The Girls at Lansing

The Girls at Lansing
1.
At Lansing Residential Center on that particular evening the wind was blowing the cold rain in squalls across the muddied lawns and against the lighted windows of the building that shelters the girls I will be teaching. The grounds look eerily familiar to my alma mater, another all-girls scene, where the only difference is, we were enrolled there because our parents could pay the tuition, while the girls at Lansing are placed here by New York State family court system for “various criminal offenses” and have no choice in the matter. I remember thinking about this peculiarity between “them” and me as I walked steadily along the bridge built over the river that flows underneath.
The main building seems to look identical to the convent at my previous precious school, where my friends and I would sneak into during lunch recess and steal their old habits and cloaks out of their squeaky cedar closets so we could go bar hopping that weekend or another. However, looking back to that time, I think now how utterly irrelevant what I supposedly did wrong in my adolescence has in fact effected the woman I have presumably become. And the only real different between me, or rather us, to “them” is that they have no real autonomy. In fact, they have no idea what autonomy looks like except when they look at me. I don’t know whether this is true or not, but I have a good sense of these girls. After all, I used to be just like them. As for us, we did these seemingly rebellious things because were given this almost inevitable autonomy at the place of our birth, where as far as the girls at Lansing go, they did whatever it was that they did to wind up here in the middle of New York in order to survive, to experience, to live. Or at least they did it for a while. I suppose the only thing they do now is tell each other stories. Whether they are true or undoubtedly false, as some of their stories are, they are still caged in this confinement, snatched from their human condition of street life, disbanded into a place that is only supposed to rehabilitate them, not teach them.
I am going here to teach them.
And they are going to tell me their story.
Since the inclination to work at Lansing, to teach a group of about 6 to 8 girls, depending on the day, if they could or could not participate in my lesson, if they were “good” in the previous days, or rather in other words, if they stayed within their box, that I came to work with them and their writing is distinctly a somewhat special one, seeing as though people and students who do venture up the slight seventeen or so miles outside of Ithaca onto the court of criminals and misunderstood young women, “only come once and never come back”. “They aren’t consistent…you have to be consistent if you want to reach them,” Dollbaby Cooper, the home’s youth recreation specialist says to me when I eagerly tell her I want to teach writing. This occurrence was an interesting scene when she told me this because she said this right in front of all 20 of my prospective students. The word consistency ran through my head as I turned and saw all of their simultaneously volatile and endearing expressions. I thought to myself that I have never been consistent with anything in my whole life. Always brushing off any kind of responsibility, condoning my behavior by saying something terrible like, “I’m only 23”, “I’m still in college”, or answering a midnight phone call that would prevent me from doing anything for about 48 hours and would go something like this “I am coming over with a bottle of bourbon and this hot new band who heard so much about you from so and so in Williamsburg, and are just dying to meet you”. In other words, the stuff of a typically privileged, college educated white girl from the suburbs, the periphery of an awfully segregated place that my hometown of Cleveland is. It was there I knew at that very moment I had to make my decision and right in front of these girls nonetheless. It was then where I had to acquire the life lesson of a certain responsibility, a lesson of “less talk more action”, an attempt to bring into focus a picture which did not suggest that I have lived my life entirely outside of the box, conflicted, concerned and with an only somewhat archaic sense of incomprehensibility. It was then I knew I had to do this because of reason and vocation: I didn’t see them as criminals, as I am told most do, nor did I see them as strangers. I saw them as kin.

