Good Kids, Bad City

by Kyle Swenson

  But there are some burdens even God can’t heft for you. He knew that in his heart. It wasn’t that he didn’t take sobriety seriously—he did, tackling the program with headlong enthusiasm. But it was nearly impossible to solve your problems when you couldn’t tell anyone about what was truly sitting at your center. What wouldn’t leave. And without the cloud cover of crack and weed, those issues were exposed. He couldn’t hide from them anymore. I should come forward, tell the truth. No, I’d go to jail, it’s perjury. Knew enough of the law to know that. Ed was caught in a battle with himself, and he couldn’t trust anyone enough to tell them. Worse, as his Christian faith moved into the central place in his life during recovery, Ed knew that it too rested on lies. God supposedly had forgiven all his sins—that promise was basically his life preserver. But Ed also knew his Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. There was no fixing that. I’m going to hell, Ed thought. That’s where I’m going. I’m going to die and I’m going to hell.

  Ed tried to swallow it all down, keep the roaring spiritual pain from showing. Even though Ed was the star pupil of the program, the counselors could sense that something else was wrong. Grief radiated off him. “There’s something more than drugs,” one counselor told him. “But you just aren’t going to tell me.” He passed through his program anyway, secured a job at a rubber company, and eventually returned to the City Mission as a security guard working the front desk intake, all while maintaining his sobriety. He hadn’t touched anything since lifting his hand in that evening church service.

  But by November 2002, the balance he’d achieved almost toppled. One day he was working the desk. The mindless workflow broke when he caught a piece of a conversation near the door—a stranger was explaining he’d just paroled out after twenty-seven years for a 1975 murder he didn’t commit. The voice, not much more than a torn-up whisper, belonged to a round, hefty man in his late forties. He placed an ID on the desk.

  Ed’s eyes hurried from the man standing over him to the name printed on the card. Wiley Bridgeman. Wiley Bridgeman. Wiley Bridgeman. If the young man Ed had last seen in a courtroom twenty-seven years earlier was buried somewhere in this face now before him, he couldn’t see it. An unruly Santa Claus–white beard circled the features. There was a distance in his dark eyes, as if they had trouble focusing, much less recognizing, right here, the man responsible for all the wordless pain they’d seen.

  After twenty-seven years in prison, much of that time in solitary confinement, Wiley had made parole. Part of his discharge required he stay at the City Mission for the first weeks of his transition. If Wiley recognized Ed vaguely, he didn’t say anything. Ed could have played dumb, ignored it. The facility employee informed his bosses of the situation, or at least he told them he’d served as a witness in the guy’s 1975 murder case. “I don’t want any trouble,” Ed promised his supervisor. Yet he also resolved to tell Wiley. This, he felt, was an opportunity.

  The next day, Ed took Wiley aside after a group therapy session. He told him who he was. The look that flashed on Wiley’s face—Ed would never forget it. Soon both were crying like babies. “I’m sorry for what I did,” he told Wiley.

  “We’ve got to go to the news stations,” Wiley said, when he recovered from the shock. “No no no no,” Ed said. “Not yet, it’s not time.”

  Wiley persisted, and continued to beg, cajole, threaten. Nothing moved Ed, and nothing in the following weeks changed his mind. If anything, the stress tightened the knots in his stomach more. His sobriety was so fragile then, so new; he felt the pressure from Wiley edging him closer to using again. He had a job. The flirtation with the divinity student working at the mission had blossomed into a romance. They were talking about even getting married. Ed knew that if he came forward, all that would go.

  Ed conferred again with his supervisor at the City Mission. He said Wiley was bothering him about the old case. The supervisor suggested Ed just call Wiley’s parole officer to complain. He did, and Wiley was moved out of the City Mission to another shelter. Within a few months, he got into an argument with his parole officer over where he was living, and he was eventually busted back to prison.

  Ed married. He got another job. He joined a new church where he led Bible study. For now, it seemed like he’d been able to swallow down 1975 again. But sometimes he thought back to the meeting with Wiley, and he recalled the look on the man’s face when he learned who he was talking to. That look—there was no putting that away. It was a look of pure, searing hate.

