Good Kids, Bad City

by Kyle Swenson

  We had an hour to make the five-minute drive to the Justice Center for the 9:00 A.M. hearing, but Kwame was working the pedal with a heavy foot. He blasted his Ford through a red light at an empty intersection in Tremont. LaShawn turned to me in the backseat, flashing a nervous smile. Neither Kwame nor his wife had slept much in the three days since he’d gotten Rickey’s call. He was going on fumes, but news from yesterday had redoubled the excitement: Wiley had been brought to Cleveland from the Allen Correctional Institute in Lima on Judge McMonagle’s order. He could also be released within a few hours.

  We pulled into a parking space behind the old courthouse. Kwame, a black knit hat perched on his head, buttoned up his dark peacoat. “Let’s go make history,” he announced. Down in his coat pocket he had a surprise for Rickey.

  McMonagle’s courtroom was already full of a dozen TV cameramen setting up their tripods in the jury box. The media buildup around the case was intense. The news peg—the longest wrongful conviction to end in exoneration in U.S. history—drew a lot interest. Over the last two days, both Kwame and I had given interviews with local TV, and the requests kept coming. Now I noticed the familiar faces of local correspondents entering the court. Many were looking in our direction, and soon camera lenses were angling our way.

  We stepped back into the hallway to wait. I recognized more outside the chambers. These were harder to place, mostly middle-aged men, black and white, chatting with one another. When OIP interns and attorneys arrived and warmly greeted the men, I realized these were exonerees, guys who, like Rickey, Kwame, and Wiley, had been wrongfully convicted and later freed by OIP. Clarence Elkins. Dean Gillispie. Each time a new exoneree won release, the others came to show support, a kind of welcoming party to the outside. “When he gets out, it’s going to be like he’s getting off a spaceship,” Gillispie told the nodding group.

  As LaShawn spoke with the exonerees, Kwame—a man who so seamlessly mixed with people—stepped away, turning to the wall. His face bunched up with tears. No one seemed to notice these private, heavy moments he took for himself. For years Kwame had held his story as a secret. Today was the first occasion when he could publicly acknowledge who he was and what had happened to him, his debut among others bound by the same misfortune.

  We sat in the first row of the gallery. Every chair was filled. LaShawn squeezed her husband’s hand and leaned toward him. “This is the longest nine o’clock I’ve ever had to wait for,” she whispered. Kwame nodded. “It’s like waiting for a roller coaster to start,” he said.

  When Rickey was led into the courtroom, the orange jailhouse jumper was gone. He was wearing pressed dress slacks, a white collared shirt peeking out from the V-neck of a zip-up sweater printed with an argyle pattern. Camera flashes lit up the lenses of the new glasses perched on his nose. He smiled for the media, perfect white teeth blazing in the glare, and raised his right hand to where Kwame, LaShawn, and I sat. “That’s beautiful,” Kwame whispered.

  Judge McMonagle appeared a few moments after the hour, sweeping to his seat and quickly calling the room to order. “The case will be dismissed. Mr. Jackson, you are going to be free to go,” the judge announced, his voice steady and drained of affect or histrionics. “Life is filled with small victories, and this is a big one. Know who your friends are, because everyone is going to want a piece of you. You better trust the people you know you can trust. So I wish you good luck.”

  Rickey thanked the judge. Then it was over. The hearing lasted less than three minutes. Rickey started moving toward the gallery, but the sheriff’s deputies nudged him in back to the side door. He still had to be processed out. Kwame and LaShawn were on their feet and in their coats, moving to the hallway. Wiley’s court appearance was set to begin downstairs. But a swirl of news cameras netted the couple before they could stop. Voices implored Kwame to talk about how he was feeling.

  “I fought this fight for these guys for years, and this happened. I could go die tomorrow, and I’d be fine. Because they made it, they made it through that fight and they’re still standing.” His features twitched with feeling for a moment. “They owe it to perseverance. You look up perseverance, you’ll find strength and integrity. That’s what happened today. We didn’t win. We just recaptured what was ours.”

