Prison Baby: A Memoir (12 page)

Two correction officers break the spell with their laughter at an inside joke.

A five-minute wait turns into twenty minutes while I wait for someone to process me through security. At last an officer waves me into a room. Inside, behind a metal desk, another officer tilts back on his chair and gestures for me to sit opposite him. He pushes a stack of forms across the desk. “Fill these in.”

I finish the forms just as a female officer bursts into the room. “Prints,” she says and gestures with her head towards the door.

I shove the stack of papers back across the desk and follow her down the hall to a room where a different officer presses and rolls my fingertips onto a black ink cushion.

So this is what my mom went through.

“We need two sets,” the officer says, “one for the FBI, one for the BOP.”

“Doesn’t the Bureau of Prisons have enough on file about me?” I ask, not expecting an answer.

“Other hand.”

Afterward, I scrub in the sink with their grease remover, but a faded shadow of ink still embeds in my fingertips. I lick my thumbs and rub them over the other fingers but the stains don’t lift.

“This way,” the officer says. She opens the front door to the grass compound on the other side. On the way out I fight to return the guards’ generous smiles and instead wave my hand like a schoolgirl.

In secret, I’d always loved the word
prison
and every word related to my first home. I’d imagined them all when I was a girl:
dungeon
,
lockup
,
the joint
,
the pen
,
penal institution
,
reformatory
,
detention center
,
the can
,
the slammer
,
the clink
.

My heart skips a beat. At last, my feet march on the prison compound: left, right, left, right. I can’t believe I’m here, where I screamed the place down 24/7, spat out milk because my body craved her drug, the dope I’d grown with, plagued by withdrawal—vomiting and diarrhea. Why did Lady Luck grant me life? Or was this my fate, my destiny to survive my drug-exposed birth but then return here? Or was it more than luck?

Like a dandelion puff on a breeze, I fly off above the prison in a distortion of time and space, my cells in a dance. Did my mom’s mind flip like this too? I fight emotional lockdown. I’ve no place inside where any of this fits.

I’m at the threshold of something I’ve imagined my whole life.

“Let’s begin on the compound,” the officer says.

“OUR MOST FAMOUS HISTORICAL INMATES INCLUDE Billie Holiday, Tokyo Rose, Squeaky Fromme,” the officer notes as we cross the prison complex. She launches into an impromptu history of the place. “No metal fences surround the camp, just a hundred rural acres, a natural barrier of rolling West Virginia hills.”

Come back, I tell myself. I can’t ground my body in the present.
Come back
. I need to focus. I want—need—to savor my return home, remember every second of what took a lifetime to find.

“Are you okay?” the officer asks.

I shut my eyelids for a minute, desperate to shake off the sensation and keep this weirdness to myself.

But the time distortion wins. We’re now in an empty basement room in another building the same compact size as the Riverview Gas Station down the hill. Déjà vu flashes through me, along with a dizzy spell, and sensory memory kicks in like a full orchestra inside. About to pass out, I press the palm of my hand against the door to brace myself. Faded-green paint chips tumble to the ground from the pressure of my hand.

“This paint,” the officer says, “it’s the same since your birth here, never painted, same since the prison first opened. This is where we used to release sheets of paper for letters and envelopes to prisoners. Your mom must’ve carried you in here every day.”

The air tastes like warmed mold. I hang on to the officer’s words, inhale the prison, this landscape I’d shared with my mom, a bond of perfection I’d created in my mind. But for how long?

My breath races faster. Don’t let her see. I try to hide the heave of my shoulders so the officer won’t notice them rise and fall. I don’t want anyone to witness my feelings yet, for sure not a stranger, an authority figure. Fast-paced everything: heartbeatbreathvision, one blur of sensation. I’m like a trapped animal set free.

“Up there,” the officer points to the ceiling, its faded white paint now chipped and speckled. “That’s the chapel. Service every Wednesday and Sunday. You might have attended church with your mom. They baptized you here I’m sure.”

Baptized?
I was raised in a Jewish family and I’ve been baptized!

Jewish mysticism speaks about two powerful muscles in the brain: memory and imagination. But what about the pocket in between, where memory reaches out to imagination but can’t quite connect? All my life I stored my prison-birth secret in this pocket to hide it from myself and from the world.

The dank, chipped-paint basement beneath the prison chapel pitches me into this brain space. Silence all around except in my head, I’m transplanted back in time, to a Baptist service and the reverberations of a chapel full of women. Hands clap, women sing spirituals, feet stomp. I’m desperate—is this my imagination or a memory revived?

We cross the compound again, towards another corner of the prison.

Then something doesn’t fit.
What about all those times they sent her to solitary confinement? My prison mom couldn’t have kept me with her in the Hole. Where did I go? Who took care of me in those weeks and weeks and weeks, on the many occasions she sat in isolation?

I ask the officer, and she answers almost before I finish my sentence, as if I’d just asked her the time of day: “Oh, you went to the Hole with her.”

What on earth does a baby do in the Hole week after week? Isolated in what some call the Box or the Pit, secluded behind four walls. What does anyone do but flip out in the Hole, where psychologists research the breaking point of our human mind, where incarcerated women and men go mad because sensory deprivation can drive a human being to chew the veins in her wrist in a suicide attempt to end the insanity.

Some inmates in the Hole holler and scream all day and night. Others throw feces out their cell doors. Some pump out a thousand push-ups a day to drive themselves to a different breaking point. Others rock back and forth under a blanket for a year or more in this space with just enough room for a bed, sink, and toilet, and no television or radio, just the scream of your own voice and the open-and-slam of doors and the cry of insanity from others in the same isolation.

