Prison Years

China

It must be 90º in here, with the heat from the floor and the heat from the ceiling and the sun pouring in. Sweat runs between my shoulder blades under a black sweatshirt; the sweat under the nosepieces of my glasses loosens them till they slide right off my face. The nurse practitioner says I should take hormones for hot flashes, but how am I supposed to tell what’s a hot flash and what’s just another March afternoon in a west-facing room with locked windows? I try to focus on the page in front of me, the one I am going to fill with the 500 daily words I am committed to writing. It’s all coming out empty and stupid, false start after false start.

Accountable economics, complex adaptive systems and social change, a sestina of failed marriage, even a sketch of the grids of the heavy-weight window screen—anything but what I won’t write, which is how it felt to come back from a clinic appointment at 10:30 this morning to find the Special Security in my room, rifling through my correspondence in their latex gloves, making notes.

“Go wait in the dayroom, Miss Power,” they told me. So I went and found a National Geographic and studied a drawing of temperature patterns of the oceans, the whole story of weather and climate in 2 X 3 inches of glossy paper. I get a lot of letters from a lot of people. They were still going through them long after all the other inmates had been locked down for the 11:30 count. There is a kind of privilege when you get to stay out then, like being one of the big kids in a family after all the little kids have been sent to bed. Eventually they came and told me to go back to my room. They never told me what it was all about, and I am trying to imagine that it didn’t really happen because that is easier than tasting the powerlessness you have to swallow.

Now the writing is interrupted by a big drama on the phone—China has escaped from the locked unit of the psychiatric hospital where she was sent after her third suicide attempt here. She charmed one of the male attendants into leaving a door unlocked yesterday and is supposed to be on her way to some place in Florida that he set her up with. Of course he rolled over the minute they held the prospect of jail over his head. That explains this morning’s room raid—I am the Vietnam war radical, and she was the Cambodian refugee. There is a certain logic in thinking that I might want to abet her.

We all troop to the other dayroom to watch it on the TV news. They call her a cold-blooded murderer; they say she shot her gang-leader, dope-dealer boyfriend. She told us that he beat her and said he would kill her if she left him. The DAs looked at her closets full of fancy clothes, her size-three body, her face like a doll, her thick black hair down to her ass. They don’t believe her; they want to know why she didn’t go the police. When she was six, she watched the soldiers in their uniforms shoot her uncle; then they took her father away, and he never came back. I’d say that pretty much explains it.

She and her mother and her little brother walked across Cambodia and down Vietnam. Every place they camped, her mother scrounged up vegetables and sometimes a little meat. She cooked up a pot of soup, put it on her head, and carried it to the nearest crossroads to sell by the bowl to the other ones who were running away after losing their uncles and their fathers, and to such merchants, keepers, and helpers as were hungry for supper and felt like spending a few pennies. They got on a boat across the sea to America and ended up in a three-decker in Dorchester, where, her mother thought, they would finally be safe. I used to see them in the visiting room, the mother my age, the brother all grown up now, and China’s own little boy not yet old enough to be in school. Her mother once told her that if she had known how it would all turn out, she would not have tried so hard.

There was another refugee here few years ago, a Hmong woman. We used to walk the square for fitness (6½ times around equals a mile), she in her fine black leather boots and me in my Adidas, talking about nutrition. She had been raped by a gang member and gone back the next day and killed him. One October day she said to me, “Most Asians have died inside, you know.” “From the war?” I asked. “Yes,” as if it were as ordinary as oak leaves on the ground. I found myself on my knees at the foot of a yard tree, my face scraped by its bark, sobbing. “I tried,” I said.

I want to remember that she said, “I know,” and that it was like cool balm on my burnt heart. But in fact, I had to collect myself before the yard guard noticed. We went on walking the square until it was time to be sent indoors for lockdown and count.

We live here with dramas extreme, but they are ordinary to us—suicide attempts, rapes, beatings, escapes, blah, blah, blah. Some stories I look at and don’t see how they can possibly come out with happy endings. That is the real reason the authorities have no reason to worry that I would help China escape.

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About Katherine Power

I didn’t set out to be a terrorist. As a student activist, I moved from protesting the war in Viet Nam to waging guerrilla war to overthrow the government….

Recent and Upcoming Appearances & Publications
3/12/19 Peace, Justice and Transformation, Parallel Conference to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, 777 United Nations Plaza, NYC
11/13/18 A Journey from Guerrilla to Grandmother, Lifelong Learners: An Independent Collaborative, Temple Shir Tikva, 141 Boston Post Road, Wayland, MA 01778
10/10/18 Provincetown Women’s Week Reading from Doing Time:Papers from Framingham Prison, AMP, 432 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA
4/6-9/2018 The Nature of Change, Radical Imagination Conference, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
1/15/2014 Complexity and Social Change, Occupy Radio
10/31/2013 Surrender, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
10/25/2013 Surrender, Taos Community Theater, Taos, NM

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