  Emotion rushed into his face, and he excused himself. But the cameras followed, chasing Kwame and LaShawn down the hallway like paparazzi hounding a star.

  * * *

  “Ed Norton,” Kwame said. We all laughed, everyone in the group eyeing me, thinking about the comparison. “Ed Norton can play Kyle in the movie,” Kwame repeated.

  “Who’s playing you, then?” I asked.

  “Who you think?” he scoffed. “Denzel.” That broke everyone up again. Kwame was in full performance mode, killing with stories and jokes. He seemed to be partly trying to defuse his jitters. In a moment, Wiley was going to walk into the courtroom and it would be the first time the brothers had seen one another since their time on death row.

  “Wiley suffered the most,” LaShawn would later tell me, and it was impossible not to concur. Twenty-one and proud at the time of his arrest. The dazzling hero in the eyes of friends and family. Prison did more than strip away the layers of that personality. The pressure of incarceration also worked loose the mental issues that had been lying in wait. A 2014 mental health assessment noted Wiley had spent nearly half of his time in prison in mental health units, where he was diagnosed with depression and schizophrenia on multiple occasions. He was hospitalized for harming himself, and regularly refused his mandated medication. He fought with guards, slapped a prison psychiatrist, and had squandered his brief parole arguing with his parole officer. Words continued to be Wiley’s safe harbor, love poetry addressed to an old girlfriend his main outlet. His lines showed a mind still burning a higher grade of intellectual fuel but unable to move forward.

  He also never seemed to be able to get away from Lucasville, Ohio’s most brutal lockup. After Kwame and Rickey were transferred to other prisons in the mid-1980s, the tensions tied to overpopulation and racial divides continued boiling behind the prison’s high security walls. Wiley was dealt out to other facilities over the years, including mental health units across the state. But invariably he was shipped back inside Lucasville, courtside for the ill will poisoning the facility. He was there on Easter Sunday, 1993, when 450 prisoners began tearing apart L Block. Nine inmates were killed by their fellow prisoners; eight guards were taken hostage. One was killed as the standoff stretched past a week and the Ohio National Guard mobilized outside. After ten days, the rioters surrendered. The violence caused more than $40 million in damage. Wiley was there, caught somewhere in the madness. It wasn’t something he talked about.

  Wiley stepped into the courtroom in a navy-blue suit Terry Gilbert had been able to get him. He was a few inches shorter than Kwame, rounder in the gut. His beard and hair were both running toward unruly and sprouted out in snow-white tufts. He waved to Kwame. I looked at the youngest Bridgeman brother. Fresh tears were running down his face. But his features glowed with pride.

  “That’s my big brother.”

  * * *

  Rickey was waiting in an upstairs holding cell after the hearing. To pass the time, his eyes grazed the walls, chiseled with the usual jailhouse graffiti. Names. Dates. Swastikas. Go fuck yourself. Back again, how stupid. Then Rickey’s eye hooked on something familiar: 144 RIP.

  One-four-four. The random jail graffiti corresponded with the first three digits of his prison number, the ID he’d been given four decades back. His identity, quite literally, as he’d come to know it. The number. Not me. 144061, rest in peace. Not me. The number’s dead and gone. I’m here now.

  * * *

  A small army of television crews had landed in town. More and more outlets—ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN—began running headlines referring to THE LONGEST WRONGFUL CONVICTION IN U.S. HISTORY. I felt a slow-burning frustration every time I read the line.

  There was a self-congratulator
y tone throughout the coverage: look, America, we fixed an old mistake, everyone should be happy. “Tonight, two men in Cleveland, Ohio, are walking free for the first time since 1975, a nearly forty-year nightmare, locked away solely on the testimony of a child,” Brian Williams announced later that evening on NBC Nightly News. Right, I remember thinking, that’s a simplified way of looking at it.

