A Little Piece of Light

PREFACE

“Say his name.”

I stand in front of the stainless-steel mirror in my cell in the solitary housing unit. My face is bare of any makeup—there is nothing covering this up, no making it any prettier. This is me, facing myself. Facing what I did. “Say his name,” I whisper at the mirror. “SAY HIS NAME!”

I brace myself to sit on the slab of metal that serves as my bed in my cell. “Thomas Vigliarolo,” I whimper. “His name is Thomas Vigliarolo!” The crescendo of sobs breaks me. “I’m sorry, Mr. V!” I call out. Weak from the years of carrying this weight, my voice drops again to a whisper as I beg for his forgiveness. “I am so sorry, Mr. V. I am so, so sorry that I didn’t help you.”

Cries echo throughout the unit—my own, and the cries of the women around me. In this place, our cries are our only release. We cry for ourselves, and we cry for each other. With each other.

For many of us here, imprisonment began long before the day we registered in prison. Feeling trapped and isolated began years before we found ourselves confined to a six-by-eight cinder block room with no clock to mark the time. A prison worse than any government facility is the feeling that nobody loves you. Nobody wants you. You belong nowhere. As the men in my life told me from the time I was a child: Donna, you are nobody, and nobody will ever love you. Years… decades… lives of abuse and neglect spurred many of us to make one desperate decision that finally, ultimately led us here. Too often, by the time a woman commits a crime, her only goal has been survival.

For that lapse in judgment, that poor decision—that mistake—it’s likely she will forever suffer the worst prison of all: the inability to forgive herself.

I’ll never forget waking up to my friend’s words: He’s not breathing. It was a turn of events that I could not fathom. Even now, half a decade after leaving prison, not a day goes by that I don’t think about Mr. Vigliarolo. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of his family, the fear they must have felt as they imagined him in fear, wondering where he was for eleven nights and worried for what he might have been experiencing.

Say his name.

I’m sorry, Mr. V.

I know what it’s like to fear for the safety of the person we love. Family is protection. I know this because on the day I gave birth, that was my fiercest vow to my daughter: I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you. And I know this because, beginning in my childhood, I lived a life of suffering and tough choices for two decades, until I finally found my family in the most unexpected place: prison. In spite of all the pain I’ve experienced in my life, I’ve never wanted anyone to die. But it is here, in this most unlikely place, that I found the protection and support I needed to turn my life around.

I am Donna—but here, for twenty-seven years, I was inmate #86G0206.

This is my story.

1

THE PRISONER OF BOYNTON AVENUE

I was three years old, barefoot against the chilled concrete floor in the back of a pub on William Street in my birthplace of Port Antonio, Jamaica, surrounded by blue lagoons, white sand beaches, waterfalls, and caves. Wafting in from a street vendor outside was the aroma of roasted meat wrapped inside steamed banana leaves. My tummy growled with hunger for something to eat. My heart yearned with hunger for attention… affection. As if suddenly aware of me while she and her sister discussed some business in the pub, which they ran together, my mummy picked me up and squeezed me closely to her. “Oooh,” she cooed, “I love you so much.” I splayed my tiny fingers across her shoulders, feeling the way her coffee skin held the sun’s heat even inside the cool of the dim bar.

At once, she released me toward the ceiling, my fall startling me when the breeze became my only security. The next second, I felt my mother’s hands braced around my body. Again, she launched me into the air—and this time I giggled with the thrill of it. A third time, she swung me high, and I flew like a bird with my arms outstretched toward heaven, squealing in laughter. When I looked down for the safety of her hands, our eyes met, but in an instant it struck me that her hands were no longer in the air, anticipating my return.

I plummeted to the ground, my head smacking the concrete floor.

Even now, fifty years later, the sheer shock of it stuns me. After a moment of numbness followed by confusion and fuzzy disorientation, the sensation set in, making it certain: my mummy let me fall.

I screamed in pain.

I screamed!

“What’s wrong with you?!” my auntie scolded my mother. An argument erupted while I lay facedown, crying out, craving loving hands to pick me up and make this better.

