The Redemption of Bobby Love

by Bobby Love

  I also asked Jordan to track down his old football coach, the one Bobby used to work with, so I could ask him to write a letter. I knew it would look good to see that Bobby had volunteered to coach the kids’ football team for all those years.

  I asked my father and my godsisters to write letters too, of course. When I had gone through all of the friends and family I could think of, I wasn’t ready to stop. If the lawyer needed people to stand up for Bobby, I was going to go all the way. So I decided to write a letter to President Obama. I knew it was a long shot, but everything about Bobby’s life was a long shot. Bobby was always telling me to try something if the opportunity was there, so I did it. I knew it couldn’t hurt. I composed a letter telling President Obama everything about Bobby’s story: how he’d started out with a life of crime but now he was a changed man, had raised four children, had a loving wife, and had rehabilitated himself and didn’t deserve to be in prison. I asked him if there was anything he could do, could he please do it. I signed the letter with my name and sent it off to the White House. Inspired, I wrote a similar letter to the governor of North Carolina, pleading for clemency for Bobby.

  I figured if the lawyer said these letters of support could help get Bobby out of jail, then a letter was a powerful tool. I prayed they would help Bobby’s cause. In the end, I never received a response from the president nor the governor, but I still felt like everything I was doing made a difference in some way.

  As summer turned into fall, life continued in Brooklyn for me and the kids. Both Jessica and Jasmine had followed in Bobby’s footsteps and were working as medical counselors for an organization that served developmentally delayed adults. They both had a heart for helping people, and it didn’t surprise me that they found careers in health care. The twins started their junior year of high school and began looking at colleges. I continued going to my job every day, and waited for letters from Bobby, instructions from the lawyer, and any sign or indication that this nightmare would soon be over. One evening as I was coming home from work, I swore I saw Bobby walking into the grocery store across the street from our apartment. It looked so much like him, I decided that had to be a sign that he was going to be home soon.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, my cell phone rang at work. I checked the number and saw that it was from Bobby’s lawyer in North Carolina.

  “Mrs. Love?” Mr. Walker said.

  “Yes, this is Cheryl,” I said.

  “I have some great news. Bobby is coming up for parole!”

  “What!” I shouted, then remembered I was at work in a room full of people. I lowered my voice. “Really? Are you serious? What happens now?”

  Mr. Walker laughed. “I knew you’d be happy to hear this, but remember, the fact that he gets a parole hearing doesn’t mean he’s getting out. So please don’t get too excited.”

  “Sorry, I’m already past excited,” I said. “But I understand what you’re saying.”

  “Okay,” Mr. Walker said. “Now I have to ask, can you come down here and speak on Bobby’s behalf? Just like with the letters, we need you and about three or four other people—​just family is fine—​to come and testify on Bobby’s behalf.”

  “We have to come down to North Carolina?” I asked.

  “Yes. Is that going to be a problem?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, even though I was already trying to calculate the cost of a plane ticket and how I’d scrape together the money. It didn’t matter. I’d figure something out, and that’s all the lawyer had to know. “We’ll be there,” I said.

  “And one more thing, Mrs. Love,” Mr. Walker said. “Bobby won’t be at the parole hearing. You won’t get a chance to see him unless you make a separate arrangement to go up to the prison, which is in another town altogether.”

  My heart sank. I was hoping to be able to see Bobby if we were going to be in the same state. But I couldn’t dwell on that. I thanked the lawyer and hung up the phone.

  Jessica flew with me down to Durham, North Carolina, where the parole hearing would be held. We were going to stay with my cousin Laverne, who lived there. My brother Scott was driving up from Atlanta and bringing my father with him, and Bobby’s sister Jean was driving in from Greensboro.

  On the day of the hearing, Laverne drove Jessica and me to the courthouse around 2:00 p.m. I had never been to a parole hearing before, but I decided to treat the occasion like I was going to church. I wore a nice dark-blue dress and a string of pearls. I’d gotten my hair done before we left New York. I remember Laverne telling me I looked so much like my mother when she saw me, which gave me a feeling of confidence for what we were about to do.

  The courthouse was a nondescript one-story building, and we all met in the parking lot and walked in together. We had to go through a metal detector and then waited in the hallway until a gray-haired security guard came and told us to follow him into what looked like a conference room.

  A tall young man with red hair met us at the door.

  “Mrs. Love,” he said to me. “I’m Mr. Walker.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” I said, shaking his hand. “It’s so nice to finally meet you in person.”

  “You too,” he said. “Now, I don’t want you to be nervous. Just answer the questions to the best of your ability and don’t spare any details in sharing about Bobby’s good qualities.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I can do that.”

  We all assembled ourselves around the conference table, and then an older gentleman in a gray suit came into the room and introduced himself. He said his name was Mr. Anderson and he would be conducting the interviews for the proceedings. He sat at the head of the table and asked everyone to introduce themselves and explain their connection to Bobby. When we were done, he addressed me first.

