Voices of Reentry

This is the first in a three-part series about my struggles with technology and human connection.

My main fear came from knowing that everything is connected, and pushing the wrong button could cause an unintended consequence I would not be able to undo. My other fear was knowing that nothing I did would be private; all my mistakes would be recorded, no matter how many times I pressed delete. I believed the number of times I hit delete would be recorded. Sitting in front of this powerful and evolving mechanism was as intimidating as standing on a ledge over the entirety of everything.

Taking the train from New Haven to Grand Central Station for the first time was the first step of my journey to Tribeca. Then again, maybe my first step was getting out of prison last July. Or maybe it was two years earlier, when I was granted a commutation and my 48-year sentence became 30. Being outside gave me access to a kind of freedom that Dwayne talks about throughout March Forth, a documentary about his incarceration as a juvenile. The film also raised questions that I still cannot answer: When does freedom truly begin for those of us released from prison? And what does it mean to be free when you carry prison with you wherever you go?

I had to learn the hard way that you just don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. And not just gone for a little while but for decades. Had to learn then, relearn some more, that there are freedoms so common that most people walk past them without ever noticing their radiance.

Every other Wednesday, twenty of us chained and rustled like cattle, formed a motley crew. Destination; courthouse basement. We waited in bullpens, (large holding cells), as if in purgatory drowning in sweat, uncertainty, and fear. Not quite hell, not quite hope. We shared cold benches, bologna sandwiches with green edges, and an unspoken understanding that most of us would not be going home. It was better left unsaid. Words were weaponized against us, in the foreign language of reports and plea offers.

I can only shake my head and wonder how I got through all the crazy things I did in one piece. Alive. When I was 15, my mom stayed on pins and needles every time I left the house. Even when I went to school she worried. Guess I had more energy than focus in those days. Guess, also, it was just a matter of time when I’d find myself in hot water up to my neck. But before winding up in prison for a robbery that netted me a 20-year sentence, I did something that nearly got me killed at age 17.

I went to prison when I was 17 years old. 19 years later, I went before the parole board. During my parole hearing, I could not stop looking at my victim's mother. I had an image of her imprinted in my mind from my arraignment and my sentencing. Though she was a little older, the pain that was imprinted on my mind, the emotions that were on her face almost two decades ago, were still fresh. I could hear her saying, “Y’all promised me 30 years.” That is all that the court gave her, a promise that I would be in prison for 30 years. I had been in prison for approximately 20 years, since I was 17, and now, I was granted parole.

Dolphins. They were everywhere. Springing and spraying in and out of an undulating tangerine sea set ablaze by a fiery-gold sun. An oceanic dreamscape with splashing dolphins and soaring seabirds doing what they do while the summer sun burns and drips smooth as honey. Such a scene is what a visual artist painted after she visited a prisoner on death row in California and asked him what he thought about from one grey day to the next. He mentioned thinking about a number of things while behind bars. Thinks he should never have committed his crime. Any crime. No time. Though he mostly thought about dolphins and seabirds soaring and splashing in and over the deep blue sea. Perhaps the image represented freedom in its truest form to the prisoner. Freedom in its most elemental state. Freedom in the abstract. Freedom without contract. Freedom that does not detract nor subtract but is pure and simple and intact. Just freedom.