The Violence Hidden in Our Mirrors

Mourning, resilience, and the brutal realities of this place

By Yaphet Davis

After submitting several requests over the past couple of months, I was finally moved to Stateville’s E-House on Tuesday, July 2.

When I entered the building, the guys appeared to be just as pleased to see me back as I was to see them. The Sergeant disappeared into his office, leaving me standing at the base of the stairs waiting for him to return to tell me which room I was moving into. His pace indicated that there was a lot going on.

The Sergeant reappeared, staring at a sheet on a clipboard, his eyes searching for my name.

“Davis, you’re going to 909.”

While looking up at the flights of stairs I had to carry my belongings, I saw him quickly disappear again from my peripheral vision.

Unbeknownst to me, 909 was the room Michael Broadway (B-Way) had died in just two weeks earlier.

Everyone was taken aback by the fact that they would move someone in there, especially considering there were dozens of empty rooms throughout the building. Besides, B-Way hadn’t even been placed in the ground yet.

We had lost a good brother, a wonderful friend, and, to some, a close companion, a valuable member of the community.

The news was a gut punch, deflating some of the joy I had from reuniting with classmates and friends. I spent the next 30 minutes despondently taking my things up four flights of stairs, piece by piece, trying to figure out why the placement office would do such a thing.

I couldn’t help but believe there was malicious intent behind this move—a slap in the face to a community that is still in mourning. If not intentional, then surely this amounts to gross indifference—the same indifference that resulted in B-Way’s untimely death.

Either way, it added insult to injury.

When I finished bringing my things upstairs, I stood at my door and forced myself to focus on the next task at hand. That’s when I noticed the wreckage left behind from that tragic day. It looked like something violent had taken place, like there had been a scuffle and B-Way was fighting for air as this place strangled the life out of him.

To me, leaving the room in that condition for me to clean felt like they used me to help them get rid of the last remnants of his presence.

Most of his things were gone, but there were a few items among a ton of trash: an open cheese cup, a piece of a pickle, a small cup with mayo in it. These were just some of the ingredients of the burrito I found in the sink, the last meal he never got to eat. As I cleaned, throwing things away, I looked for something of his to hold on to— something that would serve as a memento of this great man who is no longer with us. Something I would see and instantly think about what he represented, or maybe recall some of the nuggets of wisdom he had dropped on me on numerous occasions.

Like one time when we walked from study hall and talked about his book. He always encouraged others to write. I reluctantly told him I hadn’t purchased his book because urban novels aren’t really my thing. He explained that there is so much wisdom in every experience. Everything he wrote, including his novel and most of the assignments he completed throughout school, were written through the lens of his experiences. Since then, I’ve tried to incorporate pieces of my story into my writings.

It took four hours to complete my usual relocation ritual of getting my new space clean to my standards. I was quite disappointed not to discover any worthy representation of my now-deceased friend. Wiping the inside of the sink dry, I happened to look up and notice there was a mirror taped to the wall.

For a moment, I imagined B-Way standing precisely where I stood, maybe splashing water on his face to cool himself in the suffocating heat on the 9th gallery. I imagined at some point during those last horrifying moments of his life, while struggling to breathe, he looked upon his reflection and saw what his suffering looked like. I was frozen, staring, my vision blurred by tears swelling in the wells of my eyes. The gravity of the situation began to weigh so heavily on me that I had to sit down.

But then I began to think about this situation being a part of the ongoing fight for our lives that we have all been enduring.

I told myself to soldier up and gathered myself to my feet and back in front of the mirror, again imagining B-Way’s last time standing in that very spot—airways constricted, distressed, his ability to speak for himself constrained. The way he died was an encapsulation of what prison was designed to do to the incarcerated: to suffocate us, to take our voices by virtue of constraining our ability to breathe.

Prison is designed to take lives.

I began to see the mirror differently. In the solitude of that room, no one else saw what B-Way saw when he looked in the mirror in the last moments of his life. That last image captured by the mirror. The narrative that exists about incarcerated people has caused society to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the violence imposed on prison populations. Prison was designed to be a mechanism of inhumane brutality hidden in plain sight.

Sometimes it appears as if the mirror is the only thing paying attention, capturing every image of the violence that occurs within these walls.