A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars by Cristina Rathbone

Author:Cristina Rathbone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Criminology, Penology, Women's Studies, Social Science, Fiction
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T04:33:54+00:00

APPETITES

CARMEN HADN’T HAD a visit from her family for eight months. She didn’t like to ask her brother to come all the way out to Framingham because she preferred he spend the time with her kids, whom he looked after. She had three sisters, but they didn’t get on. On the outside they’d lived with her for years, she said, not even trying to hide her bitterness. Now, because “I can’t give them nothing, they don’t come.”

But a man does. A moreno, she said, a black man. He was a friend of the husband of a friend of hers, and it was good that he came, she told me, because after almost six years at Framingham she needed to speak to someone who listened to her troubles. Besides, she confessed, she was looking for someone to take care of her when she got out. She had lost her apartment, as well as her children, when she was incarcerated, and if she wanted to go straight when she got out, her former network of friends and family would be of little use. As a citizen of El Salvador, Carmen also faced probable deportation at the end of her fifteen-year sentence—a fate she could avoid most easily by marrying an American.

Carmen was very nervous the first time Henry Charles came to visit her. “So nervous I was going to die,” she said. To begin with, they were awkward and formal with each other: lots of “Hello, how are you?” and “Very pleased to meet you” and not much else, as she speaks just a little English and he speaks no Spanish at all. By the end of the visit they were communicating better, though, and even at nine in the evening, after three hours in the visiting room, he didn’t want to leave. How sad he was to leave her here, he said.

“Señor Henry has something,” Carmen later told me in Spanish. “A very beautiful heart. He is an older man, sixty years old. But he looks good—you know, the black people don’t age so badly—and he’s a Christian man, so we have the same religion. God has a lot of power. For Him, nothing is impossible. I give thanks to Him, for example, that my daughters are good daughters even without me being around. No drugs, nothing. And now He sends me this man!

“Ay! But I suffered a lot with men,” Carmen said then, changing tone. “Many beatings, many cheatings, and I don’t want that. I want a gentle life, a peaceful life. This man is very sweet. He doesn’t love women on the street—they think only of cigarettes and beer, he says. But with me he is happy. With me he has a happiness in his face that he didn’t have before.”

Henry visited Carmen regularly all through the summer and into the fall. He always deposited some money in her account, twenty dollars, occasionally forty, to keep her fed, he said, and beautiful. He stayed until the very last minute every time, and after several months, he finally leaned across the table and kissed her.

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