“Wishing For The Taste Of Turkey”
(An anonymous look back at Thanksgiving from a woman in prison)
“Thanksgiving was not the worst holiday in prison, but looking back, I think maybe it was the saddest because we knew an entire season of celebration was continuing without us. Still, my first Thanksgiving in custody was better than the ones before it, when I’d been addicted to heroin and selling drugs to feed my habit. Back then, most of my holidays were a druggy blur.
“Eventually, I got arrested with a Tupperware full of heroin, and I was stone cold sober for my first Thanksgiving in prison. That was a few months after a judge sentenced me to 2.5 years behind bars for felony drug possession.
“In the prison where I did a lot of my time, we lived in dorms that looked like warehouses. It was always cold in the winter, and on weekends and holidays, they only fed us twice a day, with meals never particularly worth eating. But on Thanksgiving, I skipped the mess hall: I was lucky. I had a visitor.
“The person I was dating had driven 2.5 hours to go through the correctional facility’s tedious screening process and sit across from me at a beat-up table in a noisy visiting room, surrounded by prisoners and officers. Our celebration was pitiful, but we had each other and enjoyed one of the major perks of visitation: snacks from the vending machine.
“We used up all of our quarters on soda and candy and carved the words “turkey” and “mashed potatoes” onto the Snickers and Reese’s with a paperclip. We called it our holiday meal. Then I went back to my dorm—an absolutely awful unit with mean officers. But that Thanksgiving, we had the one good officer. He came in and spotted a few women hogging the hot plates, making food only for the people they liked.
“And he issued an order: “It’s Thanksgiving,” he said, “ if you’re cooking, you’re cooking for the whole damn unit.” So they did. We all got together and donated commissary items. I lived on canned peas, so I pitched in some of them. Others showed up with instant mashed potatoes, rice, beans, and dry pasta.
“Despite the lack of tools and the hodgepodge of ingredients, the result was amazing: Pasta salad, spiced cabbage, rice, yams, turkey, cranberry sauce, green beans, macaroni and cheese, and different kinds of cakes and pies.
“Now this day is what I think of when I think of redemption. It was only one day, and then everything went back to how it was. But this is how change happens, one day at a time. People learn about kindness and hope and change through individual moments that eventually change us into different people.
“When I think back to my drug-addled Thanksgivings of the past, I am so grateful that I am not where I was, that I am out and working an amazing job where I can tell the stories of the people who are still inside, wishing for the taste of turkey, and carving the word “turkey” on their Snickers—as they count down the days to freedom.”
—Anonymous
