Chapter 5
Chair was cemented to the floor. Ankles chained to the chair in the library. I’m a little girl, but I’m wearing the red jumper again, which means I had a recent violent episode and a stay in isolation—a small, tight cell, barely big enough for one, which the guards called the bottom. Normally, my age group, all girls up to age ten, wear baby blue jail jumpers. But no matter your age, if you fight, or fight back, they call it violence. Violent girls of all ages up till sixteen (cause at sixteen you can’t stay here in this lockup no more) get locked in the bottom, in a ten-foot by ten-foot cell, sometimes naked. No matter how long you’re in isolation, when you get out, the guard hands you a red jumper, and says, “Get dressed.”
For two weeks after being locked down in isolation, everywhere you go, either your ankles or wrists or both sets, are chained and cuffed, while the other inmates are hands- and foot-free.
Like everybody, I still had to go to class. But in each class there were a few seats reserved for girls with ongoing behavior problems like me. All seats were already cemented to the floors, but the hot seats were equipped with ankle cuffs so violent girls couldn’t move left or right, or even stand up straight.
At the end of each class a guard posted outside would remove the cuffs, escort me to the next class, and lock me in the same type of chair all over again.
The authorities thought they was embarrassing us “violent girls,” for fighting. The warden stayed preaching that nonviolence shit, like she had no idea what was really going on, who was sparking shit up or how to stop it. She claimed that if we kept wilding, she would put through the order to build classes with cages, one student to a cage, like we were wildlife, not humans.
We young ones always did and thought opposite from the warden and them. Wearing red, in the eyes of many girls locked down, boosted my status, got me props, high fives, and favors. Some who wouldn’t speak to me before would try to get next to me when I was red, hoping my style and status would rub off on them. So those were the ones I yanked around like puppets.
My eyes moved around the library, a space I had never been in before. I was searching for Riot. She sent me a kite asking me to meet up in here. She must’ve gotten red that I had got into another fight the day after I got ganged up with her. Although I wasn’t sure if her angle was gonna be that my fighting made me look bad, or made her look bad. It didn’t matter, though. I live in the C-dorm with the bad young bitches, Riot lived in the B-dorm with the eleven to thirteens. Even though I had linked up with the Diamond Needles, I still had to hold it down in my dorm no matter what.
The library was kind of empty, except for the librarian who was weaving in and out of shelves pushing a wheel cart loaded down with all types of books. There were three inmates reading quietly but all separate from one another, and an inmate who was seated behind the front desk. She caught my eyes more than the others. A beige-tan jail jumper she was wearing, which meant she was aged fifteen or sixteen. Puerto Rican, that’s what she was. I could tell. Her butterscotch complexion and the tan jumper she wore were close in color. She cut her black-black hair short and had it styled nice. I noticed how the older girls up in here try to keep that fashion flow. She had dark eyes and long lashes. Her eyes weren’t big and round but were wide and curved nicely. More than that she was wearing gold earrings, small ones that didn’t dangle but the gold was real. It stood out to me, of course. How did she manage to have ’em, when jewels were forbidden? How did she manage to wear ’em and anybody could see ’em and then look at themselves not having none to rock? She had clout. That was my conclusion. I exhaled, tired of waiting on Riot. It didn’t matter, though. I couldn’t move, couldn’t leave. Once I requested the library, I had to remain here and wait out the whole hour till the guard reappeared to release me.
Butterscotch stood up. She was tall. Not doofy-tall, or man-tall, a nice height, like Winter. She was slim but had that nice figure, the type that made men on my Brooklyn block call out, “Mami, let me talk to you a minute.” She was coming my way. Her strut was nice. Maybe five and a half years from now, when my eight-year sentence is served out, I would have a strut more meaner than hers.
“Can you read?” she asked me as she laid a book on my desktop. I didn’t answer her. She was pretty, her voice was nice, and her tone wasn’t shitty or bossy, but still she had insulted me. So, fuck her. She strutted back to where she came from.