Doubt and distress and torment live in the Hole, along with terror, frustration, boredom, rage, and depression.

For my prison mom and me, though, all I imagine is an oasis of peace. Maybe she had a box of Kotex, some paper and a pen, maybe a Bible. The guards must have brought diapers and blankets for me. I suppose I was her angel of glory in a dreary place where she created a sanctuary out of chaos, where we cuddled and she could count my toes and sing silly songs. Maybe going crazy was not an option for her with me at her side. Maybe the isolation was worth it for her.

I still can’t metabolize the fact: I lived in the Hole at a time when most infants rock in cradles, visit grandma, bathe in a sink, and get diapered with baby powder. A time in a baby’s life for the sweet sound of “Awww” instead of the clang of a food slot and the yell “Chow time!”

Me with my prison mom in the Hole, just the two of us with everyone on the outside watching our outlines. How bad can this be, though? But instead of fear, I force myself to lean into the unanswered questions of what I can’t reconcile. I use this newfound discipline so the uncertainty won’t eat me alive and drive me crazy.

GRASS AND CONCRETE layer the compound, but the ground has fallen away in this out-of-body drift. My feet float, air-filled dumplings. Another space jump. I’m on the first floor of a two-story brick colonial, this one deserted. The afternoon sun slants through an open door into the hallway. We enter and the officer says, “Your mother delivered you in here.”

My head’s about to explode from emotional overload and from the humid ninety-five-degree West Virginia August heat. The officer’s shoes scuff on the tile and echo across the empty hospital room. I jump. She looks at me, waits for questions. At last I stand in the place of answers but I can’t eke out any words.
Was it a difficult birth?
I want to know but I’m silent, mute.
Did my mom pant hard for air?
Part of me, desperate to ask, tries to speak, but another part, all I can manage, is a long draw of air. I’m speechless. I suck in a breath, imagine the scent of my mom’s birth sweat from more than thirty years ago.

Another time distortion sweeps me up and I imagine a collective thump of my heart with my prison mom’s, as if we’re together again in this barred hospital room we shared. Joy floods through me and I blink back the tears. No way do I want this officer to see me cry.

We inch across the compound and the officer leads me to Cottage C, two floors of long rows of rooms on either side of a hallway. I try to make small talk with the officer, but I feel transported back into my preverbal life in prison. My senses on fire, my cells alive, and I’m without words.

She points to an open door on my left at the end of the first-floor hall. For a second, I wonder why we approach this door: C7. Then it hits me. It’s the cell I shared with my mom.

The officer and floor guards hang back. I approach the door. My breath catches. Air traps in a cave at the bottom of my lungs.

The last place she held me. She loved me in this room
. I loved her here.

For the first time I think of her pain and loss, not just mine.

I try to step into the room but my boots glue to the tile. I can’t lift a foot. I lean forward, bent at my waist to scan the room for a second. I spin back into the hall and press my back against the wall. My breath still stuck, my head about to explode again.

I turn and step into the door threshold, try to enter this five-by-eight-foot room, my first home. There’s just enough space for a table, chair, and bed. I stand in the doorway and the cell soothes me like a scene in the dollhouse I played with as a girl. My home, this cell. I slept in here, ate, crawled around. My body melts, relaxes into a comfort like nowhere else before.

Go in, step in there
.

My skin starts to itch, panic stirs in my gut. I tell myself,
Go!

I shake my head. I can’t. I blank out, then soar back in time to the moment in the middle of the night when someone snatched me from my mom’s bed.

Part of me yearns to dive onto the coarse tungsten-colored blanket, bury my face in the bed, and cry. I don’t, but now I wish I had. I missed my chance to turn around and wave bye.

Was there nothing to keep my prison mom clean, the way I found motivation? Why didn’t she fight to stay out of prison, to stay clean from addiction, to begin a new life? Why couldn’t she do what I did? Why didn’t she? Couldn’t she see any choices or chances? What if she’d quit drugs, stayed out of prison so she could look for me, find me, stay with me
?

She didn’t get the chance to read any of the poems and stories I wrote as a kid or sit in the front row at my dance and piano recitals. She missed the times I fell into hell, and she couldn’t teach me her street savvy, how to run from the cops or hunt the streets for the dealer who passed me bad dope. She wasn’t around when I passed out drunk or for the day I cleaned up. She missed it all.

Then I remind myself—“if only” doesn’t go anywhere.

She just didn’t.

Some people shoot heroin, others overdose on shame, guilt, and secrets. I’d lost myself in all of it. Drugs were never social entertainment for me; alcohol never just a beverage. They served as my anesthesia, a patch, medicine, healing, freedom. And then, near-death. Drugs ruined my every relationship, every corner of my life, because my one true love ruled—alcohol and drugs. I’d hoped this voyage to my homeland would be a tonic in my healing and forgiveness.

Right before I leave the prison’s administration building, the warden’s assistant waves me into her office. She hands me an inmate bulletin typed on coarse beige newsprint, one page tabbed with a two-inch cutout sketch of a baby.

“Open it,” the warden says, her eyes warm, almost teary.

I read,

MY NAME! MADLYN MARY. There, in black and white, evidence of us together. Even though I learned my name earlier, now it feels real. I run the words over my tongue and imagine our time together in prison, my mom and I, her whispers—Madlyn. My whole body floods with a warm gush of assurance.