Random Family

Coco clings to her community on her mother’s block, even after spending months at Thorpe House. She visits Foxy, her mother, five or six times a week, and runs errands on her block—in a cumbersome manner—rather than getting them done easily near the House. Coco likes the nuns that run the house, although she does begrudge their constantly-monitoring presence. Coco has also made friends with the two other Puerto Rican women in the House, Jezel and Mauritza. Jezel has also struck up a prison romance with Tito.

Milagros begins to think about moving herself, Kevin, and Jessica’s children upstate: Kevin’s mother, who is due for release, is making noise about taking Kevin back, and Milagros has been using coke too much. She floats the idea of moving to Coco’s, who rebuffs the idea, although a seed is planted in Coco’s mind.

Coco excels at life at Thorpe House, almost in spite of herself: she loves the games during parent-child recreation, aces apartment inspections, and throws herself into role-plays during drama. She lives for Cesar’s letters. When Cesar has good news, he addresses her with his surname: Coco Santos. Letters addressed to her with her surname, Coco Rodriguez, do not bode well. She also transcribes letters for Cesar’s incarcerated friends, which he sends to her for forwarding. She ruminates, thinking that Cesar’s life in prison is easier and more fun than her own.

One afternoon, Cesar is transferred to New York City by chance, and Coco can forego all of the logistical maneuvering usually required in order to visit him. During their visit, Cesar is cold, and cruelly teases Mercedes by taking Nikki in his lap and telling Mercedes that he doesn’t love her anymore. He also lies to Nikki, assuring her that he is her father when she asks.The prison also threatens and antagonizes the female visitors, promising jail time and invasive body searches in order to discourage the exchange of contraband. Coco tells Cesar that Roxanne will not allow her to see her child, although Mercedes wants to meet her sister. Cesar mocks Coco’s name choice of Nautica for their unborn child. A couple next to them push the limits of visitation rules by kissing and feeling each other up, while Cesar remains withholding. He seems to be more interested in Rocco, who is also in the visiting room—he and Cesar are being charged with a mugging.

Shortly thereafter, Cesar sends Coco a letter. His mugging charge has been dismissed, and he has returned to Coxsackie. He tells her that he must have a baby son no matter what, and that if Coco cannot give him a boy, he will have one by someone else—although not Roxanne, who has vowed never to have any more of his children. He also asks Coco to find a woman named Whitney, who is rumored to have his child. The child is said to look exactly like Mercedes. This letter leaves Coco distraught. She weeps. 

It is September 1993. Lourdes dresses like a schoolgirl to go to prison to see Cesar;her outfit is possibly an attempt to stave off her hatred of prisons. Her arm is in a sling. She claims that she got injured when she dove in front of a bullet for her boyfriend, Domingo, who was supposedly in the process of intervening on a domestic dispute between Elaine and Angel.

Lourdes, Coco, and Mercedes brave the tedious and demoralizing prison visitor process, and Cesar makes it to the visiting room. Cesar has heard an alternate and truer version of the story surrounding Lourdes’s injury: Domingo beat Lourdes for stealing his drugs. A shootout between Angel, Elaine’s husband, and Domingo ensued. Domingo threatened Robert when he went to retrieve Lourdes’s belongings. Elaine called the police, and Domingo landed in jail for carrying an unlicensed gun. Cesar sees this problem as his to fix, even from jail. He has already sent word to Rocco, who is out of jail. Cesar tells Lourdes that the next time Domingo beats her, she may end up dead. Lourdes grudgingly admits to him that she has already bailed Domingo out and returned to him. Cesar informs Lourdes that he will arrange for every bone in Domingo’s body to be broken, as retribution.

The family spends the day in the visiting room, engaging in meandering conversation while snack wrappers pile on the table. Cesar confesses that he has tried heroin, out of sheer boredom. This devastates Coco, as Cesar used to condemn every drug except marijuana.

Cesar teases Mercedes with the last piece of Starburst candy. His teasing mirrors “the pulse of Cesar’s neighborhood: the bid for attention, the undercurrent of hostility for so many small needs ignored and unmet, the pleasure of holding power, camouflaged in teasing, the rush of love” (162). Then, the fleeting moment ends, and Cesar’s family leaves him for the outside world. On the way home, Lourdes expresses resentment at Cesar’s controlling and paternalistic attitude toward her and her decision to stay with Domingo.

