Where do I go from here?
As promised, President Donald John Trump was a different kind of president. The inaugural song that he danced to said it all: “My Way.” After he appointed Jeff Sessions to the position of attorney general, Sessions issued an order that surprised everyone. Though a consensus had grown between political parties that the criminal justice system needed to be reformed, Sessions ordered that prosecutors pursue the toughest possible charges against criminal defendants like me. It even included more mandatory minimum sentences. This instruction left those of us who were sentenced during the failed era of the War on Drugs reeling in despair. Far from being a war on drugs, it had turned into a war on families that separated people from their loved ones for decades—and too often, even for life.
Even with all the drama that had taken place in the US attorney’s office in Memphis, I still believed that I would one day walk out of prison. I had gotten the US attorney, Edward Stanton, on my side, and he had become convinced I needed to be set free. A flame had been lit that we were going to continue to fan.
Now that the door was open to us, my daughter Catina called the US attorney’s office the day after Obama left office. When Stanton’s secretary answered the phone, my daughter identified herself.
“The whole office was pulling for Alice,” the secretary said.
“Do you think your boss would support a sentence-reduction motion for my mother?” she asked.
“Get us a motion and we can try again to get your mother free.”
“Woo-hoo!!!” Catina screamed as she hung up the phone.
My clemency attorney Marcia Shein prepared a sentence-reduction motion and filed it on my behalf. Less than two weeks later, we were shocked to learn that Edward Stanton was resigning as US attorney. We saw it on the news that February 28 would be his last day in office. But we’d gone too far and fought too hard to give up by then. I was no longer parking my hope on a man—because I’d finally learned that hope is not a man.
I was scheduled to speak at New York University the last week of January 2017. When I accepted the invitation, I’d hoped I would be speaking as a free woman who had been granted clemency. Instead I spoke of the heartbreak that I, along with thousands of other prisoners, was feeling after having been left behind. The first platform I had spoken at via video visit had been orchestrated by the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls at Hunter College. Andrea James was the president of that group, and Topeka Sam was the national organizer. My final university speaking engagement from prison was through the same council.
In the spring of 2017, Malika Saada Saar, the senior counsel on civil and human rights at Google, invited me to speak at a Google-hosted YouTube summit on criminal justice reform. Malika first heard me speak through a YouTube platform at a #cut50 Clemency Now event in November 2016 that was being hosted by Google in DC. Little did I know the role that technology and Google would play in my fight for freedom.
Jake Horowitz with MIC attended the Google summit and was so moved by my words that he sought out a way to connect with me to do a video op-ed. Google connected Jake to Topeka, who had access to contact me and coordinate video visits. Topeka told me that Jake was interested in my doing a video op-ed, but it would be months before I would hear anything about it again.
Kendall Ciesemier arrived at MIC the first week of October 2017, and Jake reupped the email chain. After a date was set for me to do the video op-ed, Jake organized a time for Topeka to come to MIC to test the technology.
On October 16, 2017, I called Topeka to find out how I would be introduced to begin the video op-ed. That’s when I discovered that it would not just be me speaking into a camera, but a news reporter would actually be interviewing me. This was a problem, because conversations with any kind of journalist required special approval from the prison. Topeka and I both knew that though I’d been previously been interviewed via video visit, I had never sat down with an actual reporter. When I spoke of my concern to her, Topeka said that she had just found those details out that day and understood if I couldn’t do it. She told me that she would let MIC know. I told her to wait and I’d get back to her.
I went back to my cell and pulled out all the approvals, including the blanket approval I had received to speak on various platforms via video visit. I reviewed again the stipulation that said I had approval to do video visit interviews as long as I didn’t speak negatively about the prison. I felt good about what I had in writing; the only problem was that the staff member who had given me the approval was on leave. Who there would give me permission? Plus, what if they said no?
I couldn’t take the chance.
I prayed, as the possible consequences of not getting permission for this ran through my mind. I thought of Queen Esther in the Bible, who made the decision to go before the king to save lives in spite of the fact that it was against the law to go before the king unannounced. She said, “If I perish, I perish.” Then she touched the heart of the king. I thought about all the times in my life that I had fought against injustice. Was not my family worth fighting for? Was not my life worth fighting for? Were the other prisoners, whose faces no one might ever see, worth fighting for? In life, sometimes you have no choice but to fight.
