My Mother's Hands, By Jarvis Jay Masters

When I was first placed into foster care, I dreamed I heard my mother's voice. She would call out my name, and I'd see her face and run to jump inside her arms. She would whisk me away, and together we would go find my sisters and brothers. I dreamed of how we would all hide somewhere away from the rest of the world, a world that had taken us from each other.

I remember the first time my mother came to see me in a foster home. After our visit, I ran over to the window and stared out at her. That window seemed as strong and hard as cell bars. I placed my hands on the glass panes and watch as she looked back over her shoulder at me, in tears. As the distance stretched out between us and she headed to the car, I felt like I was in prison, and yet I was more connected to her pain than to my own. Although I had no true sense of how a mother was supposed to provide for her children, I knew, as the social worker pulled me out of her arms, that her tears came from her deepest self. She was trying to reach back, to gather me up. In her pain was a single promise: to gather us all back together again.

That was the promise she made to me in my foster home. The Procks had created a caring home for me, a home made out of any child's dream, a place of unconditional love. They were the ones who gave me what little childhood I had. I felt like the light in the Procks's lives. But even so, I still dreamed of my mother carrying me away in her arms.

Whenever my mother visited me at the Procks's, I would always be sitting outside on the porch. She would hurry out of the car, run into the front yard, pick me up and spin me around and around. Then she would start crying in the Procks's arms, and thank them for taking care of me. Like a mantra, she would sob, "He's my baby … my baby … my baby." The Procks consoled her, out of a deep-rooted heart connection as Black Americans, a connection that was not tainted by what they knew of my mother's past. And they knew it all. They were told more by my social worker than I could ever have told them.

Looking back at those visits, when she and I talked of many things now lost to my memory, I especially remember her trying to explain why she couldn't take me away. I would sit in her lap; there was never anyone around us. She would fight back tears and constantly wipe her eyes, and I felt strong, as if she had given me the power to hold her, rather than her holding me.

Then she would tell me that she was still "sick." I knew what she meant. Even as a tiny boy, I knew that her sickness was not the kind that would make a child need a doctor.

When she said that she was very sick, I knew it meant she was not being her true self. I had witnessed it many times before I was taken from her; I had seen this sickness steal away her life energy when she lay across the bed in a daze, or crouched on the floor in the corner of the bedroom, trembling as if she were freezing cold.

Now I know it was her heroin addiction. On my knees, peeking through the open bedroom door, I had seen her tying off her arm with a rubber strap and shooting heroin into her veins. There were times when she could not get up afterwards. I would walk over and sit down next to her. If she was conscious, she would lean on me and say "Mama is sick," and use me as a crutch to get to her bed, where she would fall asleep. Every time my mother mentioned being "sick" at one of our visits, this was the image that arose in my mind, and I felt like I understood why she could not take me home with her.

The secrets about her life that she entrusted to me made me feel older, almost as if I was grown up. Later on, in the early 1970s, when I lived with my aunts and uncles, all of whom were sisters and brothers of my mother, I heard many stories about her life. They weren't all good. But no matter how many times my relatives called her "crazy," their stories still gave me much to be proud of.

One time, my mother unexpectedly dropped by my Aunt Barbaree's place while I was living there. I was outside playing when my aunt called to me that my mother was there. I ran as fast as I could to see her. As soon as I opened the door, I saw her in the living room with my uncles Dewitt and Calvin. They were showing her how to kick box and handle the butcher knife she held in her hand. Relatives and friends were sitting around the living room, watching her kicking high into the air, with the knife in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I couldn't believe it. When she saw me flying through the front door, instead of giving me a hug, she went around the room telling everybody "I told you so" and collecting dollar bills under threat of the knife. She had bet everyone that I would come running in the door the moment I knew she was there.

She took all the money she had won, rolled it up, then knelt down and stuffed it into my pants pocket. She gave me a kiss. Then she stood up again and announced, "Which one of you all wanna step up? 'Cause me and Jay will kick anybody's ass who wants to fight, including you, Dewitt!" Then she looked down at me. "Now, baby," she said, smiling. "You have to get your big uncle Dewitt … can you whip him?"

"Yeah, I can," I said, dancing around like a prize fighter, doing the Mohammed Ali shuffle, all of ten years old.

"So come on! Bring it on, you bad motherfucker!" she shouted, still waving the knife. The way we took our stance in the middle of the living room, and the way my mother pretended to be deadly serious, had the whole house rolling over in laughter. And I felt as if we were taking on the whole world. I felt so proud standing only chest high next to my mother.

