(Note: This piece was originally titled “The Plague,” but because of the coronavirus, the author and ACM decided to change it.)
The third door beeps, clicks, and opens automatically. A familiar waft of cafeteria chicken and bleach kicks me into remembering. I stop, my palms sweat, I force my body back to present tense. I’m here to visit Rae*. She is moving across the floor toward me, her tall body silhouetted against barred windows, which spit slats of white light. She is smiling. The nurse calls me over to the counter to sign a clipboard. I pick up a pencil that’s tied to the clipboard with a piece of red yarn. I accidentally sign my name under the “Patient” column.
Rae is next to me now. “You’d better watch out!” she laughs. “They ain’t gunna let your ass leave!”
I laugh too, erasing my name. I say, “Maybe I’d be better off up here with you anyway.”
The nurse tapes a paper band around my wrist, and my smile fades.
Rae is swallowed up by blue scrubs. We clasp hands, then embrace. I breathe in the scent of Jergen’s lotion and laundry detergent. The layout of the unit is the same as the adolescent ward, which I haven’t seen since I was seventeen; I’m now thirty-three. We sit at a plastic table that’s bolted to the floor. A TV hangs from the top corner of the room, all noises and flashes. We face each other, elbows on the table, wrists parallel, her brown skin encircled by a strip of yellow paper, my pink skin encircled by a green one.
“How you feeling?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she answers.
I look over her shoulder. A man leans back in an arm chair with his legs apart, holding his belly in his lap.
“I try not to think about how I feel, ‘cause it changes all the time.” Rae says. “I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel, so I just let them tell me.” She waves toward the nurse’s station. She leans toward me. “I’m scared to go home,” she whispers. She looks back over her shoulder.
“What are you scared of?” I ask.
“That they’ll send me to prison next time, or bring me back here. That I’ll forget to take my meds, or to eat.”
“What have they been feeding you in here?” I ask.
“A bunch of bullshit!”
“I know that,” I scoff. “Have you been sleeping?”
She looks at me as if I’m crazy.
After a while, Rae leaves to pee. I look down at my scars like little white canoes on my upper arm. I look at the door, remind myself I’m free to go. I feel like I’m flying under the radar, or that I’ve been tricked into coming up here. I look over at the man with his belly in his lap. He nods at me. I’m an imposter, just as much here as anywhere.
The familiar smell—the remembering—brings pictures now: Saltines and peanut butter on a Styrofoam plate; beds that crinkle with plastic under the sheets; florescent lights that line the rooms and stay on all night so the nurse can check every fifteen minutes that you didn’t try to kill yourself; another nurse at 5am, tourniquet around arm, needle, tube of blood plopping onto chest, next tube hooked up and filling dark with red; at breakfast, a boy kicking at my ankles under the table to flirt; nurses moving me to a side room to eat alone; me asking through tears of rage why they’d isolate me when I didn’t do anything wrong; the nurse saying something about protecting my safety (maintaining power is often called “keeping people safe”). I remember telling myself not to pace or to cry. I was trying to prove wellness without access to the things that would make me well–connecting with friends, nature, art supplies, fresh food–and the madness of it all driving me crazy—as it would anyone.
A few months back Rae had been arrested after dancing in the yard in front of her own apartment. When she first called me from the phone in the psych unit, I had tried to understand what the charges were. She dismissed me, saying “they just were.” I quickly came to understand that my insistence that there should be “probable cause” came from my own privilege. Cops can make up any reason to pick someone up; resistance itself is enough.
She comes back to the table.
“Have you been writing any?” I ask.
“I give up writing,” she says. “It shows them I’m crazy.”
Her eyes often snap with a flash of light, as if she can see things others can’t see. When she first moved to Chapel Hill five years ago, she wrote five pages a day, and collected neighborhood trash to build doll houses in the yard. She danced outside when she felt like dancing. She says she’s got to give all that up, because these things led to her persecution. To a doctor, this could be paranoia, but it’s real. She starts dancing in her yard—the next thing she knows, she’s wearing handcuffs.