2.
Same time, same place, I began directing a group of young writers stuck in the Lansing Residential Center. The home is often described typically as a medium secure correctional facility for girls ages 11-17. Where, ideally, the all female group were eagerly awaiting their first lesson. Hopefully, the sort of programming I will attempt them with will prove somewhat effective either today or some other day, eventually. I think to myself, perhaps their writing and their selective time with me, since I am completely devoted to them, could provide a sort of replacement for the “missing pieces” of their girlhood and their lives. I want to teleport them to a place where they feel most comfortable, most secure. For their first assignment I tell them I want them to think about what it means to be a woman where they are from by writing, and if they can’t do this, which Jaquana has a problem with, I tell her to write about something she hasn’t written about today. She writes about trust as virtue and something that is unattainable. Jaquana’s story is typical of most of the girls wedged in The System.
Her story can be “simply” told. In fact, when I ask her to write her story, she brushes it off, makes a little noise under her breath and says, “That’s easy!” Her story would go something like this: One day Jaquana trusted her mother. After all, mothers are to be trusted by their daughters. So, one day Jaquana started selling drugs. These weren’t the same drugs Jaquana’s mother likes. Jaquana’s mother like different drugs. On another day, Jaquana’s mother makes her go out and get the drugs she likes for her. She says to get them anyway you can. Jaquana did it through her body, losing that much more of her soul because all Jaquana wanted to do was make her mother happy. Jaquana says that she doesn’t trust her mother. She only wishes she could. But, after all, she ended up at the bitter end of Lansing Residential Center because she trusted her mother “too much”. Jaquana tells me, “If I would have known my father, I would have trusted him and left like he did”. Jaquana is fifteen years old, has lived at Lansing for a year, will probably be in there until she is 18 and the only thing I want from her is to trust me.
The girls have a good sense of themselves and have an even better sense of the difference between them and me. Still, the only deviation that they really see and verbally communicate to me is that I am white, they are black or Latino, I live “out there” while they are here, “locked up”. During the first lesson, they underestimate me.

3.
Around two o’clock on some morning last July, on the busy street corners in the community of Mott Haven, a 16-year-old named Yanique Serrano was stopped and questioned by police officers, one white one black, both whose names Yanique couldn’t remember, nor did she need to. A few weeks later she was indicted by the Bronx County court on felonious charges in possession of marijuana. She laughs about it now because she seems far too young to really understand that six pounds, the amount she told me she was arrested for, is an enormous amount.
In the spring, almost a year after her arrest, while Yanique Serrano sits miles away from the home she shares with her two great aunts in the Bronx, during my short stint of attempting to teach her something about writing, I see her once a week for about two and half hours at Lansing Residential Center. Again, I am thinking about what has brought me here. I only suppose now, after nearly a month of making the trek out to Lansing, that I began coming or going because I am interested in the alteration of issues, for an issue is what Yanique Serrano and her fellow detained mates had by then become.
Yet to understand how she ended up here you must first consider Yanique Serrano, who she once was and who she is now, to the State of New York and to me. She came from the Bronx, a characteristic all-too typical of the girls at Lansing. Her mother is from Puerto Rico and her father was born and raised in the Bronx. She met her father for the third time in her life only days before her arrest. The Bronx certainly has had its share of declination. In the 1960s and 1970s, most of the communities, including the community of Mott Haven, where Yanique’s family has lived since her mother became a citizen, underwent a weakening in the quality of life. Urban Renewal Projects, such as the Robert Moses’ Cross Bronx Expressway almost single handedly destroyed existing low-density neighborhoods in favor of roads that produced the quintessential urban sprawl as well as high-density housing projects. Another factor may have been the shift by insurance companies and banks to stop offering financial services to the Bronx and to other working class areas, more notably and most affectionately called the “rustbelt” in favor of building up the suburbs, “the sunbelt”, a practice we know as redlining, a sure process known to result in residential racial segregation, which by now defines the Bronx. The story of how the Bronx came to be the place that it is today as well as how Yanique Serrano came to be the young woman she is today is especially important in the indispensable contemporary African-American history of people simply because of the horrible notion that one day redlines were drawn on a map.
The Bronx police probably knew Yanique before her big time arrest, and probably had a list of all of the kids in the crowd that she ran with or just held drugs for. I am telling you neither that Yanique Serrano surely possessed the amount of marijuana she claims nor the court claim nor that Yanique Serrano did not knowingly hold the drugs, for in the context of social politics, Yanique Serrano’s guilt or innocence is irrelevant. I am telling you only how Yanique Serrano happened to be in the Lansing Residential Center, and why I go up there every week. Still, I do not get the sense that the girls at Lansing are or were intended to become my personal political martyrs.

