Revive the Archive: Jennifer Browning’s “Waitin’” (2001)

Revive the Archive is a series that showcases student works from The York Review’s extensive archive. These student works will vary each week of the series, ranging from pieces of writing to pieces of artwork.

Estoy esperando. I’m waiting.

From 2001, this next piece is by Jennifer Browning and entitled “Waitin.’” About an individual’s life behind bars, awaiting the death penalty, it is eerily relevant today, as prisons continue to overflow with women and men from all walks of life. Texas is the setting, perhaps near the U.S.-Mexico border. With a family outside of the prison, the speaker is perhaps also waiting, in vain, to be a spouse and parent once more. The speaker’s precise crime is unknown to us, but they do reference some particularly gruesome events as examples of what they did not do. I’ll expand a bit on two of those references, though many readers need no context.

In 1996, brothers Joseph Lyle Menéndez and Erik Galen Menéndez were convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The victims were their wealthy parents, Jose and Kitty, who’d been watching TV in their Beverly Hills home. The sentence, for each Menéndez brother, was life without parole. Earlier this year, Lyle was moved to Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility outside San Diego, reuniting with his younger brother after over two decades of being apart.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold committed suicide in the library of Columbine High School. They had just murdered 13 individuals — 12 students and a teacher — and wounded 24 others. At the time, it was the deadliest school massacre in U.S. history.

Browning was published in 2001. The children born around then obviously weren’t poring over the newly released volume of The York Review, but they are young adults now, whose lives have been framed by bloodshed. They, too, see this country’s ongoing struggle to define criminal justice — it’s a vindictive system in operation, discriminating especially against people of color and immigrants. The Federal Death Penalty Act in 1994 expanded capital punishment to dozens of crimes. It is technically available for even drug traffickers, though it is not really applied and may be unconstitutional. Our current president is dead set on building a wall to keep out “stone cold criminals.” The Bureau of Prisons is making it more and more difficult for inmates to receive much-needed psychiatric care.

“Not sure I’m human anymore,” the speaker of this poem admits. We take our freedom for granted. Fortunately, there are visionaries at work right now, seeking to reform the prison system through writing, art, education, and activism. Rapper Meek Mill, whose video op-ed “Prisoners Deserve a New Set of Rights” was recently released, reminds us of the perpetuation of seemingly distant injustices: “The plantation and the prison are no different.”

Walidah Imarisha, the author of Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption, is another such visionary — acutely aware of the troubling realities, determined to expose them and thus bring healing for entire communities. She writes, “There was a time I believed prisons existed to rehabilitate people, to make our communities safer. When I saw for the first time (but not the last) a mother sobbing and clutching her son when visiting hours were up, only to be physically pried off and escorted out by guards, I knew nothing about that made me safer. This is the heart of this country’s prison system. And the prison system has become the heart of America.”

Time is precious for the speaker of Browning’s poem in limbo. But, ultimately, a person does not have to be incarcerated to feel their humanity slipping away.

“Waitin’”

I wait

Alone

I’m sittin’ in this small, dark room.

Down the hall a toilet flushes

Feet wearin’ slippers shuffle

round and round the little cell.

The big clock,

across the way, on the wall

ticks off every second.

They’ve always ticked so slow,

now’s it seems real real fast.

Time is slippin’ away

Far away from me.

I sit on the edge of my bunk

Fingerin’ the picture

My girl and my baby, mi pequenc bebé

Ripped and yellow it is

round the edges.

I’m just waitin’. All alone.

Not sure I’m human anymore

Been a long, long time.

Every day’s so depressin’

Men just kill themselves,

I wait to die, para morir.

I don’t got a watch

but I don’t need one.

My last meal is settled

In my belly.

Summer’s gone

so Texas air gits cool at night.

Noises from outside is more quiet now.

I can sense the time.

I’m just waitin, el esparar.

The hallway talkin’ gits silent

when we hear the boots echo.

I wait.

The photo in my pocket,

I stand up and face the bars.

Waiting. Esparar.

Before I asked, “Why me? Por qué yo?

What’d I do?”

I been readin’ books and mag’zines.

I’m no Albert Fish

I didn’t eat nobody

I ain’t like those Menendez hombres

I wouldn’t never shoot my parents,

Don’t even know where they is now.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold

they’s already dead.

They don’t gotta suffer.

Not like me.

Why do I hafta rot in here?

Six years of waitin’.

Now’s I know,

no more questions.

“To everything there is a season,

And a time to every purpose under the heaven

A time to be born,

And a time to die…”

I’m waitin’ to die. Estoy esperando.

My arms locked behind me

Guards on either side

I start to walk and walk

and walk

It’s a long walk

Recorrer y el recorrer

but it ain’t long enough.

Too soon I’m done walkin’.

Time to sit down,

for the last time.

The wait is over.

El dios de mayo tiene misericordia en mi alma.