Jumu’ah (Friday)
In memory of my mother Deborah Denise Berry
By: Al-Ameen
“You might want to put your folder down,” C.P.O. Tiffany said to me as she dialed numbers into her land-line telephone.
“Why – what’s wrong?”
I put my folder down. I could feel my heart-rate begin to speed up on me. Tiffany is the 7-block C.P.O. She’s a Black girl with short black hair and a smooth brown complexion. She’s a small-little Black girl; with small-little hands; small-little feet; a small little head, a small-little nose on a small-little face. She just has a small-little body overall.
She stood behind her desk in her usual grey shirt, black pants, and black shoes (which I did not have to see to know she had on). In her uniform attire she he’d the phone to her right ear with the same side hand and shoulder while leaning over looking into her desktop monitor.
I have had a few run-ins with Tiffany in the past and she has never failed to rub me the wrong way.
Once I stopped by her officer, during her office hours to inquire about the process of getting my name legally changed. During this entire brief waste of time her full attention was on her keyboard with her index fingers typing what was apparently more important to her than what I was asking about. The only time she looked up at me was at the end of a word or sentence she finished typing. Needless to say she did not help me at all and acted oblivious to the process, if any, that the state prison plantation provided for my inquiry. Those experiences are all too common here. Nearly all of the C.P.O.’s hired to help us offer us no help and are unprofessional in the process. It’s as if they vie against each other with who can do the least work. Then they are praised by the prison plantation administration with employee of the month awards for doing nothing. Now here I was again in C.P.O. Tiffany’s office bracing myself for another attack on my dignity.
Prior to being in her office I was sitting in the masjid (mosque) after the Jumu’ah sermon and prayer when the C.S.D Building officer informed me that I was being summoned back to my unit. I honestly thought that it was that racist, islamophobic, neo-slave hater known as Sgt. “Red Beard” calling me (I haven’t reached the U.S. Supre,e Court’s threshold standard of proof of discriminatory intent but I as well as every other neoslave here knows Red Beard is as intentionally low as they come). He is round like that chubby demon in the movie Spawn, average height, low hair-cut, full beard reddish like the hair on his head, and he wears glasses. When he walks he wobbles from side to side as if his legs are too weak to support his weight. He has a deep and nasaly voice that immediately goes from aggravating to excruciating to listen to once you discover how impudent he is.
I was thinking that maybe he had been rummaging through the refrigerator boxes and found the butter I had in mine, or had shaken down my cell and found the bleach I had in my locker. These normal household items are considered nefarious contraband in prison slave plantations. Most C.O.s operate “out of sight, out of mind” when it comes to these and other similar items, but Red Bears and others worst then him literally go searching for these items so they can write d-reports and send neoslaves back to probation or the hole. I remember when I first moved on the unit I wanted to move in the cell with an akhi (muslim brother). According to the unit rep (every unit has a neoslave representative) Red Beard said he would never move two Muslims in the cell together, and he never did.
When I entered my unit the unit officer, whose name is Potter, was standing in the foyer at the top of the flight of stairs listening to a neoslave speaking to him. As I came through the door he had his uniform cap removed, holding it by the brim in his left hand and rubbing his head with the palm of the same hand. He noticed me coming through the door to his right and nonchalantly broke his attention away from the neoslave to tell me C.P.O. Tiffany needed to see me. Potter’s eyes widened a little when he turned his head and looked at me. he pressed his lips together and spread them across his face, then inhaled and exhaled through his nose before speaking to me. But he does that a lot when he speaks so I consciously refused to entertain in my mind the allusion of his idiosyncracy. I ignored that it was a sign of what was to come, and that it correlated with what I would soon know. I guess I was optomistic because at that moment it was obvious that I was wrong about my initial thought that Red Beard had flagged me for contraband.
Walking over to the 7-2 unit when CPO Tiffany’s office is located, I felt hollow inside. It was out of routine for her of any C.P.O. to schedule an appointment so late in the day. After eight years of being counted more than three times a day, I, of all neoslaves, know that the state prison plantation runs on routine and operates like a well-oiled machine. In fact, disciplinary reports are handed out everyday for disrupting ‘the normal operation’ of the institution.
