by Donna Hylton
I know she’s right. I don’t want her to go… but I don’t want her to be in pain. Mother weakly motions for me to come closer. “Promise me,” she says, “that you’ll get the women out.”
I remain there, silent for a moment. I don’t want to lie—I can’t do that to her. We both know the system we’re all up against. “Mother,” I tell her, “I promise you I will do my best to get the women out.” She relaxes ever so slightly into her pillow.
I lean down to kiss her mouth, and I whisper to her: “It’s OK, Mom. You can go.”
I turn on classical music, her favorite (and still mine). I take a seat at her side and watch her face in angst, her labored breathing, thinking of all the things I’ll miss about her. Her smile. Her unshaking love. Her candy. Her love of all things Irish, especially bagpipes. Her fondness of food and drink, and gatherings of family and close friends. Her favorite holiday: Thanksgiving.
On November 27, 2013 at 2:17 a.m.—on the eve of Thanksgiving—Mother passes.
Of all the sadnesses I’ve experienced, of all the people I’ve lost, losing this woman hurts me the most. I spent fourteen years looking forward to the day we’d be mother and daughter on the outside. Now, the only parent who has ever loved, wanted, and chosen me as a daughter is gone.
Three different memorial services are scheduled, including one at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, where she taught. Her official church funeral is held at St. Francis Xavier in downtown Manhattan, where the nuns have me listed in the program as Mother’s daughter who will lead the congregation in one of her favorite prayers.
I notice there are eyes on me, and I’m not used to standing before crowds without Mother there. Fortunately, the priest breaks the ice when he tells the story from the hospital of the time Mother introduced me to him as her daughter: “‘Nuns don’t have daughters,’ I told her!” says the priest. “And Sr. Mary replied, ‘This one does.’”
The story makes the congregation break out in warm laughter, including me. I approach the altar and take the podium, suddenly fighting back tears… but as I adjust the microphone, I’m overcome with calmness. I know she’s with me.
Our congregation listens to a few of Mother’s favorite readings, such as the Charter for Compassion, part of which states:
Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate all the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect… We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world… Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensable to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.
We also listen to a reading from the Gospel of John, chapter 15—the same reading I read to the women at my final worship service at Bedford: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Mother devoted her life and her career to justice and the freedom, safety, and well-being of women. I know that there is no greater love.
That’s why today, I spend my days working full-time as a community health advocate, assisting others who are transitioning out from prisons and jails. I also continue to spend my days, nights, and weekends as a criminal justice and prison reform advocate for people who are locked up, as well as those who are reentering society. I’ve started an initiative called From Life to Life—from doing life to living life. Through this organization, with help from others, I’ve been able to assist six women to date in getting released from Bedford Hills. Out of those six, four were terminally ill, and when they passed, I went to identify their bodies and helped raise money to bury them. For the others—one of whom is young Love—I met them as soon as they were out and provided them with clothes and a subway card or taxi fare. I fed them, gave them furniture for their apartments—all those details that are necessary when a woman is just starting out again. Combining my pastoral care experience with the more advocacy-oriented aspect of my background, I do for others what so many others have done for me.
I also remain an advocate and a voice for women’s issues and rights. I may have left prison physically, but mentally and emotionally I’m still with my sisters on the inside, trying to help them. “Get the women out,” Mother told me. Out here, that’s what I’m working every day to do. I’ve become a voice for a campaign called Candles for Clemency, where each year, we hold a candlelight vigil outside of Governor Cuomo’s residence, which happens to be just a couple miles away from Bedford Hills. Our group is often composed of many famous politicians and celebrities, and our goal is to push the governor to grant clemency to men and women who have been in prison for long periods of time but who have served their time with good behavior.
In 2015, I take the stage and open the event with a speech. But when I hear one of the governor’s staff and another politician speak about the system, it seems as though they want the crowd to believe that they’re already doing everything they can to grant clemency to some prisoners. No, I think. There are so many women who need our help. I think of the ones I knew who died in the Long-Term Care Unit after praying for release so that they could die with their families present. I think of a woman I went to visit at Bedford shortly after I was released. She had stage 4 cancer and had been the victim of spousal abuse, accidentally killing her husband while she tried to defend herself one night. She’d already spent twenty years in prison, and with the collective efforts of Mother Mary, a few others, and me, we got her placed in a nursing home where she was able to see her children and have a decent meal before she died. “I’ll be happy if I die free,” she told us, and she did—all while her family was given a few last precious moments with their loved one.
I go on listening to the speakers at the Candles for Clemency event, but all of a sudden, my head feels like it wants to explode—then it’s as though the blast takes place on the inside of my skull. I think this could be one of my migraines, so I shut my eyes and try to brace myself, while the words coming from the stage continue to pound and ring inside my head.
