My family means so much to me, so I desperately wanted to connect with them as much as possible while I was in prison. That meant I lived for phone calls.
For 23 cents per minute, I could talk to my family members. Pretty steep for someone who made twelve cents per hour. The prison justified the cost, saying it had to pay people to monitor the conversations. They had to make sure we weren’t doing anything wrong on the calls, like having a three-way call or planning something illegal. Every few seconds, the call was interrupted by a recording.
This call is from a federal inmate.
For almost $70 per month, we received 300 minutes, which I tried to spread over 20 calls 15 minutes in length. This was tough, since I always found it impossible to tell my family member I had to go.
One day, I called Tretessa, and I could tell from her voice that she was crying. When I heard her distress, my stomach immediately churned.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. She told me that my son Bryant was in trouble. Still anchorless from my imprisonment, he fell in with the wrong crowd and was arrested for computer fraud. He’d gotten into minor trouble before, but this was not minor.
“Please talk to him, Mama,” Tretessa begged. She knew the dangers of going to trial, the way that people will come out of the woodwork to testify against you—people you have never met—to get a better deal for themselves. “If he’s convicted, he might get thirty years in prison.”
Bryant was good hearted, very handsome, and tough as nails. Still, I didn’t even want to imagine what life in prison would be like for him. My heart was broken. I felt so powerless, sitting in a federal correctional institute in Texas, trying to communicate with my son in his county jail via the postal service. But that was my only option.
I begged for him not to go to trial, after what had happened to me. I asked him to just settle and get what he could out of the system, to pay the price. They offered him three years, but he refused.
“I can’t afford three years in prison,” he wrote, telling me he opted to go to trial. My heart sank as I read those words. I felt like I was reliving my own past failures. I felt responsible, since I hadn’t been there to guide him as a mother. He ended up being sentenced to nine years, and eventually he ended up at Kingman prison in Golden Valley, Arizona—one of the worst prisons in America. And so, I became a pen pal to my son, prison to prison.
I had tried so hard to give my kids a better life. I remember holding Bryant’s little chubby hand in the welfare line, wondering what sort of example I was showing him. In spite of all my trying, however, he ended up in jail. Just like his mama. The pain of this was hard to even process.
It helped to receive his letters, though I wasn’t always happy to hear what was going on over there. They called him “Memphis.” I shuddered to think about my son in such a place.
I held out hope that somehow we both would be free. Even though my attorney Wayne had told me he’d stopped filing motions, I believed that the truth would come out. Though I had committed a crime, I had received a penalty that far outweighed my offense. But in 2010, I received news that one of the people who knew the truth was dying.
My sister Coria told me over the phone that Wayne Emmons was in terrible shape. She knew this because she and her husband, Samuel, had been involved in Memphis law enforcement for over thirty years each and had both retired as majors. Because they knew Wayne, they had followed his life after he had been my attorney.
At seventy-two, Wayne had long ago stopped practicing law. He was one of those southern lawyers whose reputation, attitude, and personality supersedes their actual career. He practiced law for only fifteen years before going on to become a comedian. Wayne also consulted with John Grisham—who had grown up right there in Southaven—on some of his characters. This relationship earned him small roles in movies. He told people that he was tired of dealing in “human misery”—which I can confirm is exactly what his legal career had wrought.
“Samuel and I are going to go to the nursing home to visit him,” Coria told me. She hoped that maybe his conscience had been pricked and that he would finally tell us the truth about whatever was going on with my case that caused him to fail to represent me wholeheartedly. We always thought he’d done a bad job, and his subsequent visit at Carswell created even more questions. Was there more than just incompetence at play? He’d acted afraid and fearful, almost as if someone had pressured him into downplaying my defense. My sister hoped that going to his bedside would give him the opportunity to come clean.
She told me that the visit began well. They were kind to him, and he returned their kindness as they reminisced about old times. But when Coria brought up my name, his eyes narrowed and his previously lucid conversation turned into babbling.
“It seemed suspicious,” she said. “Like he didn’t want us there.”
I pressed the phone against my ear. I probably shouldn’t have had any expectations about the visit, yet I did. “Then what happened?” I asked.
“He ended up calling security,” she said. “He said, ‘Get them out of this room!’”
Of course they left. They didn’t want to upset a man in a nursing home. He later died, and with him, any hope of getting real answers about his role in the case that landed me behind bars for the rest of my life.
This call is from a federal inmate, the automated system said.
But we didn’t need the reminder.
In 2013, I received a letter that gave me much-needed hope. It was from a woman named Jennifer Turner who worked at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Jennifer was an attorney who was searching all over America for prisoners like me, whom she dubbed “the living dead.” Someone had given her my name, and I took a moment to read the letter even though The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ—my epic play—was just about to go into its tenth annual production.
“Dear Ms. Johnson,” her letter began. “I’m contacting you because I’m doing a report on prisoners charged with nonviolent crimes who had been sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.”
Well, she got the right person.
In her envelope, she included a profile form. She’d also included her email address and asked me to add her to my CorrLinks account, which gave her the ability to email me directly. I was honored that she’d reached out to me, and I tucked her letter away in my cell so I could come back to it once I had the time.
I’d received the letter two weeks before Easter, so I couldn’t stop to fill it out. My first Easter play was such a huge success that I’d put it on every year. The crowds never got smaller, and news of the play went through the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which everyone called the BOP. Whenever women transferred from other places, they always wanted to know about this play they’d heard so much about. News travels, even throughout the prison system.
