Raising Heaven (Locked Out) Read online

  Text copyright © 2015 by Patrick Jones

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  The images in this book are used with the permission of: © Creatista/iStock/Thinkstock (young woman); © iStockphoto.com/DaydreamsGirl (stone); © Maxriesgo/Dreamstime.com (prison wall) © Clearviewstock/Dreamstime.com, (prison cell).

  Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std 12/17.5.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jones, Patrick, 1961–

  Raising Heaven / by Patrick Jones.

  pages cm. — (Locked out)

  Summary: Seventeen years after she was born to a prison inmate, Deja agrees to raise her newest half-sister for the first six months, until their mother’s next release, but despite the help of friends and relatives and a support program at school, caring for a baby proves to be a monumental task.

  ISBN 978–1–4677–5802–4 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978–1–4677–6186–4 (eBook)

  [1. Prisoners’ families—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Babies—Fiction. 4. African Americans—Fiction. 5. Houston (Tex.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.J7242Rai 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014018198

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 – SB – 12/31/14

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-6186-4 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-7696-7 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-7697-4 (mobi)

  To the Isis Rising Prison Doula Project of Everyday Miracles

  —P.J.

  1

  SIXTEEN WEEKS BEFORE DUE DATE

  I was born in prison.

  Well, that’s not honest. They released Mom for the day, took her to a county hospital in cuffs, and with two guards watching, the docs cut me out of her. That was seventeen years ago.

  Now, she’s back inside, this time in the county workhouse doing a year straight time for violating her parole—again—and drug charges—again—and she’s pregnant—again. She’s been pregnant a bunch of times between me and my half-sister who’ll be born in a few months. Some she got rid of, a couple she had, but most never made it. The county took me from her soon after I was born, but Grams got custody, unlike my half-sibs who came later. They’re in foster care or adopted, but still among the millions of people in Houston. I don’t see much of ’em and that’s OK with me. We got different dads, and I don’t really feel attached to them.

  But the one on the way—she’s different. I’m gonna help raise this one. Since Mom’s only doing a year, it’s not enough time to lose her parental rights. She’ll have the baby at the county hospital, they’ll bring it home to Grams, and we’ll take care of her until Mom’s home in six months.

  And this time Mom says she’s getting clean and staying clean. This time she says she’s going to be a good mom. This time she says everything’s going to be different.

  Nothing we ain’t heard before. I think that’s what breaks Grams’s back: not raising me, not taking Mom in when she’s out, not working hard for hardly any money. What breaks Grams is Mom breaking her promises. If Mom would say, “I’m an addict, I’m gonna use,” then she’d accept that: that’s who you are. We don’t like it, but we get it. Instead, every time Mom comes out, it’s all about “getting clean” and “starting over” and “working the program.” But they’re all just words.

  Used to be every time Mom broke a promise, it broke my heart a little bit more. But now I got no trust left to shatter, no hopes to be crushed. That’s for little kids, and I ain’t been one of those for a long time. Mom stole my childhood along with all the money, drugs, cars, and jewelry she took.

  I can’t get that back, but I can get the next best thing. I can make sure this baby’s life don’t turn out like mine. I’ll raise up a sweet child the right way, and unlike Mom, I won’t break my promises.

  2

  TWELVE WEEKS BEFORE DUE DATE

  My cousin Malik, who came here after Katrina, has this bit about Houston whenever he meets somebody who’s just moved here. He says, “I know I’m going to Heaven ’cos I spend my time in Hell.” Then he asks the person, “You know the difference between Hell and Houston?” And the person says “I don’t know” and then Malik says, “Hell’s got less people and a better climate!” Most people laugh. Until they’ve been here awhile. Then it ain’t funny, especially in summer, like now.

  Me and Malik are walking home together after school—late, ’cos he had an Honor Society meeting. While I was waiting for him, I looked up baby names online. I keep a list of names on my phone. Whenever I find a name I like, it goes on the list. Now, I run a few of ’em by Malik while we walk.

  “That’s nice,” he says every time I read one off for him. He knows Mom’s letting me pick the name for her new baby ’cos I’m gonna be taking care of her. Malik is gonna help out too, but he don’t get a vote on the name.

  It’s a long walk home. We live in the Fifth Ward. You know you’re getting close when you start to hear sirens.

  We’re used to walking, even in this heat. Hardly anybody in the Fifth has a car. Aunt Beatrice, Malik’s mom, drives a beater about as old as me that only starts half the time. I got my license, but I don’t drive. I ain’t got nowhere to go ’cept school—Malik, my friends like Shanice, and Grams are all in the Fifth. My “Big Sister,” Molly, takes me to the downtown library sometimes, but I feel like a space alien there.

  One time when me and Malik was walking back from school late like today, he said, “Deja, let’s count the men we see on the way home.” I don’t think we saw a dozen. “It’s like a vacuum cleaner sucked up ’em up,” Malik said. Except we know the vacuum is the workhouse like my mom’s at, the state prison like his dad’s at, or the cemetery.

