A Knock at Midnight(52)
When she wasn’t crafting, Sharanda was cooking. Prison cuisine is an intricate process, and to earn a reputation as the best Carswell cook, as Sharanda soon did, is no small feat. The ingenuity it takes to make anything edible—let alone a delicacy—out of the junk food sold at the commissary with the rudimentary appliances available cannot be overstated. After Carswell took away all but a single shared microwave for several units, Sharanda constructed her own makeshift crockpot of sorts using a thermal cup and plastic bags. With this, you could cook any number of items simultaneously by mixing ingredients in the plastic bags, tying them tight, and dropping them in. In a pinch, a hot iron worked wonders as a grill. The real magic was figuring out how to break down processed foods in order to transform the ingredients. Sharanda ground corn chips into meal for her famous tamales, melted the insides of Oreos and used juice mix to make frosting; she broke down cookies to make a crust for a creamy cheesecake, made the filling with vanilla pudding, coffee creamer, and lemon juice, using ice in mini trash bags as a makeshift freezer. She whipped up a hell of a cranberry sauce from assorted jelly packets, and her meatballs had women lined up around the corner. Her chicken and dressing were famous, as was her gumbo.
“But how do you do it?” the women asked. “Please give me the recipe!” Sharanda was generous with her food but not her culinary secrets—those she shared not even with her mother, the only woman in that whole prison of eighteen hundred who Sharanda believed could outcook her. From her bedside, Genice had taught young Sharanda to cook elaborate meals as a child. Now, the two had a friendly competition going; Genice found someone on her floor to mix her ingredients for her. In this place where nothing was under your control, where there was zero privacy, and every small humiliation was on public display for the whole prison population to whisper about, it was important to hold on to some best thing, some private joy, for yourself. Sharanda’s renowned recipes were hers alone.
For the most part, Sharanda cooked for pleasure, but daily, women knocked on her cell door asking to buy her food. When unending requests for her tamales inspired her to put them on sale (one tamale for a dollar’s worth of stamps), she had three hundred orders by the end of the day. She hired two women she trusted to help her, one to mix, one to work the microwave. Sharanda assembled the ingredients and folded the tamales. She was two hundred down when another woman came over to her and whispered, “That officer said you better send him some tamales.”
Sharanda froze.
“It’s legit,” the woman said. “He’s hungry.”
Sharanda laughed. “You better tell the officer to send over some tamale money!”
Sharanda never believed she would die in prison. She couldn’t. To do so would be to succumb to a hopelessness and despair from which she might never emerge. Instead she threw herself into the everyday things that brought her joy and a sense of meaning—her card making, her culinary creations, caring for and mentoring other women on the unit. She taught cosmetology, did hair in the prison salon for women in maximum security or in the cells of those on hospice care. She dedicated herself to personal growth and development. As a “lifer,” she was automatically dropped to the bottom of the list for prison classes and programs. Still, she signed up, and when finally admitted, took full advantage. A five-month office technician program, a keyboarding and data entry course, banking courses. Determined to prevent the younger generation from following in her footsteps, Sharanda joined the prison’s SHARE Program, aimed at deterring at-risk teenage girls from a life of crime. She completed a comprehensive eighteen-month faith-based program called Life Connection, in which she participated in activities to help bring reconciliation to the community.
Women often succumbed to terrible depression in prison. The Carswell Admission and Orientation Handbook warns incoming women of this on page one, and includes instructions for what to do if they or a cellmate becomes suicidal. On any given day in any unit, several women would be on suicide watch. Often, prison staff asked Sharanda to mentor women who were having the hardest time adjusting to life inside. Sharanda nurtured and coached them, cajoled them to bathe and eat, did their hair, mentored them in their jobs so they wouldn’t find themselves in further trouble and into the dark hell of solitary confinement. Her quick smile and positivity eased the burden of incarceration for many. Staff and prisoners alike adored her.
* * *
—
IN THE SPRING of 2012, as Sharanda and Genice entered their twelfth year of incarceration together, I was trying in earnest to get Girls Embracing Mothers off the ground. My conviction of the importance of its mission had only grown since I first conceived of the program when applying to law school. Though Mama was out and doing well, Jazz and I still struggled with the emotional trauma of having had a parent in prison, and the growing realization of the unending punishments society inflicted on those, like Mama, who had already served their time.
Clenesha, Sharanda’s daughter, nine at the time of her sentencing, was now a beautiful twenty-one-year-old with her mother’s dimples and infectious smile. Over the years, she had become like a little sister to me, and I knew the pain her mother’s incarceration caused. At lunch one day, Clenesha agonized over whether to attend Texas Southern University in Houston with her friends. “I can’t leave my mom,” she said. “I want to go, but if I stay in Dallas I’m only thirty minutes from my mom.” Her decision process was so like the one Sharanda had made in her youth to stay close to Genice. It was a sacrifice I knew all too well.