* * *
—
In the living room, I go through the same routine. I walk the perimeter of the room. I check the locks on the windows, check the lock on the front door, look through the curtains, scan the yard, the street, look as far as I can in every direction. Clear. I turn back and realize, thankfully, that the couch rests against the wall. I press the seat cushions, find them firm, harder than the bed in the guest bedroom. I lie down and push myself against the back of the couch, replicating the position I grew accustomed to in prison—back against the wall, facing the front of my cell. After a while, my head slumps, my eyes flutter, and I drift off to a semi-sleep. Then I jerk awake. I hear something outside. Someone screaming on the second tier. No. A cat howling. I start to close my eyes again. A car backfires. Or is that a gunshot? I curl up against the couch again, fly back up when I hear a siren.
Before I know it, the first light of day sneaks across the living room floor. I extricate myself from the couch, gather up my pillow and blanket, and return to the guest bedroom. I don’t want my mother to know that I can’t sleep here. I can’t abide her worrying about me. I’ve put her through enough. I lower myself onto the edge of the bed and look at my hands. I turn them over and study my wrists. I see invisible handcuffs. I feel the cold metal. I look up at the ceiling. I have left prison but prison has not left me.
* * *
—
The second day I’m home, I visit my aunts who live in the city. Honey and Sugar have aged, but being older hasn’t diminished their physical strength. They take turns crushing me in a series of hugs. They cry; then we sit at the table, sipping coffee, and talk about faith and the power of prayer. I admit that when I first got incarcerated, I didn’t have much use for God.
“I couldn’t see Him,” I say. “I couldn’t feel Him.”
“He could see you,” Honey says.
“I found that out. Going to church saved me. The verses you sent saved me. Believing saved me.”
“Now you have to find out what He has in mind for you,” Sugar says.
“I will,” I say. “I promise.”
* * *
—
I offer to go to the grocery store for my mother. She writes out a list, gives me some cash, and slips an extra twenty-dollar bill into my hand.
“Get something for yourself,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say, and I do feel thankful.
I also feel humiliated. I should be buying her groceries out of my own money. But I have no money, no job, no bank account. I will start looking for work this evening. Now I walk into the grocery store, a casual, everyday errand nobody thinks twice about. I open the door and take a few steps in, and I freeze. Paranoia lunges at me, grips me.
Face and hands, I think, surveying the store, the shoppers, the clerks, the cashiers.
I walk farther into the store and keep my eyes fixed on faces and hands.
I blink and see myself back at Green Bay Correctional. Gladiator School. Every week a hundred new inmates infiltrate the population. I don’t know where they stand, how violent or crazy they are, what message they may want to send. I don’t know when something will happen, but I know something will.
“Sir?”
I see a man wearing a green apron standing behind a glass case. I’m at the meat department.
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“You’re next.”
My hands shake as I look over my mother’s list. I can’t decipher her writing, can’t make out the words.
“Chicken,” I say.
“How do you want it? Pieces? Thighs? Legs? A whole chicken?”
“I, uh—”
I stare at the man at the meat counter. He taps his fingers impatiently on the top of the glass case. I swivel my head and see a woman behind me, shaking her head. She must think there’s something wrong with me. I want to explain to her and to the man at the meat counter that I just got out of prison. I spent a decade locked up for a crime I didn’t commit. Being thrown back into normal society isn’t as easy as you think. They don’t prepare you for going in, and they prepare you even less for getting out.
But I don’t say any of that.
“Thighs,” I say.
* * *
—
My mother’s ancient computer wheezes and whirs when I boot it up. I log on to Yahoo, a popular search engine, and look for jobs. I don’t find much, and the computer’s sluggish dial-up connection drives me crazy. My mind shouldn’t move quicker than the computer. After an hour of poking around the Yahoo classifieds, I hit nothing but dead ends. I come away feeling inadequate, realizing that in order to get hired, I need a driver’s license, a state ID, and a strong résumé.
Strange, I think. At seventeen, being interrogated by the police, I wanted only to go home. Now that I’ve come home, I feel this burning urge to leave. I want to be on my own, to stop being a burden to my mother, to be my own man. In prison, I was a lawyer. On the outside, I feel helpless.
* * *
—
My third day home, I take the train downtown to get my driver’s license. Before heading to the DMV, I walk through my old neighborhood. The whole time I feel as if I’ve taken a wrong turn and entered an entirely different city. Businesses I remember have been replaced by stores I don’t know. The corner grocery store has been torn down, a twenty-four-hour convenience store put up in its place. Houses have been demolished, leaving an alarming number of empty lots. I remember there being a pay phone on every corner. Now I see none.