  The thirty-second soundbite version being promoted here was that a boy lied, innocent men were sent to prison, and now they had been cleared. That view, however, ignored all the critical context of Cleveland racial politics, not to mention the direct role police detectives allegedly played in forcing Ed to falsely testify. Without those pieces, the Jackson-Bridgeman case existed in a vacuum, a onetime piece of tragic luck; but within the frame of Cleveland’s history, the wrongful conviction felt chained to so much more than what a boy saw or didn’t see. The breezy television spots edited out the most crucial elements.

  Kwame was having a similar reaction to the media interest wrapping around the case. A few days before Rickey and Wiley were released, I asked him if he felt the way the newspapers were tying a bow on the exoneration was wrong. It seemed to overlook the culpable parties, I said. Kwame answered that he forced himself never to forget about who was involved, from the police to the prosecutors to the Arthur Avenue neighbors who let them down to the city itself.

  “It’s not my town anymore, and that’s what I’ll tell Rickey and Wiley out here: it’s not your town anymore.” The way Kwame saw it, he was the advance man for Rickey and Wiley; he’d been out here, lived through the damage you couldn’t mend and the changes you couldn’t undo, suffered through the emotional bends triggered by life beyond prison. He was there to guide them through that new world. “And I’m still getting caught up,” he told me. “So you can imagine, Buddy and Rickey, they’re just coming out the door.”

  * * *

  The revolving door pushed Rickey Jackson out into a bitter wall of icy lake breeze. Gray clouds capped the city—not the sunshine he’d expected, but it was up there somewhere. Rickey took a deep breath and started walking. He didn’t have a direction or destination. One foot just followed the other. His attorneys filed behind on the sidewalk, camera crews and photographers chased along. Images of the procession bobbed in the dead dark glass of empty storefronts as they moved down Ontario Street and onto Public Square.

  Kwame waited in the sheriff’s office hallway for Wiley. When he appeared, the brothers embraced for the first time in years. Kwame took his brother’s head in his hands like a child’s, looking him deep in the eyes, then rested his forehead against Wiley’s own.

  A half-hour later the three childhood friends from Arthur Avenue all met again in the lobby bar of the Renaissance Hotel on Public Square, a cold walk away from the Justice Center. The crowd of friends and lawyers clapped as the three men embraced, arms around each other’s shoulders and heads bent in a huddle. They stood there, pooling four decades of grief, oblivious for a few moments to the happy noise in the room. When the three heads straightened up, LaShawn stepped forward, wrapping Wiley in a hug before turning to Rickey. “Hey there, brother,” she said.

  OIP had arranged a group lunch with the exonerees and their supporters. Rickey chose Red Lobster. “Honestly, it was just the first thing that popped into my head,” he told me later. Twenty OIP students, past exonerees, Mark Godsey, and Brian Howe were all clustered around the long table. Whole appetizer menus were polished off. Ricky, Kwame, and Wiley all bulldozed through the Admiral’s Feast. Toasts were hoisted. Someone ordered a glass of champagne for Rickey. “Tastes like manna from heaven,” he announced. Awkward pauses hung in the air occasionally between the three friends, but mostly they bantered and joked as if they were back driving through Cleveland in Wiley’s Sebring. “I don’t think Wiley’s stopped smiling,” LaShawn kidded her brother-in-law from across the table. I said my goodbyes after lunch.

  Later Kwame fished his surprise for Rickey out of his coat pocket. His hands held a small digital camera. As he powered it on, Kwame explained that before Rickey’s mother died, Kwame went to visit her in an East Side high-rise where she lived out her last years—ironically, just down the hall from Anna Robinson. Before leaving, Kwame wanted to take a photo of Rickey’s mother, hopefully to show him one day. “You’re lucky I’m an idiot with technology,” he told Rickey. He accidentally had the camera set on video, not snapshot. Instead of a picture of Essie Mae, Kwame had captured a short video, just a few seconds of the elderly woman setting her hips for a picture. But for Rickey those brief moments were recovered time.

  That night—after the celebrations, the interviews with big media outlets, the words that didn’t quite come and the silences they struggled to fill—Cleveland’s three native sons hopped in Kwame’s car and drove the streets until late into the night. They didn’t get out, just rolled past old neighborhoods, including Arthur Avenue, now dead quiet, wrapped in darkness broken only here and there by streetlights.