As the next speaker steps to the microphone, I leave the front of the audience and walk to the back, holding my head in my hands until I go into the arms of the actress Kathleen Chalfant, who sees the way I’m cradling my face. “It’s OK, Donna,” she says, embracing me and speaking close to my ear. “It’s OK.” She thinks I’m crying from the intensity of the speech.
Inside her hug, I suddenly feel my body burning up. “I need air.” Now alarmed, Kathleen helps me out of my suit jacket and lowers me to the ground. In a distant fog, I hear a quiet commotion surrounding me and a woman who says she’s a nurse. An on-site EMT worker stands over me, and last thing I remember really clearly hearing is the word “oxygen.”
Yes, I think. Oxygen.
Hours later, after some testing, a doctor informs me that I’ve had a stroke. I remain in the hospital for a week but am unable to walk or talk when they release me.
Nicole Scott, the correctional officer who treated me kindly from my earliest days at Bedford, comes to stay with me. For eight days, she cooks, feeds me, gives me my medication, helps me practice my physical therapy exercises, and gets me to the doctor for checkups. Two days after I come home from the hospital, Rev. Maria Lopez calls me. “I’m coming to wash your feet,” she says. When she arrives, I’m fighting to do laundry and keep the apartment neat. Rev. Lopez urges me to sit down, and she kneels on the floor next to my feet. “We are here to care for each other,” she says. “There is no greater love than that.”
An even higher figure from my Bedford days also comes to care for me: Superintendent Elaine Lord. She’s now retired and has recently won a battle with cancer, and apart from that, it’s almost unheard of that a superintendent of a prison would do something like this for a
former inmate—but that’s the kind of person she is.
At this moment, neither Superintendent Lord nor I might have dreamed that in 2016, the former prison superintendent and I would appear for a television interview where we discuss some of the circumstances and realities for women in prison and their families, along with how reentry can be better for all of them, and for general society. “We’re spending four times as much money to keep these women in prison than we’d spend if we gave them the best of services on the outside,” Superintendent Lord says. “We could send a young person to Harvard for what we’re spending to incarcerate [these women].”
We can’t change the system alone, but we can encourage women to speak about the violence in their lives. The crime is often a symptom of a deeper problem—the violence in their lives—and Superintendent Lord and I repeat this to anyone who will listen. I didn’t wake up one day and say, “I’m going to commit a crime today.” That nineteen-year-old was so removed from the world, secluded in a dark, lonely, empty place with nowhere to turn and no one to talk to. Getting women to speak out about the violence in our lives could go a long way in reducing the number of crimes women commit and the number of women in prison—a figure that is increasing much faster than it is for men. Statistics also show that the ages of women going to prison are much younger than they were in my early days at Bedford. We live in an era when the future for girls should be getting brighter. Instead, it’s growing darker.
In 2015, I took part in a public discussion with Piper Kerman, who wrote the memoir Orange is the New Black, on which the television series was based. After I shared with the audience the details of my own sexual assault, a woman in the crowd bravely stood and spoke for the first time about her own rape. I applaud her and honor her, because she’s taken the first step to get help before the violence has a chance to escalate and take an even more tragic turn with someone ending up dead—either the victim, or the rapist.
Mass incarceration affects everyone, not just the person sentenced to prison. It breaks up families and impacts children who grow up so traumatized that they go on to repeat the cycle. Since I was released from prison, there have been bumpy moments as I try to reconnect and reconcile with my own daughter, who after my release moved from Chicago back to New York and earned an A+ certification in computers. She’s shared some thoughts about her past, and our past. “The last picture in my mind that I have before your arrest was when we were on the train. You had on this blue, puffy coat—I think it was the wintertime. I don’t remember where we were going, but I just remember staring at you. That’s one of the few moments I remember having you, when you were free.” It’s a memory that I’ve kept with me, too.
Adrienne brought comfort to my heart when she revealed that even after I was incarcerated, she never doubted my love for her. She took a moment to fight back tears when she said, “There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t miss you—it was the hardest thing in the world. I used to almost hate to go to Bedford, because I could never take you home with me. I used to look forward to those visits, and dread them at the same time.”
We discussed the time we had to appear in court, when she was that seven-year-old in jeans and a T-shirt, and she couldn’t look at me. I always thought it was because she was angry at me or confused by her feelings, but for the first time, she recently shared: “The reason why I couldn’t look at you was because of my father. When we went to the courthouse, he had me lie and tell the judge you were a bad mother. I couldn’t look at you because I was ashamed to lie, and there was no way I could help you.” It broke my heart to know that even as a little girl, she carried the weight of her father’s lies and the burden of wanting to help me. Today, Adrienne says, “We’re learning each other. That’s what I want.”
It shouldn’t take thirty-six years or even a single day for a mother and child to have to relearn each other, but for too many families, this is life. When we work together to heal this part of our justice system, there’s a good chance we will actually see crime rates go down.