"You see, Jay? They know when I get you by my side, what we can do. Ain't that right?"

"That's right. Mama," I said, with my dukes up. "Come on, Dewitt, let's fight!"

"Okay, baby," she said. "They don't call me Shorty for nothin'! I'm a ba-a-a-d woman! And your uncles know it. I was kickin' their asses back when … and I'll kick their asses now!"

"Sit your crazy ass down, Shorty," said Dewitt, still sitting on the couch. "We've been protectin' you all your crazy life." Everyone laughed. "And, Jay, boy-You know your mama ain't goin' to be around tomorrow … What your bad-ass goin' to do then, huh? You best sit your ass down, too!"

"I'm goin' with my mama," I said. "That's what I'm goin' to do!" But I knew it wasn't true.

My mother grew serious. "Dewitt," she said, "you better not go messin' with my baby when I'm gone." She turned to me and asked me to put the butcher knife away in the kitchen.

When I came back into the living room, my mother was on top of her oldest brother on the couch.

They were scuffling like kids, and she had his massive body in a headlock, all four hundred pounds of him. Even as he was telling her to stop messing around, I saw all the love between them.

Later that same day, she took off her shoes and both of us went outside in the middle of the street. People came out of their houses like spectators at a major event to see my mother, barefooted, demanding to race me down the block. I thought she was crazy for wanting to race me. I was too young, too fast. It wouldn't be a fair race. Standing there in the street, I didn't want to race my own mother. I didn't want to look back over my shoulder at my poor ol' mama behind me. But the more I declined, the more insistent she became. So I decided that instead of trying to win, I would just run by her side, and however fast she ran, I would be at her side, escorting her down the block.

I heard, "On your mark! Get set! Go!" and suddenly, she took off. As I tried to catch up with her, I fell further and further back. It was blowing me away to see how fast she ran. Now all I could think about was what my friends were going to say if she won: "Man, you let your own mama beat you running!" The teasing I would hear in every schoolyard, playground and park in the neighborhood kept me running as fast as I could. But she was way too fast. When she stood at the corner waiting for me, I realized that I couldn't have beaten her even if I had wanted to. I always wondered if her winning had something to do with running barefooted. There was no other explanation I could find for how fast she ran.

When she was growing up, my mother was a tomboy. My uncles taught her how to fight, how to use knives and defend herself against the kind of men she always fell in love with. They were always protecting her and beating up her boyfriends, but once they showed her how to use a box-cutter, she didn't need their help any more. So my uncles told me.

I was the first of my mother's children to be placed back with family members after being taken from my mother, and I reminded everyone of her. Sitting around their kitchen tables, my relatives spoke of things that had occurred before I was born, and their stories helped fill in the gaps about my mother's life that I didn't know. My heart didn't care if their recollections were "good" or "bad," as long as I got to learn who she was and what it meant to me to have a mother. I spent little of my childhood and teenage years around her, and yet she knew me well. She could see right through to me, as if we had never been separated. It didn't seem that anyone else understood the deep connection between us.

Whenever I heard the words neglected, abandoned or abused-words my social workers used to describe my first years of life-those words didn't include my mother. Nobody ever gave a single, professional thought to my mother's own sufferings. Nobody knew about my memories of my mother getting beaten repeatedly, of hearing the thump of her body against the floor, of seeing her lying in a pool of her own blood.

As a child, I felt like I was the only one who knew what those words-neglected, abandoned and abused-really meant. Every time the social workers separated me from my mother, the suffering I had witnessed only made me feel closer to her.

One day, when I was living at my aunt Barbaree's, I walked into the house and saw that the living room was filled with all of my aunts and uncles, brothers and cousins. They watched me slowly close the door behind me. Shocked at the sight of everyone staring at me, I froze stiff. All these people watching me in complete silence had to mean that I was in serious trouble. I wondered what I had done wrong this time.

I was getting the jitters when someone said, in a soft whisper: "Jay, your mama is dead."

"Where is she? Is she in the room?" I asked. Although I heard the word "dead," it meant something else. They meant my mother was there someplace.

"No, Jay!" said the voice. "Your mama is dead she is dead, Jay!"

Seconds went by. I could not see whose face was talking. So many of them staring at me. I blinked, trying to wake myself out of this nightmare.

