Bettie began her life in rural Mississippi. At a very young age, she was aware that belief in African Americans’ racial inferiority was ingrained in the social structure. She also experienced sexual abuse by an overseer at her family’s farm. She moved north to Chicago to live with her parents, who later divorced. After difficulties at home, she left and embarked on a self-destructive course that included prostitution, theft crimes, and drug addiction. She took the opportunity to complete her last sentence at Grace House, in Chicago. There, she received support to address her pain from sexual abuse and drug addiction, as well as support to complete her education. She is now well on her way to achieving the personal and educational goals she set for herself.
Bettie Gibson
MY NAME IS BETTIE. I’m forty-nine years old. I was born in Delta City, Mississippi, on a sharecropped farm. My parents were sharecroppers. My father’s mother was a schoolteacher. She kept me when I was born. She was a very fair-skinned lady, with long hair; she was more Cherokee Indian than anything else. My mother’s mother had my complexion; she had dark skin and woolly hair. I was the middle child, and I had three other sisters.
I think one reason why I fell into crime was that I wasn’t educated. My father’s mother had a lot of high ideas for me. Even though she was educated and taught the Black kids in the school down in Mississippi, I didn’t have enough time to be around her. I didn’t understand how important it was to be around someone with a stable foundation and an education. She lived well and got the things that she needed and wanted. With my skin color, though, I wouldn’t have gotten too far. I would have to go through another door because of my skin color.
When I was young, there was a show in town. We had to sit in different places than the little White kids. Then, at the end of the show they would have a Black man wrestle a bear, and then a Black kid would wrestle a bear, to win money. That was entertainment for the White people. Because of my grandmother, I got to do things that other Black kids didn’t get to do. There was Sears and Roebuck, for instance. It was a big deal if you shopped out of their catalog. My clothes and Christmas gifts came from Sears and Roebuck, but the other Black children didn’t have that. You had to have money to order something from Sears. But even though I had all of that, the feeling of being inferior brought me away from that place.
Sharecropping was very similar to slavery. The overseer on the farm would try to have sex with us when we were children. He used to come over and try to put his penis into my cousin and me, and give us money and other things. We never were penetrated, but I felt that fondling and having to put our hands on his penis was just as bad. I was scarred from that. I never told anyone about it until I was grown. He would come inside my grandmother’s house. She and the other Black people were so afraid of the overseers and the other Whites. They would find women chopped up on the river with axes, dead. It was just hush-hush. I would hear mumbling and whispers, but when the overseer came around, they would be quiet. So as early as the age of three, I knew that we were inferior to White people and I couldn’t take it. I knew that something was not right in the house, that my grandparents were afraid of those people, and that we were beneath them. I said, “If my parents have a better place than this, I’m leaving.”
When I was about four or five years old, my father decided to get out of the South and come north to get a job. We came to Chicago to try to better ourselves. I should have stayed in the South with my grandmother, but I wouldn’t listen. I would have gone to college or the military. I just wanted to be a government person. But I always thought that everyone was equal and no one was superior. Everything was supposed to be uniform; what applied to you should apply to me. So when I was asked whether I wanted to remain in Mississippi or move to Chicago with my parents, I chose to go with my parents to get away from Mississippi. Since I had lived with my grandmother, I didn’t know anything about my parents.
My dad got a job as a welder when they came to Chicago, and made pretty good money. He didn’t really bother about education, though. My mother and father had only a third-grade education because they had to drop out to pick cotton in Mississippi. In this way, we were a dysfunctional family because two people didn’t know anything except how to go to work and make some money. They didn’t know how to tell us that an education was essential if we were going to lead productive lives. That wasn’t instilled in us even after we came to Chicago.
