Orange Is the New Black (22 page)

Ghada was from Lebanon but had lived in South America for many years and so was fluent in Spanish, with pretty tenuous English. Because of her long residence in Latin America, Ghada was an honorary Spanish mami. This was a good thing, because she was totally unaccepting of the authority of the staff and uninterested in the institution’s rules, and only the monumental efforts of her friends to protect her from the consequences of that indifference kept her out of the SHU. This won her both annoyance and respect from her fellow prisoners. No one seemed to know what Ghada was down for, but we could all agree that she was another OG. Ghada loved Yoga Janet, which was the primary reason she came to class. She was not all
that interested in doing the poses properly, but she brought great enthusiasm to the ritual.

The final member of our ragtag band of aspiring yogis was Sister Platte, who took proper form very seriously. Sister had tight hips, so twists and Pigeon Pose prompted a knitted brow, and if she had indulged in the greasy home fries at the midday meal, the forward bends would give her trouble. When I sank into a deep lunge, the tiny nun would study me, plaintively wondering, “What am I doing wrong?”

The five of us had a camaraderie that made those few hours among the most enjoyable of the week. Every class we would meet to claim the peace that, at Danbury, could only be found within one’s own body. Each session ended with Janet’s final relaxation, when she spoke soothingly to us of the work we had just completed, and the things we had to be grateful for every day, together in prison. And every single week Ghada would fall asleep within minutes during final relaxation, snoring loudly until someone woke her.

O
NE EVENING
Miss Mahoney, the cheerful education administrator from down the hill, made a lot of people very happy. Miss Mahoney was one of the few prison staffers who seemed to be on our side. As near as I could tell, she was one of the education department’s few saving graces. She did have an annoying habit of trying to be “down on tha mic” when she was on the PA system. On this particular evening she announced that a gender awareness class would be offered in the dining hall. What exactly was going to be conveyed there was unclear.

Then she got to the important matters: “Would the following ladies please report to the CO’s office for their GED test results…” And you could just tell from her voice that the news was good for every name called.

“Malcolm!” Mahoney called.

I jumped out of my bunk. Natalie had taken the GED test
approximately a dozen times and was definitely way past due to pass it. She got nervous during the testing, and time and again the math section had proved her bête noir. Where was Natalie?

When I got to the main hall, there were already screams of joy, and women were pouring out of all of the Rooms and Dorms. When a woman of twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five has struggled to earn her high school diploma in prison, taking pretest after pretest and trying to learn in a poorly run program and classes full of every imaginable delinquent student behavior, and then actually passes, it is a victory. Some of these women had dropped out of school thirty years before and were finally getting one of the only positive things—one of the only measures of achievement—one can earn in prison. Plus, it meant that these women could finally earn above the lowest pay grade at their prison jobs—if you didn’t have your GED, you couldn’t earn over fourteen cents an hour, which was barely enough to pay for toothpaste and soap. Everything came out of our prison accounts—hygiene items, phone calls, fines. If a prisoner didn’t have her GED and didn’t have money coming in from outside, she was screwed. Natalie had toiled for many years as a skilled baker in that prison kitchen, a treasured member of the cooking staff, and yet she could never be paid more than $5.60 a week for forty hours of work.

Where was Miss Natalie? Her name had been called five minutes ago, but I didn’t see her in the throng of jubilant, shouting, laughing women in the hall. Where was my enigmatic bunkie, that supremely self-possessed woman? I knew how badly Natalie wanted that diploma, I suspected it hurt her that she had struggled for so long to pass that math section. With embarrassed dignity, she had declined my offers of study help. This was her moment! Could she possibly be hiding, ashamed to join the orgy of congratulations and illegal hugs taking place in the hallway?

No, wait, she was down at the track! I had watched her putting on her sneakers. In my flip-flops I took off down the hall, out the building, and down the stairs to the track at top speed. She didn’t even know! Halfway down the stairs I was calling out to the others
on the track, “Is my bunkie down there?” I rounded the field house—and there she was with her crazy friend Sheila.