  7

  ALHAMDULILLAH

  Cleveland, January 2011

  The cardboard box was flimsy and strained against the weight of all the paper inside. There wasn’t a lid, so as Kwame Ajamu stepped from his apartment on a chill-shot weekday early in the new year, he had to be careful. Didn’t want some subzero kick of wind making off with these transcribed pages of his past. Not today.

  He was living in an efficiency on Whittier, just off East Fifty-fifth Street. There was a bus stop at the end of the block. From there, the 16 line went north, then drilled west toward downtown along Superior Avenue. Buried under a heavy coat and with a knit hat topping his round head, Kwame settled into a seat and watched the city scroll past. Anything to keep his mind away from where he was heading. He was nervous.

  Kwame liked the bus. The public transit lines, their strict routes weaving a cat’s cradle across the town, were an easy way to reacquaint himself with the hometown he didn’t even want to live in anymore. When he was released from prison in 2003, Kwame didn’t want to be like guys who got swamped by the changes outside, the ones who end up missing prison enough to slip back. So he rode the bus to familiarize himself with what the city had been up to while he was away.

  The bus was also how he met LaShawn. She’d been waiting at a stop, trying to figure out how to catch a connection. Kwame didn’t know her. He’d only been out a few months and was still living at a halfway house. But he approached the woman. She was rail thin and bowlegged, skin a light brown. When Kwame tried to speak, her face locked down into a hard look—just like every woman Kwame had tried talking to out here. But this time he had a slick comment ready. “Excuse me, Mrs. Buttermilk, I didn’t know you’d gone sour.”

  LaShawn’s face split with a laugh, and he’d been making her laugh ever since. Once they started seeing each other, Kwame let it be known right away he wasn’t messing around. Being together meant getting married. Getting married meant he’d have to tell her about his twenty-seven years in prison. Tell her why he’d been in prison, as crazy as it sounded. Tell her his real name. But prison forces you to be a good judge of character, and he was right about LaShawn. She stayed. Now they had been married for nearly five years and were getting ready to move into their own house.

  For twenty-eight years he had told people his story, only to watch them dismiss it as improbable. The work of an overactive, self-serving imagination. A denial of guilt. A criminal’s bullshit. So after leaving prison, he stopped talking about his past. Outside, LaShawn had been the only one to know the truth. All that had recently changed. A few days earlier, he’d told a lawyer, Terry Gilbert. And now, on this January morning, Kwame was hauling this box to meet another stranger downtown. He was worried once again he wouldn’t be believed.

  * * *

  There is a beautiful story in Islam about Bilal ibn Rabah, an early convert to the one true faith. This was in the first hard days—the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, marching through the desert, tribe warring against tribe, sandstorms and persecution and bloodshed. Bilal was a slave. His master was an enemy of Islam. When he learned of Bilal’s choice to follow the Prophet, he ordered the slave be whipped until he renounced the teachings. But no matter the blows he took, Bilal would only utter ahad, ahad. The one, the one—the one true God.

  The master finally had Bilal dragged to the desert. The slave was thrown onto the scalding sand. Heavy rocks were piled upon his chest. But Bilal still refused to r
elent. Even though he could no longer speak, his index finger lifted—the one, the one.

  That total act of defiance sang through Ronnie Bridgeman. All those years earlier, on death row, the lines from the Koran had poked a comforting light through his desperation. For a prisoner in his twenties, Bilal’s story reached across thousands of years to touch him where it mattered.

