A Knock at Midnight(69)
Mike is a big man with a hundred-watt smile from ear to ear. Stroke or no stroke, the hug he gave me was powerful. Here was a man set to die in prison, squeezing me for all he was worth, his grown sons looking on. There are no words to capture the feeling of a homecoming like that. A powerful Black man, back from the dead. Free at last. Over the past several years our lives had been so intimately connected, and yet this was the first time meeting in person. It didn’t feel like it. I knew Mike, and Mike knew me. He was my brother.
“You saved my life,” Mike kept saying. “You know I had to come to thank you. You’re my angel!” Whenever he paused between words, he seemed to smile even wider.
I shook my head. “I should be thanking you for trusting me with your life, to allow me on such an amazing journey.” I meant it. I had been complacent, satisfied with the first reduction, content to let Mike spend four more years in prison. If I hadn’t heard the pain in his voice, hadn’t been jolted out of my own false sense of satisfaction, Mike would still be in prison that very moment. I wouldn’t want to spend four years in prison. Why should anyone else? I was grateful to Mike for reminding me that there was nothing more urgent than freedom.
My apartment was on the twenty-fourth floor, and we stood at the floor-to ceiling windows in the living room, the boys looking at Mike, and Mike gazing out at the skyline of the city he hadn’t laid eyes on in over two decades. We were all grinning, still stunned by the events of the past forty-eight hours. Mike’s sons couldn’t keep their eyes off their dad. They were grown men, tall and athletic, with sleeve tattoos on their muscled brown arms, but their looks of unabashed delight as they took in Mike’s presence were full of the innocent adoration of much younger boys. They love their daddy, I thought. It didn’t matter how grown they were. They loved their daddy the way they did when he first went away.
The sky turned from blue to blush pink to a deeper blue, and the city lights began to wink on—the neon green of the Bank of America Plaza Building, the rotating crystal ball of Reunion Tower.
Mike took a deep breath, still smiling, his eyes shining. “Man, I sure am glad to see my city,” he said. “I sure am.”
When he spoke in that moment, he barely stuttered at all.
Chapter 13
LOVE, FAITH, HOPE
My corporate career showed no signs of slowing down, and ORIX was exactly where I wanted to be. The mode was aggressive, the energy was huge, and so were the spoils of this new chapter of my professional life. But the stark difference between the luxury perks of my job and the reality of my clients’ lives inside was beginning to take a harsher emotional toll. I loved my job, but my heart—and increasingly my head—were elsewhere. Instead of enjoying our lavish company dinners, I thought about the food on the prison tray. When I traveled, diving into the turquoise seas of Turks and Caicos, I took advantage of a sorely needed reprieve from the pace of my work at ORIX. But I also thought of Sharanda, of Wayland. They should be able to marvel at the purity of the Caribbean waters, too. I’d go to a market and think, Sharanda would love this—only to be reminded of where she was instead.
Whatever satisfaction was brought by the luxe perks and excitement of corporate law was tempered by the reality that still, six years after our first meeting, Sharanda was laboring under the burden of her life sentence. She was always telling me she was proud of me, reminding me how important it was for Clenesha and other Black girls to see women like themselves in positions of power. “I never had that in Terrell,” she said. “You keep your head up, Brittany. Keep doing what you’re doing.” Her faith in me kept me going. In all the time I knew her she had never complained. Every single day, the women around her lost their minds from the pressure cooker of incarceration, and yet Sharanda remained Sharanda—upbeat, generous, making the most of her present. She had made it through the worst of the crushing grief that followed the death of her mother, but for the first time I was beginning to see signs of wear from the long war of attrition she had so far endured with such grace.
Her body hurt. Sharanda’s knee joints had worn away, the pain acute from sixteen years of walking on nothing but concrete. A specialist at John Peter Smith Hospital confirmed that both knees were bone on bone and signed an immediate surgery order, only for the Carswell physician to revoke it, prescribing weight loss instead. Chronic pain added to Sharanda’s fatigue. She still counseled the most severely depressed incoming women, was still a positive light in the unit. But I could see that the struggle it took to shine that light was mightier than it had ever been.
One Saturday during a short lull between deals I drove out to see her. Her dreadlocks were almost shoulder length now; she’d begun to grow them after Genice’s passing. “This place is dreadful,” she said, “so I’m growing dreads. And I’m not cutting them till I’m free.” She’d pulled her hair into a half ponytail, and the style made her face look even younger. She still smiled and responded to my questions, but I could sense an emotional distance that I had never felt before.
“Sharanda, what’s wrong?” I said. “I know it’s something. I can feel it.”
“It’s nothing,” she said, forcing another smile. “I’m good. I just…the little things are really starting to get to me.” She sighed and looked down at her hands. “They’re moving me, Brittany.”