If Nuns Ruled the World (14 page)

“I am not comparing myself to Jesus. I try to follow the Gospel and live the Gospel. But I do believe that on some level I took my place on what I refer to as a modern-day cross. I see the world with new eyes.”

8.

I Want to Run a Laundromat Before I Die

If we really believe in the resurrection, then we have
to believe in second chances. Nobody comes out of prison saying,
“Wow, I really hope I screw up again.”

—Sister Tesa Fitzgerald

I
l
ove going to prison,” Sister Tesa Fitzgerald told me as we strolled down Twelfth Street and onto Thirty-Seventh Avenue in Long Island City, Queens. “You can taste the hope in the prisons. The women are appreciative and welcoming. You get a real sense that people are working to change their lives.”

Everyone for a ten-block radius knew Sister Tesa. They belted out, “Hey Sister T!” and in turn she would greet them by name with bear hugs. Even the neighborhood stray cats curled themselves around her legs as she walked with a measured gait. She knew their names too. Sister Tesa is the honorary mayor of this neighborhood just a half mile inland from the East River, tucked behind the red-and-white striped smokestacks of the Con Edison power plant.

This is Hour Children territory, Sister Tesa's nonprofit dedicated to helping moms connect with their kids while they serve time in prison and then aiding them in the rebuilding of their lives and families when they are back on the outside. The name “Hour Children” comes from the fact that jailed mothers get only an hour at a time to visit with their kids.

We stopped to greet one of Sister Tesa's employees on the street. Almost everyone who works for her, in her hair salon, her food bank, and her thrift shops, is a former felon. Sister Tesa shuttles back and forth between her home and office in Long Island City to prisons in upstate New York on a weekly basis. The outpouring of love for Sister T is the same at the prisons, where the guards all know her name. The inmates cheer when she walks down the corridor, pressing notes of gratitude into her hands.

She cries with the women who don't know whether their kids will want to see them or speak to them again. When babies are born in the prison, Sister Tesa is the one who takes them out of its walls for the first time and she raises them as her own until the women are released.

Sister Tesa works with an annual budget of $3.6 million—a mixture of grants, donations, and government funding she refers to with a growly laugh as “grant stew”—and she is adamant that it is never enough. With that money the Hour Children staff and an army of volunteers run five communal homes, where former felons can live with their children once they are released. From prison halls to the outside, they are a full-service operation. Over the past twenty-five years, Hour Children has provided help to more than nine thousand mothers and raised thousands of children. Sister Tesa starts as an advocate in the prison, providing counseling to get the women ready for the real world. Once they are released, she takes care of everything and anything that could be a stumbling block for these women, from finding affordable housing to securing a job, finding the right doctors, and obtaining the right medication. No detail of a woman's life is overlooked. They are given clothes, taken to the salon, and taught computer skills and even office manners.

The difference Hour Children makes is clear. More than 29 percent of New York State's female ex-convicts are eventually rearrested. For women taken in by Hour Children, that number drops to 3 percent.

Sister Tesa's office is always cluttered, but during the holiday season it is packed with toys, bikes with training wheels, Barbie dolls, video games, and the odd Rainbow Loom—all for the kids in the program. The walls are a panorama of photographs of children, ranging from wallet-size to eight-by-tens. There are girls in dance costumes, boys smiling with gaps in their teeth, high school graduates, and babies—so many babies.

“They're all my babies,” Sister Tesa told me in her thick Long Island accent that waxes and wanes depending on whom she is talking to. Put her in front of a local politician and she drops almost all of her
r
's and
g
's. This mix of babies—black, white, Latino—belongs to the prisoners who have gone through her programs. The photos trip over one another, and as I gazed at the wall, she named each child and told their story. Julia, just eight years old in her photo, has since gone to college at the University of Vermont and lives in New Jersey where she is now “engaged to a wonderful man.” Cyrus is a handful, but he just got the best report card in his class. All over the room are Catholic tchotchkes, including a candy jar in the shape of a nun that reads
heavenly habit,
and a small sculpture of two nuns in full conservative dress wearing sunglasses and riding a motorcycle. The inscription reads,
if you follow all the rules, you miss all the fun.

