from school whom Mr. Harris had invited, I laughed and played in the water while Mr. Harris barbecued. After we’d finished swimming, in the bathroom, Karen showed me how she used a hair dryer to style her hair. I stood in admiration as Karen used a brush to make her hair look smooth and shiny. I was so taken in to learn a style so different from what Daphne always insisted I should wear to make me look like a child.

  Before she left that evening, Mr. Harris said that he’d bring her back in a few days and treat us to pizza, ice cream, and a movie. I looked at Karen with wide eyes, thinking how lucky we were that he chose us to spend time at his house that summer.

  “Donna,” Mr. Harris told me the next day, “I have something to tell you. It’s not good.” I remember fearing he was about to tell me that I couldn’t babysit for him anymore, but he quickly assured me: “No—you didn’t do anything wrong. This is about Karen.”

  I looked at him, puzzled.

  “Last night, Karen committed suicide.”

  “What?” I whispered, searching his face in that way children do when our very basic human instincts suggest we understand what this means, even if we’ve never learned the language for it.

  “Donna,” Mr. Harris said. “Karen killed herself.”

  “But… why would she do that?” I played back the past twenty-four hours: I was just with her, we had plans to go to the movies. When I looked up again at Mr. Harris, his face was solemn. “Why do people commit suicide?” I asked him, quietly.

  I watched as he tried to work out some explanation, though on some level I already knew that no one could fully make sense of this. “Sometimes people are depressed,” he said, “and there’s a lot of peer pressure. Or sometimes there can also be something going on at home that people don’t know about.”

  It’s here I remember thinking: Maybe Karen was getting hurt at home, too.

  And my next thought followed—Is killing yourself the answer?

  I began to wonder what my friend had been experiencing inside her private world; I wished we’d had more time together so that I could have shared more about my life to let her know she wasn’t the only one suffering. We’d talked about my going away to boarding school—did she feel sad that I was about to leave? I became nauseated with regret, unsteady with all the questions and uncertainty; I even had a feeling of betrayal, some notion that maybe I perceived us to be closer as friends than Karen did. Did she know yesterday that it would be our last time ever seeing each other?

  It was just days after the suicide that Mr. Harris pushed himself into the bathroom while I stood there covered in only a towel. My childhood was a constant search to find a light, something to make my surroundings less scary and unpredictable—and someone always interrupting my search, taking my hand in a promise to lead me faster into the light, but then dragging me into a deeper darkness.

  My story of losing Karen unearths another memory that I’d buried, a time I’d witnessed someone else take their own life. I was about ten years old, home in Boynton on a weekend morning, while Daphne ran errands and Roy worked in his bedroom. Alone, I stood on our balcony, as the echoes of screaming and laughter from children in the playground below bounced between the brick buildings in our neighborhood. Suddenly, a person dropped in front of me and hit the ground. In a fraction of a second, it occurred to me that I knew him.

  He lives four floors above us.

  He landed on the sidewalk below in a lump, a moment so vivid that I swear I can still hear even the fabric of his clothing hitting the ground. There was blood everywhere, a small scatter of neighbors below calling out in shock. He just killed himself, I remember thinking.

  He found a way out.

  Disturbed, in shock, I stepped silently inside the apartment. After a moment, the sound of crying sirens blared. I thought of Daphne, who only stopped to speak to the neighbor women when there was a tragedy for her to weigh in on with her psychological expertise, when there was someone to judge for their public flaws. I thought of Roy down the hall, needing someone to reassure me… to hug me and tell me that I’m safe.

  Instead, he took me into the dark. By this point, I was never safe at home with Roy. Inside the closet at his hands, I continued to stare at the light to try to escape. By now, the abuse had been going on for more than a year, and feeling so disgusted with it—with myself, my own body—I’d begun to try to resist. He responded with increased aggression, turning household objects into weapons to threaten me. He’d begun to hold me down on the bed and wrap his hand around my throat. Often during the rapes, I thought of our neighbor, who jumped to his death. Daphne and the neighbor women would gossip about it for weeks.

  But I knew that our neighbor had found his own solution.

  Awake in solitary, I suffer from anxiety, wondering what’s happening to my daughter and playing back the story of my life, reliving each chapter of abuse. The years of progress I’ve made in my healing have been snatched away—again, by a man who had power over me.

  Desperate for some outlet for my anguish, I begin to journal every single day. We’re not allowed contact with any victim’s family, but instead, I write letters to God asking Him to facilitate forgiveness from Mr. V’s loved ones toward me. Here, I pour out all the things I wish I could tell them:

  Dear Mother God,

  I am writing to you in hopes that you will help me deal with and overcome this heavy despair that I am feeling right now! I am asking you to please forgive me for the part I played in Mr. Vigliarolo’s death. I am asking you for mercy, Mother God, and for strength. I am asking you to send blessings to Mr. V’s family and most of all to send them—to me—and everyone: PEACE!!!

