Second Chance Café

On New Year’s Day, a line of hopefuls seeking a second chance formed outside Joyce’s diner. Joyce believed that everyone deserved as many second chances as they needed to get through this life, but Joyce was surprised that no one had been willing to take a chance on her when she was first released from prison.

A man with a bald, black-shaved head stood in line, shivering in the cold. Joyce immediately recognized him as the Shetani. The hair was gray and chalky, but it was him. A shiver of fear ran down her spine. She’d recognize him anywhere. But his eyes were clear without spider-webbed veins. Joyce froze at the counter. There was a Glock-19 handgun under the register.

Did she really mean what she said about second chances, or were there some people who did not deserve one?

* * *

Joyce Amalinda had been just 11 and had been living on the streets in Johannesburg when a man offered her a meal and placed her in the back of an old white transport van, smeared with mud. Joyce had been born in Florida, but her parents could not make a living there and returned home to Johannesburg. One day her father didn’t come home. Not long after, her mother became ill and never recovered, dying in their home. Leaving Joyce alone. The Landlord changed the locks and left her out on the streets.

Joyce was placed in the back of the van with two other girls, who were eating sandwiches and drinking bottled sodas to stave off weeks of near starvation. The man came around and opened the doors and gave her a hot sausage and egg sandwich on a round roll. He also handed her a yellow pillow and an old stained crocheted blanket.

Joyce was transported to Cape Town. A vineyard owner had purchased her and the other girls to work in the fields tending to the grape vines. She worked from sunup to sundown out in the dry heat that chapped her lips and blistered her skin. Especially during the dry, hot season of the winter months. The vines would cut her hands and arms, as she pruned them. The pesticide chemicals she sprayed on the vines burned her nose and the splatter of the spray got on her ankles, leaving permanent white burn marks on her dark black skin. After the long days, Joyce would be given her meal, mostly bread, gruel, porridge, or beans.

Joyce and the other girls slept on mats on the cold ground in a barn where equipment and haggard mules were stored. Joyce cried on the first cold night but also felt lucky to have a place where she would be away from the danger and poverty of the streets—someplace where there was food.

Joyce got used to the conditions. She barely spoke to anyone during the day. Sometimes she played with her bunkmates at night if they weren't too tired. There were no older girls at the vineyard. The older hands told the girls that the owners thought women workers were a distraction to the men. One of the girls, Anika, who was two years older than Joyce left one day without warning. Joyce had no idea what happened to her, but she would soon learn.

One day Joyce had been taken to the bunkhouse where a group of men were playing cards and smoking cigarettes around a folding table. There were casks around the corners of the room, which had an earthen floor. The room smelled of honeyed fruit and oranges and the musty smell of rain on peaty soil.

A man in overalls, with no shirt, and a trucker hat, who was sweating down his chest, had sat her down and asked for her birthday. She had lied and said she was born on December 31st on New Year’s Eve and was turning fourteen this coming winter. The man asked her questions about her birthplace, her parents’ names, and many other things. She had lied about all of it. The older girl who had left, Anika, had told them about the day she had been brought to the bunkhouse and had warned them to lie—because the men were creating papers for their transport. Transport to where? But Anika had only said that they always moved the girls on their birthday. Joyce had remembered this and chosen a December birthday because it was the hottest time of year, during the hot, dry season before the January harvest. Joyce couldn’t think of any better time than New Year’s Day to start over.

After that, Joyce counted down the days until December 31st. The other younger girls distanced themselves from her but occasionally asked her if she was ready. She lied and put on a brave face for the benefit of the younger girls.

The same man in the overalls came early in the morning before the other girls woke up and said he was taking her on a trip for her birthday. She was brought to the same van that had brought her to the vineyard but this time she was stowed in the back with three older girls. None of them spoke.

The one girl was shaking in fear and crying. Another girl was talkative and kept saying they were taking them to a brothel. She was clearly afraid of the brothel. The last girl, who seemed older and more experienced, was calm and kept telling the others that it wasn’t that bad and it was easy to escape. In the meantime, she said that there would be food. Warm beds. Clean clothes. Playtime. And medicine. But the girl who was crying kept saying, escape to where? Escape how? They’ll have us under lock and key. I don’t even have my own papers.

