Convicted

by Jameel Zookie McGee

  Before I went off to prison, I had a car. I last drove it the morning of my arrest when the cop told me to park it until I took care of my unpaid tickets. When I got home my old car was right where I’d left it, but it wasn’t in the same shape. Someone had busted out one of the windows. Leaves and snow had blown in and covered the inside. The tires had all gone flat and dry-rotted away. The engine didn’t even turn over, much less start after sitting idle for three years.

  With no job and no settlement money from the city, I didn’t have the cash to buy another car. I had no choice but to try to get my old car up and running again. Some friends paid me to help fix up their cars, and I used the money to slowly repair my own car. The first thing I did was go down to the junkyard and get a new window. Then I cleaned out the inside and detailed it. I bought new tires and then worked on the engine. Slowly but surely it started to look and act like a car again. A few months after I got home, I had wheels again. I sure was glad because I was tired of walking everywhere I went.

  —

  When it became clear the lawsuit wasn’t going to be settled anytime soon, I started looking for a job. I’ve never been afraid of hard work, so I figured I could find a job pretty quickly. However, finding a good job around Benton Harbor can take some time. I put together a résumé and started sending it out. That’s when I discovered another lasting consequence of my false arrest. When I listed my work experience, I had a three-year gap from the time I was in prison. Companies took a look at that, and red flags went up. Even though I explained the situation to them, most places didn’t want to hire someone who had spent time in a federal prison, even if his conviction was thrown out later.

  After running into a few brick walls, I went to a temp agency who placed me in a die-casting plant part time. At first they scheduled me only on weekends. I really needed a full-time job. You can only sleep on your brother’s couch for so long, but I took the job because I didn’t have a lot of other options. When I proved to be a good worker, they moved me to a full-time shift. However, they paid only $8.50 an hour. No one can live on that, but I kept working there because I needed something.

  I also got a job at a body shop. Every day I worked an eight-hour shift at the die-casting plant and then went straight to the body shop, where I worked another couple of hours. I also worked for a while as a bouncer at a club, but I got tired of that pretty fast. I did not enjoy breaking up fights.

  After ninety days, my probationary period at the die-casting plant ended. The company reviewed my file to see if they wanted to hire me permanently, which also meant a small raise. But then my boss called me into his office. He pointed to my file and said, “We can’t hire you because you have a drug arrest.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. I thought the court had cleaned up my record when they dismissed the charges against me. They hadn’t.

  “In 2006 you were arrested for selling crack,” the manager said.

  “Those charges were dismissed and that was supposed to have been taken off my record because I didn’t do it,” I replied.

  “I don’t know about any of that,” he said, “but you have a drug arrest, and we can’t hire anyone with a drug arrest on their record.” That ended my days at the die-casting plant. When I walked out for the final time, I wondered how much more that false arrest was going to cost me.

  I found another job right away at a company that did nickel and hard-chrome plating. If they knew about my arrest, they didn’t seem to care. I cleared my probationary period and settled into the job. After I’d worked there awhile, I saved enough to get a place of my own and move out of my brother’s house. Life finally started to feel normal again.

  I still stayed pretty much to myself and remained extra cautious about where I went and who I was with. In a way I was a lot like I was in prison, only without the anger eating me up. God had set me free from that. He set me free not just from my anger but also from the prison itself, and for that I was eternally grateful. One thing I was not, though, was a churchgoer or even much of a God-centered person. I pretty much left God in prison. I guess I felt as though I didn’t need him on the outside.

  Life wasn’t easy, but that’s life in Benton Harbor. Life wasn’t too easy for anybody I knew. But all in all, I was doing all right. I had never been a churchgoer, not after the negative experiences I had with church growing up, and I didn’t really see a need to change now. God and I had been tight in Milan and Terre Haute, even though I wasn’t that involved with chapel. I figured I didn’t need church to consider myself a Christian. No, when it came to God, everything was basically the way it had been before I met Andrew Collins, and I saw no need to change that.

  The main thing I did not have in my life that I really wanted was a relationship with my son. Two years after I got out of prison, I still had not seen him, but I wanted to. I wanted to see him more than anything, but I had no way of getting in contact with him. Then one day while I was still living with my brother, my ex showed up with my son. I don’t remember if she called ahead of time or anything like that. I didn’t even know she was back in town. She didn’t stay long, just long enough to drop off my son and tell me he was mine for the summer. Then she left. It was a drop and dash. He didn’t have any extra clothes with him or anything, but that didn’t matter to me. We could buy clothes.

  That first meeting was surreal for both of us. I was like, “Hi, I’m your dad.” Even though he had never met me, he knew who I was because he’d seen pictures of me and heard about me. We made up for lost time pretty fast. The first thing I did was take him shopping for clothes and shoes and anything else he needed to live with me for a while. I was so happy getting to do this. I mean, that’s the kind of things dads are supposed to do. When we got back to the house that first night, we played some video games and had fun together. I just wanted to get to know him, and I didn’t know how much time I was going to have with him beyond this one summer.

