Among Women

by J. M. Cornwell

  One of the other women gripped the girl’s elbow as a warning and whispered something in her ear. Maureen gazed at the girl, right eyebrow raised. The girl mumbled an apology and hung her head like a whipped puppy. Pearl hesitated at the top of the stairs, bent down and refastened the Velcro strap on her shoe. Peering sideways at the group, she caught Maureen’s smile like dawn after a long stormy night. "They gave me eighteen months. I'll be out in seven."

  Covering for the chastised girl, the woman who had grasped her elbow spoke up. “Less than that you play yore cards right. Lieutenant already checked yore room. Moved Linda up outta there. Put her in with that fat, stupid bitch always mumbling.”

  “Lieutenant’s looking after me, like always.” Maureen yawned and stood up to stretch. “I think I’ll go check out my room.”

  A mousy, pale brunette coming down the stairs stopped when she saw Maureen. Flustered, she turned around and sprinted up the stairs, shrinking against the wall near the supply closet. When Maureen passed her, the girl sidled over to the stairs and nearly fell down them in her haste to get as far away as possible. The crowd parted and swallowed her whole, all eyes on the upper tier.

  “What was that all about?” Pearl sat down, ears cocked for any whisper.

  “Ain’ Maureen’s fus' time inside. That one’s neither. Used to share a room ‘til she done touched somethin’ din’t b’long to her. Don’ pay to get Maureen all riled. That one like a demon when she be pissed.”

  “Did she hurt the girl?”

  “Depend on what you call hurt. Warn’t no bruises or cuts, nothin’ anyone’d see, but Lieutenant done moved that girl out fus' thing befo' roll call next mawnin’.”

  Pearl wanted to know how anyone could casually murder her husband and get off with what amounted to a slap on the wrist. The look in Maureen’s eyes was cold and dangerous. Pearl shivered, a sense of ominous foreboding stirring up some long dormant sense of self-preservation, the instinct that kept a deer at the edge of a clearing when the winds brought the odor of a predator to sensitive nostrils. Pearl’s curiosity over powered the fear.

  "Betty," Pearl whispered, "why didn’t she get life? Seems wrong. She wasn’t defending herself. At least it doesn’t sound that way." She picked up the cards.

  "Maureen light.”

  "She stabbed him before."

  "She light."

  "What do you mean, she’s light? Light how?”

  Holding her hands out palm down on the table next to Pearl’s, Betty said, “She light. Light-skin. Not light as you, but lighter’n me.”

  “So what?”

  "In them olden times, she be a house nigga and I be a field nigga. House niggas always get over. Light to the house and dark to the fiel’s. We be free, but not free. Not down here."

  Pearl had noticed something similar with the guards. The dark-skinned guards deferred to the light-skinned guards even when the guards with darker skin held higher rank. It was not overt, at least not that she was aware of until now—not consciously—something intangible like a flash seen out of the corner of the eye. There and not there. Something about their body language. “It should not make a difference.”

  “It do.”

  It was not a world Pearl knew or understood. In here, they were all prisoners eating the same food, sleeping on the same lumpy mattresses under the same type of blankets bunked two to a cell made for one, except for special cases like Maureen. What should be simple and uncomplicated was anything but. There were treacherous currents, dangerous undertows and dark depths beneath the placid surface.

  After Pearl had been stranded in New Orleans, everything seemed surreal. Since the shock of finding J.D. had taken almost everything, it had been difficult to get her bearings. Nothing seemed real anymore. Never had she been so unsettled or unsure.

  One night when she had walked alone around Lee Circle, she had met a man who offered to take her out for dinner. The man had been polite and had said he was hungry.

  It was a warm evening and Pearl felt like taking a walk. She had been running around on job interviews and wanted nothing more than to pretend for a few moments she was a tourist. He had started telling her about the statue of General Robert E. Lee. Pearl hadn’t let on she was familiar with the history. He must have heard her stomach rumble.

  “How about you join me for dinner. I’d like the company.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but…”

  “If you’re worried about me putting the moves on you, don’t.”