LeBlanc tells us that Cesar’s friends and girlfriends admire him for his loyalty. He is brutally honest and can be hurtful, but this makes him trustworthy “in a world with a high tolerance for obfuscation and ducking and lies” (163). He makes it clear that he desires a wife to help him through his sentence, one who is attractive enough and committed to performing her wifely duties of providing moral support, sex in trailers, putting money in his commissary, and regularly bringing his children to visit.

While Coco unflaggingly wants Cesar to want her, she is unsure that she is both willing and able to meet Cesar’s demands. She vents her doubts by carrying out full-on verbal conversations with Cesar’s letters, and also by confiding in her mother. She cannot shake Cesar’s prior remark that he tells her he loves her as an empty gesture aimed merely at making her feel good, and this colors his declarations of love from jail. She is pleased that Cesar is honest with her about his other girls—Roxanne and Lizette—but she wouldn’t be able to stand Cesar having other women if they were to get married. He also is very self-absorbed and does nothing to assure her that she is pretty and desired. She also resents the fact that Cesar seems to save his fatherly love for a son who does not yet exist, to the detriment of his daughters, and she dreads the possibility of having a son who might end up like his father, and who wouldtherefore subject her to the pain that Lourdes currently endures.

For a time, Cesar is housed in the same prison as his father (Rikers), and he arranges for Mercedes to meet his father. Coco takes Mercedes to Rikers, where Mercedes sits on her grandfather’s lap. Jessica hears about this meeting and chastises Coco for putting Mercedes at risk, as Cesar’s father is the man who abused Jessica when she was a young girl. Coco sympathizes with Jessica’s feelings, but also brushes them off: she rationalizes that the man wouldn’t dare make a false move while sitting right next to Mercedes’s mother.

Coco gives birth to a girl: Nautica Cynthia Santos. The baby provides focus for the family. Hernan, Foxy’s boyfriend, throws a party. Foxy attends it without slinking off to get high. Foxy and Hernan later deliver a refurbished crib to Coco, and Iris promises to use her money from a lawsuit in order to buy Nautica a new stroller.

After the birth of the baby, Coco is afforded fewer special privileges at Thorpe House. The birth of the baby also frees her to indulge in more rebellious tendencies: she dyes her hair blonde, gets a nose piercing, and sets her sights on both going dancing and scoping out new boys. She also boldly insults Cesar in front of Mercedes, although Mercedes remains loyal to Cesar, and does not like her mother’s attitude change. Coco also tears down all of the awards she has received through participation in programs at Thorpe House and replaces them with photographs of Cesar. She begins missing curfew, skips several house meetings, and has points deducted during her apartment check, for violations. Sister Christine becomes concerned about the ways that Coco’s performance is slipping: “the Thorpe House nuns [know] that the viability of Coco and her family [depends] on her ability to maintain consistency in the little things” (169). 

Coco has an anticlimactic birthday, which falls on Thanksgiving. Her old neighborhood friends, who had promised to come through for her celebration, end up not showing up. She bounces from friend to friend looking for someone to celebrate with, and eventually ends up at Lourdes’s place.

Lourdes is living with Domingo in an illegal, makeshift apartment that is sandwiched between two legitimate units. The power for the unit is siphoned off from the next-door unit; however, today, it is off. Domingo works full-time at Hunts Point, unloading vegetables from trailer trucks, and also deals drugs on the side. As a recent immigrant from the Dominican Republic, he sees Mount Hope as a temporary holdover, and Lourdes as “a lover-mother who [is] becoming more burdensome than useful” (172). Lourdes regularly feigns pregnancy and subsequent miscarriages in order to keep him around. Lourdes is also pretending that she has filed a lawsuit as a result of her injured arm and promises to give Coco a church wedding when the supposed money comes through. She also sings the birthday song to Coco, in an effort to console her, and promises that Domingo will buy Coco a winter coat, a luxury that Coco has not had in years.

