(3 of 8)
At noon on Feb. 6, 2001, Sanders walked out of prison and cashed his $40 release check from the department of corrections. He immediately bought a disposable camera and had someone take a picture of him standing in front of a police van. In the photo he looks unusually somber. He's staring straight ahead, as if he's posing for a mug shot. He will carry that picture with him "to remind me," he says.
That afternoon he took a cab to his mother's house, the same squat brick house where he grew up, at the end of the same street in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn where he used to commit death-defying stunts on his homemade scooter; the same street where he eventually sold marijuana, crack, heroin, cocaine and "you name it."
Ophelia Sanders, 70, welcomed Jean home. They sat at her kitchen table and talked for a long while. He oohed and aahed at the pictures in the living room--a brother graduating from college, nephews grown taller than he is. He did not immediately recognize a shot of one of his daughters. There were just two shots of him: Polaroids taken in prison. Neither had been framed.
Ophelia made her son dinner. But he would not be allowed to stay the night, not this time. Like many parolees, Sanders had come home to a family scarred by his past, deeply distrustful of his future. When they learned that Jean was coming out of prison, Ophelia and her two other sons, Orlando and Andrew, had a family meeting. They decided that he would not be welcomed back home. It was painful, but the open-door policy had not worked the past three times Jean was released. So Sanders spent his first night out of prison--and six months' worth of nights to come--in a homeless shelter 2 1/2 miles away.
A short woman with a tuft of white hair and a heart-shaped smile, Ophelia has spent the past 15 years in the maddening loop of mothering a criminal son. She bounces--sometimes in the same sentence--from guilt to anger to worry. She goes to church every Sunday for four hours. She has worked in lingerie factories for 40 years and has never allowed alcohol in the house. Her other sons have managerial jobs. She does not know what makes Jean different. She has not stopped wondering and worrying. Since his release, whenever Jean is late to meet her, Ophelia is sure he's been locked up. "It's easier when he's upstate," she says. "At least I know where he is."
The last time Jean went upstate, in 1994, Ophelia told neighbors that he had gone to college. It was a fib, but she had seen the potential for it to be true. "Jeanie is the gifted one of all my kids," she says. "He can tear down this house or a car and put it back together again." During Jean's latest seven-year stint, Ophelia made the 12-hour trip to visit him three times. That's more than anyone else went. Now Jean is reaching out to his kids. Every week or two he calls two of his daughters. They talk with him but resist his efforts to suddenly be their father. "He needs us more than we need him," says Niferteriah Jones, 20. "It's kind of selfish in a way. I've been accustomed to living my life without a father, and now he wants a big welcome-home party."