Read Online Prison Baby: A Memoir by Deborah Jiang Stein - Free Book Online Page A

Ohio because my mother has friends there who teach in the state and . . . what else can I do? I’m too broke to live on my own for long, and my dad’s university job covers our tuition, no matter where we attend.
    But it doesn’t pan out. My second day on campus, I head to my dorm room after dinner, and my side of the room is empty, all my belongings gone. Come to find out, the resident advisor moved me upstairs to the floor for Black students. The school is unofficially segregated, as so many are even now. When the Black Student Union asks me to join, I figure why not, and attend a few meetings where I make friends right away. The Union is the catchall group for anyone non-white, even though I don’t fit into any race categories—I am nothing and everything, neither Hispanic nor Caucasian nor African American nor Asian/Pacific Islander but, rather, some unknown blend.
    ADOPTION RESEARCH SURVEYS indicate that not until the 1970s did more than a thousand white families include adopted children of color. My pioneering parents stretched beyond the margins to adopt me. But whenever I asked my mother about my caramel-colored skin and button nose, about the hint of an almond shape to my eyes, she’d tell me she loved me and that I was one of the family. I was too scared to eke out even one word to her in response, to tell her I didn’t feel part of anything.
    In truth, there was no love big enough to cover the stigma and shame I carried about my prison roots or about my ambiguous racial whatever-ness. By the time my parents adopted me, no love could repair the trauma I’d already lived or the traumas that would follow.
    WITHIN WEEKS OF the “eviction” from my dorm room, I round up a few other girls from the BSU and we roam the halls in search of white girls’ rooms so we can torch terror into them. We stack newspapers against their doors, then toss a match onto the piles. I’m into fire again, just like I was in elementary school. One college escapade after another, always fueled by cheap Thunderbird pint bottles and opium or weed. College was the first time I smoked opium, and since I’d heard about poets and artists in days past getting all creative on opium highs, I felt sort of artsy instead of druggy. What isn’t artsy is the plot I scheme to heist an armored car with a classmate in my economics course. We hunch together in the student union cafeteria over coffee and cigarettes and sketch a detailed diagram to intercept an armored car he knew of that traveled across the plains of central Ohio. But we never get further than an elaborate map and doodle, and a lot of drug highs.
    Soon after, in the middle of my freshman year, my parents receive a letter from the dean with instructions that I should “find a college better suited for my needs.” I’m asked to leave, and it’s perfect, because I’m more than ready to switch majors from liberal arts to street drugs.
    I dive into the fast life back in Seattle and travel at two speeds, either invisible or belligerent, both in high gear as I start my slippery slide downhill.
    The first time I load a spoon of dope, I go straight to the top of the class and cook up a speedball—heroin and coke. The afternoon I first shoot up, I cinch a belt around my bicep, pull the strap between my teeth, and give my vein a two-finger slap. I register—draw a little blood first before plunging. My palms sweat and my heart races, a horse inside pounding the track to the finish line. It’s divine. The coke and heroin flood through me, a chemical orgasm, part birth and part death. It’s all a gift, and I’m home!
    I’m nineteen and prowl the streets with a boyfriend I’ve met at some party. Seattle’s my city now, not my family’s. Jonathan is engaged and getting his MFA in Bloomington, Indiana, and my father’s accepted an offer from Johns Hopkins University, so my parents move to Baltimore. While my dad goes more Ivy League, I dive further off the edge.
    MY FATHER TAUGHT me