She then goes to a party called The Fever with her friend, Terry. The party is held in the basement of a crumbling building close to where Mighty was killed. The two young women then go back to Thorpe House, and LeBlanc reprints Coco’s poignant and heartfelt list of things she is thankful for, which has been posted alongside the lists of the house’s other occupants. LeBlanc also reveals that a lot of brand-new, single-family homes have gone up right next to Coco’s building, ostensibly to improve the neighborhood. The families that live there, however, keep to themselves, and the inaccessibility of the houses and the lifestyle which they represent actually serves to demoralize Coco and those like her. Coco finishes her birthday at 5a.m., feeling old and exhausted.

Cesar, who has been transferred upstate, does not call Coco for her birthday. However, he writes her a long letter, in which he reminds Coco that she has promised to give him a son. He also accepts Nikki, blaming himself for Coco’s infidelity, and professes his devotion to Coco: his other women have abandoned him, while she has stayed loyal. His one request is for her to keep her anxious habit of picking her face in check, and he tells her that he misses her dearly. This letter makes Coco’s sad birthday her best yet.

At Foxy’s prodding, Coco gets Nautica’s ears pierced, so that the baby will no longer be mistaken for a boy. Coco procures the money for the piercing from her gruff older brother, Manuel. Manuel has a fourteen-year-old, beautiful, and pregnant girlfriend named Yasmin.

LeBlanc intimates that Christmastime heightens the ghetto’s mandate to buy things, which always puts everyone on edge. Similarly, inmates in prison, starved for resources, experience high stress and anxiety during Christmas. Jessica has crocheted hats and scarves for all of the children in her family but has no money to send them out. She knocks herself out with prescription pills as a result. Cesar gets into a prison yard fight with a Muslim man, and spends Christmas Eve in room confinement, awaiting his transfer farther upstate, to an isolation unit. Coco, in the meantime, decorates her room festively for the holiday. Her children receive many donated gifts, care of Thorpe House, and Coco proudly snaps pictures of her girls next to the Christmas tree. However, instead of paying her debts to a store named Dayland, she displays her habitual self-defeating generosity by buying gifts for everyone in her extended family.

Not long after this, Coco confesses, via a letter to Cesar, that she has been writing to her old puppy love Wishman. Cesar knows that letter-writing is not only a way for inmates to cultivate a connection to the outside world, but also opens up the possibilities for real romantic relationships. He, for his own part, has been cultivating a precious letter-based friendship with his former fling Giselle, who has become his confidante. Giselle’s looks remind Cesar of Jessica, and her commitment to grooming herself and caring for her appearanceis a sharp contrast to Coco’s inability to stop picking her face. Giselle, however, urges Cesar to be patient with Coco, as she knows that it is not easy to raise two children as a single mother (she can barely handle her one child, even with help from her family).

Wishman reports to Coco that the federal charges against him have been dropped, and Cesar figures that Wishman must be lining Coco up as a post-prison prospect. Coco has mailed Wishman photographs of herself without telling Cesar. Cesar begins to feel more like he is monitoring a wayward child in his relationship with Coco, rather than corresponding with a future wife. However, with Giselle’s influence, Cesar ends the year optimistically, reflecting that he only has seven—not nine—years left of his sentence. 

On a sluggish afternoon at Thorpe House, Coco receives an unexpected phone call from Jessica. When Coco tells Jessica that Mercedes is persistently mixing up a dream that Cesar was home with reality, Jessica counsels Coco. She tells Coco to place a glass half full of water under the bed, directly beneath Mercedes’s pillow.

Coco gets a tattoo of a heart bearing a ribbon which reads “Coco Loves Cesar” on her thigh. A man named Spider, who learned the tattoo trade in prison, gives Coco the tattoo. Mercedes and Nikki watch the process. They become upset when Coco begins crying due to the pain. Foxy, and Richie, Coco’s stepfather, also pop in to watch parts of the tattoo process. Manuel chastises Coco, asking her what will happen if she and Cesar break up. Coco’s rejoinder is that any new man will simply have to accept that Cesar is a part of her. Coco looks forward to summer days flaunting the tattoo in front of all of Cesar’s old exploits.

Cesar is transferred to Southport, in order to endure his solitary confinement, a punishment for his Christmas Eve fight. He and Coco split up and then get back together several times.

