A Knock at Midnight(75)
“I love it,” I said. “And just wait until you hold that baby!” We had no more tears after the first minute of my visit, but that minute never left my mind.
When I left it was pouring rain outside, torrential rain, cold and gray and ugly. I had to cover my head with my coat to run to the car but got drenched anyway. I was glad. The minute I felt the rain on my skin I let out the pain I had been holding in since I felt Sharanda’s. I cried in the car, glad for the water streaming down the windows, shielding me from people in the parking lot. I hadn’t sobbed like that in the car since the first prison visit with my mom. I was drained, exhausted. I was angry at the guard who yelled at the kid on the grass. I was hurt by Sharanda’s tears, by Clenesha’s stress, by my own questions. It had been two long years since we’d filed the clemency petition. Was Sharanda really going to get out? Even to ask the question seemed a betrayal of our efforts, a failure to believe. But I understood Clenesha’s desperation. For sixteen years Sharanda had taken every day as it came, embracing her present, serving as a light in the darkness to all who crossed her path. Sixteen years. How much more of this could we endure? How much could Sharanda?
Before I left the parking lot, I pulled out my phone. I pulled up a screenshot of an old tweet that I kept for times when I felt I could hardly go on. When I was studying for the bar in 2011 and was scared I wouldn’t pass, I’d tweeted Bishop TD Jakes and asked him to keep me in his prayers. I’d never expected him to respond. But he had. “The last mile is always the hardest. You will win if you don’t quit.”
I kept the phone on my lap all the way home and kept looking at that tweet. “You will win if you don’t quit.”
On that hard day, hope seemed distant. Not quitting was all we had.
* * *
—
“MAMA, WILL YOU look in my purse and get my phone?”
“What the hell you got in here, a brick?” she said, pretending to struggle mightily to lift it.
It was around noon on Friday, December 18, 2015, and Mama and I were driving all over Dallas, running last-minute errands for our third annual GEM Christmas party the next day. As usual, my mom was making fun of me for packing my purse with an iPad and other necessities for on-the-go work. I was grateful for her jokes that morning. I’d taken the day off from ORIX. We had a million things to do to get ready for the party—making sure all the girls had gifts to open, and that we’d purchased the right size shoes and clothes for all the girls and their brothers. It was the last Friday before Christmas and traffic was terrible; it seemed all of Dallas had taken the day off to do their last-minute shopping. But I wasn’t on edge because of bad drivers.
“The Obamas are leaving for Hawaii tonight,” I said. My mom looked over at me. She always knew my heart.
“So today’s the last day for it, huh?”
“Yep.”
We were quiet for a little while. We didn’t need to speak. Both of us knew the stakes. The last round of clemencies had been in July, five months prior. There had been rumors for weeks that another round was coming—after all, holiday clemencies were a tradition even before the Clemency Initiative. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday had crept by, with me checking my phone a hundred times regardless of how tense the negotiations were at work. Nothing. If Obama didn’t announce today, there would be no Christmas clemencies at all.
Mama reached into my purse again. She pulled out a picture she knew I carried with me, of me and Sharanda in front of the Carswell Christmas tree the previous Christmas.
“We’re just gonna put this right here,” she said, and placed the picture on the dashboard. We kept driving, not talking, which was unusual for the two of us. It was a good silence, full of shared understanding of the weight of the next few hours. I was glad my mama was with me. I was glad Sharanda was, too, even if she was only on the dashboard.
It wasn’t but five minutes later that my phone rang with a 202 area code. Washington.
I gripped the steering wheel so hard as I answered that I’m surprised it didn’t break off. On speaker, a woman’s voice echoed through the car. “This is Kira Horstmeyer from the U.S. Pardon Attorney’s Office calling for attorney Brittany K. Barnett.”
“This is Brittany,” I said, my voice as even as I could muster. I pulled into the next parking lot and stopped the car. I could hear my own heartbeat. Mama put her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.
“I’m calling to inform you that President Barack Obama has granted clemency to your client, Sharanda Purlette Jones. Her sentence will expire on April 16, 2016. Please take a pen and paper to note the exact time we’ve arranged for you to have a call with Ms. Jones.”
My mom was crying, I was crying. We scrambled for a piece of paper, a pen, settled for the back of an envelope. After all these years of believing, I couldn’t believe what was happening. The moment was entirely surreal. If my mom hadn’t been sitting right there next to me, I would have thought I was dreaming. It was like there were two Brittanys in action at that moment, the one on the phone, listening carefully and writing down the information she gave me, and the real me, standing on the roof of the car with my arms flung out, so many thoughts and feelings rushing through me that my body could barely contain them. Sharanda Jones will not die in prison. Sharanda Jones is free.