Since my arrest had been in late December, Thanksgiving of 2011 was my first Turkey Day behind bars. Thanksgiving was the worst holiday to be in prison, but it may have been one of the saddest.
The best holidays on the inside were usually the ones that had been the least exciting in the free world things like Labor Day, Memorial Day, and Super Bowl Sunday, These were the times when it didn’t feel as much like an entire season of celebration was continuing without us, when our absences at family gatherings were a little less noticeable.
A lot of people had families in prison - not biological relatives from the outside, but people behind bars they called mothers and sisters and uncles, entire structures mimicking the world we left behind. Aggressors took the masculine roles, adopting titles of brothers and fathers, and just like on the outside, your mother’s brother would be your uncle.
These were the people who’d have your back, the people you could break bread with and expect presents from on holidays and birthdays. I did not have that - I was too new, and not interested anyway -- but on Thanksgiving I was still one of the lucky ones: I had a visitor.
Lee skipped spending time with his own family and drove up to see me. All we had to celebrate with was candy from the visiting room vending machine, but we pretended it was a full feast. We took a paperclip and carved the word TURKEY into the back of the Snickers and wrote MASHED POTATOES on the Reeses.
Afterward, I went back to the dorm to read, crossing my fingers and hoping that we wouldn’t be stuck with the asshole CO who liked punishing us for trivial or entirely imagined offenses by making us stand in the corners of the dorm for hours at a time like schoolhouse dunces.
But that day, we had a good officer.
When he came in for his shift he saw Washington and a few of her friends cooking together in the common room, hogging the hot plates so no one else could make food. And he issued an order: “It’s Thanksgiving. If you’re cooking, you’re cooking for the whole damn unit.”
So they did. The rest of us got together and donated commissary items. Supplies were limited, and spices weren’t allowed - except what we got on the prison black market, smuggled out of the mess hall in strip-search gloves. When it was all done, they shouted, “Get your bowls! Get your bowls!” We lined up at the common room tables and gaped.
Despite the lack of tools and the hodgepodge of ingredients, the result was amazing: pasta salad, spiced cabbage, rice, yams, turkey, cranberry sauce, green beans, macaroni and cheese, and ten or fifteen different kinds of cakes and pies.
Most of it was a little orange because Sazón is the number one spice in prison, but it tasted so good, and no one fought, no one stole, no one got sent to SHU.
After so many stormy days, it was a rare moment of shared humanity. Then everything went back to how it was.
This was not a fresh start or turning over a new leaf. But when I look back on it, I still think that this is how change happens one day at a time, people learn by stacking together individual moments that eventually add up to a different person.
Those moments felt so scarce behind bars, but in my thoughts, they are vivid, high-lighted in bold hues by a desperate mind that did not want to forget.
Extracted from “Corrections in Ink” by Keri Blakinger. Published by St. Martin’s Press in the US and Icon Books in the UK, out 7 June 2022 in the US and 7 June 2022 in the UK.
