Behind the Chicken Wire: 5 Surprising Truths About the Secret Sociology of Prison Life

 

Mama Cat

My Fourth Prison Husband: Union Parish (Farmville), Part 6

Let me tell you something that might sound small but is not small at all.

After three years in prison, I sat down and took a private bathroom break for the first time.

Just me. A sheet hung across a doorway. No one watching, no one walking past, no one seeing me be a human being in the most basic possible way. I sat down and I did not have to perform being okay with the situation. I could just exist for a minute, by myself, in a body that was mine.

I cried a little. Or maybe I did not cry and it just felt like I was going to. I cannot fully explain what three years of no privacy does to a person except to tell you that a sheet hanging in a doorway felt like freedom.

They called it the boom-boom room. I called it a miracle.

Welcome to Farmville.

* * *

I Did Not Want to Be a Trustee

Union Parish Detention Center. They call it Farmville, after the town—Farmerville, Louisiana, smaller than Claiborne, mostly country Black people, open dormitory style, and the first place I had ever been that was run by a Black warden.

I want to be clear about who I was when I arrived at Farmville: I was not the same person who had walked into Catahoula or Claiborne with a hustle in my step and a plan for how to make myself comfortable. The six months in the hole at Claiborne had rearranged something in me. I had lost weight. I had lost the bounce in me that made people want to be around me. I did not trust anybody in any position of authority, not one single person, and I was not interested in pretending otherwise.

So when the administration asked if I wanted to be a trustee again—same kind of deal I had at Claiborne, same kind of access and movement and privilege—I said no.

“Put me in general population.” I said it flat. I meant it flat. I had done what being a trustee could do for a person, and I had also seen what being a trustee could cost. No thank you.

The only thing I arrived with that worked in my favor was a piece of paper. The nurses at Claiborne had put it in my medical file: bottom bunk required. A back issue, they had written. I did not have a back issue, but I had learned by then that having the right paperwork mattered more than having the right truth. Wherever I went after Claiborne, I would always have a bottom bunk. The system said so.

I walked into my unit at Farmville and the first thing that happened was somebody had to move so I could have that bottom bunk. There was some grumbling. A slim man growing out his hair was annoyed and not quiet about it. My homeboy—an older New Orleans man they called Cake Batter, which I never asked about, some names you just accept—stepped in immediately.

“You better stop on that arrow before she knock you out and take your dick.” This is what he said to the man complaining about giving up his bunk. To me he said: “Shakie, you can have mine.”

I took his bunk. The slim man went to the top. I looked around at my new home.

Farmville was going to be different. I could feel it.

* * *

The Boom-Boom Room

Most prisons have nowhere to be alone. At Elayn Hunt, there had been cells, but the cells were full and you were never not visible to someone. At Catahoula, there had been dorms. At Claiborne there had been dorms. Always other people, always eyes, always the feeling of being in the center of a stage you did not audition for.

Farmville had something I had never seen in any of those places.

Along one wall was a section with a toilet, and someone, at some point, had started hanging a sheet across the opening. Behind that sheet you could not be seen. You could sit down, do what you needed to do, breathe, think, have a single unobserved moment in a life that was otherwise entirely public.

They called it the boom-boom room. The name was ridiculous and it did not matter.

My first night there, a man named Be Rock—I am going to call him that, though his name changed a few times in my memory—who had been placed next to my bunk introduced himself and then, like he was giving me a tour of a luxury property, said: “Come let me show you the boom-boom room.”

He pulled the sheet back and showed me a toilet. He said: “You can really handle your business in peace in there.”

I went in. I pulled the sheet. I sat down.

Three years. Three years of being watched, of having no corner to turn to, no door to close, no moment to collect myself in private. I had adapted to it, the way you adapt to things when you have no choice, but adaptation is not the same as acceptance. Some part of me had been waiting, the entire time, for this.

I took the longest, most peaceful, most spiritually significant bathroom break of my life.

If you have never been incarcerated, you may think I am exaggerating. I am not. When you go to prison, you really do forget about the little things: privacy, quiet, the ability to be human for a moment without an audience. The boom-boom room at Farmville was the first time in three years those things came back to me. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

* * *

How Farmville Ran

I need you to understand the economy of Farmville before I can tell you the love story, because one fed the other.

Farmville ran on cell phones. Not secretly, not carefully—openly. Flip phones everywhere. People talking, people making moves, people doing business. The prison rules about phones were the same as anywhere else: get caught with one and you lose six months of good time. But the culture of Farmville had evolved around a simple principle: if we do not fight, the deputies do not pay attention to us. And if the deputies do not pay attention to us, nobody confiscates anything.

