By Tom Farrell
It’s a summer afternoon in 2019, and I’m at PNC Park watching a Pittsburgh Pirates game with some friends: Foster, Lew, Miles and Matt. From its spot at the edge of Pittsburgh’s North Side, PNC Park overlooks the downtown Pittsburgh skyline. Home runs that clear the wall land in the Allegheny River, but not this day. It isn’t much of a game; most Pirates games this decade are best forgotten. It is sunny, though, and the company is good, the pizza bland but filling, and the beer weak but delightfully cold.
I love this little ballpark and this little town I brought my family to thirty years ago. Where I grew up, New York City, legend was that no one ever hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium except for Pittsburgh’s own Josh Gibson, of the Negro League’s Homestead Grays. The Grays played their home games at Forbes Field, the grandfather of PNC Park. It wasn’t the Grays or baseball that brought me to Pittsburgh but a job as a lawyer and a desire to leave a city as vast and noisy as the stadium that tens of thousands of baseballs couldn’t escape.
Foster and Lew knew Forbes Field. They grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s and 60s. When they went to prison in the 60s, the Pirates and Steelers still played at Forbes Field. By the time they got out, Three Rivers Stadium, where the Steel Curtain Steelers won four Super Bowls in the 1970s, had been built and torn down, and two stadiums, PNC for the Pirates and Heinz Field for the Steelers, had taken its place.
I order another round of beers. Lew tells me that he worked as a hot dog vendor at Forbes Field nearly 60 years ago. Before I can ask a question, he adds, “And that’s where I learned how to pickpocket!” He loves to tell stories. As with me, his favorites are about when we were young, life was exciting, and we had the strength to embrace it. Mine are about growing up in Brooklyn as the Irish kid in an Italian neighborhood, playing stoopball and stickball and trying to fit in as the son of a law school professor among working-class friends. His are about leaping bank counters, prison escapes, a police bullet in his back — and much more when he starts “kicking it.”
Instead of armed robberies, he reminisces about a sport of his youth — tennis. He learned to play it in juvenile detention facilities. It was his favorite game. “All the guys gave me a hard time, told me it was a girl’s game, but I loved it.” These days, he doesn’t play much. The senior citizen housing project where he lives in McKeesport, a beat-down former mill town on the Monongahela River upstream from Pittsburgh, doesn’t have any courts. He says he’d like to talk to kids about tennis, about how even a Black kid from Homewood could enjoy it.
Foster wants to see the baseball game, and he can’t focus with all the chatter. The Pirates never fill the stands, even on a beautiful afternoon, so he finds an empty seat in the next section to watch the game in peace while the rest of us yap.
After the game ends, we walk to a nearby bar where Matt had won free beer for life. A philosopher by education and attitude, he’s made the existential choice to jettison striving and affluence and instead to live simply. He has a house on a double-lot not far from the stadium where he grows corn and vegetables and plays bocce on a homemade court. For work, he does some home renovations occasionally. Mostly he fixes up his own place and his share of a “camp” in southern West Virginia, where he grew up. Like Lew he likes to tell tales — to kick it.
The North Side was Miles’ home, too. He lived there until he was fourteen. On the walk to the bar he becomes animated, gives us the tour of his old neighborhood. He points out where streets were re-routed and homes removed to be replaced by empty parks and parking lots. Waves of urban renewal washed over the North Side from the 1960s to 1980s. Factories came down, and houses were condemned to make way for a bridge and a shopping mall that never caught on. The neighborhood had been mostly white in the early 1960s. Our friend Taili’s grandmother had been one of the first Black people on her street. Her presence upset the white woman next door, and she shot Taili’s grandmother to death. The shooter got a sentence of one-year probation. The street has been erased.
Matt’s free beer spot is on the corner of Western Avenue and Galveston. Decades of spoliation have given way to gentrification, which brought paving stone sidewalks, edgy restaurants, hipsters and the brewpub that is our destination. As we turn onto Western, Miles stops us in front of a row of renovated three-story brick buildings. Lew, Foster and I know what this place means to Miles, they from the prison time they served with him, me from the restorative justice think tank where I met all of them.
