In prison, they called me Harry Potter
Idon’t think that I particularly look like the wizarding wonder, but with short hair, no makeup or piercings and a collared prison uniform, apparently some of the others found the resemblance uncanny.
It started the day they cut off my dreads, leaving me with a haphazard ’do that one person immediately pinned as Potteresque. And from there it just caught on.
Complete strangers would spot me on the walkway and shout, “Oh, my god, it’s Harry Potter! Why is Harry Potter in prison?”
Everyone there seemed to see the resemblance — even though it’s a connection no one has drawn before or since.
But I wasn’t the only one with a hoosegow moniker. Not everyone had one, but prison names were definitely a thing. Sometimes people picked their own; sometimes they were foisted unwillingly, by a bad haircut or other coincidences.
There were the other fictional characters: Tinker Bell, Peter Pan.
The geographic names: Asia, China, Africa, Philly.
The colors: Black, White, OneArmed Red.
The randoms: Bad Baby. Scrappy.
The food-related: Cream, Sugar — even Pork Chop. I have no idea how anyone came to be called Pork Chop, but it’s all anyone ever called her.
But most of these names were prison-only names. They weren’t names we’d been called before and weren’t names we’d use after our release.
For some, it became more than a name; some women adopted completely different prison personas. They became gay for the stay. They suddenly turned from nice women into cell-block bullies, from outsiders on the fringes to well-connected knowit-alls. And it completely made sense they would take on another name.
For me, the prison name was about some familiarity, some ownership. Some demonstration that we could be something other than the seven-digit number assigned to us by the state. It was a small symbol of defiance, an unwillingness to turn from a person into a piece of “state property,” as prison inmates were called.
But, sometimes, it was also about distancing ourselves from the outside world. In prison, we weren’t the same people we were on the streets. And we sure didn’t need to be reminded of the lives and identities we’d left behind on the outside.