by Yusef Salaam
“Hey, I have to tell you something.”
I imagine this made her nervous. Anytime someone opens up with “We have to talk” or “I have to tell you something,” it’s usually not good. I didn’t know what she’d do or say, but I couldn’t let it fester for much longer. I knew I needed people in my life who believed me. Who would say, like some of my friends, “Yo, wow. Yeah, I knew you didn’t do that. Don’t even worry about that. You’re my people.” It was those kinds of affirmations that taught me who to keep in my life and who to let go. When I told her, her response knocked me over.
“You raped that woman, didn’t you?” She smirked at me as if she’d found out a secret.
No, she couldn’t have said that.
It was such a deep disappointment. I kept thinking, I can’t keep this person in my life. She is the enemy. This person is part of the enemy. I tried to tell her the truth, but she seemed convinced I was something that I was not. The worst part was knowing that she would have been okay with me actually having done it.
Needless to say, I faded into the background after that conversation. Maybe the kids nowadays would call it ghosting.
All these challenges with relationships likely fueled my reluctance to be vulnerable with people. I knew how to be charismatic. I knew how to be engaging. But being my whole self, revealing my sensitive side in particular, was difficult. I was always waiting for the proverbial room check, I guess, for someone to hurt me when they caught me with my guard down.
This was true even in my friendships. When I came home, it took time to feel a semblance of normal. It took awhile just to be able to say, “Hey, what’s up?” to people in the neighborhood without fear. I didn’t think anyone would run up to me and punch me, or at least I hoped not. But it was a visceral feeling of exclusion. Of never being accepted. Of being treated with skepticism. We weren’t exonerated yet. And while our small community overwhelmingly supported us, there were those in the wider world who believed that we were the monsters we were painted to be. I was afraid that I’d learn just how much I was hated, and it would shatter me.
Of course, there are people you just vibe more with in life. Pam and Shaharazade are probably my oldest friends since I came home from prison. We were all going to Hunter College at the same time. They were the first to crack open the hardened exterior of my heart, to break down the walls I’d erected in fear.
Some of my Hunter Crew: Shaharazade, Jacqueline, and Pam.
There was a group of us who’d hang out all the time. We’d go out to eat and laugh about all the stuff going on at school. One of our favorite places was Dallas BBQ, on the East Side near campus. It was always a good time. Plus, it was 1999 in New York City and I was an artist and poet, so of course we’d all hang out at the spoken-word open mics held at Hunter. They made me feel more at home. In community.
One evening, about a month after I met them, we were headed to TGI Friday’s in the Bronx. I pulled Pam and Shaharazade aside. “Hey, I’ve got to tell you both something.”
Their faces were blank and expectant in the way that people get when they aren’t expecting anything unusual.
“We’re friends. But I don’t want to continue our friendship without letting y’all know this.”
I was terrified in that moment. We were all cool. No one in our crew knew who I was. As much as the press followed our trials and convictions, there was no wave of media when we were released. Some people knew what we looked like, but not everyone remembered. I was so scared about what they would say. I was racked with fear, wondering, Will they shun me?
“I’m Yusef from the Central Park jogger case.”
Their faces changed. But they softened.
“Man, that was messed up!” Pam said. She grabbed me and held me so hard. “Welcome home, Brother.”
It felt like a thirst had been quenched. As if my whole being had been refreshed in that very moment. I mattered to these people. I needed that support. We all need it. We all need someone willing to crack open the walls around our hearts. They showed me such care; their love and support poured into me, filling up the gaping void that I always felt inside of me. There’s something about being believed. About being seen. They saw me and loved me.
Shaharazade and my first daughter, Rain.
Romantic relationships were more challenging, however. Hit or miss. Many women were like “Nah, Brother. You need to get that jail/probation together. You need to figure that thing out.”
Some people expected me to wild out when I returned home. But that’s a bit of a stereotype, I think. There are young people who think it’s cool to go to prison, as some kind of rite of passage into manhood. Like a hood bar mitzvah. That misguided perspective is reinforced when they come home. And though people celebrate you because they have missed you, there can also be this twisted elevation. “You’re a man now,” they say. All the ladies want me, you think.
But that didn’t happen for me. Because of the spiritual journey I was on, I was clear that I wanted to be married. I wasn’t the type to hang out at the club. My brother would take me every now and then, and I would stand in one spot, panicking and thinking, Yo, people are too close to me. I had never been much of a club person anyway. I rarely went to the teen basement parties that people in the neighborhood would throw when I was younger. But post-release, clubbing was especially not a good time for me. I didn’t feel safe. I’d play the wall just like I would in the facility. I’d have much rather been getting a bootleg DVD and binge-watching some movies.
One reason why, I think, marriage felt like something important for me to do was that I wanted to maintain my integrity as someone who practiced Islam. I didn’t always fight my urges. I had multiple long-term relationships—including my first marriage, which did not end well. The demise of that relationship is not solely my story to tell. But part of the problem in that relationship was due to my inability to support my family in the way I understood a man and father should.
