Riot Baby, page 5
She worries sometimes, whenever she gets onto the Q101, that she’s turning into one of the other women or the other men coming to visit friends, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, guardians, godparents, bullies, victims, community pillars, the man who sold their mother crack. That deadness of the face. That unthinking that attends the packing of goods and materials to make sure no contraband is being brought into the jail facility.
When Kev and Ella sit in the visiting area, across the table from each other, Ella breathes a slow sigh. One time, they’d brought her to a different room where glass separated them and Kev had been escorted to his place in chains, having been dubbed that morning a problem inmate. There were no bruises on his face, yet, nor any discernible limp, but the shuffle very obviously masked some sort of hurt. Maybe his ribs.
This time, there are no chains. They let him walk freely, and his arms, though they don’t swing far or wide, speak of that freedom.
He talks about parole, about watching guys get out, but doesn’t sound too excited about it, because it’ll be no different on the outside than on the inside and he’s got some years before he’s eligible. If he can stay out of trouble. No consorting with known felons; well, that means he can’t even get a ride from Melo or Prodigy or anyone else on the block. Has to report regularly to his PO, and most POs are assholes and maybe this one won’t even pick up his phone. Has to regularly report any change of address, etc., etc., etc.
Ella knows she should be excited for the possibility of him being let out, but she has Oscar Grant’s murder in Oakland playing in her head and wonders if she would have the wherewithal to film Kev’s death and upload it live. She doesn’t know what she would do; maybe it is safer for Kev in here. And suddenly the thought of him on the outside, where so much has happened without him, terrifies her.
* * *
It’s early in what’s going to become a much longer stay than I ever expected. But I pick up things quick, have to, because I come in smaller than most of the others, and I start out in the juvenile ward, RNDC, before I get starred up and end up sharing a cell and a chow hall with the older niggas.
This old head named Ricky is standing over me taking hits from a Capri Sun in between bites from a chocolate chip cookie while I take my shit, and I got the palm of my hand against my eye to try and push back the headache that’s making me go practically blind. I can’t hear what Ricky’s saying, only the mosquito-buzz of this nigga’s incessant storytelling and supposed wisdom, and he says something about how jail sentences beget more jail sentences, and you’re only supposed to be in Rikers for short sentences or pretrial and it’s mostly niggas that can’t afford bail here and something about making poverty illegal, and I wanna tell him to shut the fuck up with the voice I used to use in Harlem, the loud, commanding, brimming-with-violence voice. I have a different voice in here. I ask questions like “We have a problem?” or “Nigga, you good?” and I can mean “Do you need help?” or “You want me to fuck you up?” and it’s like gang finger-shakes how people here immediately know the difference.
“Rick,” I whisper. “Please, be quiet.”
The headache lets up a little, but then I get dizzy, and I worry I’m gonna fall off this toilet with my jumpsuit around my ankles and my ass out in the air, and it’s gonna be a wrap for me because Ricky here, or whoever, isn’t gonna mind a little shit-dick. Ricky starts humming what sounds like an old Negro spiritual, a prison song, and I close my eyes tighter, and suddenly, I can feel Louisiana beneath me. A rush of color and sound and smell, then it’s all gone. Headache and everything.
Whispers skip down the line of cells, and I finish my shit, wipe, and go to the bars to see niggas twisting their fingers and notes getting passed. Shit.
Under my bed are a bunch of National Geographic magazines. I pull them out with a roll of duct tape and start taping the issues around my torso. Ricky’s got this sad look in his eyes, and I just tell him, without turning all the way around, “Stay in your cell for rec.” And I see suddenly past his look and into the mess of feelings wrestling behind his eyes, his sorrow that this is now a Young Man’s Game, that he has aged out of the everyday chaos of incarceration, gratefulness that this guy, Kev, NYSID Number 25768192Y, is looking out for him, wants to keep him safe, then the hard joy that comes with dodging the violence, a sort of glowing peace.
Out in the yard, we cluster. Eight by the pull-up bars, four on the basketball court, nine by the benches. One of the prisoners by the bench puts a leg up on the seat to mime tying his shoe and pulls out a homemade shank.
