Margaret Sexton: A Kind of Freedom

In the kitchen, Jackie realized she hadn’t done the dishes the night before and she didn’t bother to start them now, just poured water into the pot. She knew it was only a matter of time before her clothes were spewed on the sofa, and old food was stacked on TV trays again.

Sybil didn’t ask where Terry was, and for the rest of her life Jackie would be grateful for that, that she didn’t make her spell it out. Sybil only took the baby from her, held him up to her own shoulder, and chanted in a baby voice Jackie couldn’t have imagined coming from a more unlikely source, “Mama’s not feeling well but she’ll be back, she’ll be back, oh yes, she’ll be back.”

Jackie didn’t bother to correct her, to point out that something about this time felt permanent, felt as if she’d been driven down to the bottom of a hole and wasn’t capable of feeling her way out of it because it wasn’t just about missing him this time, or missing out on the family she had banked on. It was about knowing that whatever pain had driven him out had managed to touch her too, and she didn’t have crack to deliver her from it.

She didn’t correct Sybil though; she just poured her coffee, sat down on the sofa and stared ahead at the TV screen. She flipped it on. The Price Is Right had just started; someone was betting on a two-seater sofa, a nice leather one Jackie knew she could dress up with pillows and throws from Macy’s, but the woman on the show was betting too much, $999 when a sofa that size, nice as it was, wouldn’t go for more than $500. Jackie wanted to intercede, cry out, Don’t set your sights too high, girl, it won’t hold , but she just sat in silence. If she was listening, she would have heard the sirens building in the distance, then leveling off, meeting their target, but as it was, her mind was as focused as a tide breaking, ready to crash. On what, she didn’t know.

Winter 2011

Going back, when T.C. thought about it, was just like getting out, anticlimactic. His aunt had whittled the sentence down to three years, but he didn’t think about it like that. He just thought about who he needed to be nice to to get an old TV and what CO might let him play ball a half hour longer. The second time was easier in that way. He didn’t have to learn the system. He knew most of the people in there either from his last stint or just from the street. Some he had been close with at home, and they weren’t happy to see him, as much as they were comforted by a familiar face.

He told his mama he didn’t want visitors. Not yet, he said, though the truth was, not ever, and he planned to drag her along until that became clear. That was the thing about people on the outside. They thought it cheered him up to see their faces, but it just reminded him too much of freedom when everybody knew it was better to adjust to the kind of freedom available on the inside. For instance, he didn’t have a roommate this time, and that was something; he could also go out to the yard whenever he pleased.

It was those small victories he wanted to bask in, those small victories that kept him afloat so when his mama came, he stayed in his cell as long as he could. The CO had to ask for him a third time before he stood up, and even then he dragged more than walked to the waiting area.

He didn’t understand it, but she looked better than he’d ever seen her. Made up, thinner, joyful. He wanted to ask if she had come to the right place. She pulled him to her in a tight embrace.

“Hey, my baby,” she exclaimed. “You look good. You look real good. They treatin’ you all right in there? I sent brownies. Did you get ’em? Made ’em from scratch, and MawMaw is going to send a cake, she wanted me to make sure and tell you that.”

“Is everything okay, Ma?” he couldn’t help but ask.

“Oh, everything’s good, real good.”

They sat while she finished answering him.

“I started volunteering as an aide for Miss Patricia. You know she lost her hearing, and I’m helping her through that. She’s got so much grace, this woman, it’s really given me some perspective. What do I have to complain about? I have my health. I have my family. And this.” She waved her hand at T.C. and shrugged. “Well”—she paused—“anyway, have you seen any good shows lately? I know they let you watch television, right?”

T.C. nodded, told her he had been watching Modern Family. “It’s good,” he said, “I laugh at some of the jokes, and that Sofia Vergara, man, if I had a woman like that—” He stopped because he was talking to his mother.

“Well, I’d say Alicia is a good girl, a real good girl,” his mama said. “She brings the baby by every Saturday for me to keep him all by myself while she’s at work. She doesn’t want to cut his hair, but I don’t hold that against her because she doesn’t have to bring him by, I know she doesn’t.”

This was the part T.C. hadn’t wanted, the reason he’d told his mama not to come, and the reason he wanted to crawl under the steel bed in his cell when visiting hours approached.

“How’s he doing?” he asked, because he couldn’t not ask at this point and because he wanted to know, but he was afraid of what he would do with the information, how it would haunt him once his mother was gone, and it was just him and those four walls and all the time in the world to consider what might have been.

“Oh, he’s good, real good, baby. Saying some words. Mama and—” She stopped. “I think I’ve even heard him say MawMaw once or twice. I want to bring him by, son. Alicia doesn’t want to come herself, and that’s her business, but she said I could bring Malik, and I want to. Maybe next time, for your birthday?”

“No, Mama, hell no,” he shouted so she wouldn’t bring it up again. “I can’t have my son seeing me like this, thinking it’s all right to go to jail.”

“Oh, he’s not going to even know what jail is.” His mama lowered her voice as if she had been the one screaming. “He’s a baby.”

“Yeah, but that stuff sticks with lil’ kids, and if he keeps coming, in a couple years, he’ll be old enough to remember. I don’t want him to ever think of me like that.”

His mama just nodded. “I understand,” she said. “I understand.” She took her time saying the rest. “I just thought it would be good for him to see you. The thing is, I want him to know his father. Children don’t need their parents to be perfect, they just need them to be there, they get so much from that, and I just, well, I always wished I had pushed your relationship with your father more. He wasn’t perfect, but he was your father, and that was something. I just don’t want to see Malik go through what you did.”

Time was called on the session, and T.C. told her he would think about it, call her next week. But the thing was, there wasn’t anything to think about. It was one thing to be in there, to know that he had gone back out of his own stupidity — that ate at him enough. But to see his best thing, the person he’d let down most thoroughly, witness what a fuckup he’d become, well that would have broken him, and he didn’t think he’d be able to recover.

He told his mama as much when he called her on Saturday. “I just can’t do it, Mama,” he said. “It’s only three years. I’ll start fresh with him when I see him then.”

“I understand,” she repeated. “Say, Alicia’s over here, just dropping him off. She wants to talk with you.”

“Okay.” His heartbeat was going. He hadn’t had the nerve to call her since going in, and he thought that was a good thing. She deserved better than him, better than what he’d done, and what it had made out of all of them.