  Most men you do see are running the corners. Something about those corners: they draw people to ’em like magnets, thinking they’ll find gold, but mostly they find lead. That’s what happened to Derek, my daddy. He ain’t the only one.

  Malik says he’s not gonna be like that. He says I ain’t gonna be like that neither. We made a promise to each other in junior high that we weren’t doing time. We was gonna stay out of trouble, not do drugs, stay in school, graduate, all that. So far, so good.

  “You got the baby’s room ready?” Malik asks. He says it all playful, ’cos the baby’s room is really just my room.

  “Almost,” I say. “I found my old crib boxed up in the storage room.” The storage room is Mom’s room. She don’t use it much even when she ain’t locked up, so Grams keeps all kinds of junk in there.

  I don’t mention what else I found in that room. There was a cardboard box full of letters Derek wrote to Mom when one or the other of them was on the inside. They’re all the same—love he didn’t provide, promises he didn’t keep. She’d write back the same things. When they were together on the outs, they’d try to make it work. They’d get clean while they were locked up, but it never stuck. It takes months to get into a program; it takes minutes to score on the corner.

  I ain’t mentioned those letters to anybody, not even Grams. Especially not her.
br />   To hear Grams tell it, it wasn’t her fault. She raised all her kids right. The fact that “right” means “go right to jail” for two of the three don’t faze her none. She says Carla was a good kid till Derek “led her down a dark path.”

  I don’t remember Derek much. Before he got his one-way ticket to the cemetery he was usually locked up, out late, or with another woman. But when he’d come around, Mom would use me like some chip in a poker game. She’d say, “If you want to see Deja, you’ll straighten yourself out.” Since he never got straight, it means he didn’t want to see me, which means he didn’t love me. I don’t think of Derek as my dad. He was a donor, not an owner.

  I think that’s why me and Malik is such good friends, and why he says he’s gonna be around to help out with the baby. Like he wants to be the dad neither of us ever had.

  “You gotta have one of those spinny things,” Malik says. “To hang over the crib. A mobile. I’ll ask Shanice if she knows where we can get one.”

  I just laugh. “I’m more worried about bottles and diapers and onesies than I am about spinny things.”

  “Nah, we’ll get one,” Malik insists. I bet Shanice knows all about mobiles. I bet she had all kinds of toys when she was a baby. I love Shanice—she’d be my best friend even if she wasn’t Malik’s girlfriend—but her folks probably had more money to spend on mobiles than Grams has to spend on groceries.

  I don’t say that to Malik, though. I just tell him, “You’re gonna be the baby’s favorite cousin-slash-uncle.”

  Malik smiles. “This baby’s gonna be the future,” he says. “She won’t grow up with the past we inherited, filled with our parents’ mistakes.”

  That’s what I’m hoping. It’s the only hope I got.

  3

  FOUR WEEKS BEFORE DUE DATE

  Sunday service at our church is always full. I’m there with Malik, Shanice, and Aunt Beatrice. Even in this heat, we’re still dressed up because Beatrice demands it.

  Maybe because it’s hot as Hell, Pastor Green talks a lot about the kingdom of Heaven. I can’t say I’m paying that much attention. I’m only here to keep Aunt Beatrice off my back. She’s the good one in the family—the middle child. Mom’s the youngest, and Clinton’s the oldest. Clinton’s doing life in Huntsville.

  After the service is over, we catch the bus back to Grams’s house where everybody gathers most every Sunday after church. It’s a big family—Grams has five sibs, and everybody takes care of each other. The say it takes a village to raise a child. Grams’s family is our own village, ’cept year by year the men leave the village and don’t come back.

  I relax into my seat. The seats of this city bus are a lot nicer than the ones on the prison shuttles I used to take to visit Mom. At least this time when Mom messed up she only got County time, so I spend less time on those buses.

  “So Deja, you getting excited?” Shanice asks.

  “Yeah, and a little nervous,” I admit. I spent the first week after school hunkered down in the Fifth Ward library—which has AC, unlike home—reading books and printing out Internet articles on raising babies. But instead of feeling prepared, now I’m just scared awful. “Wouldn’t you be if it was you?”

  “Deja, I wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing,” Shanice says. “I mean, I’ll support you and help out how I can, but a baby—don’t matter if it isn’t your own. That’s hard work.”

  “Most things are.” For me, that’s always been true. For Shanice, not so much. She’s used to having two parents with jobs, a home with AC, teachers fawning over how smart she is, having life come easy to her.

  “Besides, Grams is gonna help out,” I add.

  Aunt Beatrice snorts like a cartoon bull. “You believe that?”

  “She told me she’d help out all she could,” I say, too loud.

  Beatrice shakes her head and offers up this sad little smile. “She didn’t help me none,” she says. “If I recall, she didn’t help your mother that much when you were little either. She acted like she was helping, made a big deal of every little thing she did, but in the end it was only what she felt like doing. She didn’t strain herself. She wasn’t no superhero and she wasn’t no saint.”