What made her operate outside of her normal routine for a neoslave? I though. I entered through the door, went up the flight of steps, checked in with the unit officer, and headed to her office. The door was open so I looked in but waited at the threshold of the doorway until she glanced in my direction, which I interpreted as a sign of her tacit approval to enter. I walked in and sat down in the chair she has in her small office directly in front of her desk reserved for neoslaves. “You can close the door,” she said as I settled in the chair. She lifted her small-little smoothe brown face off the phone and thrusted her chin in the air towards the door as if I needed a non-verbal gesture as well to understand what she asked of me. I closed it. She picked up the phone. “Your wife…Nia…I have to call her for you.”
“Can I just call her back on my unit? I have money on my phone.”
“Nope. I have to call for you.”
She used every object in her office as an excuse to look away from me. I heard they were trained to avoid looking into the eyes of neoslaves. The hollowness inside of me expanded even more. My heart was racing at double the speed now.
“Hello…Nia…Is this Nia…I have yous husband here o.k…And I have to put yall on speaker. OK…OK, one second.”
She pressed a button on the phone base that turned on the speaker-phone then she hung the phone up. She pushed the phone closer towards me to the top end of her desk and I learned forward in the chair.
“Nia.”
“As-Salaam Alaykum,” she said.
“Wa Alaykum Salaam, what’s up?”
“This is hard for me to tell you this…but…shortly after I got off the phone with you this morning…your mom passed away in the hospital…I’m sorry I…”
“Nia”
“Uh huh”
“I’m gonna call you back in a second when I get back over to my unit, alright?”
“Alright. I love you.”
“Love you too.”
When C.P.O. Tiffany hung the phone up, I swear I had every intention the second the phone call disconnected to sprang right up and rush out the door back to my unit to call my wife but I could not move. I just sat and stared blankly across the small office at the window I could not see out of because there was an AC in it. Out of my peripheral I could not help but notice C.P.O. Tiffany was now looking at me. Suddenly at that moment in time I became visible to her.
“Would you like to see mental health?”
“No, I’m good.”
I broke my blank stare as I felt tears flooding my eyes. I grabbed my folder off her desk and I held it in my lap, staring down at it. The first tear rolled halfway down my cheek and fell off my face onto the tan-colored folder. I stared down at the deformed circle it made. Drip, drip. Two more tears fell straight of my eyelashes and splashed against the soft surface of the folder.
“You want a tissue?”
“No, I’m good.”
I wanted to leave but I could not move. C.P.O. Tiffany ignored my refusal and handed me tissue anyway. I accepted it from her but I did not use it. I could feel her faze weighing heavily upon me. Does she really care that mommy is gone? Or are my tears a source of state prison plantation drama that she can take home and entertain her friends with. If she really cared why would she hand me a piece of tissue when it could never be enough to wipe away the life time of tears I will cry for my mother? C.P.O. Tiffany’s brown skin does not fool me. She’s not earning a wage to care. She earns a wage to give me absolutely no privacy on the phone with my wife as she struggles to find the words to tell me that my mommy is gone…gone forever. She gets paid to protect the state prison plantation from legal liability by asking if I would like to see mental health. She gets paid to pretend that the state prison plantation will actually transport a neoslave to see his only mother one more time before she is laid in the ground. All these thoughts I had at that moment in time became a source of strength for me as I grieved for mommy and battled with the anger I had due to feeling helpless to be there for her and my family. I picked my head up and the tears begin to flow down into my beard. I did not try to wipe them; there was no need to. I looked at C.P.O. Tiffany so deep into her eyes I could see the long line of Uncle Toms she emerged from.
“I hate this place. The hate that I have for it, is so visceral, it communicates with the neurons in my heart. I hate what this place does to people; including you; and definitely what it has done to me. If I was not strong this place would destroy me as it destroys the family with spatial hostility. And I know destruction because I destroyed in my days of ignorance. I hate its physical infrastructure. I hate the filthy magnesium saturated water that I am forced to consume and bathe in. I hate that this state prison plantation is allowed to be called a ‘correctional’ institution. Soon I will return to society teeming with this hate. I will return to society remembering this day. I have realized my purpose now and you have helped to liberate me.”
Mobile now, I stood up and walked out of her office and went back to my unit to call my wife as I told her I would. C.P.O. Tiffany maintained her focus on me even as I turned my back to her and walked out the door. She will see me for the rest of her life now.