Her question Can you read? reminded me of Ms. Jenkins, my first grade teacher. I learned my letters in kindergarten, but Ms. Jenkins taught me to read. The first day of class she said, “If you can’t read or write, you can’t do anything.”
We were all little and quiet, and if the rest of the kids were thinking like me, they were probably only half-listening and dreaming of being at home with Momma. When I was little, whenever I wasn’t at home, I always felt like I was missing out on something, maybe even something big.
Ms. Jenkins made herself clear. She taught us one sentence: “I will be responsible for myself.” She made us each write it a hundred times, and repeat it ten times, and recite it on our own five times. Close to the end of our first day of first grade, she handed out a paper and gave us a quiz on our little lesson. She collected the papers ten minutes after she handed them out. Then she gave us each someone else’s paper to correct.
Next she sent us up to the blackboard in groups of four. She said we were playing a game called Challenge. She called out a word, and we had to write the word on the board swiftly. The winner was the student who wrote it on the board the fastest and who spelled the word correctly.
Her teaching style jerked us out of our dreams and made us feel pressed. As our long day with one teacher in one classroom came to an end, Ms. Jenkins pulled out a tin can of goodies and gave every student who scored 100 on the quiz, a foil-wrapped candy, like mini Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, or Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses. She gave the winner of the Challenge game an unusual and pretty pencil case that was see-through on one side with a slide-down cover. It was filled with decorated pencils, and even a pencil sharpener.
On the first day of first grade, Ms. Jenkins made me want to win. Now I could get any kind of food or candy gift at home, of course. We lived in the projects, and we had everything to choose from cause Poppa kept us living and eating very well. But what Ms. Jenkins did was different. She filled us with a feeling that we had to work to win, that we had to focus to learn, and whatever was happening anywhere outside of her class didn’t matter. We had to get it right or be exposed and embarrassed.
On our second day in our first grade class, as soon as we arrived she handed out blank sheets of paper and gave us our second quiz. We couldn’t believe it. We just looked around at each other.
“Learning is not only repeating,” she told us.
“Learning includes remembering,” she said, slowly pronouncing each word. “Everything you learn should be remembered and used in your life.”
When she collected our papers, she made every student stand. She called out our names and separated us into two groups. “These are the students who remembered.” She pointed. “These are the students who forgot.” She pointed. Immediately she gave each student in the group who remembered a bag of multicolored marbles. Then, she told the kids who forgot. “If you don’t learn to read and write, you can’t do anything.” We stood there feeling ashamed. Shame was a new feeling for me. I was a rich girl from a rich family, the best family in my Brooklyn hood. I never had a reason to feel shame before I met Ms. Jenkins.
As we, “the forgetters,” had to remain standing, answering Ms. Jenkins like we was in a chorus, I got red and redder. Ms. Jenkins called out, “If you don’t learn to read and write, whose fault is it?” Then she taught us all to respond by saying it out loud: “If I don’t learn to read or write, then it is my fault.”
At the end of class I took my paper to Ms. Jenkins.
“I got a 95,” I said to her. She looked down at me and said, “That’s not 100.”
&nb
sp; When I told Momma, she said, “Fuck her! Who does she think she is messing with my pretty baby?” Later that night, Momma gave me a card plastered with gold stars that she must’ve got from the five-and-dime. Now I had a hundred gold stars from Momma. But, somehow, I still wanted that one gold star and that 100 percent from Ms. Jenkins.
By the end of first grade, I could read and write very well. I enjoyed reading and writing to impress Ms. Jenkins, a teacher who we spent so much time with, that one day I accidentally called her Mommy. Even though I admired Ms. Jenkins, I didn’t enjoy reading books on my own, because the books were all boring. My real life was way better.
As the best learners and rememberers were rewarded daily and immediately by Ms. Jenkins, I learned the deeper meaning of what she meant when she told us, “If you don’t learn to read and write, you can’t do anything.”