My group rushes them, and I feel nothing.
Rusty metal breaking jawline, fists smashing cheekbones and cracking ribs, someone getting a boot print stomped into their chest. It’s gravity that smashes us together, and then we turn into electrons being flung apart by stuff larger than ourselves. It’s all physics. The wild, swinging punches, the crumpling. The thwap of knuckles beating soft flesh, the dust rising to cover us, but unable to muffle the squawk of walkie-talkies and the foomp of the first gas canister being launched, and the coughing. The blood-rich coughing. All of this has the air of inevitability in it.
Burning takes my eyes and my face as I prowl for the rest of the fight, the tangle of bodies to get lost in. Someone’s blood has already crusted on my knuckles.
“Get the fuck on the ground!”
I ignore the command, because that’s how this is supposed to go.
The first volts seize through me, and I prepare to go down, but then I hear bones cracking. Through the smoke, the CO flying through the air to land on the ground somewhere in the distance. The earth rumbles beneath me, like it’s getting ready to swallow me up. A crater forms. Then more and more craters form, and COs are shouting and screaming, then I hear the rubber bullets. More gas canisters. Then, eventually, darkness.
When I wake up, I’m naked in a single-man cell with a yellow piece of paper on my chest. There’s a blue jumpsuit at the end of the green mat. The place still smells like the last three guys who got thrown here in AdSeg. Through the aching, I work my way into the jumpsuit, then, finally, pick up the paper to read it: “This prisoner is unmanageable in G.P. Loss of all privileges. No TV, no books, no sheets, no hygiene products, twenty-four-hour watch.”
I’m in solitary.
I try to think about the last parts of the riot, the sound of the ground getting pushed in, breaking against itself, the CO flying through the air, arms swimming, before landing on his back and not getting up. If I can only regulate my breathing, I’ll be all right. I just have to stay calm, but, because that’s not how this is supposed to go, my headache is back.
My nose has been bleeding.
* * *
Ella has the rice and beans steaming in two plates, ready for Mama when she comes home from the hospital still in her scrubs. Mama never seems tired coming back from an overnight shift. She has never fallen asleep on the subway, stays alert all through the trek home, always takes the stairs, and keeps her eyes open all through the meal. And Ella wonders once again at her strength. She had tried once to massage calm and peace into her mother’s mind, ease her into sleep, but Mama had shot back with a curt “Don’t do that,” before going to sleep on her own.
Mama takes her seat now in the kitchen and lets out a sigh. “Thank you for cleaning the bathroom.”
Ella smiles. It’s the least she can do, clean the place while Mama’s at work, but Ella knows that Mama says these things because she knows Ella needs sometimes to feel useful. “You workin’ again tonight?”
“Mmhmm,” Mama says around a mouthful of beans.
“Do you wanna do something when you have a night off? See a movie or something?”
Mama looks up, then frowns. Silence stills the air between them. Mama puts down her fork. “What’s in those boxes, Ella?”
Ella looks behind her, feigning surprise, at the shoe-boxes. When she turns back, she can’t look Mama in the face. “I just thought, you know, if you needed the money—”
“Where’d that money come from?”
Ella wants to snap at her, bark that she has a Thing that nobody else has, a gift that she can use and that all her life, she’s been giving and giving and giving and now why not take something somebody’s not gonna miss and it’s not like she took it all from one person or even like she’s robbing anyone they know. Ella wants to spit the words out, that she’s tired of skimming, of snatching food from supermarkets or making toilet paper vanish off bodega shelves. She can destroy an entire building, she can plumb the depths of any person’s mind and find their worries and their wants and she can twist them. She can make things fly. “Why don’t you want it?” It comes out as a hiss.
“I don’t need it.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Ella, I don’t need this.” She’s standing now, palms heavy on the table, arms shivering with the weight.