“Bunkie! Your GED results are back!” I panted.

Natalie smiled nervously.

“Come up, bunkie, come up and see!”

“Okay, bunkie, I’m coming.” Ladylike to the end, Natalie did not rush.

I started up the stairs as a number of people came down. “Where’s Natalie? Where’s Miss Malcolm? There she is! Come on, Natalie!” My bunkie looked surprised, but she still didn’t hurry. She had that look of skepticism on her face, unwilling to give herself over to celebration until she saw its cause with her own eyes.

When she entered the Camp, an entourage traveling before and behind her, the noise in the hall was deafening, and people were calling out, “Where’s Miss Malcolm?” She was immediately enveloped by people hugging and congratulating her. As she made slow progress up the hall, Natalie laughed and smiled and looked overwhelmed.

Down near the CO’s office, someone was waving her test results in the air. “Natalie, you did it!”

I suddenly thought I was going to lose it and start crying right there, and I was not a crier. The release of so much collective happiness in that miserable place was almost too much for me. It was like hot and cold air colliding, creating a tornado right inside the hall. I took a deep breath, stepped back, and watched my bunkie be enveloped by well-wishers. When I congratulated her in the relative privacy of our cube, she tried to downplay her triumph, but I could tell that she was deeply satisfied.

T
HE FACT
that I’d become used to life in prison shocked my friends and family, but no one on the outside can really appreciate the galvanizing effect of all the regimented rituals, whether official or informal. It’s the insidious, cruel paradox of lengthy sentences: for women
doing seven, twelve, twenty years, the only way to survive was to accept prison as their universe. But how on earth would they survive in the outside world when released? “Institutionalized” was one of the greatest insults one could throw at another prisoner, but when you resisted the systems of control, you suffered swift retribution. Where you fit in and how comfortable you were willing to get depended on the length of your sentence, the amount of contact you had with the outside world, and the quality of your life on the outside. And if you resisted finding a place in prison society, you were desperately lonely and miserable.

Mrs. Jones had been in the Camp longer than any other prisoner but would be going home next year. Her cubicle, a Puppy Program single in the corner of A Dorm next to the outside door, was so cozy we all feared what would happen when it came time for her to leave it. “I like this cube. I get all the fresh air I want, plus I can walk the puppies just like that!” she cackled. During the day I liked to drop by Mrs. Jones’s cube to play with Inky, the Labrador retriever she was training as a service dog. I would sit on the floor and rub Inky’s belly while Mrs. Jones fussed around the cube, showing me photographs of women with whom she had done time or her latest crochet project (she specialized in Christmas stockings), and asking me if I wanted random objects she had squirreled away during her fifteen years in prison.

Mrs. Jones spent a lot of time down on the track walking Inky, and she was impressed by my running. She was concerned that she was overweight, so she resolved to start running too. “You and me, we’re going to compete!” she would crow, poking my shoulder hard. “We’ll see what you’re made of!” But Mrs. Jones was perilously top-heavy, and after wheezing her way around only one lap, she sat on a bench, heaving for breath. I suggested she try speedwalking instead. This she found manageable and would huff and puff around all morning at top speed, obsessively.

One day Mrs. Jones came to see me in my cube. I was writing letters up in my bunk. She peeked around the particleboard like a little girl, which I found disconcerting. “What’s up, Mrs. Jones?”

“Are ya busy?”

“Not too busy for you, OG. Come on in.”

She came closer to the bunk bed and whispered conspiratorially, “I got a favor to ask ya.”

“Shoot.”

“You know I’m in the college class, right?”

The class was a basic business course, taught by a pair of professors who came in from a nearby accredited college. It didn’t mean much in terms of getting one closer to a college degree (for that you needed to pay for correspondence courses), but it did count toward “program” credit with an inmate’s case manager. The case managers were tasked with managing the completion of our sentences, which meant recalculating our “good time” (we were supposed to serve only 85 percent of our sentences if we earned good time), collecting fines from our inmate accounts (if you couldn’t pay fines, you wouldn’t get good time), and assigning our “program” activity, including mandatory reentry classes. The “programs” available to Campers were feeble and few. The college class was one of the only options, but after reading over and helping to revise a number of women’s homework assignments, I was skeptical about the class’s usefulness. Camila’s business plan for a Victoria’s Secret competitor, for example, was entertaining but highly hypothetical and totally unrelated to what she might be doing when she got out of this human warehouse in five years.

