A Little Piece of Light

by Donna Hylton

  In so many ways, Betty Tyson has shown me what’s possible. The morning we watch her walk out of Bedford tall and sure, I’m beginning to believe that I might have the chance to put on my own high heels again one day.

  In 2000, the next to go is Elaine Bartlett, who has inspired all of us with her courage and her strength as a mother. Elaine was charged with a first offense felony for selling cocaine and has become the poster child for protests against New York’s 1973 Rockefeller Drug Laws, named after Nelson Rockefeller, who was governor at the time the laws were adopted. The laws were controversial with their dated, harsh statutes regarding the sale and possession of narcotic drugs. Elaine rallied a lot of public support and attention, and eventually celebrities like Charles Grodin, Susan Sarandon, and Russell Simmons involved themselves in the fight and led demonstrations to push for reform of the laws. Some of them have even come to Bedford to spend time with Elaine in the visiting room.

  Elaine’s story has brought many people together, but the relationship that she and I have is particularly isolating. The two of us had a rocky start in my early days, when she got into a fight with one of my friends and I tried to pull her off. An uncertain period began that to me was senseless, and Elaine held a grudge against me for many years. I understood that she was fighting for clemency and to return home to her children, and eventually, this became a common denominator that brought us together and reopened our hearts to each other and our shared reality. The whole time, I’ve wanted Elaine to go home. As she departs, I’m thankful we were able to revisit a friendship… a sisterhood. Not long after Elaine’s departure, Kathy Boudin is released on parole, too.

  As we lose members of our prison family, other women begin to enter. In the summer of 2000, Sante Kimes arrives at the prison and is assigned to my unit. She’s been convicted of two murders, robbery, violating anti-slavery laws, forgery, and a number of other crimes with her son, who’s twenty-five years old. I’m the unit representative, whose role it is to greet incoming women and orient them. Sante is old and frail but has a boldness about her that doesn’t make her seem very remorseful for the crimes. “Oh, I’m innocent,” she tells me. She tells me how beautiful I am—always a red flag for me—and asks for my help in writing legal documents. One of the correctional officers warns me to stay away from her. “She’s very manipulative, and dangerous,” the officer says. When Sante requests that I write letters from her to her son, I know to keep my distance even more. The court ruled that she and her son aren’t allowed to have contact, and I have no intention of getting involved with that.

  My focus is to stay positive and move forward to change lives—for other women, for myself, and for my daughter. When I meet one of the most sexually driven women during my time at Bedford, I’ll feel called to stay this course. Teenager Amy Fisher, known in headlines as “the Long Island Lolita,” who shot the wife of her thirty-five-year-old boyfriend in the face, has moved into a different unit than mine, and within a few months of her arrival many women in my unit begin to hear about the sex-crazy girl with the prima donna looks. When she’s placed in my unit, one of my friends comes to me. “Hey,” she whispers. “Amy told me she wants to have a threesome: me, you, and her.”

  I don’t pay the proposition any mind. Having recently studied behavioral sciences and given some informed introspection to my own life, I gather that what might be at work under the flirtatious exterior of someone like this is a history of childhood molestation. I don’t hold it against Amy—if any of us wants compassion for the wounds of our past, then we have to treat another with that same compassion—but I politely decline to participate in anything like what’s been proposed. Soon, Amy and I grow to be friends who exchange secrets about makeup and talk about clothes. It becomes clear to me that she’s struggling with a theme that so many of my Jail Sisters and I have had to work through: the bond between a mother and child. Amy worries about her mother and often hurts for what she’s put her through. She misses her mom, and both the woman and the mother in me note the little girl filled with love and innocence, who’s aching to resolve the wounds that come from having been brought up in an abusive household.

  I persist out of my compassion for Amy and so many others, including my daughter and the child still living inside me. To this end, I’ve accepted an invitation to contribute material about my experience with Helen to the writing of a book, Breaking the Walls of Silence: AIDS and Women in a New York State Maximum Security Prison, for which Whoopi Goldberg writes the foreword. With several other women, I also take part in the production of a public broadcast announcement entitled We Are Not Who You Think We Are to educate the public about the signs, words, and body language that are indicators of abuse. Inspiring and supporting other women has emerged undoubtedly as my true calling and the reason I exist.

  In 2001, I’m gratified to play a part in bringing college education back to prison when I’m a contributing writer and researcher for a collaborative study conducted by the Graduate Center at the City University of New York under the direction of Dr. Michelle Fine, a distinguished professor in social psychology, women’s studies, and urban education. In partnership, our core group of change-makers at Bedford—including Kathy Boudin, Judy Clark, Pamela Smart, Iris Bowen, Migdalia Martinez, “Missy,” Rosemarie A. Roberts, and Debora Upegui—write about the effect that college has on prisoners in terms of rehabilitation, remorse, taking ethical responsibility, and positive post-prison outcome.

  This study allows the public and the legislature to understand that education plays a vital role in the rehabilitation of people incarcerated, especially when they have already served a significant amount of time in prison. Education changes minds as it gives these people skills that are marketable and sustainable, and also gives them a sense of their crime, the role they played in it, and the damage they’ve caused. Even if they committed a crime under threat, they can understand the events, relationships, and patterns that led to that. In the future, they can make a better choice. The study also shows that it’s actually more cost-effective to release an aging individual with an education versus to keep them in for life.

