Cold Steel Tables
Looking back on it, there was never any hope for the two of us.
It was the spring of ’04 when I walked hand in hand with my mother. Seven years old, I walked past guards and through security checks. I sat idly by, watching her become increasingly annoyed as she was told to walk through the metal detector again. And again. And again. My mother was quick to forget that we were regulars, not welcomed guests. Three bangles, two hoop earrings, and one belt later, we were inside.
The vending machines hummed, their contents too expensive for the intended. Filled with honey buns, Pop-Tarts and Life Savers, they were a sweet reminder of the outside world, one where you could walk to the bodega with $5 and leave a richer man. Inside, they were a reminder that you could slave away three weeks to make $5 and leave poorer than ever.
The chatter of men and women, wives and husbands, mothers and sons, filled the prison walls. Babies cried when passed to their fathers, men with calloused hands and stale bodies. With the ability to shower only once a week, deodorant was considered a luxury item — seven weeks of hard labor.
The walls were eggshell, the ceiling was low and the room stretched on for what seemed like an eternity. The rows of cold steel tables lined from wall to wall with the men in beige uniforms offering no sharp contrast. I looked at my father. He walked over and sat before my mother and me. She tells me to sit up straight.
She cooked him curried chicken and rice. Its aroma filled our noses, my mouth watered as I tried to focus my eyes on him and not whatever was still on his plate. He offered me some. I
declined. He asks me what’s school like? If I had a crush on anyone, if I thought I could beat him up. It was the same conversation we had every two weeks or so. Sometimes I went longer without speaking to him because he was on keeplock — the inability to leave your cell for 23 of the 24 hours in a day.
We were all sitting there for different reasons. My father because he was lonely. He would ask my mother to take him back whenever we visited. She would respectfully decline. My mother was there because she thought what she was doing was right, refusing to deprive her daughter of a father. After all, she wasn’t a state penitentiary. I was there because I felt what I later came to realize was guilt. Surely my presence, more so comfortability, was a small price to pay to not disappoint my mother, or father.
It was routine. I would dread these cold steel table days. I would dread the humming of the vending machine, the cries of babies, the eggshell walls and the low ceiling. I would dread seeing him.
My mother stood up from the table and went to the bathroom. She believed she was doing us a favor, allocating a few minutes of much needed daddy daughter time in the one hour we could see him. She wasn’t.
He turned to me. His eyes low, sunken in, were blanketed by two dark circles. They found a way to climb back into his skull, desperate to escape the things they had become witness to. His skin pale, dry, had been deserted by the luxury of lotion for quite some time. When he smiled, I expected his face to crack. It didn’t.
There is an awkward silence. We’re strangers to one another. We are two people brought to a party by our mutual friend who disappears into the night. We wait for my mother to return.
When she does, they speak a bit about grown up things I do not yet understand. She paints images of what home looks like for him. Who just opened a business, who just closed one, who just had a baby and so on. I’m not interested. Ignoring the two of them, I look around. I watch as a young mother bounces her screaming baby on her lap. Everyone else seems to ignore them, but I’m fixated. I wonder if I, too, cried as baby inside these walls. If my then 19-year-old mother bounced me on her lap and tried to stop my wails. I wonder if she was more disappointed that she couldn’t comfort her child or that she had to bring her here in the first place. I wonder.
I think back to the year before, when I sat on my bedroom floor between my mother’s thick brown legs as she fought to drive a comb through the knots in my hair. She had asked me if I knew why my father was in prison. “Because he’s a bad person,” I told her. Really, the thought had never crossed my mind. I was not scared of my father; never once did I think he would hurt me, physically, but a beige uniform was able to convince of what kind of person he was. “People go to prison because they’ve done something bad, not because they’re bad people,” my mother told me. Growing up, I left it at that. For a while.
As the years went on, I became curious. I would ask my father what could he have done to allow himself to be stolen. To be no more than a box of letters hidden underneath his daughter’s bed. He’d change the subject. I turned to others, but no one ever gave me a straight answer. Naturally, my father’s mother claimed he was framed. Her story began at the bodega he worked at in 1998. She spoke of his boss, an older blind man and the two neighborhood kids who didn’t like my father. One night, they entered the store looking for my father and when he they couldn’t find him, they vandalized the property, robbed the store and attacked his boss, the blind man.
My mother laughed when I asked her. She said it was for something stupid, like him attempting to rob an E-ZPass. She couldn’t remember much. It was far from the crime of the century. His brother, my uncle, said it was because he was black, my older half-sister said she didn’t know, except that it was ‘probably something dumb.’ So, I left it at that. For good.
When the baby stops crying, I look back at the empty containers we carried the curry chicken and rice in. I ask to use the bathroom and when my mother takes me she says that I didn’t have to lie about needing to pee. She senses how awkward my father and I are. We leave. But before we go, we hug one another robotically like the men and women, wives and husbands, mothers and sons around us. I wonder if they too visit their loved ones in prison out of guilt. The fear of being labeled insensitive, selfish, or some other unmentionable name. Letting go of me, my father tells me I’m beautiful, but how could I be beautiful when I am a reflection of him? I say thank you.
I still think of that compliment. If I could go back to that moment, I would tell him to look at how broken his daughter is. To look at her closed-mouth smiles, her slouched shoulders, her drifting eyes. She’s in pieces, wrongfully imprisoned by a relationship she never asked to be a part of. But, a part of me thinks he knows this.
We don’t speak anymore. Occasionally he’ll call, I’ll answer, he’ll yell about nonsensical things, complain that I no longer care about him, tell me he loves me and hang up. It’s a new routine, one that’s less painful than before.
My father served ten years inside of a corrections institute that does little to correct anything. He was not rehabilitated. He was not saved. He became one of the 50 percent of men who return to prison.
Changing his collar from blue to white, his second stint was for counterfeiting checks. My father was not a father to me and I don’t entirely blame him. He did not choose to wear a beige uniform, shower once a week or stare at the same four walls, the same hardened faces. He made a poor decision, like most us. Only difference is that most us aren’t 20 something year old inner city black men with two children and no education. Most of us will never see the inside of a prison.
He calls me from inside, on the day of my prom. Tells me he knows I look good. I cry in the bathroom as my date waits downstairs for me.
As a society, we ignore those we lock up behind bars for nonviolent offenses. We give them harsher and longer sentences, send them to maximum security prisons and use them as next-to-free labor sources in hopes that they will learn a lesson that will trickle throughout their communities.
People go to prison because they’ve done something bad, not because they’re bad people. My mother’s words ring in my head.
As a society, we have created fatherless, broken homes and have mocked these same communities with stereotypes. We’ve instilled policies like the war on drugs and the three-strike rule to protect ourselves from bad people, when in truth, the “war” has against the poor, black and vulnerable.
As a daughter, I do not know what it means to have a father. I know what it means to sit at cold steel tables, look upon calloused hands and avoid the eyes of men in beige uniforms.