'We're one big family': inside the guest house for loved ones of prisoners
By five o’clock on a Saturday evening, the parking lot outside the Hospitality House in Alderson, West Virginia is filling up fast. From my car, I watch as little girl in a pink jacket jumps from a New Jersey plated van.
“But why can’t Mom come stay with us here for just one night?” she asks.
A muffled adult voice answers incoherently from inside the van and then a boy bounces out and turns around.
“This don’t look like no hotel,” he yells. “What’s this supposed to be? Some white boy’s grandma’s house?”
The three-story Victorian does look rather grandmotherly, a little weatherbeaten but in a well-loved kind of way. Since 1976, it has served as a pay-whatyou-can bed-and-breakfast for the visiting loved ones of the women incarcerated at Federal Prison Camp, Alderson – the prison made famous by Martha Stewart, who spent five months there.
Inside, Brian DeRouen is busy tending the wood stove. He and his wife, Kathleen, moved to the area in 2007 to join a Catholic intentional community but they became interested in the Alderson Hospitality House and took over running the place. Brian himself was incarcerated for an act of civil disobedience at Fort Benning, Georgia back in 2005 and so the couple have a personal passion for criminal justice reform work.
I have been a volunteer here on and off for 15 years and, recently, dropping in most weekends to help prepare meals.
Octavia, a woman with short gray hair and a National Parks sweatshirt, is setting out the silverware.
“Hey,” she says as I approach. “Good to see you.”
“How’re you doing?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “A little sad,” she says. “This is my last visit with my Angela ’til spring. What with the snow in the mountains, I can’t risk getting stuck here.”
Octavia travels by train for 12 hours to visit her daughter-in-law, Angela. She visits her as often as she can get the train ticket money together. Her son can’t make it out to see his wife right now she says, but seems hesitant to go into details. Here, no one presses anyone for anything they don’t want to share. There is an unspoken understanding: no one expected to be in this situation, but here they are.
This is certainly not how Octavia thought she would spend her retirement; she had planned on buying an RV and joining tours of the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains, but instead she is putting money into her daughterin-law’s commissary account and traveling to a town in West Virginia she’d never heard of before.
The front door bangs open and a woman with shiny blonde hair and bedazzled jeans joins us at the buffet table. This is Barbara, from coastal Virginia. She is quick to smile but her blue eyes hold pain. She comes to visit her daughter, Brandy, whenever she can get a weekend off from her home health nursing job, and whenever her back pain lets up enough for her to drive.
“I’ve been getting acupuncture, which really helps,” she says. “But man, that stuff’s expensive and what with the money I gotta give Brandy for her commissary … sometimes it’s between that and having the gas money to come visit. Did you know they don’t even give ’em shampoo and conditioner? Just this powdered detergent shit, excuse my language. If you want shampoo, you gotta buy it.”
Octavia nods in agreement. “You can spend $250 a month easy, just helping them get the littlest necessities.”
“I knew I had to come this weekend though,” Barbara says. “It’d been three months since I seen my baby.” She has a habit of pushing her fingers into the inside corners of her eyes when she talks about emotional things. “I was so glad there was space for me here at the House. The first couple times I came up to visit Brandy, I’d go over to the River Rest motel after visits, lock myself in that room and cry all night.”
“Plus, here you know everybody understands,” says Octavia.
“Here we’re all one big family!” a voice booms.
We look up to see Chris walk in carrying a grocery store cake with pink icing.
“You know,” Kathleen says, tipping her head towards me as she carries a steaming pot of spaghetti to the sink, “this place really is family to Mesha. She wouldn’t exist without it.”
“How’s that?”
“Her parents met here.”
And it’s true. I wouldn’t exist if Sara Jane Moore hadn’t escaped from the prison in 1979.
Moore was serving a life sentence for attempting to assassinate Gerald Ford and on 5 February, she scaled the chainlink fence and walked to the Hospitality House, where she told one of the volunteers that her car had broken down in the snow and she desperately needed a ride to the bus station in the next town.
It was not until after he had already transported Moore that David Shelton Ross realized who she was. He called the police immediately but that was not enough to assuage suspicion against the house workers. The following summer, when Moore was prosecuted for her escape, all of the Hospitality House workers were mandated to the trial and there was no one left to run the House. The founders, Dick Dieter and Maggie Louden, put the word out to various social justice organizations and a man named Sam Maren answered the call.
