The black cuffs and lengthy Smith & Wesson chains were cold and, as bleak as they looked, it was a complete parody of an uncomfortable period. In my case, however, a wrong had to be repaired. I was certain the annoying, switching rattle of the chain links never got old to the guards as they led the way into the health clinic. The two had escorted many prior to me, rather than be annoyed, this sound they embraced. The sound to them was ubiquitous, it’s tassel of untangling and straightening was as formal as taking the same route home from work every day (ironic!).
I’d never been out of the facility prior to this visit. For two years I’d been cooped up along narrow hallways, eighty men bubbles, inside of a 12 by 15-foot two-man cell at Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, unable to evade the testosterone filled prism. Everywhere one turned, upset, filth, keys and violence. Despite the circumstances, I was glad to get out of the facility.
I was dressed in all orange garbs, escorted by two corrections officers on both sides of me, shackled at the wrist to waist, and ankle chains dragging along the stone grey felt carpet in the narrow halls. The sight of a 210lb muscular black man in prison attire attracted many glances, and whispers I seldomly heard. One, in particular I believe was meant to be heard by two, who I supposed were doctors in long white lab coats. Their paces were quicker than ours, thanks in part to the chain’s cuffs tearing into my ankles’ thin skin layers, and partly due to the restrictive chain length on the strides of my steps. As the pair grew closer, their words were of an ongoing conversation, and as they passed with their periodical stares, they did little to hide what they were saying.
“I’m tired of outpatient care,” the man stated.
It didn’t take the woman long to reply, “Me too,” cutting her eyes in my direction.
The comments didn’t move me. The pain in my side hurt worse than any comments made by a couple of disgruntled doctors. As we rounded the corner into the waiting area, a few people were inside waiting to be seen, or check in. A white couple, and a black woman, she was alone and reading over a health magazine. They were all older, just like many others I’d seen coming in. One of the officers with me approached the receptionist’s counter and notified her of who they were bringing in. She was obviously accustomed to this process. And, to me, strangely too comfortable. She called me to the counter as if I was there on my own. I approached, cuffs on wrists. I stretched my hands up onto the counter and signed the necessary document I was sure many other normal ‘civilized’ citizens had to sign when they were called upon by the woman standing on the opposite side of the glass. When I sat back down, I was brought back to reality, because, for just a brief moment, I had actually been taken back to an epoch of freedom, a period when correctional guards were figments of my far-fetched imagination.
Another man arrived; he was an older black man. He wore a slick leather fedora, a cropped but thin leather black jacket, and black straight leg 90’s jeans, sort of faded and which seemed to fit his whole appearance. I guess out of curiosity I watched him, just to see if he would watch me, judgingly was my disposition to seek.
I had been incarcerated for twelve years at the time and had become adept in reading the body language of those who didn’t wear the same clothes as I did. I had grown to ascertain when someone was applying a stigma to me, or basing their opinions of me off my garbs, the man had been no different.
He grabbed a National Geographic magazine from the side table, subtly pretending to read it while his eyes occasionally, with intention, stretched across the room to meet my unbothered stare. His eyes were definitely judging, and sort of spoke words only I could hear: “Do you know what our ancestors went through to avoid the position you’re in?” this invisible voice conveyed. “Do you know what we went through? What I went through?!” The imagined confrontation seemed right in my face. He didn’t have to ask the questions aloud, nor did he have to elaborate what would follow, it was summed up in his shunning glances, raised brow and twisted lip, while he frustratingly chewed on the inside of his cheek… judging.
But it was my choice to care or not, about how he felt that is; my choice to hold my head low and give access to my crown, yet it was my optimal choice to hold my head up, chin forward and relax my eyes to the ceiling with an unfazed aloofness. Frankly, I felt I’d done enough time to have the privilege to not care of what people thought of me and my past mistake and the garbs I wore for it. I had resolved that this mistake was no plan of my own, and so it could only be considered as an inadvertent misplacement of my expectations. I felt nothing for the man’s judgement, nor the older couple’s sad aptitude to caress the other for support because of some perilous health condition that tended to gradually worsen after every visit with the doctor. I just wanted my side examined so that I would know if I was living, or going to be given the gift of perishing from my subjugated body.
