Kenzell Williams didn’t recognize his mother when she arrived in the mail.
She slipped into the house inside a padded envelope containing a children’s book and a cassette tape.
Kenzell, 6, lives in Cedar Park, Texas, with his aunt, Cindy Williams. She put the tape in a little boombox and told Kenzell to listen. A woman’s animated voice was reading a book called “The Magic School Bus Gets Ants in Its Pants.”
“What is that?” Kenzell asked.
“That’s your mother,” his aunt said.
“It doesn’t sound like her,” Kenzell said.
“Yes it is. Keep listening.”
“Oh, yeah. That is her voice!”
After the end of the story, about schoolchildren on a field trip inside an ant hill, Kenzell’s mother had a special message for him:
“Kenzell, I hope that you enjoyed the storybook that Mom read to you today. When you get sad, just tell them to turn on the tape and you can listen to my voice. I miss you and I love you, son. Take care.”
Kenzell’s mother, Sandy Foxworth, 39, can’t read to her son in person or even hold him in her lap because she is in a Texas prison serving a 20-year sentence for aggravated assault.
Reading from afar
But she gets to read to her son through a novel program run by volunteers in Austin. The Women’s Storybook Project of Texas collects new children’s books and, once a month, tapes female inmates reading stories to their children or grandchildren.
“It’s a very simple idea that has a very big impact,” said Judith Dullnig, coordinator of the storybook project. “It’s a way for the mother to show her child that she loves him, and introduces literature at the same time.
“We’re finding that it’s important for the [other] family members to hear from their loved ones. Adults have been listening to it also, as a bonus.”
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The Texas Department of Criminal Justice supports the program, which operates in two women’s prisons and soon will expand to a third. The storybook project helps improve inmates’ conduct because only well-behaved prisoners are allowed to participate.
“This is a great thing,” said Capt. Beverley Wilkins, disciplinary officer at the Murray unit.
The Texas program, modeled after those in other states, started in 2003. About 2,200 books have been taped and mailed to children, some of whom live in other states or countries.
Inmates like program
The program’s popularity is obvious at the Lane Murray Unit, one of five women’s prisons in Gatesville, 40 miles west of Waco. On a recent Saturday, 23 female inmates in white uniforms line up on the sidewalk outside the prison’s locked chapel. Some peek through the glass-door panels as they wait to get in.
Dullnig and five other volunteers inside rearrange chairs in the chapel and nearby meeting rooms. Five reading stations are set up in the center and in each corner of the chapel. Down the hall, several inmates with special privileges help unpack boxes of books and display them on conference tables in a room used as a library.
When the volunteers are ready, a corrections officer unlocks the door and the excited inmates file in.
“Keep the noise down. Talk later,” Wilkins barks.
After brief introductions between volunteers and inmates, the prisoners are allowed to mill about the book piles, studying covers and thumbing through the texts. It is a study in quiet contemplation.
Foxworth chooses the book about ant antics for Kenzell because “he loves bugs, and he’s a very adventurous child.”
“For me to be able to reach out to my son in this manner is so wonderful because it’s important my child knows that I do still love him even if I am not there physically,” she says. “It’s hard to bear the price for what I’ve caused because I made wrong choices. Although I’m here, he’s not forgotten and he must know on a constant basis that he’s special.”
Foxworth will be eligible for parole in 2012.
The volunteers allow the prisoners to record personal messages before and after they read the storybook. The messages are supposed to be short, but sometimes allowances are made.
Inmate Cindy Ann Mendoza, 36, picks out books to read to her grandchildren, 4-year-old Isaiah and 2-year-old Josiah. She begins her recording by singing the entire “Happy Birthday” song to “Mr. Josiah.”
As she sings, her voice catches and tears fill her eyes. Volunteer Kate Moss from Austin joins in and helps her finish.
“Hi, Josiah. It’s me, Grandma Mendoza. I want to say Happy Birthday, and I want to say I love you very much,” she says on the tape.
Mendoza has been in prison since Valentine’s Day in 2000, when she received a life sentence for fatally stabbing her fiance’s father in the home they shared in San Marcos. She said prison has saved her from her past life of alcohol and drug abuse.
“I was a mom always drinking and doing drugs and wasn’t there like I should have been” for her son and daughter, she says. “Now I can be there for my grandchildren, maybe not physically but through the books and correspondence. I have a chance now to be at least a grandma.”
The storybook project volunteers receive steady feedback from children and relatives of the inmates. Children kiss the tapes, carry them to bed and fall asleep as the tapes play, the volunteers are told.
“Dear whoever gets this note,” one letter began. “Please let my mom, Gina, keep reading the books on tape. One more thing, I love hearing her voice. By Cameron.”
And in Cedar Park, Kenzell smiles and taps his toes as he sits on the living room couch while listening to his mother read him the story about ants.
“I want to go see my mom,” he says when the tape ends.