It’s a few minutes before 5:30 on a Saturday morning in May, and Michigan Avenue is quiet. There’s a trickle of cabs, most without fares, and an occasional car. A CTA bus cruises north in the curb lane with only one passenger, and slows for two women who stand about 40 feet apart in front of the Art Institute. Neither woman makes a move to board, and the bus continues past. One of the women is black. She paces between one of the museum lions and a sign for the CTA’s Culture Bus. The other woman, an American Indian, stands in a bus shelter holding a child in her arms. A blue Buick pulls to the curb, and the driver, a large black woman in a striped shirt, leans across the front seat and rolls down the passenger window. “You all waiting on the Windy City?” she calls.
A minute later the woman from the Buick comes hurrying across the street and climbs into the bus. “You’re looking all the same,” she says as she starts down the aisle. She settles into the third seat behind the driver. “Ervin, this is my last trip,” she calls to the driver. “Where’s Roy?”
Once again the bus waits for any late passengers, but at 6:30 Smith steps off the bus and it pulls away.
Pam is the woman making her last trip.* She has been riding this bus since the service started in January of 1987. “It usually ends in tragedy,” she says. “We sacrifice our time coming down here, but when they get out, we’re not together.”
“These prisoners, they all got a line, and they all be from the same book,” Pam says. “If one writes a letter, they all use the same letter. Only the names change. If you’ve read one of their letters, you’ve read all their letters. That’s what brings the women down here. They want to hear all those sweet nothings. Because on the street men don’t talk that way. In the letters they talk so good, they talk so sweet. Women want to hear this. They want the kindness. They want somebody thinking about them, and there’s so little of it on the street.
“But a lot of women are lonely, and a lot of women don’t have the self-confidence. That’s the reason they come down here to meet men. If you really want to find somebody that’s low-down and dirty, there’s one on the street that’s just as low-down and dirty. But a lot of women don’t have that confidence. And they want to hear the sweet nothings. They want to hear ‘Baby, I love you.’”
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Theresa is sitting across the aisle from Pam; her hair is in curlers. She is on her way to visit her fiance, John, who she has never known outside of prison. She first heard about him through one of her girlfriends who was visiting another prisoner. She sent down her picture, and the two began to exchange letters. She’s heard everything Pam has to say.
