Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,111

waved a flag under his nose. Said he pleaded with the judge and all. He said to the judge: “It’s just one tragedy after another, Your Honor.”

I told him the only tragedy is that I don’t see my babies nowhere. How come my babies weren’t in the courtroom? That’s what I wanted to know. I shouted it out. “How come they ain’t here?”

I was hoping somebody would be there, that Lara girl or somebody, but there was nobody at all.

The judge, he was black this time, he must’ve gone to Harvard or something. I thought he woulda understood, but niggers can be worse on niggers sometimes. I said to him, “Your Honor, can you get me my babies?

I just wanna see them once.” He shrugged and said the babies were in a good place. He never once looked me in the face. He said: “Describe to me exactly what happened.” And I said: “What happened is that I had a baby and then she had some babies of her own.” And he said, “No, no, no—with the assault.” And I said, “Oh, who the fuck cares a flying fuck about the fucking assault, god fucking damn it fuck me fuck you and fuck your wife.” Then my lawyer shut me up. The judge looked down over his glasses at me and sighed. He said something about Booker T. Washington, but I wasn’t listening too good. Finally, he said there was a specific request from a warden to put me in a penitentiary upstate. He said the word penitentiary like he was lording it over me. I said to him: “And fuck your parrot too, asshole.”

He snapped his gavel on the bench and that was that.

—

I tried to scratch their eyes out. They had to put me in restraint and bring me to the hospital wing. Then on the bus upstate they had to restrain me again. Even worse, they didn’t tell me they was going to move me from New York. I kept shouting out for the babies. Upstate woulda been okay, but Connecticut? I’m no country girl. They had a shrink meet me and then they gave me a yellow jumpsuit. You’d need a shrink for sure if you wanted to wear a yellow jumpsuit.

I was brought into an office and I told the shrink that I was real happy to be in suburban Connecticut. Real real happy. I said if she gave me a knife I’d show her just how happy. I’d trace it out on my wrist.

“Lock her up,” she said.

—

They give me pills. Orange ones. They watch them go down. Sometimes I can fake it and tuck one of them in the hole in the back of my teeth. Someday I’m going to take them all together like one great big delicious orange, and then I’ll reach up to the jolly pipe and say sayonara.

—

I don’t even know my cell mate’s name. She’s fat and wears green socks. I told her I’m gonna hang myself and all about the jolly pipe and she said, “Oh.” Then a few minutes later she said, “When?”

I guess that white woman, Lara, worked things out, or someone did, somehow, somewhere. I went down to the waiting room. The babies! The babies! The babies!

They were sitting there on the knee of a big black woman, long white gloves on her and a fancy red handbag, looking for all the world that she just woke up from the Lord’s bed.

Down I ran straight to the glass wall and stuck my hands in the bottom opening.

“Babies!” I said. “Little Jazzlyn! Janice!”

They didn’t know me. They were sitting on that woman’s lap, sucking their thumbs and looking over her shoulder. Like to broke my heart. They kept snuggling into her bosom, smiling. I kept saying, “Come to Grandma, come to Grandma, let me touch your hands.” That’s all you can do through the bottom of the glass—they got a few inches and you can touch someone’s hands. It’s cruel. I just wanted to hug on them. Still they wouldn’t budge—maybe it was the prison duds, I don’t know. The woman had a southern accent, but I knew her face from the projects, I seen her before. I always thought she was a square, used to stand in the elevator and turn away. She said she was rightly conflicted whether she should bring the babies in or not, but she heard I really wanted to see them and they were living in Poughkeepsie now with