Orange Is the New Black (11 page)

There was tension in Room 6 over who cleaned and who did not. Miss Luz, who was in her seventies and sick with cancer, was not expected to clean. The Puerto Rican woman in one of the top bunks spoke no English, but she would silently help me and Annette dust and scrub. The bigoted Polish woman who occupied the bunk below me refused to clean, much to Annette’s fury. My tattooed A&O pal pitched in halfheartedly—until she discovered she was pregnant and was quickly moved to a bottom bunk in another room. The BOP doesn’t like lawsuits.

The new girl who took her place in Room 6 was a big Spanish girl. At first I used the politically correct term “Latina,” as I had learned to do at Smith, but everyone, regardless of color, looked at me as if I were insane. Finally I was firmly corrected by a Dominican woman: “We call ourselves Spanish around here, honey, Spanish mamis.”

This new young Spanish mami sat on the naked mattress of the top bunk, looking dazed. It was my turn to show someone else the ropes.

“What’s your name?”

“Maria Carbon.”

“Where are you from?”

“Lowell.”

“In Massachusetts? I’m from there, I grew up in Boston. How much time do you have?” She looked at me blankly. “That means, how long is your sentence?”

“I don’t know.”

That stopped me cold. How could you not know your own sentence? I didn’t think this was a language problem—her English was unaccented. I got worried. She looked like she was in shock. “Listen, Maria, it’s going to be okay. We’ll help you. You need to fill out your paperwork, and people will give you the stuff you need right away. Who’s your counselor?”

Maria just looked at me helplessly, and finally I retreated to enlist one of the other Spanish mamis to assist with the new arrival.

O
NE EVENING
the PA system boomed “Kerman!” and I scurried to Mr. Butorsky’s office. “You’re moving down into B Dorm!” he barked, “Cube Eighteen! Miss Malcolm will be your bunkie!”

I hadn’t been down into the Dorms (which were “out of bounds” for A&Os). In my imagination they were murky caves populated with seasoned convicts. “He likes you,” said Nina, my expert on all things prison, who was still waiting to get back into her A Dorm cube with Pop. “That’s why he put you with Miss Malcolm. She’s been down a long time. Plus you’ll always be honor cube.” I had no idea who Miss Malcolm was, but I had learned that in prison “Miss” was an honorific conferred only on the elderly or on those who were highly respected.

I gathered my few belongings and nervously advanced down the stairs to B Dorm, aka “The Ghetto,” clutching my pillow and laundry bag stuffed with uniforms. I would have to retrieve my pile of books on a second trip. The Dorms turned out to be large, semisubterranean basement rooms that were a maze of beige cubicles, each housing
two prisoners, a bunk bed, two metal lockers, and a stepladder. Cube 18 turned out to be next to the bathroom, on the sole wall with narrow windows. Miss Malcolm was waiting for me in her cube, a petite dark-skinned middle-aged woman with a heavy Caribbean accent. She was all business.

“That’s your locker.” She indicated the empty one, “and these are your hooks. Those hooks are mine, and that’s just the way it’s gonna be.” Her clothes were neatly hung, with her checkered cook’s pants and burgundy smock. She worked in the kitchen. “I don’t care if you’re gay or what, but I don’t want no foolishness in the bunk. I clean on Sunday nights. You have to help clean.”

“Of course, Miss Malcolm,” I agreed.

“Call me Natalie. I’ll make your bed.”

Suddenly a blond head popped up over the cubicle wall. “Hi, new neighbor!” It was the tall, baby-faced white girl who washed dishes in the dining hall. “I’m Colleen!” Colleen looked at my new bunkie cautiously. “How are you, Miss Natalie?”

“Hello, Colleen.” Natalie’s tone expressed tolerance for silly girls, but tolerance with limits. It wasn’t unfriendly or mean, just a bit stern.

“What’s your name, neighbor?”

