Walkie-talkies blared at a high volume suddenly. “The A-dorm is all clear,” a male voice reported into the warden.
“Move officers to the B-dorm,” she ordered. We could tell her anger was mounting. She wasn’t the only one.
A whistle sounded.
“Get on all fours,” the warden commanded. We all looked around with questions printed on our faces. There were three hundred eyeballs moving.
“Do whatever she says,” Riot whispered to me.
In a split second the gym was packed with girls on their hands and knees, including the three brawlers.
“You want to act like animals?” the warden asked. “Whatever you’re going to do in life, do it well. Now crawl,” she ordered.
There was a long pause and most girls began crawling on hands and knees. Riot shot me a look. She was already crawling. I saw the warden maneuvering between the rows of crawling females. I thought about Lina. She wasn’t in the gym. Was she somewhere crawling on her hands and knees? She taught me to think for all of the Diamond Needles and not only of myself. I knew they all wanted to attend the festival for business, friends, or fun. I knew Lina wanted to go and that she planned on seeing someone special to her. I had the dancing girls who I was training and who I knew were gonna win if they perfected my routine. But I could step away from all that shit easily. It didn’t mean much to me.
“If I catch you, and you are not crawling, you will get disciplined for not obeying my orders,” the warden called out in a controlled and angry voice.
If I could be sure that Winter was coming to visit me, would I crawl for that? I asked myself. My eyes filled with tears. It didn’t matter. I was facing the floor and no one could see my tears if I kept my head down. So I did. I began crawling. I was angry that I even considered that Winter would show up for me. I had promised myself many months ago not to think or believe or hope for even one visitor. That way, I could separate myself from the heavy feeling of disappointment and depression. The temperature of my body began to increase. The flow of heat within me was moving strangely because of the way I was bent down and crawling on my knees.
“Now bark,” the warden ordered. “Everyone!” The gym made the barking sounds double and triple as each girl barked differently from one another, all dogs.
“Stop!” the warden called out swiftly, and crawling, barking bodies bumped like bumper cars.
“Now moo,” she ordered, and there was another long pause. I was confused as to whether she was saying for us to “move.” But one girl began making cow noises and soon every girl was doing it. My face was still facing the floor so I didn’t moo, the same way I didn’t bark. How would she tell who was and who wasn’t barking or mooing?
“Does it feel good to behave like animals?” the warden called out. “Would you prefer to live like them?” No one answered because they were all still mooing.
“Quiet!” Her voice overpowered everyone’s. The mooing stopped.
“How do your knees feel? Should ladies crawl on their knees and bark like dogs, and moo like cows who can only eat and poop?” she asked. No one answered. Thankfully, I thought to myself.
“Drop down flat on your bellies!” she commanded. We were all now lying flat facing the floor.
“Are you all a bunch of snakes? Are you sneaky slimy creatures? You want to ruin it for one another? Let me hear you snakes hiss!”
The hissing sounds of more than a hundred girls itched the inside of my ears, and I felt like a rash was traveling through the inside of my body. The sound was loud and disturbing. I vomited. The stinky goop landed beneath my chin on the floor I was facing. I could hear a few girls farting and a few crying.
“Stop!” the warden screamed out.
“Stand up!” she ordered next. “At the sound of my whistle all of you walk towards the wall that you’re facing. Press your faces against the wall. Make your nose press against those cement blocks!” she said. This shit was getting stranger and stranger. I wiped my mouth with my jumper and stepped over my wet pile and walked towards the closest wall.
None of us could see one another or anything else because we were all facing one of the four walls, our backs to the warden, not a comfortable feeling.
From the sound of her movement and voice, she was walking towards the center with the guards.
“Close your eyes,” she ordered.
I don’t know if everyone did. I didn’t. But I didn’t turn my head left or right not even slightly. I know better than to tell on myself.