  Prison was not easy on Ronnie Bridgeman. Sure, Lucasville wasn’t easy for anyone. Seemed like every day for the nine years Ronnie spent at the facility, a ten-inch shiv found a home in someone’s belly. Blood covered the walls, dashed the ceiling, even spilled on your morning mess hall eggs. He lived inside a bubble of fear. But the violence was only part of Ronnie’s unease. He also was completely at odds with his surroundings. Some of it was age. Most of the hard-timers in Lucasville were in their thirties. Ronnie was still lightly glazed with childhood innocence—he still got excited about Christmas and Thanksgiving. On the range nobody wanted to hear that holiday shit. But the displacement also ran deeper. Ronnie might get to talking to some guy one day, only to learn he’d chopped off his wife’s head or was a cattle rustler—what the inmates called a serial rapist. Ronnie wasn’t a criminal; he wasn’t wired that way. Bessie Bridgeman didn’t raise her son like that. Yet his only companions were men serving time for crimes they’d meant to commit; they had stolen, hurt people, lied. He couldn’t relate.1

  Islam, however, offered shelter. He studied the religion and found the Muslim faith was one not of compulsion but of choice. You entered into it, and by doing so, reached right back thousands of years. When Ronnie raised his head from the floor following the second ruku, his face pointed east, his lips moving around the strange words of the tashahhud, his index finger danced, just like Bilal’s all those centuries back.

  More than death row, general population was a top-down matrix of dos and don’ts. The administration told you when you woke, ate, what job you’d fill your hours with, when you’d see the sun, even when you could walk through a door. Your personhood was denied, individuality stomped out. Grafted onto this were the unwritten dictates of the population: never talk to a guard; don’t snitch; when someone does you a favor, pay them back double. A prisoner’s behavior, then, was penned in on all sides by someone else’s ideas.

  In Islam, Ronnie found individuality in structure, a system he willingly chose. There was a logic to it, sequence to the process of prayer, strict order dictating how you interfaced with the world, right down to your greetings to fellow Muslims, even what you said when you sneezed, al-hamdu Lillaah, or when someone sneezed near you, Yarhamuk Allaah. There was also elegance to how the religion’s dictates tidied up the smallest corners of your life, from going to the bathroom to eating. It kept you clean, pure, as well oiled as a Cadillac, Ronnie thought. The control was empowering, he felt, like slipping on a Superman cape. This was not structure that obliterated you; these were processes linking you to a larger tradition.

  Religion wasn’t his only outlet. When the truth finally clicked into place—I’m not going nowhere—Ronnie decided he might as well make his life as enjoyable as he could. He started boxing, training with old pros and sparring with guys who could have been professionals had criminal charges not torpedoed their chances. School was another outlet. He went through the program to get his GED, then began working as a clerk in the facility’s education department; that way he could take as many classes as he wanted. The culinary classes were a favorite; after a couple of years, Ronnie was a wizard in the kitchen, whipping up stuff from the meager ingredients. Not that he was a Boy Scout. Ronnie had a taste for weed; it was plentiful in any prison facility, as long as you didn’t mind smoking something that had been smuggled in through someone’s ass. Ronnie did mind it, meaning he usually had to find prison staff willing to smuggle stuff for him. Over the years, he became a PhD in bullshitting with them. He had more games than Milton Bradley, as he liked to say. But on the main, he stayed clean: prayer, helping guys get into the right GED program, and the occasional lungful of Colombia Flower Top to mellow the edges.

  Ronnie also talked about his case to anyone who would listen. No one, it seemed, believed that he was an innocent man flung into prison for murder. That was hard enough. As Ronnie got older he also began to notice something in the staff and teachers he knew from the education office. They would chat and laugh together, and Ronnie would lay some of his stories on a roomful of people, build an easy camaraderie. Then he recognized the thought forming in their faces. They liked him, he saw that. But they tapped the brakes—he was a convicted murderer. They couldn’t really like him. Just as he couldn’t walk those last steps to bond with his fellow inmates, outsiders couldn’t ultimately connect with him. Regardless of who he was as a man or how he acted, no matter the number of the course certificates he earned or the words per minute he could snap out on an administration typewriter or how many inmates he steered into education courses, he was still on the other side of a line in the eyes of the staffers. He was a killer.

  In 1995, Ronnie decided to change his name to Kwame Ajamu. It was a final, definitive move to push free from who he had been.

