Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

I had won the bunkie lottery. Natalie, a woman near the end of an eight-year sentence, was a reserve of quiet dignity and good counsel. Because of her heavy accent, it took careful listening on my part to understand everything she said, but she never said anything unnecessary. She was the head baker in the kitchen. She rose at four A.M. to begin her shift and kept largely to herself with a few select friends among the West Indian women and her kitchen coworkers. She spent quiet time reading, walking the track, and writing letters, and went to bed early, at eight P.M. We spoke very little about our lives outside of prison, but she could answer just about any question I had about life at Danbury. She never said what had landed her there, and I never asked.

How Natalie got to sleep at eight P.M. was a complete mystery to me, because it was LOUD down in B Dorm. My first evening there I was quiet as a mouse in my top bunk, trying to follow the hooting and hollering that took place across the big room filled with women. I was worried that I would never get any sleep, and that I would lose my marbles in the cacophony. When the main lights were shut off, though, it quieted down pretty quickly, and I could fall asleep, lulled by the breathing of forty-seven other people.

The next morning something woke me before dawn. Groggy and confused, I sat up in my bed, the room still dark, the collective slumber of its residents blanketing everything. Something was going on. I could hear someone, not shouting exactly, but angry. I looked below me-Natalie was already gone, at work. I leaned forward very slowly, very cautiously, and peeped out of my cubicle.

Two cubes away I could see a Spanish woman who’d been particularly loud the night before. She was not happy. What was pissing her off, I could not figure out. Suddenly she squatted for a few moments, then stood up and stalked off, leaving behind a puddle in front of my neighbor’s cubicle.

I rubbed my eyes. Did I just see what I thought I saw? About a minute later a black woman emerged from the cubicle.

“Lili! Cabrales! Lili Cabrales! Get back here this minute and clean this up! LILIIIIIIIIIIII!!!” People were not happy to be awakened this way, and a smattering of “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” broke out across the big room. I ducked my head back out of sight-I didn’t want either woman to know that I had seen the whole thing. I could hear someone cursing quietly. I cautiously stole a glance: the black woman quickly cleaned up the puddle with an enormous wad of toilet paper. She caught me peeking and seemed sheepish. I flopped back down on my bunk and stared at the ceiling. I had fallen down the rabbit hole.

The next day was Valentine’s Day, my first holiday in prison. Upon arrival in Danbury, I was struck by the fact that there did not seem to be any lesbian activity. The Rooms, so close by the guard’s station, were bastions of propriety. There was no cuddling or kissing or any obvious sexual activity on display in any of the common rooms, and while someone had told me a story about a former inmate who had made the gym her own personal love shack, it was always empty when I went there.

Given that, I was taken aback by the explosion of sentiment around me on Valentine’s Day morning in B Dorm. Handmade cards and candy were exchanged, and I was reminded of the giddy intrigue of a fifth-grade classroom. Some of the “Be Mines” that were stuck on the outside of cubicles were clearly platonic. But the amount of effort that had gone into some of the Valentines, carefully constructed from magazine clippings and scavenged materials, suggested real ardor to me.

I had decided from the beginning to reveal nothing about my sapphic past to any other inmate. If I had told even one person, eventually the whole Camp would know, and no good could come of it. So I talked a lot about my darling fiancé, Larry, and it was known in the Camp that I was not “that way,” but I was not at all freaked out by women who were “that way.” Frankly, most of these women were not even close to being “real lesbians” in my mind. They were, as Officer Scott put it, “gay for the stay,” the prison version of “lesbian until graduation.”

It was hard to see how a person could conduct an intimate relationship in such an intensely overcrowded environment, let alone an illicit relationship. On a practical level, where on earth could you be alone in the Camp without getting caught? A lot of the romantic relationships I observed were more like schoolgirl crushes, and it was rare for a couple to last more than a month or two. It was easy to tell the difference between women who were lonely and wanted comfort, attention, and romance and a real, live lesbian: there were a few of them. There were other big barriers for long-term lovers, like having sentences of dramatically different lengths, living in different Dorms, or becoming infatuated with someone who wasn’t actually a lesbian.

Colleen and her bunkie next door got lots of Valentines from other prisoners. I got none, but that evening’s mail call yielded plenty of evidence that I was loved. Best of all was a little book of Neruda poems from Larry, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. I resolved to read a poem every day.

I WAS finally able to shop commissary on February 17, when I bought:

XL sweatpants, $24.70, given to me in error and which they would not let me return

A stick of cocoa butter, $4.30

Packets of tuna, sardines, and mackerel, each about $1

Ramen noodles, $0.25

Squeeze cheese, $2.80

Pickled jalapeños, $1.90

Hot sauce, $1.40

Legal pads, pens, envelopes, and stamps, priceless.

I desperately wanted to buy a cheap little portable headset radio for $42.90. The radio would have cost about $7 on the street. At the base pay for federal prisoners, which is $0.14 an hour, that radio could represent more than three hundred hours of labor. I needed the radio to hear the weekend movie or anything on television, and to use down in the gym, but the officer who ran the commissary brusquely told me they were out of radios. No mas, Kerman.

Because I could count on money from the outside world, I could buy items to return to each person who had helped me upon my arrival-soap, toothpaste, shampoo, shower shoes, packets of instant coffee. Some women tried to wave them away, “Don’t worry about it, Kerman,” but I insisted. “Please, forget it!” said Annette, who had loaned me so many things in my first several weeks. “You’re like my daughter! Hey, did you get any new books today?”

The books continued to pour in at mail call. It had gotten to the point where I was embarrassed, and also it made me nervous; it was a clear demonstration that I “had it like that” on the outside, a network of people who had both a concern for me and the time and money to buy me books. So far no one had threatened me with anything more intimidating than a scowl or a harsh word, and no other prisoner had asked anything of me. Still, I was guarded against getting played, used, or targeted. I saw that some of the women had little or no resources from the outside to help make their prison life livable, and many of my fellow prisoners were seasoned hustlers.