Detention Center Beautiful—Christmas Inside of Prison

An excerpt from Ride or Fly, the forthcoming second book in Nicole Daedone’s series, written from inside the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Christmas Eve morning—Miriam and I are back on.

She’s “I don’t like people” abstinent. She’s been doing well. Which is exactly why, when she comes down the aisle toward me, I know she’s about to blow a gasket.

“I can’t, Nicole,” she says. “Not today. Not on Christmas.”

I smile, honestly honored. In here, being needed is a kind of intimacy.

“Tell me.”

“That girl,” she says, already exasperated. “I tell you. She said she’d set up the tables. Then she stayed up until five a.m. and now she won’t get her ass up.”

It’s got to be Janiya.

This is my territory. Not the tables. The social physics.

“No problem,” I tell Miriam. “She likes the glory. Ask Kristi and Lana to do it. Kristi is a dervish—she’ll have it done in ten minutes. Then let them have the glory.”

Miriam’s whole body softens like I just handed her a hot cup of coffee.

“You’re good,” she says with her eyes, and walks off.

I watch her cross the dorm to Kristi, then Lana. Over recall they move like elves—fast, quiet, competent—making the dorm truly Detention Center Beautiful. People underestimate what goes into a holiday in here. No money for extra, no privacy, barely any space. What there is, is ingenuity and an almost manic devotion to making one day feel like more than another square on the calendar.

The care itself becomes a salve. It starts melting the ice between women before anyone says a single meaningful word.

Miriam pulls up her big blue chair. Cards come out. Board games. Her whole leadership style is that chair: planted, present, letting the room orbit her instead of chasing it.

It’s not that she doesn’t move. It’s that she doesn’t panic. She’s the kind of woman who can sit still and somehow that stillness becomes an instruction.

Royal comes out from her bed. It’s been a while. Her absence had been felt, and Miriam hadn’t let her slide.

“What you doin’, Ma?” she says, fierce with love. “You gettin’ outta here soon. You need to practice living free.”

And it works. Royal sits up. Then she’s out of bed. Then she’s in the room like she never left, floating between the bunks checking on her girls. I watch it play out from mine.

The various sets of twins come around Miriam’s chair to get their flavor of milk. Some sweet milk. Some tough. Some quiet warmth. They come in, fill up, and then—warm bellies—they go back out and interact with other women.

Not one eruption.

That’s the miracle, right there. Not that people are being nice. That’s not even the goal. The miracle is that the energy has somewhere to go besides collision.

Late seventies soul music comes on. Royal starts dancing like a real one—kind of sexy in her understatement. Tamara joins in, looking like she was definitely a hottie in her day. Janiya can’t help herself; she starts to twerk, but she’s doing it next to “grandma,” so she tones it down. The room laughs. Rach and I add our little moves into the mix.

The dorm, for a few hours, becomes a place where people can be human.

It’s one of those moments—and there are more than the outside world would believe—where I wish people could see it. In Buddhism there’s a practice of training the mind to see preciousness. Today I don’t have to strain for it. Even the everyday world would understand if they saw it, because it’s universal: women confined, pressure everywhere, using what they have to make where they are beautiful. Then letting that warm sensual beauty fill the room. Each woman delighting in the expression of the others, each sending out her own perfume to add to the whole.

It’s like the star on the tree—the thing that makes the whole thing complete.

And underneath the beauty, the dorm keeps its shape. The food runs along the old lines—the Spanish women at one end, the Black women at the other, each group cooking for its own. Nobody decides it. It isn’t Thanksgiving, when the hope of dropping the divisions and sharing a meal came apart. Today it’s quieter than that—just the way a thing keeps going when no one interrupts it. And no one interrupts it. Rach and I are inside the warmth and outside it, the way we’ve been since the classes stopped: near all of it, at no one’s table.

I had hoped Nevaeh might have said something, ideally to Royal who might have actually had the sway to change things, but whether she had or hadn’t, Nevaeh wasn’t here now to carry the message. She had been my bridge, when she chose to be, but you can’t arrange your way into being chosen, and the moment you try to manage it, you’ve taken the very thing that was theirs to take on. So I stay put.

As the day goes on, it breaks into smaller scenes. Miriam is sitting at the table with Lyric, who let out her braids and is leaving Tuesday. She asked me to curl her hair. It was my recent vocation. I’d been promoted from mere meditation teacher to beautician the day a woman who doesn’t speak English watched me curl my own hair and decided I was good enough to curl hers. She just stared at me and moved her finger in a curling motion, like, Do it. Please. Now. And word travels in here the way gossip travels anywhere: instantly, with embellishments. By the time I stood up, I’d gone from teaching meditation to doing hair.

Then Janiya calls me over because John Legend is on.

“It’s his birthday today,” she says, like I’m supposed to write it down.

“Okay,” I say. “That’s great.”

“He singin’ a ballad,” she says reverently. Then: “That means he a Capricorn. And I love me some Capricorns.”

And I kid you not: this makes her twerk. I crack up laughing.

Miriam says that in her church—the one she’s founding when she gets out—Janiya can do her sermon like that.

Meaning: twerking.

I say, “Oh, you’re gonna have some real transformation in that church.”

They all nod. Not like it’s the joke I intend, but like I’ve spoken the gospel.

Across the room, Marcy makes the ugly cry face because she can’t take it anymore. She’s pregnant and she wants this kid out, and she wants to see the nurse every two hours—loud enough that people from unit team come over. The nurse comes every day and says, “There’s nothing I can do.”

Marcy discovers she’s spent all her money on those nurse visits.

I hear her telling the story and another woman whispering, “Serves her right.”

It’s like that in here. A soft day still has teeth.

Marcy’s been craving rice, spam, and cheese—apparently a whole thing—and she doesn’t want the spam to cook too much like it’s bacon. Rach rattles off a list of spam aficionadas around the dorm who might help, and I tease her that the spam passing from one hand to the other was her good deed for the day.

But Marcy isn’t having it. She really needs cheese. She can’t buy cheese from commissary. She’s settling in enough that she’s sitting like a boss at Josina’s bed and calls me over. Doesn’t get up. Just calls me over.

I go, because I’m the only person in this dorm who reliably goes when called, and because if I want to talk to someone, I walk over to them. This is apparently radical.

She tells me the whole story and then ends with, “So… cheese.”

As in: will you buy me some.

I laugh. “The nurse is expensive, huh?”

She laughs too, because she knows she’s just messing with people—little trickster. I say I’ll see what I can do and walk away.

That’s what I mean when I say beauty is social technology.

It isn’t aesthetic. It’s structural. It’s a way of giving a room somewhere to put its longing besides violence. It’s a way of letting people feel chosen without having to take from someone else. It’s hair curls, and music, and tables set up at dawn, and laughter that doesn’t become cruelty. It’s Miriam in her chair, letting the twins come in close, then sending them back out warm.

In here, we chase the crown jewel—release, freedom, home—and miss the little jewels right in front of us. But the little jewels are what keep a place from going dark. They’re what let you practice living free while you’re still inside the fence.

And on Christmas Eve, it holds—the day, and the thin distance running through it. I keep my place at the edge of the warmth, easy to reach.

From Ride or Fly, coming soon. Subscribe to read more from the series as it’s released and check out the website