Lockdown (4 page)

At Progress you could get visitors any day between 10 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, and on Saturdays and Sundays between 10 and 6 in the afternoon. I hadn’t had any visitors, so when Mr. Wilson called me out of the dayroom Sunday afternoon I thought it was a mistake.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Your mother and sister,” he said with a grin. “I might have to steal your little sister, she’s so cute.”

I stopped dead in the hallway and looked at Wilson to see if he was kidding. My moms hadn’t visited me in months. “You sure?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s for you. Remember, they can’t give you anything to bring into the facility,” Wilson said.
“They’re supposed to leave all gifts at the office.”

“Yeah, okay.”

The visitors’ room was decent. There were red and yellow tables you could sit at and real curtains on the windows. There were cameras in each corner of the room, but I didn’t mind them. A television was tuned to the weather channel.

I looked around and saw a woman who looked like my mom standing in front of one of the vending machines. She was alone. For some reason I thought for a moment she might not recognize me.

“Hey.”

My mother turned and looked at me and smiled. She was looking neat, maybe a little thinner than the last time I saw her.

“Well, how you doing?” she asked.

“I’m okay,” I said.

She kissed me on the cheek. “You’re taller!” she said. “They must be feeding you good.”

“The food’s okay,” I said.

We sat at one of the tables. “They said that Icy was with you.”

“She’s in the bathroom,” Mom said. “So what’s going on?”

“Ain’t nothing going on,” I said. “I’m in here doing the time.”

“I tried to get your father to come up,” she said. “He said he was tied up and maybe he would get up the next time.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s so far back in his child-support payments I can’t even keep track of them,” she said. “I got a date to take him down to Family Court and he didn’t show. They don’t do anything, so I don’t know why I keep getting dates.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Icy come out of the bathroom. She came over with her hands on her hips doing her movie-star walk.

“Reesy, darling!”

“Yo, Icy!” I got up and she threw her arms around me and hugged me harder than I thought she could. “Let me look at you, girl.”

Icy stepped back and put her hands on her hips and turned around.

“Yo, you sure you’re nine or you’re nineteen?” I asked.

“What were you doing?” Icy asked, slipping into a chair at the table. “I bet you were playing video games.”

“I don’t think they have any video games in here,” I answered. “How long it take you to get up here?”

“We got the bus at twelve thirty,” Mom said. “But I bet it stopped in every little place that had a convenience store or a gas station. My back is killing me.”

“You should try riding the van all the way up here,” I said. “When I came up, the scenery was nice, though.”

“They got a school,” Mom said. “I saw it in the brochure. You learning much?”

“Learning I don’t want to be up here,” I said.

“We’re learning how to divide fractions in school,” Icy said.

“You going to summer school?” I asked.

“If I go to summer school, then I can get into Harlem Children’s Zone.” Icy squinched her eyes up and wiggled the way she does when she’s pleased with herself.

“They’re not taking you just because you got a half a dimple,” I said. “You got to have something in here.” I tapped her on the head.

“I got smarts going on,” she said. “And now that I heard the good news, you know I’m going to study hard.”

“What’s the good news?”

“Hillary Clinton is not going to be the president, so that leaves the door open for me to become the first woman president,” Icy said.

“They giving out GEDs?” Mom asked.

“You can take the course or you can apply for the tests,” I said.

“’Cause you know you got to be doing something with your life when you get out of here,” Mom said. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know it,” I said.

There were two other families in the room. One was a girl’s family and the other one I recognized as Play’s aunt and cousin.

“Did you look into any of the family programs they have?” Mom was still talking.

“Like what?”

“You’re just going to do your time and then slide on out to the streets again?” she asked.

“I’m going to school,” I said. “You don’t have any choice. Even if you have a high school diploma or a GED, you got to go to school unless you’re on some kind of medication where you can’t learn anything.”

“You can learn if you put your mind to it,” Mom went on. “If you don’t put your mind to it, then naturally you won’t learn anything. I don’t want you coming home and just hanging out….”

She was starting to drone on, talking about the value of education like she was inventing it or something. She came up to visit and she was sounding like a recording or a television commercial. I knew she didn’t care about what she was saying, either.

