We were all dressed alike, with those stupid canvas slippers.
Another white woman in the group was also back in for a violation, and she was bitter, which made more sense to me.The rest of the group was a mixed bag of black and Latino women who leaned against the walls, staring at the ceiling or floor. This place is a dump.” She said this all pretty cheerfully, and I was stunned that anyone returning to prison could be so matter-of-fact and upbeat.
She was back in prison on a probation violation. About ten years my senior, with a friendly-witch aspect, straggly red hair, aquiline nose, and weathered creases in her skin, she looked as if she lived in the mountains, or by the sea. She seemed to think I was weird for talking to her.Ī small white woman on the other side of the room, on the other hand, was chatty. Her name was Janet, she was from Brooklyn, and she had sixty months.
I made small talk, asking her name, where she was from, how much time she had to do, the tiny set of questions that I thought were acceptable to ask. Her rough cornrows and aggressively set jaw couldn’t disguise the fact that she was very young and pretty. Sitting on my left against the wall was a young black woman to whom I took an instant liking, for no reason. She looked at me as if I were completely insane, then rolled her eyes. I tentatively asked her if they stood for Jesus Christ-maybe protecting her from the festive devil? She had a little tattoo of a dancing Mephistopheles figure on her arm, with the letters JC. Among the group was one of my roommates, a zaftig Dominican girl who was an odd combination of sulky and helpful. We got tattoos.The next morning I and eight other new arrivals reported for a day-long orientation session, held in the smallest of the TV rooms. A typical recollection: “We worked, we threw parties, we went skinny-dipping or sledding, we fucked, sometimes we fell in love. When Kerman reflects on this time, she seems unwilling or unable to explore her motivations, and more often resorts to describing her lifestyle in list form. She spent the next four months traveling the world on heroin-smuggling missions with Nora and her crew: Hanging out in Bali beach clubs, wandering through Paris, and transporting drug money (but never actual drugs), before realizing that she was getting in too deep and breaking all ties. While this disclosure may have prompted a “Check, please!” from your average gal, a young Kerman found it “exciting beyond belief.” Kerman begins by describing how, in 1992, she found herself a recent Smith College graduate from a good Boston family “with a thirst for bohemian counterculture and no clear plan.” She stuck around her college town waiting tables and soon began dating an older woman named Nora, who revealed on their first date that she was part of an international heroin trafficking network.
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