She smiled, took a swig from the purple water bottle beside her. She said she had wanted to save that letter and the inmate’s gift. “I wondered if I was just allowed to tack it up in my cubicle or something,” she said. “But back then you couldn’t do things like that—especially not with inmate mail.”
There were protocols. Inmate mail didn’t get saved. It didn’t go to the president. “You would scan it to see if it was a pardon request,” she said, “or if the person alleged he was being abused. Those got forwarded as casework. The rest basically went in a box to be shredded.”
She took another sip. “It was a policy that had been in place for years and years, and we were just the new guys, you know?”
When Fiona first became director of OPC, one of the first things she did was challenge the policy about inmate mail. Where had it come from? Who had started it? Was it even written down? She credited a plucky intern for encouraging her to look into it. “Well, that doesn’t make any sense,” the intern had said when she was learning the rules. Surely a president who got his start as a community organizer doling out food to the homeless would want to hear what people stuck in prison had to say.
One day, Fiona wondered what would happen if she simply added a letter from an inmate into a batch of 10LADs. What would Obama do? What would senior staffers do?
Nothing, it turned out. No one said a word about it. So she did it again. And again.
“Well, this is now something we do,” Fiona told the staff, and that was how the policy was changed, Fiona-style. Inmate mail got its own code in the hard-mail room, and people were encouraged to sample it along with all the other types of mail.
It was a private triumph, a mailroom coup. “Because there was this feeling like only we knew about it,” she said. All those people writing in about sentencing disparities and criminal-justice reform. Not a particularly hot topic in the news. But now the letters made their way to Obama. In 2014, when the administration rolled out a Justice Department program offering executive relief to federal prisoners serving long sentences for nonviolent drug crimes, it surprised no one in the mailroom. The president, they were happy to see, was paying attention to the mail.
There was a similar trajectory with issues around same-sex marriage and repealing the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Conversations about these things happened in the mail whether or not they happened anywhere else at the White House. Fiona, and Elizabeth before her, and Mike before her made sure to include those voices in the 10LADs. In that way, little by little, voice by voice, the mail could drive actual policy decisions.
The guy who wrote in anonymously in 2009 wrote again in 2014, after “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed. This time he used his name.
July 4, 2014
Dear Mr. President,
On August 3rd my husband, David Lono Brunstad, will be promoted to Senior Master Sergeant, and I’ll be there to hand him his new shirt with the extra stripe on it. I know this is a pretty common occurrence for many military families, but it has special significance for mine—not that long ago our relationship had to remain a secret because of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
David’s deployment to Iraq in 2009 under this misguided policy was [a] dark and lonely time for the both of us. It was common for me not to hear from him for four or five days at a time, and for most families the old axiom “no news is good news” applied. Same-sex partners knew, however, that we weren’t on anyone’s contact list should something bad happen, so the pressure would just build and build until finally I heard his sweet voice on the other end of the line.
I knew he was under fire on a pretty regular basis and there were times that I struggled with keeping it together at home all by myself. On those days, Mr. President, it was your commitment to end this discriminatory policy that kept me going. I believed you—I trusted you—and I knew that, no matter how bad it got, that there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
My husband will deploy next June, but this time his pack will be a little lighter without the worry of whether or not his family will be taken care of. Sir, I doubt that I will ever be able to thank you in person, so I just need you to know that this military family will always be grateful for all you have done for us.
With Sincere Gratitude,
Darin Konrad Brunstad
Vancouver, Washington
* * *
—
“So we have one, two, three, four,” Fiona counted. She was closing in on the finalists. “Nine, ten, and then this one is eleven, so we have to remove one.” She read, shook her head. “Okay, okay, I guess.” She draped the discard on the far end of the couch. She looked over at it, then reached out to give it a little pat.
She gathered the final ten and began shuffling them, pulling one out, putting it behind another and another in front. I wondered about all the shuffling. “Oh, the order is critical,” she said. It was like putting a book of poems together, or a playlist. “The order in which you see stories affects the way you perceive each one,” she said. “We sometimes use the term ‘sucker punch’ in this office, which is brutal, but…”
“Ballsy” was the word Yena used to describe Fiona. She did not hesitate to give the president mail brutally critical of his administration, or mail that was disturbing, or mail that was heartbreaking, and when she put the letters in order, it was for maximum impact. She could put three gun-violence pleas back to back. She could set the president up with a letter from someone gushing about the Affordable Care Act and then another from someone on the margin whose life had been made worse because of it. “It’s not ‘You failed,’ ” she said. “It’s more ‘Solutions don’t solve things for everyone.’ ”
She grabbed a pencil. “Sometimes on Friday, particularly on Friday, we’ll end with one that’s like ‘Hey, I like the way you tie your tie.’ ” She called that a chaser. It could be a comment about the dog or about the president riding his bike, or it could be just “Hey, are you a pancakes or waffles man?”
