is cooler than anything in the world.” —Michelle Obama
The first thing I remember knowing about myself is that I was smart. I got a lot of attention for being articulate and curious. The more grown-ups told me that I was smart, the smarter I wanted to be. One thing I quickly noticed was that being smart was associated with “going places” and “getting somewhere in life.” I took these phrases literally and quickly came to the conclusion that everyone knew leaving Mud Lake was a smart thing to do. I felt that desire increasingly validated within me. Where did I think I would go? At age four or five, I was thinking that wherever Wally and Beaver lived, with the neat lawns and cute houses, would be nice, and that Ricky and Lucy Ricardo seemed to have it pretty good in a place called New York. I was also drawn to wherever John Forsythe was living (Malibu?) in his TV series Bachelor Father, but at that age, “ocean” was only a word, and for all I knew, the sandy dunes of that show might only exist within the brown box of our tabletop TV. My impressions of “somewhere” and “places” came almost entirely from television and glimpses of the impressive homes of Bloomfield Hills, an affluent neighboring community. When I think of some of the places I have been—the White House, Beverly Hills, the Waldorf Astoria, the Plaza Hotel, the Eiffel Tower, the Apollo Theater, the Amazon rainforest, and too many mansions to count—I realize my quest to get “somewhere” and go “places” had very little to do with tangible physical destinations. It was much more about not staying on the scruffy shore of Mud Lake, a place that was all too real.
One very early experience of “going places” was the monthly family trip to Jackson, Michigan. In those pre-expressway days, the journey to Jackson was a long, drowsy-making excursion through foreign farm country: green, open meadows where languid cows and grazing horses lifted their heads to glance at my great-grandfather’s slope-roofed, aging Pontiac, and where weathered roadside Burma-Shave signs seemed to outnumber human beings. When I could manage to capture a window seat, I stared out at the foreign territory that is rural Michigan, feeling disconnected from this world without the cracked pavement, chain-link fencing, and cacophony of voices of my everyday surroundings. I remember a slight fear that we might somehow be stranded in these hamazulas of the Lower Peninsula, and I was anxious that we keep moving toward civilization as I knew it. My future as a city-dweller was probably foreshadowed by my unease with the lonely distances between farmhouses and my relief when the buildings of the University of Michigan and the city of Ann Arbor appeared on the horizon. After we passed these, I knew we were not far from our destination: the long, flat-roofed edifice of the Southern Michigan Correctional Facility, known to us as Jackson Prison.
There, my grandfather, a small, gentle man who held me tightly and kissed my face lovingly when families were allowed to embrace at the beginning of a visit, was imprisoned for all of my childhood, having been sentenced to natural life for the crime of murder.
Until the day I worked up the courage to ask my mother what her father Walter had done, no one in the family ever discussed the crime or his conviction, and as a small child I simply accepted those trips as a normal part of life. There was invariably a wait after we arrived at the prison. Later, I found out that my grandfather always took the time to shower, shave, and change clothes before greeting his family. Before the visitors’ grille was replaced by a microwave oven and automated food vending machines, we used to lunch on delicious, greasy hamburgers that were prepared by trustee prisoners in white clothing, aprons, and hairnets.
Eventually, a uniformed officer would call out my grandfather’s last name, and our family would proceed through a series of locked gates, with the adult males being patted down by prison personnel. (The ladies’ purses had been checked in at the front desk.) Before I was old enough to understand its terrible significance, I loved the sound the barred metal doors made as they clanged shut behind us. We kids were sometimes allowed to play with the numbered metal disk that served as a receipt while the adults conversed in quiet tones, sitting opposite my grandfather with a wooden half-wall between them. Over the years, the visiting room became less restrictive and our family was allowed to sit in a small cluster without barriers, but my childhood memories were of watching my grandfather’s face behind a wire mesh screen, with the whole room being surveyed by an armed guard seated on a platform. Even when the procedures were at their most restrictive, they never stopped my great-grandmother from passing the tiny, folded hundred-dollar bill under her tongue to her beloved son, whom she was allowed to kiss on the mouth at the beginning of the visit. My grandfather had nicknames for everyone; I later learned that this was to keep our names from being known by other inmates or by the prison officials whom he assumed read every one of the letters that regularly arrived at our homes. They were written in his ornate cursive, with salutations like Dearest, Most beautiful, Most loving, Most wonderful, Most devoted, Most intelligent, Most caring, etc. I was told that these long greetings were meant to frustrate the prison “screws” who had the right to invade his privacy and try to fathom the meaning of his references to Big Shot (his sister Dean), Boss Man (my infant son), and many others who were never referred to by their given names.
Occasionally, our long ride to Jackson would turn out to be in vain. My grandfather was sometimes in “the hole,” usually for fighting. These infractions were sometimes the result of fending off attempted sexual assault. As I grew older, I learned that despite his diminutive size and soft-spoken manner, my grandfather was a “tough guy.” Men who knew him spoke of a fearlessness that no one could explain. “He just ain’t scared of nobody,” my cousin Henry said, with a look that contained both admiration and the knowledge that fearlessness can be a dangerous quality for a black man to possess. My grandfather’s reputation—built on incidents like the time, feeling he had been cheated, that he reclaimed his losses from a local gambling joint at gunpoint—probably contributed to his being convicted twice of a robbery/murder committed at a local pool hall. Those verdicts, based on circumstantial evidence, robbed him of twenty-one years, seven months, and seven days of his life; convictions that were overturned and called “a travesty of justice” when I was a young adult.
On the day he was freed, as we walked away from the Oakland County Jail, we heard a voice yell out, “Mr. Banks! Mr. Banks!” When my granddad turned around, a huge racket of whistles, clapping, and banging of anything that would produce a sound broke out. Exclamations like “God bless you!” and “Good luck!” rained down from the black prisoners he had left in the grip of the penal system. For these men, most of them at the beginning of the journey that had finally ended for Walter, to see him walking free must have buttressed their hopes of returning to life on the outside one day. Strangely, though as a young adult I was overjoyed to see him free, my own childhood fantasies of escape from Mud Lake had never extended to my grandfather being released from prison. Perhaps because he had always been there, Jackson was simply where he lived. Unlike today’s reality, where so many black men are incarcerated that a child could hardly be blamed for seeing prison as a fact of African American life, I can’t remember knowing anyone else who had an incarcerated relative during my early years.
I don’t remember much discussion of my granddad’s guilt or innocence among family members; our loyalty and unconditional love were an immutable fact of life. As is the case with so many jailed black men, he was neither as guilty as society found him nor as innocent as his loved ones might have wished. When he was released, my grandfather seamlessly rejoined what remained of the family he left and took up his life without much talk of the time he had lost. Walter’s homecoming was not entirely without dramatic undertones, though. Without a word to the family, a day or so after his release, he visited his ex-wife—the only grandmother I ever knew—to come to terms regarding the house he had built and which she now shared with her current husband. This negotiation carried the potential to be a whole lot less civilized than the peaceful resolution that actually went down. Elders in the family told me that as a younger man, Walter might have approached this kind of discussion accompanied by a pistol. They breathed a collective sigh when the parties came to a quick and amicable settlement; my grandfather was not known for his patience. With the money he had, he quickly bought a car and a small house in Pontiac’s East Side, planted a garden, and reignited his relationship with a lady named Willie, a former paramour whom he fondly referred to as “Bill.” The East Side house was rumored to be a near-gift from a hustler named Roy, a hometown brother whom Walter had taken under his protection in prison.