Читать книгу The Pink House - Trish MacEnulty - Страница 8

From the Journal of Nicole Parks

I promised Lolly that I would write the story of my time in prison. She said I should call it a memoir, so here it is. Some of it is from my journals, and some of it I remember though there is plenty I have forgotten, thank you very much. But what I can’t forget is Lolly Johanssen and what she taught us in her classes. Lolly is the person who inspired me to be a writer. Some people go to prison and end up finding God. Lolly helped me to find me.

I was in prison for possession of narcotics and for carrying a concealed weapon—an unregistered firearm at that. But what you need to know about me is that I am not, nor have I ever been, a dope fiend. I have never done any drugs, have never stuck any drug-type substance up my nose or in my arm, and have never even smoked a blunt. To tell you the truth, I pity addicts because their lives do not belong to them. They belong to the drug. I should know because even though I never touched drugs or smoked a nasty cigarette in my life, I had my own addiction: to a man. A smooth as melted chocolate, sweet-between-the-sheets man named Antwan. And that’s how I wound up in this place – this prison with its pink buildings up in the middle of Nowhere, North Florida. Sometimes we joke that it’s a big old pink palace, and we’re all a bunch of ladies in waiting, waiting, waiting.

In some ways prison is just like any place else; there’s a game to it. You can be all cool and rebellious and you can do every single day of your time and then some if they can figure out more charges to put on you. I have seen that happen to many a stupid-ass woman. They sneer at the C.O.s and refuse to do their work and get written up and locked down every day. They know they are the shit. I decided right away that wasn’t the way I wanted to play the game, and I got put into a different category. See, even those people who run the prison are willing to cut you a little bit of slack, well not exactly cut you slack. Let’s see. How can I say this so that even if it isn’t factual, it might be a little bit true? There’s a few things, a very few things, that they offer to inmates that aren’t so bad. It’s mostly for show so they can say they’re trying to rehabilitate us. If you can get it in their minds that you are one of those who won’t cause any trouble and will make them look good, then you can get in that certain category of inmates who are eligible to take programs. We were a small group, and it wasn’t like it looked like a big privilege to the others. I mean, going to a writing class? Most of them would rather slam their heads into a brick wall. But me, I knew that anything a little different from the everyday same ol’ same ol’ would be good. And I had always liked to write. I kept a journal all through middle school about all the stupid little fights with girls and the crushes I had on various boys. Then in high school my English teacher helped me get a scholarship to the University of Miami, and I was the first one in my family to go to college. Now, I am the first one to wind up in prison.

I come from a respectable family of AME Zion church-going, hard working folks, and I had destroyed their dreams for me. I was their A-student girl, the one who was going to be some kind of professional, a lawyer or something. Unfortunately, I was learning about the law the wrong way. Now, what I wanted more than anything else was to get back on track, to earn the respect of my momma and daddy and somehow regain a portion of all I had thrown away. So when the lady asked if I wanted to take a poetry class, I said, “Yes, ma’am. I’d like that very much.” And I somehow felt as if I might get a piece of my life back, a small piece.

So there were twelve of us out of a population of 670 women and the class was on Thursday evenings -- same time as the NA meetings, but you already know that I didn’t have to go to that. They didn’t have Antwan Anonymous meetings. That first night we stood at the fence of our zone, watching the poetry lady walk up to us. She was a tall skinny white lady with short dark hair and she limped as she carried a satchel case over her shoulder and some kind of box in her hands.

“She walks funny,” someone said. “She got a club foot?”

When she got up to us, she smiled this big wide smile as if she knew all of us really well and she was so happy to see us. We forgot about her foot. She handed the box to Lucille and looked around at our faces.

“This is going to be great!” she said.

At first I figured she would be sort of like those professors I’d had in my one year at the university—nice but clueless. I found out pretty quickly that she was different. It was the way she looked at you as if she saw something inside you that you had no idea was there. When she suggested I change a word here or there in my poem, I didn’t take offense. I knew she was right. Even the hard cases seemed to like her.

We had class in the library, and for twelve weeks, we couldn’t wait till Thursday nights. If our phone privileges fell on that night, we ignored them. She gave us notebooks and colored pens and pencils. Sometimes she’d sneak in some chewing gum. We’d chew all through class and then wrap our spent gum in paper and she’d collect it before she left so no one would know. And for two and a half hours, we’d write about anything we wanted to write about. I wrote poems about my daddy’s daddy who was a sharecropper, about my great-great-grandmother who escaped from slavery to live with the Indians in Florida, about growing up near the cane fields, about catching fiddler crabs, about missing Antwan, about the azure waters off Bimini and the funny little man who sold me a straw hat when we were there. I don’t know why, but it made me feel free. It took me out of that environment, and it seemed like whatever we wrote, Lolly somehow made us feel that we were on a par with Shakespeare or Langston Hughes. And sometimes she’d bring poems to read to us—poems by Nikki Giovanni or Gwendolyn Brooks or a guy who had been in prison named Ethridge Knight. When we read our own stuff aloud, Lolly would watch us with her big green eyes, and she’d nod or sometimes close her eyes like she was listening to music, some Grover Cleveland type stuff like my dad used to listen to. We thought she was an angel.

One night someone asked her what happened to her foot.

She laughed, took off her shoe and showed it to us. It wasn’t real! We were shocked. She rolled up her pants leg and showed us that the whole leg all the way up to her thigh wasn’t real.

“This is my Barbie leg,” she said. “I had cancer when I was fourteen years old, and they had to amputate my leg just above the knee.”

“Oh, my goodness,” someone asked. “Do you have those what-do-they-call-em pains where your leg used to be?”

Lolly nodded. “Phantom pains? Yes, sometimes it hurts like hell.”

We understood the idea of phantom pains. Some of us had pieces of our hearts amputated, and we hurt where there shouldn’t have been anything at all.

Lolly had big thick eyebrows, and when she pretended to be serious, her eyebrows would scrunch up and her freckled face would get crinkly and she made you laugh. Once she showed us that leg, some of us stopped feeling so damn sorry for ourselves. After all, we’d lost our freedom but we would gain that back eventually. She’d never have her leg again. And it made us love her all the more. So, we wrote and wrote, hoping that our abundance of words would make her happy and somehow they did seem to.

Then the program was over and she said she’d try to give us another program that summer. Lolly was true to her word. Only this time instead of writing poetry, we were going to put on a drama production.