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“rageragerageragerage ”

by edna togba

We all get a little crazy sometimes. It’s just a question of those who know how to control it and those who don’t.

My friend’s mother worked as a security guard for the Cook County Jail in Chicago. Sunday mornings, while my friend and I waited for her to finish spraying perfume before we left for church, she told us stories about what had happened at work the night before.

Usually she worked in the normal jail, but sometimes she worked in the maximum-security section for women. There wasn’t much excitement except for when a new inmate was brought in. That’s when everyone would get a little more rowdy, and the prisoners who were usually quietly crazy in their cells began to get excited and “act out”-banging their heads against walls, shrieking uncontrollably, committing bodily harm. This is exactly how the inmates did not act the night when the guards brought in a mother for killing her son in an attempt to exorcise the devil supposedly possessing his body.

About a week earlier, the mangled-body of a three year-olds body was being described all over the news. Authorities in Chicago described the case as one of “the most tragic moment in child services up-to-date.” A mother had lynched her little boy. The police had to cut down his broken body from a rod in the closet.

When asked why she had done this she muttered something about trying to “get the devil out of him.” She was declared crazy at the trial and ended up at the Cook County Jail where my friend’s mother, who is a God-fearing woman, said she had looked in the face of the devil when they brought the mother into the facilities.

My friend’s mother said that everyone had heard about how crazy and possessed this woman was supposed to be. She explained that usually in jails, child-molesters and child-abusers suffer at the hands of their fellow inmates. Some men get very painfully castrated, against their wills. Others are harassed and abused on such a daily basis that they end up committing suicide. Some call this prison justice.

This is not what happened though with the mother. No one harassed her and no one tried to beat her up. Everyone was much too afraid. Her appearance, my friend’s mother explained, was one of a crazy-woman-sputtering and spitting with open lacerations on her face, wild eyes that never focused but just glazed over especially when she yelled out nonsense, which was often.

She ended up hanging herself, just as she had hung her son. My friend’s mother said that they had to cut her body down from the ceiling in her jail room. The exact details of her death were a little hazy but no one wanted to go into further investigation. Many people have said that she deserved what she got. Not the same kind of prison justice most inmates received but close enough, my mother’s friend said.

I remembered all of this Friday afternoon while reading an article about a little boy who had been killed in East Harlem the day before. Lately, I’ve realized that I haven’t been as emotional about news articles as I used to be. I remember, going to work at the bank in the morning, reading the paper and having coffee in the break room with everyone else and having to excuse myself to go to the bathroom in order to cry the way that I couldn’t in front of my boss. I had to do the same thing Friday while having a late-lunch in the campus center. I went to the bathroom and closed the stall door and hoped that no one would hear me.

In the Friday’s New York Times, the article said that a boyfriend had killed his girlfriend’s little son. It was an accident. While taking a nap, the little one tried to wake the 20 year-old boyfriend from a nap. The 20 year-old didn’t know who/what was tapping him and in his hazy and violent awakening, he struck out and hit the little one. With so much force that the impact of the little boy’s body crashing against the wall caused such severe internal trauma that he died shortly after.

It’s horrible to think about these things. Sometimes there isn’t anything to say. People are crazy and sometimes not so crazy but it does seem like that craziness is in all of us. Sometimes the craziness is controlled. Sometimes it is not. That rage which causes someone to violently swap at a little kid is not any different than the rage that caused the woman to beat the living hell out of her little son. The woman’s rage seems to be an exaggeration with nothing in common with you and I.

Not at all like the boyfriend/girlfriend who is verbally violent or the way that I’ve seen some people desperately pour alcohol down their throats as though it was their life source. The woman isn’t like the fiction that people like Denis Johnson or Allen Ginsberg create while on drugs or the paintings that are done in the moments of extreme intoxication.

Someone said that you have to crazy or depressed to make good art. What I think they are saying is that you have to have some kind of rage/passion in you that you can translate into an expression. An expression which is emotionally useful or pleasing to experience. Maybe even beautiful. But never should that expression be life taking. Rage should be transformed into a new experience, giving new life.

That woman who killed her little boy and the boyfriend who killed someone else’s son did not know how to control their rage. Some of you reading this column probably do not know how to control the anger inside of you. I think that rage and passion and anger can be used to create something. That’s what I’m trying to do anyway.