My record chased me, as it does so many of the formerly incarcerated. I firmly believe that the system is designed to disallow men who have been imprisoned to fully return to the roles of husband and father in a way that is valued—in terms of becoming the financial and emotional foundation of a family.
I wanted to take on the traditional provider role, and so I always questioned how, psychosocially, I was to find my place as a father and husband when the system had tried to strip me of my worth. I eventually got there, but it took a lot of time and pain.
LaKiesha and I met when she was nineteen and I was twenty-seven. She’d grown up very independent, having lost her mother as a child. When we first met, she said something to me that I understood the weight of only after our marriage fell apart: “I’ve been my man for so long. You have to teach me how to let you be my man.” At the time, I brushed it off. Of course I’d show her. But I was still unraveling what being a man meant to me, and I had no idea what her vision or her expectations of me as her partner were. We met when she was a supervisor at Internet Customer Service Enterprise, on Forty-Second Street. I’d worked as a representative before being promoted to assistant supervisor. The training for this new role wasn’t comprehensive—my boss said, “Learn from her,” and so LaKiesha taught me what I needed to know.
We got married when LaKiesha turned twenty and quickly began building our life together. But we faced huge obstacles. I was only five years post-release. I was still emotionally and mentally extricating myself from the institutionalization I’d experienced. I was educating myself but trying to find my way in a world that still thought of me as one of those beasts in the park.
I don’t think she really understood what it meant to be married to someone with a conviction like mine. It meant being fired from jobs; it meant that pain and emotional strife would show up in ways that restricted my ability to be vulnerable. I’d been pushed to the margins by the system. Because of this record, I was not fully restored to society, and so I was pushed out into the margins even further. Some
men check out entirely. Some learn to numb themselves. Others, like me, find it incredibly difficult to connect emotionally and to articulate what we need in a vulnerable way. It hurt to be constantly seen as a failure. I couldn’t mold myself into what we both understood about manhood—that a man must provide for and protect his wife and children—and it eventually destroyed our marriage.
But we still tried. We moved to Georgia for a stint. Packed up all our stuff and just left New York for a fresh start. We lived in the back room of a strip mall’s storefront, where my friend from prison, Abdur Rashid, ran a production studio.
Our picture of what our lives would be in the South was very different from the reality we faced when we arrived. We thought maybe we’d get an apartment, a nice car. We did eventually get those things and slowly began to rise up out of our predicament. We moved to the Stone Mountain area. We had cars now and a decent place to live. But I still didn’t have a job. She was working, but my record barred me from every opportunity I might have gotten. By then, the strain of living so precariously and being unable to reach each other emotionally had already broken what was barely hanging on in our relationship.
We had two children by the time we left Georgia to return to New York City. We lived with my mother in Schomburg Plaza for a while until we found our “penthouse” apartment on 138th Street. Trust, it was a penthouse only because it was on the top floor of a six-story walk-up with no elevator. We had our third child shortly after moving in.
I knew things were really done when one day we’d stopped at the Barnes and Noble on West Eighty-Sixth Street. I couldn’t find parking, so I pulled our Jeep Cherokee next to a fire hydrant to quickly run into the store. When I returned, there was an expensive parking ticket on the windshield. LaKiesha was in the car. I was confused.
Rain and me.
“Why didn’t you move the car?”
She didn’t have much of a response. She sat and watched the officer write the ticket and did nothing. She was done. In hindsight, I understand that I needed more validation from her. And I had failed her. We’d been married for five years but only together for two and a half, separated the remaining time.
When I told my mother we were divorcing, she consoled me. “Someone will love you again,” she said. I wasn’t so sure.
Even after that marriage ended, I struggled financially and emotionally. There was still this fear of being vulnerable. I explored a few other romantic relationships, but they never amounted to much. I didn’t want to go there again without being prepared. Without, at the very least, being financially ready to support my family. I also didn’t want another failed marriage. And honestly, no one I met was rushing to the altar.
Deep down, I knew it was going to take an exceptionally strong woman to deal with the baggage I was carrying. Thanks to Magic Johnson, I finally met her.
I felt wrecked for years after the end of my first marriage. I felt like I was just blowing in the wind. I didn’t have control over my life in the ways I wanted, and it messed with me mentally and emotionally.
One day, I found myself in my mother’s office. I was working for her at the time, trying to make some extra money to help support my three children. I remember having an unusually strong urge to move, to take the trash out. I started walking around the office, emptying all the wastepaper baskets into a bag to then put in the alley for pickup. There was something going on in my head and heart. It was a spiritual prompting to move and keep moving, that only with the distance of many years I can see for what it was. Once I was outside, I felt my spirit moved again. To take a walk. In that moment, I just went with it.
I was on 138th and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, and I headed downtown. I didn’t have a plan. I had no destination in mind. I just kept walking. The birds were chirping and the sun was hitting my skin in that tingly way, warming me from the inside out. At 125th Street, a still, small voice whispered again: “Go to Starbucks.”