This is my earliest memory. All these years later, my heart sinks to remember it. It remains a moment that symbolizes the first twenty years of my life: adult hands harming me instead of protecting me. A touch that I should have been able to trust, but could not.

William Street was two blocks from the water and therefore a lucrative hangout for locals looking to make a few dollars from the tourists who came to the beaches of Port Antonio. It was an area known for its laid-back Rastafarian spirit and its tropical fruits, flowers, butterflies, and birds. When I chased the mango hummingbirds into the fields on the edge of town, they showed me how to suck the nectar from the honeysuckle and morning glories. Fast and graceful, boundless and free, these creatures seemed magic to me.

My mother also believed in magic, but her fascination was different than mine. She was a devotee of the taboo practice of the West Indies called Obeah. Before it had been outlawed in the late 1700s, some observers of the religion believed it was a way to transmit harm to their slavemasters. They performed witchcraft and spells and sacrificed animals wildly and cruelly in public spaces. Some, like my mother, also used their children as real-life voodoo dolls.

I was born very shortly after Jamaica gained its independence from Great Britain in 1962. With the transition from British rule to independence came upheaval, a lack of systems, and centuries’ worth of hurt and resentment. At that time, some laws in Jamaica weren’t being enforced effectively. Systems also weren’t very precise when it came to recording births or administering birth certificates—especially not for a mother like mine, who once told me that I was born on October 29, 1964 inside a cave. I’m more inclined to believe the part about the cave than I am to believe the specific date of birth. Only when I grew older and more detached from any sense of security at all did I realize I wish I’d had enough time with her to ask who my father was, why my skin was so much lighter than the skin of most of the people around me… or more about where I belonged, in general.

Back then, in Jamaica or anywhere, there also weren’t insights or clear diagnoses for the problems my mother suffered. Today, we’d understand that her unpredictable mood swings, tenderness that turned to violence or indifference in a split second, were due to mental illness or a personality disorder, possibly bipolarism. One minute, she was bright-eyed and charismatic, while the next she was a monster, dunking me in scalding water, lashing me with a tree branch or rubber telephone wire that she found on the side of the road after a tropical storm snapped it to the ground. It was routine for her to burn me with fire and cut me with a knife. “Shut up!” she’d yell through gritted teeth while she lashed me. “You’re unclean!” Sometimes, after she finished hurting me, she would soothe herself with deep breaths, then pull me close to hug me. “I am sorry,” she’d say softly in remorse. “My baby… I am sorry.” I would melt into her embrace, so achingly hungry to be loved in any moment.

Whether she was holding me close or harming me, there was no explanation for her emotional expression, no reason for her reactions. I simply nestled closely into her kindness when it was available and obeyed her when it wasn’t. She was my mother—as a child, I needed her. She was beautiful and passionate, and over and over, I found it easy to forgive her. On some level even then, I understood that she loved me the best that she could.

But a child who never knows what will happen next will find some way—any way—to flee the moments of trauma and pain. I remember sitting in the corner of the cave where my mother and the Obeah priest would hold their rituals by firelight. “Come,” my mother would motion to me. As a toddler, I would rise from my place against the wall of the cave and climb onto their stone table as their feathered costumes and head scarves now billowed above me. I kept my eyes on the glow of the fire on the rough rock ceiling overhead, focusing on that flicker with more and more concentration until their swaying and spells and cries out to their god sounded distant from me, as though I were sinking asleep and my ears became cushioned with protection from the sounds.

As my mother and her leader fell deep inside their prayers, their eyes closed and their voices hushed, I, too, would begin to disappear. In my mind, I began to rise up, out of my body, and look down on myself so that I was no longer feeling my experience from the inside, but observing it from the outside. I wanted to be out in the sunlight, chasing the butterflies. By the time I was four years old, blacking out to escape my reality had become my only way of emotionally surviving my dangerous childhood.

Early on, I devised a way to escape my mother’s harm. As soon as I could walk, I learned to run—fast. I’d run from home into the streets, always the same bare feet, looking for a safe place as my hair fell heavy like ropes down my little back. Because my mother often wasn’t home, I’d wander Port Antonio by myself, searching for some companion. Townspeople would allow me to duck inside their offices to hide from my raging mother while she made scenes in the street. To protect myself from loneliness, I created an imaginary friend—Michael—who would loyally roam with me to the shore.