“Now, ladies, I hope we have reached an understanding. You don’t want to be animals. I don’t want to treat you like animals. No one can see your faces now. I want the person who knows where the fork and knife are hidden to raise her right foot. No one else will know who it is. But I will know. You will not be punished for providing the right information. You will be treated properly and rewarded kindly for saving lives. You will be the one who proves that you are not an animal living by the laws of the jungle. You are human enough to care about the safety of all of your peers,” she said, politicking.
We stood facing the wall for half hour, silently. I wondered if anyone had already raised their foot even a little to signal the warden. Maybe she had already identified one or two or three snitches, but was making us stay facing the wall so she could pretend that no one had snitched. Then she would call the snitches to her office in the middle of the night or early in the morning when no one would notice that they were missing.
Her walkie-talkie flared. “Dorm B all clear.” The male guard’s voice bounced around the gym.
“Search dorm C. It’s the last place I would expect to discover the weapons. But check carefully. Over,” the warden ordered.
“Bathroom,” I heard a girl’s voice say softly.
“No bathroom!” the warden called back angrily. “You want to live like animals, then do it well!” I could tell she was more madder cause the guards were searching everywhere but not finding nothing. I peed. I don’t know if anyone else did, but I had to pee from way back when the alarms were setting off and all this bullshit first started. I didn’t dare move a leg or foot or turn my face to see what kind of puddle or stream I had made. I didn’t need her calling me to her office like I had a damn thing to say to her.
“Everyone turn around!” the warden said suddenly. We all turned. “All my tans, pinks, and yellows, walk over here and line up,” the warden said, pointing to the center of the gym where she was standing.
“You are the ones who are supposed to set the example for the baby blues. If these are the kinds of things that you do, what are you teaching the babies to do?” she asked, and I knew the bitch was just crazy. We baby blues weren’t her babies. We were never treated in any type of way that someone who has a baby would act. We weren’t treated no more specialer than any girl wearing any color prison jumper.
“Strip!” she ordered the girls ages eleven through sixteen, the pinks, yellows, and tans. But they all just looked around at one another and didn’t do it.
“Strip,” she repeated. “This is a matter of security. Who knows what you are hiding beneath your clothes. Now step out of your shoes and strip.” I got heated cause we all had already been searched thoroughly. She knew she wouldn’t find nothing through a strip that she hadn’t found already. And who could hide a fork and knife in their ass or between their thighs or below their tongues?
A few girls stripped boldly, letting the warden know it wasn’t nothing to them to be naked, long as they got to attend the festival. The others followed one by one, their cheap prison shoes besides their feet and the jumpers piled on top.
Tiny, the smallest girl up there, did not strip. Now she was the only one who didn’t.
“Ms. Parker, are you any better than the rest of these girls?” the warden asked Tiny. That was Tiny’s real name, Chanel Parker.
“No, no better,” Tiny said softly.
“Then do as they have done. Or are you hiding the weapons?” she asked. Tiny didn’t answer
.
“I know your history, Ms. Parker. You better step out of your jumper in the next three seconds or you will pay the price,” the warden threatened. I felt sorry for Tiny. Riot was up there completely nude. Hamesha was nude and in tears. Riot wasn’t telling Tiny to obey what the warden said, like she did back when we were first ordered to crawl.
Tiny pulled off her jumper slowly. As it dropped to the floor, she immediately tried to cover herself with her small hands. She could only conceal her nipples. She couldn’t cover the truth. Her beige skin, her back and sides and stomach were all covered with dark brown marks of different shapes and sizes. There was a long scar that bubbled on her thigh just below her butt and there were even some scars behind her knees.
In the silence of every girl seeing Tiny’s life story stamped and scraped and burned and sliced into her skin, obviously painfully, I wanted to murder the warden. I didn’t want to shoot her with a gun, which would’ve been too gentle. I wanted to cut her with a knife and burn her with a few lighted cigarettes the way someone obviously did Tiny. I wanted to embarrass her, humiliate her, torture her. I wanted her to feel what each of us had to be feeling. It was the emotion I hated the most of all emotions, shame.