Suddenly I saw people getting up off the couches and chairs and approaching me like they were monsters. I closed my eyes when they came near me. I started fighting them, fighting all of them, swinging my fists into my uncle Dewitt's huge stomach. He held me. I heard him telling me to "let it go, get it all out." I screamed into Dewitt's stomach. It muffled the sound of my cries and hid me from everyone watching. My uncle was telling everyone to get away from us, that he was holding me, and I would be all right.

With everyone standing in a circle around us, I just stood there crying and crying, not wanting Dewitt to let go of me. I hated myself for crying, but I couldn't stop. The harder I tried, the more I cried. It hurt to realize that I wasn't as strong as a man was supposed to be. My tears felt like melted lead; I was 13 years old, and I had thought my crying years were forever behind me.

While Dewitt was still holding me, my cousin Angie came running out of one of the bedrooms yelling "She's alive! She is still alive. Jay, your mama is still alive!"

With everyone talking at once in a whirlwind of spiraling noise, it took Dewitt to tell them to shut up so that Angie could tell us what she had just found out. She had just gotten off the phone with other relatives at the hospital. My mother was still alive after all. She had been gang-raped, beaten up, and then shot seven times before being dumped in an alley and left for dead.

Someone had seen a car drive up into the alley and had heard gunfire and seen the bright flame of every shot. After the car drove off, the person ran up to see what had happened, and recognized my mother. He was the one who started telling everyone that she was dead.

The doctors didn't know if she was going live; she had suffered several very serious bullet wounds and lost a lot of blood. In the meantime, the rumors of her death had spread quickly and reached the whole family. That was why everyone was gathered at Barbaree's. They wanted to tell me before I heard it on the streets.

Now Angie was speaking directly to me. My mother was in critical condition, but the doctors were giving her a good chance of pulling through. My uncle Dewitt shook me and told me to wipe my face. He knew my mother. He knew how strong she was. If those bullets didn't kill her right away, they weren't going to kill her now.

It wasn't what my uncle was saying, but how he said it, that made me believe him. My whole family's shock now turned to hope. The old news that she was dead had vanished, and now I was convinced that my mother would live.

Everyone started swapping stories about my mother and how tough she was, how if anybody could survive being shot seven times at close range, it was Cynthia, "Shorty," "Lady Day," "Venus"-they had many names for my mother. Some of their stories went back to the time when she was my age.

That night I finally got to the hospital to see her. All of us, my uncles and aunts, brothers and cousins, stood quietly around her bedside. The only sound came from the humming and beeping of the medical equipment, from all the tubes connected to my mother. The machinery made me afraid to touch her, as if I might break something and she would die.

She didn't move. I watched her hand resting on the side of the bed. I wanted to touch her, but I was scared that it would hurt her more. Relatives were trying to speak with her. Leaning over the bed, they whispered her name. "Cynthia, can you hear me?"

The more they tried to communicate with her, the more my attention was transfixed by her hand. I only wanted her hand to move. If only her fingers would tell me she knew I was there. It was our secret. It was how she could tell me that she was all right, without anyone else needing to know. Looking at her hand, I was sure she could remember another time, a time long ago…

My mother pushed us all under the bed I'd never seen her so panicked Boom! Boom! Boom! I winced every time she got hit …We were all frozen with fear …She fell hard, hitting her head on the floor…Blood was pouring out of her face…She gripped my hand real, real tight …

I waited for my mother's hand to touch me now. I watched and watched, wanting her hand to move. My mind was begging her to let even a finger speak to me, to tell me she knew that I was there for her again.

When the nurse came into her room and said we all had to leave so that she could get some rest, I couldn't give up wanting her to know I was there. When I felt someone touch my shoulder and try gently to lead me away from my mother's side, it felt like they were trying to rip us apart. Immediately, my hand grabbed the bed rail. I was not going anywhere.

"No, no, NO!" I yelled.

Slowly, my mother's hand began to move. She lifted it up to the bed rail, softly pried open my hand, and brought both our hands together onto the bed. A flood of tears ran down my cheeks. I looked at my mother's hand lying on top of mine, and when she slipped her fingers between mine, I knew that she knew it was me, even though her eyes stayed closed. Her fingers spoke a language without words.

