by Mateo Hoke
Tonja was released from prison in March 2014. The marriage she had successfully maintained while incarcerated fell apart, and she spent much of her time over the next two years on the streets of New York City looking for work and housing. She eventually got into another relationship and found some stability, but after that relationship ended she returned to the streets.
MY REPORT CARD ALWAYS SAID, “TONJA TALKS EXCESSIVELY”
My dad was just sixteen when I was born, and he worked at the Ford plant, though I didn’t know him because he died when he was young. I was born in Starkville in 1974, which is in north Mississippi.38 It’s the home of Mississippi State University.
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and then my family moved to Queens when I was older. In New York I had an average childhood. I had two older brothers, an older sister, and two younger brothers. Dan was born in 1968, Pete in 1969, Donna in 1970, Chance in 1978, and Norris in 1980.
And we also sort of adopted other kids. I have a Jewish brother, a Korean brother, a Trinidadian brother, a Guyanese brother. Seriously. What would happen was, if one of us siblings knew a kid who was having trouble with their family or not eating right, we’d bring them home and my mom would let them stay. But it’s just like an extended family. I say my family is like the Rainbow Coalition. My mother is from Mississippi, she’s biracial. Her father was a sharecropper. So, her thing is, you should at least feel accepted, wherever you are. She never made anyone feel not accepted, you know?
My mom worked first as a lunch lady, and then later she worked nights cleaning office buildings. By the time we were getting in from school my mom was leaving to go out. By the time we were ready to leave in the morning, she was coming back in. When she was working, we were latchkey kids. When I got to be twelve or thirteen years old, my mom was basically disabled—she had a heart condition, I never really knew exactly what—and stayed at home all day.
But my mom taught me how to cook. Every southern dish you could imagine. A lot of vegetables and breads. In southern cooking, the vegetables tend to be more of a statement than the meat. For instance, in the South, getting the cornbread stuffing right makes all the difference. Good soul food, I guess it was.
When I was in elementary school, I was a good student. I was a great student. My report card always said, “Tonja talks excessively. If she could just not talk so much.” But I never got in trouble.
I was probably closest to my oldest brother, Dan. We shared a lot of interests, including basketball, and he always encouraged me to try out for the team. But I spent a lot of time with all my brothers. We’d do some of everything—sports, play games, music. I’ve always been creative musically. Music speaks to me.
When I was about twelve, my two younger brothers and I were determined to write this great song. I can even remember some of the lyrics to this day. It was the worst song ever. Literally, the worst song ever. I remember the lyrics, but I won’t tell them to anybody. No way. But I loved music.
I went to Thomas Jefferson for high school. I made the basketball team my freshman year, but I found out I enjoyed watching it more than I enjoyed playing. I was still a good student in high school, and the school offered me a job as a tutor.
Around 1989, my mother, after she had taken sick, she decided that she wanted to move back home to Mississippi before she died. I was around fifteen. We understood, we said, “Okay, fine.” However, once we get down there, it’s crazy. Mississippi is the only Confederate state we got left, you know? We were kids raised in New York. Now we had to go back down to this Mississippi life.
Pete and Dan were constantly back and forth from New York. Dan is Black, but he makes a lot of white people look like they’ve been out in the sun too long. And he’s not albino! This is just his look. But in Mississippi that doesn’t fit too well; he looks like a Black man trying to be white. His trips back to New York City made people suspicious. The next thing we know, there’s the sheriff’s department, with their pump-action shotguns, and they took my brother out in his underwear. They claimed he was doing all this drug trafficking.
Now, my mother wanted to take the charge for him. My mother was like, “If this took place, it was not him. I did it. This is my child.” My mother’s logic was, “If they get a hold of him, they’ll kill him. You know, with me, it’ll be a little different.” And we’re all like, “Mom, you can’t do this.” But my mother took the charge for him and did six years and one day in federal penitentiary.
So we came back up to New York, and we were in the foster care system. The two boys, my younger brothers, got to stay together. They went into a foster home with a woman who is still a part of our lives today. But I went into a group home. They split us up. Well, I immediately left. Just walked away one day and went AWOL. For a few years I was just off the grid.
YOU NAME IT, I DID IT
I tried to go on to college, but it was short-lived. I had this idea that I wanted to own a funeral home, so I studied mortuary science and business management. I also worked as a cook. I figured people always have to eat and they have to die, so I’d never run out of money. Pretty soon, though, I realized I was scared of dead people. I took as many classes as I could tolerate, but then I’d had enough.
After I left school, I did a lot of cooking. I was a professional chef in every facet of the culinary world. I was the head cook of a senior citizen’s center. You name it, I did it.
But I was also concentrating on music. I did a lot of studio work, a lot of production work. I submitted lyrics for a TV show. I’d make music that might sit on the shelf for years not getting used, and then it gets put into something.
I started dating Lakeesha around 1994. She was younger, and we met on the pier one night in New York. I was actually pregnant at the time with my first son, Taylor. His father was gay. So was I, but I hadn’t come out yet to my family.