What is the definition of sanity in the context of white supremacy—in a culture that requires deviance to define a “normal” that is actually totally insane? It’s not crazy to dance, nor is it crazy to be afraid of dancing when it means you get hauled off. My stints on the psych unit ended with a warm reception back home from slew of teachers, parents, and doctors whose job it was to get me better and reinforce my position of relative privilege— which included reinforcing the blinders that kept me from seeing anything outside of my own opportunities and struggles. Nobody’s on the other side to catch Rae when she gets out. But the insanity of white supremacy doesn’t just affect the people who are persecuted; the persecutors and bystanders themselves—we— are nuts from the soul-strangling (albeit unknowing or passive) participation in systemic violence.
Out of my own discomfort, I try to encourage her. “Writing can be a tool. You’re not crazy—writing is how you keep from being crazy. What’s crazy is they come after you for being yourself. Like dancing. When I used to dance around drunk in the parking lot with my white girlfriends, nobody bothered us. But they come after you when you do it.”
“Yeah that’s right. It’s not us that’s crazy—it’s this fucking world. But I can’t write, for real,” she tells me matter-of-factly, looking past me. “I can’t risk putting this kind of darkness outside of me.”
A nurse brings a tray of food and slides it toward Rae.
I’m ashamed of my self-righteousness and naïveté. I’m spoiled by the privileged notion that risking creativity is just a matter of “having courage,” and I can only be a witness to the dangers of self-expression for Rae. And at the same time, I’m clutching to my belief in the visceral need for her to write out her truth. I look at her. For a second, she’s with me, lifting her chin and flashing her eyes. She offers me her piece of cake. I lie and say I’m not hungry. I know that in places like this, cake is gold.
The third door beeps, clicks, and opens automatically. A familiar waft of cafeteria chicken and bleach kicks me into remembering. I stop, my palms sweat, I force my body back to present tense. I’m here to visit Rae. She is moving across the floor toward me, her tall body silhouetted against barred windows, which spit slats of white light. She is smiling. The nurse calls me over to the counter to sign a clipboard. I pick up a pencil that’s tied to the clipboard with a piece of red yarn. I accidentally sign my name under the “Patient” column.
Rae is next to me now. “You’d better watch out!” She laughs. “They ain’t gunna let your ass leave!”
I laugh too, erasing my name. I say, “Maybe I’d be better off up here with you anyway.”
The nurse tapes a paper band around my wrist, and my smile fades.
Rae is swallowed up by blue scrubs. We clasp hands, then embrace. I breathe in the scent of Jergen’s lotion and laundry detergent. The layout of the unit is the same as the adolescent ward, which I haven’t seen since I was seventeen. We sit at a plastic table that’s bolted to the floor. A TV hangs from the top corner of the room, all noises and flashes. We face each other, elbows on the table, wrists parallel, her brown skin encircled by a strip of yellow paper, my pink skin encircled by a green one.
“How you feeling?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she answers.
I look over her shoulder. A man leans back in an arm chair with his legs apart, holding his belly in his lap.
“I try not to think about how I feel, ‘cause it changes all the time.” Rae says. “I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel, so I just let them tell me.” She waves toward the nurse’s station. She leans toward me. “I’m scared to go home,” she whispers. She looks back over her shoulder.
“What are you scared of?” I ask.
“That they’ll send me to prison next time, or bring me back here. That I’ll forget to take my meds, or to eat.”
“What have they been feeding you in here?” I ask.
“A bunch of bullshit!”
“I know that,” I scoff. “Have you been sleeping?”
She looks at me as if I’m crazy.
After a while, Rae leaves to pee. I look down at my scars like little white canoes on my upper arm. I look at the door, remind myself I’m free to go. I feel like I’m flying under the radar, or that I’ve been tricked into coming up here. I look over at the man with his belly in his lap. He nods at me. I’m an imposter, just as much here as anywhere.
