I heard it when I first walked in, it was a small, quiet sound, barely audible.
“Can-n-n I-I-I please talk-k-k t-to you-u-u?”
Over the radio I hear, “Go check on 204, she’s pushed her help light.”
I walk up the stairs and peer in through the small opening in the door. “Hey what’s wrong?”
I couldn’t see her face, I just heard the muffled voice and I could see the tears falling onto the front of her orange jumpsuit.
“I just need to talk to somebody before I start punching the wall.”
Several kids earlier who had been visited by their families and had particularly bad conversations had gone back to their cells and punched the cement walls so hard and so many times that their knuckles became bloody and swollen.
Once in an area away from the other girls we sat down and the story poured forth faster then my ears could listen.
“My mom and aunt came earlier today and they told me that my uncle passed last night …” The story was a horrific one and I did not know how to console her. 204’s uncle had fallen out of a window the night before and his four year old daughter had witnessed the tragedy. So traumatized, by seeing her father’s body, bloody and flattened on the pavement, she had been taken to a mental hospital several hours away, because of the shock she had gone into.
“My uncle raised me. He was only 22 years old, and his daughter… I should have been there. If I had been there none of this would have happened.”
I tried as best I could to lend a listening ear—to be someone who cared about her, in the midst of all of her pain. But her story was so tragic and my eyes kept filling up as she told me bits and pieces of her life through her sobs.
“When I was very young my father would beat me with his belt buckle until I was black and blue. When my mother kicked him out my uncle came to live with us and he was the man in the family he taught me about life. I just don’t know what to do now that he’s gone.” She said wringing her hands over and over in her lap.
I wished I could take her hands and hold them and tell her I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved so dearly, but instead I told her that I was so impressed by her maturity in talking to me instead of breaking her knuckles on the concrete like so many of the others had.
“My brother, he’s here right now too, when he was walking in the hall I saw that his hands were bloody. I know he’s been punching the walls. Do you think I could please visit with him? I know he is taking this so hard. You don’t know how hard it is to be locked up in a room with concrete walls and not be able to be with any of your fam–”
“Are you almost done in there?????” the radio blared.
I turn down the volume on my radio and I am forced to tell her our time is up. “I will try and get a visit with your brother,” I tell her, knowing full well the odds are stacked so much against her. I walk her back to her cell and secure the door. My steps back to the control room are heavy.
“Hey guys,” I open the door to two other staff. One is a supervisor. “So do you guys know what happened with her family?”
“Yeah, I heard,” my red headed co-worker replied, smacking her gum. “I heard that he got in fight with his girlfriend and he got pushed out of a window. Ha! The girlfriend’s words were so slurred when she called the family they could hardly understand her. No one really knows what happened, but he was probably drunk.” The way she said it as if the man deserved to die made me want to throw-up. “And, anyways,” she said “it was just her uncle.” Everything in me wanted to reach across the room and slap her. Don’t you know anything about native culture? That aside, haven’t you ever lost someone you loved. I wanted to scream this at her, but somehow I kept my composure.
“Well, anyway, I was wondering if we could get her a visit with her brother in B pod?”
They both looked at me.
“He’s not her brother, he’s her cousin…” my supervisor said complacently. “Anyway, we can’t authorize that unless we call the assistant director at home.”
“Sooooo…..???” I was shocked that they were not considering this a brother and sister relationship since the two had lived together since they were babies.
“So, it’s not going to happen.” My supervisor said as he opened the door to leave.
By this point I was irate. “So we’re not going to take into consideration the pain that these two are feeling and the fact that they have grown up together since they were infants???”
“I just don’t think its necessary….” He said, looking a little annoyed.
“And besides,” the red headed smacked, “She doesn’t even know what really happened and she’s just being emotional.”
That was it. I couldn’t take it anymore. The insensitivity. The gall. “No. She’s just hurting,” I said as I slammed the door. Angrily I stomped down the hall, wanting to say a whole slew of other things, among them Isaiah 10:1-3a:
“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will you do on the day of reckoning when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help?”
For some reason that verse had a whole new meaning and I wanted to recite it to them loud and clear over the radio as I sat in the break room…but I had said enough. So I turned down my radio and pretended for a few seconds that I lived in a place where people cared about those who are different from them and believed in kids who have had the shittiest of lives.