Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007

'But he's still my brother'

The voice on the the phone said my brother had been stabbed to death in a prison knife fight.

In an instant, we became a victim's family.

Only this victim was a convicted murderer, one of thousands of nameless, faceless criminals in the S.C. prison system. But he was my brother, my mother's son, my nephew's father.

We broke out in panic, wondering how to get details. We couldn't rush to his side.

I saw the horror envelop my mother's face until we discovered it was a crank call. Or maybe the caller said Moochie was in a fight. The years have blurred the details.

What's not blurred is the knowledge my brother confessed to killing a man: Anyone would deserve harsh punishment for such an act.

But he's still my brother.

Loving visits

Loving him, our family gained an intimate knowledge of the S.C. prison system. Our journey began at the Berkeley Detention Center. We saw Herbert "Moochie'' Bailey Jr. trapped behind cold steel bars in a small cell with a small white toilet and a roll of tissue on a cold, gray cement floor with a bed not much wider than our couch.

We saw that place many times. We'd pack Kentucky Fried Chicken, coleslaw, mashed potatoes and gravy and a gallon of brown and sweet tea into our wood-paneled station wagon.

It was a 20-minute drive down U.S. 52 from St. Stephen. We passed the site of the murder every time.

Once there, a locked door would greet us, behind it a mesh iron door, behind it a couple of officers who searched us with hand-held metal detectors. Beyond them, a large metal gate slowly went straight up, then straight down.

It was creakily loud.

Once through the gate, an officer let us in the other side of a thick, brown metal door. Only a small window surrounded by bars gave it life.

From there we walked up and down dimly lit gray halls, a brick wall to our right, with the occasional barred window, and rows and rows of steel bars and black men and white toilets and tiny beds with dingy mattresses and the smell of sweat and dried urine, enough to burn your nose, not quite enough to cause vomiting.

At the end of our journey, we found Moochie behind those bars and near one of those toilets. He would grip the bars with both hands, sometimes reaching through a dinner-tray opening to touch our hands.

My young eyes didn't see the murderer the white woman on the TV news spoke of. It wasn't quite clear to me why he was there. Growing up, seldom did we visit the zoo, but many times we saw Moochie caged. The caramel color of his skin clashed with his dank surroundings.

Some days we got to skip the steel bars and sat in a cafeteria where we ate with Moochie. It wasn't home, but Moochie was with us, if only for a few hours.

Always the same

We followed him from prison to prison. Every weekend and every holiday we'd take a self-guided tour through rural South Carolina. I remember Allendale Correctional in Fairfax and MacDougall Correctional and Lieber Correctional in Ridgeville and Broad River Correctional and Kirkland in Columbia and Evans Correctional in Bennettsville and Lee Correctional in Bishopville. They looked the same and felt the same and smelled the same.

Even from behind the steel bars and barbed wire, he was still the big brother. He implored us to read a lot and stay healthy, and asked if we were taking care of Mom.

He renamed himself Mtume Obalija Mfume and assigned each of us African names. He called me Kfare.

He loved laughing and posing for $3 Polaroid family portraits at the end of visits.

The hurt he didn't know

But he didn't know that Doug had begun to despise basketball because it reminded him of the days Moochie taught him to play. He didn't know how Willie hated to see his brother jailed, or how I began to stutter, or how the relationship between my mother and oldest sister grew strained as they disagreed on how much time kids should spend in prisons, or the nights my mother spent crying and guilt-ridden.

Our father died at age 68, just two years after Moochie's sentence began. He didn't know how it tore us up to see him - in handcuffs and leg irons - at the funeral.

He didn't seem bothered by our worry that he could be raped or beaten, that we cringed upon learning he had to stuff towels under his door to keep rats out of his cell.

We figured that to remain sane where insanity reigns he needed to maintain the illusion of his role as our protector, needed the mental escape that came from his new religion, Rastafarism.

But in 1995 things changed.

Then-Gov. David Beasley declared that every S.C. prisoner get a close-shaved haircut. By that point Moochie's dreadlocks, grown in adherence to Rastafarism, had reached most of the way down his back. He refused to have them cut. Prison officials sent him into solitary confinement. For five years. The last year he didn't speak a word, not to prison guards, not to his family. He kept a pencil and paper to communicate.

He drifted away and has yet to fully return. We love him, but barely know him anymore. We preached to him the importance of being remorseful and the need to cut his hair to get back into the general population, to serve "good time'' to make a good impression before the parole board.

We sat with him during bi-annual parole hearings, spoke on his behalf and brought preachers and attorneys. We told board members how our family would never be the same until he was freed, about how we would make sure he had a job and a place to stay and reason to become a productive citizen.

Moochie told them he was a different man, that he was sorry for what happened.

Each time they told us "denied'' within a matter of minutes. Each time the feeling of helplessness grew. Willie left one of those hearings, drove a few miles, pulled off to the side and cried alone for two hours.

"I can't stand to see my brother like that,'' he said.

Two families grieving

Meanwhile, the Bunch family still grieved, suffering with the memories of a loved one snuffed out by violence.

They moved on, continued to live. There was no other choice. A few moved out of the area and had children, who married and had children of their own.

Mary Hilton, Bunch's sister, lived in a modest brick home in Bonneau Beach with a loving husband until he passed away. A sister who has since died moved to Alabama. Another sister moved to Florida.

For a while, Hilton ran a farm with her husband in Dorchester County.

She has good memories about how her brother would talk to her, urged her to look to God when she became depressed.

Before I met her, I imagined that our families could come together, hug and cry on each other's shoulders, banding together to free my brother from the prison system that has held him and the rest of us captive for the past 25 years.

During those same years, Hilton was just as hopeful he would never taste another day of freedom.

"My feeling is to keep him there. Keep him there,'' she told me without a hint of bitterness. "He killed an innocent man that wasn't bothering nobody. To put him back out there, he is liable to kill another innocent. I want him there. It would be the best for him, and it would be the best for me if he stayed there.''

I understood, but no longer felt guilty for wanting him home.

Hilton won't have peace if Moochie is freed.

We won't find peace if he remains locked away.

Before I walked away, I did something I had longed to do.

"Mrs. Hilton, I know this won't make any difference, but I am truly sorry for what happened,'' I said through a stutter more pronounced than normal, my face hot with shame. "I'm really sorry about what my brother did.''

"You couldn't help it,'' she said, leaning toward me across the cafe booth. "And neither could I.''

I knew I would never speak with her again, knew there would be no Hollywood ending.

My focus shifted back to my family and where we must go from here.