  “Mrs. Love,” he said. “Tell me a little bit about Bobby and tell me why you think he should be let out of prison.”

  I took a deep breath. I had practiced what I wanted to say. I knew in my heart that I wanted Bobby back home with us. But all of a sudden my mind went blank. And then I wondered if what I was going to say would be enough. I tried to remember the notes I’d written the night before, but I couldn’t get anything to register in my brain. Then a voice inside me said, “Cheryl, just speak from your heart.” And so I opened my mouth and said, “I love my husband. I miss my husband, and I want him to come home.”

  “Go on,” Mr. Anderson said.

  I snuck a peek at Mr. Walker, who was nodding his head at me like he wanted me to say more.

  “Okay, so, I know the things that Bobby did, what he did in the past wasn’t right, but he rehabilitated himself without being in jail. He raised two sons and two daughters who are good kids. He teaches Sunday school at our church. He helps people who need help even though we don’t have a lot of money. We aren’t perfect, we don’t have a big fancy house or anything, but we love each other and we love our children.”

  I continued to talk for about fifteen minutes. I talked about how hard Bobby worked. How he’d worked for almost fifteen years with developmentally disabled adults. How he worked two jobs for most of his life, and even how he saved up so we could take our kids to Disney World twice. I didn’t sugarcoat things, and I mentioned how we’d struggled financially, but I said Bobby always took responsibility for his failings and did his best to support us.

  By the time I was done talking, I had gone through at least half a box of tissues. Jessica, who was sitting next to me, was sniffling too.

  When I was done talking, my father spoke, followed by Jessica and then Jean. Everybody shared their own examples and stories about Bobby. Jessica talked about her father being a great dad. My father said he’d watched Bobby develop into a loving and caring father and a son-in-law he could always count on. Jean talked about being so proud of Bobby for overcoming what she described as a difficult childhood.

  “Our father died when Bobby was nine years old,” she said. “And after that my mother did everything she could to ke
ep Bobby out of the streets, but she couldn’t handle all eight of us. Our little brother died of a drug overdose. Bobby’s two oldest brothers were in trouble with the law when Bobby was still in middle school. Bobby started out on that path, but he turned his life around. On his own. He is a hardworking, law-abiding citizen, a good father, and a good husband to Cheryl.”

  Needless to say, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room when we were all done talking. Well, the lawyers weren’t crying, but all of us family were wiping our eyes. I didn’t know if we had said enough to convince Mr. Anderson, but I felt the love in that room for Bobby all around me and it felt so good.

  As we headed out of the room and started walking to the door, Bobby’s lawyer, Mr. Walker, caught up with me.

  “Mrs. Love, well done,” he said. “You all did a great job.”

  “Thank you. What happens now?” I asked.

  “Well, now we just have to wait and see,” he said. “I wish I could give you a more concrete answer, but that’s how these things work. I’d say we should hear something one way or the other within six weeks.”

  I smiled. “Once upon a time, six weeks would have sounded like a lifetime, but after all this, I can wait,” I said.

  Mr. Walker smiled back. “That’s all we can do, right?” And then he excused himself, saying he had to go take care of some paperwork.

  The rest of us gathered together in the parking lot and hugged on each other.

  “I think we did a good job in there,” Jean said to me.

  “I think so too,” I said.

  “And Cheryl, I’m sorry if over these years you thought I wasn’t being honest with you. I just—”

  I cut her off. “Jean, please, you don’t have to apologize for anything. We’re family and that’s all that matters.”

  She pulled me into another hug and we stood like that for a moment.

  “Come on, you guys, we gotta get back on the road before it gets dark,” Scott announced, breaking up the lovefest. He and my father were driving back to Atlanta, and Jessica and I had a flight back to New York in the morning.

  “Thank you, everybody, for coming and doing this,” I said one last time. “Let’s keep praying that it works and Bobby can come home.”

  And that’s what I kept saying to myself all the way back to New York.

  BOBBY

  On October 27, I knew my family was sitting in a conference room somewhere testifying on my behalf for my parole hearing. I was sitting in my cell, asking for my immediate release. But instead of asking my jailers, I was asking God, just as I had been every single day since arriving back in prison. Cheryl had given me a Bible back when I was at Rikers, and for the first time in my life, I really started to read it and tried to understand the meaning behind the passages. I dedicated myself to understanding God’s word and His role in my life. Reading the Bible gave me great comfort, and I think that’s when I finally began to understand what God can do. If someone can have a spiritual awakening, I’d say mine began at Mountain View Correctional Institution, way up in the mountains of North Carolina, near Asheville.

  The actual town it sat in was called Spruce Pine. It sounded like a peaceful place, but it was just another prison made to warehouse criminals. The prison was built to hold around a thousand prisoners, but when I got there the inmate population seemed to be hitting maximum capacity. Cells meant for one person often had two. I was supposed to have a cell to myself, but many times I was given a roommate until space opened up somewhere else.