  “Why not?” Pearl had forced a smile, a little surprised at herself for asking. She had bitten her lip and decided it was best not to say anything else. He might think she had been flirting with him. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  “You’re pretty and you’re smart. You didn’t let on you knew all about General Lee and let me ramble on. I don’t get too many chances to talk with a woman like you,” he said. His smile had been genuine and his manner disarming.

  Her first thought had been about J.D. He had been charming and had seemed genuine. That had turned out well.

  “How about it? We won’t go far.”

  “I don’t even know your name.”

  He bowed and tipped an imaginary hat. “Jess Walters at your service.”

  She curtsied. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “Now, how about that dinner?”

  Pearl hesitated, but the loud grumbling in her stomach decided for her.

  “You’re hungry. I’m hungry. Any reason we can’t eat together?”

  “No.” She did not want to blame some stranger for another man’s mistakes, and she was hungry. Pearl nodded. “All right.”

  They walked over to Magazine Street and down a couple blocks to a diner that looked as though it had been there for decades. It probably had. Pearl waited for Jess to order and chose an entrée that cost less than his: hot roast beef sandwich and gravy with no sides.

  “I don’t do cheap dates,” he said. Jess ordered French fries, cole slaw and apple pie for two.

  “Dessert isn’t necessary.”

  “Afraid you’ll get fat? Don’t. Enjoy yourself.”

  Reluctantly, she nodded, surprised at herself for being so easy. She was hungry and was grateful for his insistence.

  The food was hot and good and Pearl was soon full after less than half the meal. After several days with little or nothing to eat, her stomach had shrunk.

  “Oh, you’re one of those girls,” he said. “Always dieting.”

  “Not really. At least not on purpose.”

  He had flagged the waitress behind the counter. “A doggy bag, please.”

  After the waitress had put the rest of Pearl’s meal into a container, Pearl excused herself to go to the restroom. When she had returned, Jess was counting rolls of nickels from a metal box. Neither the waitress nor the two guys sitting next to the cash register had blinked. It was just another day in New Orleans. Pearl had been curious, though.

  As they had walked to Lee Circle, Pearl could not rein in her curiosity. “What’s in the bag?”

  He had pulled the box from the shopping bag and shook it. Loose metal had rattled against the sides. He had opened the box. “Fell out of an armored truck. Some dimwit ran a red light and bashed that truck but good. The street was full of sacks and boxes like these. He dumped the box into the shopping bag. One of the bags burst open and money flew all over.” He shook the shopping bag. “This one fell under the truck and I grabbed it when the guards were chasing people trying to make off with the loot. I didn’t think they’d miss one little box. Thought I’d get quarters or better, but nickels spend just as good. Got a little over a hundred dollars.”

  Pearl had not been happy about him treating her to dinner with stolen money. Her stomach had protested, gurgling like the contents of a backed up sewer drain bubbling up. Heating up the leftovers did not seem like such a good idea either, but there was no guarantee there’d be anything to eat tomorrow. She had swallowed hard and gripped the bag o
f food tighter with sweaty hands.

  There was an undercurrent of something off kilter, somehow out of balance about the city. The genteel decadence gone to seed of the Garden District, the haunted and furtive shadows of the side streets off Magazine, the carnival gaiety of the French Quarter with its smells of mouth-watering food in the evening and the sweet decay of garbage piled in the streets in the morning. All of it existed side by side with tourists attending conferences or sleeping off the previous night’s excesses in their cozy hotel rooms. The whole city was as wonderful as it was awful, a twitching cockroach at the center of a luscious praline.

  Shills carried menus from Brennan’s or Commander’s Palace to entice tourists into live infomercials and vacation condo deals greasing the wheels of commerce with cheap gifts and free meals. Little black boys with soda bottle caps embedded in their sneakers tap danced between shoe shines and prostitutes of every size, shape, age and color sidled up to men to ask for a date. Most of the vice was contained in the Quarter, but some of it leaked out onto the bustling streets.

