If You Can Survive Prison...: a memoir

By Crystal E. Green

In If You Can Survive Prison..., Crystal E. Green takes us on an emotional ride through the memories her experiences left behind. From her disturbingly traumatic childhood to the seemingly constant trials and tribulations she experienced as an adult, there is no holding back.

When absolutely everything about her life said that she was destined to lose, she decided to fight back; she was determined to win! 

If You Can Survive Prison... is the inspiring story of learning to overcome the battles of life and using the lessons to empower oneself. It is the story of perseverance, despite the pain and strength, despite the struggle. Through comedic relief and sarcastic intermissions, Crystal delivers a heart-wrenching tale that leaves us asking just how she made it through.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crystal E. Green
• Release date: Apr 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386936237

Crystal E. Green

Michigan-bred storyteller, Crystal E. Green gives emotional, Black, female-driven love stories life by challenging theories of normalcy across a wide spectrum of possibilities. Green’s style is witty and colorfully descriptive. When not developing, writing, directing or producing her own work, Green enjoys spending time with her husband and their two children, consulting other creatives, tasting new foods and traveling to places she's never been before.

Book preview

Warning

This book contains words, phrases and vivid details that might trigger a wide variety of emotions or cause some readers to become highly offended. Reader discretion is advised.

Introduction: Reckless

Growing up, I rarely saw my mother, let alone, have conversations with her or lesson-filled memories or any moments whatsoever that made me think wow, mom really taught me something, there! For the most part, her heavy crack and liquor dependencies occupied most of her time however, as an adult, when I look back I now realize that my mother taught me perhaps the most valuable lesson of my entire life: If you can survive prison, you can survive anything! I know you may be thinking. That’s stupid, Crystal. Really stupid! But wait, there’s more.

The year: 1984. The time: That’s not the point. The place: Somewhere in Michigan, alright? One of my mother’s reckless crimes had landed her a cozy spot in prison. Judge the lady if you want but, when I think about it, committing that crime was probably the smartest move she could have ever made. Yes, the ultimate cost was her losing custody of me, the baby who she had half-heartedly protected inside of her womb for months but, had she not been incarcerated, I may have never been born, or worse, I may have been born a crack addict myself. I mean, can you image the possibilities?

You see, the day that my mother was sentenced, I was sentenced, too- a very cute and tiny, innocent fetus, whose only crime was conception which, I suppose made me guilty by association. We were as one and whether I committed the crime or not, I was paying the time right along with her. Sure, everyone knows that prison food is infamously disgusting and that the water tastes like fish pee but, those details were minuscule in comparison to what my future, both near and far, would hold for me.

In the months to come, I would encounter a dramatic...experience. Rather than simply leave my mother’s womb, take my first breath and nurse at my mother’s nurturing breasts, I would be forced to leave behind not only my mother but, any opportunity to bond with her or ever really know what it felt like to be loved by a mother. More importantly, I would lose my identity- an identity that I would spend the next thirty plus years of my life struggling to, but nevertheless, find. 

But just as my mother survived that prison sentence and lived long enough to survive many more, I too survived it and have lived long enough to survive many other challenges, so to speak. In other words, if you can survive prison, you can survive anything! Really, you can.

Relocation

As my mother served the remaining time of her prison sentence, I was relocated. At just four days old, I was removed from my mother’s unflatteringly track-marked arms and permanently placed in the arms of my maternal grandmother. But, who am I kidding here? To my knowledge, all I had was a maternal grandmother and apparently I had just magically appeared comfortably nestled within the cushions of my mother’s uterus. Yeah, something like that. But that is not the point and I am not bitter, so let’s just move on. Shall we?

As grateful as I am for having a roof over my head, clean clothes, a bed to sleep in and a belly that would never know the meaning of true hunger, this part of my journey was not the warm and fuzzy granny time that everyone might have hoped for. Imagine being sentenced to one year in prison and being told at the very end Psych! Gotcha! Well, that, my friends, is the story of my life.

My grandmother spent the next eighteen years of my life letting me know that by choosing to replace my mother, she was sacrificing her own happiness. I had always wondered what that meant anyway. I mean, she was an old woman from the beginning of my life; was I really interrupting some party she was planning to throw? Had I not been in her life, would her weekends consist of club hopping and one-night stands? Was I really standing in the way of her doing anything she desired to do? Whether I was or not, she made it seem that way and whatever style I was cramping, she made sure that I knew that she absolutely hated me for it.

My grandmother made sure that I knew that the only reason I had been given life was because her daughter had been arrested, preventing her from shooting up. She was always sure to emphasize the fact that I was merely the product of a drug addicted felon and that, in her opinion, I, from infancy, was just like her. But in the midst of all the accusations and constant belittling, she somehow failed to realize that my mother’s drug dependency started with the beast she shared a bed with.

As the story goes, my grandfather, an aggressively jealous gambling addict, had lost a bet. Both unable and unwilling to handle the loss, he flat out murdered his opponent in cold blood. But, as with any good story, what is murder without a little revenge, right?

While my grandfather was sent away to prison to pay for the crime that he single-handedly committed, the family of that dead opponent was not satisfied with the prison sentence that he was given. This young man’s future had been taken from him in the spirit of anger and envy. Sure, he had been cocky in his defeat but he didn’t deserve to lose his life. Naturally, his family wanted more. They wanted my family to feel what their family felt. They wanted revenge.

As my grandfather sat in his prison cell, completely oblivious to any impending tragedy, the opponent’s family planned their revenge. That revenge was my mother, a beautiful, bright, intelligent young girl, who aspired to become a doctor someday. But, rather than murder her and simply return the criminal favor, they made a move that would negatively impact my mother for the rest of her life; they decided to strip her of her sobriety.

Cunning in their approach, the opponent’s family lured my mother away from school, kidnapped her away and injected her with an unmeasurable amount of drugs. They left her alone to die but, lo and behold, she survived. Although she lived, she was never the same again. She found comfort in drugs and alcohol, a comfort supported by an urge that she simply could not seem to control.

What my mother had experienced was real and it had affected my grandmother deeper than anyone else. Not only was she consumed with the guilt of having birthed a child with this monster but her heart was broken because the perfections of her little girl had been wiped away and that little girl had, herself, become a monster.

So, while my grandmother felt, for lack of a better word, bad, about what had transpired, she was jaded by the after effects-the countless times that she had to use her hard earned money to bail my mother out of jail, the personal items that she held near and dear to her heart that had been stolen from her and replaced with crack rocks and worst of all, the mysterious murder of her son, her first born child, who was rumored to have lost his life while trying to save my mother’s. This picture was not pretty.

When I came along, my grandmother was far past the point of feeling sorry for my mother and remembering the good that she was. And I, as innocent as I was, was a mere slip-up for my mother, who, considering her lifestyle, would have never purposely gotten pregnant. When my grandmother looked in my mother’s eyes, she saw the greatest disappointment of her life. And when she looked at me, she saw no difference.

In fact, I have come to the realization that there was absolutely nothing I could have done to show her otherwise, to prove to her that I was