| |
|
On
the first night of the prison writing group, my workshop partner knew
her way around the facility like nobody’s business, shuttling me
through the prison checkpoints, instructing me on the essentials. “Let
them stamp your hand, no, your left hand. Wait until he pushes the buzzer.
Don’t look up at the towers.”
When
I got home that first night, my house had changed. It was beautiful. The
tattered bit of green gingerbread trim beamed at me. So did the rug, and
the chair with broken arm. I made a fire. I ate food. I touched everything.
Then I sat with Trudy the cat and was grateful to pet her.
Hey,
take it easy. I’m the same cat you tossed outside yesterday.
“I
went to prison today,” I said. Trudy sat as usual, gazing out into
the moonlit yard.
“The
women there are punished if they look out the windows.”
Trudy’s
tail twitched. She squinted until the pupils of her eyes turned to furious
Xs. It’s the one thing my cat can relate to, looking out windows.
Indoors during the day, she sits in a window, bedazzled by the view.
They
can’t look out the windows? That’s barbaric.
“The
guards think they’ll make gang signs to other prisoners in other
towers.” Maybe it was the men who made the gang signs; I couldn’t
remember. The women seemed to spend most of their time worrying about
their children or ill parents or whether their spouses would wait for
them. They didn’t seem interested in fancy hand signals.
When
Trudy sits in the window, she growls at birds and flips her tail back
and forth, but she also uses no hand signals. She turned and looked at
me.
I
would go mad if I couldn’t look outside.
“I
think they do go mad. But when they write it’s a lot like looking
out the window.”
I
have written with the women in prison every week for a year since that
first day. Now I know not to look up at the towers. I know that inmates
wearing orange haven’t been sentenced yet and the ones wearing green
are serving designated time. I’m not saying that all these women
are wrongly accused. But I also know that the ones wearing orange are
in prison because they were too poor to post bail. I know that many of
the ones in green, who did break laws, did so because of their bondage
to highly addictive drugs. But even without their addictions, these women
face many demons. I know this from their writing.
A
woman who has had everything imaginable and unimaginable done to her since
birth writes unblinkingly about her life. That’s her starting place
and we all simply stop breathing when she reads. But the place she goes
to when she journeys deepest into herself is not the world of razor blades
or cat-eyed pimps, but to her deep, inexplicable belief in love.
They
write about food, home, family, planting gardens, the men who have beat
them, the smell of grandmother’s hair. They make funny rhymes, laugh
at old boyfriends, long to pee in a bathroom with a door, breathe fresh
air. They startle me each week with the honesty and freshness of their
voices that have clasped strong fingers around my neck and left me breathless,
that have been so sweet all of us have cried.
But
it is when they write of the blistering damage that has been done to their
children that the protective bravado of these women is peeled away. They
come undone. I come undone. I’ll never forget a haiku written by
a young inmate who had lost all rights to both her children because of
her drug abuse. The last line, “Hush baby, don’t you cry,”
had too many syllables for a haiku, but by then we weren’t counting
syllables anymore.
On
nights like these, I drive home but hardly remember the trip. I go to
bed and toss in my sleep. Their little ones come to me in my dreams and
slap at my body with tiny palms. Writing guru Julia Cameron says healing
isn’t the intention of writing, but only a byproduct. I know what
she means, but for the sake of the women writing in prison, I hope the
byproduct is bountiful and compassionate.
|
|
|
|