  When the study is published, it’s called Changing Minds: The Impact of College in a Maximum Security Prison.

  The statistics in the report proved education is a worthwhile cause: since the college program at Bedford began in the mid-nineties, one in every five of the 850 inmates has pursued college or postgraduate degrees. Of the inmates who attend college in prison, only 7.7 percent return to prison (an occurrence that’s known as “recidivism”), compared with 29.9 percent of inmates who do not attend college. After graduation, one student says, “I was able to bloom in a very dark place.”

  After the report is finished, it’s distributed to every governor in the United States and the departments of corrections in select states to gain support for college programs in prisons across the country. Many policy makers who read the report realize that they’ve taken away something that’s proven to drastically improve their communities and our society.

  The Changing Minds report accomplishes what we hoped, and more: a bachelor’s program and an associate’s program return in an initiative that Bedford Hills refers to as the Center for Redirection Through Education, which also has an arm outside run by Thea Jackson and her husband, Bailey Jackson. Together, the Jacksons work to get funding and universities to be part of the college consortium that’s providing us with the program curricula and credits. In 2000, Marymount Manhattan College establishes a master’s program that combines women’s studies and English literature. I register for the program as soon as enrollment opens.

  In our now four-year-running writing group, Eve Ensler sees how we’re taking the initiative and using our personal stories to shape the world outside. This is when she organizes many of the poems and essays from our writing group assignments and compiles them into a script. Then, she does what we might not have dreamed: she brings together some celebrity friends to read our stories onstage at Lincoln Ce
nter in Manhattan. Actresses like Marisa Tomei, Glenn Close, Rosie Perez, Ossie Davis, and Hazelle Goodman perform in the show. The production, which Eve has aptly titled Borrowed Light, raises $163,000 for the Center for Redirection Through Education. This ensures that more incarcerated people will have access to a better education.

  Shortly after, Eve brings in her group of actress friends to put on the same star-studded performance in the prison gym as the one that was held at Lincoln Center. This time, as a collective group, we all want to effect an understanding among the women at Bedford so that all of us as individuals know: I am not my crime. I am not that one isolated moment in time, where one bad event led to another. I am not my mistake. I am not an object. We want the women to know that as children, as teenagers, or at any point in their lives, no matter when or how badly they experienced abuse, they are not alone. There are others who have been there, and who understand.

  The actresses also sit down to meet those of us in the writing group and discuss our stories. I notice that as we open up, nothing seems to faze any of these famous, wealthy women. A few of them open up, while others nod in a sense of knowing that hits me. I finally realize: on some level, even they can relate to the experiences of abuse that we’ve shared. Like that moment in my first Family Violence Program meeting, I’m waking up to the fact that physical, mental, sexual, and emotional abuses are universal to many, many women. Our skin color, our education level, our geography, or our economic status: abuse is all too often woven into the very definition and experience of being a woman.

  Before we all go out onto the prison gymnasium’s stage, the actresses and our writing group gather in a circle and pray. When I take my place in the audience and the lights come up, my heart pounds in my ears as I wait for Hazelle Goodman to breathe life into my words. When I hear her self-assured, youthful voice speak, I feel a thrill: I wrote that! That’s my story! When she finishes, I look around at the women surrounding me. They’re smiling, clapping; our eyes are filled with tears. We’ve all heard our own words being recited onstage, which somehow brings my journey to a new point of validation. Literally and figuratively, these actresses have given our stories voice.

  Eve asks if we’d like to turn our journey in the writing group into a documentary. We agree with a unanimous yes, as long as there’s an understanding and a collective mission to be authentic—to ourselves, our victims, the world, and young people who are in positions similar to the ones so many of us were once in. What I Want My Words to Do to You goes on to receive a Sundance Freedom of Expression Award and a NCCD Pass Award. It airs on PBS and is shown in high schools, colleges, junior high schools, and community centers across the world. The stories that brought us to prison and for so long have disconnected us from the world have now strengthened and gained enough power to bond us with women and young people across the globe.

  In 2003, when sexy photos of Pam Smart in a bra and panties on a prison bed are published in the National Enquirer, Pam tells us women and prison officials that an officer was blackmailing her and raped her. When she files a complaint about it, she’s immediately placed in the Box for two months. Like they did regarding her trial, the media rip her apart, as do some of the women at Bedford. But because I know what it’s like to be threatened by an authority at the prison, I grow angry. Why should she get punished for that? It’s piling abuse on top of abuse, and it’s not right.

  A short while after Pam returns to the general population in prison, she files a lawsuit against the officer. If her allegations are true—and I know from my own experiences that they very well could be—the prison system is failing miserably. I hope one day I can do something about it, and I keep this goal in mind as I continue to work and study hard.

  My master’s program combining women’s studies and English literature continues to evolve my awareness of my role in society. Also, especially from my years in the writing group, it’s clear how much insight we can gain about our own lives when we listen openly to the stories of others.

