A Knock at Midnight(91)
Out in the Arizona mountains might have been the first time in my life I had ever really done it. It felt incredible. And it felt hard. Teachers, lawyers, social workers, activists—anyone who works with the directly impacted, anyone who confronts the system day in and day out—will tell you that residual trauma is real. This is especially true for Black women, who for generations have carried the weight of the world on our broad and capable shoulders, wedging our bodies in doorways in order for our brothers and sisters of all races to walk through. Human beings are built for empathy—built to absorb and experience the pain of others. Adrenaline, urgency, the forward momentum of the work, all of those things can propel you when you’re in the thick of it. But when that stops and the world stills, it matters not how great the victory. You feel the losses sustained along the way. And the exhaustion.
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A FEW DAYS later, I left Arizona rested and grateful but still in a complete fog as far as what my future held. I returned to Dallas and binge-watched too many Netflix documentaries to name. I watched one on the Black Panther Party, and then started it over again. I watched Ava DuVernay’s 13th and I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin, and they only reinforced what had become so crystal clear through this clemency journey: that the current crisis of mass incarceration was only the latest incarnation of the long, violent history of the oppression of Black people in this country. That every single human being left behind by President Obama’s Clemency Initiative was buried alive by laws and social norms that had a direct link to our nation’s sordid foundation: genocidal colonization of native peoples and the chattel enslavement of Africans. That my own journey was inextricably bound to this history. And my own liberation was tied to that of every single person unjustly chained in America’s prisons.
I felt inspired. But to do what? I still had no idea, and no energy with which to do it. I may have been a little depressed. I walked around my house in a daze in sweats and a T-shirt, barely eating. I stayed on the couch under a blanket. I couldn’t muster the energy to leave the house. All my life I had been so certain of my path, so driven toward my next goal. Now I had no idea what lay ahead.
My lack of clarity made me emotionally raw and vulnerable in a way I had never let myself be before. Sharanda fussed over me, cooking my favorite foods in the evenings after she got off work, and Palyn, her one-year-old granddaughter, made me smile. Corey coached me in emails from prison. I spoke on the phone frequently to all of my clients, listening as they related the challenges and the triumphs of reentering a society they’d been away from for so long. I filed motions to get Sharanda, Mike, Wayland, Terry, and Donel off supervised release early and advocated for Corey’s early release to a halfway house. I lay on the couch and waited for some kind of sign to tell me what the hell I should do with the rest of my life.
Just as I was getting ready to restart the Panthers documentary for the third time, I got an email from Taylor Dolven, a journalist from Vice News, who’d done great work covering the #ClemencyNOW campaign. “A while ago I did an article on a man named Chris Young, who is serving life without parole for drugs,” she wrote.
Now the federal judge in his case has resigned in protest of mandatory minimum sentences, and is talking about Chris’s case in the media as an example of why he did so. It’s pretty extraordinary. Chris was wondering if this might open the avenue for clemency for him—or for something. He asked me to reach out to you and see if you’d have a conversation with him, just for advice.
A federal judge resigning in protest of drug sentencing laws—that was big news. A federal judgeship is a lifetime appointment, an honor that many judges yearn for. And this judge had resigned? I had to check it out for myself.
Taylor had attached three items to her email: her original Vice piece on Chris Young, a recent interview from The Tennessean with former federal judge Kevin Sharp, and Chris’s sentencing transcript. The first line of The Tennessean article read: “Kevin H. Sharp sent Chris Young to prison for life and he thought it was wrong.” I sat up a little and kept reading.
There had been many Chrises in the six years Judge Sharp had served as a lifetime Obama appointee on the bench, but Chris Young’s case was the one he recalled in his interview with The Tennessean—the one that, according to the reporter, made Sharp choke up and brought tears to his eyes. I got a familiar feeling in my chest; after what felt like weeks of dormancy, it felt good to have that feeling again. Intrigued, I opened the court transcripts. What I read there over the next few hours was extraordinary. Yes, I told Taylor, I’d have a call with Chris.
One phone call later, my grand confusion was dispelled. Chris’s incarceration story was a by now familiar travesty of the justice system, but his life story was remarkable. It exposed the flaws not only in criminal justice but in all the oppressive systems that underpinned inequality in America.
There was no longer any hesitation on my part. The answer for what to do with myself was right in front of me. Only this time, there would be no Clemency Initiative to provide a ray of light. We would have to do everything through the courts.
Chris Young’s life depended on it.
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CLARKSVILLE, TENNESSEE, IS about forty-five minutes northwest of Nashville, on the border with Kentucky, built along the river and divided by the two-lane highway and nearly defunct railroad tracks. Populated by military families connected to Fort Campbell Air Force Base on the north side and pockets of concentrated generational poverty on the south, the town has an average income of $21,395 a year. This is where Chris Young was born, in 1988. Like me, Chris was part of the second generation of the crack epidemic. But Chris grew up with a suffocating level of poverty I’d never known. And unlike me, he didn’t escape the epidemic’s legacy.