A different man, this time a black man with a scruffy beard and a baseball cap and denim button down came back and gave the girls white pills, saying, this will help with the movement sickness—help them to rest—these pills he said were “for peacetime.” The girl who was older and more experienced took hers right away and they all followed her lead. Joyce began to feel drowsy and weird right away.

The house was on Piet Grobbelaar Street in Brooklyn, near the Ysterplaat Air Force Base. There were burglar bars on the window and a steel, hinged fence outside. It had been dark when they had arrived, and the girls were led through into a back room where there were several beds and a small bathroom. The room was locked from the outside, but there was a small window in the wall that connected to a kitchenette room that could be accessed through the window. There was another man who looked similar to the driver who was always holding guard in the kitchen. The rest of the time the door to the rest of the residence was locked tight.

They were left alone for several days. One day the man who had driven them returned and took them outside, made them strip down, and hosed them down with a garden hose. He provided soap for them to wash themselves. He watched. The man they had started calling "Tikoloshe" because he disappeared, as if invisible, told them they should go back into their quarters. They’d find new clothes there. On each of their beds were white loose linen dresses.

The man had come in while they dressed and had given the girls little pills called “blue rocks” that the man said would give them motivation and “keep them from being lazy.” Joyce didn’t like to think about what happened next. It happened almost every day for the next four months.

The Tikoloshe would appear and call her name and bring her to another room where a man was waiting for her, and she better not let him down. The Tikoloshe always told her afterward that she had done well and gave her some food and talked to her and apologized for what was happening but told her she had to behave and had to do as she was told and bring him the money and she could work off her debt. The Tikoloshe said the man who owned all of them was very bad, but he would release the girls once their debt was paid off. The Tikoloshe said he was looking out for Joyce.

After four months, the Tikoloshe took Joyce out one night to the town and said they were going on a trip. She was placed in a shipping container at the port which was loaded onto the biggest ship Joyce had ever seen. Joyce sat in the container with at least fifty other girls, on the cold hard steel. It was dark, and she could not tell how many were there. Many looked bruised and beaten, their faces all drawn, all pale, all looking out from the grip of the white and blue pills. Out at sea they all became sick and were hurled around the metal dungeon, into one another. One girl hit her head and died, and her body began to smell before they reached the port.

Joyce was taken to a similar house in Newark as to the one in Brooklyn in Cape Town. It was near the seaport. From there she was taken to a motel, the Starlight Motel, and asked to do what she had done a hundred times before. Her handler, the man who looked after her, was a drug-addicted Jamaican man with long dirty dreadlocks who always smelled like rum and cigarettes. He was a slovenly man who smelled terribly and who was abusive and beat her. To this day, she still had nightmares about the look of his foggy red eyes, scratched with red spider web veins and filled with venom the world had put there without giving him the antitoxin.

It was six weeks of beatings, rapes, and starvation, fueled by white pills and blue pills, under the man’s guard. She called him “Shetani” which means shape-shifting demon, because he took many different forms, and his abuse flowed from those shifting attitudes. Then Shetani took Joyce out for her first job to the Starlight Motel, driving in a big German car that was something like twenty years old, but still drove alright. The Shetani apologized for what he did and what the other man she was meeting would do. He told her she had a lot of debt to work off, and for both their sake, she better behave herself. Later, the police could never identify the Shetani. He was a ghost, a real demon, without any official record or any means of identification.

The man in the room was different from the men in Cape Town. She would learn later his name was Ronald Jackson and he belonged to a gang. Ronald’s face was thin with a sharp nose and his eyes were black like two empty midnights. There were marks on his arms, a constellation of marks, and he yelled at her and called her names she did not understand. Then the man grabbed Joyce’s arm and punched her in the jaw. Joyce’s face stung from the blow and her knees lost balance. The room was lighted, but she felt at once in pitch darkness. Her stomach burned and her chest screamed at her. As she fell to her knees she shrieked. “Shut your mouth you dirty street whore, or I will shut it for you,” Ronald had said. Joyce did not doubt he meant it. And as she stood to her feet, all the pain rose within her and turned to blinding white anger. She didn’t think, just acted.