Meanwhile, my prison family who are still inside live vicariously through me. I send them care packages and talk to them on the phone, chatting with Pam Smart almost every day. We have girl talk, where I tell Pam all about my life and she keeps me updated on what’s going on in prison. Pam loves to hear every detail about the trips I take, what I eat there, whether I’m wearing her leggings. I do—in fact, I wore them on a recent trip to Los Angeles as I toured Beverly Hills. When I told her, Pam laughed joyfully. “You give me hope,” she said.
In June 2017, just three weeks before I was scheduled to deliver this book to my publisher, I was on my way from Brooklyn into Manhattan when I bumped into an old acquaintance from Bedford. I’d taken care of her when I worked in the mental health unit, and she’d spent a little time working beside me on the utility crew that I created, and also in the mess hall, doing dishes and serving meals.
On a sidewalk bench in downtown Brooklyn, this woman sat alone and in disarray. I spotted her feet—bare, swollen—and when I looked at her face, I recognized her, but I kept walking.
Then something made me go back. How could I not acknowledge her when I know how it feels to be invisible? “Hello,” I said.
She saw me… but in another way, she didn’t see me at all.
“It’s Donna,” I told her. “It’s me, Donna.”
She heard me… but in another way, she didn’t hear me at all.
I realized how, as visible as she was sitting on this bench, she was invisible to the world. As I stood next to her, everyone else continued to walk by her in disdain and disgust. I started a conversation with her, mentioning a few names of the women I knew she’d remember from Bedford. And then I told her my name again. She snapped out of her psychosis and in this moment of clarity, she recognized me. “Donna?” she said. “Donna Hylton?”
“Yes.”
“You’re free? I never thought you’d get out!”
For twenty-seven years, I considered telling her, that was my fear.
After we talked for a little while longer, she asked me for three dollars. I gave her a five. “Go get a pair of flip-flops for your feet, OK?”
When she slipped back into her psychosis, I wasn’t sure if she heard me.
When I walked away, the run-in left me dazed… disturbed… and then, heartbroken. Here was a woman who was more oppressed by life outside—the baking summer sun, the concrete city heat, the neglect of society—than she’d ever been inside. At Bedford, she spent her days working on mess hall detail, doing our dishes and serving us meals. It hit me how she fed all of us women, but out here, no one was feeding her.
Her state of being tells me a lot about how our society treats people who need help. In prison, she was cared for. She was clean, clothed, fed, and given her medications. Free, she is homeless, off her medications, and dirty. Unloved, unwanted, and left behind. Is anyone looking for her? She is more than a number. Our society has grown callously indifferent to human life. Rikers Island itself has become the largest mental health hospital in the world. Jails, prisons, and detention centers are not the appropriate response to mental illness in our society. My friend’s life on the street is proof: it doesn’t work.
For Mother Mary, I will keep fighting for the humanity and the rights of the women both inside and outside. When I look back now, I see there was a reason she—my true mother—was so adamant to get me out of prison and involve me in her work: I think the day she picked me up from prison in 2012, she already knew that she was sick. This is my daughter, she’d told the priest inside the hospital. She never bore a daughter, and I never had a real mother. Perhaps it is our love, and not our blood, that makes us family. Promise me you will get the women out, she said.
I promised.
When she let go, I could feel her relief. She trusted me, and believed in me, and she’s the reason I tell my story today… only it’s not just my story. It’s the story of far too many women. I aim to change that.
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nbsp; Some mothers leave their daughters jewelry or money, family recipes or traditions. My mother left me something very precious: She left me a better woman. She left me her legacy, a mission to carry onward.
We must keep working to get the women out—out of prison, and out of the cycle of violence in their lives and in our society. No matter what the past holds, we have to be part of the future solution.
We must also work to understand how the cycles of abuse and victimization are often two sides of the same coin. Even though I have been released from prison, knowing that Mr. V died as a victim in a senseless crime compels me to speak out against abuse and violence. We must understand the root causes. This understanding, compounded with compassion, will be the way to stop victimizing and abusing each other. Mr. V and every victim of these cycles are the reason for my advocacy; the reason I speak those uncomfortable truths. We can no longer remain comfortable—change will truly begin when we become uncomfortable.
And to that end, there is much more work to be done.
Hindsight has many benefits, freedom the most beneficial of all. I see now that some of the choices I made were part of a larger narrative—forming in the carefree laugh of a child, running barefoot through her island country, alone. Racing through fields toward the white sand beach, where she would drag her holey bucket through the blue-green waters hoping to catch crawfish.
It is with difficulty that I try to recall some things past and, when I do, I wish I had the unerring instincts of a child to have been able to discern those situations and people that would be the catalyst for the chaos about to come. The chaos whose origins had already established its root in an abused two-year-old body.
Somewhere in my memories lay the promise of redemption, the possibility of forgiveness. Sometimes it is hard to articulate the interior struggles I have encountered—not because I can find no words, but because I get so flooded with memories, completely submerged in a history I would rather reshape.