Chapter 13
The Lines Shift
Black-tie affair
Kiki’s birthday was a black-tie affair by MDC standards. We were honored to be invited. There were “crab cakes” made from whatever seafood the kitchen had that day, sushi, rice balls, and a ridiculous Chips Ahoy cookie cake with two whole Hershey’s bars pressed on top like jewels. What I didn’t realize was that it was an “opps day.” I thought I was being neighborly when I walked a couple of loaded plates over to Janiya and some other women. But there was an invisible electric fence running straight down the middle of the dorm. The moment my foot crossed whatever line only they could see, the air shifted and I felt as if I’d been zapped. As I walked back across the dorm, the glares from the women spun my head around.
Nevaeh met me halfway, clucked her tongue, and said, “We do not share with opps.” I blinked. “Huh? What?” “Opps,” she repeated, like the word “bitch” should follow. “Opps, opps. Janiya not cool and if you over there you ain’t neither.” “That makes no sense,” I said, still operating under a more flexible code. “You and Janiya were friends just yesterday.” “You need to read the headlines,” Nevaeh said. “That shit is over.” “Oh dear God. Okay, got it.” Nevaeh went back and explained to everyone that it was an error of the uninitiated. That did not stop the gossip from flying. It floated up and over the dorm like laundry on a line. Nevaeh and Janiya, up to their usual antics as the heart and the brain on Monday, and on Tuesday they are “opps.” In a place where eye contact can be a threat, their volume reads like safety: If they’re yelling, at least you know where you stand.
Later that week, I found Janiya on her bunk, knees up, watching What’s Love Got to Do With It on her prison tablet, mouthing every line like scripture. Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne acting out the drama of Ike and Tina Turner’s tumultuous relationship on-screen. “You really love them,” I said, taking a seat next to her. Janiya’s eyes stayed on the screen. “That’s my couple. Ike and Tina? That’s my shit. People only see the beatings. You gotta read between the lines.” “What do you see?” I asked. “Ain’t no Ike without Tina, and ain’t no Tina without Ike,” she said. “She was stronger than him. You can tell. He had to keep her down ’cause he knew she was better.
Without her, he never would’ve been Ike.” She tapped her head. “That’s how it is with my man. My mind, my sense, it stabilize him. He don’t do nothin’ without me. My man can’t live without me.” There was no brag to it, just simple facts. “First job I ever had was being a prostitute,” she added, like she was telling me her major. “I wasn’t supposed to be no ho. I finally got the kid I wanted, and the Feds came kickin’ the door in. Now my kid got neither of us. If I never met that man, I’d be in the medical field or some shit. I wish I never met him.” She shrugged. “But I can’t walk away from him.
And I ain’t gonna lie on him either. When it’s needed, he there. We grew up together in this shit. Love is difficult.” She said “love” like a scar. “I hate pimps,” she went on. “I only like him. We had a different relationship. I learned the game. You gotta know who’s gonna rape you and who’s gonna pay you. Game is chess, not checkers. I watched how everybody moved. Once I got comfortable, I got more money. I became his bottom bitch, the one closest to a wife. I built his business. He know that.” On the screen, Ike was in the studio, Tina on the other side of the glass. “At first it was romantic,” she said. “Then the honeymoon over and he hit me.
First time was ’cause I talked to one of his friends. Second time, I talked to another pimp, he wanted my money. My man snatched my phone and smacked me twice on the gate in front of everybody. Third time he raised his hand, I blacked out and beat him back. Treated him like any dude on the street. I was taught to protect myself. I can fight.” She said it with pride, and there was something raw under it, a small girl in boxing gloves who refused to sit down. “So what do you love about Ike and Tina?” I asked. She thought for a second. “I love that kind of loyalty. She stayed, even when he was on drugs.
Women can change a man. She made him. I feel like that. My mind keep my man from spinnin’ all the way out.” She paused. “Only part I hate is when he raped her in the studio. That’s your woman. Don’t do that. That part hurt my heart.” “You ever heard that chant Tina recorded, ‘Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo’?” I asked. As if she’d been waiting her whole life, Janiya bolted upright, eyes closed, hands pressed together, and launched into a pitch-perfect imitation of Tina Turner’s chanting, strong enough to overpower Angela Bassett’s impression on the screen. “You know that’s how Tina finally left,” I said softly. “For good. She broke the whole pattern.” “Yeah, after he broke her all the way down first,” Janiya said. “It was that mantra,” I kept going. “Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo.
Over and over. To change herself, not just her man. I did that chant for years. It roughly means ‘the lotus rises from the mud.’” I could see her version of Tina’s chant hiding under all her goofy bravado. There is a way to turn poison into medicine that doesn’t depend on whether a man ever changes. Janiya looked down at the screen, now the real Tina Turner dressed in white singing for a whole auditorium of people. Then she looked at me. “So you think women can really change a man?” “I think they can,” I said. “But I think the only change we can count on is our own.” She rolled her eyes like it annoyed her to agree. “Yeah.
Maybe we supposed to change ourselves first,” she muttered. “Look, I’m a Leo. I want a man-man. Provider, in control. I wanna chill. But female lions do all the work anyway.” She sat with it a moment before offering a quick grin. “Maybe it’s our job to be greater.” That always seems to be how it works in here. But in this place, nobody gets to walk out on Ike. The state does the leaving for you. Sitting on that bunk, listening to this so-called “problem girl” talk about bottom bitches and chess and a love that hurt like hell, I could feel it: The part of a woman that knows she’s stronger than the man who’s breaking her, and that one day, whether by chant or prayer or sheer fighter’s will, she might choose herself. “Game is chess, not checkers,” Janiya said again. “Exactly,” I told her. “But you choose how you want to play.” For a minute we just sat there, the glow of the screen on her face.
We would never be in the same room on the outside, but here we were, stitched together by a mantra about a lotus growing out of mud. Later that evening, I walked toward the back of the dorm, where Royal usually held court in her bed with a book. Royal looked up as I came over. Before I could say anything, I caught sight of them: Nevaeh and Janiya at a table near us, recently reunited, playing cards and eating banana pudding, telling the new girl they both did not like, “You better get yourself a shower ’cause your ass stank.” So much for eternal opps. I pointed at them, eyebrows raised. “These are the mortal enemies I almost got in trouble over?” Royal laughed, deep and warm, and squeezed my shoulder. “I know, baby, but you gotta learn.
When it’s real, it’s real, and don’t get in between.” “Royal, you know I am not a real opps kind of woman,” I told her. “I think we need to change that. We have more in common with each other than ninety-nine percent of the world. You don’t think it’s ridiculous for us to waste our energy on that?” “I know, baby, but that’s the way it is.” She rested her warm, soft hand on my shoulder. “This ain’t like outside, this is MDC.” “Well, Royal, we are going to be changing that.” I smiled. “You different, Nicole,” she said. “I kinda like that. But be careful.” She did not have to tell me twice. “Respect the opps” went into my mental prison manual that night, written in block letters. “Still talk to everyone” was the rule I wrote right underneath.
Over time, Janiya became a sort of steadiness for me that helps me make it through. She is loud and goofy and drives everyone crazy, but her willingness to play the fool makes her oddly nonthreatening. If I am disoriented, I make eye contact with her. That is no small thing in a place where women not only withhold eye contact, but where that withholding can mean danger is on the horizon. In a world where things are rarely what they appear, those clownish personas are just avatars. Underneath, both of them run on a serious love frequency that makes sure no one is ever completely isolated. At the table, Nevaeh and Janiya cackled at their own joke, heads thrown back, shoulders leaning into each other like they’d never heard of opps in their lives.