laboring through standards on a park corner. It all seemed like something out of a movie.
A white woman from a poor rural Alabama town, Marsha had never been to New York, but she was about to be honored at a dinner with two hundred guests. It was all exciting, but she was experiencing something unusual as she made her way to the venue. She soon sorted out what she was feeling. Freedom. She was wandering the streets of the world’s most dazzling city with her husband, and she was free. It was a glorious feeling. Everything in the last three months since her release had been magical. It was beyond what she would have imagined even before she was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women.
When Hurricane Ivan hit coastal Alabama and blew chaos and calamity into Marsha’s life, she thought things were as bad as they could get. Ivan spawned 119 tornadoes and created over $18 billion dollars in damage. With six children to protect, she had no time to panic over the loss of their home or the violent destruction of everything around them. It was the uncertainty that worried Marsha. Where would she or her husband find work? How long would the kids be out of school? What would they do for money? What would they do for food? Everyone on the Gulf Coast was feeling vulnerable in the face of such an uncertain future. The constant wave of tropical storms and hurricanes that menaced coastal Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida in the summer of 2004 turned their relaxed Southern coastal life into an apocalyptic struggle for survival.
Marsha and Glen Colbey were living in a crowded trailer with their children, and they knew they were at risk when the hurricane warnings were announced. They weren’t alone; plenty of other families shared their situation, which offered some consolation. But when Ivan destroyed the Colbey home in September, there was little comfort in finding herself in line with thousands of other people seeking assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Aid eventually came. The Colbeys were given a FEMA camper trailer as temporary housing, and they put it on their property so the kids could stay in their nearby schools. Marsha and Glen had found construction work and roofing jobs at the start of the summer, but now it would be weeks before rebuilding jobs would be available.
Marsha could also tell that she was pregnant. She was forty-three years old and hadn’t planned on having another child. All she could think about was how in a few months the pregnancy would limit her ability to do construction work. Her worry sometimes tipped over into a deeper anxiety that triggered an old temptation: drugs. But there were too many people depending on her, and there was too much to manage to give in. Five years earlier, police were called after nurses had found cocaine in her system when she was pregnant with her youngest son, Joshua, and the authorities had terrified her with accusations and threats of criminal prosecution, imprisonment, and the seizure of her children. She was not going to risk that again.
She and Glen were dirt poor, but Marsha had always compensated for the things she couldn’t give her kids by giving them all of her heart. She read to them, talked to them, played with them, hugged and kissed them constantly, and kept them close at all times. Against all odds, she nurtured a precious family bonded by an intense love. Her older boys, even her nineteen-year-old, stayed close to her at home despite the many distractions that emerged as they finished high school. Marsha liked being a mom. It’s why she didn’t worry about having so many kids. Getting pregnant with a seventh was not what she had expected or preferred, but she would love this child as she had loved each one before.
By winter, things in Baldwin County had settled down. Jobs had returned, and Glen finally found more steady work. The family was still struggling financially, but most of the kids were back in school, and it seemed as if they had survived the worst of the destruction.
Marsha knew that a pregnancy at her age was very risky, but she couldn’t afford to see a doctor. She just didn’t have the money to spare. Having endured six previous deliveries, she knew what to expect and thought she’d make the best of it without prenatal care. She tried