As those of us who learned to read and write well sat watching a Disney animation film on a huge portable white and silver screen, while Ms. Jenkins’s personal popcorn popper popped popcorn, and her hot plate melted the butter, the forgetting, slow-learning kids sat in a corner rewriting their mistakes a hundred times. There was no movie, no popcorn, no butter, no fun, or relief for them. They couldn’t even see the screen. They couldn’t do nothing. Everybody knew who they were. I wasn’t down with them. I hate feeling ashamed.
“Open it up to page 100,” the pretty Puerto Rican said, standing close, right in front of my desk.
“I’m not listening to you,” I told her.
“You wasted eighteen minutes already,” she said.
“So what?” I answered, all blasé.
“I’m Lina, number 2, the Diamond Needles. You better start showing me some respect, little girl. Riot left this for you. Read it,” she said, then walked away, strutting.
I opened the book, thinking, Oh, so now she knows I know how to read, huh?
Slipped between page 100 and 101 was a folded news article. I opened it up, flipped it around, and smoothed it out with both hands. It was my poppa. My whole little face got hot. My fingers suddenly felt moist. I rubbed my palms together, and my tears fell into my hands. Nervously, I looked up to check who was looking.
Lina was looking. Her stern stare softened some soon as she saw my tears. I was angry at myself for crying. Swiftly, I looked away, then down.
The photo of Poppa had pull like a thousand magnets. I stared at it, wished I could fall or leap into the frame and talk to him as he hugged me warmly, like he used to hug Winter.
His face looked serious and tight. It was strange to see him there without Momma right beside him. How could they leave her out? The two of them were always the perfect picture. “There is no king without a queen,” Poppa would say. Maybe that’s why in the photo he wasn’t smiling or calm, like he usually was; no queen, no Winter, no Mercedes, no Lexus, no me. Come to think of it, his feeling in the photo and my feeling right then were exactly the same.
I shifted my eyes away from the news clip. I pictured Poppa in my mind. One day he wore a black tailored suit with genuine alligator shoes. Him in his suit, dress shirt, gators, and cuff links were so handsome, he made Momma pause and go silent. She already was dressed up fly, but after she saw Poppa, she went back to her bedroom. Her door closed. Moments later it opened slowly. She came out looking “like a million bucks,” Poppa said.
I liked the pictures in my head better than the ones in the newspaper, although no flick of Poppa could up or lessen his permanently handsome face.
I read,
New York Daily News
Bed Time in Bedford-Stuyvesant
by Edith Kates
Brooklyn, N.Y.
February 6, 1996
Ever since the January 1994 arrest of gangster Ricardo Santiaga, and the takedown of his reputed narcotics machine, there has been peace in the notorious Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. In a sweep that ran through the rough streets of “the Stuy,” its crack-vial-strewn alleyways, and abandoned buildings, over rooftops and stretched to the manicured lawns and mansions of Dix Hills, Long Island, 28 members of Santiaga’s team were captured, cuffed, arrested, and arraigned. Charges ran from misdemeanors to murders. Crime boss Ricardo Santiaga, known for his enviable management skills and ability to command complete loyalty from his crime partners, was captured in a predawn police raid of his Long Island estate. Santiaga, who strangely had no priors despite his 10-year rise to power over a $100-million-dollar crack empire, managed to rack up a rap sheet overnight that ranged from felony weapons possession, to manslaughter, to tax evasion, and eventually came to include premeditated murder.
Fast-forward two years after Santiaga’s arrest; Bedford-Stuyvesant has experienced a 50% decrease in its murder rate and an 85% decrease in drug-related arrests. Local residents, who once were completely silent when questioned by police regarding Santiaga, now appear happy to let their children out of their apartments and into the new park provided by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who is building a safer New York for all law-abiding citizens, replete with a visible increase in neighborhood police presence. “Now we can breathe,” one Bed-Stuy resident, who asked to remain anonymous, said. He would not have been so outspoken if Ricardo Santiaga were not behind bars serving natural life.
The reporter’s words were funky. I sat still for some minutes, maybe more. Then her words and all images flew out of my mind and there was just a blank, black space.