My father was 23 when he agreed to take the job. He had been on the road, up in DC protesting the closure of a homeless shelter and then down in Florida picking oranges, and thought he’d take a break to help out. On the days when he wasn’t busy cooking for the guests, he practiced his saxophone on the balcony and happened to catch the eye of a woman living in an apartment across the street. I was born five years later.
Back in the kitchen, Kathleen rings the dinner bell and guests wrap around the room in a single file line.
“Sometimes this reminds me of our ladies, lining up for chow,” one man says quietly. “Except for this food is real good.”
I think about how that phrase – “our ladies” – acknowledges the sadness in each and every guest. It amazes me sometimes how few words are necessary to unite the guests here, despite the obvious differences in race, class, and political leanings.
Reflecting on this, Brian DeRouen said, “In normal life, we don’t sit down regularly and talk with people that we disagree with, but here at The House, folks do. They not only interact, they share meals. In normal life, half of them would be at Arby’s and the other half at some fancy restaurant, but here they are together. The fact of having someone they love at the camp is really equalizing. No matter how big the differences, the commonality is bigger.”
DeRouen recalled a moment when Democratic US Representative John Conyers was visiting his wife, Monica, who was serving time for conspiring to commit bribery, and after dinner a group of guests were sitting in the living room watching the news. The coverage was of the Democratic National Convention and the majority of the guests in the living room were criticizing the Democratic party, using very vulgar language, when suddenly Con
yers himself appeared on the screen. Everyone in the room did a double take and then looked over at Conyers where he sat at the end of the sofa.
He had told the other guests that he was from Detroit but he had not mentioned what he did there. The other guests rushed to apologize for the way they had been talking but he just laughed and shook his head. “You can’t get very far as a politician if you don’t have thick skin,” he said. The result was a lively, but very respectful, political conversation that lasted until 2am.
DeRouen points out that people’s voting tendencies don’t necessarily change after interactions like that, but it does become more obvious to everyone how surface level the supposedly big differences between people are in comparison to the depths of the human experience.
“… that bimbo in the White House,” someone behind me says. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to offend, but …”
“You know, I really wish I hadn’t voted for him,” Barbara says. “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time but the more he keeps talking and tweeting, the more I think he might not be telling us the truth.”
There are a few groans from others in line, a little awkward silence.
“Oh, hey,” Chris calls from the end of the counter. “There’s cake over there, too, for everybody. It’s my wife’s birthday! The girls up at the camp are making her something special in the unit tonight, something like cheesecake they know how to make with Sprite and nondairy creamers and strawberry jelly. Anyways, I told her since I can’t bring her a cake to the visiting room that we’d celebrate here.”
“Well, happy birthday! Do we have a date yet?” Kathleen asks. By “date” she means a scheduled release date for Chris’s wife, and with the “we” she manages to draw us all in.
“Yeah!” Chris says. “February 23rd.” A cheer goes up across the room. Chris’s face is glowing, but a moment later his eyes wrinkle with worry. “It’s a really good thing she’s getting out of there now too,” he says to no one in particular. “It’s changed a lot in there, they’re bringing in all kinds of drug criminals now. It used to be white collar crimes but now that’s all changing and there are women from MS-13 in there.”
“What’s MS-13?” Kathleen asks. “A gang,” Chris says, “like the Mexican mafia.” (I don’t tell him the gang originated in Los Angeles).
“And there’s no fence up there so there’s all sorts of stuff coming in, just getting brought in by the gang girls. There’s a lot more strip searches going on now because they keep finding so much stuff in there. That’s what’s so awful for my Nancy, she messes up on some bookkeeping paperwork and next thing you know she’s in prison being stripped naked and searched for drugs. They ought have a different prison for women like Nancy – and a different word, like something that says you broke the law, okay, yes, but you’re not, like, a drug criminal.”
An unease settles over the line as Chris keeps talking. When he takes his plate to a table and sits down, Barbara turns to me.
“That’s a bunch of horseshit,” she whispers. “Sorry, excuse me, but if there’s anybody you ought to feel sorry for above the others, it’s the girls with drug charges, like my Brandy. She’s one of the only one’s up there for drugs and so everybody just, you know, looks at her weird.”
Octavia, Barbara and I fill our plates and sit at a table together, but Barbara just picks at her food.
