to interact like a normal mother and son. She even smiled slightly when she began to describe the food she could order for them—pizza, barbecue chicken, jambalaya, po’boys. When they ran out of things to say, she told me, which could happen because she often spent the whole day there, six or seven hours, there were TVs they could watch, and if people brought kids there were coloring books and even video games for them to play.
“I’m coping,” she told me. “There’s times when I don’t have enough money to send, and I tell him I’m sorry, I know you need food, but it’s either food or I keep coming to visit. One or the other. It’s hard on him, I know. He lost some weight last time. I could see that he lost it.”
We sat in silence for a while, then she asked me if my mother was still alive. This question always surprises me, though I’ve heard it many times. I said yes, and she asked another question people often do, was my mother okay?, and I told her yes, it was a long time ago. She had remarried, we had moved to another city, she and my stepfather were still together.
“We talked about a lot of heavy things when I was writing my book,” I said. “I didn’t really remember my father, even though I should have—I was six when he died, old enough to have memories. But it was a blank spot for me, who he was, so I liked talking to my mother about it, even though it was hard for her. I maybe take things too seriously sometimes, to the point that it’s a little ridiculous. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, wanting to keep having conversations like that.”
We looked at each other as if to acknowledge that what I’d just said was a little absurd, though this acknowledgment somehow also seemed to imply the opposite: that we understood each other enough now to be able to speak frankly. She told me then that a few days ago she’d learned that the kidney disease she’d had for several years had progressed to the point where she needed treatment. This was what she’d meant before when she’d said she was “coping,” that in fact she didn’t feel well most of the time. She hadn’t told Kendrick about this, and she asked me not to tell him either, though I’d explained to her that I couldn’t communicate with him anyway. She was hoping that her other son, Marcus, might be able to come stay with her for a while when she started dialysis treatments. He lived in New York, and she knew he couldn’t stay forever, but she didn’t know what else to do. She told me then that Kendrick had been difficult before the play, that he had somehow gotten it into his mind that his twelve-year-old daughter, Aysha, might be able to come to the prison to see him perform, though neither he nor Sonia had had any contact with Aysha in many years. She said she’d stayed in touch with Aysha’s mother, Janelle, for a short time after Kendrick went to prison, but after Katrina everyone had scattered, and now she didn’t even know where they lived. One of the last times she’d seen Aysha was at the trial, she said—Aysha crying for her father, Sonia and Janelle telling her he would come home soon, lying to her in that way because that was the only thing one could do.
“She was finally getting to be a talker,” she said. “She’d been slow learning how to talk before, but she had it by then. With her, it was like silence, silence, silence, then all the sudden—full sentences.”
She was three, the last time she’d seen her father, I thought. Kendrick was twenty-two—a part of him was still twenty-two, it occurred to me, still referring when we met nine years later to rappers and basketball stars that no one had talked about much in those nine years.
I asked her if Kendrick had ever had any trouble with the law before he was arrested that summer, and she said no, that in fact he’d had “a lot of friends who were police.” I didn’t know what to say to that. It was the first time I doubted anything she’d told me, though I believed she believed it herself. She went on to tell me that the summer Kendrick was arrested he was planning to become an EMT, because he wanted to “help people.” He’d gone back to community college and was planning to transfer to a four-year school, because that was “the caliber of person” he intended to be. I’d told her on the phone that I had no plans to write about any of this, though I’d also said that I never knew what I was going to write until I was actually writing it. Deborah made images—their value was obvious. The value of writing seemed far less obvious to me, just a groping around in the unknowable. As Sonia told me a story now about Kendrick learning to speak Spanish as a child, so that he could make friends with some neighborhood kids who only spoke Spanish, I thought that at least some of this had to be just sentimental exaggeration, but I didn’t press her. I remembered that day at the prison when Kendrick had told me that he knew who really committed the murder but that he would never divulge the other man’s name. I remembered the way he’d tried not to cry without trying too hard—the embarrassment of the effort, his fear of seeming too performative.
The night of his arrest, Sonia told me now, two detectives from the sheriff’s office had come by her house—they were looking for Kendrick as a potential witness, they said, and they left her their business card. When Kendrick came home a few hours later, he went to the detective bureau to clear things up, but he was gone a long time—it was four or five the next morning when the police car returned, pulling into Sonia’s driveway in the dark. It was summertime, hot, but she remembered that her hands went numb, she got so cold. They had come to pick up a pair of Kendrick’s basketball shoes, the detective said. They were bright green, she remembered—like all his shoes they were immaculately clean. A forensics team later tested the shoes for bloodstains but found no bloodstains. She said that not long before all this, she happened to have served on a jury in the same courthouse in which Kendrick would eventually face trial, and she remembered how the sight of all those young men in handcuffs had affected her. It was disorienting to remember now, like déjà vu, as if everything since had been just an illusion, or some sort of amnesia. They wouldn’t let Kendrick out of the car that night. They wouldn’t let her speak to him. It was the last time she ever saw him outside a courtroom or a prison, standing there shivering in the heat, looking at him through the window of the police car.
“I thought about calling ‘On Your Side,’” she said, referring to a public advocacy segment on the local TV news. She looked at me as if to see if I thought this was a good idea, something to pursue possibly even now. She told me then that a friend of hers had been at a beauty parlor recently, and there she had come across a woman who had made a statement to the police about Kendrick all those years ago, though she never testified at his trial. This woman had been a suspect in the murder herself, but she negotiated a plea deal and so she was free. Sonia’s friend had overheard this woman saying that there was a man in Angola doing time for a murder he’d had nothing to do with.
I brought up the Innocence Project of New Orleans, which offers free legal assistance to inmates who are serving life sentences or death sentences and who claim to have been falsely convicted. But as I wrote down the information and tore the sheet out of my notebook, I also remembered the caveats on IPNO’s website:
Please understand that we receive a large number of letters every week and it will take some time for us to respond to the application or inquiry.
Please tell your loved one to be patient. It often takes years before we can begin to review a case.
We do not have the staff to handle phone calls and they only slow down our review of applications.
“I brought you all the way out here on a Sunday,” she said, after dabbing at her eyes with another tissue, for she’d started crying again. I didn’t know what she meant at first, and she just shook her head, not telling me, as if resigned to the idea that I wouldn’t accept her meaning anyway. Sunday, I realized—the day of prayer. She was not at church but in Carville, in this house that wasn’t hers, microwaving meals she stockpiled at the dollar store, she’d told me earlier, between shifts at the lab. Her tears were tears of near hopelessness, made bearable by faith. Perhaps it was in some way a relief for her to talk to someone, as she’d said, but I couldn’t
