by Bobby Love
“Yeah,” I said with a bittersweet smile.
She put her papers down and really looked at me then. “Wow,” she said. “What have you been doing all this time?”
“I raised a family,” I said, sitting up straighter. “I have four children. My twin sons are doing their thing in high school and they’re both looking to go to college.”
Erica started writing in her notepad as I talked. She interrupted me only when she had a question or needed clarification.
“Have you been working?” she asked.
“Working and paying taxes,” I said and proceeded to tell her about all of the jobs I’d had over the past forty years.
When I finished sharing my story, Erica put her notepad down and just looked at me for a minute before saying anything. Finally, she spoke again.
“Mr. Miller, I’ve never heard of any case like this before,” she said. She told me she’d done some preliminary research about other escaped prisoners who had been arrested, but almost all of them had committed other crimes while they were out.
“I don’t have any precedents for how your case is going to be handled,” she admitted. She also told me that there really wasn’t a lot of information about my past crimes either.
“From what I understand, they don’t even have records on you from way back in North Carolina,” she said.
“Is that good or bad?” I asked.
“Actually, I think it’s good because we can focus on all of the positive things you’ve done, and if we have evidence on that, we can build a better case.”
I must have smiled or something because Erica frowned.
“Mr. Miller, they’re still going to send you to Rikers.”
“But what about bail?” I asked.
“You escaped from a state prison, Mr. Miller,” she said, as if I’d asked a really stupid question. “They’re not going to give you any kind of bail. They’re not even going to consider that.”
I felt the flicker of hope I’d been desperately holding on to vanish.
But Erica laid out the plan she thought we should follow. And that was to get me sent back to North Carolina as soon as possible and then work with the authorities and possibly the governor to seek clemency in light of my record of rehabilitation. She actually laid out a bunch of different scenarios of what could happen, but I stopped paying close attention after she said I would have to go to Rikers.
It was late. I was tired.
“Hey, Mr. Miller.” Erica raised her voice to grab my attention. I lifted my head to look at her.
“You’re going to do some more time, okay? But we’re going to try to make it as short as possible.”
That simple statement reignited my hope. Not a lot, but enough to face what I knew was coming. I reminded myself that I had survived prison before. I could do it again. At least I hoped that I could.
* * *
By the time I was loaded up into the van that would take me to Rikers—handcuffed, cold, and hungry—all I wanted to do was sleep. I wanted to sleep and forget everything that was happening to me. By this time it was well past midnight. Once we made it to the island prison complex, I was led directly into a tiny room and was told to strip. When I had all of my clothes off, I had to pass them through to a guard and submit to a full-body cavity search. Every single orifice on my body was invaded. The humiliation of that moment had me thinking back to the day I escaped. Planning. Running. Freedom. If only I had waited a few more months for my next chance at parole. If only I had sucked it up and hung around for a legal release. Instead, I had fled, and now here I was in this hellhole, having a stranger probe my naked body like I was a slave on an auction block.
Once it was determined that I hadn’t smuggled any contraband into the jail, I was given a gray jumpsuit, slip-on shoes, and a pair of socks. They wouldn’t allow me to keep my cane. I had to wait while someone located the linen for my bed, which turned out to be a sheet, a pillowcase, and a scratchy gray wool blanket. Then I was marched up several flights of stairs, my arms out in front of me, balancing my bed things like precious cargo. I limped the whole way. The guard didn’t care and didn’t say a word. He opened the door of my cell, watched me enter, then locked the door behind me.
I was alone. It was quiet. The cell was dark with only a sliver of light coming in from the hallway.
I looked at the filthy twin mattress on the metal bed frame and could only imagine what bodily fluids might be on it from the last occupant. With my last bit of strength, I flipped the mattress over before making up the bed. Then I lay down, looked up at the ceiling, and felt my tears make warm rivers down my cheeks, then pool in my ears. Out loud I whispered quietly, “God, please help me survive this.” And then I asked myself, “How did I get here?”
As I started to review my life, trying to figure out how I had ended up in the place I swore I’d never return to, I fell into a merciful sleep.
chapter two
When We Were Young
* * *
BOBBY
A midwife brought me into this world on November 6, 1950. In those days, Greensboro, North Carolina, was still a city divided along the color line, including the hospitals. So when I made it known that I was ready to make my debut, my father, James Edward Miller, took my mother, Annie, to the midwife, who had a little place where she worked off Highway 421. That’s where I was born.
I was my mother’s seventh child, but my parents’ second child together. As the story goes, my parents were each other’s second chance. They had both been married before and both had children. When they decided to marry and start a family together, getting out of South Carolina was their first priority. They came north to Greensboro hoping for new beginnings. My father took starting over to an extreme and never spoke about his former wife and two children in South Carolina. I never met them and don’t even know their names. My mother, on the other hand, refused to leave her five other children behind, and they became part of the new beginning.
