Something Like Beautiful (2 page)

As part of my degree requirements, I studied the criminal justice system, in particular its impact on communities of color. The course requirements dictated that we visit a prison, and one Saturday afternoon our professor took several of us up to a facility to sit and talk with men who had committed all manner of
crimes—armed robbery, murder. He asked us to try to uncover who they were, who they were beyond their convictions.

“These men come from most of your communities, and have had access or lack of access to the same things you have,” our professor reminded us. “Why are you in college,” he asked us, “but they're in prison? What choices did you make, what choices did they make, and why? Do we make choices because we have complete free will, or are there other factors, whether we're conscious of them or not, which guide our decision-making process?”

These were questions that would reverberate in my head for years and years to come. At that time, I had no process for making decisions, none beyond the beat of my own heart, a place spilling over with emotions that translated into poems that translated into a longing for real romance, real love. I stood before crowds and said as much in poems I shared because I was certain that what resided inside the muscle that guided the poems could perhaps be a salve, could be a force that could conjure a great, wide, and wonderful life if only I and just one other were willing to embrace it.

And I was willing, which is why when the life of love and romance showed up, even as it did inside a place that pulsed with death, I did not question it. I did not question Rashid, not to the extent one might have expected. Rashid, the man, the student, Rashid the optimist, was also a prisoner, and while in the eyes of many that could be his only title, it never was for me.

Nine years before I met Rashid, he had been sentenced to twenty years to life for his role in a gangland type of murder. He had been a member of a small group of men who shot and killed a man who the group believed was stealing from them.

When I met Rashid, I did not know this. I knew only that he was bright, handsome, always seeking ways to educate himself, ways to transform. We became friends, not just Rashid and I, but all of my classmates who traveled up to that prison with me that first time and all those times after. They, like me, were moved by these men whom society would have us throw away. But our little group believed that no one was disposable, and so they, like me, read poems and had long discussions about the future with the men who were there. And we came to care for some of the men we met and spoke with. And we came to care for Rashid. In this way, he became part of our little clique. Which is why we kept going, why we kept having those talks, reading our poems.

Poetry and words can transform a soul, a person. I believed that then and I believe it now. They had done so for me and I was watching them do so for Rashid, who already had a voracious reading appetite. The longer I knew Rashid, the more I believed in him, and then one day, about a year after we'd met, he called me.

I had given Rashid my phone number after one of the poets in our group read a poem aloud that provoked the guards and we were put out of the prison. I told Rashid to call me when he could so that I knew he and all the other men did not get in trouble for any of our actions. A week, maybe two weeks later, he rang me and said that, no there had been no more problems with the guards, but yes he was reaching out anyway because he wanted me to come visit him. And he was very specific. He did not want to see me as a volunteer or as a poet, but as a friend. I hesitated. I said no. I rebuffed the request several times over. But finally I gave in. The truth was, I liked him.

The first time I visited Rashid in a personal rather than a professional capacity, it was the day after Christmas. This was when he told me everything about his crime. He brought down the transcripts and he encouraged me to read them carefully. He wanted me to know who he had been so I could trust who he had become, who he was still trying to become.

He spoke to me of his shame, and he spoke to me of his desire to do better, to be better. He showed me pictures of his son, born when Rashid was eighteen years old and, as it turned out, would be headed to prison less than two months later. At the end of the visit, we kissed, perhaps a little awkwardly, but certainly intimately. It was a kiss that began a romance.

For five years we courted. We wrote letters, two and three times a week. We spoke on the phone weekly at first, but later, daily. We did our best to shed our fears about vulnerability and trust, and as much as two people can do this, we revealed ourselves to ourselves wholly and without arrogance.

Rashid would be the first person with whom I discussed in depth the molestations that punctured my childhood, that sent me reeling headlong into the world as a girl who by twelve, had no sense of my own youth, and certainly no sense of my own value.

I told him that despite the privileged and in some ways rarefied life that my parents, academics both of them, provided my sister and me, childhood was dangerous. Home for me had been a safe place, but out in the world of schoolteachers, camp counselors, and after-school jobs, danger was a dark cloud that seemed never to lift, never to blow away. And I had ne'er a skill to blow them away myself.

Because I grew up in the years before sexual abuse was discussed openly—or at all—I did not understand even basic things. I did not understand, for example, that the thirty-something-year-old man who claimed me as “his girl” when I was fourteen was a predator. I did not understand anything that happened to me any of the times they happened. I only knew that I felt dirty, wrong, and misplaced in the world.

Rashid encouraged me to seek counseling and supported me when I did. He read books about survivors of sexual violence, and he read books about the partners of survivors of sexual violence so that he could better understand the way I moved in the world, the fears that kept me internally bound. But more than anything else, Rashid listened to me. He refused to minimize my hurt or make judgments about the choices I had made as a girl who had fashioned a life based on hurt. Rashid held me close in every meaningful way a person can hold a person close. I tried to hold him in the very same way. I tried to understand what his life had been.

He told me that he had been a boy who had been abandoned in Guyana. His mother left for the United States when he was an infant, and his father followed some eleven years later. Rashid and his brother, who was a year older, were, for all intents and purposes, left alone to raise themselves during the critical years between twelve and sixteen. And even once he arrived in this new nation, his mother was simply not equipped to parent the child she had left as an infant with an angry and frustrated father who beat his son so badly that at ten years old, Rashid tried to commit suicide.

“I swallowed turpentine,” he admitted to me during one
painful visit, even as he added that beating children with canes until they bled was the norm in the world where he grew up.

“No one, including my father, probably including me, would have understood this is abuse. It was the way things were. But still, I was tired of hurting so much.”

