I Can Take it from Here Read online

  Copyright © 2022 Lisa Forbes

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:

  Steerforth Press L.L.C., 31 Hanover Street, Suite 1, Lebanon, New Hampshire 03766

  In 2020, Steerforth Press launched Truth to Power Books: investigative journalism, iconoclastic histories, and personal accounts that are nuanced, thoughtful, and reliable — qualities at a premium in the Internet age — and that inform through storytelling, not argument.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  ISBN 9781586423049 (ebook)

  Ebook ISBN 9781586423056

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It is an under-recognized fact that most former prisoners in the United States are traumatized before entering prison or while in prison. Many published studies indicate that most incarcerated people experienced childhood abuse or neglect.

  In 2016, the American Psychological Association published an article that asserted, “Nearly all youth detained in the juvenile justice system have experienced traumatic events often leading to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” These boys and girls will “remain at risk for future offending” unless they receive treatment for PTSD and associated conditions. Many of those traumatized youth end up in adult prisons, just as I did.

  According to the United States Department of Justice, more than 650,000 ex-offenders, or people I prefer to call restored citizens, are released from prison every year, and studies show that approximately two-thirds will likely be rearrested within three years of release. As a society, we will never end mass incarceration and mass recidivism until we acknowledge and address the role trauma plays alongside other factors, such as systemic racism and poverty.

  The book that follows is my story, but in many ways it is also the story of millions of other individuals, and part of the story of our nation. We are all in this together.

  CONTENTS

  Escape

  Book One: Chicago

  Jump

  Friendly Ghosts

  Wiggling

  The Lake Michigan High-Rises

  The First Time

  Shame

  Mama and Daddy

  Sisters and Brothers

  I Need a Knife

  Mount Olympus

  Romance

  Shunned

  In the Loop

  James

  The American Dream

  The Crime

  Confession

  Cook County Jail

  The Trial

  Shipment

  “You Just Have to Be Patient”

  Tango Aftermath

  Recovery

  The Education of Lisa Forbes

  The Parable of the Enlightened Man

  Of Thee I Sing

  Baptism

  Home

  Prison Action Committee

  Legacy Theatre

  My Day

  Book Two: Atlanta

  New Car, New Home, New Life

  Free

  Entrepreneur

  Marrying Mommy

  Answered Prayer

  Really Old Hurts

  Surgery

  Divorce

  Book Three: Colorado

  Denver

  A Temporary Life

  Parliament

  InTown Suites

  Zoe

  A Room Full of Faces

  Armageddon

  Lisa Forbes Inc.

  Book Four: The Way Forward

  From Invisible to Restored

  Acknowledgments

  ESCAPE

  For a long time, I thought I would get out of prison. I was confident a judge would overturn my sentence on appeal and free me to raise my young daughter. I was a nineteen-year-old Black girl from the projects and the people who judged me, mostly white men and a few senior citizens, one of whom the bailiff had to prod repeatedly for sleeping during my murder trial, were hardly a jury of my peers.

  Guilty, they had said.

  “Don’t worry,” my state-appointed appellate public defender had assured me.

  The state of Illinois sent me to the Dwight Correctional Center in 1987. A lot happened that year. The stock market crashed, Michael Jackson released Bad, the dusky seaside sparrow became extinct, Jesse Jackson ran for president, Eli Lilly pitched Prozac to a jittery nation, and a jury convicted me of murdering James Bankston. The state of Illinois moved me from the Cook County Jail — where I had languished for eighteen months awaiting trial — to Dwight, a maximum-security women’s prison some seventy miles from Chicago. A sickeningly cheerful security guard gave me a baggy blue uniform. I got a prison number, too: N77122. In prison, the women played Scrabble, took antidepressants, and watched Cops. At night, I dreamed I was in a different place, back home with my daughter.

  My parents, who visited me once a month, thought I would get out, too, although we rarely discussed my appeal. Instead, we talked about politics, home, and religion. My mother brought me Watchtower and Awake! magazines, jammed with stories about missionaries, earthquakes, and the end of the world. Soon, the authors said, natural disasters would plague mankind no more. “Under God’s Kingdom, every tear of sorrow will be wiped away forever.”

  My father, who grew up in Jackson, Tennessee, often talked about the South, and shared memories of his family. He didn’t like the boys who dated his sisters. Once, a mule kicked an unlucky relative in the head and, he said, “he was never the same after that.”

  My father loved city politics. He talked about Harold Washington, the first Black mayor of Chicago. Washington died unexpectedly in 1987, shortly after I’d gotten to Dwight, and two Black men — Timothy Evans and Eugene Sawyer — vied for his job. Evans gained the support of African American voters, who saw Sawyer as a puppet. But Sawyer, supported by a mix of white and Black voters, won. Worried about protesters, Sawyer was sworn in at 4:01 A.M. in the parking lot of a closed restaurant. It was the talk of the town.

  My mother, a Jehovah’s Witness, pooh-poohed such talk. City councils, school committees, presidential candidates — flawed rulers could not change the world. She said, “There’s no solution to any of these worldly problems except in Jehovah’s Kingdom.”

