I hadn’t witnessed anything at Danbury to allay my fear of childbirth, but for the first time I had some tiny insight on the mother-child relationship. The single most reliable way to get another prisoner to smile was to ask her about her children. There were always families in the visiting room; this was both the best and the worst thing about the many hours I spent there. Young children were growing up while their mothers did time, trying to have a relationship via fifteen-minute phone calls and the hours spent in visitation. I never saw these women look happier than when they were with their children, playing with the small collection of plastic toys kept in the corner and sharing Fritos and Raisinets from the vending machine. When visiting hours were over, it was gut-wrenching to watch the goodbyes. In one year a child could change from a squirming baby to a boisterous talkative toddler and mothers would watch football championships and prom nights come and go from the distant sidelines, along with their children’s graduations, wedding days, and funerals.

As tough as it could be for a prisoner to visit with her children, it was also hard for parents to see their babies locked up. There were so many young girls among us, eighteen and nineteen years old. Some of these kids had been heading to a place like Danbury for some time, but one bad decision could suddenly land a young woman in a merciless and inflexible system. A lack of priors and a history of general good conduct didn’t matter at all-federal mandatory minimums dictated sentences, and if you were pleading guilty (the vast majority of us did), the only person with real leeway in determining what kind of time you would do was your prosecutor, not your judge. Consequently there were sad-looking parents visiting their kids-though not mine. My mother was like a ray of sunshine in that room.

For our visits every week my mother was always dressed immaculately in soft, cheerful colors, with her blond hair carefully styled, her makeup perfectly applied, wearing a piece of jewelry that I had given her for a distant Christmas or birthday. We would talk for hours about my brother, her students, my uncles and aunts, the family dog. I would fill her in on whatever new electrician’s skill I’d learned that week. She always seemed perfectly comfortable in the visiting room, and every time she visited, I got comments from other prisoners afterward. “Your mama is so nice, you’re a lucky girl,” or “That’s your mother? Get out! I thought it was your sister!”

I had been hearing that one most of my adult life. People would often say it to her as well, and even though she had received that compliment approximately three thousand times before, it always made her glow. In the past, this familiar exchange made me feel resentful. Do I look like I’m in my late forties or fifties? But now I enjoyed watching her pleasure when people drew a close comparison between us. Even with this disaster I had dragged us all into, she was still proud to be my mother. It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother defeated, even when life presented difficulties and disappointments. I hoped that our resemblance extended beyond our blue eyes.

My father, more than a thousand miles away, was able to come visit me when the academic year was over. His relief when he saw me was palpable. I have always been a daddy’s girl, and I could tell how it pained him to see his baby, even a baby in her thirties, in a place like this. We still enjoyed our time, eating peanut M &Ms while I spun all the intrigues of the place out for him to absorb. The difference between our weekly phone calls and an actual in-person conversation was like a text message versus a weekend-long visit. If there was one silver lining to this whole mess, it was the reminder of my family’s greatness.

I had a lovely visit with my mother that Mother’s Day-although the visiting room was deranged. I had never seen it so crowded with large family groups. A lot of women in Danbury had families who lacked the resources to come and visit often, even though many of them lived in New York City. Tired grandmas and aunties, taking care of their daughter’s or sister’s children during their prison stays, had a very hard time marshaling toddlers and teenagers on the buses, trains, and taxis necessary to get to Danbury-the trip could take four hours each way from the city and cost money. But Mother’s Day was special, and children of every age swarmed the place, and a cacophony of conversations flowed in many languages and accents. In the midst of all of it was my mother, smiling happily when she spotted me walking into the madness.

TWO COPIES of The New Yorker arrived for me at mail call, to my horror. Someone out there had sent me a second subscription. Miss Esposito from C Dorm also got the magazine, and had been mad at me when my first copy showed up in March-she thought it was a waste of money for both of us to get it. The damn things were piling up all over the prison.

Esposito was an odd duck. A big, solid woman in her fifties, she wore her dark hair in a disconcertingly girlish Dutch boy bob. She was always part of the welcome wagon for any new prisoner, regardless of race-she herself was Italian-American. She volunteered that she had been a gang leader with the Latin Kings, a claim I was at first skeptical about-why would the Latin Kings have an Italian Queen?-but it turned out to be true. She was a former 1960s radical intellectual who’d gotten involved with gang activity at a pretty high regional level. Esposito was doing a long, long sentence.

I could tell pretty quickly that Esposito, although a needy person, wasn’t after anything from me that I wasn’t willing to give, and she was heartwarmingly appreciative of my magazines and books. One day she came to me, with a fan in her hand. It was a medium-size oscillating plastic table fan, like you might buy in Woolworth’s. It looked just like the one Natalie had. “Bunkie, you going to be glad we got this when summer comes,” she said. “You can’t get these no more. They stopped selling them at commissary.” The commissary now sold a much smaller fan, a crappy little one that cost $21.80. The old-school ones were prized, especially by the older ladies, who seemed to feel the heat most acutely.

Esposito’s fan was broken. It wasn’t even hot out yet, but she was stressed. “Can you maybe take a look at this, down in the electric shop? I’ll do anything to get it fixed.” No promises, but sure, was my reply. I toted the thing down to work on the bus the next morning and took it apart, with my coworkers observing keenly. It turned out to be an easy fix, and I was glad that my access to tools was helpful to another prisoner. Back in the Camp, when I triumphantly plugged the fan in and it whirred to life, Esposito almost fainted with joy. I refused to take any commissary payment, but Esposito paid me in reputation.

Almost immediately another old-timer approached me, hoping for a board to slide under the mattress to help ease her back pain. There were a handful of older ladies doing very long sentences-Pop, Esposito, Mrs. Jones-and if I did one of them a favor, they were sure to tell everyone. Soon I was besieged by women bearing broken radios and broken fans and seeking repair for things in their cubicles-hooks for their clothing, loose conduits, busted shoe racks, all sorts of things.

Little Janet thought this was over the line. “That stuff’s not our job, Piper. It’s not electric, so why should we fix it?”

“No one else is going to do it, babe. The feds aren’t going to take care of us in this shithole. We have to do for each other.”

She could accept that logic, and besides she had other things on her mind at the moment. Little Janet had attracted an admirer, a tiny little white girl named Amy with a loud mouth. Amy was new among the always-present subset of prisoners I called “Eminemlettes,” Caucasian girls from the wrong side of the tracks with big mouths and big attitudes, who weren’t taking shit from anyone (except the men in their lives). They had thinly plucked eyebrows, corn-rowed hair, hip-hop vocabularies, and baby daddies, and they thought Paris Hilton was the ne plus ultra of feminine beauty. Amy was the tiniest and the most obnoxious of the new crop of Eminemlettes, and she was smitten with Little Janet, who despite her two-year tenure in prison seemed to have no idea how to handle a middle-school crush. Little Janet did not mess with girls, so Amy was barking up the wrong tree. Little Janet wasn’t so mean that she’d ice Amy; she tolerated her puppyish worship.