A Knock at Midnight(50)

Even the media had found their way to the story. “If I have to stay in here,” Genice told one reporter investigating prison hospital conditions, “I’ll probably end up dead.”

None of this made it any easier for Sharanda, who was halfway across the country from her family, serving her sentence 850 miles away in Tallahassee, Florida. Weasel, housed at Carswell’s low-security camp across the street from the medical center, heard of Genice’s dire condition through the prison grapevine and updated her sister through letters. Caring for Genice had been one of the defining responsibilities of Sharanda’s life, and even a life sentence wouldn’t change that. Still numb from the shock of her sentencing, only one thing made sense to Sharanda: She had to get to Genice.

    Sharanda spent her first year in federal prison desperately writing letters on her mother’s behalf. From her concrete cell in Tallahassee, she wrote to the warden at Carswell, to Judge Solis, to journalists, to the ACLU. She sent lengthy instructions to the medical staff at Carswell, explaining how to turn her mother without causing damage, how to move her bowels, the therapy exercises required to keep her blood from clotting. She endured the cruel taunts of the guards as she petitioned the prison administration for a transfer to Carswell to be nearer to Genice. “Keep on writing, Jones,” they told her. “You ain’t never seeing Texas or your mama again.”

When she wasn’t advocating for Genice, Sharanda studied in the law library, where she slowly learned that the judge had handed her a virtual death sentence. In the federal system, life was life. All Sharanda could do was live in the present and pray. Every day, she spoke to Clenesha on the phone for ten minutes, trying to keep from screaming in grief as she listened to her nine-year-old recounting schoolday adventures. Back in her cell, she focused on getting her mother the care she’d helped provide since she was four years old.

She’d been inside for almost a year when the news came. “Jones, pack out,” a guard said. “I don’t know how in the hell, but you’re going to Texas. Maybe now you can stop writing those damn letters.”

The following day, Sharanda was chained, black-boxed, and transported in the same animal conditions she’d experienced when she first pulled chain. Only this time, she sat tall all the way, despite the digging metal of the black box, the chafing chains around her wrists, ankles, and waist. In the hell of the past year, even this dreadful passage counted as a small victory. Sharanda Jones was on her way to Carswell Federal Medical Center to be reunited with her mother.



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    IT WAS ALMOST too late. Sharanda arrived at Carswell on a cold night in 2001 to find her mother in alarming condition. Genice’s face was discolored, her legs obscenely bloated despite her severe weight loss, her skin covered in a sheen of cold sweat. Well aware that complaining would get her nowhere but solitary, Sharanda began to nurse her mother back to health. This required every bit of ingenuity she could muster. Genice was on the fourth floor of the main hospital building, reserved for those with chronic conditions, so Sharanda got a job in cosmetology on the first. She took a second job in the laundry, located in the basement of the same building, so she could deliver sheets to Genice’s floor. She made sure she was in charge of hair in that unit, too. In between work-sanctioned visits she would sneak up to Genice’s bedside, timing her elevator rides to miss patrolling guards. Orderlies admired her devotion and turned a blind eye.

Under Sharanda’s care, Genice’s swelling went down, her sweats eased, and she gained color in her cheeks through a nutrition plan Sharanda concocted with what she could scrap together in the prison commissary and carefully monitored. Within a few months, Genice could make it outside the unit in a motorized wheelchair, where she met Sharanda on the yard and spent a recreational hour breathing in the fresh air, the sun on her face. If they went to the right place on the yard, they could even wave through the chain-link fence to Weasel, who was winding down her eight years at the low-security camp.

Despite Sharanda’s growing realization that the attorneys she and her family continued to pour money into were not going to help her, she found reserves of courage and strength within herself that she didn’t know she had. Committed to her mother’s care, she made a pledge. “God is not going let you stay like this forever,” Sharanda told herself. “But you are here right now. You can’t live for the outside. You’ve got to be fully present. You’ve got to live here. In this moment. In this place.”

    With that commitment, Sharanda endured, even as Weasel was eventually released and it was just her and Genice. When I came to Sharanda a few years later, inexperienced and na?vely optimistic, she had nothing left to lose.

“And besides,” she said, “I believed in you.”



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OVER THE NEXT several years, as I graduated from law school and threw myself into my corporate career, I visited Sharanda whenever I could. We hardly talked about her case on these visits. Unlike at Texas state prisons, where visiting sessions were a strict two hours, Saturdays with Sharanda could stretch all day. I got to know many of the women of Carswell and their stories through Sharanda. There were other lifers at Carswell, a few, like her friend Alice Johnson, also in for drug charges. In addition to those with medical needs, Carswell also housed women in maximum security, and some on death row. Sometimes Sharanda would point out women in the visiting room convicted of the most gruesome crimes—aggravated child abuse, kidnappings, murder. Most of them had a release date. Sharanda Jones did not.