The Scariest Weekend and the Week the Blog went Down

As my birthday approaches tomorrow, it is taking me back to last year, being at Carswell, and remembering the scariest weekend I had while incarcerated. I did not fully write of the experience then. I did write a little about it after, but I could not write about it. My fears were caused by this blog. Well, sort of. Here's the full story...

The weekend was looking to be a good one. It was a three day weekend from my job in education, due to MLK day on the Monday. My mother and step-father were going to visit me on Saturday and Sunday. I planned to spend much of my actual birthday (Monday) with my friends at the Rec after having to move from 1South to 1North. Sure, I was incarcerated, but I had a lot to look forward to. There was a party being planned, a cake being made, and knowing my friends, I was going to even get a gift or two! Plus, cards and letters from home were coming in and I felt well loved and cared for. Prison is the last place anyone wants to be for their birthday, but as I wrote a couple days after the date here on the blog, it was by far, not my worst bday. I actually have some pretty warm memories of the day.

What I don't have are very good memories of other things from that weekend. It started just as I was about to leave work actually earlier that week. I happened to be alone in my classroom - which were the moments I loved the most. The quiet. They were the times when the students were gone and we were doing lesson planning and assignment grading. Some classrooms had several tutors in them. Sometimes, we were lucky and sat alone in a classroom. Quiet. Ahhhhhhh.

The classroom I was in at the time happened to have one of the teacher's offices located within it. Since it was a male teacher, if he was ever in his office, there had to be two of us inmate/tutors in the classroom so that it was not 1-1 with a staff/inmate. This was the teacher who I respected and he always followed the rules, so when he walked in the classroom to head to his office, I immediately stood at my desk to walk to another classroom to seek out another tutor to come into my classroom or to sit in their classroom (those are the rules). However, the teacher who I respected started to talk to me and said that he was just grabbing his coat and heading out (which was something he did quite often). So, I just stayed at my desk grading. As he started to head out of the back door, though, he turned to me and said, "so, Dragonfly Hazel, eh?" and I just froze and slowly looked him in the face across the room. I said, "is that a problem?" He just laughed and continued to get his things together. I walked over toward his office and asked again, "ummm, is it a problem?" I did not know if keeping the blog was going to cause me any trouble. I knew that I was not exactly anonymous with how honest about myself I was, but I did not know how it would go down since he was letting me know he knew about it.

The rest of the conversation went something like this: he indicated that I needed to make sure I continued to not use any real names. He indicated that I should be careful. He had this weird laugh that I couldn't quite get as to whether he respected what I was doing or he thought it insane or what not. After he left the office, I just stood there, not sure how to react. It was the first time anyone approached me in a kinda negative way about this blog and it was someone who had a great deal of power over me.

It perhaps was foreshadowing for what was yet to come as later the same week. Back to the Friday of my birthday weekend. Things were fine between the teacher who I respected and myself and I took the whole conversation to be a bit of a warning and a bit of an acknowledgment. At the time, I thought, somewhere in my ego brain, that perhaps that teacher had some respect for me too. It's not that I ever learned that he didn't, but as someone who was an inmate, we are all just inmates to the staff - even as tutors in classrooms, we were all just replaceable. In reality, they were just doing their jobs. I digress.

So, that Friday, I am heading into my unit after work and I get approached by someone I do not even know who starts yelling at me about this blog and that I am telling everyone's secrets to the whole world by keeping a blog while I was at Carswell. At 5' tall and round, I am an easy target and I have never been in a fist fight, so when people start screaming at me, I tend to cower. However, this person just starts going off on me about things she knew nothing about. I said to her that I do keep a blog, but I am not writing about other people's happenings in it, that that is not the purpose. It is about me and my journey and experiences. I do write about things I see, but I do not use anyone's names or anything.

Well, then in turns out that someone on my unit's girlfriend found this blog and the person was nervous that her secrets from within Carswell would be revealed to the girlfriend through my blog. So, rumors started to go around all of Carswell, but especially my unit - 1 South at the time, then 1 North (we moved on January 20th - the same weekend). One woman on my unit went room to room to tell them that I keep a blog about Carswell and the Unit, that I write about the women there, that I use their real names, and that I expose all their secrets. Literally.

