by Elle Johnson
When my sister got her license and wanted to drive us to the movies, my father told her she could borrow the car if we took a loaded gun along for protection. My sister never borrowed the car, and I waited until I was out of the house and in college before I learned how to drive.
When I was twenty-six, in order to make the documentary, I needed to understand my father’s job. Because it would help my career, my father was willing to talk. To a point. We sat in the kitchenette, stirring half-and-half into our coffees. He lit a cigarette. I opened a window. He said, “Being a parole officer is the worst job in the world.”
“Then why did you do it?”
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. When my father was young, his nickname had been Siggy, short for Sigmund Freud. While my father liked to analyze people, he didn’t want to be analyzed. Or asked questions about himself. I waited.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because it’s interesting.”
“To you,” my father shot back.
“Yes, to me. And presumably to you, too. You’re the one who did it for thirty years.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” he said, playing the martyr. He liked to make it seem that he had no control, when the truth was he controlled everything and everyone. It was maddening. I’d endured his rule when I was a teenager; now that I was an adult, I didn’t have the patience for my father downplaying his influence. I wasn’t going to let him rewrite history. I pressed, “Well, then, what did you want to do?”
“Eh,” he said, taking a puff. “Have you girls and raise a family.”
My mother once told me that my father had considered opening a liquor store. He had found a location and secured a loan, but for reasons known only to him, he decided against it. I couldn’t imagine my father standing behind a counter, ringing up sales in a register, making small talk and change for customers. My father was not a man of modest ambition. Though he never did share what his dreams were with me, his actions belied a great need. A strong desire to determine his own destiny and to live as he pleased.
His best friend, Alpha, was the vice president of a small savings and loan, and he would give my father tips about what stocks to buy and when to sell. My father had his eye on a plot of land for sale in upstate New York. He saved up, then borrowed $13,000 from his father-in-law. The rest of the money he got from the US government. He’d found out that the land was on a migratory path for birds, and if he let the government dig up some trees and put in a pond on the property, it would cover the difference. We spent a summer driving back and forth to the Land, as we called it. My sister and I played in the babbling brook we named Haiku Stream and watched bulldozers dig up the dirt. My father built a stone wall around the property and a rustic entrance gate made of wire, twine, and branches from felled pine trees. When the pond was finished, we floated around in lazy circles on inner tubes and caught tadpoles in plastic ice cream containers from the Gouz grocery store. My father sold the pine trees to a local lumber company and handily made back his investment and then some. The type of career my father would have been good at—finance, investing, real estate—wasn’t open to a Black man in the fifties when he was looking for work. I think he felt cheated. I felt cheated for him.
“But why parole?” I asked him. “You must have had a reason.”
“Because.” He took a long pull on his cigarette and blew out a steady stream of smoke. “It paid good back then.”
I knew he was lying. Simplifying his reason because he didn’t want to say whatever the truth was out loud.
“I set my own hours. If I started early I could be done by afternoon. Then I’d go swim at the pool uptown.” He smiled, remembering the cool blue water. “That was great. It was right there, up on the East Side, off the FDR. An Olympic-size swimming pool and nobody used it. Boy, that was really something.”
“So you became a parole officer because you wanted to swim?” I teased.
“Yeah, yeah.” He laughed.
“What did you like about being a parole officer?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“You liked the people.”
“Oh no. They were horrible. A lot of funny-time people on parole.”
“Not the parolees. The people you worked with. You liked them.”
“Not all of them.”
“Calvin Moy and Joe Isherwood? Ernie?”
“Most of the guys on the job weren’t like that.”
“So what about the parolees?”
“What about them?”
“Did you want to help them?”
“Help them?” My father laughed. “I knew five minutes after I started it wasn’t going to be what I thought.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Because.” He paused, then answered sincerely. “You can’t rehabilitate someone who was never habilitated to begin with.” Then he stamped out his cigarette and said, “Okay.” I knew he wouldn’t answer any more questions.
I wondered if he felt bad writing off the mostly Black and brown parolees as people who didn’t know how to fit into “normal” society. This was the double-edged sword, the trickiness of being a Black LEO. Impartial judgment was tainted by what you knew to be the complicated legacy of racism in America. You didn’t want to betray your people, but every day you saw how some of your people would betray you, betray the race. Black neighborhoods should be policed, deserve to be policed, want to be policed—but policed fairly. Black LEOs operated in a system in which victims who were Black were ignored, overlooked, or assumed to be criminals, and criminals who were Black became victims of the police and a criminal justice system that held them in low regard.
Being from a family of Black LEOs, I had a nuanced perspective. I wasn’t afraid of the police or suspicious of law enforcement officers. They were just human beings doing a job, flesh and blood, not infallible symbols of justice. But I also didn’t put LEOs above reproach just because they were “on the job.” And I knew it could be tricky for Black officers—they were questioned as either traitors to the race or not to be trusted on the force. Black LEOs had to be tough, have the courage of their convictions, and think for themselves—like my father. Impressionable minds wouldn’t last.
A week later my father told me he had talked to a couple of guys on the job. “I’ll give you their numbers. They’re expecting your call.” Ernie was at the top of the list.