  My daughter, Mercedes, sat on my lap, looked around, and played happily as we talked. My mother dressed her in a pretty blouse; her hair was always full of barrettes. But she wasn’t worry-free.

  Three years later, in 1990, I was still waiting for my appeal to be heard. Mercedes had just started first grade. Almost seven, she was a bright little girl and a budding writer. She loved to write short stories. My mother mailed copies of them to me. Full of three-dimensional characters, they included amazing, complex plots. But they weren’t fairy tales with happy endings. Her characters tended to be sad or angry. I wondered if her stories reflected some inner anguish.

  When I told my parents about my concerns, my mother laughed, shook her head, and said, “They’re just stories.”

  Mercedes favored her father: light complexion, curly hair, brown eyes. “Is she Puerto Rican?” people asked. By the time I went to prison, she had only seen her father a few times. I don’t think she connected his absence to my incarceration. I never talked about my crime. How do you explain a twenty-five-year sentence to a little girl who falls asleep clutching a Cabbage Patch doll — a doll that her father gave her? How do you tell your daughter you murdered her father?

  During these visits, I tried
hard not to cry, but usually I did. Occasionally Mercedes asked when I was coming home. I always smiled and said, “Soon.”

  It could have been worse, several inmates told me. Some killers spend a lifetime behind bars. I might get out in my thirties. I wasn’t comforted. My life in Chicago’s public housing projects had been awful enough. At four, I was hit by a car. An older brother sexually molested me for years, my sisters bullied me, my father drank, and my mother talked about “the last days.” God would destroy the world’s nonbelievers, she said, including me. “Jehovah knows who he’s going to kill.”

  Jehovah would have to get in line. I was so miserable, I thought about killing myself every day. We lived on the sixth floor of a sixteen-story high-rise in a sea of public housing. I wanted to jump from a high window and leave my unhappy life behind. My daughter saved me from that fate. I named her Mercedes, not after the car, but after Our Lady of Mercy. I understood her to be the patron saint of abuse victims, incest victims, and martyrs, but I wasn’t Catholic, and I may have gotten her mixed up with other caring saints. After I went to jail, I learned she was the patron saint of prisoners, too. All I knew was that my daughter was my lifeline. Her unconditional love sustained me like an umbilical cord whose connections were reversed.

  Prison mangled that bond. “Sometimes she cries at night,” my mother told me on one visit. “She won’t stop. She cries and says, ‘I want my mama.’ I tell her, ‘Your mama’s not here,’ and she cries herself to sleep.”

  In the fall of 1990, I got a letter from the appellate court during mail call. Realizing a lawyer would have called if the news was good, my heart sank. I tore open the manila envelope. The court had decided to uphold my conviction. Back in my room, I sat on my bunk, too stunned to cry. Two days later, Mercedes turned seven.

  That’s when I decided to break out.

  I continued to meet with my family each month, but our visits served a new purpose: I used them to plot my escape. Every month we met in the visitors room, a large space with folding chairs at various tables. Visits were limited to four hours. The room was noisy, crowded — sometimes I waited an hour for a table — and someone was always crying. Visitors and inmates bought candy, crackers, and chips from the vending machines on one wall. Or they ordered pizzas, hot sandwiches, and ice cream at a deli-style counter. The correctional officers, or COs, sat behind a glass enclosure to the right of the counter. The room included a row of monitors tied to cameras trained on every part of the security fence. I paid careful attention to these cameras on visitation days. Waiting in line for pizza or an Italian beef sandwich, I held Mercedes in my arms, made small talk with my parents, and studied the screens. A few, no longer working, had gone dark. They were the prison’s blind spots.

  I studied the layout of my new home in earnest. Established in 1930 as the Oakdale Reformatory for Women, the renamed Dwight Correctional Center was overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded in the late 1980s. It didn’t even have a chapel — just a few Bible study classes. More than half of the prisoners took psychotropic drugs that kept them drowsy. The women who had been addicted on the streets to crack or heroin were now addicted in prison to Elavil, Sinequan, and Adapin — mood-altering drugs that were dispensed as readily as breath mints to help the women deal with “depression.”

  Although the inmates were young, mostly in their twenties and thirties, many of them had few teeth or wore dentures, either because drugs had rotted their teeth or because someone had knocked them out. The ones convicted of murder had killed their husbands, boyfriends, or tricks. A few had killed their babies or children. But women were also serving hard time for being petty thieves or “boosters,” stealing and reselling clothes and jewelry.

  Every one of us, I’m quite certain, struggled with acute trauma tied to physical, sexual, or emotional abuse.

  We all wore colored ID cards to indicate our flight risk. An ID card with a white background signified a low risk. After that, the ranking was blue, medium risk; red, high risk; and green, extremely high risk. Except for a few women who had escaped from work release centers, nearly every inmate wore a white badge. Nobody dreamed of running. Those with children talked about their children. Those about to be released imagined their lives on the outside. Most of the women had forged lesbian relationships and prison “families.” They had a wife, a husband, and a younger inmate who was their son or daughter, or an older inmate who was their momma. The inmates were their family, and the prison was their world. Dwight treated their inner pain with tranquilizers.