I stared at the ceiling with my mind too jumbled to think, and truthfully, unconsciously sad with a numbness I’d been, for thirteen years of my incarceration, to actually grasp the reality of my situation. Yes, the moments came when I wasn’t quite myself, and they didn’t come annually, but they came, briefly. When I speak of reality and being able to grasp it, I’m speaking of distinguishing whether I know the gravity of the years I was sentenced to and what it means, or even if I cared… I’ve teetered between the two for years. In this instance, the thought was a perishable, and not at all an actual thought but a tool perhaps, a prophylactic to drown out the world and its torturous, overbearing judgement and ruthless denial of love, or maybe it was to protect the rambling of my mind? No… it was the outside world; I was certain of it. I felt it had no connection to me, nor at the moment I to it.
My eyes had been shut for a couple of minutes when two older black men stepped inside the area and took seats in the chairs beside leather jacket. Both were dressed in slick Adidas sweat outfits, one was a velour black and the other same fabric, but navy blue. If one hadn’t been heavier than the other, I would have drawn the conclusion they were twins, but my assumption stayed inconclusive because I had no evidence except for the matching attire, their behavior to one another as if they’d known each other since birth, and their lingering heights. The two appeared to be attached at the hip since birth and spilled into this uncertain environment. But somehow, since the 40’s they’d managed, managed to shield themselves from the adversity they’d faced for years because of the complexion of their skin. I knew of the era they’d arrived from, such a horrible period. I knew my situation wasn’t much adversity, rather it was the end of the few alternatives a dope boy faced.
The two men basked in each other’s presence with hearty giggles. Each grabbed a magazine and equally found something on both their pages funny. Not once did they stare in my direction, nor did I get the feeling there were having a good ol’ time off my presence, they were just being themselves and living in the moment. And I admit, deep down I wanted them to stare at me, judge me, criticize me for my predicament, so that I could despise them for it, like I’d done the other two, but they didn’t, and to me, it was sort of peculiar.
My name was called and we were ordered to head to the MRI waiting room. We took two lefts down long, narrow deserted halls with the isolated sound of ailing patients’ moans drifting out of doors we passed. It was a fate I was ambivalent to embracing. Through three doors we finally came upon the MRI room. Four people were already waiting inside to be seen: a young Latina woman who was discoursing away on her mobile phone; a white guy who couldn’t have been no older that thirty-five stared straight ahead as the woman who’d been sitting beside him – probably his mother – stood up and walked through a door adjacent to the room and passed a waiting nurse in the hallway; and an older black man, who seemed a bit out of it, rocked back and forth mumbling words that were difficult to make out.
The officers stepped inside first and I followed. One took a seat across from me and the other to my left, and as before I disregarded the presence of the others inside the room, as I was expected to do. I tilted my head back and stared through the innards of nubs of paint on the ceiling. I created a timeline of their creations, giving them purpose for a purpose. I adjusted it to when and how I arrived to where I was. My childhood… nuh… full of riddles, ambiguous love, and uncertainty. As a teenager: curiosity, a dreamer, imaginative, to an abrupt transformation, even unexpected to me… hustla. To an adult, barely reached, thus a timeline with no depth. It didn’t matter, this was it for me.
The Latina woman stopped talking on her phone, and as sounds were the only noise in the room, her foot steps to the receptionist’s desk was the most distinct sound there was in there. “Excuse me…,” she said, vying for the woman’s attention behind the desk whose eyes and fingers were glued to a computer.
The receptionist looked up, “Yes?” She looked worn out by life.
“Can you tell me how long this wait is going to be?” asked the young Latina woman.
“It depends; but I do believe your next, ma’am,” said the receptionist.
The young woman seemed to weigh up her options, and I knew, or had a gut feeling, that somewhere in there it involved having to not be in a waiting room with a convict. “Can I be rescheduled? I have to go,” she said.