• • •
Late night, I couldn’t sleep. We were all returned to our right spaces after the weapons were discovered in the C-dorm where I was housed. I was lying still, but my whole body felt like it was moving. My heart was racing. My thoughts were tangled tight like a rubber band ball that I once made. My fist and toes were balled up and stuck.
When I first met Tiny, even though I knew she was four years older than me, I felt protective over her. Maybe it was the way she introduced herself to me after I introduced myself to her. She had said, “I’m Tiny. I’m small like a dot. No, like a germ. I’m so small you can’t even see me.” I’ll never forget that.
I knew not to ask her why she was locked-down same as me. Lina taught me that. I knew not to ask her about her past. “Sometimes it’s too painful to discuss and rude to even ask about,” Lina had said.
Tiny’s from New York, the projects out in Yonkers. Her whole family was wiped out in a drug war, and not by the police. It was a street war over territory. Tiny’s brothers were gunrunners turned stick-up. When their family gang began setting up and robbing the drug spots, it took a lot of murder before the dealers discovered who was behind it. When they did discover that it was Tiny’s brothers, the war happened over a stretch of only ten days. Tiny’s whole family got wiped out, parents, brothers, and all. Tiny had told me this story herself one day when I was feeling bad. She wanted me to know that her life was way worser than mine. As I listened to her details, I couldn’t argue. She was right. Tiny told me she never told nobody her story except for Riot, who was the one who chose Tiny to gang up with the Diamond Needles.
Tiny told me that she was gonna tell me the “ending part,” that she never even told Riot. She said she was kidnapped by her brother’s enemies and tortured for six days. She told me that she was raped and taught me what that really meant and involved. She told me that people always say she’s nice-looking, but that she feels “all nasty on the inside.”
“How did you get away from them?” I asked about the kidnappers.
“That’s why I’m here,” was all she said. “Make sure, Santiaga, if some nigga tries to get in between your thighs and you don’t want ’em there, kill him,” she said that with a straight face, no tears. “In here is safer than out there,” Tiny added. After what all had happened tonight, I wondered if she still thought so.
All the Diamond Needles had stories that make the body shake and tremble. As the personalities of each of my ten sisters flashed through my mind like a dope-ass film that never been made yet, the moving pictures in my mind paused with Riot in the frame. Riot is number 1, and I been trying to figure her out little by little. As images of the warden’s horror show flipped back and forth in my mind, I kept rewinding so I could figure out the events from the double-Dutch game to the warden. Forty minutes of reviewing moving reflections in my mind led me to some conclusions.
Lina is smart. Riot is scary-smart, I thought to myself. Riot somehow knew that the Real Bitches were setting up to recruit Cha-Cha. Riot also knew that Cha-Cha was my enemy. Riot probably figured that the Real Bitches were not only try’na copy her style by recruiting young ones from the C-dorm same as she did, but that they were also setting up to challenge the Diamond Needles. Riot knew it all, but didn’t show it and didn’t react. She didn’t and wouldn’t fight none of the big strong black chicks who had named themselves “real bitches.” Instead, Riot put a plan together and set her army into motion, each Needle in a power position. Riot gave the orders more gentle and quietly than the warden ever could. Riot stood in the gym, innocence spread across her face. She crawled like the robots, barked like the robots, mooed and hissed like the robots, then she stripped like the robots. She even told us Diamond Needle girls that our clique had nothing to do with what was happening. I definitely believed her. I am sure Tiny and Hamesha did, too. But the fact that the fork was later found in Cha-Cha’s bed, and the butcher knife tucked inside of the rubber gloves belonging to the leader of the Real Bitches had me doubting Riot. The fact that Cha-Cha and her leader were both wiped out in one incident, forbidden from the festival and confined to the bottom during the hottest month of the year made me believe that Riot had set them up as punishment for challenging her and for challenging me.
This is what my mind was working out right then. I knew our Diamond Needles clique had a girl working the kitchen detail, in the exact place where the fork and knife went missing. I had met Diamond Needle number 6, Rose Marie the Jamaican, when I first went to introduce myself and hand her my candy gift.
