Grace After Midnight_ A Memoir - Felicia Pearson [29]
I was crying when a CO came in the cell and saw me there.
“You okay, baby?”
I looked up at her. She was pretty. Her eyes were soft.
I sucked in my breath and tried to act strong, but she saw me falling apart. She put her hand on my forehead.
“You gonna be all right,” she said. “Sometimes it just gets that way in here. But it’ll pass, sugar. You’ll be fine.”
I let her touch me. I liked her touching me. I liked when she held my hand. Didn’t want to tell her that I was high on some crazy weed, but I figured she already guessed that. She didn’t care. But she did care about me. She sat with me for a long spell. When I started shaking, she held me.
“I’d take you to the clinic,” she said, “but you’re better off here. They’ll give you blood tests in the clinic. You don’t want no blood tests.”
The CO was a sweetheart.
That night she became my sweetheart.
That night she got me through the worst trip of my life.
CO became my first and only love in the Cut.
CO
Falling in love in Grandma’s House is a different kind of falling in love. You’re not in the world. You’re in jail.
You ain’t going to the movies and ice-skating or taking a walk in the park. You’d like to snuggle by the fireplace or book a room at the Hotsheet Hotel. But there’s no fireplace and not much time to snuggle. You got to sneak, and sneaking ain’t easy in the Cut.
Truth is, me and CO never did make love. We made out. We kissed in the dark corners and found some time for hugging, but straight-up screwing never happened. Neither of us wanted her to get fired. That would be the end of our relationship and the end of the only romance I was having.
CO did me favors. One big favor was getting me a bunch of colognes and perfumes from the outside so I could sell ’em on the inside. Had me a good little business going.
Bitches all over Grandma’s House came to know me as the perfume lady. Had me a bunch of different brands—one for every taste.
CO was a lady. Naturally I was the man in the relationship. I would have loved to have been fucking CO, but just the idea that another woman was caring about me and loving on me made a difference. She’d slip me little notes that told me to meet her here or meet her there. Then she started writing letters about her life on the outside. How she was lonely. How she’d never met anyone like me. How, once I got out, she could see us hooking up forever.
“You mean it?” I said.
“With all my heart.”
But hearts are changed by the Cut. Once inside, you don’t have the same heart you had on the outside. Least I didn’t.
At age eighteen, my heart had hardened.
It was hard to begin with, but seeing what I saw and hearing what I heard, my outlook on life got even more basic: Life was shit. So fuck it. Get what you can.
I know that folk talk about rehabilitation in jail, and for a while I thought maybe I’d become a different person. But forget about it.
Maybe if I had had a good teacher to inspire me—maybe that would have made a difference. But the truth is that I had this one teacher who made my life miserable. She had the opposite temperament of CO.
She had it out for me. She called me all kinds of things.
But I had only word for her . . .
BITCH
Bitch look at me and say, “You got your homework?”
“Yeah, I got my homework.”
“Read it.”
I read a little essay I wrote about basketball players.
Bitch say, “I didn’t tell you to write about basketball.”
“You said to write about what I like on television.”
“Television shows,” Bitch says, “not television sports.”
“Well, a game is a show.”
“Tear up your essay.”
“What!”
“You heard me—tear it up.”
“But I wrote it real carefully.”
“You wrote it real sloppy.”
“How you know that?”
Bitch say, “’Cause everything you do is sloppy. Now write a new essay and present it in class tomorrow.”
I look at the bitch like she’s crazy.
Problem is, I believe she’s crazy in love with me. I truly believe she likes girls, and she has the hots for me in particular. But because