The receptionist typed a few keystrokes then stared back to the young woman. “Okay, I rescheduled you for next month, we’ll call you with a day.”
“Okay, thank you,” the young woman sounded relieved and walked away in more relief.
Being in a room with a convict wasn’t the norm for most citizens, but for me it was, even before being incarcerated.
In 2001, in middle school, I sat in the school’s auditorium along with every kid in the school. I didn’t know what everyone else was thinking, but I knew what was going through my mind when the three men dressed in orange garbs walked onto the stage dragging their ankle chains on the wooden floor followed by two guards. It wasn’t those past dreams that had suddenly stopped occurring of a young me staring through the bars of prison windows from a top rack, yet I thought about, strangely, Ebenezer Scrooge and his relentless selfishness. I thought about his old partner carrying those heavy chains he would forever be connected to in his ghostly state all because of greed, and Ebenezer, haunted by the warnings to change or face the same fate, is reluctant. But when it’s too late and the adversity becomes too much to bear, he begs for forgiveness, he begs to be given another chance. He’d been given warnings and chances, and he pleads his desire to earnestly change. Just when he thinks another chance is gone, he gets that chance. I felt like the three men in the context that I’m able to avoid such fate. And I’d felt like Ebenezer for twelve years, asking for another chance, however, my pleas weren’t answered. Up until recently I stopped asking, and even thinking about that chance, I stopped wanting and started waiting on the day when I could be anywhere else other than here. So, I certainly cared none of the young woman’s displeasure of sitting in a room with a man in orange garbs, I didn’t care, it was ceremonious to me.
I opened my eyes to check the scenery, new company had arrived while I had been in my distant state. The couple who’d been in the first waiting room with me earlier had come in, followed by them was an older black woman in her mid-sixties, she hadn’t stopped smiling once as she entered, and I was sure she had no choice. She was escorting a little boy around five years of age, his indifference to sadness and pain gave her a youthful gift, the gift of nostalgic joy. The little boy couldn’t stop bouncing up and down. “He should be at a children’s hospital, not here,” I wanted to say, but the words I kept to myself. I turned my face back to the ceiling, but now I closed my eyes and drifted in thought, which didn’t seem as difficult as it had been before. I guess I had been in more of a constrained state before. My mind seemed to collect all the bad things that I’d been through and pushed them into a pile on the table. I couldn’t sift through them because of the potency of their negativity. They adhered together and became a solid ball that I hated, and it sort of frustrated me to the point that my nerves shook a bit and the muscles in my jaw clenched. I wanted to be left alone, from my thoughts and all the judgement.
I felt a presence in front of me, but I paid it no mind because it was likely someone leaving in fright of being in the room with a man in orange garbs, or it was someone heading over to speak to the receptionist to reschedule their appointment. But the presence lingered, and I heard nothing. I opened my eyes immediately and noticed the little boy walking away from me. He was probably misbehaving I thought, curious of the bad man sitting across from him wearing chain links. But before he could address his curiosity his guardian called to him, but I had heard nothing prior; no clenched fist warnings, nor warnings of stomping feet. The woman the kid was with shot me a benign grin, and when the kid made it to her, he collapsed in her arms and pointed at me with a huge, shy smile. Or so I thought. He hadn’t been pointing at me. I looked down; he had been pointing at the piece of candy sitting beside my hand on the armrest. He’d left me a gift.
I stared back at the two asking “why?” to myself. Wanting them to hate me, but being hated wasn’t me, something I didn’t actually want to feel. The kid didn’t mind me, didn’t mind the orange garbs. His unknowingness, the inability to judge, and his innate love for a world he was still discovering discarded all biases… even to me. A man who created an inane space in his soul, removed from the child’s existence. A portion which seemed incurably indifferent to what occurred in the physical, now understood. I didn’t need to cascade into some hole in my mind because of the outside world’s dissatisfaction, rather there was still hope to give, good to be grateful for, and a reason to feel for others.
