A Knock at Midnight(19)
After pulling chain, incarcerated women in Texas are placed in virtual quarantine, known informally in prisonspeak as the “the pound” or “dog pound.” At night they’re warehoused in cells with up to twelve other women while they’re put through a series of tests—medical exams, psych evals, and others—and inducted into their new lives as prisoners in an institution. Mama wouldn’t qualify for a contact visit for another thirty days. She hadn’t known this, and neither had I.
I tried to hide my shock and disappointment, but I’m sure it was written all over my face. Mama waved furiously when she saw me, her smile genuine but also crumpling as she fought back the emotions she’d been struggling to contain since she’d been locked up. Her skin was pale and sallow from her weeks without sun, and she looked so thin, so vulnerable. I sat down heavily in the chair across from her.
Mama was talking—I could see her lips moving, could see her saying “I’m so glad to see you, Britt.” But I couldn’t hear anything. We were separated by a cloud of thick, scratched Plexiglas, three feet from each other but completely isolated, each in our own world. That glass is deceptive. You might as well be on a separate planet from the person you’re trying to see, to touch, to hold, to smell. I needed more but couldn’t have it. It’s a desperate, lonely feeling to see your loved one right in front of you and yet be unable to reach out and rest a hand on their arm, to hear their voice, to smell their hair, their skin, to feel their soft touch patting your arm or cheek.
As though she could hear my thoughts, Mama scooted up as close to the glass as she could. She raised her hand to it, pressing hard. She picked up her phone and I picked up mine. I rested my forehead on the glass and put my hand to hers, the battered Plexiglas between us a barrier to our maternal bond. Next to our palms was the smudged imprint of a tiny pair of lips where some other, younger child tried to reach their own mother before me. The sight almost broke me.
When Mama first said hello into the receiver, I still couldn’t hear her. Prison phones are cheap. They sound like you’re in a tin can, and if you don’t speak right into the receiver and press the hearing piece to your ear, you can miss a lot. We got it straight after a few tries, but when I think of the hell of that visit, I remember the tension in my arm and shoulder as I pressed that phone to my face, not wanting to miss a second of the sound of Mama’s voice.
“Have you lost weight, Mama?” I asked.
“I’m sure I have. It’s hot as hell in here. You think Texas prisons have air conditioners? They got us packed in here like sardines in a can, all in these thick granny-like gowns. Thick like a burlap sack. Everybody loses weight up in here.”
“But it’s a hundred degrees outside! How are y’all surviving?”
“Brittany. You don’t want to know. There’s these big old fans at the end of the hallways, but they don’t do much. Whenever we get a chance we wet our gowns—in the sink, in the toilet water, whatever. Wear them wet to stay cool. It may be nasty but better than roasting to death. But enough about this place. Now tell me how your little sister is doing. Tell me everything.”
Mama and I did talk about everything on that visit. We cried. We laughed to keep from crying more. Mama had been there only a week and couldn’t believe she was in prison any more than the rest of us could. She said she’d been to a revival service given by Mike Barber Ministries that brought her some solace, was excited that they gave each of the women a box of popcorn and a fresh bar of soap. The gifts and the sermon gave her some hope, she said. Otherwise the weeks had been sheer hell. I comforted her the best I could, told her everything was going to be okay. I had no way of knowing if it would be.
* * *
—
DADDY SUDIE HAD a saying for whenever times got tough. He’d gather up his fishing gear and make me follow him out to the pond in the front of his house, where fat yellow perch swam in lazy circles and laid their eggs in the reeds. Daddy Sudie always brought a pole for me. As he baited the hooks, he’d hear out my complaints, intent on every word. Only after I’d exhausted them and we’d tossed our lines into the still water would he speak.
“C’mon, Big Girl,” Daddy Sudie would say to me, “ain’t nothin’ but a step for a stepper! You just gotta keep on steppin’.”
That man was always right.
As anyone with a loved one in prison will tell you, no one does their time alone. Jazz and I were doing time right next to our mom. But on the outside, we had to keep stepping.
Jazz had a better job and was taking classes at a community college. She’d come out as a lesbian in high school and was busy exploring her identity and community away from the confines of small-town Texas, away from the instability of my mom’s addiction. The emotional wounds surfaced sometimes unexpectedly—Jazz put her fist through a pane of glass when Mama was in county, shredding her forearm to the bone—but in her own way, she was steppin’. And so was I. From the impression I’d made as an intern, I had scored a job in the audit group at PricewaterhouseCoopers in downtown Dallas.
PwC was a great firm and gave me all kinds of experience. I primarily worked with venture capital funds that were investing in start-up technology companies, mostly out of Austin. I loved the detail of the work. Working analytically with the inflow and outflow of numbers, the nuts and bolts of their finances, I was able to learn the minutiae of the businesses we were auditing. It was fascinating to me and began my personal obsession with tech. Still, I felt restless.