Why Are We Whispering?

She is wearing all white, dirty white, her ID number written in Sharpie across her chest. “I was a very ripe peach,” she says, facing the class. “I was about to be torn open so the pit inside could spawn more peach trees.” We’re in Alabama’s only maximum security women’s prison. “That’s what it felt like when you were being born,” she says. “My girl.”

She, let’s call her Della, holds her classmates in an unwavering gaze as she tells her story. After a year teaching in maximum security men’s prisons, this is my first experience with incarcerated women. Her eyes are steady on me too, the new instructor.

“Nurse, nurse, my water broke!” she calls out, rehearsing the monologue she’s crafting for her daughter. Just a few months before, she lived at home with her four children and husband. She usually made oatmeal for breakfast. Now she’s in prison for life without parole.

When Della finishes, another student stands, faces us. Mary tells us that she can’t read or write. Her voice is soft and low, eyes to the ground. She tells us that she’d like to get married in Disneyland. That she has brain damage from being beaten so many times as a child. Then, she lifts her chin and begins strutting across the room. “One day my prince charming will walk out of the ocean,” she says, swinging her hips, extending her arm toward the cinder block wall and fixing her eyes to where her fingers point. “And oh goodness, he is fine.”

Stopping at the gas station outside town after class, I lean against the peeling bathrooms and pinch my thigh to redirect the pain burning hot in my throat, in my heart. After the two hour drive home week after week, I sit alone at home or go out to the bars and occasionally try to tell one of my friends a story — there’s this student, I start to say — but it never comes out right.

All this — these stories, their incredible importance and the impossibility I’ve encountered thus far in trying to communicate them — is running through my head when I open the new book Hear Me, See Me: Incarcerated Women Write, an anthology of short prose and poems from the only women’s prison in Vermont. Here’s a piece of the first poem I flip to, “Merely Me,” by Raven:

Why am I ‘mentally ill’?

Why are we whispering?

How come they decided ‘I am mentally ill’?

I stand up and say my name and they look my way.

I say, ‘I am not perfect, is all.’

I raise my voice and say, ‘I am a person whose feelings are topsy-turvy, is all.’

Yes, I think right away. This. Why are we whispering? I am a person whose feelings are topsy-turvy, is all.

The voices in this book are diverse. As one of the workshop leaders writes in the book’s introduction, the words inside appear as they are “originally written, candid and unedited,” allowing readers “direct access to real and immediate worlds.” In the growing body of prison literature, some anthologies showcase the polished work of a few writers, but this book presents a whole spectrum of writing:

from the nearly illiterate woman struggling to pen a couple of sentences, to the college graduate who crafts a finished piece effortlessly; from the dyslexic woman stumbling to read back what she just wrote to the wheelchair-bound grandmother who utilizes writing as a form of prayer.

This is the kind of book we need, a chorus of largely unheard voices all shouting and whispering with joy and fury, all speaking about what it is to be a human, a woman human, a woman human who is locked away in America. The writing is about the time inside and also the depth and breadth of the lives outside.

“I know what I would be doing if I was home with my family,” TH writes in “If I Was Home.”

We would all be cuddled up on my bed with a big bowl of popcorn watching Halloween movies together.

Whether I flip between pieces or read sections chronologically, I am struck by the commonalities of the subjects, our most human — love, parenthood, failure, silence, loss, pleasure, anger, desire, abuse, ego, addiction, friendship. It is through the volume of voices collected in this anthology, page after page of women writing their truths, that this book gains its most potent force.

These are not easy stories. Many disclose hardships most of us will never face.

“I’m at war with myself,” Stacy writes in “Darkness and Truth.”

Me against the world. Alone. Angry. Bitter. Harder than I should be ’cuz I’m forced to be. And maybe it wasn’t just my choices. ’Cuz I still hear their voices.

Though literature is powerful, there are kinds of suffering that nobody else will ever truly be able to understand. But it is the collection of these stories, both terrible and elegant, that starts to transcend the limitations of individual experience and open the possibility for compassionate connection. These are voices we rarely hear from, not just because they are incarcerated, but because of the racial, social, economic and educational background of most people who spend time in prison. For that very reason, they are fundamentally important. But it isn’t just who we’re hearing from on these pages, it’s what, and how, and why. Beyond all the reasons these voices are singular, they also, in some way, echo all of our stories. And they do so beautifully.

“Give me the strength, the power/ to rise from the bondage of my addiction,” Tess writes in “I am Here.” “It is me, your daughter/ I am here, in your light,” she calls out across the blank page. And we are here too, we readers. We hear you, women writers of the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility, and through your words, we see you.

Della’s daughter will not likely get to hear her mother tell her the story of her birth, her peach-seed-self blossoming into the world. I hope Mary gets to tell her Prince Charming about her plans for Disneyland one day. I’m not sure whether she will have the opportunity. These are complicated, emotionally irreconcilable losses present on many different sides. Nothing changes that. But I am grateful, very grateful, that a book like Hear Me, See Me exists, on whose pages we have the great privilege of reading the words all these daughters have chosen to share with us.

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Sarah W. Bartlett (Ed.) directs Women Writing for (a) Change – Vermont, a community that midwifes the words of women for personal and social growth and change. She also co-directs writing inside VT, a program that supports writing-based reflection and growth among Vermont’s incarcerated women. It is based on the practices of WWf(a)C-VT.