Authors: Keith Thomas Walker
But Candace did fine all by herself. At 6:42 a.m. she delivered a tiny little girl who weighed only six pounds and nine ounces. Candace didn’t have a name for her, but she came up with one as soon as they handed her the fresh bundle of joy: Leila Denise Hendricks.
* * *
Next to the police raid and having a baby in a foreign land, holding Leila for the first time was another moment Candace would never forget. The police had her cuffed to the bed, and her nurse said CPS would take custody of the child, but nothing could take away from that treasured moment. Lying there with a brand new baby in her arms was a turning point in Candace’s life.
But it was nothing like going to jail.
The police wanted Candace recovered and out of the hospital within forty-eight hours of her childbirth experience. The nurses allowed her to see the baby a lot during this time period, and every moment was precious to Candace. Leila was nearly bald, but she had a thick tuft of curls on the very top of her head. Leila’s feet were extra tiny, no longer than Candace’s middle finger. She was also very fair-skinned, but her knuckles were a few shades darker, providing a glimpse of what her actual skin tone would be.
And Leila liked to hold onto Candace’s pinky finger when Mama fed her. Leila liked to hum when the bottle got really good to her. She had the most beautiful eyes in the world.
Candace savored each moment with Leila, but not with the dread other women in her situation might have felt. As fantastic as it was, Candace truly believed she would be exonerated of her charges. They could take her baby, but with all her heart, she knew she would have Leila back soon. The source of this faith was a simplistic and almost childish belief that at some point life had to treat her fairly.
Lying in that hospital bed, Candace realized she literally had nowhere else to go but up. So when the powers that be deemed she was well enough to go to jail just twenty-seven hours after the delivery, Candace handed over her baby with lighthearted tears in her eyes.
“
I’m gonna fix my life
,” she promised sweet Leila.
Candace figured this promise would be easy to keep because she had no choice.
The Overbrook Meadows County Jail is a magnificent structure made of steel and concrete, iron and fiberglass. Once there, you become property of the state. The guards will tell you when to eat, sleep, laugh, and cry. To make sure you understand this, they put you through the ringer immediately.
Upon entering, Candace was fingerprinted and photographed. This was her first mug shot
,
and she had to take it fresh out of the hospital. She wondered if it looked as bad as Nick Nolte’s.
Candace wore a red T-shirt and blue jeans with white canvas shoes. They made her strip nude, wiggle her tongue, spread her toes, and bend over. They lifted her breasts, pawed through her hair, and sprayed her for lice. This was a terrible start to jail life, but luckily it was the most humiliating thing to happen to her at the facility.
They took Candace’s shoestrings and ushered her to a holding cell where she waited two hours for her arraignment. It was cold in there, and it would be cold everywhere else for the remainder of her stay.
* * *
The judge set Candace’s bail at twenty thousand dollars. From the courtroom, the guards took her to a small office and asked if she was homosexual or in a gang. They had a phone there, but Candace declined her free call. She’d already decided not to call her parents until she got out. The only other person who might care about her whereabouts was Trisha, but Trisha had no home phone.
They gave Candace a handful of toiletry essentials and a blanket and assigned her to a small room built for two. It was 7:35 on a Tuesday morning. When Candace got to her cell block, breakfast was long gone, and all of the cages were open. There were approximately thirty women on the unit. Most of them occupied a large bench ten feet away from the only television. Others read books or played cards. Some were still in their beds, huddled in their blankets like a cocoon. Candace felt a little sleepy herself.
She staggered through the multitude oblivious to the odd looks she attracted. One inmate in particular, a large woman with dark eyes and dark lips, watched with barefaced angst as Candace found her bed.
“Damn. Why I always end up with the crazy ones?” she muttered.
* * *
Candace climbed into her bunk and turned her back to the sounds of strangers in the common area. Her mattress was way too small and tragically thin, but she tried to pretend she was at home. She thought about New York and closed her mind to the sounds of calculated madness. And though it left her vulnerable, she closed her eyes and thought about her daughter. Every now and then a guard came over a loudspeaker with an important announcement, but pretty soon Candace didn’t hear that, either.
She slept through lunch.
When the guards showed up with dinner, her cell mate woke her up with what would come to be a typical request.
“Say, if you don’t want your dinner, will you get it and give it to me?”
Candace wondered why the woman didn’t take the tray on her own.
“They won’t give you nobody else’s plate,” her cell mate clarified. “You have to get it yourself if you want to give it away.”
Candace rolled over to face the female who would be her closest companion for the weeks to come. The first thing she noticed was her short hair. It was
really short
. The sides were shaved lower than the top. Candace’s cell mate sported a tan-colored jailhouse jumpsuit rather than street clothes, which made her look even more like a boy. The woman was also large, two hundred pounds at least, and she had a part in her left eyebrow. She was no older than twenty-five.
“I’m Neci.” She had a raspy voice and large hands with pudgy fingers.
