N thought she had her little operation together.
But then S freaked out.
“I ain’t doing it!” she screamed. “We’ll get caught and get shot.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I told her.
She wouldn’t shut up so I stomped her a few times until she did.
“You don’t gotta go with us,” I said, “but if you say a word I’ll bust you up so bad you won’t be able to open your mouth ever again.”
I thought that settled that, but I was wrong.
S kept freaking out and a week later wound up telling the CO—the correctional officer—about our escape plan.
CO came by, saw our stash of pepper and stack of blankets and started laughing.
“You fools,” she said.
We didn’t say nothing.
CO got a stool and pushed back the tile where we’d hope to escape.
“Come on up here,” she told me and N. “Look at your escape route.”
“I don’t need to look,” I said. “I know what’s up there.”
“What?” asked the CO.
“A brick wall thick enough to keep a tank from breaking through,” I said.
“If you knew that, why in hell were you looking to climb up there?” she asked.
“I wasn’t. We dropped that idea soon as I saw the wall. We innocent.”
“Well, you’ll have time to think about your innocence when I put you both on administrative lock 23/1,” said the CO.
That meant holed up for twenty-three hours with one hour for fresh air.
“But we didn’t do shit,” I said.
“But you were going to do shit,” she snapped.
I started to argue, but why?
THE STRIP
I’d never been more than a few miles outside Baltimore.
Probably Father’s house beyond the county line was the farthest I’d even been.
Never been to L.A. Never seen Hollywood. Other than what I’d seen on TV or in the movies, didn’t know nothing about Las Vegas.
So why am I dreaming about that big Strip with all those fancy hotels and their huge neon signs flashing Stardust, Caesar’s Palace, the Mirage, and Treasure Island?
Why am I seeing myself in Vegas, shooting craps at the table and playing the roulette wheels?
In this dream, I’m riding around in limos and sipping fancy drinks in the VIP sections of the nightclubs where the rap stars go to chill. I’m sitting in the front row of a heavyweight fight and I’m betting heavy. My man is winning and the crowd is cheering, the money’s rolling in, the chips are red and green and yellow and blue, the blue lights of the after-party are low and I see the faces of all the stars. Mary J. is there. “That’s my wife,” I declare. Biggie’s there. Faith. Dre. Coolio. Da Brat. Latifah. Nas. Fugees. The party’s on and poppin’.
But moving around the room, I feel something’s wrong. I don’t know what, but my stomach ain’t right. My head ain’t right. My head is starting to spin. My stomach is starting to ache. I’m feeling sick. Did I eat something rotten or drink some poison?
For all the bad feeling, I keep looking for someone. Don’t know who it is, but I gotta find this person because this person is in deep trouble. I leave the party room and run through the casino, run outside on the Strip, run down the Strip, the neon lights racing over my eyes, my eyes searching every which way to find—who?
Everything goes blurry. Everything gets scary. Now there are niggas with knives and guns chasing me and I’m sweating and screaming, “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!”
“Wake up, girl,” says N, who’s standing over me.
“Man, this dream freaked me out,” I say.
“The way you shaking, looks like a nightmare.”
I look at my hands. They are shaking. I don’t understand why. A dream has never before made my hands shake.
I try to forget it.
And I do.
Can’t tell you how much time passed—maybe a few weeks, maybe a few months. But when the news came, I remembered every detail of that crazy dream.
“TUPAC SHAKUR SHOT
IN LAS VEGAS.”
That’s what the news said on September 7, 1996.
For those of us sitting around city jail, it was like the president was shot. Only worse. We couldn’t relate to the president. But all of us sure as hell could relate to Pac.
Now I understood my dream. It was so clear. And so goddamn scary.
He was shot in a drive-by and was laid up in some Vegas hospital. Pac was fighting for his life.
The crowd down at city jail wasn’t a praying group, but we had us some prayer meetings. We prayed that Pac’s life be spared.
We talked about when he was a young kid backup dancer for Digital Underground. We talked about his first record, 2Pacalypse Now, and his last record, All Eyez on Me, and his new joint as Makaveli, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory. We talked about his genius.
We heard his lines in our head: “No matter what you think about, I’m still your child.”
“What you feed us as seeds grows and then blows up in your face—that’s thug life.”
We waited for his change to come. We wanted him to live so bad. We wanted more Pac joints, more Pac movies. We knew he’d blow up to be bigger than anyone in the history of the game.
We wanted him to stay alive.
And then on the sixth day after the shooting, he died. Respiratory failure. Cardiac arrest.
I didn’t wanna talk about it. Didn’t wanna think about it.
Still don’t.
Uncle came by.
“We gotta talk about your case,” he said.
“You were gonna make the case go away,” I said. “You said the witnesses didn’t really see nothing.”
“Well,” said Uncle, “almost all of them told us that.”
“What you mean, ‘almost’?” I asked.
“One witness can’t be turned around,” he said.
“Man or woman?”