I introduced myself, and she bounced out of the top bunk and around to the opening of the cube I now shared with Miss Malcolm. I was pelted with questions about my cool weird name, how much time I had, and where I was from, and I tried to answer them one at a time. Colleen was the resident Camp artist, specializing in flowers, fairy princesses, and fancy lettering, and she said, “Oh shit, neighbor, I gotta make your name tag! Write down the spelling for me.” Colleen illustrated cubicle name tags for all new B Dorm arrivals in feminine script with sparkle details on each one—except for the people who had spent time down the hill in the FCI, and thus already had official-looking black plastic ones with white lettering, like Natalie’s.

I had won the bunkie lottery. Natalie, a woman near the end of an eight-year sentence, was a reserve of quiet dignity and good
counsel. Because of her heavy accent, it took careful listening on my part to understand everything she said, but she never said anything unnecessary. She was the head baker in the kitchen. She rose at four
A.M.
to begin her shift and kept largely to herself with a few select friends among the West Indian women and her kitchen coworkers. She spent quiet time reading, walking the track, and writing letters, and went to bed early, at eight
P.M.
We spoke very little about our lives outside of prison, but she could answer just about any question I had about life at Danbury. She never said what had landed her there, and I never asked.

How Natalie got to sleep at eight
P.M.
was a complete mystery to me, because it was LOUD down in B Dorm. My first evening there I was quiet as a mouse in my top bunk, trying to follow the hooting and hollering that took place across the big room filled with women. I was worried that I would never get any sleep, and that I would lose my marbles in the cacophony. When the main lights were shut off, though, it quieted down pretty quickly, and I could fall asleep, lulled by the breathing of forty-seven other people.

The next morning something woke me before dawn. Groggy and confused, I sat up in my bed, the room still dark, the collective slumber of its residents blanketing everything. Something was going on. I could hear someone, not shouting exactly, but angry. I looked below me—Natalie was already gone, at work. I leaned forward very slowly, very cautiously, and peeped out of my cubicle.

Two cubes away I could see a Spanish woman who’d been particularly loud the night before. She was not happy. What was pissing her off, I could not figure out. Suddenly she squatted for a few moments, then stood up and stalked off, leaving behind a puddle in front of my neighbor’s cubicle.

I rubbed my eyes. Did I just see what I thought I saw? About a minute later a black woman emerged from the cubicle.

“Lili! Cabrales!
Lili Cabrales!
Get back here this minute and clean this up! LILIIIIIIIIIIII!!!” People were not happy to be awakened this way, and a smattering of “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” broke out across the big room. I ducked my head back out of sight—I didn’t want either
woman to know that I had seen the whole thing. I could hear someone cursing quietly. I cautiously stole a glance: the black woman quickly cleaned up the puddle with an enormous wad of toilet paper. She caught me peeking and seemed sheepish. I flopped back down on my bunk and stared at the ceiling. I had fallen down the rabbit hole.

The next day was Valentine’s Day, my first holiday in prison. Upon arrival in Danbury, I was struck by the fact that there did not seem to be any lesbian activity. The Rooms, so close by the guard’s station, were bastions of propriety. There was no cuddling or kissing or any obvious sexual activity on display in any of the common rooms, and while someone had told me a story about a former inmate who had made the gym her own personal love shack, it was always empty when I went there.

Given that, I was taken aback by the explosion of sentiment around me on Valentine’s Day morning in B Dorm. Handmade cards and candy were exchanged, and I was reminded of the giddy intrigue of a fifth-grade classroom. Some of the “Be Mines” that were stuck on the outside of cubicles were clearly platonic. But the amount of effort that had gone into some of the Valentines, carefully constructed from magazine clippings and scavenged materials, suggested real ardor to me.

