September 13, 2011

This is in response to Mr. Avakian’s “An Appeal to Those the System Has Cast Off.” It is the story of a close friend of mine, an immigrant, and I feel it represents the thousands upon thousands of others like her who have also been cast off by the system. … While I give you guys much props for standing for a most worthy cause, it is also every conscious individual’s job to awaken the slumbering masses.

While incarcerated on this sentence I serve, a young friend of mine confided in me inside a semi-crowded visitation room that she contemplated selling her body. Now to be a sensitive and thoughtful twenty-five year old mother of two and have been brought to this drastic conclusion in dotcom America seems… out of place. Yet, upon closer inspection so does the continued mass incarceration of blacks and a government that caters largely to the Haves, even while appeasing its oppressed Havenots with gestures that amount to placing “Band-aids” upon “bullet wounds.” Still, I was staggered by my friend’s revelation, and angered. You see, the reason that brought about her bleak contemplations of becoming a prostitute was she was unable to work and thus unable to provide for her two little boys. The reason she was unable to work was because she is an immigrant and the INS -- in the harsher, post 911 Bush era -- caught and acted upon some discrepancy that was made in her paperwork when she came across from her native [country]. What kills is she was all of six years old at the time and the discrepancy was made by her mother, not her. So the INS decided they would strip her of her citizenship, her green card, and planned to schedule a meeting sometime in the indefinite future to see whether or not she was to be deported to her Mother country, which was not quite as alien to her as it is to me. (I’ve never been there, by the way.) Oh, and she was told that should she be deported, she herself would be responsible for her children’s transportation and care. Yet she was flat broke and, with her citizenship revoked, unable to attain a job.

Prior to this, she’d been working at a restaurant, raising her boys as a single parent, and planning to take the required course to become a certified nurse. Her dream deferred, she chose to focus on providing for her children, like any mother would. They were seven and nine, attending school and always growing-out of clothes and out of shoes. She decided to act: at the risk of further penalization, she attained a job at a local bar in which she was to be paid under the table. Her employer propositioned her for sex and one of its patrons sexually accosted her upon her first night there. It was also her last. The second, and final, illegal job came months later when she found work with a small construction business that put up sheetrock. Excluding the boss, the entire crew were all Mexican and also being paid under the table. After earning $600 after her first month she felt ecstatic. Maybe this small victory was just a beginning. Maybe the tide had changed for the best and, hell, maybe the wizard would visit the INS mucks and grant them hearts. However, after her second month she was dismayed and shocked when the boss said he wasn’t paying them, that they would have to wait until next pay period -- and, no, there would be no back pay. Another young lady, the only other female besides her, told my friend that he’d done this before, more than once in fact. So, fuming and humiliated, she quit.

It was around this time she became diagnosed with cervical cancer and wound up sitting across from me in that visitation room, audibly considering the sacrifice of her body for her kids. Actually considering in earnest what others have hypothetically, due to her circumstances. And what crime did she commit to be left out there, abandoned by her adopted country? None. The fact is America leaves its women defenseless, vulnerable to the wolves, and to quote another author, eats its babies. FIGHT THE POWER!!

Prisoner from South Carolina