A Knock at Midnight(18)
I was so sorry for my mother—I knew she had a disease, one that she was not able to control, one for which, since that first trip to rehab when I was ten years old, and despite failing drug test after drug test, she had yet to receive treatment. I missed her deeply, but I had no idea what to expect inside. Being prepared, feeling competent and confident, was everything to me, but I knew nothing about prison.
And there were other emotions, too, ones I’m less proud of but that were just as strong, just as real. I was thinking of myself. I was in my early twenties, a selfish time in my life. I had done everything I was supposed to do, just like my grandpa had told me out there by the pond. Just a few weeks ago I’d felt on top of the world—I’d be making good money at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and I was about to be a certified public accountant. All of it—my degrees, my car I’d just paid off, my apartment, my job—all of it I’d achieved myself, despite whatever else was going on in my life. And I felt proud of that. A few short weeks before, I had truly believed I had everything under control. But now here I was in a prison parking lot, hanging on to that hot steering wheel for dear life, crying my eyes out.
Was my mama really in that place? Would they keep her locked in that blue tin box for eight whole years? Drag her out to these hot fields, hand her a hoe, patrol her on horseback like a slave? All the anguish I’d felt since my mom had first called from Clarksville swelled inside of me and would not be contained. The armor I’d worked so hard to build, an armor made from competence, confidence, the trappings of success, had been pierced by the arrow of my mother’s incarceration. The shock of it was as strong as the pain.
When my sobs finally eased, so had some of my despair. I felt numb and tired, but also centered. The truth was, none of my professional success would shelter me from this experience. And why should it? Did I really believe that I should be exempt from the degradation of prison because I had a good job, a couple of degrees, a plan for my life? The older woman in the beat-up Dodge Caravan across the parking lot straightening the dresses and smoothing the hair of the twin girls with her was no less worthy. And the two little girls getting ready to go in and see their own mama certainly weren’t. Nobody is suited for the experience of having a family member locked away in prison. I wasn’t special, and no amount of personal success would make me exempt from this struggle. The answer to my despairing “Why me?” was simple. Why not you?
* * *
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I STEPPED OUT of the sweltering car into the even hotter oven-like air to walk toward the blue building that held my mama. When I hit the button outside the blue steel door a gruff voice crackled back through the intercom. I said I was here for a visit. When the door opened, I entered a cramped space with two long tables with bins leading to a metal detector. I placed a plastic bag with quarters I had read to bring and my keys in one bin, took off my shoes and set them in another. “Belt,” barked the guard standing at the metal detector, and it took me a moment before I realized she meant me. I went back, got another bin, put my belt inside. “Do you have underwire in your bra?” the guard asked as I approached the detector again. I felt a moment of panic. Did I? I didn’t know. What if I did? Would they send me home after I’d driven all this way? The woman’s voice was still hard when she spoke again, but maybe she saw the stricken look on my face. “They have wireless ones down the street at Dollar General if you need it,” she said, and beckoned me through. The detector didn’t go off, and I went toward the bins, but before I put my shoes back on another guard made me raise one foot and then the other; she ran a wand along the sole of each, then had me hold my arms straight out and spread my legs while she patted me down. The assumption of guilt was present in every brusque word and pat doled out by the guards—as if by just visiting an incarcerated person, we were somehow less than human. I tried to fight off the creeping sense of shame I felt at that moment just for being there, for being in a position to be herded through security with the other visitors like cattle. I felt humiliated, as I’m sure is the intention of such procedures. Finally they released me into the visitors room. I exhaled a sigh of relief, not realizing until just then that I had been holding my breath.
Anxiously, I scanned the tables in the cafeteria-like room, looking for Mama among the few women in white who sat waiting for their visitors. I didn’t see her anywhere. I felt that rising sense of panic again, made worse by the nervous and discomfited feeling from the search I had just endured, the close, stale air, the jingle of the guards’ keys, the scrape of plastic chairs. Finally, I approached a guard sitting behind a solo visiting table at the front of the room.
“Who are you here to see?” she asked.
“Evelyn Fulbright.”
“Name won’t work, inmate number?” I stood taken aback for a second, even though I’d already committed Mama’s number to memory. Everything about this place was dehumanizing.
“1374671.”
The woman glanced at her computer and beckoned another guard over. “Dog pound.”
Dog pound? I followed the second guard around the corner, away from where visitors and prisoners held hands across the table and embraced at the beginning and end of their visit, to a narrow hallway lined with chairs pulled up to six windows. Mama was on the other side of one of them, waiting for our visit. As I saw the windows, I realized that all my hopes of touching her and hugging her were for naught.