Feelings I had murdered months ago began flooding the black space in my head and then my heart. My new tears felt like boiling water. The rims of my eyes were hot. I bet the bitch who wrote the article didn’t know that my father read the New York Daily News every day. Poppa would’ve looked down on that reporter for looking down on her customers. Nobody treated their customers better than Poppa. Momma and us even got into trouble with him sometimes, if we acted up around our Brooklyn hood.
Finally, I took a deep, deep breath, looked up, and Lina’s arm was stretched out before me, her hand holding two tissues.
“Lina, let me get a sheet of paper—oh, and an envelope. You got one?” I asked. Instead of answering me right back, she used the tissues to wipe away my tears. She held my chin lightly and began wiping my whole face. I felt something.
Then, Lina’s face changed to thought. I believed that I understood exactly what she was thinking. In lockdown it’s difficult to get our hands on anything. It ain’t easy like how easy it was when we was back in our homes. To get even the smallest items required us to have money on the books at commissary, something of equal value to trade, or some kind of long request process, paperwork, and explanation to some counselor authority. To get things quickly like we needed and wanted, we’d have to plot, steal, or beat someone’s ass for it. I don’t steal. I’d rather convince.
Lina took back the book with the article stuffed inside on page 100. She returned with the Newsweek magazine. She laid it on my desk without explanation and walked way over where the librarian was and began talking with her quietly. I listened but didn’t turn my head around. I was flipping the magazine pages, hoping Lina had placed the news article back inside. I found it, along with two sheets of paper and one envelope. I addressed the envelope to Edith Kates, The New York Daily News, NY, NY, with no street address and no zip code, cause I didn’t know it. I figured the mailman had to know it already. He probably had to drag them sacks of mail every day.
On the first sheet of paper, I wrote using the pencil that was chained to my desktop, and all of the desk tops in here. It was on a chain so short, I could hardly angle it enough to write. I wrote,
Dear Miss Kates,
I call you “miss” because you’re probably not married and have no family at all. You probably are a very lonely person who thinks you know everything. But you don’t know nothing at all. I don’t know how you got that job at the Daily News because you are a liar. No one should let a liar write for a newspaper because people depend on you to tell the truth. Especially people who have no other way of finding out if their mo
ther or father or sisters are even dead or alive. Or whether or not they are somewhere living their lives with smiles on their faces. Or even if they were killed in an accident.
My father Ricky Santiaga is a good man, a hard worker and great friend. Every place he went, there was nothing but smiles. In Brooklyn, in the summertime when the ice cream truck rolled around he would pull out a hundred dollar bill and give it to Joe, the ice cream man, so every kid outside on the block could eat. Everybody’s mother thanked my father for the good things he did all the time.
My father gave the best block party every year. People who didn’t even live on our block came around. One time, there must’ve been more than a thousand people. That party was the first time I ever danced on stage for an audience. I was 6 years old. You should’ve of heard the people cheer. A few of them even threw money.
I don’t get it, how y’all could try and make a good family look bad? You steal their children, put them in a place that might look good but is bad.
I don’t know exactly where my poppa is. From what you wrote I guess y’all got him in a cage. He can’t get out so y’all comfortable lying on him. Why do you all love to put people in cages?
I can tell he’s looking for me. Even in your dull black and white paper his eyes shine and I could feel his nose and mouth breathing. That’s the only thing I can thank you for. After 739 days I can say for sure, Poppa’s alive.
If you found my father, Ricky Santiaga, would you even tell me? You should try and meet him. Talk to him. I’ll bet you’ll fall in love right then and there. But you better not, cause my momma will whup your ass for definite.
I be Princess Porsche L. Santiaga #7261994 ROYALTY.
“Mail it for me,” I said to Lina as she walked up on me from behind and lifted the closed magazine from my desk. I knew she would check the clock, so I did, too. There were seven minutes left before the guard would appear to release me from the chair and move me to my next class.
“Mail it for me, please,” Lina repeated, correcting me softly.