In our house we didn’t use words like “half-brother” and “half-sister.” We were just a family. My eldest brother, Millard, was twenty-two when I was born; then came Leroy, Mildred, Raymond, and Irma. Jean came next. She was my sister closest in age, and we shared a father. Three years after I was born, my mother had my little brother, Melvin. And I was Walter. Walter Curtis Miller, Mama’s lucky number seven. She named me Walter because she thought it was a name that sounded like somebody important. I hated the name Walter, though, so for as long as I can remember, everyone in my family called me Buddy.
My eldest brother and eldest sister were living on their own by the time I joined the family, but we were still eight people crowded under one roof. I didn’t care. All I remember about that time in my life is being surrounded by love. My parents rented a small one-bedroom wooden house that was nothing to brag about. It was down on Wilmington Street on the east side of town. We didn’t have many modern conveniences. No hot water. No real bathtub. When I was four or five years old, I can remember having to take our baths by the fire in the living room. My mother would have to heat the water on the stove and pour it into a big old tub she bought. Then Melvin and I would have our bath with everybody in the room watching us. I thought it was a whole lot of fun and I’d always ask my mother, “Mama, why doesn’t Jean take a bath like us?” Jean was three years older than me and didn’t think bathing in front of our entire family sounded anything like fun.
Our little house was the first one on the block, and at the end of our street was a lumberyard. We used to go down there and gather up leftover wood planks and then pretend they were horses and we were cowboys like the ones we watched on TV, like Wild Bill Hickok and the Lone Ranger. Right across the street from the house there was a dusty clay field where our whole family would go out and play baseball. As a child, I actually thought it was a real ball field. The other kids from the neighborhood would come out and play too. Especially in the summertime as the sun began to go down and it stopped being too hot to have f
un.
The only person who wouldn’t join us was my father. He would sit on the little porch in front of the house and watch. But he’d never play with us. That was his way.
I loved my father, but he was difficult to like. He was tall like I would eventually be. He had a dark complexion, and I always remember him with his steel-toe work boots on that he had to wear for his job at the steel mill. He rarely smiled.
“Daddy, can you read this book with me?” I’d ask him, excited to show off that Mama had taught me how to read before I’d even started school.
“No, boy,” he’d answer and brush me aside.
When he came home from work, I’d say, “Hey, Daddy, how are you doing?” and ask to sit on his lap. The answer was always no.
I remember asking my mother, “Mama, why Daddy don’t like me?” And she would say something like “Your daddy likes you, Buddy. But he don’t know how to express himself or say things to you to tell you how he feels about you.”
Sometimes my father would let me help him take off those heavy steel-toe boots and I would perform that task with honor. First I had to untie the laces, then pull those heavy things off his feet and place them dutifully by the door. When I’d come back, hoping for some kind of praise, or maybe just a smile and a thank you, my father would say, “I’m tired,” and he’d head back to his room. Or maybe he’d go get a drink. I didn’t know what it was called, but my father liked to drink a clear, colorless liquor that made him talk more, but the things that came out of his mouth weren’t nice.
My mother, Annie, was the opposite. Like my father, she worked too. But for a Black woman in the South without much education, the options were limited. She did domestic work, like housecleaning and laundry services. She worked in a meatpacking company at one time and at a warehouse where she washed the linens for a local hospital. Sometimes my mother would even go back down to South Carolina and pick tobacco and cotton for a season and then come home with her earnings. I don’t remember a single day my mother didn’t get up to go to work. But she never made us kids feel bad or guilty for the work she had to do.
The only thing she asked of us in return was to love Jesus, be good, and focus on our education. She took us to church every Sunday and made sure we were up for school on Mondays.
By the time I was five years old, my parents had saved up enough money to move us out of our house on Wilmington Street to a bigger house just across the way. By this point another sibling had moved out, so it felt like we had more room to spread out, even though the house wasn’t that big. We got a new couch and some bunk beds for Melvin and me. It wasn’t much, but as a young child, I wasn’t aware of the things we didn’t have because most of the people who lived around us were poor and Black, just like we were.
Not having money didn’t keep me from having a good time though. I was a curious child and found plenty of ways to keep myself happy and entertained. Mama said I asked too many questions. So did my teachers. But I kept on asking. Luckily, Jean was always there to help me find answers and to keep me abreast of all the things she thought I should know. She was the one who told me what all the bad words meant. She was also the one who told me, when I was six years old, that our parents were splitting up.
“Buddy, Daddy is going to move out,” Jean said one day when we were sitting on the porch slurping popsicles. She said it real matter-of-factly, without much emotion.
“Why’s Daddy gonna move?” I asked.
“Because Daddy and Mama is breaking up,” she said, like it was obvious. My six-year-old brain couldn’t compute.
“Why?” I asked again.
Jean was only nine so she didn’t know much more than I did. She just shrugged her shoulders. “Because that’s what’s happening.”