  Streetcars clattered a short way down Canal Street before looping around and down the dim streets. Businesses with soaped windows like cataract-obscured eyes slid by as the streetcars buzzed and shuddered down the tracks toward the zoo and the Garden District. All along the way, darkened windows and boarded doors huddled between clean and well ordered store fronts and houses, blackened teeth in a mouth full of otherwise shining white. Dark shadows encroached on the light.

  Like the sequestered Quarter within the confines of a city that had seen better and more prosperous days, the more obvious vice was housed in the parish jail, split among the various quads.

  The more she listened and watched, the less Pearl was convinced that the women were really criminals. Rather they were victims of an impoverished system that chewed up women and spit them out. In a life with few options, the women were forced to make the best of things with the only assets they possessed outright: their bodies and a certain native intelligence tempered by life on the streets. Any opportunity would do if it brought another day of food or a few more luxuries—or drugs to numb and cloud their minds so they could go about their business without having to think beyond the job to do or the next fix.

  “Tomorrow be a real good day ‘cause we gets canteen.”

  “Canteen?”

  “Yeah, boo. Buy anythin’ you want from the canteen. Ice cream, sugar, coffee, dill pickles with cayenne.” Betty smacked her lips and Pearl’s mouth watered. “Oh, lawdy, do we get some good stuff. They gots them yella legal pads and pens and stuff like toofpaste and deod’rent. I done ordered me some mo’ envelopes wif stamps. You can get mos’ anythin’. Watch. You be seein’ some tradin’ tomorrah.”

  She explained the system.

  The women traded and gambled for sugar, salt, pepper, butter, and bread, betting their canteen foods (Kool-Aid without sugar or saltpeter), big dill pickles in plastic packages, small bags of sugar and instant coffee, Frusen Glädjé ice cream in domed white plastic containers, the makings for hand-rolled cigarettes, and chips that disappeared seconds after being handed out. It was the Tuesday feast between the starch-laden three times daily meals designed to keep them calm and torpid and that cost the parish the least amount of money.

  On canteen days, the women scooped up their treasures, handed out what they'd lost playing cards or dominoes, and disappeared into their cells to gorge on ice cream and unsweetened packets of Kool-Aid. Very little Kool-Aid made it into a glass with water or was sweetened with more than a few grains of sugar. The brown one- and two-pound sugar bags had to last for a whole month for those who subsisted on what the parish deposited into their account. Parish wages for criminals were twenty-five dollars.

  Those lucky enough to have willing family or friends on the outside that could afford to deposit money into inmate’s accounts bought two bags of sugar and two jars of coffee, deodorant, toothpaste, and brand name soaps that did not turn their skin to drying ash on crackling dark and light parchment. Some of the women bought 12-inch televisions that cost less than fifty dollars on the outside and three hundred dollars from the canteen. Radios, books, magazines, anything desired was available for a price. The rest of the women learned frugality and how to do without while smart opportunists excelled at gambling, blackmail, and loan sharking—or favors for allowing fleeting intimate contact away from the ever present scrutiny of the guards.

  “Get mos’ anythin’ if you has the means. Ever’ Tuesday like Christmas.”

  What fascinated Pearl the most were the various schemes and plans she heard in passing. The Orleans Parish Women’s Correctional Center (WCC for short), was an institution for higher criminal learning.

  Hookers memorized and traded the names (and preferences) of well-heeled clients, a legacy from those stuck inside who wanted to keep their clients on the hook: tag team prostitution. Every hooker knew she'd end up in WCC eventually, so it paid to make friends with strolling sisters willing to share and not steal clients. Shoplifters swapped new and better techniques of getting loot out the door undetected, which stores had the least security, how to get around more sophisticated systems in the better stores, lax times and the names of guards who could be bribed. If one fence was in jail, someone always had another fence’s name on the outside doing business as usual. Inmates exchanged information, upgraded out of date skills and were not above recruiting while sitting at the feet of the mistresses of their trades, like pregnant Martha.

  Martha enjoyed sharing her secrets. Most of all, she enjoyed the looks of respect and shock on the faces of new girls previously unaware of the celebrity in their midst.