“Mama,” she growls. And in her mind, scenes replay. The chaos of the trauma ward, blood-slick tile floors that oiled gurney wheels squeak over, commands issued over the body of a man bleeding out from his gunshot wounds, Mama at the trauma surgeon’s side as the team opens up the patient’s abdomen, the gape the size of a basketball, Mama later sopping up the stomach acid leaking from the exposed intestines with gauze, then hooking the man up to a machine that sucks the acid out; Mama opening the door to another patient’s room to see two hulking men in T-shirts and shorts looming over the bed, Mama thinking they’re family. Then the men jumping back and telling her they’re plainclothes cops and this patient’s the suspected shooter. Mama wishing they’d leave the boy alone for just a little bit, not interrogate him and get ready to lock him up while the vertical incision from just below his nipple to his belly button was still fresh, while the kid was still reeling with just having had his kidneys removed and his spleen and part of his stomach, while the kid lies there as raw and open as the wound they can’t yet stitch back together. And how could Mama not want to leave all that behind?
“It’s wrong, Ella. And I don’t need wrong in this house.”
“You could buy a new one.”
Ella stands, snatches her jacket off the back of her chair, and leaves without another word. Outside, she lets visions wash over her. Of Mama attending to a little black boy shot in the arm, Mama assisting the surgeon as the surgeon massages the heart back to life. Then that same little black boy, not even six months older, back with a gunshot wound to his upper arm, his brachial artery almost bleeding out, almost dying again, then the boy before Mama’s eyes for a third time, shot in the head. Dead.
She’s halfway up the block to a nearby park when she stops. She can’t let herself get this angry. Not again. A couple deep breaths later, she heads back and is at the door again, but it opens without her key. Which means Mama never locked it.
“Mama?” Her “I’m sorry” dies on her lips.
Mama lies on the floor, her legs tangled beneath her, her arms splayed out, limp. Urgency radiates from her body. Even before Ella rushes to her side and fumblingly checks to see if she’s breathing and thanks God that she is and calls for an ambulance and helps them get Mama into the back without even bothering to hide the shoe boxes, crumpled and conspicuous, in their kitchen, even before getting to the hospital where she’ll watch over Mama as she recovers from what she’ll tell Ella was “just a fall,” Ella knows that as long as Mama’s alive, she can’t ever let herself get that angry again.
“I’m not leaving,” she says at Mama’s bedside. “Mama, I’m not leaving.”
Eyes closed, Mama squeezes Ella’s hand. Ella knows she should be thankful, but she can’t get herself all the way there, because she knows the only reason Mama’s squeezing her hand is because she knows Ella needs sometimes to feel useful.
* * *
“Have you ever been to a rodeo?” Kev asks. There’s quiet eagerness in his voice the next visit, a thin, fast-moving river. “You know. Horses, bulls?”
“No,” Ella manages behind her smirk. It’s good to see Kev animated like this. For a time, after his stint in solitary, he didn’t say much. Some visits, he said nothing, and it was always a tiny miracle that he took her visits to begin with. He could just as easily have refused. Or been denied.
“They had rodeos at the prison where I was held before they transferred me up here.” As he speaks, he does not look at Ella; he seems to look everywhere else, at the COs who walk alone or in pairs throughout the visiting room or along the hallways seen through the smudged glass of the entrance and exit doors or at the dust motes that, to Ella, would occasionally swirl to mimic the features of someone’s face, a loved one’s, an enemy’s, a passing stranger’s. “You know how it is down there. They couldn’t do it to slaves anymore, so they put collars around our necks and did it to us. Field niggas. Just hoein’ away. Pretty much picking cotton.” At her knee. “The sheriffs sit on horses with their shotguns at their shoulder.” At the floor. “The Passage.” Out the window. “And you got a lotta niggas locked up for petty shit. Larceny, that sort of thing. Property crimes.” At her. “They called it Angola. In case you forgot it all comes back to Africa.” Which makes Ella breathe a nervous chuckle.
Underneath the table, Kev shifts one of his pant legs up, touches the skin of his ankle to the skin of Ella’s.
