Prison Baby

Author:Deborah Jiang-Stein [Stein, Deborah Jiang]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-9811-0
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2014-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FULL CIRCLE

“OUR MOST FAMOUS HISTORICAL INMATES INCLUDE Billie Holiday, Tokyo Rose, Squeaky Fromme,” the officer notes as we cross the prison complex. She launches into an impromptu history of the place. “No metal fences surround the camp, just a hundred rural acres, a natural barrier of rolling West Virginia hills.”

Come back, I tell myself. I can’t ground my body in the present. Come back. I need to focus. I want—need—to savor my return home, remember every second of what took a lifetime to find.

“Are you okay?” the officer asks.

I shut my eyelids for a minute, desperate to shake off the sensation and keep this weirdness to myself.

But the time distortion wins. We’re now in an empty basement room in another building the same compact size as the Riverview Gas Station down the hill. Déjà vu flashes through me, along with a dizzy spell, and sensory memory kicks in like a full orchestra inside. About to pass out, I press the palm of my hand against the door to brace myself. Faded-green paint chips tumble to the ground from the pressure of my hand.

“This paint,” the officer says, “it’s the same since your birth here, never painted, same since the prison first opened. This is where we used to release sheets of paper for letters and envelopes to prisoners. Your mom must’ve carried you in here every day.”

The air tastes like warmed mold. I hang on to the officer’s words, inhale the prison, this landscape I’d shared with my mom, a bond of perfection I’d created in my mind. But for how long?

My breath races faster. Don’t let her see. I try to hide the heave of my shoulders so the officer won’t notice them rise and fall. I don’t want anyone to witness my feelings yet, for sure not a stranger, an authority figure. Fast-paced everything: heartbeatbreathvision, one blur of sensation. I’m like a trapped animal set free.

“Up there,” the officer points to the ceiling, its faded white paint now chipped and speckled. “That’s the chapel. Service every Wednesday and Sunday. You might have attended church with your mom. They baptized you here I’m sure.”

Baptized? I was raised in a Jewish family and I’ve been baptized!

Jewish mysticism speaks about two powerful muscles in the brain: memory and imagination. But what about the pocket in between, where memory reaches out to imagination but can’t quite connect? All my life I stored my prison-birth secret in this pocket to hide it from myself and from the world.

The dank, chipped-paint basement beneath the prison chapel pitches me into this brain space. Silence all around except in my head, I’m transplanted back in time, to a Baptist service and the reverberations of a chapel full of women. Hands clap, women sing spirituals, feet stomp. I’m desperate—is this my imagination or a memory revived?

We cross the compound again, towards another corner of the prison.

Then something doesn’t fit. What about all those times they sent her to solitary confinement? My prison mom couldn’t have kept me with her in the Hole.

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