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For romance, I turned to Guiding Light. That was my joint, every day at three. I was hooked on that soap and couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. It was like A Different World. I knew it was fake and had nothing to do with real life. But that only made those shows better. They let you escape from a place where no one was escaping.

I also liked watching Jerry Springer ’cause that motherfucker is crazy. He’ll have men on that show who are fucking their mother-in-laws. Then he’ll have the daughters breaking chairs over their mothers’ heads. All kinds of shit.

So you get in the Cut and you find your place. My place was to fly under the radar. I didn’t want to be no star in Grandma’s House. I’d rather not be noticed. Why attract attention, especially from the crackheads who were out of their minds and might do anything to you? I stayed to myself.

I played volleyball and was damn good. I overcame the disadvantage of being short by jumping high and spiking hard. We even had a coach from the outside come in and train us. We had big tournaments in the Cut and my team won the trophy.

After I was in there for a month or so, Uncle came to visit.

“You all right?” he asked.

I nodded yes.

“You ain’t getting rough with these girls, are you?”

I shook my head no.

“Didn’t think so,” said Uncle. “You know better than that.”

“Sure as hell do.”

“What about the schooling in here?” he wanted to know.

“They got a GED program.”

“You going for it, Snoop?”

“I think I should,” I said.

“I know you should.”

He took my hand and patted it.

“Mama been down here to see you?” he asked.

“No, and she’s not coming down. I don’t want her here. Don’t want her to see me in a place like this. It’ll break her heart.”

“Well, that schooling thing is great,” Uncle said. “You’ll probably do better in here than you’d do out there. Less distractions.”

“Oh, I seen some distractions.”

“Well, avoid them,” Uncle warned.

“For sure.”

For the most part, I did avoid those distractions. Eventually, though, some of those distractions caught up with me. They had to. No matter how good your intentions, you just can’t sit in jail, year after year, and not get your ass in a little trouble. Least I couldn’t.

Meanwhile, though, the best entertainment—and the scariest—wasn’t the nightmare Freddy Krueger movies they had on VHS. The best entertainment was the stories that women inside the Cut told about themselves. That’s some shit I’ll never forget.

“I COULDN’T HELP IT.

THE MAN JUST

HATED KIDS.”

You’d hear these stories.

You’d be eating dinner. Or out in the yard. You’d be up in the gym or down in the laundry. The stories you’d hear would burn your ears. You had to listen. You wanted to listen. The stories on TV and the movies were okay. Getting off on A Different World or that fool Jerry Springer was one thing; that shit was mildly entertaining. But the real stories told by the real-life women at Grandma’s House would blow your goddamn mind.

Of course in jail you had a long time to twist your story any way you wanted. You never knew how true someone else’s story might be. But it didn’t matter. You sat there and you listened and, after hearing how some lady wound up in the Cut, you just said to yourself, “Lord, have mercy, this bitch is crazy.”

No matter how crazy she might be, you sat there and listened. That was the way you passed the time at Grandma’s House.

I remember one inmate I’ll call L. L was a light-skinned bitch who reminded me of my real mom. She was fine. She had these green eyes that looked like marbles and she had a refined way to talking. When she started into her story, she began telling it like a lady. Like she’d been to college or even law school. She talked like she had no ghetto in her.

“My mother was a schoolteacher,” she said. “My grandmother had been a schoolteacher too. My father was a salesman who did very well and I always had lovely clothes. I sang in the choir in the Methodist church and I won all the spelling