by Donna Hylton
Somebody please tell me what happened here! “I smelled roses!” one woman calls out.
“Yeah,” another adds. “I smelled roses, too.”
“So did I!” I add. “It was really strong!”
Pastor Morris looks at me. “It was coming from you, Donna.”
What?
“When you sense the strong scent of roses while you’re deep in prayer, the Spirit is making its presence known to you.”
This moment in March 2011, when I’m filled with the Holy Spirit, is a pivotal, life-altering experience. I know now for sure that the Holy Spirit is real, and there’s no turning back from this knowing.
This day is the start of my visions and dreams. I know for sure that my life is changing—that I’m changing. Something is happening.
Throughout spring and summer of 2011, I continue with my Bible study courses and in the fall of 2011, I become ordained as a Christian minister. After a lifetime of searching my soul, I know now that Jesus has always been a constant for me. No matter what’s happened in our lives, he loves and accepts everyone.
That October 29, my forty-seventh birthday, when I glance out the window of my cell, there’s snow. It has never snowed on my birthday before, and it reminds me of the afternoon outside with Daphne, before the abuse by Roy ever started, when I experienced snow for the first time in a moment of pure, childlike wonder—a moment of innocence. “Snow precipitates from the sky, Donna Patricia…” Daphne had explained. I don’t tell anyone, but to me, it’s a very clear sign that another event is about to precipitate:
I’m going to leave prison.
From this point, I begin to wake very early in the mornings to give myself plenty of time before breakfast. I use this time to start my day in prayer, to meditate, to journal my dreams from the night before and the occurrences that are giving me clues: things are changing. There are little, subtle signs and clues almost every day. I go into periods when I fast from eating for a few days at a time to prove to God my faith that He will provide for me.
Jeremy, Jaya, and Tamar all continue to work tirelessly with Mother and me. Then, in December 2011, I appear once more before a parole board. This time, they ask me what my release plan would be if I’m allowed to leave Bedford. I tell them that Mother and Jeremy have assured me they’ll arrange housing for me at Providence House, a transitional housing facility founded by Sr. Elaine for women who have been newly released from prison. Altogether, I spend two hours with the board. “In all the years I’ve been doing this,” says my facility parole officer, “no one has ever had such a long board interview.”
When I receive the parole board’s letter of decision, what I’ve known since that day nine months ago with the roses becomes true:
I’m a free woman.
On Sunday, January 15, 2012, as my parting gift to the women, I host the prison’s Sunday services. To a standing-room-only chapel, I read from the Gospel of John, which says, “Greater love has no one than this, than he who lays down his life for his friends,” and from Isaiah 61:1:
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the Lord has anointed Me to preach good tidings unto the meek. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound…
I share with them the most important understanding I’ve developed during my time here: that we can connect deeply with humanity if we look through the eyes of love and compassion. We have to treat each other with constant love, both here and out in the world. I also tell them that rulers, leaders, kings, government, and our justice system may too often observe what’s known in the Bible as “the letter of the law,” or the literal interpretation of what the law states. However, I tell them, it’s our job to live by the spirit of the law and that God’s greatest law is to love one another as He loves us.
I would be released the following day, except for the fact that it’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day—a significant detail in this ongoing fight for human rights. The holiday gives Pam, Judy, and the rest of my prison family the chance to shower me with mementos to help me remember them. Pam even gives me her favorite pair of leggings, hugging me as she says, “Wear these so that a piece of me will be in the free world with you. Maybe it will bring me good luck.”
The next morning, on Tuesday, January 17, 2012, after I’ve been incarcerated twenty-six years, nine months, and two and a half weeks, I wake up and take a few minutes to say a prayer of thanks, and a prayer of protection for my sisters who will remain here. Then I put on a pretty black suit from Mother, and, thinking of Betty Gal Tyson, I slip my feet into a pair of high heels before I’m escorted by an officer toward the administration lobby. “It’s so quiet around here,” I tell the officer.
“There’s a code blue,” he says. “Partial lockdown.” When I look at him with question in my face, he explains: “They were worried there would be a rush of women wanting to see you off.”
At the front gate reception area, I accept a small package. In this moment, my past meets my present as I discover what it holds: a tiny pair of earrings, and a watch that my captain friend from Rikers gave me before I arrived at Bedford. In one way, time stopped for me when I came in here, and yet, so much in my life has changed. These two tiny belongings have been kept safely for me since I arrived at Bedford.
After I sign my discharge papers, an armed guard buzzes open a steel electric door as morning light from the bright winter day breaks its way inside. I step forward into the light of day, into a free world that I don’t know anymore. Among feelings of exhilaration, sadness, bewilderment, hope, and uncertainty, I drop to my knees.
Thank you, God. Thank you.
When I look up, a figure I know well stands before me. In front of a small sedan with a smile on her face is Mother. She’s come to pick up her girl and take me home.
13
CARRYING THE TORCH
As Jeremy Benjamin waits in his car behind her, I climb into Mother’s Honda Civic—the smell of the inside of a car permeating my mind. I’m sure that for a long time, the most common experiences like this will fill my senses, dawning on me over and over how freedom is truly our natural state.
