Mary Gaitskill Reads a Diary Entry by Beverly Jaynes
Mary Gaitskill reads a diary entry by Beverly Jaynes, a prisoner at WERDCC in Vandalia, Missouri, at the 2009 event Breakout: Voices from Inside. Read the entry below.
About 9 a.m. the whole H.U. was locked down because a metal part from a small dust mop was missing. This lasted all day until after the 4:30 count-time was over. We missed medical and hair cut appointments. They brought us each lunches and let us use the bathroom one at a time with a CO monitoring us in the hallways. We took naps and talked in our room. Then about 3 p.m. they finally searched our wing.… They patted us down and made us all sit facing the wall in the day room, yelling at us not to look around or talk. They had thrown all trash contents on the floor and recycling bins too. They shared all the chairs upside down in the middle of the day room. They ransacked our rooms, throwing most of our locker contents on the beds and stripping [them]. It took me over half an hour to reorganize and put everything back.… They took my clear plastic zip-up bags I put my cassettes and Walkman in, and I kept odds and ends in the cosmetic bag, and they took my new pens and marker that I had an IOC for from theater class. They even took my three rolls of state toilet paper because I had three rolls of my personal angel soft TP that I had bought at canteen. I should be able to have both so I got three rolls of state TP from the rotunda that evening. As it turned out someone did make a shank out of the metal and they found it and put [her] in the hole … for it. That made us feel better that this ordeal was worthwhile because we had thought that the metal part had probably been thrown away long ago, and we were missing important appointments for nothing.
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