Stolen Life (53 page)

S
NOW FALLING
, lying flat outside my window. It’s not real snow, it’s just bits of white falling, a white space, and then a stone wall beyond my barred window. No rocks, no trees, no stubble or grass like there should be sticking out of it. And there is never darkness inside these walls, only floodlights all the time, lights brighter than ever with snow blinding the sky. I haven’t seen stars for months. I came in spring, the end of April sometime, to the Kingston Prison for Women, and there must have been summer too, and fall, and now my first Christmas in Ontario has come, 1991. And snow is falling.

I have lots of time to watch it drift down against the grey limestone-concrete walls that go up into black. There is something black over me, like a huge trapdoor—and I can’t move it. It’s not my sentence, I can feel that in the hard walls around me, but something black made blacker by the sharp line of endless lights.

No one is allowed into the prison yard at night. If I serve my full sentence in P4W, I will possibly not see a star in the sky until 2014.

I work every morning as a general service barrier cleaner: I swab down the floors, doors, and bars with cleaner, and for two hours in the afternoon I go to school, writing and math. My nights are long, but also short-lived, and the nightmares that woke Dwa beside me in Wetaskiwin are beginning to come again. My bed here is made of steel, with a thin mattress.

I’m glad I’m not on the range any more. The range cells are like cages, six feet by nine; you can hardly turn around and you
face tall windows across a wide corridor and can’t see anything coming unless you angle a hand mirror—if you’ve got one—through the bars of your door. In the newer wings (they had to add these because more women are being sentenced to longer terms in Canada), the cells open onto an inner corridor and each cell has its own outside window. Mine faces a wall, but a small pane in it opens and a little real air can come in. The ranges are noisier, nastier—yells and shouting really echo around stone and steel—but I’m here for life, so after four months of range they placed me in the Wing, where it’s quiet, and private.

That’s funny—how private I am, will be—hardly funny. I’m one for the record books: the only Native woman in Canada currently serving a twenty-five-year sentence for first-degree murder.

Two women near me are together, getting involved with each other. I can hear them tonight louder than usual. A place like this breeds a new kind of woman; they’re driven to anything, maybe as a last-ditch try to hold onto humanness. An act of sex may be the only free relationship you can have in here, and I don’t know, when will it be my turn? I don’t want that. But it’s a reality behind bars, so it’s acceptable; it’s more or less expected. The women here have to find a new way of thinking, to live; they fear to act human, but who knows what that means in here, and so some keep trying. The guards can hear and see them of course, but do nothing. If they listen, it’s just to tell each other ugly stories, and laugh.

Older women lifers usually have photo albums: of the years—family, friends, places—before, and then the years inside. They literally age before you in the seconds it takes to riffle through the pages, a reality they never talk about. I have no mirror hanging in my cell, because prison time lies so heavy on the mind and spirit I can see my age in the face of everyone around me. Women age faster in prison than men. A woman’s body is made differently, and it deals with doing time differently. If you imprison what women are, what they were created for, they age very fast. Especially their sensuality and tenderness, their warmth; the world slots women into a certain kind of sexuality, and prison forces
that to the extreme; a woman walking out of prison is a shell of woman, mother, lover, whatever it is to be female.

Men in prison worry about getting laid when they get out; women worry if they’ll ever be loved again. Or capable of giving it. Many men pump so much iron they look better—like Leon, and with his hair cut—when they come out than when they went in. They’ll say, “When I get out I’m gonna fuck everything that moves.” and with men that’s permitted, they expect it of each other. They expect to go back to their woman, or find another one, who’s cared for their kids, who’ll care for them—but women can never expect that. If a woman has borne children, they’ll have been adopted away into foster homes; if she screws around like men do she’s just a whore, and worse than any because she’s done heavy time. A woman on parole can’t run wild like a man because her children will suffer. Men generally don’t care about their kids, in fact a lot of men brag they don’t even know how many kids they have, leave alone where they are. Who cares—some woman, somewhere, is taking care of them.

A woman in prison can never think of her children that way. Her soul is full of grief and guilt towards them—are they suffering abuse, like she suffered it?—to keep insanity at bay she has to shut down. She’s isolated, no lover, no motherhood. She ages fast into something dry; hard; shrivelled.

The reality of sex in a prison is, I think, very different for women than for men. There are, of course, homosexual people in both kinds of prisons, but beyond them, for male inmates sex is often connected with power games, protection, lust, dominance. For women it is more often a matter of loneliness, a need for affection, of feeling worthless. Women are the caregivers in any family; intimacy and tenderness is how they understand themselves, and when they’re cut off from everyone they know in the completely controlled space of a prison, they mostly feel like less than nothing.

