It’s 7 a.m. at Mabel Bassett Correctional Middle and the guards are about to open the doorways for folks with jail jobs or educational applications. Ladies crowd round 4 steel tables on the entrance of the pod, some sitting, others standing, all loaded down with clear baggage stuffed with books and snacks.
The previous 4 years of my incarceration on this Oklahoma jail have conditioned me for this. I get up at 5:30 a.m., drink a cup of Maxwell Home prompt espresso, stand in entrance of the mirror for 10 minutes to scrub my face, select which shade of orange T-shirt to put on, and am prepared by 6:30 a.m. After double-checking that my lockers are locked and my bunk is ready to cross inspection — blankets neat and tidy with no extra objects on my desk — I verify my wrist one final time. Not for my watch, however to ensure I’ve a hair tie.
Earlier than jail, I wore my lengthy brunette hair down, styling it with a few waves I added with a straightener. Wild-but-put-together-chic, I favored to assume. “I like the way you do your hair,” a co-worker as soon as instructed me as we served tables at Buffalo Wild Wings. “That’s your look.” They have been proper. It felt like me.
However the fact is my hair wasn’t all that vital to me then. It wasn’t till I received to jail that it out of the blue meant one thing. If you’re stripped of the whole lot, you’ll discover something to carry on to.
In this international panorama of state-issued orange, my lengthy hair seems like all I’ve left of my id from earlier than I used to be given a quantity and labeled “inmate.” Earlier than I used to be uncovered to the unnatural means girls listed below are herded by way of fences towards the eating corridor like cattle. Earlier than standing bare in entrance of a stranger grew to become the usual working process of weekly visitations, not the stuff of nightmares.
Most individuals right here don’t know the way lengthy my hair is. I all the time pull it up, significantly in the summertime. Oklahoma summers are thick with humidity and the times recurrently attain 100 levels. As a runner and exercise fanatic, I’m both exterior or within the fitness center, the place there’s no air conditioner. As soon as, after getting back from a morning run, my hair soaked in ringlets of sweat round my face, somebody ribbed me by asking if it was nonetheless raining exterior.
Although it’s hardly ever down, I nonetheless continually fuss with my hair — readjusting, pulling it again, shopping for extra hair ties to maintain it from intruding on my each day actions. Jail has pressured me to scale back my as soon as wild-but-put-together-chic look to a messy bun or free braid. It’s undoubtedly a nuisance, however when somebody suggests chopping my hair shorter as an answer, I’m immediately offended. My hair isn’t an arrogance mission. It’s my final connection to the life I used to have.
In right here, I now not really feel the wind blowing by way of my hair the best way it did after I rode my bike alongside the Arkansas River in Tulsa. But when I run quick sufficient across the jail’s quarter-mile path, the swishing of my ponytail triggers a faint recollection of that cherished routine. For five miles, I escape the drab, redundant surroundings of the jail yard and quiet the fixed chatter of 1,200 girls.
I begin to think about Tulsa’s distant skyscrapers. I see strangers stopping at a QuikTrip to refill tanks and seize chilly drinks between locations. I start to make out the odor of gasoline and scorching concrete, and to listen to the sounds of site visitors and the songs of the wind that fashioned the soundscape of my rides alongside the peaceable river path.
A couple of yr into my incarceration, one of many few girls who managed to maintain a straightener hidden after they have been banned from the ability let me borrow it. It did not take lengthy — a couple of minutes to warmth up the straightener, a number of extra so as to add a few waves. Then I seemed within the mirror.
My hair fell properly beneath my shoulders. In that second I got here again to me: the woman who listened to Grimes and took her beagle combine, Lola, to the grocery retailer. The woman who wore Rag & Bone denims and ordered Starbucks. The woman folks knew as Lindsey Smith and never 873962.
Lindsey Smith is an editor of The Mabel Bassett Stability, a prisoner-run newspaper at Mabel Bassett Correctional Middle in McLoud, Oklahoma, the place she is serving a sentence for manslaughter.
