It is Tuesday, September 28. Another workday for Sterling. He leaves his cell on A-Block, walks down the tier, out across the control floor, and up four flights of stairs to the chapel. He is settling in when his friend, Anthony, rushes in, grinning, to tell him the news: The governor has commuted his sentence. He will be getting out within weeks. Like Sterling, he had been in prison for murder since he was a teen. Sterling had befriended and mentored Anthony, as he had so many other men, had introduced him to RJ, had brought him into the study groups.
Sterling is genuinely, deeply happy for his friend. But he is also scared. Karuna is there in the office watching the two men. Sterling is way more than scared, she thinks. He is panicked. He is distraught. He knew that his and Anthony’s commutation packages had reached the governor’s office on the very same day.
It was back in mid-May, almost four and a half months ago, that Aliza Kaplan and her legal team at the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic had submitted the packages for both men. Sterling had been working on his personal statement not just since the dispiriting news from the resentencing hearing many months before that, but really for years, for decades, as he struggled to make sense of what he had done and how to explain his hard-won transformation. That statement, along with a number of the letters that had been part of the resentencing package and five new letters written by state legislators, made up the one-hundred-plus page submission.
Sterling had won cases and appeals and judgments. He had tried mediation. Little had come of it. He knew, his lawyers knew, that commutation was not just his best shot. It was his only shot. And so he waited. He was accustomed to long stretches of silence. But now, today, Anthony had heard, and Sterling had not. That can’t be good news, he thinks. He keeps his head down, finishes up work, goes back to his cell.
A while later he is told to report back to the chapel. There, in Karuna’s office, he sees Nathaline Frener, the former law professor who had taught restorative justice classes inside and was now an administrator at the prison. Next to her is an inmate assigned to take photographs and videos of prison events. They are here, he is told, to interview Anthony. Now Karuna and Nathaline have their heads together, whispering, in the corner. Sterling, taught by his years of incarceration to be hyperalert, to read body language, to parse nuance, is confused. Something is going on. But what?
Nathaline asks him to walk down the hall to the library with her. There she pulls out her phone and starts scrolling, begins to say something, pauses, doesn’t finish the sentence, fumbles. Sterling has known Nathaline for a decade. He knows her as organized, focused, to the point. She doesn’t fumble. And here she is fumbling. In retrospect, he sees that she was just stalling for time.
Then Nathaline looks up from her phone. She smiles at Sterling. Her smile is radiant. “You’ve got a phone call,” she tells him. They walk back to Karuna’s office. Aliza Kaplan and two members from the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic legal team are on the line, on speakerphone.
“Will you go out to breakfast with us on November 1st?” That’s what Aliza says, no preamble.
And then it hits him. He’s getting out. He too, like Anthony, has had his sentence commuted. “I do the manly cry thing,” he tells me on the phone the next morning, recounting a blow-by-blow. “I cover my face. Cry into my hands. Then I suck it up.” And the whole rest of the day, he walks around saying yes to everything. He doesn’t know what he’s said yes to. But “yes” is the word of the moment.
***
A little more than a month later, thirty-three days to be exact, Cheryl and I are texting each other near midnight. She is camped out on a cot in her living room surrounded by her three cats. Her mother, sister, aunt, and nephews fill her small house. We know we need to get up at 4:30 the next morning, but neither of us wants to break off the connection. We have been friends through Sterling for only a few years, but sometimes there is a way people connect that has nothing to do with time spent. “Maybe you don’t know this,” she tells me, “but you have been my rock.” It’s 6:30 the next morning, Monday, November 1. Dawn is another forty-five minutes away. Serious rain is maybe fifteen minutes away, coming in fast from the coast. A small crowd is gathered across from the gate, illuminated not by the moon—it is overcast—but by the glare of the prison tower spotlight. There are close to thirty people here to welcome Sterling back into the world he left behind more than a quarter of a century ago as a sixteen-year-old kid. There’s Anthony, released a week ago, Arnoldo—with Sol on his shoulders—Ivan, Jabari, and a few other prison friends who were freed before him. Trevor is here too. There are a handful of students who were in the RJ class with Sterling. There’s Melissa, the quiet activist and professor from Willamette, who keeps RJ going inside, along with a few community activists. And Karuna, of course. And Steven Finster, the man responsible for the writing group that brought Sterling and me together. There are the women from Sterling’s legal team. There’s the film crew, Lydia the documentarian whose film about RJ had been on hold since the pandemic, along with a cameraman, lighting guy, and sound guy. And there is Cheryl, her sister who looks so much like her as to be her twin, her mother—a tiny woman next to her almost six-foot tall daughter—and a lively, smiling nephew.
A few minutes after seven, Sterling walks out the gate holding a huge, impossibly leggy plant that he nurtured from nothing in his cell over years and years. He strides. He always strides. He looks both relaxed and stunned. I don’t know how that is possible, but that’s what it is. He makes his way through the crowd, calling out people’s names, hugging, moving on to the next. Everyone wants a piece of him. Big body hugs with audible backslapping when he sees one of the guys from inside; gentler, longer hugs for the others. Cheryl stands off to the side and watches the Sterling show. “I don’t own him,” she told me last week when we were texting about how public this event will be. “He’s everybody’s.” He hugs two more guys, grabs Anthony, whose head comes up to Sterling’s shoulder, and pulls him close. The film crew is maneuvering around looking for the shots.
“Where’s Cheryl?” Sterling asks, moving from public persona to private. She is right there, behind him, watching, waiting. They embrace. They stay locked like that with the mist starting to come down and the prison tower spotlight illuminating them.
Sterling is in control, which is astonishing—and yet somehow not surprising. This first moment out, this first breath of free air, is, for many, paralyzing. Not Sterling. He addresses the crowd. He relates the story about the plant he grew. He tells the crowd about the books that sustained him. About the writing he did that nurtured him. About the music that kept his soul alive. He tells everyone about the hydrant and its meaning, about how many times he’s watched other guys touch it and walk off to freedom. Now it is his turn.
It’s raining hard. Maybe two dozen of us follow him down the sidewalk and out of the prison grounds. The hydrant, on a grassy strip sandwiched between a sidewalk and a busy street, is just steps away. He stands in front of it, staring at it, the cars on State Street zipping by, the rain sheeting down. No one speaks. Then he kneels down, extends his long arm, and touches it. His hand does not linger. We clap and whoop and take pictures with our phones.
What happens next takes your breath away. It makes you question how a moment can be so real, so authentic, and so cheesy all at once. If this were a film, and this was the ending, you would groan. If this were a novel, and it was the final paragraph, you would dismiss it as overwrought. But let me tell you: this moment is real, and this moment is pure magic.
Sterling stands up to his full height, turns his back to the hydrant and the street now crowded with early morning traffic. He is facing the prison, visible behind its twenty-five-foot concrete perimeter. He lifts his fist in the air, holds it there. In the distance, up on the fourth floor, he can see—we all can see—the outlines of maybe a dozen people, inmates inside, inmates watching. Sterling punches the sky with his fist and calls out to them. And then, at that very moment, a murmuration of starlings—Mary Oliver calls them “acrobats in the theatre of the air”—swoops across the gray sky over the prison. They dive and soar, loop in the air, switch direction, and fly overhead again. Starlings are Sterling’s favorite bird.
RESILIENCE
Sterling Cunio
Resilience is picking yourself up when no one sees you fall.
It’s ten deep breaths after a devastating phone call.
It’s learning how to make something out of nothing.
It’s knowing that your own mind is all you need in an empty room.
Resilience is a bird in a tree glimpsed over concrete walls.