My friend Sharanda asked me if I’d sent back the forms to Jennifer.
“Not yet,” I said, as I continued to work on a prop for the play. She began to chastise me, since she had already sent her forms back to Jennifer. In addition to this report, the ACLU was going to launch an ad campaign to draw attention to the fact that there were so many nonviolent prisoners serving life sentences. Sharanda began to preach to me, something about how faith without works is dead, but I interrupted her.
“Now hold it right there,” I said. “I’m going about my Father’s business, and I know He’ll take care of me.”
Finally, once the play had run its course, I sat down, filled out the forms, and added Jennifer’s email address to my access list. A few days later, I received a message from Jennifer acknowledging receipt of my forms, which she described as excellent. We began corresponding and she got to know Tretessa, whom she interviewed for the project. They became close, and Jennifer was impressed by the fact that my family had never stopped fighting to bring me home.
When I heard that a new prison was being built in Aliceville, Alabama, I realized that I could at least get closer to home. My heart raced when I realized this prison would be only three hours away from my family. Though they had been faithful to keep in contact with me, it had been hard to physically see them while I was in prison.
In May 2000, my sister Thelma had it laid on her heart to take my mother and father on a road trip. My mother had been so excited that she’d get to see her baby. I didn’t realize it, but Mama always referred to me as “baby,” even though I wasn’t the youngest child. “I wonder how my baby is doing?” she’d say. Or, “I’m so proud of my baby.” I always kept in touch with letters, phone calls, and homemade cards—I never bought my mama a card. I decorated them with hearts and included photocopies of photographs I had in my cell to make them special. I spent most of my money on phone calls to her and also sent her these physical reminders so she’d have something to read and hold when she missed me. I was in closer contact with her than even my own children, because I wanted to keep her uplifted with the good things I was doing in prison.
My sister had stretched out the ten-hour drive so my parents could rest along the way. They finally arrived one summer morning, bright and early as soon as visitation opened. Though it had been only four years since I’d last seen her, Mama looked remarkably different. When I left, she had been a strong, robust woman. She was much thinner now. We had “contact visits,” meaning we were in the same room. We were allowed only a quick hug before the guards would tell the prisoner to separate from her guests. But when I saw Mama, who was wiping away tears, I ran to her. We embraced. I don’t know how long, but the guards looked away.
“You look so good,” she said quietly in my ear.
Once we settled down, I sat as close to her as I could. Daddy bought candy out of the vending machine, which we ate together. (I must’ve inherited my sweet tooth from him.) The tears quickly turned into laughter as I relayed funny anecdotes about prison life. I told them about how I’d been filing motions by myself, and I promised to make them my homemade chocolate cake when I got out.
“You’re going to live with us when you get freed,” my mama said. “We still have your room ready.” I agreed to this unlikely scenario, silently.
While we chatted, the guards came over and told my parents nice things about me. The duty officer that day was the head of the psychology department. She told them of the work that I had been doing to help the various departments put on their programs. It was an encouraging time, and the faces of my parents were beaming when they heard these guards bragging on me.
They were the last ones to leave at three o’clock when the visitation ended. When my daddy began to pray, we all began to cry. “You hold your head up, now,” my mama said before she left. It was the last time I’d ever see them together alive.
Now as I contemplated leaving Carswell, I recalled that memory as well as so many others I was leaving behind—both happy and sad. Carswell was the place I was living when my father died in 2007, it was where I created the Easter play, and it’s where I developed another prison family.
Still, those memories couldn’t compete with family. When I found out that I could possibly be closer to my family in Alabama, I signed up for the transfer. I could be closer to my kids this way, and the chance of more frequent visits with all of them was too good to pass up. But when the approval list came out, my name wasn’t on it.
“What’s going on?” I asked my counselor.
“You have too many medical restrictions,” she said casually. Apparently, because of a previous knee injury, which made stair climbing more difficult, I had an asterisk by my name. Since that knee had long since healed, I felt this was suspicious reasoning. Turns out, they simply didn’t want me to leave since I had gotten so involved in prison life at Carswell. Was it possible that I’d integrated myself so thoroughly into the life in prison that they weren’t ready to lose me?
Thankfully, after I protested and pleaded my case, I got approval to go.
On the last Sunday before I left, I went to chapel.
Chaplain Danage was happy that I’d gotten the transfer, but he was sad to see me leave. “Alice in Aliceville. There’s a nice ring to that,” he said. “Alice is going to Aliceville for her destiny.”
He called me up to the front of the chapel and laid hands on me.
“Give her mercy,” he prayed. Then the Holy Spirit came over him, and he made a prophetic utterance. He was careful not to disrespect the rule of law and also careful not to give people who had life in prison false hope. But suddenly, his usual caution and conservative language vanished. Instead he spoke it out that I would be able to go home before I died. People in the church all witnessed this prophesy.
It was a hopeful moment. Did the fact that he made such a strong statement indicate that it was truly a message from God? I firmly believed so. But Deuteronomy has a fail-safe way of telling whether a person is a true or a false prophet: “When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken.”
In other words, time would tell. Regardless, a sense of awe fell in the chapel, and we all rejoiced. Then, after fifteen years of my life behind those Texas bars, I was on the next bus out.