Anissa Gray - The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls

You do a lot of thinking in jail. Especially when youre locked in the box thats your cell. Mine is about as big as the walk-in closet I had back at home, but in place of leather bags and slingbacks and racks of clothes, Ive got bunk beds, a stainless-steel sink-and-toilet combo, and a compact, padlocked cabinet. The cabinets where you keep your valuables, like family pictures, commissary, and letters, including the one from your daughter thats not addressed to you. The letter that, truth be told, you just cant bring yourself to read, so youve got it tucked inside the Bible that belonged to your dead mother.

The Bibles the one thing you read religiously, but not for scripture. You read it for the notes written in the margins. Then, when its lights out and you cant read anymore, you lock the Bible up in the cabinet and crawl in your bunk. The top bunk, which youre still scared of falling out of. Youd still be in the bottom bunk, if it was up to you, but your new crazy-quiet cellmate asked for that bunk in a way that made you feel like she might kill you as you slept on it, if you said no.

Now you lie here, wide awake, with the compact cabinet across the way and the sink-and-toilet combo near the foot of the bed, thinking and remembering because thats all youve got here in the dark when sleep wont come. And it hardly ever comes. Im usually up thinking about getting out or what it was like before I came in or why I did what I did and how what I did compares to the next womans crime.

Its always me versus Inmate X: I did this, but at least I didnt do that.

I used to meet with the chaplain, somebody whos seen everything. Wed sit in a little room that had a view to the outside, with him in his metal chair, black shirted, white collared, but casual in jeans. The type who probably plays guitar to youth groups in parks. Hed sit with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward with his back to the window while I stared past his pink, freckled bald spot to the jails front lawn and the flagpole.

Dont go comparing crimes like that, the chaplain would say. Theres no good in it, Althea. What youve done doesnt have to define you.

Then what does?

Only you know that. No one can tell you who you are.

I stopped meeting with him.

Who am I?

I ask myself that question every night I lay my head down in here. Althea Marie Butler-Cochran: round, dimpled face; rounding, dimpled body; smooth, light brown skin. There was a definition of me that went with that name, face, and body, but its hard to see it now, even though I still look pretty much the same, except for the jailhouse weight gain.

I used to think I was like a river. A mighty force of nature. A real river that I used to watch and dip my feet in, sitting out on the dock behind my house. You cant see the river from the jail, but its out there past the barred-up windows. Past the recreation yard with the basketball court and beyond the patches of gravel and dry grass you got to cross before getting to the fence. Go over the razor wire, go out past the woods about twenty miles or so, as the crow flies. Touch down on the two-lane road underneath you. That barrenness on either side of you is farmland waiting for its season.

This road, beyond that fence and miles away as the crow flies, looks like it goes on forever because its flat and straight and all you can see are the miles in front of you. But youre not far now. Youll see the river Im talking about. The Saint Joseph. I got baptized in that river. I got proposed to there. Theres a tree on the riverbank that has, or at least used to have, me and my husbands initials: P+A Forever.

That river runs through the place where I was easier to define. The place that made me who I used to be. Althea Marie Butler-Cochran: round, dimpled face; rounding, dimpled body; smooth, light brown skin; wife; mother; daughter; sister; mighty force of nature.

The meeting of the Saint Joseph and the Portage Rivers gives the place Im from its name: New River Junction.

One river for each of my girls, is how my mama put it. Yall two will run together, she said. That was right after my sister Viola was born.

Boys and men are earth and stone, my mama used to say. But you girls, us women, were water. We can wear away earth and stone, if it comes to it.

I believed her.

And I believed Id never leave New River Junction. I made promises to her that kept me bound there. But ever since that day the police came, Ive been moving farther and farther away from home. It was a Friday afternoon, two Septembers ago. The leaves had just started to turn. I remember the turning leaves not so much because Im the type to notice things like that but because my husband, Proctor, is. That morning, on the way into our restaurant, he grabbed my hand and stopped me midstride.

Look at that, Al, he said, stringing his fingers through mine. Its here.

He pointed over my head to the big, open-armed oak in the yard. Up there, among the rustling green leaves, there was a burst of gold and burnt orange, the first sign of his favorite season. The promise of hayrides and haunted houses and the Halloween candy that he hoarded, always winking and saying, Dont worry. Ill put it away for the kids.

It was later that day that they came for us.

Me and Proctor were sitting at the long mahogany bar at the back of the restaurant, splitting a turkey sandwich and a beer. The red leather booths and the polished dark wood tables at the front of the restaurant were empty, just like always.