A Knock at Midnight(44)
“Ain’t nothin’ but a step for a stepper!” we said at the same time, laughing.
It was so good to be home. Mama Lena’s front door was a gateway to a mansion full of love and belly-deep laughs. My spirit swelled as we pulled into the driveway. Mama Lena had cooked beef tips and rice, chicken breast with her special mushroom sauce, greens, and my favorite candied yams. Not to mention two cakes. My dad was there with the hug I needed. And my aunt Felicia and all my cousins were there to tease me to death about being Mama Lena’s favorite.
“Mama, you have seven kids and dozens of grandkids,” Felicia said as we heaped our plates with Mama Lena’s cooking. “Why do you only have a picture of Brittany on your TV stand? And why is she in between your pictures of Jesus and Barack?” My family cried laughing.
As we cleaned up after dinner, my cellphone rang from a number I didn’t recognize. Usually I sent these to voicemail; for some reason, on this day I answered. When I heard that sweet Southern voice on the other end of the line I smiled, glad to have picked up. “De-Ann! How are you?”
“Hey, Brittany, it’s been a minute! Mama Lena’s been bragging on you. She says you’re a lawyer now! We’re all so proud of you.”
“Thank you so much,” I said. “I’m at her house with the fam right now. What are you doing these days?”
“I’m doing good! I’m the general manager for a mobile home sales company. Girl, can you believe they letting me run shit?” she said, laughing. “I got blessed with this job. They have no idea about my background and I pray every damn day they don’t find out. Terrified they would fire me. It’s too damn hard to find a job with a felony, ya know? I don’t take any of my freedom for granted. Not after as close as I got to living out the rest of my life in a cell.”
I’d known Loretta De-Ann Coffman all my life. She jokes now that she used to change my diapers, and I’m sure it’s true. De-Ann grew up in Campbell with my dad and his brothers and sister, and as a teenager she and my uncle Ricky dated hot and heavy—so much so that her family disowned her for having a Black boyfriend. Mama Lena took her in, at least emotionally, and De-Ann practically lived her senior year in high school at our house in Campbell. I was five years old then, and I remember her sweet, joyful presence. She would play with me and Jazz outside, teaching us how to turn cartwheels. Always stylish, she looked like the iconic Demi Moore in the movie Ghost, petite with a short haircut, sharp chin, and brown eyes. Her huge, open smile was matched only by her feisty temper. De-Ann didn’t take mess from anyone, but she had the biggest heart. She was family.
After high school, De-Ann graduated from VTI vocational school with a degree in business administration and management. She moved to Dallas with her friend Sophia, and started looking for a regular job, but they were hard to come by. So instead, she found her own path. Every weekend, Sophia and Sophia’s husband, Gregg, drove her up to a couple of local nightclubs to strut her stuff in their bikini contests. First prize paid about three hundred bucks. De-Ann won so consistently she didn’t even need a regular job.
On the Fourth of July that year a friend invited her to a boat party on Lake Ray Hubbard, where she spent the evening sitting at the bow beneath the fireworks, listening to Keith Sweat and flirting with the boat’s owner, Mike. A tall, broad-shouldered twenty-seven-year-old from the big city of Dallas, with sloe eyes and a magnetic smile, handsome and fly in his bright yellow and purple fit, Mike Wilson caught her attention and held it. By the end of that summer of 1991 they were a couple. De-Ann quit her bikini contests at Mike’s urging and moved into a lakeside condo. Mike paid the rent.
A little over a year later their romance would be cut short when Mike, De-Ann, Mike’s older brother Wayland, their cousin Terry, Donel Clark, and four others were indicted on federal charges that included conspiracy to distribute cocaine, crack, and marijuana. None of them had ever been in trouble with the law before. After a two-week trial, Wayland, Donel, and Terry received extreme sentences for their roles in the conspiracy. Like carnival mirrors, prosecutors had a way of distorting how people looked and making them appear larger than life. I’d seen them use this trick against Keyon and Sharanda. Mike and De-Ann were no exception. They were portrayed as leaders in the conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
I was only nine when De-Ann was sentenced. I remember Mama Lena accepting prison calls from her, trying to sound cheerful and upbeat. I didn’t understand the details then, only that she no longer came around the house. I heard Mama Lena talking about it with my daddy and uncles in grave tones; they said she’d been sent away under the new crack laws. No one could make sense of De-Ann having to spend the rest of her life in prison. She was only twenty-two. I just knew it felt like someone had died or, more accurately, was living through the nightmare of their own death. The grown-ups all shook their heads in sorrow and disbelief. I didn’t know what that meant, not then. But I missed De-Ann—we all did.
De-Ann served eight years of her life sentence before President Bill Clinton, who ironically had bolstered the very laws that sealed De-Ann’s fate in his devastating 1994 Crime Bill, granted her clemency in 2001. She was the only woman in the case who went to prison with these guys, the only white person. Mike, Donel, Terry, and Wayland were all Black men, and when De-Ann called me at Mama Lena’s that day, it looked for sure like they’d be spending the better part of their lives in human cages.