The first person I see at the maximum security women’s prison is the sergeant. I take off my shoes and hand over my clear plastic backpack full of books and student papers and the kinds of pens that don’t have a spring mechanism. The sergeant runs them through the X-ray machine while I step through the metal detector.

I arrive at the same time as volunteer Wende Ballew, executive director of Reforming Arts,and this is a relief. I don’t like this next part. We go out the door behind the sergeant into a narrow courtyard, bisected by an unapologetic metal cage. It is small and square, and the bars are thick. It looks like something from a 1950s zoo.

An unseen human hand presses a button, and the cage door buzzes. We open it and go inside. There is an identical door on the other side. It is locked, and it stays locked until the first door clangs shut behind us. It only takes two or three seconds for us to cross the cage, and then, to my relief, the second door buzzes and lets us both out of the cage and into prison. It’s like an airlock system, meant to let people cross securely from one environment to another. Those seconds in the cage are how I know, every week, that I am leaving the world.

Before we enter the classroom building, we come to a pair of padlocked gates on either side of a field of asphalt. We wait at the first one, hoping it won’t be too long before a staff member or an officer passes by to let us through.

We stand in the sunshine, idly chatting. On the hill far above us, I see a group of women whose khaki uniforms have blue stripes running down their legs. They are on the other side of a tall fence, separate from our facility. They trot in regimented rows, perfectly in step, and I can hear the faint sound of them singing. It’s a military cadence I recognize from growing up on army bases.

“Who are they?” I ask Wende.

“They are in the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment program,” she says. “If you are up on drug charges, the judge has the option to sentence you to RSAT instead of prison. It is a second chance that focuses on treatment rather than punishment. Women who successfully complete it are released.”

“That’s awesome,” I say. It’s what I want. For prison to be more about salvage, less about warehousing. More rehabilitation, less purely punitive.

“Yeah, but look at those women. Tell me what you see.”

I watch for a bit. It takes me a while, so long that in retrospect I am ashamed. The rows are fairly uniform, made up of pink and cream and pale olive faces. Faces like mine. I see a couple of darker faces, but they are very few. The women in rehab are overwhelmingly white.

The prison doesn’t decide who gets RSAT. That group is assembled by hundreds of individual decisions made by judges of all colors and sexes and ages and political affiliations across the state, case by case. It’s systemic.

A counsellor arrives with a key, and we go through the last airlock to the classroom. Head count is over, and our students arrive. Unlike RSAT, this is a diverse group; the administration here allows any student who signs up and qualifies to participate in educational programs. This semester my class ranges in age from very early 20s to late 60s, about 60 percent black, 40 percent white, with two Latinas. Today a woman I will call Angie (names have been changed to protect the privacy of those incarcerated), a tall woman with ash blonde hair and wide set eyes, is wearing a spectacular silvery sun hat. It has a wide, floppy brim and is festooned with orange flowers. It looks out of place, cheery and arresting in this sea of khaki scrubs.

“We made you a present,” Angie tells me.

She passes me the hat. It looks so good that I have it in my hands before I realize it is made of plastic cling wrap, colored paper and the kind of twist ties that close up bread loaf packages. It is beautiful, cleverly and carefully constructed. I grin and blush, ridiculously pleased, and put it on.

Angie is here because she was involved in the death of her husband. I have gathered that it was a dangerous marriage, the kind where both parties rarely get out alive. I know this because Angie is a lifer; I have had her in four classes now. Because I teach creative writing, her history has leaked into essays and poems and papers.

The more classes a student takes with me, the more likely I am to know. A couple of my students are in for drugs, one for embezzling. Shayla drove her boyfriend to a store and then sat outside in the car while he robbed it. He killed people in the process. She was 15, and she didn’t go inside, but she was tried as an adult. My own daughter is 15, so I know what 15 looks like, and here is Shayla — bright, funny, mercurial, pretty — and she could be here until she is nearly my age. She is still so young; the warm, brown skin around her eyes has that unlined, baby plumpness to it. She breaks my heart.

I have learned that, on the whole, I prefer not to know what brought these women to my classroom. Maybe they like that, too. One of their greatest, shared fears, my longtime student Jasmine tells me, is that they will be released, and people will look at them and see a crime. She doesn’t want to be the living embodiment of an old, bad choice — a choice that prison is supposed to pay for. She wants to be the person she is now.

