Tata got popped a few days after my seventeenth birthday. A week later, Officer Harris busted me, too.
I had a good lawyer, the one all the dealers used. I paid him twenty-five hundred dollars in cash, and he got me off with one year probation. But I was so hardheaded, I refused to check in with my probation officer after the first meeting. I didn’t like her attitude and the way she talked down to me like I was some kind of idiot. I didn’t tell my P.O. I wasn’t going to make my next appointment; I just didn’t show up. When the cops picked me up a few months later for violating my probation, I got sentenced to a year at Fulton County Jail.
It’s funny how fast things can change when you don’t even see it coming. One minute I was on top of the world, admiring a model home with marble countertops and crown molding in every room, thinking, I’m gonna live in a place like this. The next I’m behind bars, eating food that tasted like shit-covered cardboard, and thinking about all the ways I’d fucked up my life.
That was the worst thing about jail. There was nothing to do but think.
I couldn’t stop worrying about Tata. She got sent to juvenile detention for a year, but as soon as she got there she found out she was pregnant. She gave birth to her baby boy behind bars, and it was all my fault.
Mostly I stressed about my kids. I’d asked Derrick’s friend Slim and his wife Mary, who had three children of their own, to keep my babies while I was away. They were decent folks and I thought my kids would be okay. Nikia sounded fine when Slim put him on the phone. But every time I called the house to speak to Ashley, I could barely get her to talk. “You okay, baby?” I’d ask.
“Yes, ma’am,” is all she’d ever say. Her voice was so quiet, it sounded like she was talking to me from the bottom of a well.
Fulton County Jail was noisy and hotter than fish grease. We wore orange jumpsuits and shower slippers with our hair sticking up every which way from perm withdrawal. A lot of the inmates were mothers like me who did some dirt—like turning tricks, or holding dope for their boyfriends— to get money to take care of their kids. One girl was coming down off heroin. She spent two weeks puking her guts out. Another girl looked like a walking skeleton, covered in purple sores. “She got the AIDS,” my upstairs bunkee, Eva, whispered to me. “It’s like they just keeping her here to watch her die.”
It was depressing as hell. To make things worse, all anybody did was argue. I once spent an entire day listening to a girl named Jamilah arguing with her cellmate about whether some other chick named Rhonda deserved a beatdown for stealing the Jumbo Honey Bun Jamilah got at the commissary. I didn’t have time for petty bullshit and triflin’ hos. Instead I found the only two girls at Fulton County Jail who had something positive to talk about. Brenda and Eva became my only jailhouse friends.
Eva slept on the bunk above mine, but I knew her before, from Ashby Grove. She was eighteen, like me, but also a full-time crack addict and part-time prostitute. That’s how she got popped: trying to sell an undercover cop a five-dollar blow job. As much as I hated being locked up, to me it looked like jail had done Eva good. As my customer, she’d been skinny and twitchy. Without crack in her system, she had bright eyes, good skin, and a little meat on her bones.
“I gotta be real with you, Rabbit,” she said. “I feel like I got a new lease on life.” At night we’d lay in our bunks and Eva would sing to me until I fell asleep, Mariah, Janet, Whitney, whatever I requested. She had a beautiful voice. I thought for sure she could have been a professional backup singer if the crack hadn’t turned her into a ho instead.
Our friend Brenda was thirty-four, old enough to be our mama. But she wasn’t like any mama I’d ever seen; she was classy and educated. When I asked her how she got locked up, she waved her hand like she was shooing away a mosquito and said, “white collar.” I didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean. But Eva asked around and found out Brenda had been running a check-forging scam, using fake IDs and stolen checks to buy luxury items all over Atlanta. “She’s a baaaad bitch,” Eva said, impressed.
A lot of girls thought Brenda was uppity. But I liked the way she carried herself, with her head held high, like she didn’t belong behind bars with the rest of us. It was as if Dominique Deveraux from Dynasty had come to jail. Brenda had pretty hair she pulled up in a twist, long fingernails, and fake breasts that filled out her orange jumpsuit like two firm grapefruits.
I was so dazzled by Brenda’s bougie ways that I followed her around like a lost puppy. The only thing I hated was how she talked like a white girl. Not a regular white girl who works at McDonald’s, either. More fancy, like the ones who dress in all black and spray perfume in the cosmetic department at Macy’s. When she wanted me to repeat something, Brenda would say, “Pardon me?” It took a while before I figured out that pardon isn’t just when somebody lets you out of prison. It also means “huh?”
Brenda, Eva, and I spent all our time together, making each other laugh, complaining about the shitty food and talking about how much we missed our kids. The day I hit rock bottom, they were the ones who pulled me back up.
I worried about Nikia while I was locked up, but he was only three years old. As long as he had his collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I knew he’d be straight. It was Ashley who kept me up at night. She’d always been quiet, and she had the worst case of nerves I’d ever seen in a little kid. Before I got locked up, I used to wake up in the middle of the night and find her standing in my bedroom clutching her nightgown, telling me she had a dream that the two of us were standing on Ashby Grove and somebody blew my head off. The only way to get her to go back to sleep was to let her crawl into bed beside me.
The summer before I got put in jail, I’d been planning for Ashley’s first day at kindergarten. I’d picked out the perfect outfit at the mall: a white collared Polo shirt with matching Polo jeans and a little kid Falcons starter jacket. When I got sentenced, I told Derrick to make sure to bring the clothes, which were folded up neatly on the top shelf of my closet, over to Slim’s place. I knew from experience that next to jail the place with the highest concentration of trifling bitches was elementary school. Ashley was so timid, I was worried the girls at her new school would sense her weakness and make fun of her the way kids had teased me. That’s why she needed to look fresh. Nobody makes fun of the best-dressed girl in the class.