Convicted

by Jameel Zookie McGee

  Collins started talking. To be honest, I’m not sure what he said because I was having a conversation of my own. God was talking to me. It was only three words, but that was enough. Let it go, he said.

  No, God. I can’t let it go. If I don’t do this right now, if I don’t pay him back for what he did to me, how will I ever look anyone in this town in the eye again?

  Let it go.

  I argued with God. I’m right here, I said. I have to do this.

  But God argued back. Jameel, what are we doing here? Why are you doing this? We let this go in prison. That’s how you got to come home. Remember how I set you free right after you turned loose of this anger? Why do you want to grab hold of it again? What is this going to do?

  No, God, no, I said. Just let me do this and then I’ll turn loose of everything again. I promise.

  As this battle was going on in my head and in my heart, I squeezed harder and harder on Collins’s hand. I mean, I was really squeezing it hard. I had to because I was in pain. This was a battle, and it was all inside of me. I’d been out of prison for two years, and in those two years I had left God back in that prison. But today, in this park, he came and found me.

  At one point I finally heard something Collins said about being a new person because of God and Jesus. And he apologized. I did hear that. That apology resonated with me. He wasn’t ducking what he had done. He was owning up to it, which surprised me. By the time he apologized, I was breathing kind of hard. Man, this was a battle and it was rough. After he said he was sorry, I nodded toward my son and said something that had been boiling inside of me for a while. “Yeah, well, I need you to tell him why he missed out on three years of his daddy’s life.”

  Even as I said this I heard God say very loudly, Let me handle this. I got this. Let it go.

  Okay, God. This is yours. I’d be a fool to intervene now. I am not that man who wanted revenge. That man is dead and gone. God took him away in prison.

  I was about to turn loose of Collins’s hand and walk away when he opened his mouth and started talking again. He actually tried to compare his experience to mine by saying something about how he’d missed out on eighteen months of his daughter’s life just like I’d missed out on three years of my son’s life. That comment nearly pulled all the anger back. I mean, I got heated when I heard it. I was like, Come on, God. Let me take just one shot at him. Please!

  And what’s that going to solve? God replied. Let it go.

  So I did, but not before I gave Collins a few choice words describing what I thought about his “sacrifice”!

  Then I let go of his hand. The moment I did, I was free. The anger evaporated. God took it away just like that. I turned around and walked away, feeling lighter. This was my chance for revenge, but I let it go. I gave my thirst for revenge over to God, along with my anger and hate. And he set me free. I thought I had surrendered everything to God in my cell in Milan, and honestly, I had. But I had to have this moment with Collins in the park to be truly free.

  It is one thing to say you have released something to God, but you cannot really know if you have until you are tested on it. This was my test. I nearly flunked, but God didn’t let me. I thought I’d left him back in the prison, but he was right here, waiting for me at the very moment I needed him most. If he hadn’t been, if I’d done what I wanted to do, then, man, my life might have been over.

  When I left the park that day, I left behind everything I’d ever had against Andrew Collins. When I let go of his hand, I had truly forgiven him in my heart, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to hang out with him or anything like that. I figured I’d never see him again, and I was fine with that.

  Boy, was I ever wrong. After that day in the park, it seemed like everywhere I went, I saw Andrew Collins. I’d go into a store and see him coming out. We didn’t speak, and I don’t think he saw me, but I saw him. At Meijer. At Walmart. I’d be on my way home from work, and who would I see driving by in his car? Andrew Collins. It was like he was everywhere I went. I was glad I’d surrendered my anger to God in the park, because seeing him so often would have driven me crazy otherwise.

  At one point I started second-guessing God. Was I supposed to do something to him, Lord?

  Andrew

  I walked away from meeting Jameel feeling like a failure, like maybe this whole idea of being reconciled to the community in a redemptive way was my idea, not God’s. I felt stupid for taking my daughter to this event. The place wasn’t safe. I didn’t know what kept Jameel from taking a swing at me, but I was pretty sure he wanted to. If he had, what would my daughter have thought as she saw her father being knocked to the ground? What if this had escalated beyond Jameel and me? A riot could have broken out in Broadway Park. How could I have kept her safe? I couldn’t have. Why did I ever think this was a good idea?

  I did not tell Krissy about meeting Jameel. I couldn’t. It’s not that I wanted to hold anything back from her, but I didn’t think sharing these details was beneficial for either of us. When I got home, I came to the conclusion that moving probably was the best idea for our family. If I could not be reconciled to this community, the best thing I could do for my wife and daughter and myself was to put as many miles as possible between us and Benton Harbor.

  All this was still going through my head the next day when I went to church. Right before the service started, Pastor Brian said, “So H3 was pretty awesome, wasn’t it?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said in a tone that made it clear it was anything but awesome to me. Then I told him, “I had a bad encounter with Jameel McGee.” However, when I said Jameel’s name, I mispronounced it as Jamal.

  Pastor Brian looked at me with a really strange look. “Really? That seems very odd. We just hired him down at the café.” Overflow had an outreach coffee shop, café, and thrift store used as a job-training ministry.