Ten minutes down the road from Bedford, Mother and Jeremy stop off at a diner, where I’m faced with the first of many decisions I’ll get to make for myself: What should I order?! Mother and Jeremy assist me in ordering, though when we exit the diner, I’m so overwhelmed with thoughts and emotions that I realize I wouldn’t be able to tell someone what I ate for my first meal out of prison.
After breakfast, I switch to ride with Jeremy, who takes me all the way into Brooklyn and sees me into Providence House. Here, I’ll be set up with a room and meals until I’m able to get on my feet. There will be so much to take care of in the weeks ahead: finding a place to live and getting set up there, finding a job, learning my way around the city again… even the thought of shopping for a wardrobe puzzles me. The first thing I do when I get time in the bathroom is take a long, hot shower.
That night, I don’t sleep, but it’s not because of excitement. The truth is, I feel scared, overwhelmed. Lonely. I need to talk with someone—with Mother, Jeremy, Jaya, Tamar, or Kathy Boudin, who’s now working with HIV and AIDS patients at a hospital in the city. There’s only one house phone, and we’re not allowed on it past curfew. Without access to my friends, I feel like I’m still in prison. I still cannot believe any of it: Am I really free?
The next morning, Hazelle Goodman, who read my words as part of Eve Ensler’s Borrowed Light production, arrives at Providence House at 7 a.m. and greets me with a hug. “I brought you some clothes,” she tells me. “Go on and get ready. I’m taking you to report for parole.”
The house manager at Providence House had me sign documentation to receive a complimentary subway card and told me that the train is just down the block, but I don’t even know how to get there—and once I arrive, I don’t know how to board the train. When Hazelle and I descend the stairs into t
he subway station, I don’t understand why people around us are using plastic cards to enter the turnstile. When I left in 1985, we used tokens. “Here’s how you use the MetroCard,” Hazelle tells me, showing me how to swipe my ticket through the reader. When I ask her why people are walking down the street talking to themselves, she giggles. “They’re on Bluetooth,” she says. “People use cell phones now.”
I try to take it all in with a little humor, but I feel like I’ve been thrust out here. It reminds me of a line from one of my favorite movies that we watched at Bedford, The Shawshank Redemption: “While I was away, the world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.” I look around Manhattan, intimidated and overwhelmed, like I did when I was seven years old and arriving in this city for the first time. Now, I’m like Rip Van Winkle, having fallen asleep in one century and woken up in another. People rush and bump into each other, and look down toward the ground as they read and shop on the Internet and briskly send messages through their phones. No one sees each other. Nothing looks the same. Nothing is the same. All this newness has a way of overwhelming a person who’s been locked up from the world for more than two and a half decades. On my second day out of Bedford, the outside world is so much that I have to stop and take a breather to prevent a panic attack. I understand now why it’s normal for women reentering their communities to develop what’s known as “jail sickness.” When prison has been our longest stretch of a home, it becomes the only place of any consistency in our lives. We know the inside, but the outside is the unknown. A terrible headache sets in from all the stimulation and stress. When I step out just to see what it feels like to go out for a coffee, a woman on the street bumps into me with no apology while she’s texting on her phone. Automatically, I ball up my fist in anger and disbelief. What would she say, I wonder, if she knew I’d just come home after serving almost three decades in prison? I think of Mother, of her commitment to us women—to me. I loosen my fist and again start my way down the street, knowing that this readjustment is going to require a lot of forgiveness for others, and for myself.
Two days after I arrive at Providence House, I begin to ease in and find my place when Mother asks me to speak at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she’s hosting a panel on women who have experienced abuse. I’ve only been out of prison for forty-eight hours, but in front of these students, I feel at home. Speaking about my life experience to make people aware of where abuse can lead feels like a very natural fit for me. “We share the same heart and mind for women’s issues,” Mother says after my talk. It’s her way of affirming my courage to tell my story, our shared knowing that this sharing is one of the most powerful ways to help other women discern paths that are different and better than mine.
One of my first errands in the days I’m getting acquainted in the city is to send Adrienne a card. My message inside is simply:
I’m home.
A few days later, she calls me and says she knew when my inmate number wasn’t listed on the envelope’s return address, there had to be news.
That exact night, Adrienne boards a flight to New York. She comes to see me at Providence House and then spends over a week with Roy and Daphne, making trips into Manhattan to see me every day. “I just want to be around you,” she tells me.
The following month, in February 2012, I accompany Mother to Albany to promote the passing of a particular bill that I worked on at Bedford alongside some of the other women and Jeremy, Jaya, and Tamar. The bill is known as the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, and it addresses one of the major issues that has not yet been resolved: the fact that women who kill their abusers to protect themselves, sometimes even accidentally, are often given the same sentence as a murderer who kills out of pure malice, not as any kind of act of defense or personal safety.