Dear Mr. President,
I think this country needs more spunk. With all the attack, the Zika virus and the wars, this country is a very sad place. Please do something fun. Wear a tie-dye shirt and shorts to something important. Go on a water-skiing trip in the caribbean. Take your family to disney world. Do something fun and outgoing. Also, please say something that will make everyone calm. You do not know how many polotics worries I have….
Sincerely,
Lily
8 years old
“Okay, this is it,” Fiona said, gathering the pages on her lap, smoothing them the way you would pet a cat.
“So I’ll open with this one. ‘This letter has been in my mind and heart for so many years.’
“And then this person who volunteered on the campaign and has been disappointed with the Affordable Care Act…a real personal story.
“Then this notebook paper from a social worker in Texas that talks about trying to make a difference and against a lot.
“And then this letter about a DOJ correction that didn’t extend to DHS.
“Right behind the prison comment, I’ll have the son with the felony background.
“Then right behind that is this one that’s tougher to read but a haunting message from this vet who is haunted by what he’s seen.
“And then this reflection on support being temporary after natural disasters.
“And this is one, frankly, I don’t have an intuitive place for where it should fit in the batch, but I think I’ll have this in here. Dakota Access Pipeline.
“And then the grandson, Jake. His quote: ‘I hope Clinton wins.’ This little African American boy with two white parents. I’ll end with that. That’s a powerful line to give the president.
“So that’s the order.”
She flipped around her pencil and went at the letters with h
er eraser, removing any and all codes. The president should definitely not see codes. “If a letter takes a turn that is surprising in the text—say, on page three something surprising happens in her life, but the way we’ve assigned what category it falls into kind of spoils the surprise—then the writer doesn’t get to bring the president through her experience in the same way.” That was why everybody in the hard-mail room had to use pencil.
Before I left her office that day, I asked Fiona about the candy wrapper mosaic that the inmate made. What ever happened to it? Had it been spared from the shredder?
“It only exists in my memory,” she said. “And that just eats at me.”
CHAPTER 8
Marnie Hazelton,
April 5, 2011
FREEPORT, NEW YORK
She wore a tan jacket and a loose-fitting tangerine blouse. Did she look okay? How about the necklace? Too much? One thing about standing under those insanely hot lights, with gobs of makeup caked on her face, there, in that distinctly American Who Wants to Be a Millionaire moment, was that it was very, very hard to think about anything besides Holy crap, I’m on TV.
[Applause]
I’m well. How are you?
I’m very well. Yes, I mentioned in the introduction that you’ve had some hard times, got laid off as an educator, even though you are an acclaimed educator, obviously, but you got a letter from the president that gave you confidence.
Yes.
And you brought it with you, I noticed, today. So can you read that to us? He really wrote this to you, right?
Yes. Yes, he did.
You’re not a crazy woman.
[Laughter]
No, no, no. I had just wanted him to—
It’s the official stationery!
Yes. The official White House stationery.
Oooh. Very nice.
She had the letter on the desk in front of her, and she kept her fingertips touching it. It was handwritten in Obama’s distinctive swirl (he doesn’t cross all his Ts, she had noted) on a white card. The letter had nothing to do with appearing on a game show; it was a private thing, something in her recent past she had happened to mention when they were trying to flesh out her story, make her more TV worthy. They said, “Bring the letter!” Would she read it in front of a live studio audience? (She made a photocopy. There was no way she was going to take the real letter out of her home.)
Uh. It says, “Marnie.” Uh. “Thank you for your dedication to education. I know that things seem discouraging now, but demand for educators and persons with your skills will grow as the economy and state budgets rebound. In the meantime, I’m rooting for you! Barack Obama.”
[Applause]
That is very cool! That is something you keep forever. For sure. Wow. Well, you hold on to that, and keep positive thoughts going about the future in terms of jobs—and the immediate future right here, because you are now going for one hundred thousand dollars. You have forty thousand six hundred dollars in your bank. It is time to play…Classic Millionaire!
“I’m rooting for you.”
Coming from the president of the United States, those would be powerful words for any one of millions of unemployed people hit by the economic downturn, but for Marnie they were magical. They could transform her. She’d start getting depressed, frustrated, hopeless, and then just thinking, I’m rooting for you would turn her back into Marnie again.
Marnie Hazelton!
Marnie Hazelton was not just some unemployed single mom in her forties in a tan jacket and a tangerine blouse trying to win some cash.
