Walking with Gail: A mother walks to visit son in jail
Posted by Aaron - 07/02/11 at 05:02:01 am
Gail Hammett walked to the Wesley Street jail once a week to visit her son. (Katie Rausch | Citizen Patriot)
Following Gail, and on some Thursdays, walking right beside, was a trying experience. She’s no one we’re to feel sorry for — a husband in prison for dealing meth, a son in prison for waving a gun at someone. She’s an alcoholic who hasn’t quite gotten her life straightened out with a mentally handicapped son that needs constant care.
She beat cancer, was homeless and has sacrificed a lot for her sons. But she’s made plenty of mistakes, plenty of bad decisions, and cannot be absolved from responsibility for her her son’s life of crime. He’s basically a grade-A screw up.
Gail showed me, and I hoped to show readers, two things. Her story is one of the struggles mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters go through when a loved one is locked up. It’s a story we don’t often tell.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx certainly haunted me while writing this.
Once someone goes to jail or prison, they disappear, for most of us, resurfacing rarely for court or parole hearings. But for others, and for more than we probably care to recognize, those behind bars are still family, they are loved ones and burdens at the same time. Gail let me peek into that.
Her story is also one of a mother’s love for her sons. In the piece, I wrote this:
It is impossible to measure a mother’s love and devotion to her children, but consider this.
The walk from Gail’s Joy Avenue home to the Wesley Street jail is about 2 miles — 2 miles there and 2 miles back. Rarely accepting rides or taking the bus, she has made the trek about 20 times to see her son.
Gail Hammett, 55, walked 80 miles to talk to her son. Fifteen minutes, Gail said, is not enough.
“It’s just enough to make you cry. It hurts.”
Mothers, most likely, will always love their sons. But what does that mean? How does that hold up in extremes? Who could love a young man with eight felonies and headed back to prison for a fourth time? Gail answered those questions and showed the depths that love can reach.
No, I don’t think we have to feel sorry for Gail, but we need to know about Gail. We need to read and understand that this, this story, is a consequence of crime.
I met Gail in December a few weeks before Christmas. I had gone to the Wesley Street jail myself to see a man about a horse. I wrote a story over the summer about a man who saved a horse from starvation. The horse is fine. The man is in jail. I went to check on both.
While waiting at the jail, I heard women around me talking about Gail. She was late that day. They worried about her. I kept my mouth shut, told no one I was journalist and listened. Gail finally showed.
She sat across from in the waiting area. She asked me who I was there to see. “A friend,” I said. I asked her. She told me about her son. I asked about her walking. She told me about that too, as if walking 2 miles in the winter to visit a son in jail was no big deal.
It hit me later that maybe there is a story with Gail. I tracked her down, found her apartment. Katie and I showed up a week later, knocked on her door and introduced ourselves. She recognized me from jail. I told her I was a journalist. She seemed flattered we wanted to do a story on her.
Keeping up with Gail was tough. She canceled on Katie and me a lot. I knew my best shot at finding her was around noon on Thursdays when she would leave her apartment to start walking. But even then, she would leave early, decide to take the bus or somehow, disappear.
I waited an hour for Gail the morning of her son’s sentencing. She never showed. About a half hour after the hearing, she called and left a message. She was hysterical. She begged us not to run the article. She asked us to leave her alone, to let her be.
A few hours later, I went looking for her. She wasn’t at her apartment. I called her. She answered, started crying, and asked what her son’s sentence was. I told her, and she hung up. I waited five minutes and called her back. She answered, still crying, and told me she was wandering around downtown near the homeless shelter. We arranged to meet there.
Gail was talking to her son on a cell phone when we met. She handed the phone to me. Her son thanked me and told me not to write anything bad about his mom. I said I thought what she was doing for him and his brother was amazing and handed the phone back to Gail.
The time on her son’s phone card ran out. For about about the last 30 seconds, Gail said “I love you” as many times as she could, probably for 10 seconds after the call disconnected. We talked for a bit. She told me to print whatever I wanted. She just needed someone to scream at that morning.
I was glad Gail let me tell her story. It needs to be told.
Enjoy.
Walking with Gail: A mother walks to visit her son in jail
Two miles. Fifteen minutes. Two miles.
For six months, this has been Gail Hammett’s weekly routine. Almost every Thursday, she walks nearly 2 miles from her Joy Avenue house to the Jackson County Jail on W. Wesley Street.
She waits, is led up a staircase by a Jackson County Sheriff’s deputy and files into a narrow room. She holds a telephone to her ear and talks to her son — dressed in the orange jumpsuit and sitting behind Plexiglas — for 15 minutes.
She walks down the stairs, outside the jail and another 2 miles home.
“He’s my son,” she said. “I think that any mother would.”
She pauses.
“Maybe I’m not just any mother. I’m his mother.”
Gail Hammett, 55, walked to jail almost every week to visit her 27-year-old son, James Hammett. On Thursday, he was sentenced to 19 to 40 years in prison. He pleaded guilty to first-degree home invasion, felonious assault and two felony weapons violations, his fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth felony convictions. It will be his fourth trip to prison.
But Gail has not turned her back on her son. (read more)
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