A Knock at Midnight(31)
We moved up a little in the line. “I’m gonna be free someday,” Sharanda continued, looking at me intently. “I believe that. I’m not gonna die in here. That just can’t be God’s plan for me. But I’m getting out the right way, you know? These lawyers, they just want money. And then it’s like they flip and work for the feds.”
“I don’t want your money,” I said. “This is pro bono work. And I’d never ask you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.”
“I know,” Sharanda said, looking at me with a sly smile. “That’s why you’re here.” We shuffled forward. “From what I’ve seen,” she said, “I don’t even think most of these lawyers could get me out, regardless of what I did. Everybody just lying all the time. It makes you tired.”
We were silent for a minute. Sharanda tried to smile, but despite her positivity, I could see that she was tired. She had been here ten years already. I couldn’t imagine the strain of doing that kind of time. In front of us, a couple made their selections, and then it was our turn at the yellow line.
Sharanda pointed to the red hot Cheetos. “Those are my favorite,” she said. “I’ll take two, please.” She watched me from behind the line as I put my quarters into the vending machine. Two red hot bags of Cheetos for her, a bag of Cheez-Its for me. Two Cokes.
“You know, you can use dollar bills in here,” Sharanda said. “Look at you with all your quarters.”
I smiled. “They only let you use quarters in State,” I said.
“We fancy, huh?” Sharanda laughed. The rest of the visit we spent that way—laughing, teasing, talking about everybody and everything. I felt we’d known each other for years. It wasn’t like I’d acquired a client. I had made a friend for life. It felt like instant family. It felt like home.
Sharanda and I communicated constantly after our first visit. We emailed and sent letters to each other, and I visited whenever my school schedule allowed. When I faced an exam or had a grueling month of coursework, Sharanda would send me an encouraging note on one of the beautiful cards she handcrafted in her cell, intricate stitched designs of thread and yarn so polished it was hard to believe they were handmade, let alone from the meager supplies available through the prison commissary. Our bond grew. I told Sharanda about my own mom, her incarceration, and even her struggles with addiction, which I normally kept so private. And Sharanda opened up, too, revealing pieces of her life to me in the form of vivid childhood memories and the more painful fragments of the months leading to her inconceivable life sentence.
* * *
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SHARANDA’S GRANDMOTHER PEARLIE had just put the needle back in the groove of the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child” when the police knocked on the screen door one night in 1970. Sharanda was only three years old, but she would never forget the sound of that knock, she said, or the sight of the large white police officer standing in the doorway, only partly obscured by Pearlie in the bright-colored kaftan she always wore when she was babysitting.
“Are you Ms. Pearlie B. Luke?” the policeman asked.
Her grandmother nodded, clutching her kaftan at the neck. “Your daughter has been in an accident,” the officer said, his face white and serious. “You need to come with me to the hospital now.”
Sharanda’s mother, Genice Stribling, a twenty-year-old nurse’s aide, artist, and mother of four, had been in a horrendous car accident. The collision fractured her spine and neck, severing her spinal cord and leaving her paralyzed from the neck down, apart from the partial ability to raise and lower her right arm and minimal muscle control in her wrists. Sharanda remembers being placed on the white hospital bed, the beep of machines, her mother’s labored breathing, the sharp antiseptic air. The Genice that Sharanda knew was as beautiful as a movie star, full of jokes and games, always laughing. Now she lay still as a doll. Tubes ran from every part of her body, and huge metal hooks hung from a traction device attached to a steel band across her head. The accident left Genice a quadriplegic, bedridden for the rest of her life, apart from short stints in a specialized wheelchair.
It uprooted everything. Sharanda and her brother and sisters moved in with Pearlie. When Genice was released from the hospital a year after the accident, Pearlie, only thirty-nine years old, found herself the primary caretaker of her quadriplegic adult daughter and four grandchildren under the age of five: Sharanda, her older brother, Earnest, and younger sisters, Sharena and Tina.
With the help of home-healthcare nurses and their extended family of cousins, aunts, and uncles, Pearlie tended to Genice. She made Genice’s disability and welfare checks stretch as far as possible, made a little extra money butchering and cooking game for hunters in the neighborhood, got the kids dressed and out the door to school. As Genice’s wounds healed, her resilient spirit reemerged. She may have loved her kids from the bed, but she still loved them just as fiercely and wholly as she had when she walked.
“That must have been so difficult,” I said to Sharanda on a subsequent visit, when she’d described the accident in more detail.
“If it was hard we didn’t know it,” she said. “That’s just how it was in our family. We all pitched in and helped our mama. It never felt like a burden. It was just always a part of us, of our family. We were happy.”