Chapter 8
Royal
Five-thirty evening stroll for anyone who wants to join!” I call“ out through the dorm. The first time I did this, the guard laughed and told Rach I sounded like a suburban mom power-walking in yoga pants. I just smiled and said, “Well, except we’re in here, aren’t we?” There’s a kind of stereotyping that happens here— they see “white woman” and think they already know the story. I don’t bother correcting them. I just pray they’ll encounter me directly. Rach and I had started a new practice, walking the indoor track. I invite the ladies to join in the walks because Royal—a respected “OG” in our dorm who’s had two strokes and a heart attack—sat behind me saying her legs hurt from never leaving her bunk.
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She’s scared one day they’ll stop working. My plan is indirect: Get other women walking, ask her friends to invite her, and let pride step out of the way. Then one night there she was, joining the herd like a retired mare turned out to pasture again. I like her a lot. She strut-shuffles the aisles murmuring, “Hey, baaaaby,” with a warm baritone that reminds me of Maya Angelou— love concentrated by pain. It took time before I made her “baby” list. She’d trade her cereal for our morning cake and offer me a steady, curious look, but that flood of sunlight was reserved for others. I pretended not to care. I did. I told Rach I’m drawn to the apex in any field and agnostic about which field that is.
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I’m bored by the middle. People who’ve gone the distance carry an added dimension—robber barons and innovators, special forces and lawyers who actually win, the ones carved by the river all the way to the ocean. Royal is one of those. She has nothing to prove, which frees up all the proving energy other people spend. She pours it into love. She’ll talk about disappointing her grandkids with a humility that almost hurts. She doesn’t try to look cool; she is cool. She reminds me of my friend Ed, a lifelong Zen teacher whose goal is simply “to be a pretty good Ed,” and then he tears up. Those are the real ones. But 5:30 this evening, no one shows.
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I tell Rach, “We started the walks; it’s not our job to chase anyone. But it is our job to hold the frequency.” We lap the gym alone for fifteen minutes…and then, like an alarm across the dorm, the walkers begin drifting in. Allison arrives first, then Brynn. They join me and Rach. Royal and Janiya, her “granddaughter,” come in shortly after. They do a few loops and puppy-bright Janiya gets distracted and peels off, leaving Royal solo. I can see her angling back to the dorm. She walks for the company. I wave our little gaggle—Rach, me, Allison, and Brynn— over to her. Then I speed up to meet her and it’s Royal and me, stride for stride. We’re both big planets: warm to everyone, cautious with each other, orbiting to see if the other is actually paying attention.
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Royal is a storyteller, and she has stories. A full-on OG from the eighties and nineties. Out on the track, she talks the way some women pray—somewhat to me, mostly to God, the rest to herself. “I always wanted to be a lawyer,” she says. “First grade. Teacher go around the room, everybody saying nurse, ballerina. I said, ‘Lawyer.’ I wanted that briefcase. I wanted to walk in the room and know more than everybody else.” Her voice is matter-of-fact, like she’s reciting a file she knows by heart. She tells me about Bedford, her first bid Upstate. “I studied law the whole time. State law, not this federal shit.” She chuckles. “It’s not if we did it or not.
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It’s if they can prove it.” “I was in my twenties,” she goes on to explain. “A kid. And one day I just said, you know what? Fuck it. I’m not getting no job, I’m not going back to school. I’m gonna be a criminal. I made a conscious decision. I decided this my life.” It started small, she tells me—“simple things,” walking into banks and walking out with money that wasn’t hers, paper games that felt like magic tricks. “We all teach each other what we good at,” she says. “One girl good with checks, one with IDs. I’d be amazed at the shit I could get away with.” Her eyes gleam, remembering. “It’s like an orgasm. When you hit it, it’s good, then it’s gone, and you want it again.” She tells me about the crews she ran with—mostly men, always talking like they were the brains. “They think they slick.
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Think ’cause they the ones with the gun or the suit on, they in charge.” She snorts. “Half the time they running on what a woman taught ’em.” She glances at me. “I ain’t never let no man run my show. Not the ones in the street, not the ones in my bed.” “God said, ‘I make men.’ And I said, ‘Me too,’” she says, tapping her chest. “I carried them in my body nine months. Fed ’em, wiped they nose, taught ’em how to walk in a room.” Her hand goes instinctively to her belly, then drops. “Everybody act like these men just appear or like these men made us. Nah. They come through us. “I make men. My sons, my grandsons, my dudes.
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Whatever man I’m with, I’m making him. I build him up, talk life into him, show him how to move. He walking around in a body that came through a woman. He can’t never be better than his maker.” There’s no brag in it; it’s doctrine, an honest evaluation. “Lotta these girls shrink theyself so some man can feel big,” she says. “Not me. I make men. I been like that my whole life. I don’t care how many mistakes I made, I’m the best.” Abandoned at birth, her mother resurfaced after this most recent arrest—sixty years later—and told Royal she needed to eat salad instead of her daily meal of wings and ribs and potato salad from Shop Fast.
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Shame, regret, a long ledger of hard choices. Listening to her spill it out while we walk the track, I think of all the invisible women who have been “making men” their whole lives—the mothers and aunties and girlfriends who packed the lunches, wiped the faces, said the one sentence that shaped how a boy would see women for the next forty years. We talk about “the system” like it fell out of the sky, some neutral machine. But every system was once a boy in a kitchen absorbing a woman’s tired story about power, about who matters and who doesn’t. Standing with Royal, it’s obvious: She’s been making men and making the world, and then getting punished inside the very world she helped make. “May I offer you another read?” She gives me a small nod of assent, a conversation between equals. “You walk through this dorm giving love to everyone,” I tell her. “That’s the real work.
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Beating yourself up hasn’t helped—you said it never stopped you after any arrest, it just took you away from your kids. What if you gave yourself the same love you give these women, the kind that makes them stronger?” She stops mid-stride, considering the option. “You’re smart,” she says, picking the pace back up, an extra glint in her knowing eye. We keep going. Ninety minutes. She doesn’t want to stop. By the end she’s agreed to drink two glasses of water a day—another huge step toward “healthy.” Royal tells me she’s never done more than seventeen laps. I finally have to laugh and say we’ll pick it up tomorrow because I’m the one who’s tired. Real-deal love finds itself in the most unlikely places.
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