My New Orleans homeboys ran the unit. If any Shreveport or Baton Rouge energy got too loud, too dramatic, too much—that person got shipped out. Not by the guards. By the inmates. Because noise brought heat, and heat threatened the phones, and the phones were how everyone made money and stayed connected to their people on the outside.

The gambling tables ran all day. Spades, poker, chess for money—and I was good at all of it, because mathematics was always my thing and gambling is at its core a mathematics problem dressed up in bravado. I won more than I lost.

I also became, very quickly, part of the contraband infrastructure. Being bigger means having more places to hide things. Under my stomach, under my chest, and—I will be honest with you because that is what this telling is built on—what they called the safety deposit box, which is exactly what it sounds like. If the deputies came for a shakedown, I would walk up to them saying something extra, doing the absolute most, and the homophobia that those deputies had meant they would wave me through every single time rather than search me thoroughly. I knew it. I used it. That is just the truth.

I had power at Farmville that was different from the power I had at Claiborne. At Claiborne, my power came from my job and my access to administration. At Farmville, my power came from being useful to the economy of the unit in ways that nobody else could replicate. They needed me to stay. And so they treated me accordingly.

* * *

Ladies First

There was a rule at Farmville that I had never encountered before and have thought about many times since.

Every morning, from five to eight, the showers belonged to the gay people. That was ladies first. During that window, nobody else came back there. You could shave—your legs, your face, whatever you needed—without anyone watching. You could do your grooming and your maintenance and your small vanities in peace. If a straight man came back during ladies first, the other men would address it. Not violently. Just: you know the rules.

I have never stopped being moved by the fact that a prison unit full of men who would not publicly call themselves allies or advocates had quietly created a protected space for the gay people among them. Nobody announced it as a civil rights gesture. It was just the rule. You respected it the same way you respected not talking about somebody's charges.

Ladies first. Every morning. A window of time that was mine.

At Claiborne, I had power because of what I did. At Farmville, there was also this: a kind of dignity that the unit extended without being asked. The two things together made Farmville the most I had felt like a person in four years of being incarcerated.

* * *

Bleek, Who Would Not Fully Go

The first man at Farmville who came for me was a man I am going to call Bleek.

Short, built, chocolate, with a face that should have been a crime and a body that honestly was. He was quiet about it in public but direct in private. He came for me early and he came without hesitation.

Here is where it got complicated: Bleek would do everything except the one thing.

He had decided, somewhere in the architecture of his thinking, that there was exactly one act that would make him gay, and that one act was the specific thing I most wanted. Everything leading up to it was fine. He was generous and attentive and present in all the ways that should have made me satisfied. But I was not satisfied. And the reason I was not satisfied is because what I wanted was not just the physical thing—it was the acknowledgment. I wanted him to want me completely, without the internal wall.

He woke me up in the middle of the night, consistently, to help him with what he needed without fully giving me what I needed. I was frustrated with him the entire time and also I kept waking up. I am being honest.

I have thought about the men who operated this way—and there were many of them across my nine years—and I do not think they were dishonest exactly. I think they had told themselves a story about what it meant to be who they were, and that story had a line in it, and they were not crossing the line. The line was just in a place that felt arbitrary from where I was standing.

Bleek and I eventually parted ways, with some drama that involved another man, as these things tend to do. I do not hold him in bad memory. He was a good person. He just would not fully go.

* * *

Strike and the Money We Made

There was a man from Lafayette named Strike who was my spades partner, my card partner, and one of my best friends at Farmville. Creole, curly-haired, a smile that was almost too much to look at directly.

We were unbeatable together. Nobody could take us at the card table. We read each other's moves before they happened. We made real money at that table, and we split it, and we laughed a lot, and I want to tell you that some of the best relationships I had in prison were not the ones that became anything romantic. Strike and I had a chemistry that was its own kind of intimacy—the kind that comes from trusting somebody enough to let them hold your strategy.

We had a moment once, in the boom-boom room, that almost became something more. A lieutenant showed up at exactly the wrong time and I had to stand on a toilet so I would not be seen, and the moment passed, and we went back to being what we were: partners at the card table, making money, protecting each other's reputation.

I ate everything I could reach at Farmville. I say this not to brag but because it is the truth and also because I think it is important to be honest about what years of incarceration does to your relationship with desire. You are surrounded by people. You are lonely in a way that has nothing to do with being alone. Your options for connection are limited and your hunger for it is not. I was a person trying to be a full person inside a system designed to reduce me to a number. Some of what I did in pursuit of that fullness was complicated. Some of it was simple. All of it was human.