* * *
—
“Get it together, girl,” she had told herself back in the day, when she was a young woman just out of college trying to make it as a rapper. (She was selling mixtapes on the street.) “Get it together.” It was her dad’s voice, her mom’s, her grandparents’; backward and backward, all the ancestors telling her the same thing.
Her dad: one of the first black students to integrate Baltimore Polytechnic high school. Her mom: a week in prison after being arrested for trying to integrate a movie theater in Baltimore, then the Peace Corps. A grandfather in World War II, two great-grandfathers in World War I. A great-great-great-grandmother who arrived in the hull of a ship and was sold as a slave. “Get it together, girl.” You were part of a continuum. You weren’t random. You were the end of a long line of courage and fight, and you had to keep it going. “A life of service,” her parents preached. That was her destiny.
“One out of four students in New York cannot read,” the ad in the newspaper had said. “What are you going to do about it?” She applied, got the fellowship; in September 2000 she stood for the first time in front of her class of fifth graders at PS 309 in Brooklyn, New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, one of the lowest-performing schools in the state. The fifth graders could neither read nor write. The level of poverty. The stories of violence. “I didn’t come from this,” she told the students. She did not hold back. She said, My mom went to college, and my dad worked for a large corporation, and I’m telling you there’s more to life than what you see at home. (Some of them didn’t have homes.) She wanted them to know there was a whole world out there. She showed them photos of her and 50 Cent, Eminem, Public Enemy, from her fangirl days. She showed them maps of all the places she’d seen, said they could see them, too, one day. She taught them their opinions mattered. What did they think of President Bush financing mosquito nets to help all those people in Darfur dying of malaria? They said, “It’s great!” She told them, she said, Well, don’t tell me. Tell him. They wrote to President Bush. He wrote back! With a photo of his dog, Barney! It was a teachable moment. She had become giddy with the idea of teachable moments.
One year later, in 2001, she was in the middle of an English lesson when the first tower of the World Trade Center got hit. They could see it out the window. Then the second tower. Gray smoke turned to black smoke; they could hear people in the street screaming. She told the kids, she said, Everybody stay in your seats; just please stay in your seats, and then the principal came on the loudspeaker telling everyone to remain calm, and teachers ran into the halls asking one another what the hell was going on.
That fellowship in Bed-Stuy was supposed to be for only two years, but she extended it for three more. She had found where she belonged, in the classroom, serving scared kids desperate for heroes.
She rooted for Obama to become president long before any of her friends believed a black man could become president.
In 2011, she listened intently to his second State of the Union address; he was talking to her:
The biggest impact on a child’s success comes from the man or woman at the front of the classroom. In South Korea, teachers are known as “nation builders.” Here in America, it’s time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect….
…To every young person listening tonight who’s contemplating their career choice: If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make a difference in the life of a child—become a teacher. Your country needs you.
A nation builder. A patriot. That’s what she was.
After Bed-Stuy, in 2005, she accepted a job in another district, the Roosevelt Union Free School District on Long Island—a whole different set of needs, a district so poor and so deeply in debt that the state had to take control of it and put it on a watch list for “fiscal and academic concern.” She brought ambition to that school. She won teaching awards, got promoted to an administrative role, to coordinator for elementary education.
It’s hard to say exactly how it all unraveled, but after a few years, she could tell something was up. She even went down to the human resources office one day. “Guys, is there something I need to know? Is there something you need to tell me?”
“Nope, everyth
ing is fine!”
She came home that same day to a letter waiting for her in the mailbox. “The position has been eliminated…budget cuts.”
In the mail. Are you kidding me? Budget cuts. In the mail.
All right, Marnie, just to recap, you have banked forty thousand six hundred dollars. You are just four questions away from a million dollars, but you have no lifelines left. Here’s your question for one hundred thousand dollars—
No lifelines left. This was so pathetic. And let’s not even go into how she had to go out and shop for this jacket and this shirt because she had nothing to wear on TV. Did she look fat? Did her eye just twitch? Holy crap, I’m on TV. You can’t imagine how hard it is to think in a situation like that. Put it this way: She’d had to use a lifeline on the question before this one. It was about “Rub-a-Dub-Dub, Three Men in a Tub.” Seriously. Here she was, a nation builder, a patriot (she was also by this point two years into a doctorate in educational leadership and policy), and she was stumped by a nursery rhyme.
It was the butcher, the baker, and the what? The what? “I think I’ll ask the audience, Meredith.” Ninety percent of the audience (most of whom were probably not two years into a doctorate in educational leadership and policy) knew that, no, there was no cobbler in the nursery rhyme.
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