Wayne, 49

No matter how deep the scars or how black the gates, the light of understanding will shine through.

It wasn’t until 19 years after the incident, that I finally understood why I killed a man and ended up with a life sentence. Before that, I believed I had murdered someone because that’s just what we thought in my town. If you got into a fight and hit someone over the head with a 40-ounce beer bottle, it meant you killed him before he killed you. That was our false rite of passage. It made sense to me back then. But that wasn’t the whole reason. There was something deeper underneath, an actual motivation I hadn’t uncovered.

That truth came to me in New Folsom Prison when I began complaining about mental health issues to my clinician, Dr. Wells. Her response, every time, was “Maybe it’s something from your childhood.” I remember being frustrated, thinking, what the fuck does my childhood have to do with me now? But Dr. Wells would calmly repeat the question, gently urging me to go back and think about it.

Because of poor insight and awareness, I thought she was just messing with me. I kept complaining for weeks, and every session was the same. She would bring up my childhood, and I would brush it off as nonsense. But somehow, like magic or a spell, I started thinking about my childhood constantly. I thought I knew everything about it because I had lived it. I thought it was stupid to reflect on something I already knew so well. But the truth was, I actually knew very little.

Then one day, while wasting time thinking about my childhood, I remembered something. I was around 14 or 15, I heard my name as I was walking down the hallway in my mom’s house, heading into the living room. The voice came from just outside the front door, which made me curious. I eased closer to listen. It was my mother speaking. She said, “Wayne, he’s doing good. Staying out of trouble, playing tennis, going to school, not selling drugs or stealing cars, and staying out of juvenile hall. But it’s just a matter of time before he goes back to stealing cars and getting into trouble again.”

I remember feeling confused. Why would my mother say that about me? She loved me. She had my best interests at heart. Why would she speak so poorly? I didn’t hear a reply, so I peeked around the corner to see who she was talking to. It was the enemy, the man my brother Rodney and I called “the man.” It was my father.

My father was strong and powerful. He was the personal bodyguard to the Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Tonga, where I was born. That’s between Samoa and Fiji. To put it simply, my mother, my five siblings, and I all got the shit beat out of us for the smallest things, especially me. I had ADHD, and I missed a lot of what I was or wasn’t supposed to do.

When I saw it was my father my mom was speaking to, I felt betrayed, hurt, confused, mad, and angry. I made a pivotal life decision right then. I was going to ruin my life to ruin hers. I didn’t know how, but I made that choice. And after that moment, I never thought of it again. Not that memory, not that decision.

My tennis coach, Jeff Aarons, the greatest man I’ve ever met, used to tell me almost daily, “Wayne, if you go back to the streets, you’ll either be dead or spend the rest of your life in prison.” I swore I’d never stop playing tennis. I loved the way it made me feel. But looking back, it wasn’t the tennis I couldn’t leave behind. It was Jeff. No one had ever appreciated me or encouraged me like he did. Jeff is just like Jesus.

I was one of the first kids to join the East Palo Alto tennis and tutoring after-school program at 14. That was all I wanted to do. For reasons I couldn’t explain to my mother, Jeff, or my little brother Essa, who copied everything I did, I started cutting school. I quit playing tennis. Eventually, I went back to the streets. In less than 16 months after hearing what my mom had said, and after making that life choice to ruin my life to ruin hers, I murdered a man for no real reason during a fight.

I remember asking myself during high-speed chases and street life moments, why wasn’t I playing tennis? I wondered that same thing during difficult times in prison. But I never had time to explore those thoughts. They were like trees to a man in the middle of a battlefield. You see them, they matter, but not when you’re fighting.

That memory from childhood didn’t just explain why I was in prison. It revealed the guilt that had soaked into every corner of my life. The guilt of murdering a man for nothing. The guilt of my brother Essa’s suicide. The early death of my mother and grandfather. The collapse of my family. It sent my brother to Hawaii, 2,000 miles away. It led young people in my community into the same life of crime and violence. People who looked up to me followed my path and ended up with long sentences or life in prison.

That memory hit me 20 years into my sentence. But something else came with it. A concept, a truth. While the events of the past are fixed and cannot be changed, the meaning of the past is still alive. The story can shift. The picture can evolve. We can create an alternate future that responds to the past, not to excuse the evil done, but to offer a path to redemption.

My past was the dark paint on the canvas of my life. But the moment I chose to repent, to turn toward good, that dark paint began to brighten. The story started to change into something more vivid, more alive. This is what life is. We are born into ignorance and slowly come to understand the truth. No matter how deep the scars or how black the gates, the light of understanding will shine through. It comes down to choosing good over evil.