  The majority of the guards at Mountain View were white, which was something I wasn’t used to, and there were far more white prisoners than when I was in prison before. This was a medium security facility, and it was well locked down, with multiple watchtowers and double guards on duty everywhere. It never crossed my mind to try to escape. For one thing, not only was the security far more severe than I remembered, but also the prison itself sat in such a remote place, somebody would have to run for miles through the mountains before getting to safety.

  But the biggest reason escape wasn’t on my mind was because from day one I had a single mantra, and I would tell it to anyone and everyone who asked. “I’m going home.” And I was going to do it lawfully this time. It was my prayer and my belief. I knew I had been rehabilitated and I knew I no longer belonged in prison. I was just waiting for everyone else to realize the same thing.

  I had a counselor assigned to me who right away tried to get me to take a prison job.

  “No thank you,” I said.

  “But if you take a job, it will help you take some time off your sentence,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked for clarification.

  “Well, you don’t come up for parole for nine years,” the counselor explained. “But if you work, then you might come up earlier because you’re showing a good effort at rehabilitation.”

  “No thank you,” I said again. “I’ve already been rehabilitated. I don’t need a job. I’m going home.”

  “Miller, everyone wants to go home. That’s why I’m telling you to take a job so you can get home sooner.”

  I kind of chuckled then. “I know you’re trying to do your job, and I appreciate it, but I don’t need to take a job. I know I’m going home, and it’s not going to be in nine years.”

  The counselor looked at me like I was crazy, but I didn’t care. I knew my time in that place was temporary, like I knew the sky was blue. I wasn’t interested in figuring out how to work the system or play games of any sort. I was ready to submit to the will of God because I had come to realize that God had a plan for me. And it did not involve me spending the next decade of my life behind bars. I didn’t claim to know what the plan was, but I thought the best way for me to use my time would be to study God’s word and maybe figure it out.

  During that first month, the counselor came back several times trying to get me to take on a prison job, but I kept telling him no, and he finally stopped asking. By then I’d established a pretty regular routine for myself. I woke up and went to breakfast, then I’d spend the majority of my day reading the Bible, writing letters to Cheryl, and praying in my cell. They had church service Monday nights, Tuesday nights, and Sunday mornings, and I went to every single one. From doing all of this reading, writing, prayer, and reflection, I truly realized how profoundly God had been working in my life. I now fully understood how God had kept me under His gaze of protection since I was a little boy. Given where I came from and where I had been, I should have been dead or living in the streets. Like my little brother Melvin, who had died from a drug overdose. The trajectory that I had been on for the first part of my life was a roadmap to destruction, and yet I had a beautiful, caring wife and family who loved me. I could look back on the last thirty-eight years and know I had touched many people’s lives and made them better. Yes, there had been hard times, but even that to me was proof that God was always looking out for me, because I survived.

  While I was trapped in that prison, I put all of my energy into understanding God’s word and how He worked. All of the inmates knew that’s what I was about. If they walked by my cell and saw me writing or reading, they knew not to bother me. The few times I did socialize with the other men, I found myself offering advice and just listening to their problems. I wasn’t trying to make friends, but if people needed to talk, I was available to listen. I still regretted that I hadn’t been able to have these kinds of talks with some of my younger family members who’d gotten in trouble with the law. So in some way, I was trying to make amends for that part of my past by helping the guys who really wanted to change their lives.

  I lived my life in prison like a man on a mission. I did everything I could to stay out of trouble because I knew my lawyer was trying to get me released on parole. One evening I almost got written up for taking too long to finish my dinner. A guard told me I was supposed to get up and move out so the next group of inmates could come in to eat. I started to argue that I was just finishing my dessert and would be done in
a moment, but I didn’t want a piece of cake keeping me from getting back to my family. So I shoved that cake in my mouth and shuffled out of there.

  I tried my hardest to stay positive and focused. I wasn’t happy in prison, but I kept my focus on my faith in God, and He showed me that He was with me. The whole time I was in prison, my feet hurt because of the neuropathy I suffered on account of my diabetes. I wasn’t allowed to have a cane, and so I was often shuffling with a limp through the long hallways of the building. One night I had a dream that God was just holding my feet. When I woke up the next morning, my feet didn’t hurt, and I was filled with this feeling that God was with me. Another morning I woke up with the sun filtering through the window and hitting my bed. Normally the sun never hit my lower bunk, and again I took this as a sign that God was showing me that He was with me and I just had to keep the faith. There were certain passages in the Bible that I returned to again and again to help with this, like Philippians 4:19: “And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of His glory in Christ Jesus.” I knew my lawyer was working for me. I knew Cheryl was working for me. But it was God who I knew would truly meet all my needs and set me free.

  So on October 27, when my family was pleading my case, I was doing my part too.

  chapter ten

  “I Am Bobby Love”

  * * *

  BOBBY

  It was two weeks before Thanksgiving and I was sitting in my cell rereading my copy of Steve Harvey’s biography that Cheryl had sent me. They announced my name over the PA system saying I needed to report to the gym. My counselor’s office was in the gym, so I figured that was why I was being summoned.