Over the next few weeks, we continued our pattern of gathering together and simply taking turns speaking. And then a new bud developed—they began offering bits of feedback to the speaker, glancing at me for approval, which I happily provided.
Of course, things were going just a little too smoothly. One evening, a girl named Carly announced her arrival by pounding her fist on the table and accusing a bewildered-looking Tonisha of the great jailhouse insult: calling Carly’s mother a crackhead. In any other setting, I would have laughed off such nonsense, but not in here. If they had the means, these girls were fully capable of pulling a knife to avenge this perceived slight. In the neighborhoods where they grew up, people were stabbed for less—for failing to say “excuse me” or for accidentally stepping on a sneaker. Among these girls, an accusation like this was serious business. As Carly got louder, chairs scudded back from the table. Anticipating a scuffle, the officer ran out of the bubble, radio in hand. Despite the mounting tension, I was determined to stay calm and use our new tools to handle this. Projecting a composure that I did not feel, I said, “Carly, you seem to be very upset about this.”
“Oh, I am! You don’t say that about somebody’s mother—you just don’t.”
“But I didn’t say it!” Tonisha protested.
The girls looked a little bewildered, not sure whether to rumble or weigh in with their thoughts on the matter.
“So, Tonisha,” I continued, “you feel you’re not getting a fair shake?”
“That’s right—I’m not!”
And then Veronica, a quiet girl with long braids, pulled back up to the table and said, “I think everybody needs to just calm down.”
“Yeah—no point doin’ something stupid, Carly,” added a sweet-faced girl nicknamed Polite. “You don’t know for sure Tonisha even said it!”
With the scales tipping toward discussion, they all quietly pulled back up to the table.
Carly sat with folded arms. “Oh, she said it all right!” But the steam was gone.
“Besides,” added Ebony, “wouldn’t it be nice to have five minutes of peace in here? Just five minutes. Wow! Amazing!”
When the hour ended, Carly and Tonisha refused to look at one another but left the table in peace, and the others quietly dispersed. The fight never happened. At the bubble, the shocked officer shook her head. “Could you come here every night? Please!”
It was a triumphant walk back to the clinic.
After that pivotal session, a new trend developed whereby the girls saved up the slights and insults they’d suffered during the week and brought them to the table for arbitration, knowing that the group offered a safe forum for feelings to be expressed and hurts to be acknowledged. A breakthrough had occurred, and every girl around that table knew it. And as the group evolved, there were other changes. For one thing, the mad grab for donuts ended. Instead, they took to passing the box around with exaggerated British accents: “Aftah you, dahling,” “Ewh no, but I insist!” It was hard for me to keep a straight face and they knew it, very much enjoying entertaining me.
These were happy moments, but the best news of all came when Janet called me into her office and told me it was official, that DOC had reported a dramatic reduction in violence on the problematic unit.
“Isn’t that something?” Janet beamed. “They’re growing, Mary! And here’s the proof!”
I was thrilled. People don’t really want to fight. They just need a way to handle their differences without losing face.
* * *
In every way, the adolescent group was a joy. I only wished the same for the nursery, but the babies never stopped crying and the mothers were perpetually exhausted, so we muddled through as best we could. But one blustery afternoon, a terrible shock awaited when Allison and I arrived to find everyone gathered in the living room, weeping.
“Miss B,” Addie cried, “it’s Millie—Millie’s dead!”
“What! Millie Gittens? What do you mean she’s dead?”
“Apparently,” said a slack-faced Camille Baxter, “Millie never made it to that program. They picked up the baby, all right—but somehow Millie wound up right back on the streets. We got word this morning from one of the nurses that she died in a crack house. The nurse knows her people and said they found her body yesterday afternoon. She overdosed.”
My eyes were stinging and my mind was whirling. Millie Gittens was dead! I wanted to sit down and cry with everyone else, but I had to hold it together. The mothers needed this group, and with an intensity I’d never seen before, they talked, cried, and even smiled, recalling the good and bad about poor Millie.
“And here we thought Millie was so lucky to be getting out of here,” Addie mused. “Turns out jail was the best place for her to be.”
“Maybe not the worst place for us, either,” whispered Marisol.
“Better than dying in some crack house,” voiced another.
As they rocked and clung to subdued babies, each one knew that Millie’s fate could just as easily have been her own.
Back at the conference room, my own tears started flowing, and Wendy and Allison comforted me. Inevitably, I wondered if I’d given up on her too soon. “No, Mary, you did everything you could,” said Wendy. “You went above and beyond for her,” said Allison. From our car-ride conversations, Wendy and Allison knew all too well about my “Millie struggle,” and I appreciated their words. In my heart I knew they were right. All I could do now was say a prayer for Calvin, who would go into foster care in preparation for adoption. I just hoped the sweet little boy would fall into loving hands.
In the days following the news of Millie’s death, I took new stock of my relationships with these women and stepped up my efforts to help them. There was so much at stake, and this window of intervention into chaotic lives had to be maximized. I was especially concerned with Rhonda Reynolds, who was unraveling. Gone were the pigtails, fuzzy headgear, and waiting room hijinks. “The police lied to me!” she cried. “They said all I had to do was tell the truth and everything would be okay. And I did—I told the truth about that girl jumping on me, and now I’m going to prison! They lied! I’m so stressed—and these nightmares aren’t going away. I need sleeping pills!”