  * * *

  It was January 2003, and the flat farmland surrounding the Richland Correctional Institute was arthritic and brown with winter. But as Kwame walked out of the building, his lungs hauling in cold breaths, the landscape glowed as if under spotlights. Green as a bright summer day, he thought. Martin Luther King Jr. was on repeat in his head: free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty. A cab was waiting outside the prison. “Take me to the Grey Dog,” he said.

  The driver shot him an awkward look. “Grey Dog?”

  Kwame thought. “Grey … hound?” The drive to the bus station cost him ten dollars. The ticket for the eighty miles to Cleveland put him back fourteen dollars. And like that, he was home after twenty-seven years.

  Kwame never wanted to go home. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t his home anymore. When he finally got word that the state was considering paroling him out, he asked to be assigned elsewhere—Columbus, Toledo, Akron, Canton. Anywhere but Cleveland. Too many ugly thoughts tied to the place. But the parole board ignored his request and placed him in a halfway house on the East Side. His return was all the more painful because there was no missing how much time had been lost. It wasn’t just the city’s changed face—new skyscrapers rubbing elbows with Terminal Tower; plywood filling up the windows of corner stores and shopping centers; shaggy fields sitting where blocks of houses once stood. He was also coming home to a family tree that was missing all the branches he knew. His mother had died in 1990, his sister in 2000, his brother Hawiatha in 2002. Both his siblings left behind large families, bundles of nieces and nephews; but Kwame had never met any of them. They put in the effort to get to know him, but they were still strangers.

  People had also changed all over the city. The intervening decades had pounded friendliness out of them. Kwame was a talker; he was always trying to strike up conversations with folks. No one seemed interested in hearing him out. Most of the time, Kwame’s banter was met with a look like he was something someone had just stepped in. In time, he began to feel crack cocaine itself had subtly altered the tone of the whole town. He’d had the interesting experience of watching the impact of the epidemic from inside the prison system. He first learned about crack in the 1990s, when he spotted old guys twisting metal clothes hangers to their boom boxes where the antennas were supposed to be. Crackhead prisoners had been stealing the metal antennas to use as makeshift pipes for the drugs they got inside. The same desperation now seemed to be driving life on the outside. After six months at the halfway house, he moved into a small place off Cedar Avenue. Crackheads clustered outside his door. A cloud of freebase smoke lingered over the whole street.

  At first, the only job he could get was working at a recycling center, six dollars an hour and a stink he couldn’t get off him after work—just like the chemical smell that had stuck to his father all those years back. But Kwame ha
d caught a serious break, alhamdulillah, right at the start of this whole nightmare. When he’d been taken into custody in May 1975, whoever plugged his information into the system had flubbed one digit on his Social Security number. Outside, it meant Kwame Ajamu could apply for a job with his actual government-issue ID, a number that would not be red-flagged with “prior felony conviction.” Fingerprints—that would give him up. But not those nine digits. Like his new name, it was one more way to lay distance between who he had been and who he was today.

  The typo also meant he could get a better-paying job without the stigma of a criminal conviction. When an acquaintance asked if Kwame would be interested in a ten-dollar-an-hour job at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, he applied without worry. He was assigned to the warehouse where the voting machines were stored and fixed. The gig ran 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. Kwame liked it. He became proficient at fixing the machines and started going out on calls with other board employees. The job made him feel like he was representing something important. The problem was that it was seasonal work—ramping up toward Election Day, dying off after. The board liked Kwame so much, they asked him to apply for full-time positions. But he always declined. It puzzled his coworkers, but Kwame knew that official employment would necessitate a deeper background check, including fingerprints. So despite loving the job and getting high marks from the bosses, Kwame couldn’t advance.

  This was just how it was going to be. Wife, job—sure. But the past would always wall him off from a truly normal life. And if he ever wanted to scale that obstacle, he’d have to get Rickey and Wiley up and over with him. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—leave them behind. Their shared pain was like an invisible mark. No one else could see it; they alone knew what it meant, understood the constant maintenance required each day to keep going. The three men were stamped with what had happened to them. Passing time could not wear it away.