It has been my experience that because of institutional and individual racism

Epilogue
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.
—Huey Newton
My brother Michael took me home and I lived with him and his wife and son
in their house for almost a year. I got medical care that I needed. In my mind,
heart, soul, and spirit I always felt free, so my attitudes and thoughts didn’t
change much after I was released. But to be in my physical body in the
physical world again was like being newly born. I had to learn to use my
hands in new ways—for seat belts, for cell phones, to close doors behind me,
to push buttons in an elevator, to drive. I had to relearn how to walk down
stairs, how to walk without leg irons, how to sit without being shackled. It
took about a year for my body to relax from the positions I had gotten used to
holding while being restrained. I allowed myself to eat when I was hungry.
Gradually, over two years, I let go of the grip I held against feeling pleasure,
and of the unconscious fear that I would lose everything I loved.
Michael told me I needed to make new memories, and I did. I’d always
dreamed of going to Yosemite National Park after seeing a National
Geographic special about it years before in CCR. At the invitation of old
friends and former Panthers Gail Shaw and BJ, I flew to Sacramento. Scott
Fleming came up from Oakland to meet us and we drove to Yosemite
together. We hiked to the falls I wanted to see, and we stayed in the park
overnight.
I’ve been privileged to speak to law students around the country and to
speak out in Europe, in Canada, and here in America against the abuses of
solitary confinement. I was honored to meet Teenie Rogers, Brent Miller’s
widow, who had the courage and character to speak out against our
convictions. I met Deidre Howard, the foreperson who came forward with her
misgivings about her grand jury experience, proving that Judge Brady was
correct in his assessment that I would never get a fair trial in the state of
Louisiana. Deidre and her sister Donna are taking steps to get Louisiana to

---

create a guidebook for grand jurors, explaining their rights.
A great joy has been getting to know my daughter and her children. My
great-grandchildren are my hope. The innocence, intelligence, and happiness
in their eyes give me strength. I want to keep going for them, keep speaking
out, keep fighting. I hope to leave them a better world than the one I had. I
hope they can find the spirit of my mom, their great-great-grandmother, when
they need her, as I did.
I bought a house. I’m still a news junkie and usually have news on the
TV. I can still only sleep a few hours at a time. I am often wide awake around
three a.m., when I used to get some “quiet time” in prison. Many people ask
me if I ever wake up and think I’m still in prison. I always know where I am
when I wake up. But sometimes I walk into a room in my house and I don’t
know why, and then I walk into all the rooms for I don’t know what reason. I
still get claustrophobic attacks. Now I have more space to walk them off. For
peace of mind, I mop the floors in my home.
People ask me how America has changed in 44 years. I see changes, but
in policing and the judicial system most of them are superficial. In 2016, the
year I was released from prison, a black man named Alton Sterling was
fatally shot by police while he was pinned to the ground by officers in
Louisiana; a black man named Philando Castile was shot and killed at a
traffic stop by police while he was reaching for his wallet in Minnesota,
while his girlfriend screamed, “You told him to get his ID, sir”; a black
behavioral therapist named Charles Kinsey, caring for an autistic man, was
shot in the leg by police in Florida as he lay in the street with his hands up
(later the chief of police stated the cop was aiming for the autistic man who
was holding a toy truck that the cop thought was a gun); an unarmed black
man named Terence Crutcher was shot and killed as he was walking in the
middle of a street outside his vehicle in Oklahoma, obviously drunk or drug-
impaired. That was just 2016. As I write these words, in March 2018, a 22-
year-old unarmed black man named Stephon Clark was fired at 20 times—
with 8 shots hitting him, mostly in the back—and killed by police officers in
his grandmother’s backyard in Sacramento.
The officer who killed Terence Crutcher was acquitted and her record
was expunged. The officer who killed Philando Castile was acquitted. Black
people make up 13.4 percent of the U.S. population, but the year I was
released, according to the