A prison for women breeds confusion, there’s so much nothing to hold on to, and when you have lockdown, as they often do to us for any reason, which they may explain or may not—and you never know for how long, nobody knows—you just sit in
your cell, alone, perhaps twenty-four hours after twenty-four hours. That’s when you feel the years your arms have already been and continue to be empty.

And yet, I can’t remember when in prison—I’ve been in over two years straight—when I’ve had the heart and body release of a good, complete cry. Sometimes there’s a small sound, my nose runs, but whatever comes out is anger; it builds up, so I hold myself down, and I wake up with my pillow wet. Tears shed but useless. The door slams on my cell—I call it my house, with a note on the bars which says “Don’t shake my cage.” The door slams on my mind. What can a person think for twenty-five years?

By law they must keep our bodies alive in here, but what will we be when we’re released? The human need for kindness, grace—it’s impossible in prison. How can you ask for pity? All you do is try to shut down. Solitary is nowhere but inside your own head; and finally you really end up in there: your head only. I told an older girl cousin once what my grandfather was doing to me in Butte when I was four years old, but I didn’t remember exactly what all he did, only that Mom kicked old “Fightin’ Louie” Johnson out of the house as soon as she found out how he made me play with him for candy. And I remember once when I was even younger than four, I think, when I was tied to someone in a “sixty-nine” position, my ankles tied to this other person’s wrists and my wrists to the other person’s ankles. I don’t remember doing anything, but now I recognize it as arousal. I cannot help but think. It lives on inside my head.

I found one good thing in P4W one day last summer: I sang in the winds of a rain. I was working on the yard crew—I love digging in the ground and making things grow in neat rows—and it began pouring rain. The rain cleaned the dirt of this place off of me, I wanted to ride the wind, I sang and wanted to fly with the storm.

I want to die, but not in here. Here there is pettiness, only pain is normal, love is one woman sucking another. God be merciful and let me die in my sleep. But not here.

My big brother Earl died in jail. He was in our home town, but every member of his family was far away too—Leon in jail and the rest of us in Saskatchewan. Earl told me when I was a child that I did not have to let people touch me.

Why did I once think, when a man has an erection, he’s in pain? That it’s my duty to help him relieve it? Any male looks at you, he wants sex? As I grew older I tried to get something out of sex for myself, I tried to tell myself I’m sexy—hey, look at these lo-ong legs!—but I knew I never was. I try to look back, and I can’t remember any sober sex. I was too busy having to perform and I knew I could never handle it without liquor. I became more confused, numb. And I found men never seem to care anyway, as long as their lust is relieved, all that bulging, prodding pain.

My lifetime of doing what others demanded of me—if I couldn’t stay out of their way. Except with my kids; and if only Dwa and I could have been together a little longer; a little while without booze. But I was hurting in ways I could not remember, then Leon came after me. Now I’m here, and Dwa is serving his ten years in Collins Bay Institution down the road. He got himself transferred from Alberta to Ontario so at least one person in my family would be closer to me. So we could try to stay together.

I don’t know if Dwa and I stand a chance. I’ll have a visit with him in the Little House in the prison yard, two or three days every two months, if we set it up right, but so far he’s said he doesn’t want to marry me, not in prison. I was trying to tell him of my first attack, and I was so emotionally drained I mostly wasted our few days together, I slept from three in the afternoon till three in the morning. I wonder if I’ll make it through this, if Dwa has any miracle to help me, if my life can include my kids or if I’ll have to teach myself to let them go. See them once a year on visits, as long as they can come, and let them grow up in the foster home where they are now. I won’t go back to the Parenting Skills class they give here; it’s mostly designed for short-term inmates and just frustrates me to hell. The first thing they take from you here is your motherhood, and by the time you’re brainwashed enough to suit them, you’re not even a woman. You’re washed out, empty clothes walking past.

I sleep too much. But it’s never enough anyway to make time move.

The “sugar shack” is what I call the Little House in the prison yard. Dwa and I have had a few three-day visits there now. I’m finally beginning to feel loved again, and comfortable with him. He’s the same man I’ve known over ten years, but different, strange. We talk about more things, each other’s needs. Even sexual, and we never really talked of sex before, just did it. When you’re locked in prison, he says, you learn to think of women not only in a sexual way. Given the way other guys behave in prison, I didn’t expect him to say that; he looks at me now as the one who bore him children, the greatness of women who are mothers, lovers, caregivers, giftgivers, sisters, aunties, grandmothers. In prison, he says, men can see life through a woman or learn to hate them forever, turned and twisted inside. The body reacts on its own, out of its nature, and a person’s sexuality gets very tested when you are forced to abstain.