Grace After Midnight_ A Memoir - Felicia Pearson [22]
As the days of pretrial proceedings went by, she walked in the courtroom every day.
I’d seen enough.
“See what kind of deal they’ll give me,” I told the lawyer.
“You’re sure you want to deal?” he asked.
“Sure as shit.”
That witness looked clean as a whistle. The jury was going to love her. I didn’t stand a chance.
“Cut me a deal,” I told my man.
He did.
“This is the best deal they’ll give you,” he said.
I looked it over and didn’t hesitate.
“Take it,” I said.
The sentence was reduced down to second-degree murder. They also reduced my jail term down from ten years to eight for the time I’d been sitting in city jail.
Of those eight years, the first five were without parole. That meant that I could be a perfect angel but my ass wasn’t going nowhere for five years.
After five there was a possibility of parole.
I was fifteen. Maybe I could get out by the time I was twenty.
Looking at the big picture I felt like I could deal with that.
Five years was a long time, but five years was no lifetime.
I’d adjusted to shit before. I’d adjust to this shit now.
Besides, the move out of city jail was a good thing. I hated that fuckin’ place. And from what everyone told me, the joint where I was headed—Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup—was an upgrade.
They said Jessup was a cleaner, bigger, more modern facility where they tried to actually rehabilitate bitches.
I didn’t care about the rehabilitation. I didn’t believe in it. I just wanted something better than that stinking sickening city jail.
Jessup was okay with me.
I was eager to get up to the place called the Cut.
A DIFFERENT WORLD
A Different World was a spinoff from The Cosby Show. Denise Huxtable goes off to college. That’s the “different world.”
Denise’s world was filled with clean-cut college boys and cute little college girls.
I loved the show.
But watching the show from the Cut—which was another world—was a trip.
The inmates had another term for the Cut. They also called it Grandma’s House
The Cut sounded hard. And Grandma’s House sounded soft.
The Cut was hard.
Like A Different World, the Cut had a campus. Only don’t look for no wholesome college kids.
Sinbad the comic was in A Different World. He was always cracking jokes and making everyone feel okay. We didn’t have Sinbad at Grandma’s House. We didn’t have any happy-go-lucky comics brightening our day with sunshine and laughter. No, sir.
At the same time, the Cut was cool compared to city jail. The Cut had better food—thank you, Jesus—and the Cut had more activities.
Even though I wasn’t free, being able to walk from building to building gave me more of a sense of freedom than I felt during those long months I was sitting in city jail.
Also there was a window in my cell. That window was real important. The window overlooked the fields beyond the prison yard and let me watch day turn to night and night turn to day. The window let me study the seasons. It let me see the world, a piece of sky, the foggy mornings, the rain in spring, and the snow in winter. That window opened my eyes to the grass that started growing and the leaves that started falling, the new flowers being born and the old flowers dying, the trees swaying in the storms, the branches broken off by the lightning, the thunder booming in the dead of night with dark clouds racing past the yellow moon.
The window was a beautiful thing.
You might think that sex in a women’s prison would be a beautiful thing, too. All those girls cooped up together. They’ve made movies about that shit. You’d think that me, a sixteen-year-old lesbian, would have the time of my life. Well, you’d be wrong.
In the five years I spent in Grandma’s House, I had sex once. Here’s why: I value my health. I value my fuckin’ survival. The Cut was full of straight-up crazy ladies, fucked-up crackheads, women who had cut off their boyfriends’ balls. For real.
I love sex as much as anyone, but I love living more. Early on I saw how romantic relationships in Grandma’s House got out of hand. You’d be loving on some woman, then