Ernie Hobson had been my father’s partner throughout the years. He was a decade older, stout, dark-skinned with kind eyes and a gravelly voice that tumbled easily into laughter. He said parole officer was the only job he could find that “would let a Black man carry a gun and a badge and not wear a uniform.” Like my father, Ernie dressed up to go to work. He wore a black fedora with a little feather sewn into the ribbon. He told me about house parties in the early days, where you’d see all these nice cars parked out front—Cadillacs and Buicks, Lincolns. “Guys would be standing around, wearing dark sunglasses and sharp suits. All the neighbors walking by would want to know, ‘Whose party is that?’” Ernie puffed out his chest. “Parole officers, that’s who.”
Ernie lived in Harlem, in the same neighborhood as many of his parolees. When he first started, the department assigned him only Black parolees because he blended in and would be able to check up on people without drawing attention to himself. Ernie took offense. “I wasn’t having any of that. I didn’t want just Black parolees, my people. So I told my supervisors. And the boss man said, ‘Well, we’ll fix him.’ Don’t you know they gave me a caseload all the way downtown. Little Italy. All mobsters, every single one.” Ernie was so tickled he laughed until he coughed. “Their eyes would go wide when they saw a moulinyan standing at the door. That’s what they called us, ‘moolies.’” Ernie shrugged; he didn’t seem bothered. “But then they’d invite me in for a little cannoli and cuppicino.” He mispronounced the word. “I never had a problem with the I-talians,” he said. “We got along great.”
Because I was Richie’s daughter, E
rnie invited me to his home, where we could sit and talk face-to-face. He was a confirmed bachelor, living in a two-story condo with a concrete balcony overlooking the river. He had shag carpeting, shiny metallic wallpaper, and more than one black velvet painting of a naked Black lady kneeling or reclining like Ingres’s odalisque on an animal-skin rug. Ernie sat in a chair next to a slow-moving purple lava lamp that had seen better days.
“You have to understand, as a parole officer I wear two hats. I’m a social worker and a police officer. My job is to try to help you get back on the straight and narrow. But if you don’t or you can’t or you won’t—you see—well, then, my job is to arrest you. I’ma snatch your behind off the streets and send you back to Sing Sing fast fast.”
“How do you know if they’ve done something wrong?” I asked.
“I’ve got a list of conditions. Things you supposed to be doing. Or not supposed to be doing. Like drinking, taking drugs, fraternizing with a known criminal element.”
In other words, controlling people’s behavior. Even down to who they could be friends with.
“More like who they can’t be friends with,” Ernie explained. “If I say you can’t be socializing with this one and that, or so-and-so over there, then you can’t. Period. I can Breathalyzer you, drug-test you, blood-test you. Poke you, prod you. I can do whatever I want to you, make sure you living the way you supposed to.”
“But how do you know?”
“’Cause I’m watching you. Twenty-four/seven, three sixty-five. I’m going to visit you at your home. Then I’m going to show up at your job, make sure you’re working. Then you’re going to come see me at my office once a week. Show me your bills, your pay stubs, your receipts. You have to account for all the time when you’re not standing right in front of me. You see, parole is prison without walls. And every parole officer is a warden.”
My father may have been a warden, but that meant he was in prison, too. I wondered how much of my father’s personality had been shaped by being a parole officer, or if he was suited to parole because of who he already was. I told Ernie my father didn’t believe parolees could be rehabilitated. He nodded like he understood, but then he said, “Thing you have to understand is these are people who have been failed by every institution society has to offer. Schools don’t teach them nothing, churches can’t help, communities don’t want them. They were dragged up, not raised.”
“But you seem to believe,” I said.
“Well, now, you got to listen to me here. The system is broken, that’s a fact. Our resources were cut. Prisons became just warehouses for human life. Didn’t teach people anything. Because taxpayers didn’t want to pay to better a criminal. But what they failed to realize was if you don’t pay now, you gonna pay later. Either you get these people out, on the street and acclimated, while someone’s still watching them and they under your supervision, or society is gonna pay when they max out and are let out of the prisons on their own, with no one to look after them, tell them right from wrong. And that’s when you start paying with the blood of your family and friends and neighbors, when your loved ones are raped and beaten or murdered by one of these guys who didn’t learn their lesson, who society has failed.”
I thought about the price Aunt Barbara had paid when Karen was killed. Her marriage to Uncle Warren fell apart. My cousin Warren withdrew and never seemed quite the same to me. Her youngest, baby Geoffrey, was only two when Karen was shot and grew up never knowing his big sister. For weeks after the murder he sat by the front door, wide-eyed and waiting for her to come home. He pointed to her bedroom and called out “Karen? Karen?” over and over until Aunt Barbara couldn’t take it anymore. She took little Geoffrey to the cemetery, put his finger on the letters of Karen’s name cut into the granite tombstone, until he understood. “This is where Karen lives now.”
IT WASN’T UNTIL AFTER I talked to Ernie that I finally understood what my father did “on the job.” I realized I had been raised like I was a parolee.