Riot eliminated my enemy Cha-Cha and the leader of the Real Bitches—both of em threats to our clique—without raising a fist. Like Lina said, “We squeeze ’em.” A Diamond Needle only stings when it feels threatened, unlike other pests who sting as a way of life.
• • •
Almost three hours passed before my thoughts stopped their relay race, and my fingers relaxed from my fist. I was wiggling my toes now, beneath my thin blanket. Siri squatted by my bed, whispering in my ear. I was feeling a little more at ease, but I wasn’t feeling easy enough to begin giggling with her.
“Where were you?” I asked Siri. “Where were you when the alarms went off?” She covered her ears with her slim fingers and painted natural fingernails. “You know I don’t like loud noises and screaming,” Siri said.
“So what did you do?” I asked her.
“I hid in the cubicle,” she said.
“How long before you got caught?” I asked her.
“I didn’t get caught,” she said. “But I saw who put the fork in Cha-Cha’s bed,” she added, now pressing her lips against my ear.
“Who else saw?” I asked swiftly.
“No one. There was only me watching.”
“Good job, Siri,” I told her.
“Can I put a braid in your hair?” Siri asked me. I nodded yes. As she began to stroke my hair like Momma did when she was making sure not to miss even one strand, I felt myself slipping finally into sleep. As I fell, one last thought snuck into my mind even though I had worked hard to wipe them all away. The guards searched through all our stuff and didn’t put anything back the way we had it. They wanted us to know that nothing really belonged to us. They wanted us to know they could take and touch anything that we thought was ours, even our bodies.
Chapter 9
“Are you from the islands?” Rose Marie asked me.
“No, I’m from Brooklyn,” I told her.
“Well, you look like a lil Caribbean gal, ya know. We have gals dem who have a nice grade a hair like dat, ya know,” Rose Marie said, inviting herself to reach out and touch my hair, then pulled it a little to make sure it was all mine.
“Ya, it’s the genuine article,” she said approving of my hair. “Yeah, Jamaica have peop
le of all colors, all kinds. Lotta people nafa know dat. We got black, brown, gold, yellow, beige, and even tan. African, Asian, Indians, all kinds. We even have a bunch of Chinese-Jamaicans, dem come down and own a lot of tings in Jamaica. Dem give you a job, work ya hard, but never let the black ones of us come close to the cash register.”
Rose Marie didn’t want my candy gift, the same gifts that all of the other big sisters in the Diamond Needles had gladly accepted.
“What else ya hav ta offer me now?” she asked. “Ya have some yam, sugar cane, or coconut?” She stood looking down at me cause she was tall and I was young. I was amazed by her. She was blueberry-black and beautiful, so black her skin glowed. She had her tan jumper sleeves and pants rolled up. Her figure was feminine and strong, a small waist, monster booty, and eyes that shined like polished black marbles. Her hair was short and kinked. It had style. I couldn’t see beneath her jumper, but it seemed her skin all over was smooth as silk, no scars or pimples.
“You like music?” I asked her.
“Whatcha know about music? Jamaica has the best music, ya know. Everybody copy Jamaica, our style, ya know. We got the wicked sound boys, wicked sound systems,” she said, her accent getting thicker as she got more excited about her home country.
“Can you dance?” I asked her.
“American Yankee girl can’t dance. Ya have to know how to make your body roll, ’n ride the beat. If me roll me body right, man empty his pockets. Move ya body like Rose Marie, make a rude boy cry, den marry me!” She laughed, her teeth all white. I laughed, too. Rose Marie was tough. Her prison kitchen job seemed to require that she be strong. Everything that surrounded her was made from steel. The pots were huge, nothing like you ever seen your mother use. The spoons were half my height. The mixer and ovens meant to feed an army. The steel cases with the knives were built into the wall and all locked. It was easy to see why at every station where a prisoner could get a job assignment, there was at least one guard to oversee the prison staff and prisoner workers. Each guard on post carried a ridiculous number of keys cause everything was a prisoner, even the shit that wasn’t alive.