FernFolio

Eleven year-old Jacob Tyronne DeShawn’s mother is in prison serving a lengthy sentence, and he and his sixteen year-old sister Shoshona travel ten hours four times a year to visit her. Accompanied by Ms. Granite, a social worker, a rag-tag collection of children and adolescents boards an old school bus after midnight on the Friday of the Mother’s Day weekend for the long journey to Wickham Correctional Institute for Women.
While Jake and Shoshona have made the trip many times before, for some of the children on the bus, this is their first experience with the long waits, the invasive searches, and the barbed wire fences, as well as the harsh and uncompromising attitudes of prison staff. These children whose mothers are in prison know a great deal about poverty and abandonment, the foster care system, and prejudice, and they have all found ways to cope with the loss of their mothers. Shoshona is always in control, and is focussed on doing well in school so that she can become a singer. Jake retreats into the world of Jakeman, the comic book hero he has created in the pages of his notebook. Carolyn has stopped talking. Harlan is always angry.
The prison visits prove difficult. Jake fears his mother won’t recognize him, Shoshona is taken to task for not looking after her younger brother better, and both are blamed for their mother’s troubles – if only they hadn’t always been asking for things. Harlan, still grieving for his mother after her death in prison from appendicitis, confronts the prison warden and is immediately escorted from the prison.
On the way home, Ms. Granite and many of the children become ill from food poisoning and are hospitalized. Left in the care of a nasty bus driver who makes no secret of his dislike for them, Jake and Shoshona and a small group of children start the long trip back to the city. But, when Shoshona realizes that the driver is drunk, the kids on the bus stage a revolt. After leaving the driver lying at the side of the road, they take off to discover if they really are just the sum of everything that is written in their children’s aid files or if, just possibly, they might be a whole lot more.
Written by the wonderful Deborah Ellis, Jakeman is a tough, funny and tender story about the young and unintended victims of the justice system.
FernFolio Editor