At the age of six, I was offered a real escape. My mother introduced me to Roy and Daphne Hylton, a childless couple from New York. Mummy explained that both the husband and wife came from families of great status in Jamaica. They had no children of their own, but Roy was known to bring little girls to the United States with the promise of possibility, of dreams, and a good education. When I met them, Roy and Daphne exchanged a glance and told me about a happy, magical place with parks, rides, laughs, and cotton candy. “We’ve just come from Disneyland,” Daphne said. Her hair flipped up at the perimeter with precision; her skin was cocoa-colored, and she wore blue silk pants that landed smartly just about the ankle and a matching blouse, buttoned straight to the top, with carefully capped sleeves. Everything about her—right down to her nose—was slim and direct. “Would you like to travel there with us someday?”

I lowered my chin, timid about the idea of going anywhere with two grown-ups I didn’t know. I turned to my mother, searching her face for her role in this, only to find an amusement in her eyes that seemed to urge me forward. Would she be coming, too?

For another moment, I stayed silent. “Do you know what Disneyland is?” Daphne’s eyes were a see-through shade of brown when she bent to see me eye-to-eye—a nature of exchange that would later be rare between us. “It’s a magical place for children.”

“Magic?”

She stood tall again, indicating with her raised eyebrows that this was something I’d be silly to miss.

Standing in the clarity of the Jamaican sun, we all bought into Daphne’s story about magic. I would trust Roy and Daphne just enough to step onto an airplane and fly to the place of promises and dreams… but before very long, my childhood would turn into a nightmare that would be impossible to escape, no matter how hard I would run.

The next time I meet Roy Hylton will be the last time I’ll ever see my natural mother. In June 1972, four months before my eighth birthday, Roy passes my mummy a handful of money. I watch while in exchange, she hands him some papers. They’d already sent me for a haircut, where I counted each of my wild Caribbean braids as they fell to the ground, a piece of myself landing there with each one. I glance at the document in Roy’s hand—the word PASSPORT written above a photograph of a little girl with wild, frizzy hair and eyes that look tired, sad… powerless. Doing my best to practice my reading from primary school, I read the words typed under her face: DONNA PATRICIA WALDEN.

Until this moment, I’ve never known my last name.

It’s still daytime when Roy and I land at LaGuardia Airport, where adults bump into me with their suitcases as I follow Roy off the plane. The air in the taxi line smells like cigarettes and petrol, and when we get in a car that moves along into the street, the buildings here are so tall that I have to shield my eyes from the sun to take them in. Buses beep, the subway trains rattle the tracks above the ground, and steam rises from grates in the street. “What’s that place?” I point.

From the front seat of the taxi, Roy looks up from the newspaper he’s reading. “That’s a playground,” he says. Children run and swing and spin each other on the rides, shouting and squealing with laughter.

Is this Disneyland?

The taxi lets us out in front of a high, redbrick building with lots of windows and terraces all the way up to the top. “Where are we?” I quietly ask Roy.

“We’re home.”

Home? I think. What is home? “When are we going to Disneyland?”

And then there’s my most pressing question: When will I see my mummy in Jamaica again?

Roy says nothing about Disneyland, or my mummy, or anything at all as we enter the double glass doors into the apartment building. Inside, two silver doors slide open when he pushes a glowing button on the wall. “Go on,” he says. “Get on the elevator.” Cautiously I step inside, and the doors slide closed behind us. When I catch my reflection, my eyes are worried. My hair is messy, like in the photograph on my passport.

Roy lets us into the apartment, and I look across the floor of the living room, hard tiles stretching across the floor, with the walls painted a beige shade of green. There stand a bench, a chair and sofa, a piano… and lots and lots of bookshelves. There’s also a sliding glass door with a terrace that overlooks the world below.

Daphne, Roy’s wife with the flipped-up hair, walks politely down the hall toward me. “I suppose you’ll need to get acquainted around here the next few weeks,” she tells me.

When are we going to Disneyland?