I decide to go by my grandparents’ old house, the Big House, where I spent so much of my childhood. I find the Big House sitting regally on its oversized corner lot. But the two big trees that used to be in front have been cut down. The new owners have also removed the garage. That is the house, I think, but it’s not the house I knew, the house where I learned to cook, to read, and to love the Cubs and the Bears. It’s a big house, not the Big House. I slowly move away.
* * *
—
A crowd of loud, impatient, unhappy people waits inside the DMV, all of them wanting to be somewhere else. I pause at the door to catch my breath and find my bearings. I have to be here. I have no choice. To find a job—to move ahead with my life—I need to get a state ID card and renew my driver’s license.
I have come prepared. I’ve brought a copy of my birth certificate that my mother keeps in an envelope in her desk drawer; my old, expired license; my prison ID, which I hope I won’t have to show; my mother’s old cell phone that I’m still figuring out how to use; and some extra cash she thrust into my hand before I left and I guiltily folded and stuffed into my pocket.
I move away from the door and see that the crowd has been directed into several lines—a line to take the written test for a driver’s license, a line for an eye exam, a line to take a road test, a line to obtain a state ID. I step into that line, shifting my weight anxiously. I count fifteen people ahead of me. I look behind me, check out everyone within ten feet of me. I settle in and wait.
An hour and fifteen minutes later, I come to the head of the line.
“Next,” a woman’s voice calls, loud, bored, annoyed.
I step up to an older woman framed in a window below the words “State ID.” She reminds me of my aunt Honey but without her sunny personality.
“Hi,” I say, smiling. “How are you?”
“State ID?” she says.
“Yes. And I’d also like to renew my driver’s license.”
I hand her my expired license. She types my information into her computer, then speaks without looking at me. “You have a car that’s been impounded because of unpaid parking tickets. The vehicle was considered abandoned.”
She scowls at her computer screen.
“Eight years of parking tickets.”
I start to explain. “See, it w
as this old Chevy. I completely forgot about it—”
“You will have to pay the fines and all the fees to a collection agency before you can renew your license.”
“How much would that be?”
She types in some more numbers.
“Twelve hundred dollars.”
“What? Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“I’m going to have to deal with that later. I’ll just take the state ID.”
“Birth certificate, please.”
I hand the document to her.
She looks it over, scowls again, continues to speak without looking at me, hostility dripping off her like perspiration.
“This is a copy,” she says.
“Yes. It’s a copy of my birth certificate.”
“You need the original.”
“I don’t have the original.”
“Then you have to get the original. You fill out a form. Send it in. Takes about a month, six weeks.”
“I don’t have that kind of time—”
“You also need a second form of ID.”
“I need two forms of ID to get my ID?”
“Yes.”
“Like what?”
“Social Security card. You have that?”
“No.”
“Go to Line C and get a Social Security card.”
“Line C,” I say. “Social Security card.”
“Next.”
I turn away from the window and walk to the end of Line C. I count thirteen people ahead of me. After ten minutes, I move two feet forward. Suddenly the cell phone pings. I hold it away from me. I bring the phone closer and see some words on the screen. “Got your VM. At work. Talk later. D.”
I stare at the words.
I turn the phone over, bring the face closer to me.
I reflexively press a key.
Nothing happens.
I reread the typewritten message and determine that somehow my friend Deshaun has typed a message to me on this phone in response to the voice mail I left on his phone last night. I’m not sure how he was able—
“Text message,” I say aloud. “He told me about this.”
The guy ahead of me in line turns and looks at me.
“Got a text message,” I say, trying not to sound too proud or too ignorant.
“Wow,” he says, inching away from me.
* * *
—
An hour later, I arrive at the window to get my Social Security card. A woman about my age leans on her elbows and smiles. “How you doing?”
“Well, it’s been a long morning.”
She laughs. “I hear you. Okay, let’s get you a replacement Social Security card. I’ll need two forms of ID.”
My stomach flips.
“Two forms?”
“Yes, like a birth certificate, a driver’s license, a state ID.”
I say quietly, “I waited over an hour in that other line to get a state ID. The lady there told me I couldn’t get one without a Social Security card. She sent me to this line to get my Social Security card, but now you’re telling me that I need a state ID to get that.”
“Do you have your birth certificate?”
I hand her the copy of my birth certificate.
The young woman looks it over. “This is a copy.”
“And you need an original.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Please tell me—what do I need?”
“Any two forms of ID. A piece of mail that establishes your address, a utility bill, a phone bill, a library card.”
“A library card,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I’ll get a library card.”
Once again, I will be saved by going to the library.
“To be clear,” I say to the woman at the window, “I’m about to leave here with nothing.”
“Welcome to the DMV,” she says.
