Breathing Fire by Jaime Lowe

Author:Jaime Lowe [Lowe, Jaime]
Language: eng
Format: epub

9.

CARLA: CHOWCHILLA TO CHILDBIRTH

I hadn’t seen Carla since my visit to Malibu 13, when she told me about Shawna’s death. Carla’s baby was beautiful. When I met her, she was tiny, just a few weeks old. Carla’s boyfriend’s aunt had flown in from Mexico to help take care of her, and was holding her. Carla had been out for two years, and her life looked very different from the last time I saw her. She looked different too. In spite of having just given birth, Carla had carefully applied makeup—penciled-in brows, a subtle shade of brown lipstick, and long lashes. Her nails were hot pink and a tattoo of Hello Kitty poked out of the neckline of a striped top. I almost didn’t recognize her. That was the point of the orange outfits. That was the point of prison. No makeup, no deviation, no recognition of the individual. You were called an inmate, a body, you were given a number, and once you were on the inside, that’s how you were treated. But each woman I talked with—post-release, her entire appearance had changed. It was the difference between seeing a sick person and a healthy one.

Carla and her boyfriend, Miguel, lived in Little Rock, near Palmdale, with Miguel’s family, about ten miles south of Diana and the Trap. The main house was dark, in order to keep the rooms cool. Carla was out back in a smaller house with the AC on. Carla told me she was from Granada Hills and had paroled there in January 2017, about two years earlier. When she first got out, she felt like she was still in prison, still tethered to camp schedule. Carla would wake up at five, make her bed, tighten the corners, tuck in her shirt, drink coffee—she never drank coffee before camp. She’d do chores, tie some towels to a stick, and mop the floor. One morning, her mom caught her. “What are you doing?”

“Mopping.”

“We have a mop.”

Carla hadn’t realized she was doing anything out of the ordinary, tying towels to a busted stick. That’s how she mopped the barracks in Malibu. It’s how everyone mopped, as far as she knew. She had been incarcerated for only three years, but she was nineteen when her sentence started. More of her adult life had been spent in the system than out.

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