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Jailhouse Salvation 101

(word count approx 1570)

By Gina Fournier

The Merchant-Ivory movie adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View features a poignant scene following a street fight that ends in murder. Lucy (Helen Bonham Carter) comments that you witness something memorable and think you’ll never be the same, but then you forget and return to your old self. I hope to do a better job holding onto my jailhouse conversion, from skeptical to convinced about the existence of God.

Disclaimer: My conviction has wavered intensely even before I finished editing this essay.

Thanks to my former employer and its bad actors, an institution I’ll call Land of Motown Community College, where I served as an English teacher, I’ve seen the best and the worst of pure Michigan humanity. If God created humans, God sure must have a sense of humor.

Even a smattering of details from my story sound like a rollercoaster Lifetime movie no one wants to watch. Since 2012, I’ve been sexist witch-hunted through an ongoing living nightmare that has included hack shrinks, illegal and involuntary lock up in a Catholic mental health ward and now incarceration for thirty-four days in a mid-Michigan county jail for a crime I did not commit. College administrators, union teachers, dirty cops, dirty doctors, dirty nuns and dirty priests, plus the state’s top most government officials, have participated in the protection of white collar criminals and encouraged my simultaneous downfall. All this for me, so one man can prove his power over unions near union ground zero.

The U.S. Constitution’s first amendment makes clear that government is not to establish any official religion, not protect any particular religion from existing laws. Perhaps the founding fathers could foresee the distant future. Nearly two hundred fifty years later, a female citizen has found cause to invert the phrase “God bless you” with blasphemy, attempting to redress grievances.

I’ve never met the emergency room doctor who signed me into a Catholic looney bin for a week. To my horror, I was held in a Catholic Siberia, it turns out, on campus with my all girl Catholic high school. I was raised and violated by the same church, which now pretends it’s never met me. Thirty five years ago, for Halloween, classmates mimicked the Robert Redford movie Brubaker to stage a failed, backboneless prison break. These classmates, who have also turned away from my plight, dressed not in hospital gowns or orange as the new black, but plaid skirts and knee socks adorned temporarily with stripes. (Good girls, we stopped mock rioting when the nuns glared.)

Unfortunately, there is no law or principle governing the intersection of religion and families. In my time of need, even my immediate and extended family has turned away, exponentially multiplying my distress. My extended Catholic family has not advocated for me, though it would cost nothing except some skin. The anger caused by this and so many betrayals envelops like nuclear explosion.

However, I realized something on day thirty-three of my lock up in the big house. Because the ties between families and religion tend to act like strangleholds, my estranged Catholic mother is incapable of doing the one thing I want and need her most to do: to demand that Livonia Catholics honestly investigate me claims. Because of my new found belief, I forgive my aging mother. She’s only human and doing the best she can. (Unfortunately, the damage done feels irreparable. Forgiveness does not mean I can tolerate her presence.)

Through five solid years of loss, I have been cornered mentally and financially into a nearly impossible position. But the kindest of strangers have helped me to survive. Downstate, nice generous neighbors responded to my cries for help by giving. Up north, the same. People have given money, food, house wares, helpful supplies such as wood, shoes, warm clothes, plus their time and honest well wishes. I wish I would have kept better track of the names and faces of the many regular people who have been so kind, forming a lifeline, keeping me alive.

My fighting spirit has kept better track of my transgressors, including Fox News Detroit, which ran a sexist hack piece in 2015 cutting together footage I asked them not to shoot in order to make me look looser than loopy. In search of more positive and helpful press, my creative and liberal mind encouraged me to tag my own, downstate old-ring suburban home with a metaphoric phrase that offended and confused. “A religious figure criminally violated me!” Only my version was Twitter-short. Basic sentence: subject, verb, object.

Passersby assumed I was nutz. I’m not. Unfortunately, the human resources’ labor attorney and architect of my nightmare is smart enough to know that once a crone-aged female is labeled crazy dangerous, most people won’t bother to parse the facts. Just ask Hillary. Voters elected a man without ethics, unwilling to practice stability, a sexual harasser, eager to “lock her up!”

I recreated my civil rights protest up north at a lake named after the largest city in New Brunswick. Maybe I watched too many episodes of Little House on the Prairie, after numerous rereadings of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. In middle age, without an income, I’ve been forced to gather wood and water for two years, for two winters, with a third approaching, in order to survive in my dead husband’s summer cabin, which is facing tax forfeiture, and soon. In both iterations, I repainted my eye-catching sacrilegious phrase with “Act Peace.” I’m not a bad person, or dangerous, or interested in spreading evil. But Fox News Detroit has been not interested in my actual story.

While I was incarcerated, nasty locals ran down my mailbox to which my sign “Act Peace” was nailed, and then took the sign. Two paintings espousing the Statue of Liberty have been stolen. My sign about the connection between the dirty cop who put me in jail and Land of Motown Community College was stolen, I’d guess by the dirty cop. My cries for “help!” with needed justice have been ignored. Instead, community officials at this private lake community have bent the law with the help of dirty local county officials, who may try to re-arrest me over the care of my feces. Yes, you read correctly. My troubles continue. Danger surrounds. This is not a pretty story.

(FYI. Please believe me. I’m still be getting my proverbial shit together, but I’ve always I properly and responsibly discarded my poop.)

Something wicked this way came, and stayed, but I pray to harness goodness and finally slay the beast on my back. I’ve been falsely accused of being suicidal and a danger to society within a country that has grown accustomed to men mass murdering and sexual harassing. I know the pain of mental illness in the form of mental torture, so I feel very sympathetic to those, especially military veterans, who suffer from PTSD. Mental pain is real. And can be excruciating. I realize no matter my idiosyncratic tendencies, finally winning a measure of justice will require the help of other people, and, well, by any name, I guess God. I know that God may not intercede with my legal and financial problems but belief in a higher power does help with gratefulness and tranquility.

In jail, every day is a good day to die. However, the smallest graces save a tattered soul and help a person carry on to the next long minute. I want to thank the two women who ran Bible study every Tuesday. Yes, you read correctly. Unbeknownst to them, they gave me gold for a writer without means: a composition notebook, on my 54th birthday, which was an otherwise desolate milestone. Moreover, these women of God showed me a respectable and inspirational version of Christianity.

On cable tv, my cellmates preferred back-to-back episodes of Cops, shows about zombies, the shallow high jinks of Jerry Springer, endless sci-fi. (I prefer comedy and drama.) The day I was eventually sprung from the slammer, my legal troubles abated but not erased, Unsolved Mysteries ran a segment on St. Pio, an Italian priest who was said to develop stigmata and miraculously heal. Angered, under stress, I admit I acted out loudly like an ass (even by jail standards): “I hope they roast his nuts!”

Many jail birds claim to accept Jesus as their savior, though none gave up their bottom bunk for the pregnant woman in our ranks. Critically, I recognized around me the kind of souls who would have rejected Mary and Joseph. But I was forced to realize this was not a television segment that was going to uncover more Catholic dirt. Although St. Pio may have self-inflicted his wounds, trapped in a county cell block, I dropped my bad attitude and truly felt in my body an undeniable wave of love.

No surprise, in the short time since my release on PR bond, my nascent jailhouse conversion has been tested and wavered, fallen apart, and needing rebuilding. Im not a saint. My days are terrifying and unresolved. But. If I breathe calmly and deeply, and repeat my affirmations, what some call prayers, I recognize a connection between hope and light.

House of Hope in Hersey, Michigan, offered me a composition notebook. Any additional help readers may offer with legal defense, plumbing, back taxes, transportation, work or grace are appreciated. Thank you.

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