“Rhonda, isn’t it time you gave up on the pills? Whatever it is that happened to you,” I said softly, “I’d like to help you with it.”
She looked up at me, beads of sweat trickling through her scalp.
“You come here every week, faithfully,” I said, “for a reason. I think you know me well enough by now that you can trust me.”
“You want me to tell you about the nightmares? You really want me to tell you?”
“Yes, I do, Rhonda. It’s time. Let me help you.”
“I wanted to tell someone when it happened, but nobody listened to me. Nobody cared!”
“Someone is listening now.”
“All right,” she quivered. “All right then! I’ll tell you . . . I’ll tell you. The blood I dream about—it was my blood. Something happened. Something bad—real bad.”
With a faraway look, Rhonda finally began. “It happened a couple of years ago. I was gettin’ high a lot, you know, smokin’ weed, whatnot, and this one afternoon in the summer I see this guy comin’ down the street. I’d seen him around the neighborhood, and I ask him if he wants to party. So he comes in and we smoke weed, and then he pulls out some cocaine—crack—and we smoke that too. We were pretty high, everything goin’ fine. And when it’s over, I go to the door to let him out, and he jumps on my back, and I’m like, What? Then he pulls me down to the floor and starts punching me, punching me hard—hard! In my face, in my stomach, everywhere. Oh, God. I didn’t know what was happening. And then he tore off my clothes—and raped me. He raped me! And then . . . he just got up and walked out the door like nothing—like absolutely nothing. And when I tried to ge
t up, I couldn’t. My legs, my arms, they were just sliding around in blood. When my daughter came in, I was naked, laying in my own blood. It was horrible for her to see me like that. She was only six.
“I told her to throw a sheet over me and call 911. When the police came it got worse. There was three or four cops, and at first they didn’t even want to call an ambulance. They just stood around drinking coffee and telling jokes. They were laughing at me—laughing! They told me to get up, that I was faking it. They said I wasn’t even worth the paperwork, that I was just a piece of . . . of garbage. When they finally called the ambulance and I got to the hospital, I was on a gurney that got pushed into a corner—like a shopping cart. The cops were joking around with the nurses, like I wasn’t even there. Everyone just ignored me.”
As Rhonda’s horrible ordeal poured out, my own eyes were stinging.
She glanced up at me and saw the tears. “Heh,” she whispered, fixing her gaze at the floor. “Just another nigger.”
“Oh, Rhonda! No! Oh, no! You are a human being, and nothing less! The guy who did this to you—and the police and the nurses—they’re the ones who should be ashamed, not you!”
She looked up at me for a moment, a glimmer of hope in her tear-filled eyes. “But that’s just it, Miss Buser—it was my fault. I let him in!”
“You let him in to party with you—not to attack you!”
She thought about it for a moment and shrugged. “I was in the hospital—in rehab—for five months, just learning to walk again.”
“My God, Rhonda. You’ve been through hell. I can’t believe you haven’t told anyone about this.”
“I didn’t think anyone would care.”
Out in the clinic, Overton was announcing the start of the afternoon count. I went out to his desk and asked that Rhonda be included on the clinic count so she wouldn’t have to leave just then. I returned and sat with her, just the two of us. When she was finally cried out, she let out a deep breath and sighed. “Well, you wanted to know.”
“I know it wasn’t easy for you to relive this, Rhonda,” I said softly, “but it needed to come out.”
“Yeah,” she sniffled. “Yeah, I know. I think I’d like to go lay down now.”
After she left, I returned to the session booth and sat for a while, barely able to comprehend the horror of what Rhonda had endured. The inhumanity of it—not only from the rapist, but from the police and hospital staff—was incomprehensible. To the police, Rhonda was a skel, not quite a real person, undeserving of any human compassion. And it wasn’t lost on me that if I or any of my friends had been so brutally assaulted, the police response would have been entirely different. And Rhonda Reynolds’s agony was no less simply because she was poor, Black, and a drug addict.
11
By the middle of the second semester, term papers were due; for one class, I had to write about my most difficult case and explore strategies for improving it. I had no trouble identifying the case: Daisy Wilson, of course. Although I was regularly making the trek to the infirmary, supposedly to help this woman come to terms with her imminent death, our sessions remained an unending litany of her criminal escapades. When I protested, reminding her of more pressing issues, she would brush me off, saying, “Oh, we’ll get to that”—and off she went. Afterward, I was angry and repulsed. I dreaded my sessions with Daisy, hated going to the infirmary, and kept wondering what was holding up the Compassionate Release.
