There is a woman who roams the streets of North Philadelphia, her face engraved with lines like a bisection of a tree trunk; every line is a story of a time in her life, a time that I’ll never know. This woman has perhaps gone out for a carton of milk for her grandson and, inevitably, a cop car will pull up alongside her and slowly roll down a window. “What are you doing out here, ma’am? You don’t belong out here.” He acts concerned for her safety, but really he is trying to determine whether she is among those white people who come up here for drugs at the pickup spot two blocks away. In all likelihood this cop will determine that she is not, in fact, one of those people; that she really is just picking up a carton of milk for her grandson, and she will be released to walk quickly back to her apartment staring straight ahead, because you don’t show fear in North Philadelphia, even though this woman is afraid, oh yes, she is afraid.
At the top of the rolling hill overlooking the lush greenery of State College, PA, there is a jail and today we are not allowed in it. I’m banished because of the wire in my bra and her name didn’t make the list when her son got moved from another jail in Philly. My parents — “Now didn’t I tell you you wouldn’t get in?” — are in the waiting room and I’m here for at least two hours, on the hillside of a state penetentiary with nothing to look at but green green grass and the eerie metallic glint of barbed wire. So we are sitting on the curb, this woman and I. She tells me of her life in Puerto Rico and Ridgewood, Queens, but mostly we talk about jail. Her son, who was roped into grand larceny via the seduction of an overprivileged senator’s daughter. It sounds glamorous in a way, but this end result — this jail on the hillside — it isn’t glamorous. As we talk a jail patrol car passes us, back and forth. An officer stares at us with steely eyes. “We ain’t doin’ nothing wrong,” the woman says as he passes. “We just sitting out here on the curb.”
We sit and stare but mostly she talks. She tells me stories of slit throats, of jail fights, of hotdogs cooked so long they explode when you try to eat them. She tells me drugs are passed through corrupt guards, through staff, through any way you could imagine. We talk of tests that can tell if you have drugs shoved up in your rectum, of how you should never wire money to anyone if an inmate asks you to. We question what happens when they get out. We talk of gangs, of murder, of robbery. We talk of poverty, of job loss, of broken lives and shattered dreams. I try to imagine this woman as a happy newlywed in New York City — I can hear the accent but I just can’t find a face behind all the wrinkles. This is a woman to whom moisturizer and drinking lots of water could never be a solution. Too much life is the problem. Like the president who ages decades after serving a year in office, this woman has been aged centuries, milleniums, from what she has seen, from what she has known.
I haven’t seen half the things this woman has seen, and I certainly don’t want to. But we have seen the same view from this hillside, from the outside of the jail and from the inside. We have seen the way the men look at you when you enter the room and we both know you don’t look back. We have seen a life full of options become a life with only one goal: survival. We have seen the way it looks when the light in someone’s eyes goes out, when they become the walking dead. We both know all you can do now is pray for resurrection. My parents return; they had a good visit. They’re smiling. I tell her, “It was nice to meet you. Take care.” “You too, honey,” she says. “You too.” We drive past her as we leave. Her car door is cracked open; she’s smoking a cigarette. She stares straight ahead.
