Orange Is the New Black

daughter’s or sister’s children during their prison stays, had a very hard time marshaling toddlers and teenagers on the buses, trains, and taxis necessary to get to Danbury—the trip could take four hours each way from the city and cost money. But Mother’s Day was special, and children of every age swarmed the place, and a cacophony of conversations flowed in many languages and accents. In the midst of all of it was my mother, smiling happily when she spotted me walking into the madness.
    T WO COPIES of
The New Yorker
arrived for me at mail call, to my horror. Someone out there had sent me a second subscription. Miss Esposito from C Dorm also got the magazine, and had been mad at me when my first copy showed up in March—she thought it was a waste of money for both of us to get it. The damn things were piling up all over the prison.
    Esposito was an odd duck. A big, solid woman in her fifties, she wore her dark hair in a disconcertingly girlish Dutch boy bob. She was always part of the welcome wagon for any new prisoner, regardless of race—she herself was Italian-American. Shevolunteered that she had been a gang leader with the Latin Kings, a claim I was at first skeptical about—why would the Latin Kings have an Italian Queen?—but it turned out to be true. She was a former 1960s radical intellectual who’d gotten involved with gang activity at a pretty high regional level. Esposito was doing a long, long sentence.
    I could tell pretty quickly that Esposito, although a needy person, wasn’t after anything from me that I wasn’t willing to give, and she was heartwarmingly appreciative of my magazines and books. One day she came to me, with a fan in her hand. It was a medium-size oscillating plastic table fan, like you might buy in Woolworth’s. It looked just like the one Natalie had. “Bunkie, you going to be glad we got this when summer comes,” she said. “You can’t get these no more. They stopped selling them at commissary.” The commissary now sold a much smaller fan, a crappy little one that cost $21.80. The old-school ones were prized, especially by the older ladies, who seemed to feel the heat most acutely.
    Esposito’s fan was broken. It wasn’t even hot out yet, but she was stressed. “Can you maybe take a look at this, down in the electric shop? I’ll do anything to get it fixed.” No promises, but sure, was my reply. I toted the thing down to work on the bus the next morning and took it apart, with my coworkers observing keenly. It turned out to be an easy fix, and I was glad that my access to tools was helpful to another prisoner. Back in the Camp, when I triumphantly plugged the fan in and it whirred to life, Esposito almost fainted with joy. I refused to take any commissary payment, but Esposito paid me in reputation.
    Almost immediately another old-timer approached me, hoping for a board to slide under the mattress to help ease her back pain. There were a handful of older ladies doing very long sentences—Pop, Esposito, Mrs. Jones—and if I did one of them a favor, they were sure to tell everyone. Soon I was besieged by women bearing broken radios and broken fans and seeking repair for things in their cubicles—hooks for their clothing, loose conduits, busted shoe racks, all sorts of things.
    Little Janet thought this was over the line. “That stuff’s not our job, Piper. It’s not electric, so why should we fix it?”
    “No one else is going to do it, babe. The feds aren’t going to take care of us in this shithole. We have to do for each other.”
    She could accept that logic, and besides she had other things on her mind at the moment. Little Janet had attracted an admirer, a tiny little white girl named Amy with a loud mouth. Amy was new among the always-present subset of prisoners I called “Eminemlettes,” Caucasian girls from the wrong side of the tracks with big mouths and big attitudes, who weren’t taking shit from anyone (except the men in their lives). They had thinly plucked eyebrows, corn-rowed hair, hip-hop vocabularies, and baby daddies, and they thought Paris Hilton was the
ne plus ultra
of feminine beauty. Amy was the tiniest and the most obnoxious of the new crop of Eminemlettes, and she was smitten with Little Janet, who despite her two-year tenure in prison seemed to have no idea how to handle a middle-school crush. Little Janet did not mess with girls, so Amy was barking up the wrong tree. Little Janet wasn’t so mean that she’d ice Amy;