“Woman,” said Uncle.
“What’s she saying?”
“That she saw you shoot her.”
“What does my lawyer say?”
“Your lawyer wants to talk to you.”
“Does the lawyer know what he’s doing?”
“He’s the best. He’ll get you the best deal.”
THE BEST DEAL
I was up in the gym. I was playing point guard, and I was making all the moves. I’d always been good at hoops, but on this particular afternoon I had a hot hand. Everything was falling.
Game over. I headed back to my cell. Note said my lawyer was there to see me. Cool.
Lawyer was smiling when I came in the room.
“No witnesses will testify against you,” he said.
“Word.”
“Of course the trial will go on. There’s no way we can stop that, but it’s pretty clear that their case is weak.”
“So you think I’ll walk?” I asked.
“I can’t guarantee anything,” the lawyer said. “But it’s looking better than it ever has. Now it all rests on the trial.”
I thought about the word “trial.”
There’s a trial down in the courtroom. Those kinds of trials happen all the time.
Then there’s what Mama likes to call the trials and tribulations of life. That kind of trial was already happening with me being locked up in city jail. City jail smelled bad, looked bad, was bad. City jail was a trial of my patience. I saw some niggas lose their cool in city jail and straight-up flip out. They couldn’t stop either crying or shaking or screaming shit no one could understand.
City jail was a trial.
The trial in the courthouse came up two years after I’d been sitting in city jail. I thought it’d go great.
It didn’t.
First day we got there I saw this woman walk in the courtroom with the prosecutors.
“Who’s she?” I asked.
“She’s the one who said she didn’t really see what happened,” he sai
d.
“So what’s she doing with the prosecutors?”
My lawyer didn’t have an answer.
I did.
They’d done flipped her. She was getting ready to testify against me. I could see it in her eyes. I could feel it in her walk. Bitch was ready to do me in.
As the days of pretrial proceedings went by, she walked in the courtroom every day.
I’d seen enough.
“See what kind of deal they’ll give me,” I told the lawyer.
“You’re sure you want to deal?” he asked.
“Sure as shit.”
That witness looked clean as a whistle. The jury was going to love her. I didn’t stand a chance.
“Cut me a deal,” I told my man.
He did.
“This is the best deal they’ll give you,” he said.
I looked it over and didn’t hesitate.
“Take it,” I said.
The sentence was reduced down to second-degree murder. They also reduced my jail term down from ten years to eight for the time I’d been sitting in city jail.
Of those eight years, the first five were without parole. That meant that I could be a perfect angel but my ass wasn’t going nowhere for five years.
After five there was a possibility of parole.
I was fifteen. Maybe I could get out by the time I was twenty.
Looking at the big picture I felt like I could deal with that.
Five years was a long time, but five years was no lifetime.
I’d adjusted to shit before. I’d adjust to this shit now.
Besides, the move out of city jail was a good thing. I hated that fuckin’ place. And from what everyone told me, the joint where I was headed—Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup—was an upgrade.
They said Jessup was a cleaner, bigger, more modern facility where they tried to actually rehabilitate bitches.
I didn’t care about the rehabilitation. I didn’t believe in it. I just wanted something better than that stinking sickening city jail.
Jessup was okay with me.
I was eager to get up to the place called the Cut.
A DIFFERENT WORLD
A Different World was a spinoff from The Cosby Show. Denise Huxtable goes off to college. That’s the “different world.”
Denise’s world was filled with clean-cut college boys and cute little college girls.
I loved the show.
But watching the show from the Cut—which was another world—was a trip.
The inmates had another term for the Cut. They also called it Grandma’s House
The Cut sounded hard. And Grandma’s House sounded soft.
The Cut was hard.
Like A Different World, the Cut had a campus. Only don’t look for no wholesome college kids.
Sinbad the comic was in A Different World. He was always cracking jokes and making everyone feel okay. We didn’t have Sinbad at Grandma’s House. We didn’t have any happy-go-lucky comics brightening our day with sunshine and laughter. No, sir.
At the same time, the Cut was cool compared to city jail. The Cut had better food—thank you, Jesus—and the Cut had more activities.
Even though I wasn’t free, being able to walk from building to building gave me more of a sense of freedom than I felt during those long months I was sitting in city jail.
Also there was a window in my cell. That window was real important. The window overlooked the fields beyond the prison yard and let me watch day turn to night and night turn to day. The window let me study the seasons. It let me see the world, a piece of sky, the foggy mornings, the rain in spring, and the snow in winter. That window opened my eyes to the grass that started growing and the leaves that started falling, the new flowers being born and the old flowers dying, the trees swaying in the storms, the branches broken off by the lightning, the thunder booming in the dead of night with dark clouds racing past the yellow moon.
The window was a beautiful thing.
You might think that sex in a women’s prison would be a beautiful thing, too. All those girls cooped up together. They’ve made movies about that shit. You’d think that me, a sixteen-year-old lesbian, would have the time of my life. Well, you’d be wrong.