I started school in Chicago, but I never liked school very much. I found math especially difficult. I couldn’t come home and ask my parents, because they didn’t know. Back then, they would pass you from grade to grade based on your height. They didn’t have meetings with the parents to discuss what was going on with the children and their grades. Most of the teachers were White and didn’t seem to care. They were getting a paycheck. If you weren’t outstanding, they didn’t put too much energy into you. It seemed as though the rest of the kids were on top of what they should know, and they caught on quickly. I was much slower. Maybe if someone had shown me a different way, I could have caught on. You have to use other approaches for people who are slower learners, especially when they come from family backgrounds that do not have much education. I am thankful to see that the education system has changed for the better.
My mother and father didn’t have very good communication between them. When I was twelve years old, they talked about separating. We had to decide who was going to live with whom. My baby sister and I picked my father, because it just seemed that my mother and I never had a good relationship. My other sisters went to live with my mother. After my sister and I stayed with my father for a while, we went back to our mother because my father lost his eye in an accident at his job. I was about fourteen years old then. When I went back to my mother’s house, I kept running away from home. I started drinking alcohol, going out, and staying out. I would sneak out when everybody went to sleep. I just wasn’t happy there because I was always being labeled. I got through school and I couldn’t wait to get out of the house.
The first guy I met was what you’d call a pimp and he was from my neighborhood. I was eighteen years old, and I must have stood on the street as a prostitute for about two months. I don’t know if it was because of what the overseer tried to do to us when we were kids, but I thought certain sex things weren’t normal. So I started to go out on the street and pick men’s pockets and take their money. I started to get good at it. I would go down on Rush Street, to the Gold Coast, where all the leisure trade people come from all over the world and I would get into the men’s pockets. I would pick rich men’s pockets of thousands and thousands of dollars, because I would dress up real nice, and they always wanted to get close to me. I had gotten so good that I could take their money out their wallet and put the wallet back in three seconds. Then I used to steal their credit cards and sell them.
Once I found out that I could pick pockets, I was able to leave home and have my own place. This is what drove me into the street, and I felt that was really the thing to do. I lived in nice apartments. I had jewelry, nice cars, and my kids were dressed nicely. I had gotten so good at picking pockets that I was really making money. The biggest one I ever took happened when I was nineteen. The guy had a hundred $100 dollar bills; he had ten thousand dollars in his pocket, probably from the racetrack. I started buying a lot of nice things. The pimp started coming around, trying to get me to do this and that, and that’s when I started using drugs. I was nineteen years old when I first sniffed heroin. One of my sisters did it, and my boyfriend did it. I started getting curious because it looked like they felt so good, and I just had so much pain. I didn’t like myself. I thought that I never would reach my potential. At first the heroin seemed good, and then after I started taking it, I knew my life had become a whirlwind. It was going around and around, going nowhere, like a merry-go-round. I got strung out quickly because I made a lot of money; therefore, I had a lot of money to do drugs. A lot of people who didn’t make a lot of money start shooting because it’s direct contact through the veins and the high is supposed to last longer. But I didn’t like needles.
Then one night I was on State Street and met this guy that owned a steel corporation. I picked his pocket. He had about sixteen hundred dollars in his pocket. I was caught because the doorman, a Black guy, told that I had the man’s money. I gave the money back to him since we had gotten caught. The guy ran down the street after I gave the money back and slapped my boyfriend and me. My boyfriend was a big pimp from Chicago. He got out and beat the guy up with one of those clubs for the steering wheel. They put a warrant out for our arrest. This was the first time I ever encountered the penal system. This was in 1975.
My lawyer was well known in the county. He said, “Bettie, you know the judge is my father-in-law. If you plead guilty today, they’re going to give you six months.” I turned down the six months because my boyfriend told me, “Don’t plead. Don’t take six months for something you didn’t commit.” Therefore, we took it to trial. In the end, guess what we wound up with? It was five to fifteen years. They had charged us with armed robbery. The lawyer was so mad at me. He said, “Bettie, I’m not even coming back anymore. I’m going to send my protégé because I don’t even want to see you.”