Perhaps writing about her would help, although I didn’t quite see how. Nonetheless, I gathered detailed information on sociopathy, thumbing through articles on its causes, diagnosis, and treatment. One article stressed that therapeutic relationships can be tricky, as the therapist can easily be seduced by the sociopath’s charm and guile. That certainly resonated. Daisy was most charming—never rude or unpleasant—and when it came to her tales, “seduced” was exactly how I felt, drawn in to listen. Another article stated that criminals do things to others that the rest of us might actually enjoy doing had these impulses not been socialized out of us; yet hearing about these deeds can be tantalizing, which explains the wild appeal of crime-based books, movies, and TV shows. All of this was very interesting, but I didn’t connect it to me—yet. It was while I was at home on a rainy weekend, doing dishes of all things, that Daisy’s tales seeped into my thoughts. Her wild stories were better than any TV show, that was for sure. And then something started clicking. Was it possible that I was more intrigued with her stories than I realized—and that she was entertaining me? It was a crazy thought. After all, I was trying to help this dying woman. Besides, I didn’t like her stories. Every time she started up, I protested. But then I listened. I put down the dish towel and grabbed a notebook. As I put thoughts to paper, I knew I was on to something, something I’d never anticipated, something that was highlighting my own fallibility. I hated to even consider the possibility that I was an enabler here, but instead of fighting it, I allowed the idea to take hold. And as it did, everything started coming into focus. As I sat down and let it all sink in, all the anger was gone. In its place was determination. I wanted another crack at this relationship. I wanted a chance to get it right. Though I had yearned for the Compassionate Release to come through, now I needed it to be delayed just a little longer.
On Monday, I marched to the infirmary with an authority I’d never felt before, and it was a very different Daisy who greeted me. Funny how things are sensed. Wobbling along in an aqua-colored shift, she led me to the dayroom, her exposed legs covered with dark lesions, a distinct mark of AIDS. She was not doing well. No sooner had we sat down than she began to cry. “Do you know what it’s like when your own mother won’t let you in the house ’cause she’s afraid you’re going to steal something?”
“No,” I said. “Tell me.”
And she did. We met two more times, and I helped her to break the news of her illness to her family, who opened their hearts and their home. Shortly afterward, the release was approved and Daisy Wilson went home to die.
Afterward, I went over everything with Janet. “Aren’t you glad you saw this through?” Janet chided. “Looks like there was a lot to learn here—not only about sociopaths, but about ourselves. Therapists don’t work with hammers, nails, or computers, Mary—our tool is ourselves. You need to always be honest with yourself, and be very clear about your own feelings. Otherwise you’re going to have problems.”
“Yes, so I see.”
“Good work, Mary Mac,” she said, using her newly minted nickname for me. “And here you thought I was being so mean.”
“No, I didn’t!”
“Oh, yes you did,” she laughed.
“Well, maybe a little,” I admitted. I was so lucky to have been paired up with Janet. What an ace—no question about it!
* * *
Daisy Wilson was my first encounter with someone who might be considered evil, but contrary to the perception that jails are filled with “bad people,” I found few at Daisy’s level of sociopathy. Most are somewhere in the middle, ordinary people who are drug-addicted and may have committed a crime while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, those who’ve made errors in judgment or who’ve acted impulsively or out of desperation. With a little guidance and support, so many in that middle range had the potential to find their way and move on.
A prime example of someone who was finding her way was Lucy Lopez. After much finagling with the Bureau of Child Welfare, Lucy finally won approval for a visit with Junior, her four-year-old. Lucy was ecstatic and talked of little else. When the “big day” arrived, she raced to the visiting room for a reunion with the child she hadn’t seen in over a year. Her worst fear was that Junior wouldn’t remember her, but as soon as Junior spotted Lucy he cried out, “Mama!”
“It was beautiful,” Lucy told me later. “I held him, talked to him, rocked him on my lap. I never wanted it to end.”
“The only hard part,” she said, “was being nice to that woman.” “That woman” was the foster mother who’d brought Junior to the visit, and who Lucy suspected was the prospective adoptive parent. In preparation for her encounter with the foster mother, Lucy and I had carefully reviewed what she would say. I reminded her that she still had legal recourse to keep her son, but that any angry outburst, while momentarily satisfying, would only work against her in the long run. “Miss Buser,” she said, “you don’t know how bad I wanted to say to her, He’s my baby, not yours!” Lucy stopped and took a deep breath. “But I didn’t, Miss Buser, I didn’t. I just said to her, ‘Thank you for taking such good care of my child.’ It took everything in me to get those words out—everything. But I did it.”
The two of us sat back and smiled. Both the visit and Lucy’s comportment throughout the hour were a huge victory for her. “You handled it all very well,” I said, “very well!”
But a setback was looming. A few days later, Lucy got into a spat with Swanday, one of the instigators in the original Millie Gittens incident. When Swanday told Lucy she’d never see Junior again, Lucy slapped Swanday across the face, knocking her to the floor. In one moment, all of Lucy’s growth seemed to evaporate. She regretted it instantly, but the damage was done. An infraction ticket was issued—a ticket that carried ten days in isolation.
“I can’t believe I lost it like that!” she sobbed in the emergency session that followed. “I’ve gotten through worse than this—much worse! I don’t know what happened to me. And now I’m going into solitary—solitary. I’ll be alone in some dark cell . . . Oh, God! And I won’t see Michael for almost two weeks.”
Lockdown on Rikers Page 10