4.
However, the time I am writing about, I think I was in search of a political martyr of sorts. While my current status as a fifth year undergraduate student was coming to an end, and in the time spent at Lansing, I was inadvertently trying to bring the photograph to focus which certainly at this point in time as I am living it, as an acquaintance once put it, “in a life of half-assed discrepancy, drunkenness, sexual prowess”. It has always been somewhat of a struggle to surprise me. It is even harder to get my attention and the type of notorious existence I have in Ithaca doesn’t mean anything to me. It may even be getting worse, nevertheless, this was the time where I was completely occupied in my mind, graduation, booze, and in the time I spent at Lansing. The only problem now, was that my entire education, thus far, everything I had ever been told, the jokes that were made about my work at Lansing, everything that I had told myself, insisted that teaching as well as writing as my craft was never supposed to be improvised: everything was supposed to be planned on a piece of paper, only now, I seem to have misplaced it, and the only ones that really found it are the girls at Lansing.

5.
Ashley, Jacky and Tonya are my best students. I already see myself favoring them over the rest of the girls in my group. They are the most attentive and creative of the writers. Ashley writes about love, Jacky writes about her life in Brooklyn, while Tonya’s poetry embodies one smart girl from the Bronx who’s social consciousness has suddenly broken through in front of my eyes one day when I tell the girls just to write what they want.
Tonya speaks in metaphors and dreams in chance. And when I say this to her, when I think out loud, on a day when I feel especially grateful to her for allowing me to come and visit with them and share their writing with me, she doesn’t really appreciate it. I get from Tonya that she sees through me a little more that I know, or at least she thinks she does. She doesn’t say much, but her writing tells her story and she has given it to me, and with that I am grateful.

6.
Driving between Ithaca and Lansing in the gloaming minutes in April I kept the radio on very loud. On this occasion I kept the radio very loud not to find out what time it was but in an effort to erase four words from my mind. Four little words, which when put together form a question, a question that I have asked so many times, but can’t really seem to remember any one saying them to me and meaning it. The words, or rather the question asked by two of the girls at Lansing were these: will you write me. Question mark. The radio played The Yardbirds. Will you write me? Somewhere between Ithaca and Lansing it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about photography or something else that just reeked with pretension. Somewhere between Ithaca and Lansing it also occurred to me that the sadness on this particular evening was going to present itself as an inability to drive my car along the Cayuga Lake and back into town. Sweet Josephine is going to sleep. I closed my eyes and drove along the lake. I kept driving because I had work to do, essays that needed attention, tests that needed to be studied for, because I promised the two girls at Lansing that I would write to them and because there was no place to really pull over and because everything in my mind was someway going to go into a letter that I needed to write.

* * *

I have known, since then, very little about the cause of incarceration, how girls can go from there to here overnight. I know that Jacky was released a few weeks ago, having no real education or training. I know that Ashley, her girlfriend, now sneaks letters out to her in Brooklyn. I know Amanda, a quiet girl that I never really worked with, nor did I know very well, is now housed in the mental health unit. I know the girl who braids her hair in the corner, in front of a mirror you can’t really even see into, is still on suicide watch. I know that the girls aren’t allowed to slam the doors to their bedrooms – a sacrament seen to most teenage girls with just a little freedom. I also know that their bedrooms are kept cold and the girls sleep with their faces on the radiators, leaving red markings on their cheeks in the morning. I know that Tonya still has ten months left and Yanique has six. I know that Jaquana doesn’t want to write about her past anymore, but her future. She once told me that writing allows her to “reflect on experience and see what it means.” I know that the first boy I ever loved when I was fourteen drowned three summers ago, putting an end to my own adolescence, losing that privilege.
Quite often, I reflect on my years living in Ithaca and not knowing that the Lansing Residential Center even existed, on what Yanique’s life in the Bronx really looks like, how Jacky is paying to ride the L-train and on the fact that I only may or may not have impacted my students, but I am still not sure writing this has yet helped me too see what happens next.