Patricia Smith Reads “Just Another Death” by Christina MacNaughton
Patricia Smith reads Christina MacNaughton's “Just Another Death,” first-place winner for memoir in PEN's 2007 Prison Writing Contest, at the 2009 event Breakout: Voices from Inside. Read the piece below.
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Just Another Death
I sit on my bunk as the minutes tick by. The count should have cleared over half an hour ago. Something’s up. In a place where timing and routine and schedule are the axis upon which the world revolves, remaining locked for so long past the standard count time sends Morse code through the heart of every inmate. All receive the same message: something on the compound is wrong. Unfortunately, right now there is no information. Everyone’s locked, so the jail grapevine hasn’t had a chance to wrap its tendrils around the latest juicy event. I hear the C/O tell my neighbor, “Get comfy, we’re going to be down for the night.” Shit. Whatever the cause of this lockdown is, it’s serious. I’m resigned to spending the evening reading and watching TV.…
The next morning it’s business as usual and I go about my … routine with no more than a thought or two about last night’s mysterious lockdown. Why bother, someone’s bound to fill me in sooner or later. That’s the thing about jail gossip—everyone’s dying to get their hands on it, but they are even more anxious to give it away.
My hypothesis is correct; it takes little more than an hour after mass movement before the big news reaches my ears. “Can you believe it? That girl used a damn garbage bag to kill herself with. Ain’t that shit crazy?”
Someone I hardly know has (intentionally) weaseled over to me as I pass through the prison’s Grand Central Station—the Medical Unit lobby/waiting room. A heavyset Puerto Rican woman of indeterminable age, she has made a career out of ferreting out every morsel of jailhouse scandal and circulating it with Internet speed. She scrabbles over the wretched details of the previous night’s tragedy with the excitement of a carnival rat in the popcorn machine. Her beady, black eyes search over my face, hungry for my reaction.
“Wow,” I stammer, trying desperately to push the awful visualization from my mind. “Who was it?” My acquaintance leans in conspiratorially and proceeds, for the benefit of all around, to raise her voice 50 or 60 decibels. She drops the name of an old friend and I feel my heart crumple like a wad of used tissue.
The linoleum floor ripples out in front of me and hot, salty pressure throbs behind my eyes, a warning that I’ve got about seven seconds to hightail it out of here before I’m guilty of a jail misdemeanor—Crying in Public.
[…] So far away from my housing unit, I bolt to the nearest bathroom.
Before the tears have a chance, my stomach bullet-trains in reverse. I’m not able to reach the toilet and my uniform’s covered in lunch’s corn chowder. As I kneel on the dank bathroom floor, I cradle my sweaty forehead in the crick of my elbow and let the streams of snot and spit and tears swirl together and mix in the bowl. My hair is stuck in the grimy condensation on the outer rim of the toilet. At any other moment in my life this would send me reeling in disgust; right now I don’t bother to lift my head. I don’t save my hair, just like I didn’t save my friend.
[…]
Keena killed herself on the evening of June 21, 2006. It was a Wednesday, and the longest day of the year. Life here hasn’t changed because of her violent death. I still do my dishes in the sink above my toilet. I still worry about the next shakedown. I wear the same clothes I wore when I met Keena; they are the same clothes I wore the day she died. The compound is no different either. The day after Keena’s death a new girl was sleeping in her bed and wearing her uniform. There was a memorial service, but I didn’t go. From what I hear, it consisted of roughly three sentences.… Keena is just another death. The prison swallowed her up, like a vast, black ocean. I know that only two weeks from now the memory of her will vanish as well. Still, she is part of every woman here.
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