Next thing you know, by Saturday morning, perfect strangers were walking up to me and saying things like, "hey, do you know 'dragonfly hazel'?" and I'd say, "yes," and they'd threaten me and tell me to watch my back and it started to get really ugly. This was really soon after someone I really liked had gone to the SHU and her best friend thought my blog had something to do with it. I mean, it started to get really out of control. I kept trying to explain that this blog was not at all about those things, but I was not necessarily talking to folks who wanted real explanations. My friends on the inside were scared for me. Braids and bandana were telling people to get away from our room. It was like I had to be "watched." I really started to believe I may be jumped.

That's when I made the phone call. I tried calling Traveler. She maintained this site while I was away. I couldn't reach her. I reached Sporty. I was hysterically crying. I told her that I was being threatened. I told her that we had to take down Dragonfly Hazel. I told her about all the threats, the rumors, the lies. Here, my parents were in town to see me, it was my birthday weekend, and I was constantly watching my back. People who had been my acquaintances on the inside suddenly stopped talking to me. It was really scary.

The people I was closest to stuck by me. They knew what Dragonfly Hazel was really about. They knew it was not just an avenue for gossip. They helped me still make the best of the weekend and my visits with my folks. After a couple days, the rumors went to another direction, but some of those friendships never recovered. People did not know if they could trust me. I took down this site on January 19th for about a week and did not write at all. It was a very sad week for me.

That is when I wrote the piece called "why I write." I had never realized how important this blog was to me until I was forced to stop writing it. After I was home and saw the messages from people in January asking where the blog went both in email and on Prison Talk, I realize that week had an impact on many people, not just me. I wonder if that week caused people to believe the blog stopped entirely or if people wondered why it abruptly went down. Well, now you know.

It was a hard decision to put the the blog back up, knowing that people within Carswell were reading the blog and not happy about it. In a short period of time, I learned that several CO's and even the Warden were aware of it. I learned that SIS was made aware of it - that's the FBI of the prison system. I heard through the grapevine that perhaps I was protected by my 1st Amendment rights, but I wonder if I wrote anything too controversial if anything would have occurred... At one point I heard that the education department as a whole was not happy to know about my blog, but then there was little they could do to me about it. The CO that was often in my unit made comments to my friends like, "I know she keeps that blog, she don't know that I know, but I know..." That was a common statement by staff and inmates.... "you don't know that I know, but I know..." when it came to this blog.

Funny thing is, by the second half of my time at Carswell, I just pretty much assumed everyone knew. When I was moved to the second floor room where I would remain until I left, all three of my roommates had already heard the rumors about me and my blog. One was quite upset when I informed her that the rumors were not true and that I was not going to be using her real name and would only use a nickname if she approved of it. She thought I would somehow make her famous - hahaha. Perhaps my talking about her here, now will do that trick - no, oh well!!!! Sorry Longwinded!!!

I distinctly remember those feelings of helplessness and powerlessness a year ago, though. I was proud that I stood my ground when approached by others, but was in a situation where there was no way for me to just show my fellow inmates this site and say "see, this is the site, these are the entries, I'm not talking about you in those ways!!!" I'm also proud of myself for making a very difficult decision to keep writing, because I'm not sure how I would have survived my time in prison without the ability to keep my blog. It gave me purpose. It was a purpose I did not even know I had and now I get to use it for research purposes that has potential to be useful by people who study criminal justice and prison issues.

I guess this post reveals something very important to all of you - my blog could not tell you all everything. Too many eyes were watching. I was not being paranoid, I was being told. This was especially true after my birthday weekend and the week the blog went down. Maybe I was not as strong as I wanted to be in order to write everything I experienced and witnessed. My number one goal was to get home. Every prisoner's goal should be the same. I can do much more from out here than I could from in there. I still have the memories, though. They will have a very hard time leaving my soul.