Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

In prison, for the first time, I understood that faith could help people see beyond themselves, not into the abyss but into the street, into the mix, to offer what was best about themselves to others. I grew to this understanding by way of knowing people like Sister, Yoga Janet, Gisela, and even my holy-roller pedicurist Rose.

Rose, chatting in the midst of a pedicure one day, told me what she had learned from her faith; I thought later that hers were the most powerful words a person could utter: “I’ve got a lot to give.”

I HAD added frustrations, and my methods for dealing with them met with obstacles at every turn. The track was now closed after the four P.M. count. After work I would race back to the Camp, change into my sneakers, and run furiously until count time, cutting it closer and closer and stressing out most of B Dorm. I would look up from the far side of the track and see Jae frantically beckoning me, and I would run at top speed up the rickety steps and through C Dorm to my cube, other prisoners urging me to hurry.

“Pipes, you going to fuck up the four o’clock count, get your ass sent to the SHU!” Delicious admonished from the other side of B Dorm.

“Bunkie, you cutting it close.” Natalie would shake her head.

Best case, I was only getting in about six miles on a weekday. I tried to make it up on the weekend, running ten miles around the quarter-mile track on Saturdays and Sundays, but that didn’t help with my daily tides of stress and anxiety about things and people I could not control.

So I started doing more yoga. Initial interest in keeping the yoga class going had surged a bit, but a number of the new adherents (Amy, cursing and squealing with every pose) didn’t last long. Ghada still appeared occasionally to stretch beside me, crooning at me affectionately, but I didn’t have any decent Spanish or Janet’s soothing yogi presence, and she never dozed off with me. Camila would come and do a tape with me sometimes on the weekend, and she was still radiant good company (and could arch into a backbend next to mine), but she was preoccupied with her impending departure to the drug program down the hill. It was mainly me and Rodney Yee.

I got into the habit of rising at five, checking carefully to be sure that the morning count was complete-boots thudding, flashlight beams bobbing, keys sometimes jangling if the CO didn’t care enough to hold them still. I’d stand silently in my cube, hoping to startle them and make them jump. Natalie would already be gone to the kitchen to bake. I would revel in the complete darkness of B Dorm, listening to forty-eight other women breathe in a polyrhythm of deep sleep as I prepared the right measures of instant coffee, sugar, and Cremora. It was warm and peaceful in B Dorm, as I slithered through the warren of cubicles to the hot water dispenser. Occasionally I would see someone else awake-we would nod or sometimes murmur to each other. Steaming mug in hand, I would slip out of the building into the bracing cold and down to the gym to commune with the VCR and Rodney. In the perfect privacy of the empty gym, my body would slowly awaken and warm on the cold rubber floor, my head and heart stayed calmer longer, and the value of Yoga Janet’s teaching became clearer every day. I missed her terribly, and yet she had given me a gift that allowed me to cope without her.

In the last ten months I had found ways to carve out some sense of control of my world, seize some personal power within a setting in which I was supposed to have none. But my grandmother’s illness sent that sense spinning away, showed me how much my choices eleven years earlier and their consequences had put me in the power of a system that would be relentless in its efforts to take things away. I could choose to assign very little value to the physical comforts I had lost; I could find the juice and flair in who and what was precious in my current surroundings. But nothing here could substitute for my grandmother, and I was losing her.

ON A gray afternoon I was whipping around the track, pushing myself to keep at a seven-minute-mile speed. Mrs. Jones had given me a digital wristwatch that she never used, and I paced myself relentlessly with it. The weather was crap, it was going to rain. Jae appeared at the top of the hill, gesturing to me urgently. I looked at the watch and saw that it was only 3:25, thirty-five minutes until count time. What did she want?

I pulled off my earphones, annoyed. “What’s up?” I shouted into the wind.

“Piper! Little Janet wants you!” She beckoned me up again.

If Little Janet wanted something she should bring her young ass down here to the track to talk to me… unless something was wrong?

Sudden panic pushed me up the stairs to Jae. “What is it? Where is she?”

“She’s in her cube. Come on.” I strode along with Jae, tense. She didn’t look like disaster had struck, but Jae was so used to disaster that you couldn’t always tell. We got to A Dorm quickly.

Little Janet was sitting on her bunkie’s bottom bed, and she looked okay. I looked around her cube. It was bare, and there was a box on the floor.

“Are you okay?” I wanted to shake her for scaring me.

“Piper? I’m going home.”

I blinked. What the hell was she talking about?

“What are you talking about, baby?” I sat down on the bed, pushing a pile of paper aside. I thought she might have lost her rabbit-ass mind.

She grabbed my hand. “I got immediate release.”

“What?” I looked at her, afraid to believe what she was saying. Nobody got immediate release. Prisoners put in motions that took months and months to wend their way through the legal system, and they always lost. Immediate release was like the Easter Bunny.

“Are you sure, sweetie?” I grabbed both of her hands. “Did they confirm, did they say for you to pack out?” I looked at her pile of stuff, and I looked at Jae, who was smiling a huge smile.

Toni appeared in the doorway of the now-crowded cube with her coat on, jingling the town driver keys in her hand. “Are you ready, Janet? Piper, can you believe this! It’s incredible!”

I whooped, not a scream but more like a war whoop. And then I crushed Little Janet in a bear hug, squeezing her as hard as I could and laughing. She was laughing too, in joy and disbelief. When I finally let her go, I put both hands on my head to try to steady myself. I was staggered, as if it were me who was leaving. I stood up and sat down.

“Tell me everything! But hurry, you have to go! Toni, are they waiting for her in R &D?”

“Yeah, but we gotta get her down there before the count, or she’s gonna be stuck behind it.”

Little Janet hadn’t told a soul that she had a motion entered in court-typical jailhouse circumspection. But she had won, and her sixty-month sentence had been cut to the time served, two years. Her parents were on their way to pick up their little girl and bring her home to New York. We hustled her out of her cube and out the back door to where the white van was parked next to the chow hall. It was almost dusk. There were just a few of us, everything was happening so fast no one else knew what was up.

“Janet, I am so happy for you.”

She hugged me, hugged Jae, and kissed her bunkie Miss Mimi, a tiny old Spanish mami. Then she climbed in next to Toni, and the van pulled away, up the incline to the main road that circled the FCI. We waved wildly. Little Janet was turned around in her seat, calling goodbye to us out the window, until the van crested the hill and turned right, out of sight.

I kept watching for what seemed like many minutes after she had disappeared. Then I looked at Jae-Jae who had seven more years to do of a ten-year sentence. She put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “You okay?” she said. I nodded. I was more than okay. Then we turned back and helped Miss Mimi into the Camp.