I checked out Icy and she was looking around, scoping what the inside of a jail was like. Jail wasn’t the visitors’ room and I knew Icy was getting the wrong impression, but I didn’t want to say nothing.

“…they have programs at the Family Resource Center down on Worth Street to help keep the family together when you get out.” Mom was still talking. “You know anything about them?”

“Not really,” I said. “They down there and I’m up here.”

“I left some papers for you to look at in the office,” she said. “They aren’t that hard to read.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Her skin was dull and her eyes were a little watery. I wondered if she was using again.

“So if you run for president, what’s going to be
your slogan?” I asked Icy.

“Okay, I got the whole thing figured out,” Icy said. “I’m going to tell everybody that they can get free food. In school we learned that the average family of four can be fed for seven thousand dollars per year, okay?”

“Go on.”

“I need you to write a letter for me,” Mom said.

“Let me finish telling him this, Mama,” Icy said.

“We can’t stay all day, girl!” Mom snapped at Icy.

“You just got here,” I said.

“I’m starting a new job tonight,” she said. “I’m going to be working as a waitress at Sylvia’s.”

Lie.

“What kind of letter?” I asked.

“Reese, I’m really worried about your brother,” she said. She put her hand on mine. “I think he’s running the streets too much. He’s either going to get himself killed or end up in jail.”

“He knows what he’s doing,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” Mom said. “In a way I think he’s looking up to you instead of the other way around. You’re in jail now, so he thinks it’s cool or something. I’m trying to get him to go into the army and do something with his life. Learn a trade or even make
a career of it. You know what I mean?”

“Plus he’ll get an enlistment bonus. The man told us,” Icy said.

“And he can use that for his college education when he gets out.” Mom shot Icy a glance.

“So you can feed a family for seven thousand dollars….” I looked back at Icy.

“Are you hearing me?” This from Mom.

“Yeah.”

“So I want you to write Willis a letter telling him that you think it’s a good idea for him to go into the army before he gets into trouble,” Mom said.

“Yeah.”

“No
yeah,”
she said. “Do it! I don’t want to see both of you in jail.”

“Okay, I’ll do it,” I said.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

Icy pointed it out to her, and she got up and walked away.

“What you thinking?” Icy asked me when Mom was going into the bathroom.

“Tell me about your campaign for president,” I said.

“You didn’t tell me what you were thinking,” Icy said.

“That’s ’cause you’re too ugly,” I said, tapping her on the wrist.

“Anyway…so there are a hundred and ten million families in the country. So to give them free food every year will cost us seven hundred seventy billion dollars. That sounds like a lot but it’s really not that much. If you’re in a war, you can spend that much in three years. So my campaign is that you give everybody free food for four years—”

“While you’re the president?”

“Yeah.”

I loved my sister’s smile.

“And then what?”

“Then they would be fed for four years, we couldn’t afford to pay for a war, and people could turn their attention to doing stuff for themselves and be happy.”

“Okay, you got my vote,” I said.

“Can you still vote if you go to jail?”

“Not while you’re in jail,” I said. “I don’t know, really.”

“How do you think Mom and I look?” Icy asked.

“You look fine,” I said.

Mom came back and said they had to go. “I don’t
want to mess this job up,” she said. “I figure if I’m making money and can help Willis, he won’t be stealing or anything.”

They weren’t there but a minute and then they were gone. If they hadn’t come at all, it would have been cool, but just to blow in like that and then blow out was hard.

“You headed back to the dayroom?” Wilson asked.

“Can I sit here a minute?” I asked him.

“Yeah.”

I sat for a while trying to think why I was feeling so bad. I was in the facility and I couldn’t go home and I was feeling lonely, but there was more to it. It was like I wasn’t connected with nothing in the friggin’ world. Nothing.

Play’s people were hugging him and I saw them leave. Then I watched some more people come in. Indian people. A man and a woman. They were kind of heavy and they sat in a corner. After a while Wilson came in with Toon. He went over and sat with the Indian people and they started in on him. Toon had his head down.

“Look at what you are doing! This is a disgrace!”
the woman was saying. “Look at where you are!”

I knew Toon felt bad. I felt bad for him. Parents were supposed to be loving us, not telling us about how we were disgracing them.