I went downstairs and made a phone call. “Topeka, I have decided to do it.”
When I told my friends what I had decided, they were not thrilled. “Miss Alice, you know what could happen if you do this?”
“What if this is my last chance to be free?” I replied. They had no answer to that. Plus, they knew they couldn’t change my mind.
The next morning was October 17. I got up early so that Cindy, one of my friends in the unit—who happened to be a beautician and a former beauty pageant contestant—could fix my hair. I wanted one of those swept-back styles reminiscent of a 1960s secretary. When she finished, she had achieved the perfect look: it was pinned up with a little sprig coming down on the side.
At 8:00 a.m., the shift changed, and the next officer came on duty. I went back in my room and laid my uniform out on my bed and made sure my boots looked good (even though the reporter wouldn’t be able to see them). I wanted the confidence that I looked as good as possible, even down to my feet. When I heard the officer making his morning rounds, I looked out my cell. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Our regular officer had not come in, and the person who was working his post for the day was none other than my unit manager. Yikes! A former member of the military, he was absolutely no-nonsense, constantly walking the unit and making sure that everything was in order.
My heart raced.
If he saw me on that phone with lights and cameras as a backdrop, it was not going to be good. What bad timing!
I pulled out my MP3 player and put on “Fight Song” by Rachel Platten. As I listened to the lyrics—“I may only have one match, but I can make an explosion”—I felt a burst of adrenaline. “Take back my life song,” I sang as I danced and twirled around my cell. “I still gotta lot of fight left in me.”
The call was set for 10:00 a.m., and I had precisely twenty-five minutes to be on a video visit.
When I told my friends that our unit manager was on duty as our officer, their faces grew ashen. And so they hatched a plan to help me. They were going to take turns keeping him engaged in conversation in the officer’s station. When one finished talking to him, another would enter the office and speak to him. Another friend stood outside the room where I would be talking to the reporter via video visit and promised to flash a signal if I needed to abruptly abort the call. Another friend stood in the corner near where I was making the call and prayed the entire time. Everyone was still very upset about my being passed up for clemency and wanted to help me.
I took a deep breath, sat down at the computer terminal, and logged in. Kendall popped onto the screen. Just as I expected, bright lights and cameras were directed toward me. Kendall briefed me on how the interview would flow and said, “Feel free to skip a question if it makes you feel uncomfortable.” But nothing did. I felt such a sweet peace envelop me. I looked into the eyes of the camera and imagined that I was looking into the eyes of a single person. I felt a strong connection to my unseen audience.
“My name is Alice Marie Johnson,” I began. “I am a sixty-two-year-old mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. In less than two weeks, on October 31, will mark my twenty-first year of confinement in federal prison.” The reporter stopped to ask questions, like what prison life was like, how it felt to see my family while I was locked up, and so forth.
As my answers flowed out, it felt like I could bare my soul and tell of my pain, shame, disappointments, and even triumphs. No written article could articulate who I was better than my own voice.
I told her what a close family member had told me about how sad it was to visit me in prison and know I would never rejoin her except as a corpse. She said it was like visiting a gravesite. They could view the place where my body was but could never take me home. I talked about the big moments that I’d missed—the births of grandchildren and great-grandchildren; the deaths of both of my parents and one sister and not being able to attend their funerals. I explained that I had been active while in prison and maintained clear conduct the entire time. I told her definitively that I was not a risk to society. When Kendall asked me to define who I really was, I answered in this way: “The real Miss Alice is a woman who has made a mistake. If I could go back in time and change the choices I made, I would. But I can’t. I have not allowed my past to be the sum of who I am.” And finally, I made a plea to America: “Please wake up, America, and help end this injustice. It’s time to stop overincarcerating your own citizens.”
“Thank you, Miss Alice,” the reporter said. Right before my twenty-five minutes were up, my friend flashed me a panicked signal. The unit manager was walking up to the window to peek in. I quickly hung up without even saying goodbye. With six seconds to spare, it was done. Come what may, the die was cast.
