One Saturday morning my supervisor called me and said, “Are you sitting down?”
I said, “Well, I can sit down. What’s going on?”
She told me that the night before, Judge Shriver had died in his office.
At first I was numb. I didn’t know what she was saying. It didn’t make sense to me. And then it hit me. I became overwhelmed with emotion, and I burst into tears.
It broke my heart. Losing this man who had become my mentor, my family, was devastating. Judge Shriver’s death was like losing a piece of me. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to deal with.
His courtroom was closed for several weeks. When they opened it back up, they had to get an interim judge until they could find someone to take his place permanently. And wouldn’t you know it, that interim judge just happened to be the retired Judge Lacy Johns. I thought, Oh, no, not again. We’re going back to that system of arbitrary rules and unfairness.
As I practiced in Judge Johns’s court again, the struggle grew, and I got more and more frustrated with the system.
And then one day I had a young kid, about nineteen years old at the time. He had made a really serious mistake. He was at the ATM machine, he found a card. He took it with him and started using it.
He went and bought some gas, he bought some pizza, he got a DVD player.
And then all of a sudden, it clicked—This is not right. I shouldn’t be doing this.
And so he actually backtracked. He went back to the stores where he’d been buying stuff and returned everything he could. It was everything except for, of course, the pizza and the gas. But he recognized the wrong that he did, and he was trying to make it right.
So I was asking the district attorney in the courtroom if he would consider giving him what we call expungeable probation. It’s like if you do everything you’re supposed to do—you know you’re wrong and admit you’re guilty, you comply with the conditions that are set and do what you’re supposed to do—then, at the end, the felony charge gets erased from your record.
In this case it was so important for this felony charge to be erased from this kid’s record, because if he had a felony, he couldn’t get a good job, he couldn’t go to college, he couldn’t get good housing.
He admitted it. He knew that he’d made a mistake. All he wanted was a second chance.
If a DA doesn’t agree to expungeable probation, every once in a while you get an opportunity to ask the judge if they would consider overruling the DA’s decision. And if Judge Shriver had been here in this case, there was absolutely no doubt he would have overruled it.
He would have said, Oh, yeah, this is a kid who has made a mistake, and he’s ready to make it right. He can have expungeable probation.
But Judge Shriver was dead.
And I knew in my heart of hearts that this judge would never give this kid expungeable probation. The frustration grew in me, and the more I talked to the DA about it, the smugger he seemed to be.
The DA would say, “Well, he did the crime, he’s gotta do the time.”
He kept saying that to me over and over and over.
And it just built inside of me. The anger was so deep that all of a sudden I snapped.
I put down my files, and I pointed my finger in his face, and I said, “You don’t know what justice is, you are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, bleep, bleep, bleep, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, BLEEP, BLEEP, BLEEP, BLEEP, BLEEP, BLEEP, BLAH, BLAH.”
Now, mind you, this was a courtroom full of people—there were attorneys, my supervisor, my poor client, all watching this.
But at that moment I didn’t care who was watching. This was not right, this was not fair.
My supervisor came over quickly to try to calm me down.
She got in front of me so that I couldn’t see what was going on behind me, and she said, “You’ve got to calm down, you’ve got to calm down. You can’t act like this in court. You’ve gotta calm down.”
But in my ultimate upsetness, having my out-of-body experience, I looked around her, and I saw the DAs talking about what I had just said. And I saw that they were being smug about it. It looked like they were making fun of what I had just done.
And so I said to my supervisor, “I’m sorry, I need to go handle some more business.”
I proceeded to go around her and go up to the other DA and say, “Now, if you’ve got any questions about what I just told him, I’ll tell you the same thing, which is bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, BLEEP, BLEEP, BLEEP, BLEEP.”
And boy, did I feel good.
But my client didn’t get the expungeable probation.
And at that moment I knew that it was time for me to do something different. I could not practice law in a place that I didn’t feel was fair or just, that was controlled by someone’s random, arbitrary rules.
I struggled in that court for a little while longer, about two months. But then one of the public defenders who worked in the juvenile division was leaving, and they needed someone to take his place. I quickly volunteered.
The first day I went to juvenile court, it felt like Judge Shriver’s home all over again. It felt like people were really working with our youth and trying to make a difference in their lives. These were people who knew that our youth were going to make mistakes and they would sometimes need second chances.
And so, almost twenty years later, I stand before you as the juvenile court judge. And every day, as that judge, I think about the lessons I learned from Judge Shriver.
People make mistakes.
People are unique.
But it’s up to us to build them up and to give them a second chance.
Not long ago one of the attorneys who used to practice in front of Judge Shriver had a case in front of me.
After she finished, she came up to me and said, “Practicing in front of you made me feel like practicing in front of Judge Shriver all over again.”
It was the biggest compliment I’ve ever had. And something that I always try to live up to.