  I can’t argue with her because I don’t remember much from that time. What I do remember, I wish I could forget. Seems like I cried a lot, holding up my arms for someone to pick me up, but nobody did. Maybe the reason I’m strong like Molly said is ’cos I had to pull myself up alone. It shouldn’t be that way. I don’t want another kid in my family to go through that. I’ll be those loving arms reaching down.

  “Your mom was too young to have a baby then,” Beatrice says, “And too old to have one now.” That’s kind of true. Mom’s only thirty-two, but she’s lived hard more than half those years.

  I change the subject. “Hey, Malik, I told Molly your joke about the difference between Hell and Houston. She liked it.” He laughs.

  “So, if Hell is like Houston,” I add, “what do you think Heaven is like?”

  Malik starts to answer, mainly by repeating a lot of the stuff that Pastor Green said. I’m listening, but I’m looking out the windows at the Fifth. So many of these stores, houses, and cars empty inside, but outside, full of gang tags.

  “I think Heaven is like your own dream and it’s different for everybody,” Shanice says.

  “If that’s true, I’m in Heaven right now,” says Malik, “’cos I’m living a dream with an angel by my side.” My cuz gives me cavities with such sweetness. “What do you think, Deja?” he asks.

  I glance at the women and children on the bus. I think about the women and children on the prisons buses over the years, then say, “Heaven is a place where nobody makes any mistakes.”

  4

  THREE WEEKS BEFORE DUE DATE

  “Deja, how do you plan on managing this responsibility?” Molly asks me. “Even if it’s only for a few months, it’s still a lot of work and worry.” We’re sitting at this fancy coffee shop way outside the Fifth Ward. Molly’s always trying to take me places that’ll “expand my horizons,” but usually that just means somewhere with AC that’s far away from the Fifth.

  Molly’s OK. She’s the third woman I’ve had in the Big Sister program since Mom signed me up way-back-when. I’ll say this about Mom: she knows how to get stuff. She signs up for every program there is. Well, except rehab. Not ’cos she hasn’t wanted to. But there’s always a waiting list that’s almost as long as her sentence. And Mom’s not much good at waiting.

  I suck down the most expensive, fattening drink they sell and answer Molly’s question. “I got it all planned,” I say. “Planning is something I do well. And I got lots of support. My grandma will help, and my cousin Malik, and my friend Shanice.”

  “That’s wonderful.” She’s drinking some fancy, nasty-smelling tea. “When’s the baby due?”

  “Beginning of August, a few weeks before school starts.”

  “Does your school have a program for young mothers?”

  “Yeah. They said they’d make an exception and let me in even though it’s not my baby.”

  “Remind me what school you go to?”

  “Harriet Jacobs High School.”

  She types on her tablet. I’d like one of those. Or any computer. Even my school doesn’t have many computers. After a hurricane years ago, people looted the school. Even after all this time, the school hasn’t replaced all the stolen machines.

  I tell Molly a little about school, but she nods her head like she knows everything already. She’s probably looking us up online ’cos I can tell she’s reading her screen, not listening to my words.

  “So anyway, they got child care on site, but you also get to spend time with your baby,” I explain. She’s still reading, not looking at me. It’s rude, but I don’t say anything. “And the—”

  She cuts me off and starts telling me what’s on her screen. “The program is tailored to the needs and interests of each student. It offers flexibility and choice, recognizing the
unique gifts and passions of each child, as well as each child’s challenges and obstacles to learning. So, Deja, what obstacles do you think you’ll face?”

  “Well, I don’t think I’ll know many girls in the program,” I confess. “I know ’em ’cos I went to school with them, but they’re not friends or anything.” Honest, one’s my enemy. Yasmin.

  “And why is that?” Molly likes asking me questions.

  “I ain’t like them, being stupid and getting pregnant when they ain’t even old enough to drive.”

  “So you think these girls are stupid for having babies?”

  “I think they’re stupid for getting pregnant,” I say a little too loud. “I mean, the school’s got a clinic so it’s not like they can’t get something. Or maybe they just ought to say no.”

  Molly laughs at that for some reason but then starts typing again. Tap tap tap.

  I keep going. “I’m not like model pretty or anything, but I got plenty of boys interested in me. When I tell ’em I’m not interested in that, they find somebody who is. Soon word gets around. Everybody knows who gives it up and who don’t. I don’t.”

  “You’re a confident young woman. That’s a quality many women lack, as people, as parents. You sound strong.”

  “With what I’ve been through, if I wasn’t strong, I’d be broken in half by now.”

  “I bet your mom is very proud of you for being so responsible,” says Molly, which is the kind of thing people like her say when they run out of advice. She sips her tea. I can tell she’s trying to think of what to say next. What to say to a girl with a life she can’t even imagine, a life that the Internet can’t explain to her.

  “How’s your mom doing?” she asks after a minute.

  “Oh, she’s fine.” Honest, sometimes I think my mom gets pregnant before she does time because of all the extra attention it gets her. Out here, she’s just one more pregnant woman, but inside, she says they treat a pregnant woman special. More food, less work, more time in medical. And more programs too.