  I also pray that Mr. Vigliarolo forgive me, and everyone, involved in his death. And I pray that he is at peace also!

  For eight months, I’m left alone with my emotions and my mind, which are far more confining than any four walls that could ever surround me. My only consolation is that in solitary, I’m safe from CO Brown’s sadistic hands.

  When I’m released from the Box in 1996, Adrienne’s case still has not been decided. When she and I finally have an opportunity to speak, again I express my support if she wants to pursue charges. My spirit is crushed when she tells me that because I’m the only one who believes her, she feels too alone and too afraid to relive the trauma of what happened to pursue the case any further. Meanwhile, as I try to determine how I can best help my daughter, CO Brown continues to harass and accost me—he’s relentless. Now there’s also another inmate from whom I’ll need to protect myself because she seems to have developed a love-hate obsession with me. Shortly after I’m out of the Box, I arrive back at my room just in time to find a plastic zipper-lock bag that’s been slid under my bed.

  Carefully, I open it up and gently shake the powder of black specks before I lower my nose to take a small sniff: it’s black pepper, but it might as well be cocaine. Pepper is contraband and in demand because women will do anything to make prison food more edible. There’s talk among the officers who say that if I get in any more trouble, I might be the first woman ever to be sent to Southport Prison, where every prisoner is kept in solitary confinement. After the eight months I’ve just lived through, there’s no chance I’d make it out with my
sanity intact.

  Immediately, I take the stash straight to the prison authorities. A few have in fact been aware of this inmate’s apparent agenda, and Superintendent Lord stands up for me. Even in spite of my shortcomings, she knows who I am inside and that for the past couple of years, I’ve been doing my best in the face of a lot of family difficulty. Superintendent Lord and I no longer see each other by our prison labels. We’re two women trying to make sense of this place—our secluded little piece of the world where life is hard by definition.

  I’m further encouraged to continue to tell my truth when a very unexpected figure becomes a regular at the prison. In 1996, there’s murmur throughout the prison that Tony-Award-winning playwright Eve Ensler is going to visit the prison with the actress Glenn Close. Rumor is that the two of them are working to develop a screenplay about the life of Sr. Elaine. Many of us have heard of Eve, who wrote an enormously impactful Off-Broadway one-woman show, The Vagina Monologues—a compilation of women’s true stories about rape, sex, incest, genital mutilation, and the Everywoman’s journey to learning to love womanhood and her body—even that part of our bodies, no matter what we’ve experienced that has led us to feel ashamed, hurt, or humiliated.

  There’s always a lot of buzz when a celebrity visits the prison as an activist or to do research for some type of project or production, and this place is pulsing with energy as we wait for an update about the movie project from Sr. Elaine. What we learn, however, is that the plans for the movie have fallen to the wayside. We’re all disheartened, until we learn why: Eve Ensler is struck by the women here, and she’s expressed her interest in focusing on a different type of project.

  By 1997, she begins to volunteer with us, hosting what we come to refer to as the Bedford Hills Writing Group, which is composed of about ten of us who are chosen by Superintendent Lord, Sharon Smolick, and Eve herself. Pamela Smart, Kathy Boudin, and Judy Clark are among my peers in the group. We meet weekly, gathering together around a large oval table and using pens and paper to write essays, poems, and stories about our lives.

  It’s clear that Eve is a specialist at getting women to dig deep and pull our most terrifying feelings and memories to the surface. For those of us in the Family Violence Program, Eve goes an extra layer deep and really gets us to look at the ugliness of what we’ve experienced. As difficult as it is, it’s also one of the most therapeutic, healing, cathartic experiences of my life—like pulling the bullet out of a gunshot wound so that the tissue can begin to regenerate and heal.

  One early assignment is for us to share what stories the scars on our bodies say about our lives. Another assignment, titled “If These Walls Could Talk,” encourages us to reflect and open up on what we would learn about ourselves if the walls of the prison and the walls we’ve put up inside ourselves were all to come down. I write about something that very few members of my family here know about my past: my unborn child, who was ripped from my body just months before I found myself in jail. When my hands should have held my infant, they were cuffed behind my back.

  When I read the assignments in front of my class of peer witnesses, there’s so much about this act that gives me strength: their eyes on me as I voice my truth, hearing my own voice read words that I’ve written out loud, and getting this past that’s lived inside me up and out.

  Then Eve challenges us to write on this whenever we’re ready: “If you could talk to your victim or victims, what would you say?”

  I think about my letter to Mr. Vigliarolo, how I wanted to help him but didn’t know how, and how I didn’t want him to die. But when the ballpoint of my pen touches down on the page, what comes out is the very simplest, most honest truth about the way I’ve felt for the past twelve years:

  Dear Mr. V,

  I am sorry. I’m so very sorry. I will never be able to tell you how sorry I am.

  I wanted to help you. I didn’t know how, because I didn’t know how to help myself.