She walks me down the hall, past the bathroom and a wall of closets. Across from a bedroom with a big double bed is another bedroom, with a single bed. “This will be your room,” she says. “Unless we have guests. Then you’ll stay in the living room.”

To do errands in the city we ride the subway, which moves and rocks and makes me feel so unsteady. All the people and distractions in the city have the same effect on me, and for weeks I walk around wide-eyed. I have so many questions: Why does everybody move so fast? Why are all the buildings so high? When will I see my mummy again?

And what about Disneyland?

Roy and Daphne take me to flea markets, where Roy shops patiently for furniture, guitar strings, and old shoes. “Why do you buy all these things?” I ask him.

“I fix and resell them,” he says. “It’s important to know how to bargain.” I watch the thought and consideration in his face as he barters with the people who work at the flea market, just like they do in Jamaica. When they don’t agree to the price he wants, he shrugs to me gently—always my cue that it’s time we walk away. The salespeople usually catch on and take this opportunity as their last chance to negotiate a fair price. Roy’s nature is not disrespectful or unkind… but he does have a masterful way of getting what he wants.

His warmth is subtle, but Daphne’s feels nonexistent. On the walk home from the train as we pass by the playground, she warns me how I’m to behave when I begin to meet other children: I’m not allowed to have anyone over, nor am I allowed to call anyone—they ensure this with a lock on the phone. “You don’t go outside,” Daphne says one morning as she slips her arms into the sleeves of a suit jacket. “New York is not like Jamaica, do you understand? You don’t just speak to everyone you meet on the street.”

I nod. “Where are you going?” My voice comes out like a whisper.

“To work.”

“Where do you work?”

“I’m a psychiatric social worker.” She starts out the door and opens it back up to meet my eyes. “Be very quiet,” she tells me. “Your father tends to get upset if there’s noise in the house.”

My father?

The heavy white steel door clicks closed behind her. I stare at it, wondering for how long she’ll be gone. I take in my surroundings as classical music crackles through the speakers of the brown wooden radio. I stand in the center of their living room, looking around for something I can do. I take soft steps across the grayish-beige tiled floor toward the bookshelves, to not disturb Roy from the work he’s doing in his bedroom down the hall, across from my bedroom. He tends to get upset if there’s noise in the house. I don’t want Roy to get angry with me. In fact, as I linger silently in the living room, I hope he’ll forget that I’m even here.

As the sound of his hammer taps from down the hall, I quietly browse the bookcases for something that I can page through, something with pictures or small words. But shelf after shelf, there are no stories here for me. There are big, thick books too heavy to hold, with titles I can’t pronounce. They’re written by people with difficult names that I try my best to sound out from the reading lessons I had in my first year of school in Jamaica: Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche. There’s also a book with the title Crime and Punishment, whose cover I study—a painting of a man in a shadowy room who seems to be ducking in the dark away from something that scares him.

I discover a whole row of paperback books that are small enough for me to hold in my lap. I pull one of them out from the shelf and gaze at a painted image of a shirtless man holding a woman who seems too distracted by kissing him to notice that her lavender dress is falling off. I close the book and listen again: the sounds of hammering and violins.

One Saturday, just after I’ve arrived, Daphne takes me to Lord & Taylor to get me clothes for the school year. We take the elevator down to the basement clearance racks, where I gaze toward racks of dresses with ribbons that tie at the waist. “No, Donna Patricia,” Daphne says. “You have to dress nicely.” Over her arm, she drapes pairs of long slacks that bell out at the ankle, like some of the ones she wears, and turtlenecks that coordinate with little button-up blazers and plaid blouses. We go to the shoes section, and I look at the Mary Jane shoes with a tiny heel and a strap that fastens across the top of the foot. Daphne buys me a pair of blue suede-and-patent-leather loafers.

Before the first day of school, she stands behind me in the bathroom and uses a fine-tooth comb to part my hair severely to one side. “You must excel at school,” she tells me. I try to steady my neck to each tight pull as she forms multiple braids on my head and fastens each of them with a plastic barrette. “And we’ve allowed you to get familiar around here, but from now on, you’ll have to earn points at home. Do you know what this means?”

I meet her eyes in the mirror’s reflection.

