A Knock at Midnight(82)
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IN MARCH 2016, the White House hosted an event to welcome home recent clemency recipients. Sharanda and I were thrilled to be invited. Sharanda was barely out of her prison cell and already an advocate for those she’d left behind. Normally it takes about two months to process the paperwork to get a clemency recipient out of prison and into the halfway house. But there was something about Sharanda. Even though it had been Christmas, the staff at Carswell worked overtime and came in on their days off to get Sharanda Jones home. Everybody knew she shouldn’t be there. And everybody who knew her, loved her. Sharanda walked out of prison and into Clenesha’s arms a mere two weeks after our clemency call. And now, three months later, we would be attending an event at the actual White House. “From the penitentiary to Pennsylvania Avenue,” I said as we reached the airport. “Here we go!”
Sharanda hadn’t been on a trip as a free woman in almost seventeen years, but if she was feeling anxious, she didn’t let on. If you’d seen her walking through DFW Airport, you would have thought she flew every day. She walked briskly, with purpose, rolling her small suitcase behind her to stand in line at the Starbucks as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Still, a lot had changed since her incarceration, and while Sharanda always tried to take everything in stride, I knew that her readjustment to the outside could be exhausting. I tried to be sensitive to it, but sometimes I was too late. After we checked in to our hotel in D.C., I told Sharanda I’d see her at dinner, and it wasn’t until I was in my room that I realized she’d probably never used a keycard to open a hotel room door. When I took the elevator down to her room, I found Sharanda sitting on her bed, shaking her head and laughing. “Thank God a housekeeper came by!” she said. “You should have seen me out there trying to slide the card all over the door!” We laughed, but little incidents like this only reinforced for me the extreme isolation incarcerated people endure in prison.
When we arrived at the White House the next day, President Obama wasn’t present, but just knowing that he and his beautiful Black family lived there, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—in a house built by slaves—was extraordinarily moving to both of us. I have a picture on my desk of a photo Sharanda took that day with Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s senior adviser. In it, Jarrett is gazing at Sharanda as though she can’t believe this vibrant, smiling woman had ever served any time in prison, let alone sixteen years and nine months of a life sentence. Many people from the Obama administration who met the clemency recipients that day had the same expression. It was easy to see what it meant: This is a former prisoner? This is who we’re locking up?
I could understand their confusion. For most of its history, our country has worked so hard to demonize incarcerated people that we forget that they are our mothers and fathers, daughters and sons. Everyday people, all. Human beings who are not bad people, just made poor choices. I believe in the power of proximity, and at the White House that day, I was glad to see those so close to the highest office of the land rubbing shoulders with those who had for decades dwelled in our lowliest dungeons. Once those in power broke bread with those for whom mercy and justice had finally met, surely they would cease to see the thousands of waiting applications as anything other than human beings. Or so I hoped.
Seeing Sharanda embracing other recipients of clemency at the White House was incredibly moving. It was also an acute reminder that if Corey was ever going to have the chance to do the same, we had a lot of work to do.
The next morning, Sharanda and I waited nervously in a sleek white conference room just a few blocks east of the White House, in the Tenth Street offices of Covington & Burling, where Eric Holder was a partner. Sari Horwitz had surprised us by arranging a meeting with the former attorney general, the visionary behind the Clemency Initiative, at his law office. I was about to meet the first Black attorney general of the United States, a man I deeply admired and respected. I sat up straight, hands folded in front of me, full of nervous anticipation. But when Eric Holder walked in, relaxed, no tie, smiling at us so warmly it was as though he already knew us, I felt immediately at ease. He thanked us for the meeting and asked many questions, listening intently to each of our answers. Toward the end of the meeting, I asked him the question that had been weighing heavily on my mind since I submitted Corey’s petition.
“I’m a corporate attorney,” I said, “and I love that work. But my passion is criminal justice reform. I feel that mass incarceration is the most pressing civil rights issue of our time, and if I’m not doing everything I can to get people like Sharanda free, what am I really doing about it? I’m feeling conflicted about my career. I have other clients awaiting clemency and we’re nearing the end of this historic push, and Obama’s presidency. I feel like I have to do everything I can now, like there isn’t time for anything else. Do you have any advice?”
Mr. Holder didn’t hesitate. “Follow your passion,” he said. “Do what you love. I know exactly what you’re talking about. In fact—wait. My brother just sent me a wonderful quote about this today! Let me find it.”
He scrolled through his text messages. His frank response—not tempered with any caveats, any implied judgment that leaving such a career path might be rash—had surprised me. Mr. Holder looked up from his phone.