I told him the only tragedy is that I don’t see my babies nowhere. How come my babies weren’t in the courtroom? That’s what I wanted to know. I shouted it out. “How come they ain’t here?”
I was hoping somebody would be there, that Lara girl or somebody, but there was nobody at all.
The judge, he was black this time, he must’ve gone to Harvard or something. I thought he woulda understood, but niggers can be worse on niggers sometimes. I said to him, “Your Honor, can you get me my babies?
I just wanna see them once.” He shrugged and said the babies were in a good place. He never once looked me in the face. He said: “Describe to me exactly what happened.” And I said: “What happened is that I had a baby and then she had some babies of her own.” And he said, “No, no, no — with the assault.” And I said, “Oh, who the fuck cares a flying fuck about the fucking assault, god fucking damn it fuck me fuck you and fuck your wife.” Then my lawyer shut me up. The judge looked down over his glasses at me and sighed. He said something about Booker T. Washington, but I wasn’t listening too good. Finally, he said there was a specific request from a warden to put me in a penitentiary upstate. He said the word penitentiary like he was lording it over me. I said to him: “And fuck your parrot too, asshole.”
He snapped his gavel on the bench and that was that.
I tried to scratch their eyes out. They had to put me in restraint and bring me to the hospital wing. Then on the bus upstate they had to restrain me again. Even worse, they didn’t tell me they was going to move me from New York. I kept shouting out for the babies. Upstate woulda been okay, but Connecticut? I’m no country girl. They had a shrink meet me and then they gave me a yellow jumpsuit. You’d need a shrink for sure if you wanted to wear a yellow jumpsuit.
I was brought into an office and I told the shrink that I was real happy to be in suburban Connecticut. Real real happy. I said if she gave me a knife I’d show her just how happy. I’d trace it out on my wrist.
“Lock her up,” she said.
They give me pills. Orange ones. They watch them go down. Sometimes I can fake it and tuck one of them in the hole in the back of my teeth. Someday I’m going to take them all together like one great big delicious orange, and then I’ll reach up to the jolly pipe and say sayonara.
I don’t even know my cell mate’s name. She’s fat and wears green socks. I told her I’m gonna hang myself and all about the jolly pipe and she said, “Oh.” Then a few minutes later she said, “When?”
I guess that white woman, Lara, worked things out, or someone did, somehow, somewhere. I went down to the waiting room. The babies! The babies! The babies!
They were sitting there on the knee of a big black woman, long white gloves on her and a fancy red handbag, looking for all the world that she just woke up from the Lord’s bed.
Down I ran straight to the glass wall and stuck my hands in the bottom opening.
“Babies!” I said. “Little Jazzlyn! Janice!”
They didn’t know me. They were sitting on that woman’s lap, sucking their thumbs and looking over her shoulder. Like to broke my heart. They kept snuggling into her bosom, smiling. I kept saying, “Come to Grandma, come to Grandma, let me touch your hands.” That’s all you can do through the bottom of the glass — they got a few inches and you can touch someone’s hands. It’s cruel. I just wanted to hug on them. Still they wouldn’t budge — maybe it was the prison duds, I don’t know. The woman had a southern accent, but I knew her face from the projects, I seen her before. I always thought she was a square, used to stand in the elevator and turn away. She said she was rightly conflicted whether she should bring the babies in or not, but she heard I really wanted to see them and they were living in Poughkeepsie now with a nice house and a nice fence, and it wasn’t too far away. She’d been fostering them awhile now, she got them through the Bureau of Child Welfare, they had to spend a few days in a Seaman’s home or something like that, but now they were being well looked after, she told me, don’t you worry.
“Come to Grandma,” I said again.
Little Jazzlyn turned her face into the woman’s shoulder. Janice was sucking on her thumb. I noticed their necks were scrubbed clean. Their fingernails too were all perfect and round.
“Sorry,” she said, “I guess they’re just feeling shy.”
“They look good,” I said.
“They’re eating healthy.”
“Don’t feed them too much shit,” I said.
She looked at me a second from under her eyebrows, but she was cool, she was. She wasn’t about to say nothing about me cursing. I liked her for that. She wasn’t a stuck-up, she wasn’t making judgments.
We were silent awhile and then she said that the girls have got a nice room in a little house on a quiet street, much quieter than the projects, she painted the baseboards for them, they got wallpaper with umbrellas on it.
“What color?”
“Red,” she said.
“Good,” I said, because I didn’t want them having no pink parasols. “Come to Tillie and touch my hands,” I said again, but the babies never once got off her lap. I begged and begged but the more I begged, the more they turned towards her. I guess maybe the prison frightened them, the guards and all.
The woman gave a smile that pinched her face some and said it was time for them to get going. I wasn’t sure if I hated her or not. Sometimes my mind sways between good and bad. I wanted to lean across and smash the glass and grab her nappy hair, but then again, she was looking after my babies, they weren’t in some horrible orphanage, starving, and I could’ve kissed her for not giving them too many lollipops and rotting their teeth.
When the bell rang she held the babies across to kiss me, against the glass. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the smell of them coming in through the little slot at the bottom of the glass, so delicious. I poked my little finger through and little Janice touched it. It was like magic. I put my face against the glass again. They smelled like real babies, like powder and milk and all.
When I was walking back out the courtyard to the pen I felt like someone came and carved my heart out, then put it walking in front of me. That’s what I thought — there’s my heart going right out in front of me, all on its own, slick with blood.
I cried all night. I ain’t ashamed. I don’t want them working no stroll. Why did I do what I done to Jazzlyn? That’s the thing I’d like to know, Why did I do what I done?
What I hated the most: standing under the Deegan among all those splotches of pigeon shit on the ground. Just looking down and seeing them like they was my carpet. I flat-out hated that. I don’t want the babies to see that.
Corrie said there are a thousand reasons to live this life, each one of them fine, but I guess it didn’t do him no good now, did it?
My cell mate ratted me out. Said she was worried about me. But I don’t need no prison-house shrink just to tell me that I ain’t gonna be alive if I leave my feet dangling in the air. They pay her for that shit? I missed my calling. I coulda been a millionaire.
Here comes Tillie Henderson with the shrink hat on. You been a bad mother, Tillie, and you’re a shitass grandmother. Your own mother was shitty too. Now give me a hundred bucks, thank you, very good, next in line please, no I don’t take checks, cash only, please.
You’re manic-depressive and you’re manic-depressive too and you, you’re definitely manic-depressive, girl. And you over there in the corner, you’re just plain fucking depressive.