A Knock at Midnight(23)
At the end of our visit Mama hugged me tight. “Play Sade’s ‘By Your Side’ on the way home,” she whispered, just as the guard told us to separate. “For Jazz.”
Back in the car, I told Jazz what Mama had said about the hoe squad, how she was sick and tired of looking at naked bodies in the shower room, where there were no curtains. We laughed a little. We turned up Sade’s unmatched voice as loud as we could stand and let it soothe and reassure us. When we stopped at a Whataburger a couple of hours later, Jazz looked at me, her face drawn and tired from the long hours of waiting, her deep brown eyes, so like our mom’s, searching mine. “How did yo mama take me not being able to come in? Was she sad?”
“Yeah, she was sad,” I said. “She looked real good, though. So beautiful and healthy. I told her we would be flying next time. And I’ll make sure you have your ID.”
It wasn’t what she needed, but it was all I could offer.
* * *
—
MAMA TOOK ADVANTAGE of every rehabilitation program, every individual and group counseling opportunity, every parenting and recovery class that she possibly could. Until she did, she told us later, she was paralyzed by what she had done to us. After our visits she’d spend two days in a debilitating depression, unable to leave her prison cot. She was paralyzed by shame and embarrassment, haunted by the knowledge of all that had happened, of leaving us on the outside without her. A lot of women experienced this, she said. Visiting days brought a few hours of relief, of joy, and they spent that time showing their loved ones how much it meant to see them. Then the hours would be over, and the elation of the visit would slowly fade. The long wait between visits was the darkest.
My mother was plagued by dreams of our childhood, by vivid reels of me and Jazz growing up without her, left on our own as she spiraled into addiction. The guilt almost killed her, she said. It was the end of that road for Evelyn Fulbright. She wanted her family back, and despite the disease she found some reserves of that Fulbright will way down deep. And the loving siren call of her two daughters pulling her through. Somehow, in this darkest and most degrading of places, she found the strength to sit down and be still—to think, and to face herself. When she did, she found the strength to begin her recovery.
No one emerges from the indignity of incarceration unscathed. My mother was traumatized from her time in prison, and she should never have been there. She suffered a drug addiction and spent two years of her life locked in a cage because she was sick. Instead of treatment, she received punishment. Her decision to get herself sober while inside was hers alone. We punish addiction in this country, treating it as a moral flaw instead of an illness. Prison does not bring redemption, and it does not cure or treat addiction. That enormous victory belongs to Evelyn Fulbright, not to the institution that tried to break her spirit. My mother got sober despite the suffering she endured in prison, not because of it.
* * *
—
I SAT DOWN at my desk close to midnight. It was audit season at PwC, our busiest time of year, when all accountants were required to put in fifty-five-hour workweeks, which usually meant closer to seventy. But I wasn’t burning the midnight oil to audit a client’s financials. It was time to complete my personal statement for my law school application. I took a deep breath, staring at the laptop in front of me. I’d made a few starts, describing the encouragement of my dad and the incredible role model of my grandfather, who’d pulled himself out of a childhood spent sharecropping and a third-grade education to become one of the most successful contractors in a four-county radius. It was all true. Still, hands shaking and breath growing short, I highlighted what I had written and pressed Delete. I wanted to start over. I need to say something else.
By the time I’d written the first line, I was shaking all over. “Number 1374671 isn’t just a number to me. Number 1374671 was assigned to my mother, a prisoner in a Texas women’s facility.” Several times while writing that statement, I almost quit. It was terrifying, and cathartic.
In part because of Christa’s guidance and support, I, too, was able to do something I had never done before: I spoke candidly about my personal experience with my mom. I wrote about being a child of a drug-addicted parent and then being a young woman with an incarcerated parent. I had never spoken these words aloud, not even to those closest to me, let alone to complete strangers. Our family had an unspoken code of silence, and I didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for me, let alone give anyone the wrong impression of us. But Christa encouraged me to speak my whole truth, to tell my story. She encouraged me to see my experience as a source of strength, power, and wisdom—not a weakness. For the first time, I put my whole story on paper along with my vision for a project I wanted to create, called GEM—Girls Embracing Mothers. I wanted to help girls like myself. Girls with mothers in prison.
Writing that personal statement was the first time I’d let myself really face the trauma I had sustained growing up, the first time I even admitted to myself that there had been trauma. When I finally went to bed that night, spent, I was grateful to my mom for facing her demons head-on, for showing me what absolute courage looks like. I was grateful for Jazz always being by my side through the storm. And I was grateful for Christa, who took my hand and said, “Leap. Leap, so you can fly.”