It’s 7 a.m. at Mabel Bassett Correctional Middle and the guards are about to open the doorways for individuals with jail jobs or tutorial applications. Girls crowd round 4 metallic tables on the entrance of the pod, some sitting, others standing, all loaded down with clear luggage filled 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 clean 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 go inspection — blankets neat and tidy with no extra gadgets on my desk — I verify my wrist one final time. Not for my watch, however to verify 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 preferred to suppose. “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 had 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 acquired to jail that it out of the blue meant one thing. Once you’re stripped of all the things, you’ll discover something to carry on to.
In this overseas 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 method ladies listed here are herded via fences towards the eating corridor like cattle. Earlier than standing bare in entrance of a stranger turned 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, notably 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 outdoors or within the gymnasium, the place there’s no air conditioner. As soon as, after coming 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 outdoors.
Although it’s not often down, I nonetheless continuously fuss with my hair — readjusting, pulling it again, shopping for extra hair ties to maintain it from intruding on my every day actions. Jail has compelled me to scale back my as soon as wild-but-put-together-chic look to a messy bun or unfastened braid. It’s positively a nuisance, however when somebody suggests reducing my hair shorter as an answer, I’m immediately offended. My hair isn’t an arrogance challenge. It’s my final connection to the life I used to have.
In right here, I not really feel the wind blowing via my hair the best way it did once 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 ladies.
I begin to think about Tulsa’s distant skyscrapers. I see strangers stopping at a QuikTrip to replenish 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 12 months into my incarceration, one of many few ladies who managed to maintain a straightener hidden after they had been banned from the power let me borrow it. It did not take lengthy — a couple of minutes to warmth up the straightener, a couple of extra so as to add a few waves. Then I regarded within the mirror.
My hair fell properly under my shoulders. In that second I got here again to me: the lady who listened to Grimes and took her beagle combine, Lola, to the grocery retailer. The lady who wore Rag & Bone denims and ordered Starbucks. The lady individuals 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.
