Signs of the Times - Mr. Bojangles Pays a Visit
March 2005
Criminal Justice: Mr. Bojangles Pays a Visit
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I have awakened in the night with the most curious longing--nostalgia--for my old prison, VCCW in Goochland. The big blousy windows that opened into country fresh air (and, of course, the pungent rancid odor of cows that could make your eyes water and your throat sting). I miss the greenery, the trees, the James River, the freight train and its rumbling thunder. There's something about trains and prison that just seem to go together. Every time the train rolled through, I sang a verse or two of Credence Clearwater Revival's "Midnight Special."

Then there were the bugs: the ghostly white cockroaches, the Goochland specials-a species that looked like a hybrid of beetle and grasshopper, and the other weird and fantastic crawly things I had never seen before anywhere, even in Southeast Asia or Africa, that found their way in through holes in the screens. Those big beautiful windows and their screens required high levels of maintenance and cleaning. Through the winter, thousands of ladybugs walked back and forth on my ceiling. The mice needed chasing. There were snakes and leaks and bad plumbing and the radiators rattled.

I had just finished reading "It" by Steven King when my radiator woke me one night with a terrible metallic shuddering. I lay there in the dark, yes, the beautiful blackness of no light, and held my breath as I listened to the sounds of Something Crawling. Because I have watched many horror movies and shouted at the stupid people in them ("Don't go upstairs!" "Turn around!" "Turn on the light!"), I decided I would be intelligent and rational. I would sit up, turn on the light and banish the bogeyman.

Just as I made this intelligent rational decision and my hand groped for the light on the desk beside me, the Campbell soup cans stacked in my closet that stood at the end of my bed beside the radiator fell over. No, they didn't just fall over. Something knocked them over.

If a balloon had floated to the ceiling or if a clown's red nose had rolled across the floor, I would have had a drop-dead stroke on the spot. My heart jumped out of my mouth and fled the building. In my rational intelligent way, I fumbled the light, and nearly fell out of bed tangled in the bedclothes I had wrapped around me for protection. (Everyone knows that the bogeyman cannot touch the covered parts). The light blared on. And there it was. Look at me looking at it.

Blinking. Frozen with paws outreached. A little tiny mouse balanced in the bowl of a plastic spoon, soup cans scattered around like boulders. It recovered more quickly than I. It leapt from the spoon, took a skidding turn, its back legs splayed against the floor, and scampered under the locked door. I was still "gawping" (gaping and gawking), moving in slow mo.

When my heart settled back into my chest cavity and I had checked to make sure I hadn't wet the bed, I took a deep breath, turned off the light and .settled back to sleep. But my ears twitched and strained trying to hear, trying to listen, trying to understand the radiator night sounds. Was the mouse really what I had heard before the fall of the soup cans? How had such a small mouse rattled an old iron radiator? It was not a peaceful night.

So when I lie in my bed under the ever-grow fluorescent light and get maudlin for darkness and big open windows, I remind myself the past was no more comfortable or better than the present. The present has its pleasures. One of them being, I no longer have brooding imaginings about things in the dark. (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, March 31, 2005)

Elizabeth Haysom is presently incarcerated at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Troy, Virginia. This column is one of a series, published under the general heading 'Glimpses from Inside.'


Comments? Questions? Write me at george@loper.org.