  Epilogue

  COMEBACK

  The city must never be confused with the words that describe it.

  —Italo Calvino

  I was there when Rickey’s dog was killed.

  It was a bright spring morning, Northeast Ohio just shaking free of the winter. The kitchen at Rickey’s house forty minutes east of downtown was washed with sunlight. Rickey’s fiancée, Rissa, was busy at the counter, chatting with me as I sat with her five-year-old son while he gobbled up a plate of waffles.

  Rickey was outside with the dog, Kush. I’d watched him sprout from a yapping pup to a beefy pit who roamed Rickey’s eight acres with an intense protective strut. I instinctively froze whenever I spotted him. Rickey loved the dog, though. Before we got down to an interview, he’d wanted to let Kush out.

  When the front door cracked open, I swung around. “A car just hit Kush,” Rickey said, his voice small and restrained. His eyes were red.

  We all—Rickey, Rissa, the little boy, and I—bolted outside, up a driveway twisting through a lawn shadowed by towering elms.1 Cars flowed both ways along the rural country road above, each swerving out of the way of the panting, bleeding dog lying on the asphalt. The driver hadn’t stopped. Rickey wrapped the dog in a blanket, loaded him into his Lincoln Navigator, and hurried to the animal hospital.

  Kush didn’t make it.

  I returned a few days later for our interview. Rickey and I sat on his screened back porch, the view looking out on the deep woods wrapping the house on all sides. We talked for hours, an intense one-on-one drilling deep into his childhood. When we touched on his relationship with his mother—all those unresolved feelings—tears were back in his eyes.

  “There was a period of my life where I thought my mother didn’t love me,” he told me. “When she passed away, I started analyzing stuff. She did the best with what she had. I wish I could have had more time with her. I just wish I could have sat down with her, had that dialogue. And you know I never got to. I just wanted her to know—shit, I appreciated her.”

  Later the screen door clicked open, and Rissa walked in.

  “He’s making me cry, baby,” Rickey said, wiping his face.

  “Aw,” she cooed protectively, sitting next to him on the couch. “Want me to beat him up?”

  I started packing up my notebooks and recorder. Rickey apologized about canceling the other day. “Yeah, man, sorry about Kush.”

  “No need to apologize,” I told him. “Seriously. If I had been in your place, I’d have been a mess. I’m sorry about Kush.”

  “Thanks,” Rickey said, his eyes pinned to the corner of the room as if he was studying a sign.

  “But you know, in a way, I’m kind of glad it happened,” he said. “Glad that I could feel that way about something. Does that make sense? Be that upset about something. After what they did to me. They took so much away from me, you worry you won’t be able to feel certain things again. That those parts don’t work. I feel bad for the animal. But I’m happy that I could
feel something deeply like that. That I was still able.”

  * * *

  Optimism was now a big business in town. The Cleveland Comeback. Believeland. They inevitably started wrapping catchy names around the feeling, downtown at city hall, in the chamber of commerce mailers, at young professional happy hours. The momentum I’d picked up on in 2014 didn’t quit but appeared to have accelerated.

  Busted-up buildings suddenly had new boutique tenants in their shop space. New neighborhoods with buzzy names—“Hingetown,” “Uptown”—seemed to sprout overnight. Bright murals dazzled street corners. The long-empty banks of the Cuyahoga River downtown were now busy with new restaurants and six-figure condos. With LeBron back at the helm, the Cleveland Cavaliers were selling out every night, filling the sidewalks downtown with thousands of people on game days. The city hosted the 2016 Republican National Convention. Forbes magazine, which only a few years earlier had labeled Cleveland “America’s Most Miserable City,” flip-flopped, crowning the town “America’s Hottest City Right Now.” Even Cleveland’s forgotten soul singers the Ponderosa Twins Plus One enjoyed a moment of resurgence when Kanye West recycled their hit, “Bound,” for his own single “Bound 2.”