  Our first morning together I got up and made breakfast. I asked my son what he wanted to do that day. This whole dad thing was new to me. I wasn’t too sure what a six-year-old might want to do. We ended up going over to my older brother Richard’s house. I wanted my son to meet the rest of his family. My cousin David was also there.

  After hanging out at my brother’s house for a while, my son and I went for a walk. David came along. We took off down Empire Street. I planned to keep walking and head back toward home. But my son noticed a lot of people in Broadway Park and wanted to check it out and see what was going on. I was a little surprised people were actually in the park. The last time I paid any attention to the park, it had been all grown over with weeds and trees. No one had used it for a long time. But apparently someone had cleaned it up. On this day it looked like everyone in town was there, so we decided to check it out. I had no idea who the group was. If I had, I probably would have kept walking down the street.

  Andrew

  My journey home from federal prison began on an August day in 2010 with a prison van dropping me off at a mall across the street from the Miami bus station. Someone had made a mistake when they printed my release orders. I had to leave the prison at one o’clock in the afternoon, but the bus didn’t leave until nine that night. When he dropped me off, the official warned me, “If you screw up while you’re waiting for the bus, that’s on you.” I assured him I had no intention of screwing up.

  After waiting eight hours for the bus, I embarked on a three-day bus ride. That’s three days straight on a bus. Through the South. In the middle of August. There were no layovers where I could take a shower or sleep lying down or call my wife and let her know where I was. I spent the entire time on the bus. For entertainment I watched a mom and daughter drink for two days nonstop before they got off in Georgia or Tennessee. I guess they had made the trip before and decided the only way to survive was to self-medicate.

  After three days on the bus, I still did not get to go home. Before I could be released into the general population, I had to
spend three months in a halfway house called KPEP, where I was required to take classes to prepare me for life on the outside. Most people there also spend this time looking for a job, but I had a job waiting for me thanks to a family friend. I still had to stay at KPEP though.

  In my opinion this was a terrible idea. KPEP is in the heart of Benton Harbor, which put me right back at ground zero. More than that, since KPEP is a transitional facility for people getting out of prison, there was a very good chance that at least some of the guests might be people I’d put behind bars. I went to the administration and pleaded my case, arguing that this wasn’t the best place for me. Eventually my time at KPEP was cut down to six weeks. Then, at last, I was able to return to my home in a town not far from Benton Harbor.

  I went right to work at a farm east of town. I worked alongside migrant workers boxing jalapeño peppers as well as standing over a conveyor belt and culling bad tomatoes. I was paid minimum wage. It wasn’t my dream job, and my family couldn’t have survived on what I made, but the pay was a lot more than I contributed to the family while I was in prison. Unfortunately, our financial obligations also included the $10,000 fine Judge Bell had ordered me to pay the city of Benton Harbor. I had to write regular checks to the federal court system, who then sent the money to the city. Ten grand was equal to a loan for a decent used car, which is why I drove an old car my mom gave us. The car had almost three hundred thousand miles on it and the bottom was nearly rusted through, but it got me to work and back, and for that I was very grateful.

  Now that I was out, I joined my wife and daughter at a church called Overflow. We actually had started going there just before I went to prison. The church met in the movie theater at a mall on the outer edge of Benton Harbor, not far from where my wife worked. Krissy met the pastor at the mall and then seemed to run into him at least once a week. Every time she saw him, he invited us to church. During my time in prison, Pastor Brian (this pastor was also named Brian) wrote to me regularly. The church also helped my wife and daughter get by while I was away. After my release we not only started going to the church, but I also volunteered for the tech team.

  As strange as it may seem, during my first few months back home, I felt that God still wanted to use me in some way in Benton Harbor. Krissy wasn’t so sure. Benton Harbor and the surrounding area are pretty small, so I knew it was only a matter of time before I started running into people I’d put in prison. It didn’t take long at all. I was nervous about how things might go down when someone actually confronted me, but the initial encounters left me pleasantly surprised.

  The first guy I met acted mad at first, but he lightened up when I owned up to everything and apologized for what I had done to him. We both knew he should have been thanking me, because if I’d gone by the book, he’d still be in prison. At one point I smiled and said, “Come on, man, we both know you were dirty.”

  “Yeah, Collins, but you were dirtier,” he said with a laugh.

  “Yeah, man, you’re right,” I said. I knew the worst thing I could do was minimize what I had done. God had convicted me that the best thing to do was own up to everything.

  The next couple of reunions went about the same. Then I ran into people who had no intention of letting me off the hook. A few guys cussed me out, but I figured I deserved it. Thankfully, no one ever became violent with me or even seemed like they might. I started to relax a little bit. I wasn’t dreading these reunions the way I did before I got back home.