Kendall later revealed to me that she felt deeply the presence of God while interviewing me. She said it was unlike any story she’d ever heard and she sensed that something bigger was going on while speaking with me. Kendall reached out to my daughter Tretessa and asked her to send family photos. Topeka constantly updated me on what was happening.
The video was scheduled to drop on Thursday, October 19, but MIC realized that the audio of the video visit hadn’t recorded properly. They had to use the audio from the camera that was filming Kendall asking the questions. They told me that the audio wouldn’t sync because they were at different “bit rates.” I didn’t understand anything they were saying, but I knew it wasn’t good. I’d gone to so much effort and had taken so much risk, this interview had to be published. It was now or never. Thankfully, Abu Zafar edited the piece with skill and perseverance. Though a lot of effort had to go into making it work, MIC finally felt it was ready to go.
The video dropped on October 23 and almost immediately started trending. It was as if it had a life of its own. My family and friends were emailing me with numbers. “It’s going viral,” they gushed. But this scared me. I didn’t know what “viral” meant. I was afraid that the video was about to introduce a virus into the internet. Before you think that I was really dumb, you have to realize there was no internet when I came to prison twenty-one years prior, and I wasn’t familiar with tech terms.
Celebrities retweeted the video, talk show hosts discussed it on their programs, and even the officers at the prison talked about it. Something amazing was happening. Later that day, I received an email from Amy Povah with a message she forwarded from an attorney named Shawn Chapman Holley. Shawn said that a very rich and famous client of hers wanted to hire her to help me get out of prison, and she wanted to know if I would like for her to do it. She included a number for me to call. There is a country saying: “My drawers didn’t touch my behind.” That’s how fast I was running to call Shawn.
Shawn Holley didn’t reveal to me on that first call who this woman was, so I called my daughter and asked her to Google the name “Shawn Holley” and tell me who her clients were. After hearing the list of clients I just knew that rich and famous woman had to be Kris Jenner! Catina wasn’t so sure.
“What if it’s Kim Kardashian?” she asked. Catina knew Kim because she loved watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
“Kim who?”
She explained to me how this famous woman had a tender heart for others. I still thought the woman was Kris, but I started searching for pictures and articles about Kim so I would know more about her and what she looked like.
Shawn revealed that my benefactor was Kim Kardashian! She later advised me that she had talked to her client and was now my attorney.
I wrote Kim a thank-you letter expressing my gratitude to her.
Dear Ms. Kardashian,
I am so humbled by what you are doing and have already done on my behalf. When I spoke with attorney Shawn Holley, and she disclosed the name of my benefactor, I had to take the time to process and digest the news that you were the one she had been alluding to.
There are no words strong enough to express my deep and heartfelt gratitude. Ms. Kardashian, you are literally helping to save my life and restore me to my family. I was drowning, and you have thrown me a life jacket and given me hope that this life jacket I’m serving may one day be taken off.
There are defining moments in history that have shaped the destiny of this nation. I believe that we are a part of a defining moment. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus (the same year I was born—1955), that was a defining moment. She was an ordinary woman whose courage ignited and united the heart of America to stand together against a very present evil that could no longer be tolerated. This is so much bigger than either one of us.
I believe that history will record that Kim Kardashian had the courage to take a stand against human warehousing and was a key figure in meaningful criminal justice reform becoming a reality.
A million, trillion thanks! May God’s blessing rest upon you and yours.
THE BATTLE IS ON!
Sincerely,
Alice Marie Johnson
October 28, 2017
Shawn didn’t have much experience in the federal courts, so she wanted to know who the attorneys were who had been helping me. I gave her the names of Jennifer Turner, Marcia Shein, and Brittany Barnett, who had become a big help.
The video went from viral to super viral. It was the talk of the prison and the talk of the nation. People outside the prison walls were talking about it. Reporters did articles and television segments about me. Mine was one of the most watched videos of the week—celebrities were talking about the video on radio stations. I even got a card from someone I didn’t know. The lady told me her fourteen-year-old son was so upset. “Mama, they had a grandmama in prison,” he told her. People started calling me America’s grandma. People in other countries started weighing in on the broken American criminal justice system. The grandmother serving a life sentence caught international attention. “Who’s making the cookies?” someone asked. “They got America’s grandma in jail.”