* * *
—
Sunday, February 4, 2007.
I watch the Super Bowl with my mother, stepfather, some family members, and a couple of friends. During the pregame show, I say, “This is unreal. I’m home, and the Bears are in the Super Bowl.”
“Life is good,” someone shouts, and everyone laughs.
The Colts kick off and Devin Hester runs it back for a touchdown. Takes exactly fourteen seconds. We score again and take a 14–6 lead at the end of the first quarter. Then the wheels come off. We can’t stop Peyton Manning, and the Colts’ defense buries us. In miserable Miami weather, the rain pouring all game, the Colts win 29–17. That Super Bowl sticks with me, though. The Bears come close, a Black coach holds the Vince Lombardi Trophy aloft, and for the halftime show Prince kills. But my most memorable moment? At halftime, I pad into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, pause at the choices I have, all for free, all for me. I say a silent prayer of thanks, slide out a soda, and close the refrigerator door. At least for this one moment, I catch a glimpse of what normal feels like.
* * *
—
I apply to a reentry program at a nonprofit to learn basic job-seeking skills—using the computer, writing emails, crafting an effective résumé, maneuvering through online job searches. I walk into a nondescript building downtown, sign in, sit close to the front, and take a ton of notes. The instructor, a soft-spoken woman in her forties, begins by explaining the basic steps of writing a résumé. At one point, I swivel my head and assess the room. Some of the ex-convicts have fallen asleep, some stare blankly at the instructor, a few, like me, eagerly take down every word the instructor says. At the end of the day, the instructor tells us that tomorrow we’ll be taking a deep dive into the Internet.
The next day, I arrive early, notebook in hand, bringing two pens this time—just in case. I say hi to the instructor as I take a seat in the front row.
“Oh, Mr. Adams,” the instructor says. “I need to speak to you. Let’s go into the office.”
I follow her to a tiny room with just a desk and a chair.
“Mr. Adams,” the instructor says. “I checked your status, which I have to do with everyone. It’s routine.”
“Okay…”
“We can’t offer our services to you. We have to stick to the rules and guidelines.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We can only offer this program to people who are previously incarcerated convicts.”
“I was incarcerated,” I say.
“You were exonerated. You don’t have a record. You’re not an ex-convict. Our grant money is committed to convicted felons only.”
“I spent ten years in prison.”
“I don’t know what to say. I feel terrible. You can’t stay in the program. I have to ask you to leave.”
“I did ten years,” I repeat, helplessly. “I was wrongfully convicted.”
I wave at the door leading to the classroom.
“I need this program as much as anyone out there. I have to get my life back. I need this program—”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t mean to offend you, but I am so sick of people saying that to me.”
I leave her small office and charge out of the classroom. Outside, the cold air ambushes me. I put my head down and walk. I need to calm down. I walk a couple of blocks, finally surrender to the frigid wind that slices my face. I climb the platform to the El and take the train back to my mother’s house in the suburbs. My heart pounds as I barge inside. I find my mother at her desk.
“You’re home early,” she says. “Did they cancel the program today?”
“No. They canceled me.”
“What?”
“They kicked me out. I don’t qualify for the program.”
“I don’t understand.”
&
nbsp; “You have to be an ex-convict. Can you believe that? Being a convict gets you into the program. If you’re not a convict—if you’re wrongfully convicted like me—then what? Where are the programs for us? We did the same time. We went through the same hell. We’re in the same situation now. You commit a crime, you get found guilty, you get paroled out, you get some money, you get to stay in a halfway house, you go into a job-training program. That’s part of your parole. But there’s nothing for us. The state doesn’t provide any reentry programs, or any money, no benefits at all, and we didn’t do anything. All we did was time. We got screwed and ended up in prison. Then we get out and we’re still screwed.”
“Jarrett, I’m—”
“Mom, please, don’t say you’re sorry.”
I storm into my room, grab my notebook, and tear out every page of notes I took in the reentry class. Then I grip the notebook with both hands, howl, and rip the notebook in half. Panting, spent, I throw myself onto my too-soft, too-comfortable bed and slam a pillow over my head.
My poor mother, I think, as my breath backs up on me under the pillow. I destroyed her when I went to prison. I can’t keep destroying her now. I have to pick myself up. But I don’t know how.
I fall asleep in my clothes, lying prone on my back, falling unconscious on my bed at eleven thirty in the morning, gone to the world until darkness falls.
* * *
—
The next morning, I get up and smile at my mother in the kitchen, trying to appear casual, holding in the anguish that churns in my stomach. I don’t want her to see me this way. I know she does, though. She knows me too well. I battle my way through breakfast, acting as cordially as I can.
Redeeming Justice Page 20