In the following weeks, I hitchhiked to the hospital to visit her. It was too hard to wait for an uncle to get off work, or an aunt to finish what she was doing, only to have something else come up, and leave me with broken promises. But my mother kept my heart from hardening against my relatives. She never let me stay angry. She always listened to me curse them out. She swore that as soon as she was strong enough to get out of bed, she and I were going to kick some asses. She told me how I would grab Uncle Dewitt's legs and she would jump on his back and kick his ass for not visiting her. In this way, she made light of my anger.

The funny thing was, after she got well enough to be transferred to another part of the hospital, you almost needed a ticket to get in to see her. Loads of people from all walks of life crowded into her hospital room. There were her men friends, those old-time drunks and addicts. There was a steady stream of prostitutes, professional con artists, street peddlers, and homeless people going in and out of my mother's room. Even other patients were wheeling their chairs into her room. All you could hear was laughter.

Every night was a party. They had a few bottles stashed away, hidden from the nurses and doctors, but for the most part the crowd wasn't there to get drunk. Something else turned my mother's hospital room into a gathering place. I'm not sure exactly what it was. But I saw the traces of her life in everyone who came and went through that hospital room.

I remember standing in the doorway watching everyone laughing with her. I felt left out. And then my mother said to all those visitors, "Hey, you guys-time to go. I'm goin' to spend some time with my boy." And when they left she said to me, "What you waiting on? Come on over here!" I jumped onto the bed beside her, and she asked me what I wanted to watch on TV.

"Anything with sports," I said.

She found a baseball game, and we settled against the pillows. She gave a teasing tug at the bill of my baseball cap. "You happy now?" she asked.

About Jarvis Jay Masters

Jarvis Jay Masters is an African-American Buddhist writer who has spent 20 years in solitary confinement on San Quentin's Death Row. Thousands of people have read his widely published stories and essays and found inspiration from his eloquent and highly praised book, Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row.

A growing international movement is seeking to overturn his conviction of participating in the killing of a prison guard, Sgt. Hal Burchfield, despite the fact that he was in another part of the prison when the guard was killed. Recently, Jarvis engaged in his first serious discussions with prison authorities regarding reclassification and transfer to the East Block Death Row. Life in East Block allows access to telephone communications, typewriters, tape recorders, more reading and writing materials and an atmosphere with some social opportunities compared to the beyond-Spartan atmosphere and virtually complete isolation of prisoners in the Adjustment Center, home to active gang members and the most violent criminals.

Along with Jarvis's attorneys, many feel that Jarvis was wrongfully charged, convicted and sentenced. They expect the judicial system will overturn the conviction, but the courts move very slowly. His supporters feel that Jarvis rightly deserves the increased access and resources that would be available to him on East Block.

Jarvis is asking people in the community to write San Quentin's officials in support of his transfer to the East Block Death Row. He suggests that letters be strong, but polite, asking rather than demanding San Quentin's action-a transfer.

You can write and mail via the U.S. Postal Service a letter on his behalf. The Committee to Free Jarvis Jay Masters asks that you let them know you've done so by emailing them a copy at campaign@freejarvis.org or by mailing a copy of your letter or a note that you sent a letter to The Committee to Free Jarvis Jay Masters, P.O. Box 10032, Oakland, CA 94610-0032.

Here are some suggested points you might want to make in your letter, using your own language:

oThat Jarvis has worked tirelessly for years-in his writing and in countless personal letters-to encourage youth in and out of the juvenile corrections system to stay away from gangs and violence as a means of settling conflicts and seeking personal gain. He has used his own difficult experiences and criminal history as compelling examples of how not to live.

oThat Jarvis for years has had no involvement or affiliation with any prison gang. For those of you who know him personally, Jarvis encourages mentioning the BGF particularly, as this is the gang he has been linked to by prison authorities.

oThat schoolteachers and their students, counselors, Buddhist communities, youth groups, and others in California and all over America have greatly benefited from Jarvis's writing. Circumstances of life on East Block will facilitate even more communication between Jarvis and those outside who need to hear his message.

oThat Jarvis has transformed himself, while in San Quentin, from an angry young man to an effective teacher of nonviolence. He exemplifies positive change and rehabilitation, which should be recognized.

IMPORTANT: Clearly include a request that your letter be formally included in the Central File of inmate Jarvis Jay Masters C-35169.

Letters should be addressed to:

Associate Warden D. Dacanay - Adjustment Center

San Quentin Prison, San Quentin, CA 94974

For more information about Jarvis and about his case, please see

www.freejarvis.org PLEASE DO NOT include this web address in your letter to the prison.