Back in 1979 the block was convenience stores and shot-and-a-beer bars frequented by postal workers at the nearby main mail facility. On an October night Miles accepted a ride with a sixteen-year-old friend and his eighteen-year-old brother. They drove to bars in Pittsburgh’s East End, but Miles looked like the five-foot nothing child he was, and none would admit him. He waited in the car. Eventually, they returned to the North Side, to the very corner where Miles stops us on this bright afternoon forty years later.
He stands on the spot near the one-time Fort Pitt Cigar Store where the car had stopped. He asked to be let out because he had not eaten all night and he wanted to buy some potato chips. His friend Claude followed him.
“Walked past me right here,” Miles points, “And said, ’I’m going to rob the joint.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, right.’”
I had read this in the court opinion. I know what comes next. But he tells it with the same strong voice, surprisingly high for this thick-muscled man who leads us on the tour of erased streets.
Miles had gone to the back of the cigar shop to buy his chips. He waited at the cash register to pay and joked with the cashier. In the meantime, Claude, who stayed at the front of the store, followed a white mailman out. By the time Miles left the store, chips in hand, Claude was confronting the mailman.
Miles turns and shows us. He faces the street as if he had just exited the building. He points to his left. “There’s where I saw Claude pull a gun on the guy. And then I ran this way,” gesturing to his right, down Western Avenue in the opposite direction.
“By the time I heard the gunshots, I was around the corner.” He walks around the corner to Galveston to retrace his route for us.
Miles was fourteen, the youngest of eight children, when he was convicted of felony-murder on the theory that he was part of a conspiracy to rob the mailman. Even the trial judge, a notoriously harsh sentencer, thought life without the possibility of parole, the mandatory sentence, was too much. He asked the District Attorney to vacate the conviction and agree to something less. The DA refused. He said the jury knew it was giving Miles life. It did not. Juries are never told what sentence their verdict triggers. Defense lawyers who try to tell them are held in contempt. The judge promised to write the pardon board and ask that the sentence be commuted to something less. He never did. I guess he forgot amidst his judicial duties.
I look at the other guys. Like me they are silent. I’ve taken people around my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, pointed out where I played stoopball, the awning over the old couple’s porch where if a hard-hit wiffle-ball landed with a clatter it was called a home-run, even the alley where my friend Fats and I sometimes brawled. Most of the memories are happy, a bit wistful for youth now gone, at worst regret over opportunities missed. But here, Miles’ childhood ended abruptly. From here, he was supposed to go off and die in prison. I have no words when his story ends, only an urge that we move on.
We cross the street and enter the hipster bar to drink our beer and eat our fried fish and burgers. We talk and joke. Matt asks the guys about the prison expression, “ear hustle,” and Foster confirms that, yes, the term refers to when one inmate eavesdrops on others’ conversation. Miles is his usual self, talkative and funny, his shoulders loose, the tour of the opposite corner behind him.
Truth is, we, those of us who never slept behind bars, wanted him — and Foster and Lew — to die in prison. We wanted them to go away, and we still do. And it is we, not “them” or “you.” We includes me. The broken lives, the frustrated dreams, the poverty and racism that engender crime, the caging of people, even children, long past what public safety may justify — despite all that, some of us advocate for the policies that incarcerate to this extent and duration. Most of us ignore the issue, at least until it is our son, our father, our brother or sister. Even then our anger fades and we resign ourselves.
Resignation was an option as well for the many individuals who found themselves in Miles’, Foster’s and Lew’s prison jumpsuits. In our think tank meetings they speak of how men broke and became hopeless shadows of human beings. The steel bars and the guards’ commands entered bodies like a virus and replaced the strong cells with corrosive ones that emptied a man of courage and left a shell, like a tall tree rotted from the inside, ready to crack and topple in the first strong wind.
“You could see it in some guys, how they were dead inside. You can lose your humanity in there, easily. You feel alone. You feel forgotten,” Miles has told me.
I think I would have cracked and broken. Most of us would have.
But Miles and Foster and Lew did not. Miles took college classes, attained A’s in Italian, German and French. He earned certificates for eight years of a Navy Seals training course, and he also taught yoga to other inmates.
“When the other guys saw me take off my shoes and get down on the ground, they’d say, ‘Oh, no, dawg, not that gay stuff again.’ But they eventually got into it too.”
