“Every day we [as a nation] choose prisons, we don’t choose children or ourselves.”
I have long admired asha bandele’s writing, so there was much I wanted to ask her. However, because I wanted to keep the focus on children of incarcerated parents, I painstakingly prepared questions ahead of time. I reread her books, reviewed interviews she had given, and located articles written so long ago that bandele herself had probably forgotten all about them! Yet I needn’t have worried; bandele is thoughtful and earnest, a good listener and just as eager to provide others with the benefit of her myriad and intelligent musings. As a result, at a certain point during our conversation, I put aside my questions and just listened.
In The Prisoner’s Wife: A Memoir (Pocket Books, 1999), bandele narrates her relationship with the man who would become her husband: Rashid. Though when she met him Rashid had already spent nine years in prison, bandele would “do” several more years with him as his wife and the mother of their child. Ultimately, Rashid was released and deported to his native Guyana, where he lives today. In Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother’s Story (Collins, 2009), bandele tells readers about the deportation notice that changed her life, and spends some time describing her visits to Rashid, but mostly this is a story about raising a daughter as a single parent in New York. Again, since the focus of this issue is children of incarcerated parents, bandele and I spoke primarily about incarceration and the impact it has on children and families.
MS: In Something Like Beautiful, one of your chapters is appropriately titled “Statistics Don’t Tell the Story, the Story Tells the Story.” You want readers to consider the role of storytelling, but you also mean that statistics—whether about single parents or people in prison—do not alone tell us very much. Nevertheless, your story speaks to what many families of people in prison endure: the indignity of visiting, worries about transportation to and from prison, paying for collect calls, etc. Your story is unique, but it resonates with other women (and men) who travel to visit spouses in prison. Can you speak to these specific effects of incarceration on a family?
ab: What we so seldom talk about is the shift that takes place between being a prisoner’s wife and becoming a wife and mother, particularly with respect to finances. Before a woman has a child, she is going to visit her husband in prison, and she makes certain choices. After she has a child, she has to consider who is going without. When you make a choice to travel as a wife, you may go without in order to pay the expenses needed to travel to prison, to visit, etc. When you have a child, you are not the only one going without. In addition to the financial impact, we don’t talk about the energy it takes from a mother. You may have a woman who works five days a week, and then on the sixth day she goes to visit the prison, and on the seventh she has to do laundry, etc. There is so much having a child entails.
For my child, the effects [of her father’s incarceration] were blunted, because I come from a functioning family and community. Yet even then you can’t get away from the impact of a parent’s incarceration on a child. When she was three years old, Nisa asked me not to tell people her Daddy was in prison. [bandele laughs] I told her that cat’s outta the bag, sweetie! There were also times she wanted to prove to others that she had a Daddy who was alive and in her life.
The greatest challenge is to raise a child; it takes a community effort. Yet what do we do?: we leave women alone, and then we take away community resources. It’s not natural; nowhere else in the world do we expect women, or even men, to raise children alone. Yet here [in the United States] it’s the norm. We see these incredible stories on television; a woman braves the cold and raises six children alone and in poverty and they all end up going to Harvard. This becomes the standard! In reality, nobody is supposed to do this alone. I have a lot of support, especially when compared with the other women, urban black women who are not particularly wealthy and whose partners are in prison. I have a lot of privilege; I mean one of my friends is one of the top doctors in the world. Yet I still wake up shaking. Women do not have an outlet where they can say how hard all this is and how hard it is to go through a prison. Something in you shuts down when you visit a prison. When you shut down one thing, you have to wonder what else gets shut down. That’s why I stopped visiting the prison. Although at the time my daughter was only two years old, I knew that a critical time period for children was these first years, and I did not want Nisa to see me shutting down and acquiescing to all the bullshit you have to acquiesce to when you visit a prison. Before I had a child, I stood up for myself in the face of the prison, but afterward I couldn’t take the chance, and finally, I did not want my daughter to see this. This was the larger imperative: I didn’t want to be shut down for or in front of my child.
