A Knock at Midnight(98)
I was on my way to visit Chris for the first time. I planned to spend the day there, hanging out with him the way that I used to with Sharanda. More than anything, I wanted to hug him. Chris hadn’t had a visit from anyone since he’d left the jailhouse three years before, and those visits were always from behind glass. He had mentioned in passing how he hadn’t had a hug in seven years. He maintained a brave face. I could not imagine going without the healing power of a hug for so long.
Chris kept himself busy working in the law library, tutoring other men in prison for the math portion of their GED test, scouring the magazine subscriptions—MIT Tech Review and CNET Magazine—that Corey had sent to him as a “welcome to the family” gift. He emailed me nearly every day about the articles he read, posing questions and making unique and often profound observations. Chris’s intelligence was undiminished since his youth; if anything, his years of study in prison had allowed the flourishing of a brilliance that never failed to remind me of the power of human resilience. I had a notebook on the driver’s seat beside me, a notebook I considered my “Chris book.” Whenever I talked to Chris, I kept this vocabulary and idea journal with me. After our conversations, I furiously recorded the topics we’d discussed, and the ideas Chris had shared, lest they be lost.
I discovered very quickly in our calls and emails that Chris was an eternal dreamer with an endless imagination. One call he’d be thrilled with some AI invention, imagining its possibilities, worrying over its limitations and the potential problems it might create. The next he’d be crowing over venture capitalist Ben Horowitz’s blog in which Horowitz used rap lyrics as a lens to break down business and managerial principles. He followed Horowitz and Marc Andreessen’s private equity group a16z, mulling everything from their branding to their business model. “Tell Corey there’s that sixteen again!” he said.
Chris’s greatest passion was tech. Women and men incarcerated in federal prison can email using Corrlinks, but they don’t have access to the Internet. Nonetheless, using books only, Chris taught himself how to code. He was versed in Python, an advanced coding language. When I connected him to a friend of mine in the forefront of tech innovation, the two became pen pals, engaged in a lively exchange about the latest in coding, encrypting, and physics. Chris’s cell might be small, but his dreams were huge. Lately he’d been sharing new ideas he’d had about using psycholinguistics and social media algorithms to help people who were suicidal. “If only I could have gotten to Robert in time,” he’d said. “This is for him.”
I made my way to the front of the prison and parked. While all my other clients had exhausted their appeals and other legal remedies by the time they got to me, Chris had one more bite at the apple. We had ten months to file a motion of habeas relief. I planned to argue ineffective assistance of counsel, and I’d asked Chris to document everything he remembered about every conversation he’d ever had with his attorneys. I was hoping the details he provided today would be just what my argument needed. And I couldn’t wait to finally meet him in person and hear more about his suicide prevention idea, which I thought had tremendous potential.
A few minutes later, Chris came through the door, a huge, open smile on his handsome face, standing proudly at his full six feet two, a whole inch regained since the surgery corrected the length disparity in his hips. Like Corey, he projected an inner calm, and his observant, steady gaze was that of a man not easily ruffled. He had worked out hard in the six weeks since his surgery, off crutches before expected. There he stood tall and strong, without any support, his grin belying the struggle it had been to get there.
“I told you I’d be walkin’!” he said.
I stood up to meet him, my arms wide open. He walked right into them, and as I hugged him I could feel his body start to relax, the weight of his own arms become heavier as the tension in them eased. Seven years without a hug. Seven. My arms tight around him, I remembered what it felt like to hug my mama for the first time in prison, to push through the miserable plastic glass that separated us. The salt and pine scent of her skin, the strength of her arms around me. I remembered, and I hung on.
* * *
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HOPE IS FUEL. It was time to get back to work.
I had given up my corporate job to pursue my passion, and now I’d had a crash course in what it was like to take part in a movement and organize on a national level. The end of President Obama’s Clemency Initiative also meant the formal end to the Clemency Project and #ClemencyNow, both of which had been keyed toward maximizing the number of people we could free with Obama in office. I was a woman motivated, but without an organization or resources. And with a new president in office thought to be hostile to our efforts, I needed to find a new vehicle with which to get people to freedom.
Many organizations were shifting their attention away from the federal level to more local and state issues. A renewed state focus was certainly important: The vast majority of incarcerated people are chained to the state system. Still, the relentless onslaught of the War on Drugs had resulted in exponential growth in federal incarceration rates. There was certainly no shortage of worthy candidates. President Barack Obama had granted commutations to 1,716 people, more than any other sitting president, yet more than thirty thousand men and women in federal prison had applied. Thousands of people were still laboring in prison under the dark cloud of outdated drug laws. Of the nearly 185,000 people in federal prison in 2018, 46.2 percent were there for drug offenses. Almost half of the people in federal prison serving life without parole had been convicted of a drug crime, and 80 percent of them were people of color. Through Obama’s Clemency Initiative, I had come into contact with many of these individuals and heard their pleas not to have to die in prison. I couldn’t leave them there now.