The familiar smell—the remembering—brings pictures now: Saltines and peanut butter on a Styrofoam plate; beds that crinkle with plastic under the sheets; florescent lights that line the rooms and stay on all night so the nurse can check every fifteen minutes that you didn’t try to kill yourself; another nurse at 5am, tourniquet around arm, needle, tube of blood plopping onto chest, next tube hooked up and filling dark with red; at breakfast, a boy kicking at my ankles under the table to flirt; nurses moving me to a side room to eat alone; me asking through tears of rage why they’d isolate me when I didn’t do anything wrong; the nurse saying something about protecting my safety (maintaining power is often called “keeping people safe”). I remember telling myself not to pace or to cry—trying to prove wellness without access to the things that would make me well; the madness of it all driving me crazy—as it would anyone.
Rae had been arrested after dancing in the yard in front of her own apartment a few months back. When she first called me from the phone in the psych unit, I had tried to understand what the charges were. She dismissed me, saying “they just were.” I quickly came to understand that my insistence that there should be “probable cause” came from my own privilege. Cops can make up any reason to pick someone up; resistance itself is enough.
She comes back to the table.
“Have you been writing any?” I ask.
“I give up writing,” she says. “It shows them I’m crazy.”
Her eyes often snap with a flash of light, as if she can see things others can’t see. When she first moved to Chapel Hill five years ago, she wrote five pages a day, and collected neighborhood trash to build doll houses in the yard. She danced outside when she felt like dancing. She says she’s got to give all that up, because these things led to her persecution. To a doctor, this could be paranoia, but it’s real. She starts dancing in her yard—the next thing she knows, she’s wearing handcuffs.
What is the definition of sanity in the context of white supremacy—in a culture that requires deviance to define a “normal” that is actually totally insane? It’s not crazy to dance, nor is it crazy to be afraid of dancing when it means you get hauled off. My stints on the psych unit ended with a warm reception back home from slew of teachers, parents, and doctors whose job it was to get me better and reinforce my position of relative privilege— which included reinforcing the blinders that kept me from seeing anything outside of my own opportunities and struggles. Nobody’s on the other side to catch Rae when she gets out. But the insanity of white supremacy doesn’t just affect the people who are persecuted; the persecutors and bystanders themselves—we— are nuts from the soul-strangling (albeit unknowing or passive) participation in systemic violence.
Out of my own discomfort, I try to encourage her. “Writing can be a tool. You’re not crazy—writing is how you keep from being crazy. What’s crazy is they come after you for being yourself. Like dancing. When I used to dance around drunk in the parking lot with my white girlfriends, nobody bothered us. But they come after you when you do it.”
“Yeah that’s right. It’s not us that’s crazy—it’s this fucking world. But I can’t write, for real,” she tells me matter-of-factly, looking past me. “I can’t risk putting this kind of darkness outside of me.”
A nurse brings a tray of food and slides it toward Rae.
I’m ashamed of my self-righteousness and naïveté. I’m spoiled by the privileged notion that risking creativity is just a matter of “having courage,” and I can only be a witness to the dangers of self-expression for Rae. And at the same time, I’m clutching to my belief in the visceral need for her to write out her truth. I look at her. For a second, she’s with me, lifting her chin and flashing her eyes. She offers me her piece of cake. I lie and say I’m not hungry. I know that in places like this, cake is gold.
*Her name has been changed.
✶✶✶✶
Catherine Edgerton has been inking, layering, and stitching multimedia records in hand-bound books since she was fourteen. Self/community taught, Edgerton uses an intersectional narrative approach to her work, focusing on race, surrealism, addiction, and mental dis-ease. In 2013, Edgerton began creating multimedia kaleidoscopes and television lanterns out of glass, bottles, film slides, and bug wings to create fragmented imagery of worlds and landscapes. Most recently she initiated the Durham Art Asylum, which builds creative pathways and reduces isolation among folks who struggle with mental health and addiction in Durham, NC.
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