  Burning with emotion, as part of the assignment, I go on to pen a letter to Mr. V’s nephew who’s said to have been a very close family member. My message to him is the same: I am so sorry for how my actions and inactions hurt the person you loved. I will never be able to fix what I did, and I live with that knowing every minute of my life.

  Writing these words and then reading them for others to hear is a tremendous emotional release. It’s a unifying experience, a coming together of my inner and outer world, a wholeness that slipped away from me. This way of acknowledging my actions, directly to Mr. V in some sense, becomes the opposite of detaching: it’s embracing. It teaches me how to feel the hurt of what happened to my daughter and me without blaming myself, without shutting down, without trying to find some escape. The writing exercises have a way of helping me process all that’s happened, rather than continuing to be hard on myself for the fact that I’ll never be able to forget it.

  As a group, we invest ourselves deeply in Eve’s assignments. Each of us is serious about understanding, coping, and reconciling with our roles in our crimes and the abuse in our lives. We want to be examples of what happens in women’s and young people’s lives when they feel they have no way out and no healthy choices. And we want to be vessels to a time in our society when women will no longer be forced into any type of act for which they’ll later live with shame. After a year of these therapeutic writing workshops, I’m ready to put my words where my mouth is and use my voice in a way I’ve never had the courage to do before. In 1998 when CO Brown comes at me again—after three years of his abuse and the experience and growth I’ve had in the writing class, I cannot be silent any longer. If I want my daughter to continue to speak her truth out loud, then I have to do the same myself. “Fuck this!” I yell at CO Brown after one of his bully assaults. “NO MORE!”

  I march to the lieutenant’s office in the administration building to find that he’s not in. “You can leave a message for him,” says one of the workers in his office.

  “No,” I tell her, sitting on the floor in front of his office. “I’m not moving until he comes back.” His staff looks around at each other but honor my insistence. The lieutenant has told me in the past that he regards me like a daughter. For this once, I need a father figure to step up and protect me.

  When he returns, he and his staff surround me while in a very loud, clear—but calm—voice, I announce to his entire office: “The next time CO Brown tries to put his dick in my mouth, I’m going… to fucking… bite it…off.” This is officially the last day in my life that a man will ever, ever hurt me again.

  After I state my complaint, other women in the prison begin to come forward with their own similar experiences with prison staff. As more and more open up about what’s been happening in the darkest corners of the place, we realize that many of us have kept our shame secret even from our sisters. If there’s anything we should know by now, it’s that this has to change. Speaking out is the only action that truly has the power to bring sexual violence to an end.

  11

  CHANGING MINDS, CHANGING LIVES

  On December 31, 1999, we all stay up to celebrate the turn of the century by banging pots against our cell doors and cheering through our tiny windows so that our breaths make fog in the night. As the clock strikes midnight to call in the year 2000, there’s a resounding exclamation throughout the prison:

  Happy New Year!

  We’ve heard that the Y2K computer virus could cause a worldwide technological meltdown, and there’s a half-joke around the prison that maybe our cell doors will open, and we’ll all be set free.

  I can still believe in magic, right?

  While we all know that this is unlikely, I move into the new millennium feeling a new kind of freedom inside me. A powerful personal shift seems to have happened, thanks to Eve Ensler’s writing group. Those exercises helped me reach one accomplishment that I haven’t been able to access for myself: forgiveness. For the first time, I no longer hate that remaining piece of myself for some of the mistakes in my p
ast. I’ve even stopped having nightmares.

  Another source of emotional torture has slightly loosened its grip on me, as Adrienne is safe. She’s also in the process of working out her direction for her life, as shortly before her eighteenth birthday, she asked me to sign her into the United States Army. It’s difficult for a parent to think of his or her child putting her life on the line, but if this is what Adrienne needs to feel strong and protected and to continue to grow—if this is her chance to get away from Alvin, and especially if this is her chance to get an education—I support it.

  Around this time, a spiritual shift seems to begin inside Bedford as well, with a few of my greatest influences in the prison beginning to leave us. After twenty-five years in prison, Betty Tyson has been New York State’s longest-serving female inmate. She continues to hold a special distinction in my heart as my first prison mother… but now, we’re nearing the time when we’ll all have to let her go because a judge has determined that a report about the crime that Betty was accused of was wrongfully suppressed by the police. Time and again, Betty has proclaimed her innocence and has had a great deal of support from the public and even some members of the media. Now, she’s the first woman in New York State to have served such a long time and ultimately been exonerated.

  I experience both great happiness and a tender tinge of sadness when she is released. How has such a good woman lost so much valuable time here for a crime she didn’t commit? But right now, that’s not what’s on my first prison mother’s mind. “I can’t wait to get home to my mother!” she says, squeezing me into a warm hug. “And to put on a nice pair of high heels!” (High heels had been outlawed in New York State prisons several years earlier.)

  When we pull away from our embrace, everything about Betty’s departure makes me wistful. Whenever a member of the family leaves, it’s a little bittersweet. My heart is thrilled for them, but I’ll miss them dearly.