This essay is a few years old, but if anything we are closer now. I'm hoping to visit him someday when we go to New Orleans. I have an essay he wrote that I will type up and share soon.
I have a friend named Corey Adams. We’ve never met face-to-face. I know him only through his words. We will probably never encounter each other in person, but I’ve shared with him some of my most personal thoughts and feelings. Although we are both citizens of the United States, we live in different worlds. He is smart, a good writer, sensitive, and intellectually curious. We are around the same age. We’ve known each other for about seven years, but it feels much longer. I usually call him by his nickname, Sno, but most of the time he is called by his number, 357624. He is a prisoner in Angola Prison, in Angola, Louisiana, and he will be there for the rest of his life.
Corey and I got to know each other through a letter writing ministry sponsored by my Unitarian Universalist church. As part of our social justice work, some of us write to prisoners, just to let them know that someone in the outside world cares about them. I feel strongly that our criminal justice system is racist and unjust, so this letter writing project is something I’ve done for a long time. However, Corey is the first prisoner that I’ve connected with on a deeper level. I think it’s because of a lot of things — that we both are writers, share similar sensitivities, and maybe simply that we are of the same generation. We both agree that our friendship was meant to happen.
It’s kind of weird that a forty something white woman from Connecticut and an African American man in the Deep South have so much in common, but Corey and I always have something to talk about in our letters. We both love our siblings and worry about them. His brother, Horatio, is also in Angola Prison. My sister, Mika, works too hard and doesn’t take care of herself. We talk about our childhoods, the dogs we had and the people we remember. We talk about the choices we’ve made in our lives and deep philosophical stuff and also what we’ve had for dinner. We celebrate joys and sorrows like friends do.
But of course there are many differences in our lives.
He grew up in foster care, a victim of abuse and violence from early on, while I had a loving mom and a pretty idyllic Midwestern childhood. He dropped out of school in 7th grade and I received an Ivy League education. He and I both made a lot of stupid mistakes in our younger years, but he didn’t have anyone to help him when he got in trouble, and he didn’t have one thousandth of the choices I did. Which is why he ended up selling drugs on the street while I got married, became a teacher, and had kids. One night Corey got into a fight, and someone else had a knife, and someone got killed. He admits that he was selling drugs and that he hit someone, but that was it. And at the end of all the arrests, trials, and confessions, he was found guilty of second degree murder, So he will live the rest of his life in a cell. This is not fair or just. The line separating Corey and Megumi doesn’t seem that long, but it hangs over a huge chasm between us because he has never felt safe in his life, ever, and I have always been safe, even when I didn’t think I was.
This is how it is. He continues to work on his appeal, and I keep sending him books and letters. He’s writing a book about his life, which I am editing, and we hope to publish it someday. What’s funny is that between the two of us, he is so much more optimistic. He is always saying things like, “relax, stop being so tense “ and telling me to get more sleep and stop worrying. I don’t know what the future will hold for our friendship; I imagine us writing to each other when we’re old and gray, still talking about the same things. I get frustrated sometimes and feel guilty because I can’t do more to help him, but he reminds me that we hold each other up. He is one of the important people in my life, and I cherish this friendship built on words and paper and trust.
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