  We lived in cottages, not cell blocks — stone houses with steel and glass front doors. I slept in a medium-security cottage, C-14. My cell had a door with a small window. The guards could oversee the dayrooms in each building through a glass enclosure in the middle. The women passed the time watching their favorite TV show, Cops. Every day the theme song filled the dayroom: “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?”

  I could not understand why anybody in prison would want to watch that show.

  Like other minimum- and medium-security inmates, I was allowed to stroll along a gravel path that ran inside the prison fence. I simply needed to let the COs know that I was going for a walk. After my appeal was denied, I walked with a new purpose. I memorized the screens in the visitation room and looked for blind spots along the path. I spotted one between the wall and the Industry Building, where the “privileged” inmates sewed garments for Illinois prisoners, including handkerchiefs, blue pants, blue shirts, white shirts, pajamas, and dusters. They earned a dime a garment.

  I planned my breakout to take place during evening recreation. The rec yard was a grassy area inside a four-foot-tall chain-link fence, a prison within a prison. It featured picnic benches, a volleyball net, a walking trail, and a snack shack where inmates could buy two-ounce packets of Carl Buddig meats (beef, turkey, and honey ham), pizza, Italian beef sandwiches, chips, soda, and ice cream. We could eat in the rec yard or take food and soda back to our cottages. We could bring a radio (the prison commissary sold boom boxes) or wear a Walkman in the yard. We could also take cards or a board game and play bid whist, pinochle, Uno, or Scrabble.

  When I went to the rec yard, I usually took a book. I was teaching myself Spanish so I could talk to some of the other inmates, so I often carried a Spanish-English dictionary with me. My plan was simple: Walk the road, duck behind the Industry Building, find the blind spot, and climb the fence. I waited a few weeks to make sure no one repaired the monitors. And I walked the road several nights a week to make sure the number of people on the path didn’t change on different days. I had no plan beyond climbing the fence, running into the woods, and calling someone to get me.

  Evening rec was two hours long. The guards spent another hour counting the returning prisoners. It would be at least three hours before anyone noticed I was missing. Plenty of time to get lost.

  On the day of the break, I put on sneakers and a gray, long-sleeved jogging suit. I carried a button-down jean jacket to throw over the barbed wire once I topped the fence. I had purchased the clothes from the commissary. Those who couldn’t afford new clothes wore the standard navy-blue prison uniform with a matching, shapeless blue prison jacket.

  I got in the rec line with everyone else and filed out. Most of the COs stood around in the yard. A single car rolled along the path. Two or three COs walked the route, but they were spaced pretty far apart. At a casual pace, it took about forty minutes to complete the circuit. But the COs almost always stopped to talk to inmates, giving me more time. I knew that once I passed a CO, I could go at least ten minutes without seeing another one. The patrol car moved slowly, too. I’d have more than enough time. Plus, I had the advantage of surprise.

  One thing worried me: What if I encountered another inmate on the path? They might blow the whistle on me. Or they might just join me on the walk and be chatty. How could I get rid of them without drawing attention to myse
lf? I didn’t want to do anything that might appear unusual.

  I had nothing to worry about. The road was empty that day. It was near dusk on a crisp November evening — pleasant enough to huddle together in the rec yard but too chilly to go for a stroll. The rec yard was crowded, the inmates were content, and the COs were in a friendly and relaxed mood. I walked casually toward the Industry Building and faced the fence in the blind spot. No one saw me. I had no plan beyond getting on the other side of the fence, but I felt no fear, and I wasn’t worried. I was drawn to the fence like a moth to a flame. Without hesitation, I put a foot on the fence and pulled myself up. Climbing the chain link was easy. The wide razor wire at the top presented the challenge. It tore my jacket, sliced through my palms and thumbs, slashed the knuckle of my left ring finger down to the bone, and plucked circular plugs of flesh from my forearms.

  I pressed on.

  Then, at the top of the fence, I panicked. The razor cut into my left thigh. It stretched before me for three feet — much wider than it looked from the ground. I couldn’t just swing my legs over it and climb down. The barbs nibbled at my forearms like flesh-eating piranhas. I flailed wildly in a futile effort to keep my arms free as my useless jacket became entangled in the wire.

  I lost my balance and fell backward — a fifteen-foot drop — landing hard on my back inside the prison. The breath whooshed from my body. I tried to stand but collapsed immediately. My left ankle, broken, bulged to the right and over the top of my sneaker. I stared at it, oddly calm. Blood ran from my hands and dampened my jogging suit. I wasn’t going to climb a fence with a shattered ankle, and I needed medical attention. Lying on my right side, I dragged myself to the road where I could be seen and sat on the ground in front of the Industry Building. I cradled my ankle and held it in place.

  Looking up, I could see the November sky, the prison lights, and the bloodied razor wire above me.

  I was going nowhere.

  — book one —

  Chicago