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, so God’s probably got something planned there. You two are probably going to cross each other’s paths. You’re going to need God to work this out.”

  I walked away thinking about what Pastor Brian had said. Our paths were going to cross. And God was going to have to work this out—but not in the way Pastor Brian expected. He hadn’t hired Jameel. The church had hired his twin brother, Jamal. None of us discovered the misunderstanding for quite some time. By then God had worked something out, and he did it in a bigger way than anyone ever thought possible.

  Jameel

  When I walked out of Broadway Park with my son, I could not stop thanking God for saving me from myself. Then I told him goodbye and left God at the park. I didn’t really intend to. It just sort of happened. I walked out of the park free from Andrew Collins. When I saw him again, and I kept seeing him a lot, I did not have to deal with all the old feelings of hate and anger I’d felt toward him. I was now free to get on with life, so that’s what I did. Before that day in the park, God hadn’t been a big part of my life except when I needed him, and nothing changed in that regard afterward.

  My son spent the rest of the summer of 2011 with me. Then his mother showed up, and he went back with her to start the school year. I kept working at the nickel- and chrome-plating plant. I had no complaints about the work. It may not have been my dream job, but it was a job and it paid the bills.

  The lawsuit against the city dragged on. About once a year I went to a meeting with the attorneys handling the case. They always talked as though a settlement was right around the corner, but then another year would go by without my hearing from them. They held meetings in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Every time it was the same story. Getting the settlement money would be really nice, but I wasn’t counting on it. I had a job. I had a place to live. Life was all right. I wasn’t living the dream, but it was a heck of a lot better than prison.

  —

  I went in to work one day in 2012 and found I’d been assigned to one of the assembly lines. I’d worked this one before. The work wasn’t that hard. I spent the day putting metal caps on glass tube
s that were about the size of ballpoint pens. I had to give each one a twist as I pushed down on it. Toward the end of the day, I picked up a tube and started to twist the cap onto it. As soon as I applied pressure, the tube shattered and half of it went straight through my right hand.

  Immediately, I dropped to the floor as if I’d been shot. Blood spurted everywhere. The wound in my hand looked like a gunshot wound. I tried pulling the tube out, but half of it broke off inside me. One of my supervisors came running over and asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. At the time I thought I’d just cut my hand pretty badly, so I told him I’d finish my shift. I picked out the glass shards I could see, wrapped my hand in bandages, and finished the last few minutes of my shift.

  Late that night I finally went to the hospital when the pain got to be more than I could take. I figured doctors would give me some stitches and a shot for the pain and send me on my way. Instead, I spent the night watching them digging pieces of glass out of me. Before they released me, they told me I could not return to work for at least a week. Since I’d been hurt on the job, the company paid my hospital bill, but I did not receive worker’s compensation for the time I missed.

  A week after my injury I had to go back to work in order to pay my bills. The doctor allowed me to return but warned me I could not do anything strenuous with my right hand. I already knew that. Even though my hand was wrapped tightly, it was swollen and hurt like crazy. Eventually I had to have a couple of operations on it, but those were months down the road.

  My first day back at work, my supervisor put me on the line as though I’d never been injured. I told him I couldn’t do it.

  He said, “You’re going to do it or you can go home!”

  That was a no-brainer. I replied, “I’m going home, then, because I can’t use my hand.”

  My boss had me come back a short time later and assured me the company was going to pay all my hospital bills and even the cost of physical therapy if I needed it. When I asked about worker’s comp, the conversation pretty much ended. After working for the same company for three years, I was now out of work and had only one good hand.

  As soon as the bandages came off my hand, I found another job. Since I had a good work record, another plant in town hired me right off. Then I reported to work and things fell apart. My hand looked like a balloon before I’d really even started working. The supervisor who was showing me what I was going to do looked down at it and said, “Whoa!” like he’d just seen a ghost or something. “Let me see that hand,” he said. He took a close look, shook his head, and broke the news to me: “You can’t work here with your hand in that shape.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “I’m cool with it.”

  “You might be, but we can’t allow it. That hand makes you a liability. We can’t hire you,” he said.

  The next day I received a call from the man who’d hired me. He broke the news I already knew: I could not come back. I had to find another job.

  Over the next few months I found several jobs, one after the other. Some I kept for a few days before my hand started bothering me so much that I had to quit. More than one of the companies made it clear they wanted to keep me. If not for my hand, I could have worked for any of them as long as I wanted. But my hand always ballooned up, and that was the end of it. Eventually I found a job with a construction company that I kept longer than any of the others. I did a lot of physical work—hauling stuff, carrying buckets around, that sort of thing. Then one day my hand swelled up like a basketball and hurt so badly I could not lift a thing. That was the end of my construction career. Since I could not work a steady job, my bills started to pile up. Before long I lost my house and got my first taste of being homeless.

  Thankfully, before things hit bottom I received some good news for once. The town lawsuit attorneys held another meeting toward the end of 2012. I expected to hear the same thing I’d heard each year. Not this time. The lawsuit had been settled to the tune of $13 million, which was to be divided among everyone who was a part of the lawsuit. The fifteen lawyers on the case took their 30 percent off the top. They presented us with a formula that had been worked out to decide how much everyone else received. The longer your prison sentence, the more money you received. Any money seized by civil forfeiture also played a part in the formula. My portion was $102,000. After taking out the attorney’s fees, I came away with around $72,000.

