A Deeper Love Inside by Sister Souljah

to standing. Carefully, I watched her. I was dropping the beats and melodies of her Jamaican song “Down in the Ghetto,” by Bounty Killer into my body’s memory and locking it in.
    When the track switched to “Ghetto Red Hot,” by Super Cat, my turn came. I had cuffed my jumper all the way up to turn them into hot pants. I cuffed my sleeves to my shoulders. I danced Rose Marie’s dance perfectly, showcasing my pretty dancer’s thighs and legs. When I wound down into the squatting butterfly wings position, I added a bounce while I was squatting down with my legs open. I showed her I could make my pussy bounce, too. Then I stopped and bounced my butt, made it almost touch the ground, but demonstrated my control over my gentle butt bounce by never letting it touch the earth.
    Rose Marie grabbed me up, swung me around, and said, “You bad lickle bitch, a real man killa. You my girl, same as my blood.”
    “Same as my blood,” I repeated in my mind as I felt it moving in my heart.

Chapter 10
    “I’d slide you a little drink, but you too little,” Lil’ Man said to me.
    She, who wants to be called he , is number 5 of the Diamond Needles.
    “How young are you, anyway?” she asked me.
    “I’m ten, but I’ll be eleven in fifty-four days,” I told her.
    “I started drinking when I was six,” she confessed to me, as she held her paper cup filled with church punch laced with Everclear. According to Riot, the priest laced the punch and only served it to selected “older” girls in his following. He called it “a cup of mercy.”
    After trying to meet with Angel Johnson, aka Lil’ Man, several times without succeeding, I had to ask Riot what’s up with her. Riot said, “Lil’ Man is a ‘Highway man.’ ” That meant she was part of a small team of girls who get to go outside of the prison walls with guards with guns, to clean up the highways and streets surrounding the prison. Riot also told me that only the girls with the top grades in their classes and zero violent write-ups could even compete for the position. After I heard that, I had to laugh—a competition to go clean up trash.
    “Lil’ Man got a thing for cars,” Riot told me. “She’s practically a mechanic. She can put ’em together and take them apart. She love’s working the highway detail cause she gets to check out everything on wheels.”
    I knew Lil’ Man didn’t really get to check ’em out, press her face against the windows and stare at the interior, open the doors and recline in the plush piped-out leather seats or pop the hood and examine the engine. She simply got to stand and watch the whips speed by.
    “You’re only gonna be able to catch up with Lil’ Man at the prison chapel on Sundays,” Riot said.
    “I don’t even know where the prison chapel is at!” I told Riot.
    “You should find out where everything in the prison is at, even if you’re not interested in it,” Riot corrected me, as we jogged aroundthe prison yard just to do something different. “Porsche, look at every place and every person as a ‘potential opportunity.’ Never be narrow. Keep your eyes and your mind open,” Riot said, her face covered with the moisture from the spring warmth.
    Now me and Lil’ Man were seated in the chapel, a dreary place not too different than any other prison place, except the benches weren’t cemented to the floors. More girls were arriving, looking a little more happy, and a little less hateful than the average look stamped on faces of the caught and caged.
    As I peeped, a few girls were gathered in couples, interlocking fingers, sitting close up on one another. I caught on swift. The chapel was a meet-up spot.
    “You see the church is open to all prisoners,” Lil’ Man said to me. “That’s why I like it here. Every prisoner has the right to join the church.”
    That sounded strange to me, the right. Going to church was the only thing I heard of that we have the right to do.
    A man with pink skin, wearing