* * *
SHEILA CALLOWAY, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, came to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1987 to attend Vanderbilt University Law School. She received her BA in communications in 1991 and her JD in 1994. After graduating from law school, Sheila worked at the Metropolitan Defender’s Office in the adult system as well as in the juvenile system. In January 2004 she was appointed by Judge Betty Adams Green to the position of juvenile court magistrate and served in that position until November 2013, when she announced her intention to run for the position of juvenile court judge. Sheila was elected Davidson County’s juvenile court judge in 2014 and was sworn into office for her eight-year term on August 28, 2014. Judge Calloway also serves as an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches in both the undergraduate and the law schools, and at the American Baptist College, where she teaches criminal justice. Judge Calloway uses her unique combination of humor, passion, and judicial wisdom to change the way we look at justice in the United States. She was a featured speaker with TEDxNashville on the topic “Can Forgiveness Transform the Criminal Justice System?”
This story was told on August 10, 2017, at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center’s James K. Polk Theater in Nashville. The theme of the night was Flirting with Disaster. Director: Meg Bowles.
Twenty years ago I was living out my dream of being an actress and a singer in New York. At the time I was a swing on the national tour of Les Misérables. If you don’t know what a swing is, it means I understudied all the women, which was awesome.
So I was living out my dream when I got a call from my brother, Danny, letting me know that our father and our brother, Alberto, were both dead. They had been brutally murdered in our hometown of Miami. My father owned an import-and-export electronic-goods business, and Alberto worked with him.
I didn’t know this at the time, but business wasn’t going well. One of th
em made some sort of shady deal, and that deal went south—so south that one day some men came to the office, took my father and my brother into the warehouse, and then tied my father’s hands behind his back and taped his mouth shut.
They made him watch as they tortured and murdered his favorite son. (Alberto was everybody’s favorite. If you had met him, he would have been your favorite, too.) When they were done with that business, they shot and they stabbed my father to death.
There was a million dollars’ worth of merchandise in the warehouse, and they took nothing, except of course the lives of my father and my brother and the possibility of my family ever living a normal life again.
I was in a fight with my dad when he died. I wasn’t speaking to him. And the day that they died, this overwhelming sense came over me—there was a voice in the back of my head that kept telling me, Call him. Call them both. Tell them that you love them. Tell them.
And I was just like, No.
I had my reasons, and I thought they were good ones at the time. But when I got that call, I fell to my knees, and I screamed out loud that I hadn’t told my father that I loved him.
After they died, my life got really small.
I had always been the life of the party, the kind of person who was the first one on the dance floor, the first one to laugh, the first one to be out there, just first, first, first. I used to sing all the time—singing was a prayer for me.
I got off the road, stopped singing, and could barely leave my house. I was almost agoraphobic.
I developed, unbeknownst to myself at the time, a panic disorder, which, if you’ve never had a panic disorder, means you panic because you think you might panic. It’s very odd.
So I’m going to say something that sounds a little crazy, given what I just said: I’m really lucky. I have amazing friends, and they dealt with me during this time like, Okay, this is a rough patch you’re going through right now. But they listened to me when I needed to talk, they got me out of the house, and they never lost sight of who I was, even when I had lost sight of myself.
One day one of these friends, Sandy, says to me, “Oh, you know what we should do? Whenever one of us hears the other one say, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to do x’ or ‘I’ve always wanted to do y,’ it then becomes the other person’s responsibility to make sure we do that.”
I thought, Okay. I’m barely leaving the house. That might be a good idea.
So fast-forward a few months later.
Out of the blue, she says, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to skydive.”
So first I thought, Fuck…
But then I thought, okay, if it was just her and me going skydiving, I was not going to skydive. I’d chicken out. And I wanted to make sure that we did—integrity was a big deal to me. I do what I say I’m going to do.
So I went around for a while introducing myself, like, “Hi, my name’s Ana. Would you like to skydive?” “Hi, I’m Ana. Would you like to go skydiving?”
I figured that if I got as many people as possible to go along, I would do it.
I ended up getting nine people to come along with us. The day comes, and we pile into two cars. One is a neon-green Geo Metro, and the other was this boat of a Monte Carlo.
We drive two and a half hours to the middle of New Jersey somewhere.
We get there, and the woman who’s driving the Monte Carlo only has an American Express, and the place doesn’t take American Express, so she says, “I’ll be right back.”
She never comes back.
This is way before Uber, so we are like, “What are we going to do? Oh, my God!”
We’re conferring like crazy people, when all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I see this beautiful man come toward us. He looks like he’s eight feet tall and eight hundred pounds of pure muscle. He’s this Paul Bunyan man, lumberjack-huge. He’s Australian, and I think to myself, You eat Vegemite and vagina for breakfast every day.
He’s our jumpmaster, and he gives us this ridiculous thirty-second demo of how to jump from a plane, which is just, “You put your foot here, and you jump out of the plane, and then we’ll put a shrimp on the barbie. I’ll see you up there!”