I tried to imagine what it was going to be like without my father around. Even though he barely showed me any affection, I still didn’t want him to leave. We were a family. But even at six, I knew that daddies weren’t supposed to do the things my daddy did. The yelling and screaming at Mama when there wasn’t enough food for anyone to have seconds. Getting drunk most nights. And he beat my mama. She would come home from church feeling the spirit of the Lord, singing and all happy, then my father would start yelling at her for something he said she did wrong. If she tried to say anything, he would hit her. If she tried to stand up for herself, he would hit her more. I hated my father when he did that to Mama, and I didn’t know what to do to make him stop.
But my brother Raymond did. One night after Daddy had hit Mama again, Raymond stood up to my father and said, “If I see you hit my mother one more time, I’m going to kill you.”
Maybe that’s why Daddy was leaving. He was afraid of Raymond. But Raymond was just a teenager. He wasn’t that scary in my opinion.
I sat there thinking about the news Jean had given me. I wanted to ask if she thought Daddy was leaving because he didn’t want to be our daddy anymore. I kept quiet, though. I didn’t really want to hear the answer.
Mama acted like the fact she and my father were splitting up was no big deal. Daddy was going to move into a house by himself on Whitaker Street, she said, and we could visit him whenever we wanted. That was that.
I quickly calculated in my head. My aunt lived on Whitaker Street, and her house was close to my school. Daddy wouldn’t be too far away. That gave me some relief, but it didn’t stop my heart from breaking on the day he walked out of our front door.
“Daddy, don’t go!” I cried, pulling on his arm. Tears and snot were running down my face but I didn’t care.
My little brother Melvin was only three, but he too was begging my daddy not to go. Melvin pretty much did everything that I did.
My mother had no time for my tears. She snatched me up and took me to my room and told me to stay in there.
“Don’t come out until your father is gone,” she scolded me. “You’re making this harder than it has to be, Buddy.” Then she shut the door.
* * *
Mama kept her word and we saw Daddy on a regular basis. Jean, Melvin, and I used to go to his house on Friday after school, and we would come back home on Sunday. He would take us to this little restaurant for breakfast on Saturday mornings and we thought that was the greatest thing. Then, if we were good, we would go shopping at Blumenthal’s for clothes or whatever else we needed at the time. My mother used to always tell us to tell Daddy to take us somewhere else besides Blumenthal’s, some place nice like Belk’s department store, where she liked to shop. But if we ever dared to relay messages to my father sent by my mother, Daddy would say, “Don’t tell me a damn thing your mother said.”
We quickly figured out that my mother’s name and her wishes were off limits as far as my father was concerned. Their relationship had completely disintegrated. My father was angry almost all the time when it came to my mother. And likewise, Mama and the rest of my older siblings only had negative things to say about my father. Still, I wanted to see him and I knew I loved him, even if “I love you” wasn’t something we ever said to each other.
After my father left, life went on, and the truth was, I didn’t miss him all that much around the house. Things felt more peaceful. But now my mother had to figure out how to support us and pay the bills on her own because my father couldn’t be counted on to pay for anything.
Miraculously, she still found ways to show us kids a good time. Mama would call on my eldest brother, Millard, to come drive us down to the amusement park in Burlington in the summer. Summertime also meant church picnics and taking a long bus ride to my uncle’s farm in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. I didn’t like being around all those animals, but I loved to see my mama happy visiting with her brother, so I made the best of it for her sake. Mama worked so hard, it was nice to see her happy and relaxed.
Back in Greensboro, I tried to make sure I didn’t create any extra trouble for my mother. But for an inquisitive little Black boy in the Jim Crow South, that wasn’t always easy. There were times I would do things just to see what w
ould happen.
Like this one time when I was eight, my mother took me shopping with her downtown. We were in a store and I was thirsty, so I said to her, “Mama, I’m going to get some water.” I went back to where the fountains were and discovered that nobody was at the colored fountain and nobody was at the white fountain. I was all alone, just me and my curiosity. Is the white people’s water colder than our water? I wondered. I figured since white people always got the better stuff, then the water in the white fountain had to be colder. From years of observation, I had also noticed that the water shot up higher for the white people than it did for the Blacks, so they didn’t have to lean over as far as we did. That water practically jumped right into their mouths.
I looked around again, just to be sure I was alone. And then I went over and quenched my thirst from that forbidden fountain. And just as I suspected, that white people’s water was so cool and refreshing. As soon as I gulped down my last sip, I turned around and this white kid was standing there. He looked angry and mean. He yelled in my face, “Get away from there! You’re not supposed to be doing that!” And then he punched me in the face. I was stunned and scared and ran quickly to find my mother to tell her what had happened.
My mother pulled my hand off my face to make sure I wasn’t bleeding, and then she looked at me like I was crazy. “You shouldn’t have been over there drinking that water, Buddy. You know you’re not supposed to be doing that.” I don’t know why I’d hoped that my mother would have marched over and found that little boy and stood up for me. That wasn’t her way. When it came to the racial injustices that we endured every day, my mother never wanted to fight, and she certainly didn’t want to see her children causing a ruckus either. “God will take care of it” is what my mother would tell us. “God will take care of it and take care of us.”