I listened to all twelve tapes but didn’t hear anything about my father taking a stand on parole for Karen’s killers. I remembered the last time I had asked my father about Karen’s killers. I was writing another ripped-from-the-headlines episode for TV about drug dealers in Washington Heights who killed two undercover cops. I was looking for real-life plot twists and somehow ended up asking him, “How did you and Uncle Warren figure out who killed Karen?”
“We shut down the drug dealers.”
“Drug dealers? Really? Why?”
“Because. They know everything that happens in the streets.”
“How’d you shut them down?”
“Told them they weren’t going to make any money until they found out who killed Karen and told us where to find them.”
“And then what?”
“Then we’d take care of it.”
“How?” I asked. My father knew what I was asking and shifted in his seat, annoyed at the question. A question I knew the answer to, but needed to hear him say out loud. Decades later I was finally able to admit to him that I knew what he was up to that night. I wanted him to explain, to own up to his intentions, and maybe even take responsibility. I told him, “I overheard you. At Aunt Barbara’s house, the day after Karen was killed. You were in the basement with Uncle Warren and all those cops. You were talking about killing the boys who had killed Karen.” I believed he would have.
He looked at me, no remorse, no regret, no trace of a smile on his lips. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Chapter Eight
April 5, 1981
I woke in the middle of the night. Early Sunday morning. Still wearing my clothes. The light was on. The house was still. Across the hall, my parents’ bedroom door was closed. My father must have come back from the Bronx.
I wished it were summer already, when the days lasted longer and I could sleep with the windows open while the calming whir of the fan eased thoughts out of my head and coaxed in hazy dreams. When, except for the small warm round spot where the cat had been, the cotton pillowcase and sheets stayed cool against my skin.
Bothered by the buzz of the fluorescent bulb overhead, I leapt out from under the covers to flip off the light. Racing the darkness, I dove back into the safety of my bottom bunk. I quickly pulled up the musty sheets and blankets to cover my chin, put a pillow protectively over my neck, my face.
My body was exhausted, my mind spent. Before long I was swallowed by the mattress and dropped into the deep well of sleep.
Sometime later I floated up and off the bed. As if the weight of my body could have been buoyed by the stuff of dreams and molecules of heat. I drifted into the middle of my room. Suspended above the navy blue carpet, I was paralyzed but not panicked, because I was not alone. I felt an essence. A spirit. Karen.
She warmed my body like a golden molten light, slowly seeping into my spongy skin and porous bones. The sweet shock of her soul passed through me like a sigh, taking my breath away. Light-headed and elated, I wished Karen back. But she was gone. And I was in my bed once again. I opened my eyes and white halos dotted my vision, then dissipated into a ghostly green shimmer. I felt certain Karen had transcended the ugliness of her death. She was free. And now I was touched by her grace. Protected.
GROWING UP, I WAS afraid of ghosts. I was afraid of the dark. “Nyctophobia” was the SAT word for it. I couldn’t walk into an unlit room or hallway without being overwhelmed by a crippling unease that would hold me frozen on the threshold of the dark unknown. I tried to talk myself into walking through the blackness, without rushing to turn on a light, but fear always won. By sixteen I should have grown out of it. Looking back, I realized I had been raised in fear.
It started with the bogeyman of my Lutheran elementary school upbringing: the devil. He was a red-skinned, black-horned, pointy-tailed creature with human facial features distorted just enough to be unsettling. The school chaplain at Redeemer Lutheran, Pastor Lindemann, had participated in exorcisms and spoke of them
in terms vague enough to allow my childish imagination to fill in the blanks. My father assured me demonic possessions weren’t real. My mother stayed silent on the topic.
I knew there were real live devils walking among us. Their exploits were front-page news. I lived through the terror that was Son of Sam and the unsettling anxiety caused by the disappearance of Etan Patz. The seventies and eighties in New York were rampant with violent crime. Hollywood made movies about how dangerous New York City was. Muggings, murder, and mayhem ruled. Stepping into a dark, confined space with a stranger was to risk your life. Alleys, stairwells, and elevators were death traps. I remember when subway cars on the E and F lines became the hunting ground for a deranged ax murderer who hacked through passengers’ skulls when the train doors closed.
My parents wouldn’t allow me to ride the subway by myself. Every Thursday night of my freshman and sophomore years of high school, my father would meet me in the 42nd Street subway station to escort me to an acting class at a place called the Door—A Center of Alternatives. The Door provided services for troubled youth—everything from free meals to art classes, legal aid to subsidized abortions. It was on 18th Street, in one of the old B. Altman department store buildings that took up practically an entire city block.
We would get off the F train at the 23rd Street station and head down 6th Avenue to the entrance of the Door. My father’s long-legged stride forced me to walk faster. He pulled me along, holding my hand, his massive fingers wrapped around mine with a firm grip that was both comforting and crushing.
My father loved Manhattan, even with its unpredictable violence. He was a fifth-generation New Yorker. He knew the hidden history of the buildings and the city’s secret stories. He shared them with me as we walked down the wide Avenue of the Americas. And even though the sidewalks were hard and unyielding, they sparkled at night, reflecting light from store window displays. It was enchanting—even after my father explained it was just glistening mica mixed into the cement to help wash the sidewalks clean when it rained.
