Orange Is the New Black (41 page)

When they were gone, I got under a blanket on my bunk and cried for hours. I didn’t think I could keep going. Although I was days away from my release date, I wasn’t sure of what was going to happen.
It was totally irrational, but I was beginning to feel like the BOP would never let me go.

A
S A
child, a teen, a young adult, I developed a firm belief in my solitude, the not-novel concept that we are each alone in the world. Some parts self-reliance, some parts self-protection, this belief offers a binary perspective—powerhouse or victim, complete responsibility or total divorcement, all in or out the door. Carried to its extreme, the idea gives license to the belief that one’s own actions do not matter much; we traverse the world in our own bubbles, occasionally breaking through to one another but largely and ultimately alone.

I would seem to have been ready-made for prison time then, as a familiar jailhouse trope says “you come in alone and you walk out alone,” and common counsel is to keep to oneself and mind your own business. But that’s not what I learned in prison. That’s not how I survived prison. What I discovered was that I am emphatically not alone. The people on the outside who wrote and visited every week and traveled long distances to come and tell me that I wasn’t forgotten, that I wasn’t alone, had a tremendous impact on my life.

However, most of all, I realized that I was not alone in the world because of the women I lived with for over a year, who gave me a dawning recognition of what I shared with them. We shared overcrowded Dorms and lack of privacy. We shared eight numbers instead of names, prison khakis, cheap food and hygiene items. Most important, we shared a deep reserve of humor, creativity in adverse circumstances, and the will to protect and maintain our own humanity despite the prison system’s imperative to crush it. I don’t think any of us could have managed those survival techniques alone; I know I couldn’t—we needed each other.

Small kindnesses and simple pleasures shared were so important, whether given or received, regardless of what quarter they came from, that they brought home to me powerfully that I was not alone in this world, in this life. I shared the most basic operating system
with people who ostensibly had little in common with me. I could connect—perhaps with anyone.

Now here, in my third prison, I perceived an odd truth that held for each: no one ran them. Of course, somewhere in those buildings, some person with a nameplate on their desk or door was called the warden and nominally ran the place, and below them in the food chain there were captains and lieutenants. But for all practical purposes, for the prisoners, the people who lived in those prisons day in and day out, the captain’s chair was vacant, and the wheel was spinning while the sails flapped. The institutions putzed along with the absolute minimum of staff presence, and the staff that were there invariably seemed less than interested in their jobs. No one was present, interacting in any affirmative way with the people who filled those prisons. The leadership vacuum was total. No one who worked in “corrections” appeared to give any thought to the purpose of our being there, any more than a warehouse clerk would consider the meaning of a can of tomatoes, or try to help those tomatoes understand what the hell they were doing on the shelf.

Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role. But our jailers are generally granted near-total anonymity, like the cartoon executioner who wears a hood to conceal his identity. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it’s dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent?

I
SLUMPED
onto a hard plastic chair, watching BET. The video for Jay-Z’s single “99 Problems” was playing. The grim, gritty black-and-white images of Brooklyn and its hood-life citizens made me feel homesick for a place where I had never even lived.

My last week in prison was the hardest. If I had been shipped
back to Danbury, I would have received a boisterous welcome back into the fold and a hasty, tearful send-off into the outside world. In Chicago I felt terribly alone; separated from all the people and the jubilant going-home rituals I had known in Danbury and had assumed I would one day partake in. I wanted to celebrate my own strength and resilience—my survival of a year in prison—around people who understood me. Instead what I felt was the treacherous anger that takes over when you don’t have one bit of control over your life. The MCC still would not confirm that I would be released on March 4.

Yet even the BOP can’t stop the clock, and when the day arrived, I was up, showered, and ready. I knew that Larry was in Chicago, that he was coming to get me, but no staff in Chicago had acknowledged that I was going to be released; no paperwork had been shown to me. I was deeply hopeful, but also deeply skeptical, about what would happen that day.

My fellow prisoners watched the early morning news broadcast of Martha Stewart’s midnight release from Alderson Prison Camp, and soon it was business as usual, with BET music videos battling Lifetime at top volume on the two TVs. I sat on one of the hard benches, watching the guard’s every move. Finally at eleven
A.M.
the phone rang. The guard picked it up, listened, hung up, and barked, “Kerman! Pack out!”

I leaped up, rushed to my locker, retrieving only a small manila envelope of personal letters, leaving behind toiletries and books. I was intensely aware that the women I shared the cell with were all at the beginning of their prison journey, and I was at the end of mine. There was no way to give them all the things I now carried in my head and my heart.

“You can have anything in my locker, ladies. I’m going home.”

T
HE FEMALE
guard in R&D explained that they had no women’s street clothes, so she gave me the smallest pair of men’s jeans they had, a green polo shirt, a windbreaker, and a cheap pair of fake-suede
lace-up shoes with thin plastic soles. They also provided me with what she called “a gratuity”: $28.30. I was ready for the outside world.

A guard led me and another prisoner, a young Spanish guy, to an elevator. We looked at each other as we rode down.

He nodded to me. “How much time you do?”

“Thirteen months. You?”

“Twenty.”

When we got to the bottom, we were in the service entrance. The guard opened the door to the street, and we stepped out. We were on an empty side street, a canyon between the fortress and some office buildings, with a slice of gray sky above us. Homie’s people were waiting directly across the street in an SUV, and he broke for the car like a jackrabbit and was gone.

I looked around.

“Isn’t anyone coming to get you?” asked the guard.

“Yeah!” I said, impatient. “Where
are
we?”

“I’ll take you around to the front,” he said, reluctant.

I turned and started walking briskly ahead of him. Ten yards farther, and I saw Larry, standing in front of the MCC, talking on his phone, until he turned and saw me. And then I was running, as fast as I could. No one could stop me.

Copyright © 2010 by Piper Kerman

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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PIEGEL
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Grateful acknowledgment is made to Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Anthem,” written by Leonard Cohen, © 1992 Stranger Music Inc. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kerman, Piper.
Orange is the new black: my year in a women’s prison / Piper Kerman.
p.    cm.
eISBN: 978-0-385-53026-2
1.Federal Correctional Institution (Danbury, Conn.) 2. Kerman, Piper. 3. Women prisoners—Connecticut—Danbury. 4. Reformatories for women—Connecticut—Danbury. I. Title.
HV9474.F66K47 2010
365′.43092—dc22   2009037936
[B]

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