She looked at me suspiciously. “What do you know about plea bargains and rehab? And how can someone like me who can’t afford a lawyer, how can I get into a rehab program? You think they grow on trees for poor people? The only rehab for someone like me is doing time.”
I sidestepped how I knew about things like plea bargains and concentrated on how she could find one of the few remaining publicly funded drug programs. The good programs have long waiting lists, of course. I wondered whether Solina was a serious addict who would promise reform to get out of prison time but not really try to quit: drugs were readily available in Coolis, as in many jails and prisons, and some of her more violent mood swings, with periods of agitated withdrawal, told me that Solina had found her way to an in–house crack supplier. But drafting a letter for her would give me something to do, besides shooting baskets and occasionally practicing my singing.
Solina was touchingly awed by the finished letter. We didn’t have access to computers or typewriters, but I printed it carefully for her on the cheap lined paper available in the commissary. She read it over and over, then took it down the hall to the cell where she spent most of her day and showed it to the group around the television. A number of inmates studied law books in the library and filed complaints and appeals for themselves or their friends, but most came to Coolis with such minimal literacy that they couldn’t put their learning into appropriate language.
The word of that letter and my special knowledge spread fast: over the weekend, women began visiting my cell with requests for letters—to the State’s Attorney or their public defender, to different welfare agencies, the children’s caseworkers, the employer, the husband or boyfriend. If I would write they would get me anything I wanted—cigarettes, reefer, coke, crack, I didn’t do drugs? Then alcohol, chocolate, or perfume.
If I didn’t accept payment I’d look like a patsy or a phony. I said I’d write a letter in exchange for fresh fruit or vegetables—much harder to come by in Coolis than drugs.
It was my letter–writing that really saved my hide in Coolis. The women I helped began constituting themselves into an informal set of watchdogs, warning me when trouble was lurking.
My letters also began to make it possible for me to ask questions about Nicola and the clothes shop.
38 Prisoners in Cell Block H
Whether you were in jail or prison, if you were at Coolis for more than two weeks you had to work. A woman lieutenant named Dockery, who was strict but considered fair by most of the inmates, made up job rosters. The newest arrivals got kitchen or cleaning duty, the lowest paid and least popular. Kitchen duty, as far as I could make out, had to be the worst, working with grease and heat and heavy pots, but cleaning the showers and other common rooms would come a close second.
The most coveted jobs were in telemarketing and hotel reservations. The pay was the best and you didn’t have to lift anything heavy. But that kind of work only went to prison inmates. In management’s eyes, those of us in jail awaiting trial wouldn’t be around long enough to go through the training—or, more to the point, for our names to move to the top of the long waiting list for the cushiest jobs.
Of course what I was most interested in was the clothes shop. When I was in line at the dining hall or working out in the rec room, or in my cell writing letters for women, I kept trying to find someone who worked there or who roomed with someone who worked there. Everyone had a different story about it, and no one wanted to work there.
“But I knew one woman, Nicola, she wrote her mom that the pay was really good,” I said one day in the rec room when several women were watching me shoot baskets.
They didn’t play themselves, but they were hoping someone who did play would show up—watching and betting on games was a popular pastime. One of the women asked who Nicola was.
“She was that girl from China who ran away,” one woman said.
“She wasn’t from China, it was some other place over there, like maybe Japan,” someone named Dolores chimed in.
“Philippines,” I suggested, jumping up for the ball as it banged off the rim. “I know her mother, and she said Nicola wrote she was really happy to have a job in the clothes shop.”
“Of course, if she wrote it in a letter home,” Dolores snorted. “They don’t let you say nothing bad about it, or it won’t get past the censors. One woman, she worked there, she was crying all the time, they treat you too rough there.”
The third woman said they only took foreign girls in the shop; they worked them to death and then brought in more foreign girls as replacements.
“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Dolores said. “They use foreign girls because they know foreigners won’t complain in case their children get deported.”
“Yes, but don’t you remember Monique? She was from Haiti, and she said the back room was foreign girls on death row. They’re all in segregation, and the CO’s bring them over in the morning in a locked van to work and then take them back at night.”