Coco’s new GED tutor helps her with various academic subjects; being “good at strong beginnings and lousy on follow-through,” however, she misses several sessions (187). 

Coco, Mercedes, and Nautica use a bus, called Prison Gap, in order to visit Cesar in Southport. Coco, knowing that Cesar is not doing very well, has prudently decided to leave Nikki at home. LeBlanc states that prison buses to men’s facilities are more regular than those to women’s facilities. Jessica, therefore, has a harder time getting visits than Cesar does. The buses create camaraderie and community among the women who visit inmates, although some bus rides are full of conflict, including dueling girlfriends, drunkards, and rude bus staffers. Coco’s ride, however, is pleasant. The staff is warm, and the other women on the bus are friendly. The women are careful to groom themselves prior to arriving at the prison, in order to make the most of their visiting time. When they arrive at the prison after a grueling six hours, a woman warns Coco that Cesar will appear behind bars: she will only be able to touch his hands. Coco’s eyes fill with tears.

Mercedes is almost four years old by this time. With her blonde hair full of perfect Shirley Temple curls, she is initially boisterous during the visit. However, when she glimpses her father, who can barely move due to the shackles which encircle his wrists, ankles, and waist, she grows panicked. She commands him to remove his chains and play patty cake with her. Cesar sadly and resolutely tells her that he cannot. Mercedes, somehow sensing the gravity of the moment, brightens her mood and consoles her father, telling him that she will soon get bunk beds, and that Cesar can join her in the top bunk, and take bubble baths.

Cesar, angry at Coco for the fresh spate of red marks on her cheek that betray her continuing habit of picking her face, does not speak to Coco until the end of the visit. He busies himself with the girls, and the food that Coco brings to him. The solitary confinement is breaking him: he is only allowed three hours of exercise in the prison yard a week, three showers a week (which offends his fastidiously clean sensibilities), he cannot read any books or keep any photographs, and he has begun to suffer anxiety attacks.

Finally, he touches Coco’s hands, and the physical contact precipitates a wellspring of emotion on both ends. She tells him that she now knows all about the preparations to make for conjugal trailers, and that she has been learning new things through watching porn. He confesses that he wants a real life with Coco, in which they express their love not only through sex but also by making each other happy. Shortly after the visit, Cesar tells Coco to limit their daughters’ visits to Southport: he “doesn’t want them to see him caged any more than necessary” (194).

Coco visits Lourdes with Mercedes and Nikki. When Mercedes asks Lourdes about her injured arm, Lourdes’s mischievous replies are meant to hook Domingo, who stands nearby, into the conversation. Coco is uncomfortable with this; she sees that Mercedes is asked to carry burdens beyond her years, much like Little Star, and desires for Mercedes to be a child as long as she can.

Come winter, Coco has finally received her preliminary acceptance for placement in public housing. Wishman is released from prison and comes to visit Coco at Thorpe House. The other women remark about his good looks. Coco is soon pregnant by Wishman, although Wishman has already taken up with another girl, who is a virgin.

Cesar learns of Coco’s pregnancyand writes to Foxy asking her to persuade Coco to get an abortion. When Coco keeps the baby, it is the death blow to her relationship with Cesar. She sets her sights on trying to tease out a commitment from Wishman, whom she sees as having potential as a caring husband. Coco wishes that she could seek Jessica’s counsel. 

In March of 1994, Jessica requests a transfer to a facility nearer to the Bronx. It has become clear that Lourdes will never move to Florida. She lands in a maximum-security prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Simultaneously, Milagros is packing to move upstate.

Jessica has struck up a romance with a Dominican guard named Ernesto Torres. Sexual liaisons between guards and inmates are commonplace, as both groups of people are unbearably bored. Torres is uncharacteristically kind and fair to the inmates, without expecting anything in return. He mostly leaves the women to their own devices, rather than berating them or enforcing the rules. He is handsome, too, with a tiny gold hoop earring and an uncanny resemblance to Boy George, save for his slicked back ponytail. When Lourdes breaks a promise to bring Jessica’s children for Family Day (Jessica has not seen Little Star in more than a year, and she hasn’t seen the twins for three), Torres sends the girls care packages that Jessica has prepared well in advance on Jessica’s behalf. He even tosses in goodies from the outside world: candy, a VHS tape of Jurassic Park, and a bottle of perfume for Little Star. Jessica is touched by his kindness. Although Torres is in a marriage (which he professes to be an unhappy one), Jessica reads his kindness as the marks of real, deep feeling.