I came out to my mother a while later, when I was twenty-two, and she was out of prison. I’ll never forget, because it took me two tries to tell her. I started to tell her the first time, and was like, okay hold on. I went and got a beer, like a ridiculously huge Colt malt liquor, then came back and told her. She was doing a puzzle book and just looked up at me and said, “Tell me something I don’t know, Tonja.” And then she went back to her puzzle book.
Within about three, four days of meeting Lakeesha, I was in love. We moved in together the following year. Taylor was born the same year. Then we decided to have another baby, and the father was the same as with Taylor. We had Tyler in 1999. I was writing music and cooking, Lakeesha was going to school for early childhood education and working two jobs, always. We were doing okay, but just trying to keep the boys healthy and in school.
STRAIGHT TO THE AUTHORITIES
By 2009, we were all living together in a house out in Queens. I wouldn’t say we had a financial situation, but things were tight in our household, which is what prompted me to sublet part of the house we were renting. We were renting the whole house, and the basement was set up like a full apartment. I’d been using it as an office and studio, and my kids played video games down there. But we decided we’d sublet part of the house—the basement and the top floor, so we’d be living on the ground floor. I took security deposits from two separate couples that applied to move in to the two floors I was trying to sublet.
Then we had an issue with pipes in the house so I had to back out of both agreements. At this point, the couples were like, “Oh no, something doesn’t sound right.” So I’m like, “Okay, here’s your rent back. Give me a couple of days, I’ll give you the deposit back, too.” I had already spent part of their deposit money on fixing the pipes. One of the tenants went straight to the authorities and filed a complaint that just sat there apparently.
Then at the end of 2010, we were having a New Year’s Eve party. There was a group of guys that was stopped for casing some of the houses on the block, and the police were making a report. They too
k our information, our neighbors’ information, on both sides of us. They’re returning everyone’s ID—they returned Keesha’s ID; she went inside. They returned my neighbor’s ID; she went inside. And they looked at me, and it was like, “Oh, we actually have an open complaint on you, so you’re going to have to come down to the station.” I said I’d come in the following morning. It’s New Year’s night! I have a drink in hand. I’m in my socks. And he’s like, “No, we’re going to have to take you in now.” And that’s when it really started, from that point on.
And when they asked me, “Did you accept this deposit money from the tenants?” I’m like, Yeah, I did. When the police asked me if I still had part of the funds and I said yes, they decided to arrest me and charge me with grand larceny and scheming to defraud.
GOING OVER this BRIDGE TO NOWHERE
I was sent to Rikers Island the next day. This was the first time I’d ever been incarcerated. I remember the bus ride over to Rikers, sitting in this moving cage and going over this bridge to nowhere. The first thing I remember about Rikers was the smell. It was like every kind of waste you can imagine—bad food, bad body odor. I was at Rikers only maybe twenty days. Then I was bailed out and given probation.
Part of the stipulation of the probation was to make restitution payments to the rent applicants or face incarceration. However, I couldn’t make the payments, so I violated my probation and I was back at Rikers. At that point I spent maybe about six and a half months on Rikers Island going back and forth to court with the probation violation. I pleaded guilty to the probation violation, and though I didn’t understand it at the time, that meant they found me guilty of the grand larceny and fraud charges. The judge had no leniency. He was just like, “Okay, you were supposed to pay it, you didn’t, that’s it, violation.” I was sentenced to three years in prison.
There was absolutely nothing to do day to day on Rikers. In the dorms, I was stuck on my bunk with a person on either side of me less than three feet away. Dorms had maybe fifty to eighty women total. We had one hour of rec time outside every day, but the space outside was surrounded by four brick walls that went all the way up. So you just sit. Literally, you just sit there. There’s nothing else to do.
We had jobs that we were sent to do, and I worked all the time—by choice, because I couldn’t sleep—in the mess hall, in the laundry, all sorts of things to keep the jail running. We did jobs seven days a week, but we weren’t being paid for them.
We were allowed a maximum of three visits a week. I made sure I had all three visits every week. Taylor was about sixteen, Tyler was about twelve when I was first incarcerated. Rikers visits were one hour of no contact. I could hug my sons, but that was it.
After about eight months at Rikers, I was scheduled to be transferred to Bedford.39 A few days before I was supposed to be transferred, I refused to go to work. I didn’t want to do my job, since I wasn’t getting paid, and it wasn’t supposed to be mandated if you hadn’t been sentenced yet, which I hadn’t. I was written a ticket for that. Ten days bing time—my first brush with solitary.40 But I never had to serve any of those days in the bing. I was moved to Bedford first. If I’m not mistaken, to this day, I have those ten days of bing time over my head if I ever go back to Rikers.41
IT’S JUST SO SAD IN HERE
When I stepped into Bedford, in August 2011, I was first put in reception, where I was treated like scum that had to be cleaned off. Everything I was wearing was thrown in the garbage. Period. No exceptions. Then I was deloused, forced to have these chemicals sprayed on me. Until I completed medical testing, I was supposed to stay in the medical unit. But they found something in the exam, so I ended up staying in the medical unit longer than normal.