I looked up, saw Wilson near the door, and went over to him.

“Can I hang in the dayroom awhile?”

“Sure, man.”

We went out of the visitors’ room. I took my clothes off and he searched me for contraband. Then I dressed and went back to the dayroom. They were watching
Cops
on television.

Her name tag read Karen Williams, but all the guys were checking out the short skirt the woman was wearing. On the blackboard behind her she had written “Exit Strategy” in big letters.

“So, who knows what an exit strategy is?” she asked.

“That’s how to get out of here,” Play said.

“It’s how to get out of here in a way that means you won’t be coming back,” Miss Williams said. “Or does anybody here want to come back?”

Nobody answered the lame question.

“One of the things you want to have in hand is either a GED or a head start in taking the GED exam,” she went on. “Employers want to see what
you have accomplished in life, and one way of showing them is to have your GED.”

“What they know most from that is that you didn’t finish regular high school,” Diego said. “That puts you on a whole different level than kids who finish high school with a regular diploma.”

“I think it shows initiative and a willingness to work,” Miss Williams said.

“But they know you ain’t in the top set,” Play said. “If I was going for a job, I wouldn’t be waving my GED in front of anybody unless they asked me for it. And what they mostly ask you is if you’ve been arrested or anything.”

“Which is illegal,” Miss Williams said. “They can’t ask you if you’ve been arrested, and if they did ask, you don’t have to answer. Did you know that?”

“Did you know that if you don’t answer, they won’t hire you?” Play said. “And if you go and make a complaint, all they got to say is that they were thinking about hiring you in a job that handles money and you had to be bonded. Then they can ask you anything they want.”

“A lot of what you’re saying is true, but that’s why we have courts, to fight abuses,” Miss Williams said.
She had her legs crossed and we all took a look. Not bad.

“So you got your GED,” Diego said. “Then they’re going to want to know what you’ve been doing for the last year. You tell them that you’ve been in church, see—”

“Redecorating the confession box,” Leon said. “Putting in a tile floor like they do on television.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Diego went on. “Then your probation officer gives them a call to see how you doing. Or he comes around with a little cup for you to pee in. Then the job is gone because everybody knows where you’ve been.”

“Okay, a lot of what you’re saying is true,” Miss Williams said. “On the other hand, if you show up with no high school diploma, and no GED, how does that help?”

“At least you won’t be disappointed when they turn you down,” Leon said.

Some of the guys laughed. I looked over at Toon. He wasn’t laughing.

Miss Williams kept on talking but it wasn’t coming through. What all the guys knew was that there was a world on the outside and we didn’t belong in it.
Maybe we could get over once in a while, but we really didn’t fit in.

When the session was over, Miss Williams handed out a form that listed all of the papers we were supposed to have once we got out. That was cool, because whenever you go someplace, you have to start all over again or they turn you down for something because you don’t have the right papers.

The right papers didn’t mean anything. You were still yourself in your own black skin and you couldn’t sound like some white dude or some la-dee-da black dude who was heavy into what was going down with education or being middle class.

My moms had left the papers for me to sign, but when I took them to Mr. Cintron and he was telling me how cool the family program was, I saw that she could get some money from it and figured that’s all she really wanted. That’s what I thought. And Icy had given me the 411 on Willis going into the army. The enlistment bonus. If he got that, Mom would try to con him out of it. That’s what she was about.

I wondered if she had been different at one time. Maybe she even thought about being the first woman president. And then, maybe, things just
started happening that turned her around. I felt for her, but I wished she was stronger, someone that me and Willis and especially Icy could depend on.

After group skills we went to the B wing to get our teeth checked. While we were waiting, we sat with some new guys and one girl. The orientation flick was on television. The new kids were looking at the TV screen, but out of the corners of their eyes they were checking us out. I saw Diego trying to look hard.

Diego, in my mind, was a punk. But his head was so messed up that he was a dangerous punk. Every morning between breakfast and school he was on the med line. I had seen a lot of the guys do that, but I couldn’t figure out how they knew who needed the pills. The nurse gave them one or two pills in a small cup, and another cup filled with water. They took the pills and then drank the water. Then she made them stick their tongues out and move them around so she could make sure they swallowed the pills.