Candace almost laughed. This was perfect. A movie of her life couldn’t have gone any better. Here she was, young, sweet, and innocent, adapting to her first day in jail. And what type of cell mate does she end up with? Not the scared little white girl. Not the anti-social older woman. No. In the Merry Old Land of Oz, Candace got the meanest bull dyke on the cell block. Of course she got Neci, pronounced
knee/see
. This was the woman who would jack her meals, steal her shoes, and take the most sacred prize of all one sweltering night when the guards were too far away to hear Candace’s screams.
“I’m just saying,” Neci went on. “If you not gonna eat it, you might as well give it to somebody else. They don’t feed us enough in here. We always hungry.”
For a second there, it sounded like Neci had no intentions of strong-arming the meal. Candace decided to call her bluff.
“No, I’m going to eat.”
“All right,” Neci said. The disappointment made her look like a woeful bulldog. “You’d better hurry up, then. Everybody’s in line already.”
Candace eased out of her top bunk on wet noodle legs and retrieved the rations provided to her by the state. Their dinner consisted of two breaded fish fillets, a roll, milk, corn, and a ladleful of mixed fruits. Candace stood with her tray and surveyed the eight metal benches. They were filling quickly, usually with people of the same race. Candace spotted her cell mate eating with two other black women.
What the hell,
she thought, and took a seat across from the only person she knew there.
Neci was immediately talkative. “Hey, y’all. This my cellie.”
“Sleeping beauty,” one of the other girls remarked. This one was light-skinned and attractive, but there was something ugly about her. Candace couldn’t place it.
“Was I asleep that long?” she asked, cutting into her fillet. The only utensil the inmates were trusted with was a plastic spork, but the meat was pretty tender.
“Not really,” the fourth woman at the table said. “Fresh off the streets, everybody wants to go to sleep. I slept four days when I first got here.” This girl was small, no more than ninety pounds. She was about thirty-five years old, and a foot shorter than Candace. Her eyes were too close together. Candace thought she looked like a bird.
“I’m Keisha,” she said.
“I’m Candace.”
“I’m Cheryl,” the light-skinned girl offered. She was in her early twenties. She had large eyes and sunken jaws. “And you already know my name,” Neci said. “You’re my cell mate?” Candace asked.
“Yeah, and don’t trip about the food. I can get some cookies later on.”
“But you’d better eat as much as you can,” Keisha advised. “We don’t get nothing else to eat till six in the morning.”
Twelve hours with no food. That would explain Neci’s anxiety.
“I see you got you a dope case,” Neci said to Candace.
Candace was taken aback. “How do you know that?”
“It’s on your wristband.” Neci pointed with her spork. “Whatever color it is, say what you’re here for.” Candace looked around and saw that all four women at her table had different color wristbands. Hers was dark blue.
Neci pointed to Keisha. “Yellows are for tickets. Them bitches is probably going home soon. You can see it in their faces. They look happier than everybody else.”
Keisha smiled as if to illustrate this point.
“Green is assault, or something violent,” Neci said.
Cheryl was the one with the green wristband. Candace made a mental note to keep her distance.
“Mines is white,” Neci said. “White bands are for fed cases. They trying to get me for cashing checks.”
Candace had no idea what was wrong with cashing a check.
“Red is for murderers,” Neci went on. “Ain’t nobody in here with no red, but we had this one bitch a couple weeks ago.”
Keisha shivered. “She was creepy.”
“And you got blue,” Neci said to Candace. “That means you got a dope case.”
“I didn’t do it,” Candace said immediately.
Neci smiled. “Everybody in here is innocent, baby girl. You sound like one of us already.”
* * *
After dinner the inmates settled into whatever activity they would spend their waking hours doing. Some selected a book from a small cart and stretched out in their bunks. Others wrote letters or washed their clothes in the sinks provided for personal hygiene. Next to the phones, the television was the most attractive venue. The women had to agree on one program to watch, but Candace didn’t see any anger in any of the faces gathered there.
Keisha and Cheryl wandered off looking for a card game, leaving Candace and Neci at the table alone. Candace had a million questions about doing her time there, and Neci had an answer for every one of them. Like most of the jailhouse documentaries Candace had seen, the code for survival all boiled down to one thing: Minding your own business. Neci assured her that every girl who got beat down on the unit deserved it. And since Neci had been in there four months already, Candace listened carefully to everything the big girl told her.
Neci also broke down the general layout of the unit, something Candace had been wondering about since lunchtime.
“Where do we take our showers?” she asked.
Neci gave her a foreboding look. “The showers are over there.” She pointed to an area just barely out of view. “It’s three showers in there, but nobody will go in there with you. You pretty much have it all to yourself.”
“What about those cells?” Candace asked and pointed. “They can look right in.”
“Yeah. If you have to go to the bathroom, you can see in there, too. That’s why most people here don’t take showers. They’ll either wash up in the sink, or they won’t bathe at all until they get out. If they only here for like, five days, they definitely won’t take a shower. I wash up in the sink.”