“Isn't that the truth?” Sister Tesa said with a laugh when she noticed I was reading it. “We break the rules all the time.” Two cats purred at her feet. Richie, the gray one, and Romy, the black one. They could have fit into a teacup when one of Sister Tesa's volunteers gave them to her eight years ago. Now they live the life, each with his own wicker bed at opposite ends of the nun's office. They drink out of a fishbowl that has no fish. “They're my partners,” Sister Tesa told me, reaching down and stroking Richie's back. They're always here and they're part of the action. Everyone associates me with them and them with me.”

The furniture in the office is all secondhand. “I barely ever buy anything,” she announced proudly, running her hand over her desk. The Hour Children empire includes three thrift shops in Queens, all staffed by former felons and filled wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with inventory. Everything from a white baby grand piano to a sheared beaver cape to an armoire believed to be from Brittany in France is there looking for a new home.

The largest of the stores used to be a nightclub called Studio 34, which some of the neighbors described as “hell on earth.” Sister Tesa noticed a For Rent sign at the closed club while she was on one of her walks around the neighborhood, on a hunt for a bagful of her favorite samosas. She made a good deal with the landlord of the defunct club and turned it into a new revenue stream.

“We needed to get rid of four bars, a dance floor, and a lot of questionable rooms in the basement,” Sister Tesa told me about gutting the old hotspot. “I don't want to know what they did down there in that basement.” She gave me a very knowing look to indicate she knew exactly what was going on in that basement. When it was finished, every square inch was used to move secondhand loot. Maximizing value is Sister Tesa's forte. Everything she wears and everything she lives with has been donated. Her stores also clothe all of the women and their children, including her thrift store manager Luz De Leon, who met Sister Tesa while serving ten years in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for manslaughter.

“Tesa is a smart cookie,” Luz confided to me in a conspiratorial tone. “She taught us all how to sell anything.” She taught her well. Luz managed to sell me that sheared beaver cape the first time that we met.

Prisoners are released without any clothes. Sister Tesa's women don't have pajamas to sleep in or suits for interviews. “We have anything they need,” Sister Tesa said gleefully, rummaging through the shelves of the shop. “We have sweaters and suits and coats. At any given time we have twenty strollers. And we have bling,” she said with delight. “Everyone wants some bling.” She pressed a sparkly necklace into my hands. “It's only five dollars. You should buy it.”

Sister Tesa believes in both second chances and in the fact that most of the women she works with never deserved to be in prison in the first place. “If they just had better lawyers, they wouldn't have gone in. If they were the Lindsay Lohans of our life, things would have been different for them,” she explained with a touch of derision in her voice, either for the system or for Ms. Lohan, the actress who has consistently been able to avoid serving jail time for her many felonies. Most of Sister Tesa's women got sent away for a drug-related crime or sometimes burglary, often committed to get money for drugs. She sees it all as bad timing and even worse circumstances.

“A lot of it is the drug culture. It can lead to such negative behavior. The women become targets. A lot of them didn't even use drugs. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then their entire family pays for it,” Sister Tesa said with a shake of her head. “These are good women. They made mistakes, just like the rest of us.”

Sister Tesa grew up poor in a working-class Irish family in the Five Towns of Nassau County out on Long Island. Her parents were Irish immigrants who made education and faith the cornerstones of their lives. Her mom was the gregarious one. She could make anyone laugh. Sister Tesa is more like her father—slightly reserved and introspective, yet witty and warm. She claims that she didn't have one singular moment when she knew she would be a sister. It was more of a long and drawn-out calling that has been with her as long as she can remember.