Mother continues to act as my supporter, my advocate, my friend, my backbone. She drives me around the city to get me set up in helpful programs, and together, we try to figure out Google. She also helps to ease me into the beauty of freedom by taking me to the Bronx Botanical Garden to see our favorite flower, the orchid. We spend hours walking through the gardens and smelling the flowers. Mother reminds me that my spirituality and a sense of belonging to a community will be important as I continue to adjust to life outside. I agree and begin to seek out a place of worship, winding up in a church in Brooklyn not too far from Providence House. One of the parole commissioners who was on my board talks with the pastor of the church, who introduces me to a woman in their congregation, Wendy McClinton. Wendy is the president of the Black Veterans for Social Justice organization. “You deserve a second chance,” Wendy tells me. I begin working in the housing department at her organization with men who have served time as convicted pedophiles. The challenge frightens me at first: I’ll be face-to-face with men who have similar traits as Roy and those who hurt me during more vulnerable times in my life. When I start the job, I discover an effect on me that I could not have anticipated: this too has a way of healing me. For the first time, I’m able to see that most of these men who have hurt children learned abuse somewhere. In many cases, they experienced great suffering of their own. It doesn’t excuse their behaviors, but it does help me develop a sense of forgiveness that I was never able to reach before.
This begins to validate for me that we all have that light, that little piece of God, inside us. We might do some messed-up things to each other because we’re human beings, but that really doesn’t mean we’re bad people. We all have the capacity to be good. That’s the way God makes us.
I remain living at Providence House until March, when I transfer to Mother’s apartment where she lives alone in Harlem. She’s constantly on the go with all of her commitments and her involvement in causes for women, but together we find quiet moments in the evening or early morning to pray together and discuss some of the challenges she’s dealing with in her work. I begin to volunteer as an advocate at STEPS to End Family Violence, the program that she founded to help battered women. It’s a role that builds my confidence, as it quickly becomes clear that this is the same work I was doing with women in Bedford.
After a month with Mother, a housing specialist from Providence House calls me. “My name is Rose. Do you remember me?” she asks me. “I was at Bedford for a while, and you were always so nice to me.”
Of course I remember her, I tell her, and she informs me that an opportunity has just come across her desk: it’s a vacant studio apartment in Brooklyn. “I know you’ve begun to work,” she says. “Would you be interested in seeing the place?” I take the subway and find the apartment near the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and just a few minutes’ walk from Prospect Park, which is just beginning to bloom with signs of early spring. Inside, the place is clean, bright, and just the right size. When I apply to rent it, I learn I’ve been approved.
Mother donates a wooden table and chairs to me for my kitchen area, and the set matches my hardwood floor perfectly. People in our congregation and other people who know me contribute furniture and money to help me start out. I use some of the money to buy a futon bed, and I paint the walls a calming shade of blue. Over my bed, I hang paintings of seashells and ocean-blue seahorses, which call to mind the nature that I loved in my childhood. My apartment is cozy and comfortable and very close to the subway, making it convenient for me to get around the city.
Mother, along with friends like Jeremy, Jaya, and Tamar, all continue to support my reentry by teaching me basic skills, like how to write out a check and call the gas and electric companies to turn on my utilities. I realize how much Mother truly has played the role of a parent, protecting me, teaching me, and making sure I feel secure in my new life.
In the evenings and on free days, I take long walks in Prospect Park where I love to stroll beneath the trees and watch the swans in the lake. I’m free.
In October 2013, my job sends me to a conference in San Francisco—the first time I’ve been on an airplane since I landed in New York with Roy more than forty years a
go, when I thought he was taking me to Disneyland. I explore San Francisco as a free woman, loving the architecture, the Golden Gate Bridge, the restaurants, and the way this city embraces all different kinds of people.
Sadly, this high period in my life will only be momentary. When I land back home in New York a few days later on October 18, I’m out walking when I get a call from Mother on my cell phone. “I have some bad news for you,” she says.
Oh, no. Instantly my mind goes to something related to the women at prison… but what she tells me is actually worse.
“I had a few lumps in my neck that I went to have checked out,” she says. “And the doctor tells me I have a rare form of melanoma.”
Within a couple of weeks, she’s admitted to Bellevue Hospital. I’m with her around the clock, spending the night with her and leaving from the hospital to go directly to work. A priest walks into her hospital room one evening, and Mother introduces me as her daughter. With a playfully perplexed look on his face, the priest replies, “Nuns don’t have daughters!”
Mother raises her eyebrows. “This one does,” she says.
In the second half of November, she’s moved into the hospice unit. Along with her sisters in her community, she signs papers to give me the power to make decisions about her life if and when she grows too ill to make them for herself. She’s already completed paperwork to donate her body to scientific research.
Mother’s neck is now swollen with the lump, and the night before Thanksgiving, I can see that she’s in incredible pain. A group of her sisters say a prayer before they hug her and wish her goodbye. Further into the night, her breathing changes. There’s a rattle coming from her chest. She groans, and there’s a deep gurgling that sounds from inside her as she struggles more and more for breath. “Is there water in her lungs?” I ask the nurse.
She nods. “She’s in a lot of pain. It won’t be much longer now.”