People on the outside were asking the people inside there at Aliceville if they knew me. Even the officers were talking about the fact that Kim had retweeted that video. Now the fact that I had made this video certainly wasn’t a secret, and I half expected my name to be called over the intercom at any time. I wasn’t afraid.
On Monday, October 30, one week after the video had dropped, I danced for a women’s abuse program. When I left the chapel, I heard my name being called. I was to report to the lieutenant’s office. They had gotten a call from Washington, DC, that there was a possible unauthorized media contact coming from Aliceville. One of the lieutenants wrote a disciplinary report and set a date for me to see the Disciplinary Hearing Office (DHO).
While the lieutenant was talking, my eyes were drawn to a print hanging on the office wall. It depicted an eagle holding branches. The writing on the art said “olive branch.” Now, I can’t quite remember what else it specifically said, because I felt God was speaking to me, since I’d been raised in the little town of Olive Branch, Mississippi. The poster also had an olive branch being held in the eagle’s talons. In the Bible, Noah sent out a dove in search of land after being confined to the ark during the flood. When the dove returned with an olive branch, it indicated dry land. His long ordeal was just about over.
When I went to the DHO, I was handcuffed, my hands behind my back. The officer read the charges against me in such a patronizing way.
“What do you have to say for yourself?
“I had permission,” I said.
“You what?” Her face fell. She hadn’t expected that. “From who?”
I explained the blanket permission I’d received from Mr. Collins. She was shocked, then furious. “I’ll reschedule you to come back next week. Bring the evidence.” On November 8, I presented all the papers, but she told me she had done her own investigation and found me guilty.
“I’m sentencing you to fourteen days in the SHU for disciplinary isolation.” I also lost my video visitation privileges for six months (this meant that I wouldn’t be able to see my family over Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s). “Your time starts today.”
* * *
My cell was dark and cold, and had one bunk bed and a toilet and a little shower. We had a window made of clear plexiglass with bars on it. Sometimes the prisons used frosted glass so the prisoners couldn’t see out of them, so at least they hadn’t done that. Because of the increased risk of suicide, they no longer let women be alone in the SHU. My roommate was a Christian woman who had landed in isolation after hand-washing an article of clothing, hanging it out to dry on the sprinkler nozzle in her cell, and causing the sprinklers to go off.
I knew my family didn’t know where I was, because I just disappeared. Everyone began to worry as they compared notes about the last time they had talked via video chat or emailed with me. A lack of a response was unlike me. Someone always heard from me. When I missed my scheduled visit with Tretessa via video that had been scheduled for that same day, she got worried and called the prison and discovered I had been put in the SHU.
On that first night, it was hard to fall asleep. My mind raced with all the events that had taken place. I began singing a gospel song, “Amazing Grace,” to myself. And then my Jamaican cellmate joined in. Over the course of our isolation, we passed the time by singing gospel songs. Just like in the cotton fields.
The next morning, I awakened early to do my normal prayers. I looked out the small window. On the building near us, I saw an eagle so close. It was staring directly at me. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was perched as if it were at attention, pointing straight at me. I walked to the window and looked at it, but it didn’t flinch as I got closer. I stared at that bird for a long time, then fell to my knees to pray. I felt like God—who is sometimes described as an eagle in the Bible—was with me. Just as an eagle watches over her young, I felt that God was watching over me. I felt His gentle presence, and that He knew where I was. I was going to be okay.
The SHU was the most terrible place in an already terrible place. We were locked up twenty-three hours of the day and received one hour of caged recreational activities outdoors. We had just a very small space in which we could walk around inside a cage. And that was just some of the discomforts. The soap they gave us was made from lye, an ingredient to which I was highly allergic. I didn’t want to be treated special, but my condition was documented, and I needed sensitive soap. When I went to the recreation department and complained about it to others, they said, “It’s not going to do any good to complain to the nurse. She just told us that ‘in the old days, people didn’t even have soap. You’ll make do.’”
When she came the next day, I asked her anyway. She looked at me blankly. “There’s nothing I can do.” And so I used the few little packs of shampoo until they ran out.