Now, mind you, I used to work there, regularly opening up this Magic Johnson–owned Starbucks on the corner of 125th and Malcolm X. I don’t know why I was drawn to go in—I didn’t have some overwhelming craving for coffee; I had no real reason to want to go inside, especially given my familiarity. I was just supposed to be there.
I entered the cafe and immediately I saw her. Wow, who is this?
There was something about her. She stood out, like a rare treasure. She was more than the typical around-the-way girl. Of course, I didn’t know how to approach her, had no idea what to say. Thankfully, she spoke to me.
“Can you believe this? They ain’t got no more soy milk. This gentrification stuff in Harlem is all crazy and I come in here, and they don’t got no soy milk.”
But I wasn’t even hearing what she was saying because I was so mesmerized. I said, “Are you a model?”
I laugh when Sanovia tells this story because she swears that I “hit her with a line.” It wasn’t a line for me, though. I was enchanted by her. She was so stunning, I truly thought she was a model. I didn’t know anything about modeling. I certainly didn’t know that models are supposed to be tall.
“What? I’m five-two!”
We got our drinks and started walking down 125th, chatting. She was moving so fast, I at first thought maybe she was trying to get away from me.
“Hey, just hold up. Why are you walking so fast?”
She smiled, continuing to talk to me but never slowing her pace. She was walking like a New Yorker. And it had started to drizzle. A Black woman walking in the rain was bound to move quickly. And I was determined to keep up with her.
Talking to her felt like a welcome rainshower on parched and dry grass. It was nourishing; I wanted to soak it up as much as I possibly could. At one point, I even said, “Man, this is such a great conversation. I would love to continue it.”
She smiled, surprising me with her response: “No. I don’t give out my phone number.”
I was not going to give up that easy. “Well, can I have your email address?”
“Okay.”
And that was the beginning. I didn’t know it at the time, but her initial hesitation had little to do with me. She was going through a bad breakup and was being very cautious. She wasn’t interested in jumping into something immediately after the trauma of her previous marriage. But we did email each other quite a bit. I like to think that’s how our courtship began.
Sanovia lived pretty close to me, and in the week after our Starbucks run-in, we started meeting at the train station. We both took the train downtown—she worked on Thirty-Fourth Street and I was working at the Weill Cornell campus of New York Presbyterian Hospital. Normally, I’d get off several stops before her to catch a bus across town, but this day I thought, You know what? I’m going to drop her off at work. I walked her to the door of her office and headed back uptown to get to mine. That simple change to my routine unveiled all of me to her. She told me afterward that a coworker had seen us and asked, “Do you know who that is?”
“It’s just some guy who likes me.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Yeah, he said his name is Yusef Salaam.”
“Google him and come back to my office.”
I was trying to take it slow with Sanovia. Baby steps. Something about how we related to each other felt right, so I wanted her to heal, while knowing that I needed space and healing as well. I’d had every intention of telling her my story. It was 2007, so I was less afraid at that point. The media storm had blown by, and I had been home long enough to say, “You know what? Take it or leave it.” Even at her first hesitation to give me her number, I half-jokingly said, “I’m probably the safest guy you could meet.” But I was also careful with the timing because I really didn’t want to mess this up. I didn’t want to know if she’d respond like the others. I was a few years out of a difficult marriage, and I didn’t want any of that to influence what was blooming between us.
Of course, she looked me up online. And called me from work.
; My heart raced as I considered the possibility of rejection.
Rejection never came.
She simply said, “Wow. Tell me about it.”
And I did. I let her ask her questions, which she had every right to ask, and I answered every single one. I was so grateful, and surprised, by her approach. She was inquisitive, wanted to know more. The opening in my heart, cracked ajar by my friends all those years ago, was now wide open. And after she heard all that I had to say, she responded in the most amazing way possible:
“Cool.”
We started meeting for lunch occasionally. There were days when I noticed how tired she was; all that she was going through with her separation was taking an emotional toll. For me, well, I was just glad to be near her. Some days we’d hang out and she’d fall asleep. That small voice in my head prodded me toward compassion. I let her sleep. I got you, I thought. I was there with her, and that was all that mattered. That she was comfortable enough with me to do this meant everything. For the first time in my life, I knew without a doubt that I made someone feel safe.
It was the opposite of what I’d been told about myself for years. I was accused of something that would rightly make any woman feel in danger. So this simple act of her falling asleep in my presence opened something up in me on a spiritual level. It was part of my healing. Despite all the graces I’d known in my life, I still wrestled with the hole made by the trauma of my experiences. I was constantly battling this tension of knowing I came from greatness—defining myself—as feelings of unworthiness tried to seep in from the outside. I ultimately learned that self-definition had to happen outside of the prison walls also. In fact, I needed it even more as I was trying to acclimate back into the world. So when Sanovia fell asleep on my shoulder, I didn’t fully realize the depth and significance of what was happening. I didn’t know that someone else could be a salve and create peace in your soul until I found love again. Sanovia loved me back to life.