  Nine

  The fertile swell of Martha’s belly swung heavily below basketball-sized breasts that bulged from the V-neck of a blue cotton shift. The dark moon of her face shone like black Cajun coffee. She shuffled slipper-clad feet here and there from cell to serving line and bathroom to picnic table, one thick, swollen hand pressed to the deep curve of her lower spine above the prominent mounds of her buttocks.

  “I can’t wait to get to the Fed,” she said as she stirred sugar into a cup of coffee. “This killin’ me, all this waiting.” She looked directly at Pearl.

  “Excuse me?” Pearl stopped, looked around to see if Martha was talking to someone who had come up behind her. When she didn’t see anyone else, Pearl pointed at herself. “You mean me?”

  Martha nodded and shifted over on the bench, patting the space next to her. Pearl perched on the edge of the bench facing the stairs, curiosity aroused, but ready to bolt. “Why do you want to go to the federal penitentiary?”

  “Better food.” She took a sip of her coffee, grimaced, and added another heaping teaspoon of sugar. “And coffee. Better all round.”

  “I thought it would be worse.”

  “No, boo.” She nudged a worn paperback with the tips of her fingers, cover and pages curled and grimy from too many hands since . . . Pearl opened the book and checked the copyright date: 1972. The book looked like it had been around since. She riffled the pages and a couple slipped out. “Big library and I kin go to college, get me an education and get off Welfare.”

  “I didn’t think you could get Welfare in prison.”

  “You don’t, but I ain’t gonna be there forever. Just twenty months and then out. Welfare pay my mama for my kids till I get out.” She stirred the coffee, sipped, shook her head and added even more sugar.

  “Pardon me for asking, but what did you do?”

  Martha took a long drink, put it down on the table and stirred it, as if considering whether or not to answer. After several long minutes, she sucked the spoon clean and laid it down. “Shoplifting.”

  “That’s a federal crime?”

  “When you rack up them dollahs, it is.” She smiled, big, white, shining teeth as even and straight as a row of dazzling white alabaster tiles.

  “Did you shoplift from a federal depot or storage facility?”

  “No, boo. From the S
aks. My kids get the best for Christmas. They may be born poor, but they won’t live poor long as I’m the mama.” She sipped her coffee, stirred it, and sipped some more. “Got them all 12-inch color TVs, VCRs and Nintendos.”

  “How did you get all that out of the store?”

  Swinging muscular legs over the bench, Martha heaved herself to her feet, picked up her things, cradling the sugar bag in the crook of her arm, and pointed down. Pearl’s looked down. “One at a time ’tween my legs.” Martha shuffled off, belly, hips, and buttocks swaying. A deep-chested, full-throated laugh rumbled merrily.

  Pearl walked quickly to catch up with her. “But how did they catch you?”

  “Made a big mistake.”

  Stunned and stifling the urge to laugh, all that Pearl could manage was, “Oh?” Pearl stood in the middle of the floor while Martha rinsed her cup and spoon, shook off the water, and waddled past on her way to her cell.

  “Nope. Ain’t gonna make no mistake next time.” She pointed to a silent figure hunched over the discarded book, brows drawn together, a deep sharp wrinkle between the eyebrows, sounding out the words in a muttered rush of hissing and clicking. “Lainie done told me ‘bout duck tape. Next time, I‘m gonna put a roll in my purse.”

  “If you get some college, why would you keep shoplifting?”

  “Gotta keep my skills up.”

  It was inconceivable to Pearl that anyone would choose to steal, yet there was something appealing about Martha that aroused a kind of train wreck fascination. “What would you do differently?”

  Grabbing the railing, Martha turned around. “Oh, lots of things. ‘Course I won’t be pregnant next time, but a sofa pillow works fine, less’n I get myself done up again. Daddy always said a big family was a blessing and he was right, boo.” Martha glanced at Pearl over her shoulder as she started down the stairs. “Baby’s good for you. Build up your strength.” She chuckled as she descended the stairs and disappeared into her cell.

  Exasperated, Pearl followed her and asked again. “How did you get caught?”