* * *

Cup

His name was not Cup. I am going to call him Cup.

We met the way most things start at a card table: he thought he could beat me, and he could not. He bet money on the proposition, lost, and then challenged me to chess and lost that too. By the time he started coming around to talk after that, he had spent enough of his own money proving a point that the conversation felt earned.

He started helping me write my book. I had been working on a novel—a real one, a story with characters and plot and sentences I actually cared about—and the prison way of working on a book is that you write by hand and you need someone to look words up if you want to verify anything. Cup would come sit with me at the table in the early mornings and help me look things up. He had a way of making himself present without making himself the center. He would just be there, steady, useful, and interested in what I was building.

I want to be careful here because I know how this sounds. I am not going to dress it up. We were in prison and we were both lonely and we were both trying to survive and desire and connection were the same thing inside those walls. But I also want to be accurate: what developed between me and Cup was real. It was not a coping mechanism that I am now giving the word love as an upgrade. I fell in love with this man. That is what happened.

It started in the boom-boom room—where else—and it became its own world. He would get my breakfast for me when the carts came through. He would get in front of me on the yard so I would not have to push through anyone. One time my shoe came untied while we were walking the yard, and I bent down to fix it, and he said: “Don't bend over. I don't want nobody to see what I got back there.” And he tied my shoe himself.

He called me Mama Cat. That was his name for me. I did not come up with it and I could not have. It was just what he called me, and when he said it, it sounded like something true.

* * *

The Phone

We had a cell phone. Most people in Farmville had a cell phone. Mine came through my sister, who went on eBay and bought a batch of flip phones and shipped them in, and we sold the extras for two or three hundred each and kept one for ourselves. My sister made a profit. We made a profit. It was a whole little business operation and I am not ashamed of it.

Cup ran the drug operation. I ran the phone and the contraband infrastructure. We sold cigarettes when the commissary lady—Miss Mac, a nightmare of a human being who could not complete a commissary order without losing something—failed to stock them, which was often. We had product when nobody else did. We made money together the way people who are building something make money: consistently, strategically, without calling unnecessary attention to themselves.

I let him talk to women on the phone. He was bisexual and he told me so and I respected it. The deal was: you could talk to whoever you needed to talk to, as long as they were paying the phone bill and as long as you were coming home to me at night. I was getting what I needed. I was not going to be unreasonable about what he needed on the outside.

Then one evening I had a bad run at the poker table and I lost everything I had gambled with, including some of his cigarettes I had borrowed from his locker. I came back to the rack losing money, tired, needing just one good thing. He was on the phone. I reached under the covers and started playing with him, because that is what you do when you are in a relationship and you need your person, and he said what you say when your person is coming for you: “Say, Mama Cat, I am going to have to call you back.”

He said my name.

Not my name. My name.

I took the phone.

I broke it in half and threw it against the wall.

He called me a punk. That was the first time. He had never once treated me like a punk—never used that word, never looked at me the way some men in prison look at gay people, like we are less than what we are. He always treated me like a woman, like his person. And then I broke his phone and he was angry and he said it and I went to my rack and put my head down because I knew I had crossed a line and also I did not regret it even a little.

My sister sent us ten more phones. We kept one and sold the rest. We got over it.

* * *

The Fight, and What Came After

We had two real crises. The first was a man from Men's Central who had come into the unit—someone I knew from before, from the streets, young and fine and aware of both those facts. I was not trying to do anything. I just wanted to look. Cup felt it, the way people who love you always feel the things you are trying to hide, and he started watching me the way you watch someone when you are deciding whether to trust them.

He broke up with me.

He did not stay broken up. On day two of his attempt to be done with me, I cooked the man from Men's Central a full meal. Cup watched me hand him the plate and his face said everything he was not going to say out loud. By day four he had written a letter to a woman on the compound whose name was Earl—a lovely woman, I had nothing against her personally—and the letter came back to me through the mail system. He had written asking if he could see her. She had written back that she could not mess with him because she respected me.

I went and found him. I said: put your shoes on.

Now. A gay person in prison does not challenge a man to fight. That is not how it works. The rules of prison hierarchy mean that a punk challenging a straight man is almost unthinkable, and the men around us were watching like they could not believe what was happening. But I was not thinking about the rules of prison hierarchy. I was thinking about the fact that this man had looked me in my eyes and promised me things, and then he wrote a letter to another woman on the unit we both lived in, and I was not going to pretend that was acceptable because of what I was.