The person Jasmine is now, the one I know, is enrolled in Life University, has a 4.0, speaks up for her fellow prisoners and has a wicked, whip-smart sense of humor.

“Everybody have their rough drafts?” I ask. Standing inside my pale skin, shaded by my beautiful hat, I feel gratitude and pride in them, and also an odd, disconcerted shame, because while I may not know why all my students are here, I know why I am here.

I am here because of the night I didn’t get arrested, the day my grandmother danced in a wig, a drug deal in a Waffle House, and an epiphany in a downtown Atlanta Sears department store. I am here because of history, my own, and that of this troubled South I love so deeply. I am here because I am a product of all its pieces.

Family tree

On my mother’s side, my family comes straight out of a Flannery O’Connor short story — mostly potato famine refugees who didn’t find much more to eat here. I look like them, typical black Irish, with a long, bony face, dark hair and green eyes. The descendent of bog people, I am so pale that back in middle school, the mean kids called me Casper.

My maternal grandmother grew up sleeping in a shack about the size and shape of a garden shed. She picked cotton, along with the three old-maid aunties who raised her. At 14, she married a much older man, a Baptist preacher, soft-spoken, but as in love with hell and fear as any screamer.

On my father’s side, things are little more complicated. My grandfather was the descendent of the Mississippi Jacksons. I grew up inside an unexamined understanding that this branch of my family is a reason so many black Americans share my last name. At one point, according to the ledger in an old family Bible, my ancestors owned 73 separate, whole, thinking, breathing human beings. The names my ancestors gave them were written into this book; I will never know their real names.

By the time I was born, the Jackson fortune had been lost decades upon decades back, during Reconstruction. The plantation itself was swallowed whole by the Mississippi river when the levees broke during prohibition. The Bible had long ago been stuffed in the attic, and my grandfather was just my gruff, affectionate Deedaddy.

Deedaddy was a working-class guy, a yellow dog Democrat, devoted to his union. He married Ona, the youngest child of six, four of them boys. Growing up, she was the pet of the whole family. They all called her “Noug.” She was five feet tall, maybe 100 pounds, and at least five pounds of that was bosom. She’d had her pick, she told me many times, and I got the sense that my grandparents shared the conviction that Deedaddy was a lucky man.

In her old age, when I knew her best, she remained adorable, with olive skin, fluffy hair and snappy dark eyes as shiny as Kalamata olives courtesy of a half-Cherokee grandmother. I was always proud of that piece of my heritage. I tucked it into my identity: Original American. It felt romantic. I worked my lone part-Cherokee ancestor into conversation often; I never brought up the slave owners.

Doubled creature

Grandmother’s tricky heart and asthma have her on a host of medications, and eventually she and Deedaddy move into assisted living. Her brain forgets things, but her vivacity and charm are intact. Noug joins music club and takes over game night, bringing the party with her. She is still the cutest little trick in shoe leather, over 70 category.

Once, and only once, I drop by to visit without calling first. I find Noug at a dance in the rec room, dressed to the nines. Gold heeled sandals, a one piece zippered iridescent purple jump suit, and a wig. A blonde wig, practically Norse, with two long braids draped over her bosom. She is pink cheeked and sweaty from dancing. I’m charmed and a little amused, but she seems embarrassed.

She hustles me back to their apartment, saying, “Let me just change, honey.”

Once inside their place, she pulls off the wig. Down at the roots, where she’s been sweating, her fluffy hair has retracted into little zig-zags. I experience a strange moment of vertigo. I see my grandmother, and superimposed over her, a little stranger. If I saw her for the first time now, I would assume she was a black woman. This doubled creature disappears into the bathroom. In a little while, she emerges in a simple dress and flats, her hair re-fluffed, but I know what I saw.

“Indian blood?” I ask my dad, later.

He raises his eyebrows, surprised. “You didn’t realize we were saying that with air quotes?”

I had not. My brother knew, and all my cousins, understanding by a process as silent and mysterious as osmosis. The youngest by several years, I missed it.

“A lot of people in the South have ‘Indian blood’,” Dad said, and this time he makes the air quotes obvious, sketching them with his hands.

At the time, it was only interesting. I didn’t connect it to my own path. Instead, I felt that it reset a balance I didn’t like to think about. So my family had owned humans on my father’s side; we had also been owned. I was a product of both oppressor and the oppressed, and it seemed, if anything, a little bit beautiful that Noug and Deedaddy could, in the wake of history, love each other so for more than 60 years.