In the five years I spent in Grandma’s House, I had sex once. Here’s why: I value my health. I value my fuckin’ survival. The Cut was full of straight-up crazy ladies, fucked-up crackheads, women who had cut off their boyfriends’ balls. For real.
I love sex as much as anyone, but I love living more. Early on I saw how romantic relationships in Grandma’s House got out of hand. You’d be loving on some woman, then come to learn she belonged to another bitch and wind up with a scissors in your throat. No, thank you.
For romance, I turned to Guiding Light. That was my joint, every day at three. I was hooked on that soap and couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. It was like A Different World. I knew it was fake and had nothing to do with real life. But that only made those shows better. They let you escape from a place where no one was escaping.
I also liked watching Jerry Springer ’cause that motherfucker is crazy. He’ll have men on that show who are fucking their mother-in-laws. Then he’ll have the daughters breaking chairs over their mothers’ heads. All kinds of shit.
So you get in the Cut and you find your place. My place was to fly under the radar. I didn’t want to be no star in Grandma’s House. I’d rather not be noticed. Why attract attention, especially from the crackheads who were out of their minds and might do anything to you? I stayed to myself.
I played volleyball and was damn good. I overcame the disadvantage of being short by jumping high and spiking hard. We even had a coach from the outside come in and train us. We had big tournaments in the Cut and my team won the trophy.
After I was in there for a month or so, Uncle came to visit.
“You all right?” he asked.
I nodded yes.
“You ain’t getting rough with these girls, are you?”
I shook my head no.
“Didn’t think so,” said Uncle. “You know better than that.”
“Sure as hell do.”
“What about the schooling in here?” he wanted to know.
“They got a GED program.”
“You going for it, Snoop?”
“I think I should,” I said.
“I know you should.”
He took my hand and patted it.
“Mama been down here to see you?” he asked.
“No, and she’s not coming down. I don’t want her here. Don’t want her to see me in a place like this. It’ll break her heart.”
“Well, that schooling thing is great,” Uncle said. “You’ll probably do better in here than you’d do out there. Less distractions.”
“Oh, I seen some distractions.”
“Well, avoid them,” Uncle warned.
“For sure.”
For the most part, I did avoid those distractions. Eventually, though, some of those distractions caught up with me. They had to. No matter how good your intentions, you just can’t sit in jail, year after year, and not get your ass in a little trouble. Least I couldn’t.
Meanwhile, though, the best entertainment—and the scariest—wasn’t the nightmare Freddy Krueger movies they had on VHS. The best entertainment was the stories that women inside the Cut told about themselves. That’s some shit I’ll never forget.
“I COULDN’T HELP IT.
THE MAN JUST
HATED KIDS.”
You’d hear these stories.
You’d be eating dinner. Or out in the yard. You’d be up in the gym or down in the laundry. The stories you’d hear would burn your ears. You had to listen. You wanted to listen. The stories on TV and the movies were okay. Getting off on A Different World or that fool Jerry Springer was one thing; that shit was mildly entertaining. But the real stories told by the real-life women at Grandma’s House would blow your goddamn mind.
Of cou
rse in jail you had a long time to twist your story any way you wanted. You never knew how true someone else’s story might be. But it didn’t matter. You sat there and you listened and, after hearing how some lady wound up in the Cut, you just said to yourself, “Lord, have mercy, this bitch is crazy.”
No matter how crazy she might be, you sat there and listened. That was the way you passed the time at Grandma’s House.
I remember one inmate I’ll call L. L was a light-skinned bitch who reminded me of my real mom. She was fine. She had these green eyes that looked like marbles and she had a refined way to talking. When she started into her story, she began telling it like a lady. Like she’d been to college or even law school. She talked like she had no ghetto in her.
“My mother was a schoolteacher,” she said. “My grandmother had been a schoolteacher too. My father was a salesman who did very well and I always had lovely clothes. I sang in the choir in the Methodist church and I won all the spelling bees. Even today, I’m a superb speller. My older brother went on to college to become an engineer and I was supposed to go to a fancy college but I began dancing when I was very young. You’ve probably seen me in the videos. That’s how I got out to California—video directors were hiring me. Practically every week I was dancing in a different video. I had an agent, a very important agent, and a famous lawyer who would go over my contracts before I signed anything. I was in demand.
“And I was in love. I don’t want to name him, but a famous movie star fell in love with me. He was married at the time, but his wife wasn’t interested in lovemaking. She was a social climber and just using him to get to all the parties you read about in the magazines. She didn’t love him. I thought I did. I thought he’d build his world around me. That’s what he said. That’s what the man promised. He took me to Hawaii, to a luxurious resort right there on a private beach. Every day at sunset, the hotel would move the massage tables out by the water and I’d have my massage out there in the open with the breezes from the ocean and that Hawaiian music floating in the air. It was quite something. That’s where I learned about skin care products.
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