“It means that you need to help out around the house. You’ll have chores, and you’ll have to wash up before bed and brush your teeth. You’ll do just as your father and I say.”

My father? I don’t have a father.

“Remember that your father can have a short temper, and I’m very busy with my work.” She drops her hands to her sides and stares at me in the mirror. “We expect the best from you, Donna Patricia. Do you understand?”

I nod, but the butterflies inside me swarm my belly in worry.

Minutes later, Daphne walks me through the apartment building’s driveway and across the street to P.S. 93. “Look at her shoes!” one girl in my first grade class shouts as she points, and her friends all crowd around her, giggling. I look at their shoes, pretty brown sandals and shiny Mary Janes. I knew these shoes were for boys. “You don’t look like anybody,” one girl says. “Are you black, or are you white?”

“She’s an alien!” another girl says.

I don’t know what I am, so all I can think to tell them is this: “I’m from Jamaica.”

“From Jamaica!” one yells, and turns to her friends. “She even talks funny!”

These become the last words that I’ll utter out loud for weeks. My teacher, Miss Zano, gently calls on me in class and encourages me to speak up when I answer in a whisper. When the other kids laugh at my accent, Miss Zano corrects them. “Children, that’s enough,” she says. “Donna is very bright.”

At recess, the girls in my class gather at the edge of the playground, where they’ve designated an area for taking turns to spin two jump ropes to play double Dutch. I watch them for just a moment before I find an empty corner of the playground to be by myself. With my eyes down and my knees held tight against my chest, I imagine running after the butterflies and the hummingbirds in the fields back home.

For the first few weeks of school, I keep to myself this way, until I learn that not even staying alone is a guarantee against conflict. One day as I’m sitting against the chain-link fence in the schoolyard, a group of three girls approaches me. One of them kicks her foot at me.

“Leave me alone!” I tell her.

“Don’t step on my blue suede shoes!” she says. I look down at my shoes, embarrassed that they look like a boy’s. Why does she have to make fun of me with a song that I like? “Aren’t you going to say anything?” she says.

“She can’t talk, she’s not American!” says one of the girls behind her. “What is she, anyway?”

“Maybe this will make her talk.” The first girl raises her hand and wails it, smacking me in the face. That’s it. Feeling alone, like an outsider, and missing Jamaica and my mummy is all too much. When I stand up, I punch the first girl so hard that she falls down. I back off immediately, and the girls all run in the opposite direction, scared. They don’t bother me again after that.

As I get more familiar being inside Roy and Daphne’s home, there’s not much sense of belonging there, either. After school, I have to sit in the stairwell of our apartment building to wait for Roy to get home from his errands. One afternoon while I’m locked out, I need to use the bathroom so desperately that I have no choice but to race to another floor to find a dark corner in the stairwell and use it to relieve myself. “May I please get a key?” I ask Daphne.

“Why do you need a key?”

“Because I don’t have anywhere to go after school.”

“Absolutely not,” she says. “Only adults can have keys, and you are not an adult.”

On weekend afternoons, the screams and laughter of neighborhood kids in the playground below are my only entertainment. For hours I stand with my arms over the balcony railing and rest my chin on them, watching while my chest aches to be with the other children. I am alone, the alien girl. I’m the child from nowhere—I have no one here.

Back in the living room, I sit listening to classical music and the opera, the sounds and voices on the radio keeping me company. As Roy’s hammer pounds from back in the hallway, I see which words I can spell out of Daphne’s Harlequin romance novels with the cartoony covers, like Music on the Wind and A Wife for Andrew.

I pull the Bible from the shelf, thick and dense, and read beautiful phrases from Proverbs and Psalms that talk about the promise of God’s power. “Out of my distress I called on the Lord; the Lord answered me and set me free.” I also like the story of Job, who experiences a lot of tragedy in his life but never fails to believe in God. The lesson in Job’s story is that sometimes we endure suffering for reasons that only God can understand, that God will always protect us as long as we remain faithful to Him.

From Daphne’s dresser, I pick up a paperback book that interests me. On it is the photograph of a freckle-faced little boy, and the book is titled Dibs in Search of Self. “May I read this?” I ask Daphne.