I had decided from the beginning to reveal nothing about my sapphic past to any other inmate. If I had told even one person, eventually the whole Camp would know, and no good could come of it. So I talked a lot about my darling fiancé, Larry, and it was known in the Camp that I was not “that way,” but I was not at all freaked out by women who were “that way.” Frankly, most of these women were not even close to being “real lesbians” in my mind. They were, as Officer Scott put it, “gay for the stay,” the prison version of “lesbian until graduation.”

It was hard to see how a person could conduct an
intimate relationship in such an intensely overcrowded environment, let alone an illicit relationship. On a practical level, where on earth could you be alone in the Camp without getting caught? A lot of the romantic relationships I observed were more like schoolgirl crushes, and it was rare for a couple to last more than a month or two. It was easy to tell the difference between women who were lonely and wanted comfort, attention, and romance and a real, live lesbian: there were a few of them. There were other big barriers for long-term lovers, like having sentences of dramatically different lengths, living in different Dorms, or becoming infatuated with someone who wasn’t actually a lesbian.

Colleen and her bunkie next door got lots of Valentines from other prisoners. I got none, but that evening’s mail call yielded plenty of evidence that I was loved. Best of all was a little book of Neruda poems from Larry,
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
I resolved to read a poem every day.

I
WAS
finally able to shop commissary on February 17, when I bought:

I desperately wanted
to buy a cheap little portable headset radio for $42.90. The radio would have cost about $7 on the street. At the base pay for federal prisoners, which is $0.14 an hour, that radio could represent more than three hundred hours of labor. I needed the radio to hear the weekend movie or anything on television, and to use down in the gym, but the officer who ran the commissary brusquely told me they were out of radios.
No mas
, Kerman.

Because I could count on money from the outside world, I could buy items to return to each person who had helped me upon my arrival—soap, toothpaste, shampoo, shower shoes, packets of instant coffee. Some women tried to wave them away, “Don’t worry about it, Kerman,” but I insisted. “Please, forget it!” said Annette, who had loaned me so many things in my first several weeks. “You’re like my daughter! Hey, did you get any new books today?”

The books continued to pour in at mail call. It had gotten to the point where I was embarrassed, and also it made me nervous; it was a clear demonstration that I “had it like that” on the outside, a network of people who had both a concern for me and the time and money to buy me books. So far no one had threatened me with anything more intimidating than a scowl or a harsh word, and no other prisoner had asked anything of me. Still, I was guarded against getting played, used, or targeted. I saw that some of the women had little or no resources from the outside to help make their prison life livable, and many of my fellow prisoners were seasoned hustlers.

One day right after I moved into B Dorm, a woman I didn’t know popped her head into my cube. Miss Natalie was absent, and I was putting still more books away in my small footlocker, which was threatening to overflow. I looked at this woman—black, middle-aged, ordinary, yet unfamiliar. My guard went up.

“Hey there, new bunkie. Where’s Miss Natalie?”

“Um, she’s in the kitchen, I think.”

“What’s your name? I’m Rochelle.”

“Piper. Kerman.”

“What’s your name?”

“You can call me Piper.” What did she want from me? I felt trapped in my cube. I was sure she was sniffing around.

“Oh, you’re the one with the books… you got all them books!” In fact, I had a book in my hand and a pile of them on top of the locker. By now I was scared as to what this woman wanted from me and what she was going to do to me.

“D-do you want a book?” I was always happy to lend a book, but only a few people took me up on it, checking my haul at every mail call.

“Okay—whatcha got?” I scanned the selection. The collected works of Jane Austen. A biography of John Adams.
Middlesex. Gravity’s Rainbow.
I didn’t want to assume that she wouldn’t want any of these books, but how could I know what she liked?

“What kind of stuff do you like? You can borrow any of them, take your pick.” She looked through the titles uncertainly. It was a long, slow, squirmy moment for both of us.

“How about this one? It’s really, really fantastic.” I seized up a copy of
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston. I felt racist on every level of my being by picking “the black book” from
the stack for Rochelle, but there was a good shot that she might like it, might take it, and might leave me alone, at least for the moment.