The Trouble with Hope

The Road to Emmaus Runs Past the Jail

I am tired, and I am starting to suspect that what I have been calling a cold is really just dread with a runny nose.

For more than a week now, I have felt half-sick, whole-sick and everything in between. I had bloodwork done. I talked to the Tele-doc. I took the prescription sinus dryer-uppers. I started taking one of those all-in-one vitamins, the kind that promises to turn you into a new person with energy and a clear head. So far it has done nothing but sit on my sink and remind me that I am still worn out. At first, I blamed the pollen. That’s always a safe bet, right? But this feels heavier than pollen. It feels like anxiety that has settled down in my body and made itself at home.

Today is my brother’s twenty-third straight day in jail.

He has never been locked up this long. Usually he gets lucky. Usually, he finds a crack in the wall, some way to slide out before the consequences can really get ahold of him. A couple nights here, a close call there, and back out he goes. I thought this time would be no different. I kept expecting him to come slithering back into the world like he always does.

But now he appears to be stuck.

And every day he’s in there, the story gets uglier.

For weeks he kept asking for commissary money. Too much of it. More than made sense. At one point he wanted money put on another inmate’s account, which is the sort of request that makes a person think “that’s some sketchy shit.” I thought I knew exactly what it was for. Drugs. What else was I supposed to think? He has lied so much and so often that by now deceit is not some shocking possibility. It is the weather. It is the background music. It is the first explanation that comes to mind because experience has trained us so well.

So, when he called Thursday asking for more money, I got mad.

Just plain mad. I cursed at him. I told him I was done funding whatever habit he had going on in there. I accused him of wasting every dime we had sent. I said no with all the old anger I had ever tucked away piled in behind it.

And he told me he was cleaner than he had ever been.

He said the money was not for drugs.

He said he loved me.

He thanked me for the money I had sent before.

I have not heard from him since.

But he has been talking to our mother and his girlfriend. Mom started sending me pictures from the video calls. His mouth bloodied. His face dark around the eyes. A busted lip at first, then two black eyes, then a knot on his head. He doesn’t look good. He looks like somebody has been getting ahold of him in a bad way.

And then my mother told me he had finally said it outright. The other inmates told him if he did not pay, they would beat him up.

She said no.

They beat him up the next day.

So now I’m sitting in a fresh kind of hell, because I don’t know what is true.

Has he been getting extorted this whole time? Was all that commissary money not buying drugs but buying protection? Is he clean for once in his life and just too weak or too alone in there to defend himself?

Is he ashamed to tell his little sister that he is scared?

Or is he still fooling all of us?

That is the question that keeps crawling back over everything else. He has lied so many times that even his injuries do not come to me clean. I look at those pictures, and my mind goes two directions at once. In one version, three men jumped him and left him on the floor because that is what weak men in cages do to weaker ones.

In the other, I wonder whether he found just the right patch of dirt and ash on that cigarette-burned jail floor and rubbed it around his eyes until he looked pitiful enough to move somebody. I don’t know where the blood comes from. I don’t know what is real. I don’t know what kind of person it makes me that I can look at my own brother’s battered face and still have to ask whether I am being played.

That is what years of chaos will do to a family. It will rot your certainty clean through.

And meanwhile, where are the guards?

Where are the people charged with keeping men alive in that place? Where are the cameras, the reports, the intervention, the bare minimum of order? Why is it so easy for violence to bloom in there like mold in a damp house? Why does the Mississippi Department of Corrections seem content to let madness govern the day? If anybody from that agency ever reads this, I hope they know their institution is one of the things that makes me least proud to be a Mississippian. There is no dignity in a place that lets men be hunted over commissary money while the state shrugs and keeps the lights on.

And still, for all my anger at the system, the question comes back to me.

Should I send him money?

Not because I think it will solve anything. It will not.

If this is extortion, then paying once was probably the beginning of the problem, not the end of it. Men who can be squeezed stay squeezed. Fear is a business model in places like that. But if I do not send it, what then? More black eyes? Broken ribs? A skull cracked open by somebody with nothing to lose? At what point does this turn from humiliation into permanent damage? At what point does a sister become complicit by standing still?

That was the frame of mind I was in when I watched church from my living room this morning.

The readings had a great deal to say about hope. In Luke, the followers of Jesus walked the road to Emmaus carrying disappointment like a sack over their backs. They said they had hoped he would be the one. Had hoped. Past tense. Hope already spoken like a thing with a grave over it. Even after all they had seen, even after the women said the tomb was empty, they still could not believe resurrection had happened. Jesus walked right alongside them and they did not know him. That is grief for you. It narrows the world. It makes the impossible stay impossible even when it is breathing the same air.

I sat there on my couch and thought about my brother.

Did he once hope I would save him?

Did he trust me to help and then lose that trust when I lashed out at him? Is he too humiliated to tell me what is really happening in there? Did I mistake desperation for manipulation because manipulation is the language he has taught us all to speak?

I am not Jesus. I cannot redeem him. I cannot untangle a life he has spent years knotting up with both hands. I cannot tell truth from lies with any holy precision. I am just his sister, tired and angry and scared, trying to decide whether helping him now is mercy or one more surrender to the same old trap.

That is the hard truth beneath all this talk of hope. Hope is not soft. It is not pretty. It does not sit nicely in a greeting card. Sometimes hope looks more like confusion than confidence. Sometimes it looks like a me staring at my phone, wondering whether love means opening my hand again or closing it for good.

I wish I had a cleaner ending than this one. I do not.

I don’t know whether my brother is being preyed upon, whether he is clean, whether he is lying, whether he is scared, or whether he is still running the same old game with a bloodied mouth and a new audience. I do know that something is broken clear through, in him, in that jail, and in the people who are supposed to be watching over it.

And I know this too. Hope, for me, is not some bright and shining certainty. It is smaller than that and meaner. It is what is left when you cannot see your way forward and still have to keep walking on. It is what remains when love has been worn thin by lies and still refuses to die outright. It is what flickers in the dark when you are too tired to call it faith but too haunted to call it nothing.

I hope my brother finds his way out of jail this week. I hope I find it in me to decide whether I want to play a part in that escape.