A Knock at Midnight(46)
“De-Ann has told me so much about y’all,” I told him on the phone, “I feel like I know you already!”
“Man, it feels so good having a lawyer willing to help us,” he said slowly. “You just don’t know. When De-Ann said you weren’t going to charge us, I couldn’t believe it. Even if I never give this life sentence back, just the fact someone fought for me is a victory. Thank you.”
“It’s my pleasure, Mike. Truly. Thank you for trusting me with your life. My approach is a little different than some lawyers’. I really want to know your story. There’s always more to the story than what the transcripts say.”
Mike’s voice relaxed when he talked about his childhood in South Dallas, and when he talked about his parents, I could hear his love through the line.
Thomas Earl and Dorothy Wilson raised their boys with pride, pinching pennies to send them to St. Anthony’s, a nearby private school. A guidance counselor for the Dallas Independent School District, Dorothy doted on her sons. Her husband, Thomas Earl, was a hard man with particular ideas about making his sons men, but a devoted father. He worked for the railroad and as a coach at St. Anthony’s—a one-man show, he coached basketball, football and track, girls and boys, and ferried the athletes in the school bus to and from their games. After their divorce, Thomas Earl and Dorothy coparented, stressing the importance of education and hard work.
Mike’s brother, Wayland, the older of the two boys, shared his sibling’s easygoing ways but was the quieter, more introspective one. In prison, he’d become a jailhouse lawyer, counseling other incarcerated men on their cases, even writing successful briefs. He could be serious, focused, and intellectual, but then break out in a rumbling chuckle. He had a remarkable ability to find humor in anything.
As a kid, Wayland worked steady jobs all the way through high school. He attempted a semester at junior college before deciding to work full-time, loading and unloading buses at Continental Trailways from ’81 to ’84. He got his commercial license and drove for a couple of years for Schepps Dairy. In 1987, while loading newspapers for the Dallas Times Herald before his new route, an excruciating pain seared down his left leg, so intense his knees buckled. He’d crushed two discs in his lower back, resulting in tremendous chronic pain and a lack of mobility that restricted his ability to drive.
As compensation, Wayland received a $45,000 cash settlement. He bought a fourplex on Peabody Street near Pennsylvania Avenue, living in one unit and renting out the others. Eventually he had enough money saved to buy a small house with his wife, Jacqueline, who worked in merchandising for Coca-Cola and with whom he had two children, Reggie and Regina. In 1991, with money left over from the settlement and income from renting all four of the units in his complex, he started Motor Market Unlimited, an auto dealership that sold used luxury cars, listing his brother Mike as co-owner.
Wayland’s chronic back pain continued to plague him. He didn’t like the foggy, numb way the hydrocodone pills prescribed by his doctor made him feel, so he started smoking marijuana to manage the pain. Didn’t mess with his stomach like the opioid, either. Wayland sold weed as a side hustle, largely to support his own habit. He sold a couple of pounds a month, smoked about a pound. It was a low-key business that he didn’t think about too much. The car dealership he ran with Mike was doing well, car sales steady, and it kept him busy, as did managing his rental units.
Just as laid-back as his brother, Mike Wilson was popular in school and generous with friends and family alike. He was a natural leader, with the type of quiet confidence that made people follow him, believe in him. Tall and broad-shouldered, with deep-set eyes and a wide, easy smile that thrilled all the girls, Mike ran track and played football and had success in both. Sports and the firm hand of his parents kept him on the straight and narrow, although all around him the neighborhood was changing. White folks rolled through and interrupted pickup games to ask Mike and his friends where to buy drugs. The police were a constant presence, too, creeping through the streets in their black-and-whites, accelerating dangerously around corners, harassing young Black men, regarding every small Black child as a potential subject—even though all the children in South Dallas were Black. It was as though the neighborhood was under occupation.
Getting out of the city seemed like a good plan, so after high school, in the mideighties, Mike left to attend and play sports for Kilgore College, a community college a couple of hours east of Dallas. Kilgore was a small town where the local police station still flew a Confederate flag. Eighty years before, it had been the site of race riots sparked when white residents lynched a young Black man for having a relationship with a white woman. If things had changed in Kilgore in the years since, it was only on the surface.
At Kilgore College, Mike started dating a girl named Bonnie, who would eventually become the mother of his two sons, Mike Junior and Marc. Bonnie was a white girl, a local. Her father forbade “that nigger” to call the house or come by and had his friends in law enforcement harass Mike on his way to class. “You messing with that white girl, boy? Keep on and we’re gonna run your ass all the way back to Dallas,” the officers warned. Mike wasn’t intimidated; he thought the whole thing was nonsense. He continued to go to class, determined not to let a couple of racist white men ruin his first year at school. But when Mike’s parents got wind of the harassment on a visit down to Kilgore, they delivered their son a clear message. “No diploma from Kilgore College is worth your life,” Dorothy told him. “You need to get on out of here.”