We went to the back. We tussled. It started as a wrestling match and became something more. I am bigger than Cup and that showed in a way that surprised the people watching. He caught me with licks that hurt, and I caught him with enough that it looked worse for him than it was. We made love that night.

The next day was hard for him. When a man loses a fight to his punk, the unit notices, and the unit has opinions, and the opinions tend to be unkind. People who had paid us on time began to let debts slide. People who had never spoken to him funny started finding reasons to. I had done that to him by fighting him in front of people. I regret it. I regret it because it was not fair to him and because my feelings made me stupid and because the damage to his reputation damaged the thing we had built together.

He said: we need to get out of this unit. He said: I will go first, and wherever I land, you come behind me.

He went. A week later I followed.

We had a golden period after that. Two or three months where nothing was wrong, where it was just us, where I was fully in love with a person who was fully in love with me back. He found the spot every time. He tied my shoe in front of people. He read my pages and told me what needed fixing. He promised me, again and again, looking me in my face: no matter what happens when we get out, I am always going to be with you.

I believed him. I needed to believe him, and I believed him.

* * *

The Kites and the Lawsuit

People started writing kites.

Kites are letters to the warden—complaints, reports, accusations. Some of them are legitimate. Some of them are jealousy dressed up as concern. When you are too happy in prison, when you are too much of a couple, when people can see that you have built something real, there will always be someone who cannot stand it. We were too much of a power couple for the prison world. We were too visible, too content, too together.

The kites said we had been seen having sex. Maybe we had. The prison policy is no sex, and the prison reality is that sex happens everywhere in every prison every day, and the warden knows this and the guards know this and the only time it becomes an official problem is when someone decides to make it one.

They put us in the hole for a week and then separated us—him to one unit, me to another.

I filed a lawsuit.

Hand-written, filed in actual court, against Union Parish Detention Center, the warden, and the captain. I cited civil rights violations. I cited the fact that as a former victim of sexual assault, I had arranged my own protection and they had dismantled it. I cited the fact that the warden called me into a meeting and told me that being gay was nasty and that since I was in jail I should expect this type of treatment and just deal with it.

Those are the words they said to me. That is on the court record.

The case went on while I was still there. They offered to settle. The amount was low. The condition was that I drop the lawsuit. I asked them to put me back with Cup instead.

They said no. They said that if we were not having sex they did not understand why it mattered. I told them they had just admitted they could not prove we had done anything wrong. It did not help.

I took the money. They shipped me out. I have the paperwork to this day.

* * *

The Scar

There is one more thing I have to tell you.

Before we got separated, before the kites and the lawsuit and all of it, there was the time Cup cut me.

He had convinced himself I was doing something with the man from Men's Central—the one I had cooked the meal for, the one I had been talking to a little too freely. He was not entirely wrong about my intentions, though he was wrong about what I had actually done. He called me out to the hallway under the pretense of talking. I came out thinking it was about us, about reconciling, about the golden period I could see we were capable of.

He had a knife.

He cut my right hand. Not deeply enough to be an emergency, but enough. I went to medical and told them I had fallen. They bandaged me up and sent me back.

I went to his unit. We got back together.

I know how that sounds. Let me tell you what it felt like from inside it: I was in year four of a nine-year sentence. I was in a place that had told me to my face that I should expect mistreatment. I had lost one good man at Claiborne to a lie, and I had spent six months in the hole for it, and I had come out of that hole less of myself than I went in. And then there was Cup, who had been tender to me in ways that cost him something, who had called me Mama Cat like I was worth keeping, who had promised me the streets even when both of us knew the streets were a long way away.

He cut me and I stayed because love in a confined space is not the same as love in an open one. You cannot put the same standards on something built inside a cage.

When I made it to work release, much later, I called him. He had been home by then. I said: I just want to see you. I am not asking for anything. Just let me see you.

He said he would come. My sister drove to pick him up.

He did not answer when she called.

I look at my right hand sometimes. The scar is still there. Not dramatic—not a story you could see from across a room—but there if you know to look. Every time I see it I think about him. Not with anger. I stopped being angry a long time ago. I think about the man who tied my shoe so nobody would see what he had back there. I think about the word Mama Cat said in a voice that sounded like he meant it. I think about the gold period and what it felt like to be somebody's whole world inside four walls.

You put that scar there, I think. So you owe me at least the memory.

* * *

What Comes Next

They shipped me from Farmville to Concordia Parish—what the people inside called Rivers. And Rivers was a whole different world, a whole different story, a whole different version of me.

But that is next time. We have time. We have always had time.