They diagnosed me with cervical cancer. Then later they changed the diagnosis to uterine cancer. I was actually supposed to pass from Bedford immediately to a prison upstate called Albion.42 But because of my medical condition, they wouldn’t release me from the medical unit at Bedford. The problem with the medical unit, though, is you are much more limited there in what you can do—you can’t move around much, you don’t interact with other prisoners as much, you can’t go to the yard. I ended up spending months in the medical unit.
They wanted to give me chemo, but I refused because I really didn’t believe they were going to give me the right treatment. It’s hard to explain why, but it’s like the same with the food in prison. The prison is required by law to provide me with three meals. You’re not going to give me one meal a day and expect me to account for you giving me three meals. Either give me what you’re supposed to give me, or nothing at all. So that was just how I felt with the medical treatment. I really didn’t believe they were going to give me the right treatment. The doctors would hit you with, “This is an experimental drug we want to try.” I’m like, No, I don’t want to be a guinea pig. So I just refused.
Fortunately, we were able to have a lot of visits at Bedford—up to six a week. I had a minimum of two a week from my family, but sometimes more. The visits meant everything to me. It’s not even just the contact with the outside world. Those visits were my contact with life. Because my kids were under eighteen, we could be in an outside area together. We’d play basketball together, me and my two boys. Believe it or not, the majority of the time we’d sit at the table and just talk, and the crazy thing was I’d pretty much always say the same thing to them. We all knew that there was just a sadness to the place where we were. My youngest son would always say, “This is the saddest place I’ve ever been. It’s just so sad in here.” He’d say that no matter what, if I was smiling or not. Our conversation would just be like, “Make me laugh.” That’s all we did. That became our weekly thing. They had some really good jokes to tell me when they came up for our visits. That was our thing, telling jokes.
But when I wasn’t having visits, I was stuck in the medical unit. Because I was refusing medical treatment, they lifted my medical hold and sent me upstate. I was transferred to Albion in January 2012.
GET DOWN WITH THE PROGRAM
OR YOU BECOME A PROBLEM
Albion is far upstate, near the Canada border. It’s about twelve hours by bus from New York City. The rules at Albion were like rules at a gated community. Seriously. You either get down with the program or you become a problem. I saw other women punished for all kinds of reasons. I saw one woman get forty-five days in the SHU for feeding a bird a piece of bread. Soon I became a problem.
A few months after I arrived at Albion, I got in trouble with a friend. My friend was someone I’d met back at Rikers Island. Back at Rikers, this friend had shared things like snacks with me, and at one point, we’d been intimate. But at Albion, we were strictly friends. Still, there was this rule that when you come to a facility, there’s a thirty-day waiting period before you can get anything sent to you through the mail. She arrived and wanted some things, so I ordered them for her. Now there was another rule that you couldn’t have credit cards on the prison grounds. I didn’t. But I knew my credit card number from before my incarceration. So I gave it to my friend so she could order some basic things she needed like commissary food items and toiletries.
She also ordered some additional things that I never told her she could order—sneakers and a curling iron. When my partner Keesha saw that on the credit card bill, she called and told me. I reported that to the guards at Albion, thinking they would intervene.
That was a mistake. Instead of resolving the situation, they charged me with violating the prison’s correspondence policy, the phone policy, and mailing rules. They tried to charge me and my friend with stealing the credit card information. I told them it wasn’t stolen. They didn’t want to hear that. I had Keesha call in as a telephone witness stating that, yes, those were my card numbers. It didn’t matter.
I knew going into the hearing that I was probably going to be found guilty. Of course I hoped there would be a different outcome, but when women have to
spend time in the SHU for feeding birds, I knew I wasn’t going to get out of it. I don’t remember my state of mind when I heard the sentence. I knew it was going to happen and had tried to keep my family abreast of what was going on. I just remember asking the hearing officer if I could have time to call my kids to let them know I won’t be available for visits. But she refused the request. I received a year in the SHU for my violations in June 2012.
THE OBJECTIVE WAS TO KEEP YOU IN NOTHINGNESS
Going into the SHU, I just remember these hallways full of walls. Then the slamming of the door after I went into my cell. Those first few hours in the SHU still haunt me to this very day. You hope that something can be done. You don’t want to admit defeat, but you have no choice. The cell is barren, just a metal slab for a bed, and a combined toilet and sink contraption. The way it was set up, there were three corridors in the SHU unit with sixteen cells in each corridor, eight cells on a side. It’s just cell after cell. In my first cell, I was in a corridor with other people so we could talk. The first thing everyone talks about is why they’re there in the SHU. We all couldn’t believe what we’d done that got us put in the SHU. Some were there for physical altercations. But a lot were not—just petty stuff.
After a little while, they moved me to a corridor where there was nobody else in any of the cells, and so there was no one to talk to. Someone would come by to do the count. A guard would check to make sure we were alive in the morning, and to feed me. They’d slip a tray in a slot under the door, and sometimes they’d push it so hard the food would spill all over the place. The SHU diet is the ultimate diet. There were people who went in for a week and come out and it’s like, Whoa! It’s a drastic difference. Granted, it’s prison food. It’s the same food that you’d get with the general population, but the condition of the food when it gets to the SHU—it’s been sitting longer and handled by so many people. The main thing that anyone in SHU would eat was bread.
