The risk and adventure I craved during my years on the streets shows up in my entrepreneurial work. It takes risk to shape an idea and implement it into a business, the same risk I knew on the streets. It takes guts and courage to believe in your own ideas and bring them into the world. I’m best at the idea part and not the best at the business end of things.
But I plow the most energy into my relationship with Mother.
ONE DAY SHE CALLED. Frantic, she asked, “Can you meet me at the Mayo Clinic?”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“I’ve been diagnosed with . . .”
A pause gripped around my lungs and cut off my breath.
I heard her breath catch.
“I’ve got ovarian cancer.”
“Oh, Mother.” I stumbled backward and somehow managed to stop the phone before it slipped from my hand. It couldn’t be. Mother never got sick. A strong, healthy, seventy-something woman, she swam laps, gardened, snowshoed, worked out in aerobics classes every week.
She and my father drove from Chicago and I met her at Mayo, about an hour south of Minneapolis. While doctors explored whether her cancer was advanced or not, I stayed with them for three weeks in the hotel, weeks both desolate and precious, which gave us both a gift: time together and the intimacy to grow closer. We’d lost two decades and needed to make up for all the years of my childhood when I pushed her away.
Later in the hospital, I pulled a chair to the side of her bed, held her hand, and stroked her pale skin. She turned to me and smiled. “You know, we wanted to adopt more children, at least a third child, but you were so troubled and difficult, we couldn’t handle more.”
Oh, thanks for sharing, but not really. Did I need to know I prevented a piece of her dream, her vision for a family of three kids? Then my heart swelled—she’s shared this secret with me, trusted me even after all those years of broken trust. But soon the good feeling shriveled from shame. What other problems did I cause? What achievements did I prevent in her life?
After week seven Mother headed back to Illinois to begin chemo. I called her two or three times a day. Month after month after month I flew in to visit and bring her fluffy socks, bathrobes, magazines, all I could to comfort her. What gave the most comfort showed by the glisten in her eye, the smile on her full lips—her daughter sitting at her side.
She waited these thirty years for her daughter. A mother’s endurance can hold a fierce love, even if the link is not by birth. At last we both embraced the bond, but saddest of all, it was towards the end of her life.
I BELIEVE CERTAIN things happen for a reason, even if the reason is obscure or painful. After twenty years of letters to plea for information to the prison where my birth mother was sentenced, where I was born, the warden calls and invites me to visit the prison. The gates open with a warm welcome for a private tour. The timing couldn’t have been worse: Mother’s on her deathbed.
Prison is my birth country, a land I yearn to visit the way people adopted from Korea, India, China, the Philippines, various African nations, and every other country abroad yearn to visit the places of their birth. Most people at least hold a curiosity about their roots. Even non-adopted people seek their homeland.
I’m headed home. My mother country, prison.
Even though I’ve been raised with middle-class opportunities, I’ve felt exiled and paralyzed, deprived of my homeland. At last I’m headed to my motherland, a location up until now I’ve only imagined, a place elusive and bizarre but never real. I’m about to replace the impressions of prison promoted by television, movies, and public opinion with my own personal and private images. As difficult as it might feel for others to understand, I’m about to enter a world I’d always imagined as my place of comfort, a nest. While this contradicts the usual association with the word “prison,” a part of me connects the word and the place with love and safety. For any adult, we know it’s not true. For me as an infant, though, prison was the first place I felt loved.
It’s taken me into my thirties to exchange a trunkload of dope for a BA in economics, a clean record, and in my garage, two collector’s Vespa scooters alongside a classic MGB (not the same one from my drug runs on Highway 101). Legitimate money from several businesses I’ve founded fills my bank account, although not often with much to spare beyond living expenses.
ALDERSON NESTLES IN the Appalachian Mountains. Muddy Creek and Wolf Creek run nearby, streams named like characters in my life story. Morning mists cover the prison each dawn with a shroud of fog. Hummingbirds dart through willow trees and hover above fields of lobelia. In Seattle, Mother would attract hummingbirds to our garden with tubes of honey dangled outside the kitchen window. “Legend links this little bird to a miracle,” she’d tell me, “the miracle of joyful living from life’s difficult circumstances.”
The night before my prison tour I stay a mile away at the Riverview Motel, its address: Rural Route 2, Box 0. My headlights hit the motel sign: We Hardly Exist. Exactly how I’d felt for most of my life.
The Riverview connects to the town gas station, which shares a wall with the grocery store, its shelves lined with cans of Spam, big jars of pickles, pink eggs in a jar, pickled pigs feet and snouts, sardines, potted meat, and Yoo-hoo chocolate soda. Not quite the gourmet delis in Seattle where Mother used to fill her grocery basket with capers, virgin olive oil, and Bibb lettuce.
Four miles outside the prison gates, set back from a hairpin turn on Highway 21, rounded granite forms itself into a five-foot-high hunched stone. Weeping Mother, the locals call her, stumped like a pestle without its mortar. She stands isolated, attentive in the field.
I approach the prison gates, my legs in a wobble. Clouds dip in and out of the horizon then open to blue sky. Two federal officers dressed in dark-blue uniforms eye me through the wrought-iron bars. One officer nods to her colleague, who opens the gate. I wonder if the prison kept my earlier documents, the letters I’ve written year after year, the times I appealed for facts about my birth, for details about my prison mom. Always I’d close my letters with one question: Can you tell me what race I am?
“This way,” one officer says.
She flanks me as we walk to the main prison building, a red-brick, two-story rectangle. Is this what it looked like when they transferred my mom here? Her sentence began in the Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, then called the US Narcotics Farm, where the rehabilitation method for addicts and psychiatric inmates was known as the “Lexington Cure,” as if addiction could be cured rather than treated as a disease. They transferred her to this prison when the authorities learned she was pregnant. I’ve never understood why they didn’t know she was pregnant when the court sentenced her.
Footsteps crunch behind me. I shoot a glance over my shoulder. The tall officer follows us a few paces behind. A horn blast pierces the compound and makes me jump. The officer at my side says, “Three o’clock inmate count.” The inmates race to their cottages.
I’m back where I matter.
The officers escort me to the administration building across the compound. Six two-story brick colonial buildings sprawl around the campus-like prison in a semicircle.
An inmate sweeps the entryway and her movements mesmerize me. Did my mom stand here on these steps once, hunched over a broom? I wonder. Or did they relieve her of any work duty because she was pregnant?
Lost in my thoughts, I stumble and bump into an officer at the top of the stairs at the entrance. Inside, another inmate in a t-shirt with her inmate number inked on the front lugs a string mop and swabs the faded tile floor like a sailor.
We reach the control center and the guard stops. “Wait here.”
I nod, my feet glued to the floor. Three officers surround me. The buzz of foot traffic casts a spell on me. Five administrators line up to slide their clip-on plastic badges into a steel cradle embedded in a steel ledge framed by a bubble of bulletproof glass around the control room. Inside, three guards inspect name-stamped aluminum tokens in exchange for b
adges, keys, memos, radios, and authority. Other guards behind the glass monitor moments of freedom and stare at a row of closed-circuit TV sets.
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.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FULL CIRCLE
“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 e
nter 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.
Prison Baby Page 9
