The Mars Room(31)

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When they escorted us out for the weekly yard time, we could see down into the caged area of death row. Sammy hollered from the catwalk.

“Candy Pe?a, I love you! Betty LaFrance, I love you!”

Candy looked up. Her face dimpled into a sad smile. They were down there on their sewing machines, sewing a seam onto burlap, then moving the fabric ninety degrees, another seam, turning the material again to run a third seam, before tossing the piece on a pile. I didn’t see Betty, who often refused to work and lost her privileges.

They sewed sandbags on death row. Nothing else. They had six machines and they sewed sandbags for flood control. If you see a pile of sandbags along the side of a California road, they have been touched by the hands of our celebrities.

Payment is five cents an hour, minus fifty-five percent restitution, and the work is repetitive and lacks the satisfaction of making even a single finished thing. They are not completed. They still have to be filled.

Who completes the bag? My guess is men. Men fill it with sand, and close up the top.



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Other times when we showered they were on the two phones down there on death row, or waiting for the phones. Talking to journalists and lawyers, Sammy explained. The women on death row worked the media and were always communicating with folks in the outside world. They knew all kinds of people on account of who they were. They led people on and suggested they might consent to interviews or visits, promises they did not plan to keep. They weren’t interested in doing interviews. They were interested in having people to call, people who wanted something from them; it felt good to be pursued. It was a game to get attention. A game that was not a game because it was all they had.

We were not allowed mail or phone calls in ad seg. Still, I felt lucky compared to those women downstairs talking to the Fresno Bee. My mother would come to the prison with Jackson as soon as I was allowed a visit, after I was done with this ad seg term, and transferred—mainlined—to general population. She would put money on my books so that I could buy what I needed, coffee and toothpaste and stamps, in order to survive. Sammy kept telling me how important it was to have someone on the outside, but I didn’t let her know I had support. Or that I had two life sentences plus a six-year enhancement. It was no one’s business but mine. Like in the dressing room at the Mars Room, you don’t give your real name. You don’t offer information. You don’t talk about yourself because there is nothing to be gained from it.

Sammy had been back in ad seg the night that Candy Pe?a received her execution papers. Candy had to choose which method she preferred, and sign the form. Sammy listened to Candy Pe?a cry as she read the paper that offered her gas or injection. “We turned out our lights to protest,” Sammy said, “and everyone on ad seg refused their dinner tray. It creates a lot of paperwork for the staff. They have to fill out forms for every person who refuses her tray and turns out her security light. Candy was screaming over and over. Everyone on ad seg and death row was crying. Even the guards were crying. There was one handicapped lady who accepted her dinner tray, but I think she just didn’t understand what was going on. Candy chose lethal injection.”

Candy Pe?a had knifed a little girl. She was out of her mind on meth and PCP when it happened. She prayed daily, hourly, minute by minute, at the altar she’d made in her death row cell, to honor the little girl. She cried and signed the papers and Sammy was a human if sometimes a bully and she felt for Candy. You go to ad seg and you don’t stop having feelings. You hear a woman cry and it’s real. It’s not a courtroom, where they ask all the pertinent and wrong questions, the niggling repeated demands for details, to sort contradiction and establish intent. The quiet of the cell is where the real question lingers in the mind of a woman. The one true question, impossible to answer. The why did you. The how. Not the practical how, the other one. How could you have done such a thing. How could you.



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Sammy’s crime was that she’d wet the bed. She told me all about it. I know I said you don’t give out personal data in prison, but Sammy told me everything.

“When I was four we lived in a trailer and there was no electricity because my mother was an addict and had to spend whatever money she could get on dope. At night, I would pee in the bed to warm it up. I got a rash on my legs. A neighbor saw my legs and called CPS.”

Child Protective Services took Sammy away. She was in and out of group homes and wound up in Youth Authority, where she learned to fight. “You get a lot of skills there you’ll need for prison.” By twelve she was out of YA, back with her mom and turning tricks to support her mother’s habit. The men liked young company. Her first sugar daddy was a bail bondsman named Maldonado. She eventually got strung out herself, was arrested, took a narcotics number, a never-never number she called it, and had been in and out of prison ever since, on sales and trafficking charges. Her mother was long dead. Many people she’d been in YA with were here at Stanville. Her network was extensive. It was a lifetime of prison connections.

Sammy had paroled six months earlier. Her time out of prison had been brief. She was eager to mainline in order to reclaim her possessions. She had a television, a personal fan, a stinger to heat water. Her friend Reebok had her eye mask. “It’s got little piggies on it,” she said, “and I want it back.” She’d given things away but on the condition that if she returned she’d be able to repossess. She knew her leaves from prison were just that, not departures but vacations.