“It was this inner sense that this was a good thing for me to do. It wasn't an aha! moment, where I woke up and said, ‘Hey I want to be a nun today.' It was just a constant calling from God.” She didn't talk much about it with her family until she actually went off and joined the Sisters of St. Joseph, who'd taught her in both elementary and high school.

“Those women seemed so happy and they were doing good things, so it just made sense to me.” Sister Tesa pulled a picture out of her drawer to show me. It is an old picture of her sitting on a park bench with her mother and father, taken in the '60s, the day she joined the order. Sister Tesa is wearing a full black-and-white habit. As a Vatican II sister, it was one of the only times she would ever wear the full habit. These days she is partial to perfectly pleated jeans, brightly colored sweaters, and smart blazers. In the photograph, her dad is gazing at her with a mixture of pride and concern.

Sister Tesa laughs. “I think he is just wondering, ‘Is she happy?'” The answer was yes. She says she has been happy since the day she took her vows.

God is a constant in Sister Tesa's life. “God is in the fabric of my day. We walk together every minute of the day,” she told me. She finds herself talking to God all the time. After she mentions it, I catch her, in the middle of regular conversation, taking a second to ask the Lord for something.

In 1986, Sister Tesa was living with other sisters in her order and working as the curriculum coordinator for the Brooklyn diocese. A friend, Sister Elaine Roulet, the director of the Children's Center at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, asked her to escort a young child to Rikers Island so that the child could visit her mother.

Sister Elaine is a legend in the world of prison reform. As recently as the 1980s, many women in prison had no way to see their children on a regular basis while they served time. It was she who established the precedent of connecting imprisoned moms with their babies.

It all began while Sister Elaine was teaching the women inmates of a maximum-security prison in New York how to read. The reading program was fine, the inmates told her, but could she help them with what they really wanted? They wanted to know where their kids were, what they were up to, and how they could communicate with them. Sister Elaine became something called a prison family liaison for the next ten years and answered those exact questions. Most prisons in our country still use the model she put in place to try to maintain some kind of continuity in a family while mothers are locked up. Sister Tesa's first trip with Sister Elaine took just over an hour and completely changed the trajectory of her life.

“I couldn't imagine what happened to children when their mother was taken from them,” Sister Tesa told me. “So in retrospect, it was God's divine providence, because I was hooked.”

Seeing firsthand the consequences of forced separation on a child was gut-wrenching. There was uncertainty and fear preparing for the visit, followed by separation anxiety and depression on the way back. It just wasn't right. Sisters Tesa and Elaine tried to work out a way to fix it.

Step one was to make sure that the children of inmates had a safe place to grow up while their moms were away. Could Sister Tesa take them in? God help her, she had no idea. When she became a nun, she gave up on the idea of ever being a mother, and she was happy with that decision. She prayed and meditated on the idea and ultimately knew the right thing to do. Sister Tesa and the other sisters, five of them in all, became foster mothers and committed to raising the children until their mothers were let out. They found a space in the Convent of St. Rita's on Twelfth Street in Long Island City. Volunteers, family, and friends all came to help clean it out and turn it into a place that was fit for kids to live and grow up in.

Their first charge was a fifteen-month-old little girl named Naté, who was born in prison and had never seen wide-open spaces until Sister Tesa brought her to Queens, both of them uncertain about what the next few months would hold. Three other kids came in the first year, including a little girl who arrived on October 31 with a suitcase and a Halloween costume.

They didn't want the children in their care to feel alienated from the other kids in the neighborhood or at school, so they named the building “My Mother's House.” That way, when outsiders asked them where they were going back to, they never felt like it was lying. They said, “My Mother's House,” and no one asked them any more questions. Sister Tesa became a licensed foster mother, which she quickly learned was a completely different job from taking care of the kids during the day as a teacher.

“It was a real eye-opener. I got a crash course in empathetic understanding of what parents go through,” Sister Tesa told me. “It was hard. You had highs and lows. You had to let each child be an individual. The babies were actually easier to bond with. It was harder with the teenagers, who came in with all the baggage of life.”