Also, the deodorant they gave us caused my underarms to bleed. When I went to rec and told the other women about the deodorant, they told me no one uses that under their arms but on their feet to keep them soft. It was almost as if I should’ve known that. So now I didn’t have soap or deodorant, and the officers wouldn’t give me a different kind. Since I didn’t want to stink, I took multiple showers a day. I only had one change of clothes, so I washed my clothes at night using that lye soap, making sure to wring out all the lye, before hanging them up to dry while I slept.
The only book I read in the SHU was the Bible. One day, I opened it up to a random place in the Word, and it opened to Psalm 118. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone,” it read. “This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in His sight.”
That’s when it hit me so hard. This passage, of course, was not written with me in mind. It was about Jesus. But I knew that God was showing me that he was in the business of taking the rejected and shamed, and doing something amazing with them. Jesus was the stone that the builders rejected—and I was rejected for clemency. Jesus became the chief cornerstone. The idea that maybe God would be able to use me for a cornerstone or anything filled me with hope. I wrote that date down in my Bible because I knew I needed to think more about what this could possibly mean.
Being in the SHU turned out to be a time of great peace for me, in spite of the terrible conditions. In fact, I felt like God had used prison to finally answer the question I asked so long ago as a ten-year-old writing poetry: “Who is He?”
Since the video had gone so viral, I could only imagine what was happening on the outside of prison relating to my situation. My roommate said, “Alice, maybe this is a good thing. Here you can put everything out of your head and let everything happen the way it’s supposed to unfold.” We were supposed to stay down in the hole for fourteen days, but they released us after thirteen. When I went to look out the window, I saw the eagle flying off into the distance.
When I came out of the SHU, just in time for Thanksgiving, things were already in motion. It was as if my one match—the video—had caused an explosion.
Boom!
* * *
The publicity surrounding the video got new life when TMZ talked about it on their show and did an article about Kim’s mission to free me. They even published the thank-you note I’d written to Kim and included a big picture of me.
“You’re on television, Miss Alice!” my friends exclaimed. I came out of my cell and went to the television room. It was surreal to see myself make the news. Everyone watched in silence as my story was told. You might think they would high-five me, or whoop and holler at my appearance. But by this time I was an older woman in this prison for life. They respected me in a way that made it hard for them to treat me casually. I was also on the popular Telemundo show El Gordo y la Flaca, which is broadcast to almost every Spanish-speaking country in the world. This made me very popular with the Spanish-speaking women who couldn’t even speak English.
From that point forward, I would occasionally appear on shows when they spoke of Kim Kardashian West. My friends couldn’t believe this was all happening.
“She’s taking your calls?” they’d ask in disbelief.
“She’s fighting for me,” I’d answer. I called her my war angel, because she was relentless in her fight to free me.
In a comical moment, Tretessa called me, laughing. She had talked to Bryant, who was isolated from the news because he was in prison. “I think the time is finally getting to Mama,” he’d told her, worried. “She thinks that Kim Kardashian is trying to get her out of prison.” When she told him it was true, he still could hardly believe it.
Kim wanted the best legal team possible to be assembled to work on my case. Shawn Holley, Kim’s personal attorney, became the lead attorney for Team Alice. Shawn, well known for her prowess in the courtroom and her ability to effectively argue the toughest cases, quickly familiarized herself with all aspects of my case. Now she was armed with knowledge and dangerous! Jennifer Turner and Brittany Barnett had both successfully prepared clemency petitions for clients who were granted their freedom. They were each highly skilled and knowledgeable about the clemency process and would be the ones to put together legal arguments to present a compelling case for my clemency. Just as important, they were both trusted friends.
While my sentence-reduction motion was pending before Judge Samuel Mays in the Memphis court, a decision was made to bring in a top local attorney. Mike Scholl, a very well known and highly esteemed Memphis lawyer, was hired to take a fresh look at my case and supplement my motion.
Kim had now successfully brought together a team of experts in their fields who were ready to charge ahead in their quest to get me out of prison. She didn’t care how my freedom was won, through clemency or the courts—just as long as I was free.
Recess was over, and Team Alice was not playing.