Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (56 page)

Jessica’s case, like so many prison cases, was a difficult one. In a letter to Jessica, the clinic students admitted, “We feel the chances of winning either of these actions on the merits are not good.” Nevertheless, the law school decided to take it on. Many of the candidates who contacted them for help shared similar backgrounds to Jessica’s and had traveled the same worn-down paths—sexual abuse and teenage motherhood, family violence and violent men, overcrowded housing, inferior schools, dangerous neighborhoods, few decent jobs, high stress, lousy health. Yet Jessica was the one they’d chosen, among the thousands of locked-up women desperately in need of free legal aid.

Jessica’s looks probably helped, but the students also liked her. She was broken, but unlike so many other women in prison, her damage was harder to see. Her anger didn’t show through—at least, not at first. The students were both conservative and liberal, and the fact that Jessica refused to view herself as a victim contributed to her appeal.

Jessica’s concern about the legal aspects of her case came and went, but she was always interested in any new information about Torres and his whereabouts. To some of the students, she seemed ambivalent about pursuing the case. Some believed that she was still in love with Torres. During the legal consultations, Jessica’s appearance and moods changed drastically. At one consultation she looked so lifeless that, at first, a student didn’t recognize her.

That fall, the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization of Yale Law School filed a complaint on behalf of Jessica Martinez of the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut district court. The federal civil suit sought compensatory and punitive damages. It waged two charges against the authorities: that the prison had failed to protect Jessica from becoming pregnant while she was in their custody, and that once she was, the administration remained indifferent to her substantial medical needs. The prison denied Jessica’s claims.

Jessica’s aims, however, were slightly different from those of her lawyers. She cared most about the paternity claim. She didn’t care about child support—Milagros, she said, would manage—but she wanted Torres to publicly admit that the children belonged to him. His refusal to do so was like Puma’s denial of Serena, and her father’s neglect of her. Yet Jessica lost her resolve for battle. She received word through an old colleague of Torres’s that Torres was angry about the lawsuit and immediately asked Yale to drop the paternity action.

The students also argued that prisons should require guards to receive comprehensive sexual-harassment training appropriate to the populations they oversaw. (A Yale student who researched the consent issue for Jessica’s case determined that guards’ sexual-harassment training consisted mainly of the distribution, during orientation, of a booklet called “Games Inmates Play.”) Prisons were required, by law, to conduct background screenings of their inmates. Danbury had in their possession reports that documented Jessica’s history of self-destructive behavior and depression related to her abusive involvements with men. Jessica’s sentencing judge, who had requested that she receive counseling, noted her tendency to be led astray. Women like Jessica should never be assigned to work the night shift in remote locations with inadequately trained male officers, the lawyers argued. Only one month after Torres became her supervisor, Jessica had been required to submit to the first pregnancy test. The results were negative, and she returned to work, despite the ongoing suspicions raised by other inmates and staff. Yale asserted that the pregnancy testing proved that the administration had taken the rumors seriously. Given what the prison knew of Jessica’s psychological history, the administration had acted with negligence by not rescheduling Jessica’s shift away from Torres’s or reassigning her to another job.

Medical negligence against the prison was even harder to prove. On New Year’s Eve of 1995, when she was four months pregnant, Jessica had rushed to the phone to call the girls: there was always a mob, and even more of one on the holidays. In her hurry, she had tumbled down a flight of stairs and landed on her stomach. The Yale students were arguing that the prison had refused to perform a sonogram, and had only done so after Jessica’s pro bono attorney got involved. Besides that, the strongest challenge in Jessica’s favor was that it had taken more than fourteen months for Jessica to get a laparoscopy that her doctor had ordered after the twins were born. The procedure had discovered a substantial cyst on her ovary.

The students were becoming disturbed by what they were learning about prison life through discovery. “Telling her to have an abortion, her
falling down the stairs and them giving her no medical treatment, and her not knowing whether or not one of the babies she’s carrying is dead,” one student said. “The power of the prison can sort of seem transparent for a while and then appear very starkly.” Jessica had grown numb to much of prison life, but the students’ reactions gave her fresh eyes through which to view what she had assumed to be her lot. Their sincerity inspired her and she became politicized. She volunteered to testify about prison conditions when a United Nations
rapporteur
visited Danbury to investigate violence against women for a report that was eventually presented to the Commission on Human Rights. Out of more than a thousand inmates, Jessica was one of only three who dared to step forward.

To hold the prison legally accountable for Jessica’s predicament, the students had to prove that the injuries she had suffered were intentional. The legal challenge was a lot like the challenge of demonstrating the impact of racism or poverty or substandard housing: How could you untangle the structural injustices from the self-inflicted damage? How could you separate neglect from malice, the intended from the unintended harms?

By the spring of 1997, Coco and Frankie were driving down to the Bronx almost every weekend, and as a result of all the moving around, Coco’s life in Troy was falling apart. In the Bronx, the car would regularly die, and Coco and the girls would be stranded at Foxy’s; Frankie stayed at his mother’s. Parking tickets stacked up against the windshield, Coco missed the collection day for her food vouchers, Pearl missed her doctors’ appointments, and Mercedes and Nikki missed day after day of school. By March, Mercedes had accrued so many absences that Coco received a visit from a social worker from Child Protective Services. Then in May, Coco missed a recertification appointment and her welfare case was closed. Nikki bravely returned to Camp Ramapo, but Mercedes, who was seven, didn’t want to leave Coco alone. One afternoon, she was leaning out of her second-floor bedroom window, looking haggard, and one of Frankie’s friends mistook her for a grown woman.

