A Knock at Midnight(70)
“Moving you?” I froze with a Cheeto halfway to my mouth. My heart sank. “What in the hell? To where?”
“Not a prison transfer. I don’t mean that. But my cell. I’ve been there ten years. That’s like the one part of this place I’ve made mine. Ten years. And they’re moving me.”
“Did you tell them you didn’t want to move?”
Sharanda looked at me like I should know better. “You know that won’t work,” she said. “They don’t care what we think or feel. I’ll be fine.” She tried to smile. “I’m just…tired.”
When I left the prison that day, storm clouds were gathering, and the heavy gray of the sky dimmed the purple pansies the women tended so carefully and turned the razor wire black. At work we could move billions of dollars with a phone call and transform an international conglomerate seemingly overnight. But within the prison system, I was powerless to help Sharanda hold on to even the tiniest grain of dignity—a steel cot in a concrete room she’d had to accept as home for the last ten years of her life.
* * *
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WHEN SARI HORWITZ of The Washington Post first reached out to me, I was skeptical about journalists. We’d had some bad experiences by then, Sharanda and I, spending hours responding to someone’s questions only for a brief write-up that lost the energy or essence of what we thought we had expressed. I was starting to feel that media could hurt our clemency efforts as much as help, and felt disinclined to spend much more time with journalists. I didn’t have any time, for one thing, and while in some ways Sharanda had nothing but time, it took a toll on her to relive those early days of her sentence, brought emotions to the surface that survival inside required her to contain.
Sari was doing a series on the human devastation from the War on Drugs, and she planned to include a story on a clemency recipient and another on a person seeking clemency. Julie Stewart, the president of FAMM, had let her know that I happened to represent both. Would I be interested in speaking with her?
I wasn’t, not really. I’d already typed my polite response to that effect, but something made me Google her. I’m so glad I did. Sari was a three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who had already done a moving story investigating the costs of incarcerating the elderly and infirm. It was a remarkable story, and the photographs by Nikki Kahn, who would be accompanying Sari in Dallas, captured every nuance of the horrors of incarceration.
I met Nikki and Sari at the Saltgrass Steakhouse next to their hotel in Arlington so that I could give them some background information on the case. From the moment I met them I felt at ease. Sari, a small woman with a sleek dark-haired bob and incredible intellectual energy, had been a top Washington Post journalist for thirty years; each sharp question led to the next question. Nikki was calm and quiet, her questions equally probing but reflecting an artist’s intuition. I felt inspired, sitting across from these two brilliant women clearly at the top of their game. I had planned on keeping my part brief, presenting the case and our plea for mercy as simply and succinctly as possible to avoid any misinterpretation in the write-up, but as soon as we started talking I opened up. Nikki asked how I got involved with the case. I surprised myself when, as I recounted that moment when I first saw Sharanda in the YouTube video in a prison uniform so reminiscent of my mother’s, I began to cry.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just feel so deeply about this. Sharanda has to get out of prison. She has to.”
After our meeting, Sari and Nikki changed their schedules, allowing more time to research Sharanda’s case. They tracked down everyone involved. They found Sharanda’s former friends, Julie and Baby Jack, who had first turned over her name to the feds. When the couple refused to answer the phone, Sari stood on their porch and knocked on their door. They pursued the prosecutors for comment, and the judge, and scoured the trial transcripts just as I had. Sari even got permission from the Federal Bureau of Prisons for a special two-day midweek visit to Carswell during which she and Nikki would be able to spend time alone with Sharanda and Clenesha in the visiting room. It was the first time in all the years of Sharanda’s incarceration that she and Clenesha, who was now twenty-four years old, had a chance to see each other privately outside visiting hours.
After the prison visit, Sari and Nikki asked to interview Clenesha in her home as well. Clenesha is a shy and private person, and at first she struggled with the decision to open her home, and her emotions, to two women she hardly knew. “I don’t know, Brittany. They were really nice, but I don’t know if I want to be interviewed by myself. This is national news. I mean, The Washington Post? I just feel nervous.”
“Think about it and trust your intuition. There is absolutely no pressure here, and if you feel forced, don’t do it. Sari and Nikki will understand. Do what you feel. You know I’ll support you either way.”
A few hours later Clenesha called me back. “This is my mom’s life. And it’s my life. People need to know. And me telling my story might help someone else with a parent in prison know they are not alone. I’m going to do it.”
I know it took a lot for Clenesha to open her home to Sari and Nikki that day, but they had won her trust, and she shyly showed them her small home; it hardly had furniture yet. They followed her with a video camera as she showed cards Sharanda had made for her and other tender examples of their close relationship. “My whole life is on hold,” she confessed.