Small Steps, and Great Leaps Forward

In a sweltering gymnasium bathed in sickly-yellow institutional light, Alison Egerton takes the stage before an audience of women, most clad in generic white T-shirts and grey sweat shorts. A few women, hovering near the room’s periphery, wear blue scrub tops and denim pants stenciled with the words “Tennessee Department of Corrections.”

Soon Egerton’s iPod mix is blasting into the sweltering gym, and she’s throwing her body full bore into a series of high-energy rolling, popping hip-hop moves. On the floor, the women’s eyes are all concentration, but the room is full of smiles. The Zumba veterans — not holding back — occupy the front rows, gyrating and leaping in time with Egerton. In the back, a few grin sheepishly and swing their hips and arms with halting uncertainty, glancing shyly at their more confident neighbors.

“Really crunch your abs!” shouts Egerton into the roomful of inmates, her belly undulating, sweat beading on her forehead. And crunch they do.

For a year and a half, Egerton’s been doing time — she volunteers two to three times a week with fellow instructor Jenny Littleton-Albin, leading Zumba classes for inmates at the Tennessee Prison for Women. An exercise regimen might seem like a small thing for women who’ve landed in a life so far from their childhood aspirations, but for some, those baby steps can prove a catalyst to more profound changes.

During a break between exertions, Amber, who’s in her seventh year of incarceration, says she’s lost 40 pounds since she started attending the class. “I feel lighter and happier,” she says, speaking not only of the pounds she’s shed, but also of her elevated mood. “Before I got here, I was destroying people’s lives, dealing drugs,” she says. “Now I want to give back, to help people.”

Amber says she had given up on her life during her first years in prison. But her commitment to Zumba and the physical alterations the classes wrought proved a catalyst to a transformation that runs deeper. No longer discouraged, Amber’s making plans now — she’s determined to make a better life for herself and her 10-year-old daughter. (She’s up for parole in five months.) “Before, I don’t think that she was excited for me to get out,” says Amber. “Now she says, ‘Mama, I can’t wait for you to come home.’”

Later, in a coffeehouse worlds away from that bleak concrete and razor-wire landscape, Egerton takes a sip of her latte as she traces the chain of events that landed her in the joint.

A struggling single mom at 18 living paycheck to paycheck, Egerton found her way to the YMCA, where she worked as many hours as possible as a personal trainer while her son was safely installed in the nursery. She recalls a day when a co-worker called to offer her a shift and discovered Egerton’s phone had been shut off. The co-worker made some calls and learned that Egerton was behind on all of her bills. “I was drowning,” she recalls.

That day, Egerton found an envelope in her work mailbox full of ones and fives — more than $500, the exact amount she owed for her utilities. “It’s one of those moments where you decide who you’re going to be: Are you going to pay it forward, or act like it never happened?” she says.

It’s clear which path Egerton chose. “I owe it,” she says. “I wouldn’t have made it if it hadn’t been for other people giving to me.”

As Egerton crosses the prison yard on the way to class, faces light up, arms rise and wave, and one young brunette tells her, tearfully, that she can’t make it to class today. For some inmates, Zumba has become a bright spot in a dark place, a chance to put time and sweat into the beginnings of rebuilding a broken life.

Michelle, an inmate whose long blonde ponytail swings wildly as she mimics Egerton’s moves, says Zumba offers her a survival strategy, an escape from depression and the inevitable dramas that play out within those walls. “No matter what’s going on out there,” she says indicating the prison yard just outside the gym door, “This makes me feel good.”

As the hour winds down, soaked-through T-shirts and exhausted smiles signal not just calories burned, but an investment — in one’s own life, in possibility, and in futures, even futures that may play out entirely behind bars. Alison Egerton believes in that investment. “This is their one shot on this planet,” she says. “There are lifers in there who have decided that they’re going be the best that they can be. I think that takes more courage than it does for me on the outside.”