“They act like she murdered the guy. My Brandy,” Barbara shakes her head. “I don’t even see how it happened. I mean one minute she was in tech school, getting good grades and she was modeling, beautiful girl, and then she’s hooked on this stuff. And then she’s selling. She helped sell to a doctor’s son, that’s how they got her. She went and gave him the heroin and new needles and took the old needles and the hundred dollars and went back to her friend’s car and then the guy went to a party and somebody helped him shoot up and he died and they pinned it on her.”
Octavia nods. “It’s hard, I know it.” We let silence fall over the table for a while. Chris has finished eating and is helping to clear away other people’s plates, completely unaware that he has rankled anyone. This is one of the few times of unease between guests that I’ve ever encountered here and that, I realize now, is rather miraculous, especially in the current political climate. Where else could you find a room with 50 people with so many different backgrounds doing their best to help each other shoulder a common pain?
“Cake?” Chris approaches with dessert plates in hand.
“No, I don’t want any,” Barbara snaps. “I’m sorry, I’m being rude,” she says. “It’s just that this birthday stuff has got me thinking about Jason. That’s my son. His birthday is tomorrow. Well, it woulda been.”
Chris hovers at the end of the table, looking truly concerned. “He passed away?”
“Three years ago, now,” she says. “Overdose.”
He’d been clean and living with her. That night they had dinner together and Barbara was watching TV. She called down the hall to Jason: did he want the last biscuit? He loved biscuits, she says, and now she still can’t really look at a can of biscuits without crying. Anyhow, he’d come up and got the biscuit and wrapped it in a paper towel and took it back down there with him and then Barbara must have fallen asleep.
When she woke up Jo Jo, Jason’s dog, was scratching at Jason’s bedroom door from the inside, sticking his paws out from under the door. Barbara called to Jason to open the door. Jo Jo needs out, she’d said, but he didn’t answer. She tried the door and it was locked and that’s when she freaked out. The Christmas before she had found him unconscious. They had been hanging lights on the tree. She had told him they were crooked and he had taken them all back off, bless his heart, and did it again until she was happy. Then he had gone down the hall and it wasn’t ten minutes later he’d shot up and she found him and had to do CPR and call the ambulance.
This was not an unfamiliar situation to Barbara. She broke down the door this time and got in there and there was a needle and spoon and he was out. She tried CPR. If I could just get him breathing again, she said, looking around the table at us, if I could just get him to breathe.
It was the most helpless feeling, Jo Jo was there and wouldn’t leave his side and then the other dog came in and was snuffling around, eating biscuit crumbs from the napkin Jason had left on the bed.
His daughter was almost five when he died. She looks just like him, Barbara says. She is now six and still not potty-trained, she uses Pull-Ups and sucks a pacifier. She says she thinks the girl needs counseling.
Octavia gets up quietly from the table. She goes to the counter and gets two slices of cake and brings them back, slides one in front of Barbara, along with a cup of decaf coffee.
“They got the guy who sold that shit to Jason,” she says. “He fronted it to him, passed it to him through the bedroom window ’cuz Jason knew I would follow him if he went outside. I’d thought my dog would have barked when that man came up but I didn’t hear anything. If I had seen him though, if I’d caught him doing that, handing that shit through the window to my son so he could shoot up and die … if I’d seen him, I don’t know what I might have done. They got him on some other stuff, but he’s not even serving time, just probation! They didn’t even use Kevin’s case because they said the dealer had to be there at the time of death. That’s not true though because they got Brandy on those same charges and she wasn’t there when that man died. So if those are the rules, then Brandy shouldn’t be in prison!”
Barbara looks up at me, and she is drowning. She is right there in the thick of it, the quandary that is the reason that punitive justice can never really work. Justice: the quality of being fair and reasonable. The retribution you crave for your dead son’s dealer is meted out on your own daughter who was the dealer to someone else’s now dead son. What could possibly be a fair and reasonable punishment for everyone?
I think of the “my” that everyone here uses in front of their loved one’s name: my Nancy, my Brandy, my Angela. And then the “our” and the “we” that Kathleen and others invoked. This house, on this end of the criminal justice system, seems to me to be one of the few places where I have ever truly seen the quality of being fair and reasonable on display.
Behind me in the hallway, I hear Chris helping a new guest fill out her federal paperwork so that her visit can go smoothly in the morning. In the living room, a near-stranger is translating Spanish between a New York mother and her son-in-law.
In this house, it is impossible to ignore that everyone is someone’s “my” and this is perhaps what makes us truly “we”.