  We have a few particular volunteer professors in the master’s program who instill their confidence in us in a way that continues to strengthen our belief in ourselves. There are central figures, such as the renowned coffee entrepreneur Barbara Martinson, who encourage us to respond to the material we’re reading in a very personal way in order to take these stories’ lessons out into the world with us one day. Barbara is instrumental in teaching us stories about women and identity in literature. Aside from the material, she invests her own wisdom and experience in us and gives me hope that I too might one day be strong and successful out in the world.

  One of my favorite courses is called “The Search for Identity in American Literature.” I read novels like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which both address race and identity, and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys about a woman’s struggle for control of her life after she’s sold into marriage. I consume stories about incest, displacement, and the power struggles between men and women. In every single tale, there’s something I can relate to, including Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, about a gathering of people who spent their lives chained to a blank wall inside a cave. If oppression has been a theme in society for 2,500 years, it makes me want to fight all the harder to make more rapid progress.

  For my thesis, I research the 1950s writer James Baldwin, whose stories and novels explored subjects that were extremely taboo in his time. Go Tell It on the Mountain is the story of a fourteen-year-old boy in New York who’s coming to terms with his homosexuality as the stepson of a minister. I know the neighborhoods of Harlem where the story’s set, and it strikes me how fourteen can truly be the tipping point between childhood and knowing one’s own mind and person. Giovanni’s Room is a tale about oppression and Baldwin’s having lived most of his life in the closet—a closet that would have been every bit as imprisoning as the one in which I spent so much of my childhood.

  James Baldwin died in 1987, the year after I came to Bedford. I feel as though he might have understood me, and I’m moved by his ability to write his truth so bravely against the backdrop of mid-century racial conflicts. What speaks to me most of all is how he deals with the lesser spoken, very human struggles inside an individual’s heart.

  In 2003, at age thirty-nine, I earn my master’s degree. As I near my fortieth birthday, I dare to marvel at the distance I’ve traveled, even inside these walls. I was never that unworthy child, nor the kind of person who could ever stand by and watch another human get hurt. I was once a little girl, and then a young woman, with great promise and potential. A girl longs endlessly for love, and her personal strength needs to be fostered every step along the way. Maybe prison shouldn’t have been the place where I’d be protected enough to develop all this, but it was. In life, it’s never too late to become who we really are.

  With the capacities of my mind finally fully evolved, 2004 brings me to the next step in my personal evolution. Kathy Boudin has left prison shortly after the airing of What I Want My Words to Do to You, and the impact of her friendship as a fully evolved woman with a purpose to make the world better continues to inspire me. I hunger for more understanding about myself, about life, and I want to continue to tap into this stream of inner peace that comes with personal wholeness and a connection to my true self, as well as a loving connection to others. With more free time now that I’m no longer studying, I begin to spend more time in prayer, meditation, and writing about my spirituality.

  Throughout my time as a hospice worker, I’ve worked as an informal assistant to the prison’s chaplain when she’s ministering to a terminally ill woman. But in 2004, Rev. Maria Lopez, the current chaplain, asks whether some of my sisters and I would be interested in playing a more hands-on role. Instantly, I’m intrigued. Rev. Lopez explains: Who better than us women to provide pastoral care in the hospice setting? In a way, we’ve already been doing that for years.

  Noting receptivity in me and a few of my sisters, Rev. Lopez brings a clinica
l pastoral education program into Bedford. Judy Clark, Pam Smart, some others, and I go through the program, learning to provide pastoral care to our sisters in hospice. We read books by Carl Jung and other thinkers in psychology, philosophy, theology, and spiritual psychotherapy. We learn more about how best to hold a shared presence and listen to the woman who’s very ill, as well as be present for her family. For me personally, Rev. Lopez brings me to another phase in recognizing the humanity in myself, which makes me better able to recognize it in others. She teaches me that every human being is a book. Our lives are made of different chapters, but when we come to the end, what have we learned? How would we like our lives to be read? And how do we read others, even after they’re gone? Do we look back on them with judgment? Do we stick them with conditions? Or can we love them wholly, for their flaws and their mistakes? Can this show us how others might be capable of one day loving us just as unconditionally?

  As I’m pursuing the pastoral care program in 2004, the prison’s administrators grant me permission to move into the honor housing unit, where I’ll have my own room in an atmosphere that’s more relaxed and private. I’m still an inmate, a prisoner, but this is quite a step in my journey and my autonomy. It’s also a chance for me to work with something I enjoy: dogs. In this honor housing unit, I participate in a unique program at Bedford Hills that trains dogs as guide dogs for the blind and as detectors of explosives to assist law enforcement officers.

  Over the next couple of years, Rev. Lopez deepens my understanding of the power of just simply being with another person, of respecting and honoring them in their space, of allowing them to know that they have someone they can talk to in order to simply share their story. Seeing how I embrace this approach, Rev. Lopez informs me that a position has come open. She tells me that she’s noticed I’m someone the women are eager to talk to. “I’d like to help cultivate that, if you wouldn’t mind,” she says. “Would you be interested in coming to work with me?”