“How’s it going, Mrs. Jones?”

She explained that it was not going so well. She had received a bad grade on her business plan. The OG was worried. “I need a tutor. Will ya help me? We have a paper due on a movie we saw. I’ll pay you.”

“Mrs. Jones, you will not pay me anything. Of course I’ll help you. Bring me your stuff, and let’s look at it together.”

When I agreed to help the OG, I had in mind a typical student-tutor relationship; I would talk to her about her assignments, ask thought-provoking questions, and review and correct her work. She came back with her notebook and papers and a book that she put on my bed:
Managing in the Next Society
by Peter Drucker.

“What’s this?”

“Our textbook. Ya gotta read it.”

“No, Mrs. Jones,
you
have to read it.”

She looked at me, anguished and pleading. “It gives me a headache.”

I remembered that in addition to being nutty from having been locked up for well over a decade, Mrs. Jones was reputed to have had a few screws knocked loose by her abusive husband.

I frowned. “Let’s take a look at your paper that’s due, the one about the movie.”

This provoked another anguished look. “
You
need to write it, I can’t do it! They didn’t like my last paper,” she said, pulling out her business plan, embarrassed. She had received a poor grade in big red pen.

I flipped through it. Mrs. Jones’s handwriting was hard to read, but I realized that even if her penmanship had been flawless, the contents of the paper made little sense. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. I might be a convicted felon, but as the daughter of teachers, I had a strong aversion to cheating on tests.

“Mrs. Jones, I shouldn’t write your papers for you. And how am I going to write a paper about a movie I didn’t see?”

“I took notes!” She thrust them at me, triumphantly. Oh, great. It appeared that the movie had had something to do with the Industrial Revolution.

Was it better to let Mrs. Jones fail on her own or to help her cheat? I knew I was not going to let her fail. “OG, why don’t I ask you questions about the movie, and I’ll help you do an outline, and then you can try writing the paper?”

Mrs. Jones shook her head, stubbornly. “Piper, look at my business plan. I can’t write it. If ya won’t help me, Joanie in A Dorm said she would do it, but you’re smarter than her.”

Joan Lombardi was hardly a rocket scientist, and I knew she would charge Mrs. Jones for her “tutoring.” Plus my ego was involved.

I sighed. “Let me see your notes.” After extracting a few
context-free specifics about the movie from her, I set to work writing an incredibly generic three-page paper about the Industrial Revolution. When I was finished I walked the neatly handwritten paper over to the OG’s cube in A Dorm.

She was ecstatic. “Mrs. Jones, you are going to recopy this paper so it’s in your handwriting, right?”

“Nah, they’ll never notice.”

I wondered what would happen to me if her instructors caught this. I didn’t think I’d be sent to the SHU or get expelled from prison.

“Mrs. Jones, I want you to at least read the paper so you know what it’s about. Do you promise me?”

“I swear, Piper, on my honor.”

Mrs. Jones was beside herself when she got her paper back in class. “An A!! We got an A!” She glowed with pride.

We got an A on the next film summary as well, and she was jubilant. I couldn’t believe that her teachers had no comment or questions about the difference between these papers and her previous one—right down to the different handwriting.

Now she grew serious. “We gotta write the final paper. This is fifty percent of the grade, Piper!”

“What’s the assignment, OG?”

“It needs to be a paper on innovation, and it has to be based on the textbook. And it has to be longer!”

I moaned. I desperately wanted to avoid reading the Peter Drucker book. I had spent my entire educational and professional career avoiding these types of business books, and now they’d caught up to me in prison. I didn’t see any way around reading it if the OG were to pass her class.

“Innovation is a little broad, Mrs. Jones. Any ideas on a more specific topic?”