When they slapped me in jail I was eight months pregnant with my youngest child. I have four sons. My oldest son was born in 1967, and my next son was born in 1968. My third son was born in 1972. When I got down to the penitentiary I was dilating. They got the car and the man driving was doing one hundred miles an hour to get me to the hospital. When we got there, they treated me so badly; they put me in a closet. They wouldn’t even take me to the delivery room because I was Black. They let me have my baby by myself, almost in the closet. The corrections officer, a lady, was standing there. They were going to call my doctor at the prison. The CO said, “Well, she can’t wait until the doctor gets here. The baby’s coming.” I started pushing and the baby came out right there.
I didn’t get to keep three of my kids very much. My boyfriend’s mother was given custody of them. When I got out of jail, I got a place in an affluent suburb and lived with my two youngest sons. I asked them if they were involved with any gangs and they said, “No, Mama, we’re not in no gang.” I said, “Look, I’m going to tell you something. You don’t be out here in these gangs. You going to school.” They kept saying they were going to school. So one day, when I went in their room to make sure their beds were made, I found some gang literature. They were thirteen and fourteen years old. I got in the car, and I went and found them. No kid of mine was going be a gang banger. I told them to go back to their daddy and his sister’s house, because I wasn’t going to put up with it. I know where I went wrong. I know where my parents went wrong, and I was not going to be a part in destroying their lives.
Both of them were selling drugs. The older son got out of it, but the youngest one didn’t. It’s going to take more than talking to him to get him to stop because the money, big jewelry, and the cars got him caught up. He needs to go back to school. They need to send him to some type of program that says, “You either do this or you’ll never get out. You either go through this program and wake up because if you don’t wake up, you’re going to get right back out here and do the same thing and get killed or end up back in here.” Because the court system is waiting. Once you’ve been convicted of a crime in the state of Illinois, you can rest assured that you will be a repeat offender over and over again, because whatever they say you did, you did it. You cannot stand up in a court of law and take a trial on anything with your background and this is what they play on. Plea-bargaining is a very big thing in Illinois. Even people that shouldn’t be in jail, that don’t even commit crimes, plea-bargain to get a lesser sentence so they can hurry up and get in and get out. The jails are so overcrowded and filthy. The food is bad. The health care is lousy. And some of the guards are physically abusive.
Now the prison for Black women is what I call just a warehouse for people. They don’t have programs to help you come back in society, to help you with your problems as to why you wound up there. It’s just to get the money every time you come through the door. It’s a lucrative business. So here you are going right back out there to do the same thing with fifty dollars. What is fifty dollars, with no skills and no training and no education, going to do for someone? Getting out of jail with fifty dollars would make me want to go use some drugs and forget what’s going to happen two days down the line when I wake up with no money and no job. You would see women go out and come right back. There are three basic life-sustaining things that you have to have in life: food, clothing, and shelter. They don’t come free, and you can’t get them for fifty dollars. They know when they let you out that you’ll be back, unless you get fortunate enough to have a program like this to help you. And you have to want it. People fail to realize that all the people out here on the street that they see walking down the street using crack cocaine and stealing don’t do that because they want to do it. They have no other way.
My first incarceration was for armed robbery, the one in 1975. I received a sentence of five to fifteen years, and I served five years. On the second one, I received seven years, three times, but concurrent, which left me with seven years. That charge was robbery and I served three-and-a-half years. That was in 1984. In 1992, I got three years for petty theft, for pick pocketing; I served a year. Then in 1994, I served fifteen months of a three and one-half year sentence. Just as I was coming out, I got three-and-a-half more years. This happened at the end of 1997 or the beginning of 1998. I’m on parole for that one now. I went to school when I was in jail. Don’t think I just sat there. It took me four times to pass the GED. It took me four times because you are a product of your environment and what your parents are. If my parents did not have an education, where did that leave me? Now, I also have credits from local universities and junior colleges.
