Vox Populi
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Charlotte Matthews: Fog Count at Fluvanna Women’s Correctional Center
I’m in a week-long training, learning things that blow my mind. As the instructor said on day one, you don’t know what you don’t know. Say that slowly, and it makes more sense. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Days for the incarcerated are portioned like beads into segmented, see-through boxes, a few bright or holding hope, but mostly not, mostly drudgery. The count happens four times a day—at least. That means the whole place shuts down: no movement while the wardens and officers tally the women. Because the campus—what a misadvertised word—is large with green space, on mornings when fog has come off the Blue Ridge Mountains, they look for women on the outskirts. The count takes longer as they scour the campus, making sure no one is crouched under a shrub near the northwest corner.
In January, I’ll teach these women. I’ll come to where they sleep and eat and, if they are lucky, have a job in the cafeteria or cleaning floors. Some will be there for the rest of their lives. Some have been inside for decades. When I visit the facility, I’m told I cannot bring anything, only car keys. They’ve run extensive background checks. But when I enter the building, the warden at the desk acts like he’d rather be getting a root canal than talking to me. He is impatient and demanding, then instructs me to step inside this monolithic machine that looks like a throwback from the 70’s. I find out it’s a full-body scanner and they will see my insides, down to the organs.
When I ask if there’s any way we can skip that, he laughs in my face. When I explain I’m perfectly fine with a strip search, even a cavity search, explain I cannot have more radiation after all the cancer treatment, he says no. Just that: no.The officer watching the monitor as I’m in the machine pokes his head out and says I’ve hidden a bag in my chest. I tell him, no, it’s my implant, it’s where they lopped off my breasts and stuck in silicon. This seems to satisfy him. He goes back to looking at my insides.
Disbelief and suspicion drone through the cinderblock walls, ricocheting off the tiled floor. I think the world is not a cup filled with sunlight. There’s a shrill noise to my left, and a door slams, and a woman screams, I want my baby, over and over and over again. A warden struts out with a blanketed newborn in an infant car seat, hands it to an officer, who leaves the building. I later learn that it’s called separation day. I learn that pregnant women are shackled even in labor. They are allowed to have their babies with them for one week, then they are taken away. Some women express milk which volunteers take to the foster family, but they are few and far between. Most will never see their children again. I want to be a backup singer in a mid-sized band. I’ll wear a flared skirt and stand to the side, one of many, dozens of us in line holding castanets and harmonizing in a way that cracks the world open. Beside me will be a woman who has pulled two decades in this facility but is now out. Our voices will float over people who’ve come to forget about their lives for the night.
Copyright 2025 Charlotte Matthews
Charlotte Matthew’s published works include a memoir, Comes with Furniture and People, a novel, The Collapsible Mannequin, and three poetry collections: Still Enough to Be Dreaming, Green Stars and Whistle What Can’t Be Said. She is Associate Professor at The University of Virginia.
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I love this very difficult, and beautiful, essay.
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Charlotte packs a lot of story and argument in a short space here.
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Every so often someone on the outs comes along and describes, almost to a tee, what so many of us lived (and indeed live) through. They are almost always writers, many of whom serve as impromptu muses. Mine was Ricard Shelton, my then poet and University of Arizona professor who, dancing across the yard on words as lithe as a sparrow on razor wire, taught a handful of us the rudiments of creative writing. That was 24 years ago, almost to the day. Two degrees, a book, and numerous publications later (including here; thank you, Michael), I teach writing full time at UC Berkeley. So, I salute you for this and all else, oh fellow bird-of-a-feather, and keep singing.
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You are a marvel, Matt.
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Dear God, it’s 2025 and it’s the US, and Germany in the 1940s is repeated, and Jane Eyre’s workhouses are in full bloom. How can this even be a ‘thing’? I had a dream, and mine resembled MLK’s. And now I am old and we are going back to ignorance, hatred, cruelty, and dehumanization.
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I wake in a panic in the middle of the night at what we’ve become.
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truly heartbreaking. thank you for this. in the first half I am reminded of the cold treatment we all received going into San Quentin prison to teach there while i was in graduate school. we were told in a dimly lit conference room before beginning that the guards do indeed have resentment towards us and to keep it in mind. in part, we were told, because the guards do not think prisoners should receive education they themselves were never able to have. and yet… what a race to the bottom! as your piece ends with that horrific separation day… i am reminded of how many cruel spaces we make to perpetuate exactly that: new races to new depths of no compassion. there would be no bottom there… except for people like you! thank you!
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Thank you, Brian!
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excellent. Your memories are like my mom’s.
she spent 3 years in a slave labor camp in Nazi Germany.
here’s a poem I wrote about her first winter there. It appeared with some other poems about her in vox Populi.
Her First Winter in Germany – a sonnet
My mother never thought she’d survive
that first winter in the slave labor camps.
She had no coat, no hat, no gloves,
just what she was wearing when the Germans
came to her home and killed my grandma
and took my mother to the labor camps.
A German guard saved her life there.
He saw her struggling with her hands
to dig beets out of the frozen earth,
and he asked her if she could milk a cow.
She said, “Yes,” and he took her to the barn
where the cows were kept and raped her.
Later, the cows kept her from freezing
and gave my mother warm milk to drink.
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Yes. ICE = GESTAPO. Stephen Miller = Joseph Goebbles etc.
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A powerful poem, John. Thank you. It’s important to keep these memories alive.
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