I’ve been to his home. He rents half of a two-family house on a quiet street hidden on a hillside in Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill neighborhood, next to some Mennonites. His landlord told me that every morning, he works out on the sidewalk, singing loud enough to wake the neighbors, but they know him, and no one minds. The Navy Seal routine, I suppose; the child’s pose on asphalt could be painful.
The U.S. Supreme Court eventually decided that to incarcerate people for life without parole for a crime committed when they were juveniles was cruel and unusual punishment. After thirty-seven years, at fifty-one years old, Miles was re-sentenced and released, although not until after the DA delayed his release to pursue a futile appeal, denying him the opportunity to rejoin his then eighty-year-old mother at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
I still can’t truly comprehend Miles’ faith — in life, in God, in the possibility of happiness, in a world, our world, that put him in prison to die at fourteen for a crime he shouldn’t have been convicted of. And to be happy and to persist, with hope and an undefeated faith in the goodness of humanity, even in we who turned away.
* * *
Before the pandemic, the Elsinore Bennu Think Tank for Restorative Justice — Elsinore for Hamlet’s castle and Bennu after the Egyptian deity who became a symbol for rebirth — met every Friday in a handsome brick building, doorways arched in limestone, on the campus of Duquesne University near downtown Pittsburgh. After the meeting some of us would go to the university’s dining room for lunch, “chow hall,” Lew called it, the name for a prison’s cafeteria. I’m the only one of the group who wasn’t incarcerated, and, aside from Charlie, Foster’s best friend from Western Penitentiary, the only white guy.
After about six months, Faruq joined us. He was in a halfway house after his life sentence was commuted. He served forty-four years on a robbery gone awry to a shooting, as retold in Brothers and Keepers, the book his brother, John Edgar Wideman, wrote about the different paths they took from Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood, John to an Ivy League college and a Rhodes Scholarship, Faruq — then known as Robert — to a drug addiction and prison. He quickly establishes himself as a leader, as the guy who, as his brother described forty years ago, thinks and strives big.
When his time in the halfway house ends, he joins us on various outside projects, including “the Big Idea”: Lew’s plan to provide masks, medical advice and food to the elderly in hard-hit neighborhoods during the pandemic. So Thursday afternoons, Foster, Lew, Faruq and I deliver boxes of produce and styrofoam containers of hot meals to the senior housing projects of Homewood and Lincoln-Larimer, both only about five minutes from my neighborhood of lawyers and doctors.
I rent the truck for our food deliveries and call Foster to tell him I’ll be by his place in about five. It’s a senior citizens’ housing project in the Lincoln-Larimer neighborhood. When I arrive, I back the van into an open space — I’m getting good at this — and call him on his cell. While I wait, I say my good afternoon to the old woman with the oxygen tank who is checking out this middle-aged white guy driving a truck. We make small talk about the weather, the onset of spring, the deer that she spotted in the early evening coming from the woods that have overgrown the adjacent vacant lot. There are a lot of vacant lots on the hillsides of Lincoln-Larimer. I wonder if the woman shares the guilt I feel at the pleasure evoked by the trees and tumbling vines and wildlife that live where once families did.
Foster arrives. He nods to the woman and hops into the passenger seat. We bump fists and pull out. He pays a compliment to my driving skills. I ask him how he’s doing with getting his driver’s license, the usual small talk. It occurs to me that I never asked if he ever had a driver’s license. In prison from seventeen to sixty-seven, he may never have had one.
As we head down the hill, he tells me about his recent doctor visit. “So Tom, I went back to that doctor I told you about.”
I haven’t asked why two doctor’s visits in less than a month. Foster is seventy, but he runs every other day. Lew once told me Foster used to run all the time around the track in prison, “like a Nigerian.” These days, Lew and Faruq, both seventy like Foster, lift the boxes of food from the pallet when we collect them at the former Connelly Trade School in the Hill District — everything in Pittsburgh is identified by what it used to be — and wait for Foster and me to run over and then hump them into the back of the truck. And when we deliver the boxes, the same routine: they look forlorn, Lew from too many cigarettes, Faruq with a shattered back and a broken leg that healed shorter than the other. They’re holding boxes and waiting for us, mostly Foster, to take the boxes and run up the stairs to deliver them. But sometimes I see a tremble in Foster’s hands and I worry.