After months of intense discussions, we fell deeply in love.

For me it was incredible, the very definition of love, because we loved without distraction. All the other loves of my life were fueled and supported by myriad—and sporadic—intimacy: walks in the park, sex, laughter over a dinner, trips to faraway lands.

Rashid and I had none of these experiences to drive our desire or love or relationship. We only had ourselves, our hearts on the table. What other love, I said to him once, could be more pure? After five years of our self-made, self-powered intimacy, we did what most who are in love are wont—and able—to do. We got married. In a corner of a prison visiting room, as vending machines provided the background noise, we exchanged our vows, and then I went home and then he went back to his cell.

An interminable five months after we were married, we qualified for conjugal visits, or trailers, in jailhouse vernacular. Eventually the prison issued us a date, a private forty-four hours together in a small two-bedroom trailer in a yard on the prison compound. The trailers themselves were sparse in their furnishings, funded as they were by the limited monies prisoners cobbled together. But they were clean and they were neat and for those hours, they were home.

I was nervous that first time, afraid even. How do you rise up and meet the years of fantasy we had created about what it
would be like the first time we were together? But in the end, all that talk, all those years, all that friendship, superseded my hesitations and we made love, again and again. No place was off-limits. We made love in the bathroom, on the sheets I bought just for the occasion, in the bedroom, in the kitchenette while I was trying to make coffee.

But more than that, so much more, we had a period of semi-normalcy. We made curried chicken and roti together. We danced slowly to Al Green and Bob Marley. We watched the news together, we showered together. And yes, at times during that first visit—and others that followed it—we cried together.

Even now, a decade later, I remember our first trailer visit as though we had recorded it, as though I had watched a videotape every night thereafter, meticulously memorizing each movement, each pause, each laugh, all the things we talked about, all the things we didn't—like birth control and what we would do if I became pregnant.

Had we discussed it back then, I would have told Rashid that I would never have a baby with him while he was locked up. I knew many, many other women with incarcerated husbands chose to do so, and while I did not disparage their decisions, I was sure it wasn't for me. As much as I wanted a child, and I desperately did, I could not see being a single parent. My own mother and father, married for decades, for decades working together as a team, working together in love, left me no template for a household that did not include two functioning and healthy adults.

And more, I certainly could not imagine bringing a baby into a prison. I may have made the choice to enter prisons weekly
for myself, but I was all the way grown, willingly taking on the emotional slop that loving a person who is imprisoned can create. A child was an innocent, unable to weigh both sides of the equation. I could not do it to a baby.

But on that final weekend in September of 1995, I hadn't made such grand pronouncements to Rashid because I didn't believe then that I could get pregnant. I had had so much sex in my life. I had twice lived with men. I had been married once before and yet I had never gotten pregnant. I assumed it was impossible. I went up to the facility and made love with and to my husband and I did not worry.

Three weeks later I discovered I was pregnant.

I never considered keeping the baby. Even as I wept, rubbed my abdomen, claimed my child, listened to Rashid's pleading that I not have an abortion, I never once really considered carrying that baby to term. How could I? It wasn't just the prison or my unwillingness to be a single parent. It was also financial. I wasn't working. I was living in a room in someone else's home, barely eking out an income as a writer and poet.

I had just returned to school to finally finish my bachelor's degree. What did I have to offer a child, save for anxiety and instability? Any child I raised, I told Rashid this, would have everything he or she needed to make it into adulthood safely and sanely.

Still, we argued bitterly—something we'd never really done before—about the decision, but all he could offer me were religious platitudes about life being sacred. But if life was sacred, I would argue back, shouldn't every life be honored with all that it needs, all it deserves? And besides, what about my life? Was
my life sacred? I didn't need commandments, I said to my husband. “I need cash. I needed physical support,” I told Rashid.

Against my husband's wishes and against the love I felt for that baby who had barely begun to take shape inside of me, and against the desperate need inside of me to be a mother, on a cold Thursday in November of 1995, I had an abortion. In a clinic that felt less like a medical facility than it did a factory, I sat in a hard plastic chair with rows and rows of other women, some far younger than I, some shockingly older. When my name was finally called and I had dispensed with the routine tests—blood work and such—I was led into an ice-cold room where the procedure would take place.

Despite the two doctors and the two nurses who were there, and despite all those women waiting just outside for their turn on the table, it may have been the most alone I have ever felt in my life. I withered into hysteria, crying so hard that the anesthesiologist worried my breathing would be impaired. Later I realized that I probably should have been sent home that day and told to think my decision through some more. But that didn't happen and fifteen minutes later I woke up in the recovery area no longer pregnant.

Regardless of my resolve, my choice to have an abortion—something I knew was absolutely the right thing to do at that time in my life—it caused me guilt and pain for years. Terminating my pregnancy—I felt this then and I feel it now—was against the natural order of things. Had Rashid not been in prison and had we been married under “normal” circumstances, I surely would have had my baby. Or, if we lived a “normal life,” if Rashid was home and we discovered we were pregnant but
things were such that we did not have the financial wherewithal to begin a family, at the very least I would have done much greater soul-searching before choosing termination. The choice, in other words, would not have seemed so obvious.

But I knew, lying on that examination table in November of 1995, that no matter what the difficulty, I could not go through an abortion with my husband again. The weight of destroying something that was created from a place of great love, destroying something that was part of me, part of us, was unbearable. I carried the weight once. To do it a second time would, literally, destroy me. I told Rashid this. In those raw, ragged days following the procedure, I promised Rashid that if I ever, ever became pregnant again, even if he was still in prison, I would have the baby.