Mercedes no longer shared her mother’s love for the city; she wanted to stay in Troy. By summer, she declared dramatically, “I have suffered enough.” Her Tío Rocco had given her a new bicycle, and she just wanted to stay home and ride it; the little cement square of her grandma Foxy’s courtyard couldn’t contain her. Mercedes also worried about the gangs. She’d overheard stories from the boys who’d stayed in her house. “I wanna wear red, I don’t wanna go to the Bronx,” she complained.

“You a fucking spoiled brat, Mercedes,” said Coco.

“It’s not fair,” Mercedes replied. “We always have to do what you wanna do. I don’t wanna go back to the Bronx.”

“You have trouble wherever you are, Mercedes, you a problem child!” shouted Coco. But on one July run, Mercedes convinced Coco to let her stay with Iris.

In the Bronx, everyone was out on the street, everyone was talking, and the news of other people’s problems muffled Coco’s own: Foxy’s neighbor’s daughter was held hostage, at gunpoint, by her man; Wishman, Pearl’s father, was back out on the street, dealing; Wishman’s girl was pregnant again. Coco was pleased—despite her feelings for Wishman—because the couple had lost their infant son the year before. A friend had been carrying him across University and they had been hit by a car. For months, Wishman’s girl couldn’t believe her son was dead; at one point she had spooked Wishman’s mother, Sunny, by buying the lost child a pile of new clothes. Maybe the baby would help heal her.

During that visit home, Coco brought Nikki, Nautica, and Pearl downstairs to play outside. Wishman seemed to make a point of passing by Coco’s mother’s way.

“Pearl’s gotten beautiful,” Wishman said. He complimented Coco on her mothering. He peeled two twenties from a roll of bills, locked those green-blue eyes on Coco, and added an extra ten.

Except for one time two years earlier—when Coco had cajoled Foxy to ask Kodak’s mother to ask Kodak to buy Nikki’s winter coat—Coco had never asked her daughters’ fathers for help. She was proud of her independence. Some girls denied a baby’s father access to his child unless he handed over cash. Other mothers claimed they needed money for the baby, then spent the money on clothes for themselves or clubbing or beer or cigarettes. Sometimes money was the main reason girls had sex with boys. But Coco wanted her intimate relationships to be better than that.

After Wishman gave her money, she bought Pearl sneakers and handed him the receipt as proof. Coco hoped that Wishman’s attention meant that he was finally interested in becoming Pearl’s father. “I guess he’s ready when he’s ready,” Coco said. Foxy believed that Wishman’s sudden discovery of his two-year-old daughter was simply the most direct route to getting Coco into bed, and that Coco ought to get money from Wishman while she could. Foxy was right.

Foxy was in a distinctly mercenary frame of mind; she’d taken a job as a scout for a marriage broker. The broker paid her a couple of hundred dollars
for every man or woman she convinced to marry an illegal immigrant for cash; the American bride or groom received up to $1,000—and sometimes a wedding outfit and celebration dinner—as soon as he or she stepped out of city hall. She’d married off whole families—parents, children, their husbands and wives, their common-law in-laws. Some of the husbands were unexpectedly generous: one of Foxy’s in-law’s husbands bought her a used car after she passed the final immigration interview. Now Foxy was working on Coco, who desperately needed the money without her welfare benefits. But Coco worried that a marriage would jeopardize her welfare eligibility for the future. “One thousand dollars would go through my hands like water,” Coco said, wounded that her mother didn’t seem chastened by the serious risk.

Foxy had witnessed weddings in each of the five boroughs and she had learned a lot. She’d become a whiz at the paperwork and had devised her own ranking, by nationality: Indians were the most generous; Panamanians were fair enough; she couldn’t speak truthfully about Ecuadorians because she hadn’t handled too many of them. But she resolutely refused to deal with Mexicans, and Dominicans were, as ever, the worst. You couldn’t get a wedding outfit or a reception dinner from a Dominican.

Sometimes the real girlfriends of the men acted as the witnesses. Sometimes, after Foxy hooked up the men, she found husbands for their girlfriends, too. She’d heard of an arranged couple who fell in real love. If the arranged marriages worked, the immigrants inched closer to citizenship, and the American wives and husbands were paid in installments for every naturalization hurdle they cleared. But most of her clients took the first payment and disappeared.

Foxy became friends with her clients and their real wives. They periodically got together to take lots of pictures; immigration needed ongoing documentation of ordinary life—domestic proof. “Howse my gold-digging hussy of a mother?” Iris asked sardonically, as Foxy pulled out her best wedding photographs. She liked the one of the bride looking regal in a traditional red-and-gold-embroidered sari; the Indian groom had paid for her hair, at a beauty salon, and the wedding party celebrated at Jimmy’s Bronx Café. Sports figures and celebrities and drug dealers partied at Jimmy’s; Foxy had lived most of her life only blocks away, but she’d never been before.