A Knock at Midnight(54)
“I want you to meet some of the women responsible for what you are seeing,” Chaplain Danage said. He led us up the aisle where women swished white sheets in buckets filled with dyed water and seamstresses worked busily to complete costumes. In the midst of this organized chaos, a woman intently inspected finished work. As we approached, she turned around, startled at our interruption. It was Sharanda.
She looked shocked to see me, and behind the chaplain’s back I pressed my finger to my lips.
“This is our costume director, Sharanda Jones,” said the chaplain. “You should see what this woman can do with a pot of glitter and some coffee grounds!”
Little did he know I had samples of her handiwork on display all around my apartment. Sharanda shook my hand and flashed her dimples at me as though she had never seen me in her life. “And this is Alice, our resident playwright!” Chaplain Danage said, waving over the woman who was putting the actors through their paces.
“She’s our female Tyler Perry for real,” Sharanda said, laughing.
“It’s a team effort,” Alice said, before rushing away to urge more emotion from a hapless actor, her rich voice echoing around the building. “This is a pivotal moment! You must draw us into your pain. Make us feel it! Come on, bring it!”
Alice Johnson, Sharanda Jones, and I would learn much more about team efforts in the years to follow.
* * *
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WHEN FINALLY WE launched GEM it wasn’t at Carswell but Gatesville, the very prison in which my mother and I had pressed our palms together through that hateful Plexiglas in a futile attempt to break the barrier with our bond. Carswell officials had found out I represented Sharanda and had delayed their decision on the program, citing a conflict of interest, just as I had feared. But Gatesville’s warden, a woman with three daughters of her own, was sold immediately on my proposal. “Well, Mama,” I joked as we unpacked the van in the prison parking lot, “you said you’d never come back here!”
“I sure did,” she said. “Never thought I would. But to go in now through the front door with no shackles—and with GEM? It’s a beautiful thing.”
Punishment for those imprisoned in our system doesn’t stop after they leave the prison gates. After her release, Mama quickly learned that in many ways her trials were only just beginning and that she still had a long, hard road ahead. All the while, she fought to overcome the challenges of recovering from addiction. She’d discovered the futility of filling out a rental application with a criminal record—her apartment was in my name. She had been hesitant to reapply for her nursing license, afraid of being rejected, afraid of learning once and for all that she would never practice nursing again, afraid of what that knowledge would do to her fragile recovery process. We filled out the forms together, and she was reinstated, and overjoyed to find a job nursing again, but after a year and a half on the job, paying for her own mandated drug tests once a month, the nursing board suddenly announced they were suspending her license until she was off parole. We fought their absurd decision, but my mother, having painstakingly built herself back up, was once again stripped to nothing.
Evelyn Fulbright never gave up. She appealed the nursing board’s decision, gathering letters of support from every single one of her former employers, and spoke on her own behalf in front of the Texas Board of Nursing. Showing that same incredible grit and determination from when she was a young woman making a life for her girls back in Fulbright, my mother fought through the red tape and bureaucracy and got her license back again. And she didn’t stop there. Facing addiction head-on, Mama became an intake nurse at a drug rehabilitation center, providing care and counseling to those taking their first steps to recovery, seeing them through the throes of detox.
That courage was on full display as she stood before the mothers and daughters at our first GEM workshop. To see my mother on that day, handing out art supplies to moms and daughters so they could participate in the activities, comforting a woman overcome with emotion after helping her daughter decorate a pillowcase with fabric markers so she could sleep with a piece of her mom every night, sharing her own experience coming to terms with the guilt of her addiction and incarceration with the other mothers—it was painfully beautiful.
I knew from firsthand experience that the suffering of children with parents in prison is unspeakable, and the threat of lasting damage from that trauma—emotional, social, personal—is very real. Through GEM, I wanted to create space for intergenerational healing for girls and their incarcerated mothers, one that could break the cycle and build the bond between mothers and daughters. I wanted to create programming that gave girls a chance to create a relationship with their mothers that could withstand incarceration while instilling in them the strength they needed to make wise choices in their mothers’ absence. Above all else, I wanted to recognize the humanity of this marginalized part of society and work to empower young girls directly impacted by maternal incarceration to face adversity in a positive way. I wanted them to believe in their personal power to become leaders.
My mom and I made ham and turkey sandwiches for mothers and daughters to eat together and loaded the bus with supplies for guided art therapy sessions. We had a curriculum that stressed life skills and helped facilitate difficult conversations between the girls and their moms. The impact of these enhanced visits was immediate, the structured hours spent together transformative in the most powerful ways. The girls’ guardians reported improved school performance and behavior between visits, and the moms couldn’t stress enough how much hope and perseverance the chance to hold their daughters in their arms meant for their ability to keep their heads up inside.