On the dresser was a gun. Without thinking, Joyce ran to the dresser, took the gun, and pointed it at the man’s head, her little wrists trembling. The man called her a name and charged at her. Afraid, Joyce fell back, falling to the ground in front of the dresser, hitting her head on its knob, and as she fell the gun went off. The man fell forward and lay on the floor beside her, and she felt the blood from his head, leaking out onto the floor and into her hair.

Joyce could not remember the days and months that followed, being brought to the police precinct, telling what happened, going to a hospital where nice people tended to her—where all the nurses knew her name and spoke in soft soothing tones, and eventually to a jail, and then going before a judge, and being told to sign certain papers, and then being brought to a prison, where she remained for fifteen years, serving what they told her was a life sentence. What a joke, she had thought. Didn’t they know that she had been serving a life sentence from the time she was born?

Eventually, she learned English well. Eventually, she learned about what had happened to her. Eventually, she grew up. And one day a hope came into her mind—a dream—an idea—the Second Chance Café. But she did not think she would ever get a chance to make this dream a reality.

Law Students from Seton Hall Law School would come to visit her, and Rutgers University Students too from various clubs. They all asked her to tell her story, and she did, over and over. They all made various promises and showed her papers they had written and sent out to different people, judges, organizations, and the President of the United States. All manner of people they thought would hear her story and help her. But no one came forward with any help. What had made her hopeful, these visits, eventually made her angry, and she became cynical, and she went to a place where she accepted that she would never leave. And eventually, she was okay with it.

Then, one day, one of the guards came to Joyce’s cell and said that the President of the United States had pardoned her, and she was free to leave. Free, she thought. She was excited but also scared. Free to do what? And in that moment, she remembered her old dream of the Second Chance Café.

When Joyce was released, she went to a halfway house, and with the help of her parole officer, she tried to get jobs in a restaurant, in a bakery, in another diner, and even as a secretary. She applied for every job he gave her that was looking for cheap help. But no one would hire her when they found out what she did.

Finally, she got work cleaning the houses of rich people in high rises who didn’t ask about her background. It paid cash. She played music while she worked. She smoked Newport cigarettes on their balconies and enjoyed the fresh air. She fantasized about one day living in a place like one of these. The parole officer didn’t like it. But what choice did she have? And she used that money to buy a car, and she used that car to do Uber driving, and eventually, she saved enough money to get a lease on a restaurant. She lived in a boarding house with other women who had been incarcerated for a long time, and she took out loans against the business assets—the kitchen equipment, the steel cutlery, the dishes, coffee makers, and all the rest—from companies that sounded legitimate but wanted to be paid back 150% of what they gave her.

Despite all of this, Joyce managed to open the Second Chance Café, right there in Newark, down the road from the scene of her crime, and right down by the courthouses. She chose New Year’s Day for her Grand Opening, during which she would take applicants and staff the business.

* * *

Joyce sat at the counter on a bar stool, interviewing one applicant after another. She had hired several servers who had done serious time, a cashier who had been convicted of embezzlement, a dishwasher who had committed manslaughter, and a few short-order cooks who had dealt drugs.

Shetani sat down next to her and said, “The name is Amil Kumar.” The man was clean and washed, but she still recognized the stink of his skin. Her throat clumped and she felt cold sweat pool on her forehead. Now that she knew his name, she could make one call and turn him in. “What kind of work do you want?” Shetani flashed a toothy smile and said, “I’m a good short-order cook.” Joyce looked him in the eye, but he didn’t recognize her. “What is it—what do you need a second chance from?” Joyce asked. “Do I have to say?” he asked. “Yes,” Joyce said, sternly. “Honey, I trafficked young girls, I raped, murdered, stole. I was possessed of the devil himself. Served over a decade for some of my crimes—the ones I got caught for. And I will understand if you turn me away. I surely deserve it. I only want a chance at redemption.” Joyce bit her lip and looked at the man, not recognizing the evil in him, though it was surely still there underneath it all. “Let me ask you a question, Amil,” she said, “what is your specialty dish?” Amil, whose head was hung, lifted his head, fastened his eyes on her, and said, “I make a killer gumbo.”