  The money could not have come at a better time. I moved into a new house and bought a car, a 1996 Cadillac Eldorado. I’d bounced around from job to job, but now I had the perfect solution. I found a location where I could finally open my own full-service car wash and detailing shop. I put $4,000 down on the building and sank another $2,000 into some equipment. When we opened I offered full detailing services, including waxes, interior shampoos, motor cleaning, scratch removal, small dent removal, and paint touch-ups.

  Around that time I also started dating someone, and we moved in together. I felt as if I finally had my life together.

  Then it all came apart.

  The first crack came right after the settlement. I was driving down the road, not speeding, not doing anything illegal, and a state policeman pulled me over. I don’t remember if he gave me a ticket or not, because the same thing happened the next day and the next and every day after that. Every time I left my house I got pulled over by the state police. The worst instance happened on my birthday. A state policeman pulled me over and threatened to arrest me for driving under the influence. He told me he thought I was high. I about lost it. “Dude,” I told him, “I’m not high. I don’t do that BS.”

  The patrolman went back to his car and then returned to inform me that he was going to take me in because my license had been suspended. That was news to me. He ordered me out of the car, but I did not budge. “My license is not suspended,” I told him.

  Eventually another patrolman showed up and I got out of the car. After they put me in the back of a squad car, they ran my license again. Just like that, it wasn’t suspended any longer. “All right, let me out of this car so I can get on my way. It’s my birthday and I have places to go.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” the state patrolman said. “We’re taking you in for driving while intoxicated.”

  I spent the rest of my birthday in jail for suspicion of DUI, even though I had not been drinking. They let me out the next day with no charges filed. But that didn’t stop them from pulling me over on a daily basis. I checked around and discovered the same thing was happening to everyone who had received settlement money from the city of Benton Harbor. (You can draw your own conclusions from that.)

  The cops stopped pulling me over only after I had a wreck that totaled my car. I was involved in a head-on collision right in front of my car wash. A fifteen-year-old girl with no license and no insurance was driving a car with illegal plates, and she hit me head-on. God protected me from any real harm. My Cadillac folded up around me, but I didn’t have a scratch on me. I know God did that. Since I had only liability coverage, my insurance didn’t cover the damage to my car. The other driver should have paid for it, but I knew I wasn’t going to get anything from a fifteen-year-old girl.

  The next blow came when I discovered that the man from whom I’d leased the building for my car wash didn’t actually have the title to the building. The real owner lived in California and had put the building up for sale. The man with whom I’d worked made the deal with me because he needed to come up with some cash. By the time the dust settled, I’d lost my building along with all the money I’d put into the business. No building meant no business. Just like that I had to close.

  After I lost my business, a body shop where I’d done some work in the past contacted me about working there. The manager asked me to do the same detail work on his customers’ cars that I had offered at my car wash. We worked out a weekly pay rate. While it wasn’t great, it was better than nothing, at least until I could figure out how to relaunch my own business. Unfortunately, the arrangement d
idn’t last long. The body shop paid me late and sometimes not at all. I finally told the owner I was finished. He still owes me for two weeks’ work. I chalked that money up as lost and went on my way. Even with the delay in starting my business, I should have been fine. I had most of the settlement money in the bank, enough to carry me over until I figured out my next move.

  Then my new relationship fell apart. My girlfriend moved out and left town. I heard she’d moved to Atlanta. I didn’t chase after her. I figured the best thing I could do was to chill for a little while before I made any other big decisions.

  My plan didn’t work, however. One afternoon my landlord called to tell me I was two months behind on my rent. I told him that wasn’t possible since I’d set up an automatic payment through the bank. The only way I could have been behind would be if I was out of money, and I wasn’t out of money.

  Except I was.

  When I went to the bank to find out why it hadn’t sent my rent payments, I discovered my account was worse than empty. I had an overdraft of $500. Phone calls from Atlanta came right after that. One car dealer after another called about cars they said I’d purchased. At first I thought they had the wrong number. They didn’t. Turns out my girlfriend took all my financial information and stole my identity before she left town. In two months she’d blown through every dime the city of Benton Harbor had given me as my part of the settlement.

  Now I was completely broke. The identity theft destroyed my credit. I couldn’t work because of my injured right hand. And my landlord evicted me. Just like that I found myself homeless and jobless.

  It felt as though all this happened in a matter of days, even though it stretched out until the end of 2013. My life had spiraled out of control, and I did not know what to do next. My first response was to do what I did when I landed in the federal prison. I withdrew into myself. I pulled back from everything and everybody. It was just like I was back at the prison in Milan. I went into survival mode and didn’t really trust anyone. I also didn’t want to let people know what had happened to me. They had their business and I had mine, and I was more than happy to keep it that way. Someone advised me to go to the Social Security office and apply for disability. The office told me it was going to take a very long time to process my case. I was like, Okay, cool, I’ll take care of myself then.