  After a month of working on the farm, I found a job at a discount tire store not far from our church. After working there a few months, I noticed that a man who’d stopped by just to put air in one of his tires was staring at me. Immediately I knew why. The longer he stared, the more the expression on his face changed. By the time he finished airing up his tires, he looked really, really mad. He came straight over to me and got up in my face and started spewing profanities. I could take that, but then he said he was going to come back with a gun and shoot the place up. That was my last week of work at the discount tire place. I did not want to put anyone else at risk because of me.

  The confrontation at the tire store made me think that perhaps I should not work out in the open with the public. I found a job at a factory in town and tried to blend in. A few of the people I worked with recognized me. My face had been plastered all over the news, so they knew who I was and what I had done. But since I didn’t work with anyone I had ever arrested, there were no angry confrontations—at least not at work.

  I still ran into people from time to time at a grocery store or gas station. To keep these encounters to a minimum, I did my best not to spend a lot of time in the heart of Benton Harbor, where most of the people I’d put away lived. Krissy and I even discussed moving. We talked about moving south, maybe to Georgia or Tennessee or even Florida. As long as I didn’t have to take a bus to get there, I was fine with any of these places. We also considered moving west, perhaps to Colorado or even California, any place far enough away where we could start fresh.

  Deep down, though, I felt that God had something for me to do in Benton Harbor. When I became a cop, I wanted to make a real difference in my community. I’d made a difference, but not in the way I wanted. The desire to make a positive impact had not gone away. If I could find a way to be used by God in this town, then perhaps that might provide some sort of redemption for me. God had given me a strong story of how he can turn your life around and use your failures for his purposes, no matter how badly you mess up.

  One day at work, while I was thinking about this, I came up with an idea to throw an outdoor block party at one of the parks in Benton Harbor. I thought it could be a first step for our church to build bridges to the community at large. Overflow was already a diverse church with people from all walks of life. On any given Sunday you were as likely to sit next to an executive as you were a homeless person.

  I went to Pastor Brian with the idea, and to my surprise, he told me the church already held an annual event like that at Broadway Park, which had once been pretty run down. Organizers called it H3, which stood for Hoops, Hotdogs, and Hip-Hop. A team from the church had cleaned the place up, hauling away a lot of brush and trash. I remembered how bad the park looked when I was a cop. By the time the team from Overflow finished their work, it was a pretty nice park with swings, a play area, and a basketball court.

  When the time for H3 rolled around, I volunteered to run the snow cone machine as well as referee some of the basketball games. On the day of the event, I took my daughter along, but Krissy didn’t attend. She still had serious reservations about how wise it was for me to do anything visible in town. She’d been with me during some of the confrontations I’d had, and they’d left her shaken. A lot of the people who had something against me had violent records. The question was not if one of these confrontations might turn violent, but when. Even so, I believed God had called me to Benton Harbor and he’d protect me while I was there.

  I got into the flow of H3 and nearly forgot any reservations I’d had about coming. I felt more and more comfortable at the festival, until I saw the crowd begin to part like the Red Sea.

  Jameel

  If I hadn’t had my son with me, I never would have walked down Empire Street that day. Even if I had, if my son hadn’t been with me, I never would have walked into a park filled with people. And Broadway Park was packed. People were everywhere. When I saw the crowd I tried to keep moving down the street, but my son pulled on my hand, begging me like only a six-year-old can. “Please, please, Dad, can we go over there? I want to see what is happening.”

  This was only my second day with my son. I was not about to tell him no. My cousin Dave was with us too. We reached the edge of the park, and my son ran along on the grass, looking around very excitedly. I stayed right next to him, though I walked on the sidewalk. I watched the cars going by to make sure he didn’t dart into the street. I also scanned the people in the park, looking for possible trouble. Old habits from prison die hard. />
  My son spotted the swings about the same time I saw the one man I never expected to see here: Andrew Collins. The moment I laid eyes on him, all the anger and hate I had felt in prison came rushing back. All of a sudden, nothing else mattered but doing what I had dreamed of doing for years. I grabbed my son and said, “Let’s go.” He probably protested and said he wanted to play. I don’t remember if he did. Right then, all I wanted to do was get to Collins before he slipped away.

  I was on the far side of the park from where Collins stood. My son and I took off walking, with Dave trying to catch up. I set my eyes on Collins and went straight toward him. I don’t know if people saw the look in my eyes or what, but everyone got out of my way without my saying a word. Dave must have recognized Collins too, because he started talking in my ear, telling me to stop or not to do this or something like that. I don’t know exactly what he said because I wasn’t listening. This was my chance, my moment, and I was not going to let it pass. I knew what I was going to do, and neither Dave nor my son nor anyone else was going to stop me.

  When I reached Collins, I stopped and stuck out my hand. I wanted him to know who I was before I did anything. “Remember me?” I said.

  “Jameel McGee,” he replied.

  I knew what I had come here to do. This scene had played over and over and over in my head while I was in prison so many times it was as if it had already happened. But then, when he said my name, I hesitated. The moment I heard his voice I also heard another voice that was even louder. I recognized the voice, and I recognized the message. It was the same three words I’d heard in my prison cell in Milan: Let. It. Go.