A Knock at Midnight(65)

There was also Mike’s health to take into consideration. I pointed out in my motion that Mike was suffering the consequences of a severe left-side stroke. Doctor’s orders for immediate speech therapy had been ignored for nine months after the stroke occurred in 2011, and as a result, Mike was unable to read, write, or speak with any degree of fluency. He had difficulty making phone calls, as his speech impediment was severe; his stammer worsened with frustration and stress, both fairly inevitable due to the presence of the guards and his difficulty in formulating his thoughts. Other men in prison helped him to write his emails. His prison-appointed speech therapist reported negligible progress. Mike needed an intensive program, as soon as possible, and he wasn’t going to get it in prison.

    While we waited for a decision from the court, I found myself in much closer contact with Mike’s two sons, Mike Junior and Marc. Toddlers when Mike received his sentence, both boys were now in their midtwenties, as tall and handsome as their father. Like Donel, Mike had done everything he could to raise his sons from prison. Though his absence created a painful void in their lives, they still cherished him as a father figure.

One evening Mike’s younger son, Marc, texted me and asked if he could come by to talk about the pending motion.

We been let down so many times by lawyers, he texted. You just different. You bring us a lot of hope.

A few days later he sat on my couch, all long legs and wide shoulders, eyebrows furrowed on his handsome twenty-five-year-old face. “De-Ann told me your mom was in prison, too.”

“She was,” I said. “Not nearly as long as your dad. But every day was like a year. I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you.”

“I miss him. He was everything to us. We went from seeing him every single day before prison to once a month right after he went, and then nothing after they moved him to California. I’ve saved some money, and I’m thinking about going out there soon. I want my girlfriend, Nancy, to meet him. I mean, that’s my dad, you know?”

I did. Marc looked at me. Beyond his tough exterior, his lean muscles and tattoos, I saw the child who’d waited at home to play catch with a father who never returned. He was trying hard to be strong. I thought about the burden he had to carry, and how little room there is in this world for young Black men to show any sign of vulnerability. It took courage to reach out and open up to me in this way.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?” I asked.

“Almost seven years,” he said. His voice wavered just a little, a tiny crack in his confident demeanor that hinted at depths of grief beneath. “He always told us he was coming home, but as I got older, I just kind of stopped believing it.”

    “That’s a long time,” I said softly. “Go visit him, Marc. Your dad would be so happy to see you. And proud.”

“It’s been so long. It’s hard, man. To see him like that, to not be able to take him with me when I leave. Do you think he’ll ever get out? Do you really think he has a chance?”

I understood his hesitation, and his fears. In video interviews supplementing their “Living Death” report, the ACLU interviewed family members of those serving life without parole sentences. In one, a mother whose son had served twenty-two years for selling a ten-dollar crack rock looks bravely into the camera. “I know this is hard to say, but sometimes I think it would be easier if he had died. This is like a death sentence. But we don’t get to bury him. If he had died, it would be easier.”

It seemed to me that something similar was operating for Marc. He wanted desperately to see his dad. But he was afraid that a visit would dredge up the pain of his initial loss, prolong this endless goodbye, the endless mourning. A single visit was no balm for that kind of suffering. I thought suddenly about my drives down to Gatesville with Jazz to see our mom, cracking jokes with false bravado all the way there, our silence on the way home, Jazz driving and staring hard at the highway ahead like she wanted to strangle it, me sitting in the passenger seat with my face turned to the window so she couldn’t see my tears. Then the drained exhaustion of the day after, the headaches. Mama was gone for two years. Mike had been away from his sons for twenty-two.

“There’s a lawyer who I deeply admire,” I said finally, “who has helped a lot of people society said were beyond redemption. Took cases all the way to the Supreme Court in order to change the law. His name is Bryan Stevenson. And what he says is that in order to get people free, you have to believe that you can. You have to believe in things you cannot see, with conviction in your heart.”

Marc listened to me intently, searching my face for reassurance, a rekindling of hope. I could only offer my truth.

    “He is right,” I said. “And I do believe. I truly believe that your dad will be free. And I need you to believe it, too.”

When he left my apartment, Marc seemed deep in thought. The next week he sent me a text.

Me and my girl bought plane tickets. I’ll tell my dad you said what’s up.

Marc and his girlfriend flew out to California to visit Mike in Victorville. Later, he told me the conviction he heard in my voice encouraged him to go. “Your belief helped me to believe,” he said. “It gave me the courage to do what I’d been wanting and needing to do for years.”

Still, it was a bittersweet visit. Sweet to see his beloved father in the flesh for the first time since he’d been transferred to California seven years earlier, both men hugging and crying, overcome with emotion. Bitter to see the state of his father’s health—his speech painfully slow, movement and responses delayed. The last time Marc had seen his dad, Mike seemed unbreakable, could hold all three boys at once, lift them off the ground as they hung from his arms during the end-of-visit goodbye, fit all three in the breadth of his loving embrace. Now his speech was halting, and while his arms were still long like his sons’ and his chest broad, he lacked the strength to squeeze Marc as he used to. “That stroke really messed him up, Brittany,” Marc told me. “We’ve got to get him out of that place. He needs physical therapy and speech therapy. They’re not even trying to help him in there.”