Ella does not have to close her eyes to see what Kev sees; the vision, the memories, the past as he remembers it, all of it bleeds slowly then with increasing volume into Ella’s brain, as though a cord were connecting his mind to hers. It begins with sights: children dressed in Polo shirts and jeans and dresses with golden and brown and black hair, smiling or frowning or laughing with their blue, green, brown, black, morning-colored eyes in the front row of the stadium; the striped prison uniform; the black and white of one prisoner’s shirt as he stoops down, nappy hair shorn close to his skull, and pulls out a handful of identical shirts, stripes spraying in all directions, patterning him and the ground around him; other prisoners, elderly ones aged too quickly by what prison does to a person, their striped shirts tucked into stone-washed blue jeans, which are, in turn, tucked into knee-high leather boots. Then the sounds: the shimmering of a melody from the merry-go-round on the prison grounds, the hum of chatter between the incarcerated selling wares they had crafted in their workshops, magical and shining things, and the free folk who hold up those glimmering belt buckles to the light or who turn over the intricately detailed wood carvings in their fingers or who marvel at the necklace of beads held together by near-invisible thread, the creaking of a metal fence on which leans the chest of an inmate, her arms and tattooed hands dangling over, one of them bandaged and wrapped in gauze up past the wrist. Then the smells: the bull shit in the holding pens, the sweat-stink of prisoners unable to ask the air to press moisture into the skin, God unwilling to answer that prayer, sitting or standing motionless in their cages in the thick wool of their striped gowns and striped shirts; the perfume wafting off the girl whose long blond hair comes down in smooth threads to the small of her back, her face shaded by a large black cowboy hat, a black button-down shirt clinging to a shapely frame, tucked into tight jeans that raise her ass as she walks. Miss Rodeo Louisiana, making the rounds, waving to the families in the stands, waltzing past the cages that hold prisoners rendered hideous by the climate and their captivity.
“They had us stand in a circle in the middle of the ring,” Kev says. “Only the well-behaved got to do this part. We got to wear special rodeo outfits, the white shirts with the blue triangles on the shoulders and everything, tassels, glitter, all of it. We held hands around four prisoners who held up flags, America’s, Louisiana’s state flag, a Confederate flag, and one other one I never figured out, Aryan Nation or something. And one of us sang the National Anthem over the speakers, then afterward, we bowed our heads and a minister came and said a prayer over the loudspeakers. Everyone had their eyes closed and their heads bowed, everyone in the stands.”
The described world overwhelms Ella, all of its texture and scent and color invading her through her own empathetic touch, funneling into that space between her ears. She can see it all. She can feel, smell, taste, hear it all: four inmates, two of them with their silver hair in rattails, one of them with nappy hair and octogenarian eyes, one of them barely having finished being a child, their feet digging into the dirt, their legs bent slightly at the knees, hands open, fingers flexing, in a posture of readiness, attack, defense, toes light against the inner rims of the pink hula hoops at their feet. The gate clangs open and thundering toward them is the bull, eyes trained on the small coterie of collared prisoners, horns lowered, legs pumping, muscles rippling, dirt flecking its flanks, its hooves thudding against recently turned dirt and the compacted subsoil beneath. It flicks its head and one of the prisoners sails through the air, legs spread, a new gash torn through the side of his safety vest, his pain having pushed his face past contortion into an aspect of peace before he slams against the ground, body cracking in a way only he and the prisoners in the ring and Ella, who is there too, can hear. One of the others darts from the path of the bull while another manages to step aside with one foot, the other firmly planted, his whole bearing intent on winning, even as the bull’s skull crashes into another inmate. This one’s unable to breathe through newly broken ribs, grips the bull’s horns as tightly as can be managed, the bull throwing its head back and forth until the inmate’s grip slips. The bull rushes over him, crushing a leg and an arm before cruising toward that last prisoner. He sees he’s won the game of inmate pinball, runs for the edge of the ring and vaults to the top of the wall, just as the bull’s horns bong against the metal reinforcing the cushioned plastic.
Kev’s eyes are hot and glowing when Ella sees him again, across that table in the waiting room. He’s sweating, breathing heavily, smiling. Anguish pulls Ella’s heart into the floor. This is the other side of what solitary did to him. The agitation, the running straight into painful memories rather than barricading himself against them. Whatever destructive impulses propelled Kev that night of the attempted armed robbery now augmented by what twenty-three hours in a cell alone for six months will do to a man. Kev looks as though he is staring at the sun, intent on blindness.