Reversed images

I am in Sears, buying presents for a little old lady. Noug has left me with a lifelong affection for them, and I try to adopt one every Christmas. This year, my lady wants Skechers — “no boring colors!” — and a coffee maker.

I take the presents to the register.

“You didn’t want the scarf?’ she says.

“What scarf?” I ask.

“The blue scarf you — you were just here with a scarf?”

“That wasn’t me. I just have one of those faces.” She looks puzzled, almost as if she disbelieves me. “I’m very Irish,” I add. “I look exactly like every other potato famine refugee in Georgia, and there are a lot of us. Don’t worry about it.”

Now she’s tickled, so much so she starts laughing out loud.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “But are you telling me that y’all all look alike?”

Now I am laughing, too. She has what’s considered a dark complexion in America, and I am a pale, white person. We are reversed images, each with a little of the other in our blood. Not enough to show, but I know it is there.

It makes me think about Noug’s grandmother. I imagine her, a long ago slave. I don’t know the name she was given, or if she had another name, in secret. She was a line in someone’s ledger, tallied up along with their cows and acreage. Someone owned her body, and they believed they had all rights to that body. Someone put a baby in it. A baby that was pale enough to pass.

I go home, and for the first time, I wonder what that baby had to give up, to wrap her own descendants — to wrap me — in this skin that comes with so much opportunity and privilege. Her identity? Her history? Perhaps contact with family and beloved former communities?

“When you were growing up, did your family know?” I ask my dad.

“Oh, sure.” He tells me about one of Noug’s brothers who always had to keep his hair cropped close because it tattled on him.

“So, did everyone know? Like in town, was it one of those not-secret secrets.”

My father, who grew up in a different time, looks at me with wise, sad eyes. “No, honey. No one outside the family knew. That would have been … We didn’t speak about it.”

Then I am remembering the night we all played hide and seek at the outdoor mall. I think about what it might have been like, if Noug’s grandmother had done things differently. If in a post-emancipation world, she had been free enough to be herself. I know the statistics. White people and black people both do drugs, but the black people are much more likely to be arrested for it, and much more likely to go prison once arrested, and much less likely to find a judge of any shade or age or gender or political affiliation who will look at them and say, “You deserve a second chance.”

I think about the money, too. My parents sent me right back to college. Tate’s well-off family could pay for lawyers, therapy. Now Tate and I are both deep into our 40s, and I have found her again. She lives out West, clean, but still a hippie girl. She grows organic tomatoes and plays guitar like she was born to do it. We both got so many second chances, and here we are, living our connected, loving, sustainable, small lives. We are friends on Facebook.

Tate and I had ropes around us. We ran as hard as we could for the edge of the world, but we were pulled back by the privilege and loving families that Melissa lacked. I think of Noug’s grandmother and her choices, and my family’s financial security and the way my daughter’s hair curls up into irrepressible ringlets.

“She’s going to have a devil of a time blowing that out when she gets older,” a woman in line at the post office once told me.

“Why would she ever do that?” I asked. Her curls are her glory.

“No one is going to take her serious with hair like that,” the woman said. She was a light-skinned black woman, and her hair looked like my daughter’s.

Power of story

In my classroom now, we are workshopping creative nonfiction. I move from group to group, listening, putting in a word here and there. My job is mostly to bring tools and make room for my students to find their own voices, and then get out of their way. I believe writing your own story is redemptive; it makes us practice empathy. I think empathy makes us live more kindly and gently in this hard world.

Dee reads a story from her childhood aloud. In it, she is robbing a Salvation Army donation station with her mother. Tiny Dee is down deep in the storage container, passing up items, when the cops appear. Dee knows to be quiet, and her mother pretends she is dropping things off instead of taking them. The police help her deposit the items in the receptacle, burying Dee in old clothes and shoes. Dee hears her mother leave and she feels herself sinking, drowning in a swamp of hand-me-downs. Later, her mother sneaks back, unearths her and pulls her out. She holds Dee, rocking and crooning apologies. You’ll never have to do this again, she promises. Dee looks at the receptacle. It is a grinning monster that knows this is a lie.

It’s an excellent story, beautifully written. It is a true thing I know about Dee, though I do not know how she came to be in prison. Maybe one day that will be in a story, but it is already overshadowed by the time I’ve spent here with her in this classroom. She is more to me than the thing she did to land here. And really, I don’t need to know why she is here.

I know why I am here. It is enough.