I didn’t understand that my life-style was an act. I was on stage until I was almost fifty years old. I was really on stage being an image that somebody else had built me up to be. It wasn’t what I really wanted to be, and I learned to come offstage. I’m offstage now. I also learned that I suffer from bipolar mental condition. It was a long time before I knew why I suffered from this depression. I found out later that bipolar is a disease that you inherit, usually from a parent. Looking back on it, I think my mother suffered from bipolar because she suffered with a lot of depression.
I thought there would be some way to break that cycle, because I heard that people that did these programs were successful. This is why I asked for Grace House. I could have been with family members, but I didn’t want to go back into the streets again, and there was no structure with my family members. I would not have found a job. Instead, I would have started stealing. The program was the best thing for me and I’m grateful to have been picked and to have this chance. I’m going to do this program successfully because I’m doing the things I’m supposed to do in order to stay here.
Now I take the bus where I’m going and I don’t want diamonds. But don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to want these things, because this is what makes each of us individuals. That just isn’t where my priorities are anymore. I want to reach my potential. I am someone that likes to explore in her mind, because I do have one. And if I had been able to cultivate what I know, and use what I got, I would have been sitting somewhere trying to help somebody. After all the money that I made, money is really nothing; it’s just something to show, to glamorize. But can you live simply? When you can do that, then you know that you’re somebody.
The Grace House is the best thing that could ever happen to a Black woman, or to any prisoner, because it will help you get back out in the community where you can be productive. You can get a job. My main thing is to get my degree. I have those academic credits, but I don’t do math well. I need to pass math to get my degree. Grace House has a tutor who will help. I think that I could counsel someone and help them because how do you expect somebody that comes from one of the ritzy places in New York to come down and interact and try to tell somebody from the ghetto what to do and how to do it? They can’t do it, because first of all they have to identify with them. You have to give inmates some type of encouragement to want this, and they have to see something on the outside. They have to see someone who’s been there—someone who has been using drugs since 1972, and who has straightened up and is functioning. That would have a big impact on another drug addict. It would give them some incentive to want to stop from committing suicide, because in reality, using drugs is just like Russian roulette. Just because you didn’t get it today, doesn’t mean you won’t get it tomorrow, because it slowly deteriorates the body and the mind.
I think that I need to take a look at the things that I’m doing and not look at what others may have or may be getting or what others, in my family maybe, can do for me. Instead of socializing with some of the people or going to places I’ve been around in the past, I need to try to omit that from my mind. That would bring nothing but trouble to me. And I need to be patient. That’s first and foremost. I’m going to have to stay focused on the things that I might do that could lead me back to the penitentiary, and what it will take for me not to do those things. I want to stay focused on being an everyday person, without drugs and knowing within my heart that I don’t need to have some type of mind-altering narcotic to make me normal and feel like I’m supposed to feel.
I see myself getting to the point to where I have a nice job and my degree someplace on the wall. And I see myself volunteering to help others, and putting back what I’ve gotten out of it. I am working on my Bachelor’s in social work. This is a good match for me because I can share what I learned in my text, and I can share what I learned from firsthand experiences in life. There won’t be any dressing up or sugarcoating. I’ll just put it out there like it is, hoping that they won’t take the same path that some of us have taken.
I think that a lot of people should know some of the things that I’ve suppressed in me. I think maybe once they know that there are people that can bring out things that they kept inside so many years, they also can begin to open up and talk about their problems. I feel it is important that you don’t have to be ashamed of what you’ve done, where you been, and the kind of family you may be from, because a lot of people come from dysfunctional families and they just try to cover it up and dress it up. But, I want to be open with it, so people will know that they are not alone and that there are places and programs that can help them work out their problems. I want to be part of that solution. Finally, I feel loved, cared for, and have a sense of self-worth. I would like to thank all the people who came into my life that believed in me until I believed in myself. I thank them profusely for the tools that got me where I am today and for lighting my way. I’m feeling very optimistic about my life.