Jessica appeals to Amazon, an inmate who practices Santeria, for help with prodding the romance along. Together, Jessica and Amazon stick a piece of paper with Torres’s name inside the core of an apple, topped off with honey. Jessica sticks the concoction into Torres’s locker. He tosses the core away, initially dismissing it as “voodoo.” LeBlanc reveals that he will later come to view Jessica as a temptress God sent to him, and that his failure to resist her placed him under the devil’s spell. 

Jessica develops a friendship with a young Brazilian inmate named Player, who also cultivates a crush on a correctional officer. Player and Jessica become roommates, and, together, they fantasize about their men. Torres gives Jessica Women’s Worth, a self-help book. She interprets this gesture as “a sign that he [wants] to help her become the woman she could be” (202). She soon writes to Serena, promising a new life for the girl with her new man upon her release, away from the Bronx and “somewhere happy,” instead (203). Serena becomes anxious, as she does not want to leave her siblings, and Milagros rebukes Jessica for “filling the head of a nine-year-old with such plans” (203). 

Coco learns that Cesar has been courting Roxanne all along, and that he has also been writing to Giselle, Lizette, and several other girls.

Coco plans to move to an apartment renovated through the Special Initiative Program (SIP). In SIP buildings, there are social workers available to help residents keep their lives on track. Her other options are Section 8, “a federal rent-voucher program that [pays] the difference between 30 percent of a poor family’s income and the fair market rent”, or the projects, where the housing authority pays for gas and electricity (205). Sister Christine steers Coco to the SIP-renovated apartment. When Coco sees the bright, well-kept place, which is next to a park where her girls could play, Coco becomes elated. Her excitement attracts the jealousy and sabotage of the House’s other residents. After being fed misinformation about the apartment and getting into a fight with a fellow resident who is also pregnant, which incurs threats of violence from the resident’s girlfriend, Coco cuts and runs. She flees to Foxy’s, cancels her arrangements with SIP, requests a Section 8 voucher, and moves into the first apartment she sees, despite that the building is a hub of drug activity, rat-infested, and decrepit. The dangers she faces are familiar, but this time, she is surrounded by strangers, which makes her situation more precarious. By the summer of 1994, Coco has fled to the comparative safety of Foxy’s home. She left a year and a half earlier and is now right back where she started, and pregnant again.

On July 1, 1994, Coco’s brother Manuel’s girlfriend, Yasmin, gives birth to a baby boy. Coco relocates back to her Section 8 apartment, with Wishman’s two younger sisters, Hector’s gaunt friend, Weebo, and Weebo’s girlfriend, Lacey, in tow. Due to Weebo’s violent temper, Weebo and Lacey often fight, and LeBlanc reveals that Coco always intervenes on any physical fights that she sees, even if they are between strangers. She attributes this to her memory of being publicly assaulted by Wishman in the past, and the fact that no one came to her aid.

Coco sleeps with a dull kitchen knife next to her bed, which is a habit she learned from her mother, who feared her father. One night, intruders try to enter her window. In a panic, Coco pushes the mattress up against the window, and the intruders laugh—they could easily still make their way in—but they retreat nonetheless.

At the end of August, Coco’s brother, Hector, welcomes a baby boy by his girlfriend Iris (not to be confused with Coco’s sister Iris). Coco also has a rendezvous with Wishman, in which they make love three times. Coco will later wonder whether Wishman was trying to kill the baby. After the intercourse, Coco begins hemorrhaging blood. She gives birth to a tiny, sickly premature baby, whom she names Ruby Diamond Pearl. She laments the fact that her child looks like a “crack baby,” and rumors swirl about both her and Wishman’s possible involvement with drugs.

While Pearl is still in the hospital, Coco makes arrangements to move upstate. She scribbles down her goals, which include giving her daughters the world, so that they do not end up like her. Then, she gets a tattoo which reads: “Mercedes, Nikki, Nautica, Pearl. My four Pride & Joys.”