Sept. 11-God, I hate being honest. About this, I mean. I like honesty in general, just not when it makes me look like an idiot. But it’s just too hard to think up all the important ways I could have been spending these three-plus months when I’ve actually only been developing and feeding an obsession with romance novels. It’s true. Our library here at the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, WV, has an entire shelf of Nora Roberts novels, and I’ve read most of them – and with 67 more days to go, I’ll have read them all.
In the beginning, I, with the good taste in writing I’d so carefully pruned and used to create my dignified image as a mature college student and would-be political organizer, put up a show of being disgusted with the paper-thin characters, their forced dialogue and the plots that were as predictable as clockwork, but it wasn’t a very good show. I can read, enjoy, and be swallowed by the most strained attempts at romantic trash.
I take a book with me to work in the morning (unless I’m having one of those rare I’m-above-such-nonsense-now-that-I-have-this-important-activist-reading-to-do-days). Sometimes, instead of going to lunch, I’ll come back to my room and eat peanut butter while listening to NPR and finish another novel. I wait for mail call with a book, go to mail call and stand around with one and pick it back up after I’ve read my mail unless I have been inspired to write back immediately (which – choke – I’m sorry to say, even the most beautiful and touching thoughts from my best friends rarely can reach through the comfortable haze of the heroine’s reality to get me writing).
I’m pretty busy in the evenings – lately our Native American group is having dance rehearsals out the wazoo, and I have ceramics, yoga, and weaving on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, respectively. So I am forced to step away from the addiction at times – but by 9 or 9:30 p.m. I’m usually back with it, finishing up the book I’d gotten the day before. Even now, as I write this column, part of my soul is longing for Laura Templeton to finally get it on with Mik the horse breeder – I can tell it’s going to happen in the next 10 pages, andit’s going to be hot, greedy animal sex, nothing like the boring, gentle, half-interested wifely duties she performed when that cheating prick of a no-good husband was still around in the beginning of the trilogy.
Sept. 14th – So on the one hand I have this all-consuming (or at least all-numbing) escape with Nora Roberts. (By the way, I was totally right about the Laura and Mik sex. It happened seven pages later, and he actually ripped her fancy clothes off in the barn, just a few steps from the hay. It was fantastic.)
But, on the other hand I have me, moments ago, sobbing into my pillow 10 minutes after saying good-bye to my boyfriend, and being scolded by the b***hiest guard ever for kissing him good-bye for too long. I hate prison – my roommate has 10 more months away from her two beautiful daughters. Her best friend just told me how she cries when her kids come to visit, cries when they leave, and cries practically the whole time in between. My roommate’s youngest daughter said, “I’ll tell them I made [drugs], too, so that I can go with you.” She’s eight years old. One of my co-workers has 94 more months to serve, and a four-year-old son she saw today for the first time in the four months that I’ve been here.
The guard who searched me on the way out (not, thankfully, the power-hungry b***h guard who also likes to scream at us during mail call if we don’t say “here” loudly enough when she calls our name) was really uncomfortable with my tears, and somehow I ended up telling her, “I’m sorry, it’s not your fault.” What? She is the one who works here and goes home to her family each night, she is the one who has the power to write people up and take away “good time” (if I was here over a year, I could earn 54 days for good behavior), she is the one who decides arbitrarily in the visiting center search room which inmate will squat, cough and have their vagina and butt crack examined – and she earns at least 160 times what I do (probably more like 300 times).
Yet, in my twisted little head, I feel bad when she feels bad that I’m crying because I want to frickin’ go home. She works for the U.S. government, the number-one terrorist organization in the world. She works at an institution that has let two women die in the last year because of the total lack of health care and total disrespect for inmates. We aren’t believed when we say we’re sick, we aren’t believed when we say our mother and step-mother were civilly united in Vermont when we want to see our stepmom, we aren’t believed when we tell the warden that the doctor forced us to undergo a gynecological exam. The guard who searched me certainly
didn’t believe me when I told her that I didn’t want to discuss my reasons for crying with her.
Yet, her heart was in a good place. Ironically, she was the guard who handed me a big wad of toilet paper when I cried the first time in prison. One of my first nights, when I was still in one of the bunks in the lobby of Range One, I just crumbled during 10 o’clock count, suddenly overwhelmed with the awful feel of the place, the coldness and distance that seeps through every part of life here.
Tonight is only the second time that I’ve cried like that. Most of life here is pretty mundane. I get up, go to the cafeteria for breakfast, go to work, come back at 3:30 p.m. and am lazy. But it’s in the mundane that I am sustained – the look of the trees as I walk down the hill to the Landscape Shop, the burning in my thighs as I walk up it at the end of the day, the crisp bite of foggy morning autumn air, the bright perkiness of the little purple and green leafy potted plant in my windowsill. It’s between the escape and the despair that I do my best living. Isn’t it the same everywhere?Vera Brown is a junior Environmental Studies major. Brown was one of 14 arrested Nov. 17th, 2002, of a group of 85 protestors who participated in the annual demonstration against the School of the Americas, a U.S. training program for Latin American soldiers in Ft. Benning, Ga.. The demonstration is held on the anniversary of the murders of six Jesuit priests in 1989 in El Salvador whose killers were trained at Ft. Benning. Brown is serving a six-month sentence for trespassing on federal property during the protest at a low-security federal prison in W. Va.