“You know what she asked me at the end of the visit? Do you want to pray with me.”
“Pray for you or with you?”
“With me. I figured it would make her happy, so I said, if you want to, go ahead. So she took my hand, and we bowed our heads and prayed.”
Religion was not a subject we’d ever discussed. Other guys had mentioned their church-going, but not Foster. So I asked.
“Are you religious, Foster?”
“Nah.”
“Me neither. I went to Catholic schools, but I drifted away from it.”
“My mother was.”
“She go to church every Sunday?”
“No, but she knew the Bible inside out. She quoted it to us when we wouldn’t behave. And when we didn’t have enough money to pay the bills or food, she’d write a letter saying all the right things from the Bible and have me take it down to the church and they’d read it and give me money.”
“Were you short of money a lot growing up?”
“Yeah, there was always something.”
“Like gambling or . . . ?” I imagine drinking or maybe drugs. Foster grew up in the 50s and 60s, but drugs already were infecting a lot of families.
“Nothing like that. I mean my mother did play the numbers, but we just didn’t have enough. Always bills to pay, electricity getting cut off, things of that nature.”
“That must have been tough.”
“It was embarrassing. I’d go downtown with her to get handouts and see some of the other kids from school, but we’d avoid each other cause we were all there for the same thing. Our families didn’t have enough money.”
“I remember Anna used to tell me about going downtown with her mother to collect unemployment. Funny, I never asked her how she felt about that, if it was embarrassing to wait in those lines with her mother.”
Foster is silent for a moment. Then he starts again.
“I learned a lot from her.”
“Things she taught you from the Bible?”
“Yeah, but more how to handle things. I’d sit with her at the kitchen table, all the bills spread out before her, and watch while she figured which she could pay, where she could get a little more time. How to get through life.”
My parents never taught me how to make do when there wasn’t enough money. They never had to.
“Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t go away so young, what she could have taught me.”
On another of our food deliveries a few weeks earlier, Foster told me about his mother’s death. She had been diagnosed with cancer, terminal, but she wanted no part of hospitals.
“Tom, people from the South didn’t like to stay in hospitals. They were superstitious about it.”
“You know, my daughter is applying to medical schools and she reads a lot about the way doctors treated Black people. It wasn’t superstition. They did awful things, experiments on people without telling them.”
Foster nodded. “Yeah, the Tuskegee experiments.”
I wasn’t telling Foster anything he didn’t know. “Superstitious” was his polite way of telling me that white people failed his mother.
He continued. “So I called my brother from prison and he complained that she took herself out of the hospital. She wouldn’t relax. She was traveling around the country — Cleveland, Detroit, back home to Montgomery — to say goodbye to everyone.”
Not her son though. He was in a maximum security prison.
We make a right onto Bedford Avenue and drive through the Hill District, the historic African-American neighborhood where Foster grew up. He gives me the tour. To the right was the baseball field where the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the Negro League played. The house where playwright August Wilson lived is on the same street. Wilson modeled a character in his play Gem of the Ocean on the older brother of Foster’s accomplice, Sam Barlow. Sam and Foster went to prison for life for a bank robbery that went bad when a customer decided to act the hero and got shot to death when he tried to wrestle the gun from their accomplice Sharon “Peachy” Wiggins. The brother died of alcoholism while Sam was in prison. A few blocks more: the building that used to be the middle school Foster attended, Letsche Elementary School. He points to the many places he lived in the seventeen brief years before he went to prison. His first home — in fact the entire block and the street itself — are gone, obliterated, and his family removed in the late 1950s in the neighborhood devastation that went by the euphemism of “urban renewal.”
Our talks are not about renewal but loss, what and who are no longer here. Our verbal cadence matches the theme: a flurry of words to try to capture the once vibrant place or person we are discussing, followed by long silences and eyes scanning the empty spaces around us. We are men, so we maintain an even tone and move on to stories and jokes. When I’m alone though and tell my wife Anna the things Foster tells me on our way to help needy people, my voice cracks and tears well.
Tom Farrell is a lawyer who lives and works in Pittsburgh. He writes and teaches about criminal practice, ethics, and the lives of the individuals with whom his work intersects.