So we put on these one-size-fits-all onesie outfits and goggles, and then we go to an outdoor waiting room. We watch people fly up and then come down to the ground.
I start to freak out a little bit. But what has me not run after the woman with the Monte Carlo are two things:
First of all, everybody’s flying up there and jumping, and nobody’s dying.
And second, once people land, they have this look on their face like the wattage of their inner light has been turned up to maximum.
I knew I didn’t have that. And I wanted it.
Finally my name gets called, and I walk over, only I can’t feel my body. I’m just like a floating head walking over to the plane. We get in, and it is this ridiculously small plane—it’s literally small enough that my back is up against the pilot’s seat and my feet are touching the back of the plane. Claustrophobia.
We start to go up, and my adrenaline’s pumping. You ever get that feeling where you can’t hear anything because the blood is like boom, boom, BOOM! in your head?
And then I have this really weird response to the adrenaline.
Songs start bubbling up, and I began to sing maniacally. I belted out Les Miz songs.
I sang this one section in particular:
But the tigers come at night,
With their voices soft as thunder,
As they tear your hope apart,
As they turn their dream to shaaaaa…aaa…aaa…aaa…AME.
Yeah, it’s all fun and games for you now, but I sang that over and over and over again while I was on the plane, like a crazy person. My Aussie jumpmaster just smiles at me as though this is something he sees all the time.
We finally get up to the right altitude, which is three miles above the earth. We get into jump position, which is like doggie-style crouching right before the plane door.
Because it’s a tandem jump, he straps himself onto me (and that might have been fun at another time, but I’m about to jump from a plane).
He opens up the flap, and it’s shocking, because freezing air rushes in. It’s August; it’s ninety degrees below, but it’s like February up there.
I take a peek down at the earth, and I suddenly think, I’m not jumping from this fucking plane.
What the hell was I thinking, jumping? I’m not doing this.
And I am starting to panic. I’m hyperventilating and trying to catch my breath, and I’m thinking, I can’t, I CAN’T.
He’s in my ear saying, “Ready?”
And I’m like, “No! I’m NOT jumping! No! No!”
He’s wrestling with me a little bit. He’s got a hundred pounds on me—the man is huge, you know? He could have just grabbed me and thrown me out of the plane.
But instead he does this amazing thing. He wraps his arms around me, and he whispers in my ear like a lover.
He says, “I promise you I will get you down in one piece, and I swear that you are safe with me.”
What he says just like opens me up, and I start to cry. I’m letting go.
And I realize in that moment that the day my father and my brother both died, I died with them. And that I had a choice in this moment.
I could continue leading the pathetic life I had led since my father and my brother died, or I could jump from this plane with this beautiful Aussie man strapped to my back, and I could live.
So I chose to live.
We get into jump position, which is insane—it’s one foot on the wing, a knee inside the plane, straddling the open air.
“You ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
So we jump.
And we’re falling away from the plane.
<
br /> The earth comes at you pretty quickly.
Then we go into full flying position, and it’s so loud. Your skin is stretched back, like your lips are wrapped around your face.
We fall away into my grief and my despair and my hopelessness and my rage. My missing my father and the fact that I didn’t call him.
And, finally there was nothing there.
Just me.
He taps me on the shoulder and tells me to pull the rip cord. And it was so loud before, but then all of a sudden the parachute opens, and it’s just silence.
The kind of silence that’s thick, that does not exist here on earth.
So we float down to earth.
He tells me to “Bring it in, baby,” and we bring it in.
Friends all come over to me—we’re all these little beams of light, you know? I can feel my own light up to maximum. And we pile into that stupid neon-green Geo Metro like Keystone Cops.
We don’t even drive back to New York, we float back to New York, back to figuring out how I could live my life again, one day at a time.
I realized that part of it was I had all this love to give to my father and my brother that I didn’t give. And when you don’t give love, it rots inside you. So my life rotted for a little while. But when I jumped from that plane, it stopped.
I started figuring out how to tell people “I love you” (even when I was angry).
It’s been twenty years now. And I’m still here because I’ve chosen to live every day.
* * *
ANA DEL CASTILLO is a certified desire and life coach and course and seminar leader, specializing in helping people know what they want so they can get what they want. Ana is also a professional actress and singer and has been in shows such as Nunsense, Les Misérables, and her own one-person show, which she wrote, produced, and starred in. She is currently writing her second one-person show, of which this Moth story is a part. Ana wishes to thank her mother, Reina, for her unique and beautiful style and for always giving her material to draw upon; her dearest friends, Christen Bavero and Carla Vilches, for their unfaltering love and support; and the incomparable and incomparably talented Seth Barrish, who believed in her and this story before she did and gave her the direction she needed and the encouragement to go for it. Ana Del Castillo is honored and thrilled to be a part of this book! Telling her story on the Moth stage has been a true dream come true.
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