A Knock at Midnight(21)
And then I did.
Christa Brown-Sanford. Young, smiling, confident, gifted, and Black. I knew nothing about her besides what I saw on that website. But I sent her an email that very day, and she wrote me right back.
We met at a Starbucks downstairs from both our offices. I wasn’t easily impressed, then or now, but something about Christa’s polished poise, her calm and open demeanor, captured my imagination. She was the first lawyer I’d ever met, my Clair Huxtable in the flesh. To this day, I’m amazed by Christa’s generous offer of her valuable time in response to a random email from a girl she didn’t even know. There wasn’t an ounce of arrogance in her. Just kindness. As I sipped my latte and Christa her tea, I took a deep breath and spoke out loud the dream that I had almost abandoned: I wanted to be a lawyer.
Christa smiled at me as if she’d known me all her life. “I am so glad to hear that, Brittany. And I’m so glad you reached out to me! You are exactly what the legal world needs. How can I help?”
Relief washed over me. We spent the rest of the hour making a game plan. “Take real practice LSATs,” she said. “Every single one you can get your hands on. I’ll send you a link to where you can buy them online. And you’re going to need a really strong personal statement, so start drafting that now.” With every note I wrote, I felt a weight lifting.
Another hour passed before Christa finally said, “I’m so sorry, I have to go.” As she stood up and put her sleek blazer back on, she turned to me. “I have a meeting with a partner on a new deal they’ve put me on. But are you free again on Thursday? We can work through more of the process.” I nodded, still not believing that this complete stranger would extend herself so far to lift me toward my goal. “In the meantime,” Christa said, “call me anytime if you have questions. I’ve got you. This is so exciting!”
I see it over and over again now. A young person tells an attorney they want to be a lawyer and are met with a litany of reasons why not to be. Crazy long hours, no work-life balance, not the glamour you see on TV, mountains of debt, jobs hard to come by. All these are true things, but they were not things I heard from Christa. She encouraged me from day one. And she didn’t pay me lip service, either, smiling and nodding and giving me words of encouragement only to go back to her partner track at Baker Botts and never think of me again. She even recruited her sister, who was getting her Ph.D. in literature at the time, to give me feedback on my personal statement. Christa took my hand that day in Starbucks and never let it go.
* * *
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THERE WERE NO phone calls in Texas prisons in 2007. Every week I wrote my mom a letter, and every week she wrote to me. I told her about my ideas for applying to law school, about my new boyfriend, Rico, about the ins and outs of life at PwC, and an idea I had to help younger girls get to the prison to see their moms and to mentor the girls in between visits. She wrote me about nasty guards, the stifling heat of the cells, her continued efforts to take advantage of the prison ministries and self-improvement programs. She was proud of completing the twelve-step drug addiction recovery program. I was proud of her. She even opened up about her regrets, the shame she felt about how drugs had made her disappoint her daughters and herself. It was the first time we had ever spoken so openly about her addiction. Those letters bridged the distance between us.
At the end of August 2007, Mama was transferred from Gatesville to the Lockhart Correctional Facility, a prison just outside Austin. Conditions were better there. The new prison had air-conditioning—temperatures in Gatesville had routinely reached over a hundred degrees—and more programs, parenting classes, classes in self-esteem building, as well as an opportunity for my mom to teach pre-GED classes to other women in the prison. But it was an hour and a half farther away, meaning Jazz and I would now have to drive four hours for just a two-hour visit. I had frequent-flyer miles from work, and Southwest had an eighty-eight-dollar roundtrip deal, so we devised a plan to start flying into Austin and renting a cheap car at the airport for a few hours. It would cost a hundred dollars more each trip but save eight hours of travel time. It meant some penny-pinching, but we agreed the sacrifice would be worth it.
We still had one last drive to Lockhart before we put our plane plan into effect. The trip began like any other: I had Jazz spend the night at my house so we could get out the door as early as possible, and we spent the evening relaxing together, catching up on our lives. We always kept the nights before our visits lighthearted, subconsciously building up for the emotion to come. Prison visits were similar—Jazz and I dreaded and looked desperately forward to them at the same time. Usually I nagged Jazz about every little thing, just as I had since the moment I could first grab her little hand and pull her along behind me, playing the bossy big sister to the hilt. I’d ask her a hundred times whether she’d brought her ID, paid her last light bill. She was twenty-one years old, and I’m sure it drove her crazy, but it was the role I’d always played and I suppose she’d grown to depend on it. That week I was distracted by something at work, and when I woke her at five o’clock all I did was make sure she grabbed her hoodie and a piece of toast so we wouldn’t lose time on the interstate stopping for breakfast.
Five hours later, we pulled into Lockhart. I opened the trunk so we could lock everything inside but our IDs and quarters. January is the coldest month in Texas, and the air of a gray day stung my gloveless fingers. Jazz was still rummaging in her backpack. All I could see of her was the back of her neatly cornrowed head, her hoodie pulled up around her neck in a futile attempt to keep her ears warm, and the back of her baggy jeans.