On the Frank Brown Recreation Center’s blue-green basketball court, boys play a jubilant, thumping rhythm with their high-bouncing, wild dribbles; they pause their athletic drumming to look at Calvin Smith’s tall and powerful frame.
He is maybe three times their height, quadruple their build and perhaps infinitely times more likely to make the shots they’re missing, so it’s understandable that they look on worriedly.
But he smiles at them.
“You guys doing good?" Smith asks.
“It’s hot,” one of the kids says.
“Too hot for me to play, that’s for sure,” Smith responds with a smile.
He scans the court for shade because with sun like this, even the white flowers imprinting his black shirt could dry up.
This heat is no joke, he says. It’s a heat that crisps hair, burns necks and glues T-shirts to skin, a heat that could cook beetles on the road and boil orange Gatorade by the bench.
In his beige pants and brown loafers, he wipes sweat from his trimmed beard and points toward the kids. When he speaks in his deep tone, it sounds like he could narrate a movie trailer.
“I hope these kids know, man, that it’s not just about winning here,” Smith said. “You have to win in all aspects and in life — especially life.”
Smith understands the opposite all too well. He lost the most valuable thing he had and gained something unwanted. For him, to feel sunlight is to feel freedom.
In 2011, the Auburn native was arrested on a burglary charge and later convicted. He lost 10 months of life in the Lee County Detention Center. For the first time, Smith was no longer a free man.
His story, however, is as gray as the cell that encaged him and encages millions right now.
In 2009, amid the recession, Smith left his alma mater, Johnson Smith University, after a dispute with a professor that deterred him from getting a bachelor’s degree in visual and performing arts.
He was only six credits shy of a degree.
He came back home to Auburn in June 2009. A flailing job market destined to trap him in poverty welcomed him home. That month, the unemployment rate was 10.5 percent in the city, according to the U.S. Bureau Labor of Statistics, meaning roughly 5,500 people were struggling to find work in Auburn. Smith was one of them.
The only papers folded in his wallet were cards from businesses not hiring. Still, he managed to make money here and there, just enough for him and his girlfriend. Then, his girlfriend broke the news. He was about to be a father.
“I was nervous. The economy was terrible, and my girlfriend at the time was constantly reminding me that in nine months, my son was going to need everything,” Smith said.
The recession was pinning down his chance at prosperity and slowly crushing him. Some nights, he felt like he was being buried by his own negative thoughts, he said. It was suffocating.
In December 2011, as the country slowly crawled its way out of a recession, he mistakenly saw a way to gasp some air, to catch a small break and pay off large bills. He was still in peril financially, so when Smith saw a wad of cash nestled in a car seat, along with a new iPhone, his intoxicated state enhanced his conviction to break in.
Smith had never stolen before, but money was nonexistent, and no one was going to get him out of this trench. He grabbed what he could and ran.
“It’s lawless, what I did,” Smith said. “I knew right away that I was wrong. No doubt about it.”
Smith passed out before he could get far. The judge sentenced him to 10 months.
“That was the first time I ever stole, and I got caught. To me, that’s a sign,” Smith said. “That’s God telling me, ‘Let me show you what happens to people that lead this life.’”
His God showed him right away. Smith, with a son soon to be born, was given a cell and a uniform.
Smith was immediately put on three months of 23-hour lock-down.
“That’s 23 hours of being inside a cage, basically like an animal. I got out for an hour a day,” Smith said.
The only escape came when he closed his eyes and dreamed himself as far away as he could.
“I’d tie an old sock around my head because they turn the lights on at 4 a.m., and they don’t go off until a certain time,” Smith said. “So, I’d cover my eyes and go to sleep, and trust the man next to me; try to have a good relationship with him and not step on his toes to make sure he wouldn’t kill me in my sleep.”
He’d dream of being back home with brothers and sisters that told good jokes and mommas and papas that cooked great food. He’d dream of buying a lemonade whenever he wanted, of a fresh breeze washing over him and feeling raindrops dance on his car. The little things, he said. But his eyes always betrayed him, and he’d awake back behind cells, back inside that cage.
The only way he could tell time was by tracking the few rays of light breaking through a window at the top of the housing unit in jail.
Only these tiny streaks of light managed to roam freely inside those walls.
One day still makes him squint his eyes in disgust as he tells what happened. There was a man there accused of rape, and when an inmate discovered this, he pestered him about it.
Smith heard the man accused of rape whisper to another inmate, “I got this toothbrush I’ve been sharpening for 18 months. If he keeps talking, I’m going to get him.”
“When I heard that, I just thought, ‘Man, I don’t want to see that. I don’t want my eyes scarred,’” Smith said.
Smith lingered in this environment for the next several months. Freedom, he said, felt closer and closer with each wisp of a dream, with each fleeting image of family and his newborn son. He’d dream and dream and dream. On June 25, 2015, he woke up to the sound of an opening cell door.
Smith couldn’t wait for his sister and brother to pick him up, so, as a newly free man, the first thing he did was get as far away as he could from jail, just like in his dreams. He got his possessions and walked to TigerTown.
Smith says he approached life with newfound vigor after jail. He quickly found a job and felt proud to be a father for his son.
He was focused on not becoming part of the percentage of ex-inmates who fall victim to the system’s high recidivism rates. The 2017 return rate for a burglary charge, according to the Recidivism Center, is 62 percent. Smith is part of the other 38 percent.
“You never learn a lesson if you don’t make a mistake,” Smith said. “As long as I keep working hard and God protects me, I know I’ll be OK.”
As far as life after jail, he despairs of not being able to vote in the upcoming midterms. By 2020, however, he will be able to.
When he walks, he does so with a gentleness that juxtaposes his appearance. Smith says this is how jail changed him.
When he plays basketball, he doesn’t use his tall frame to drive in the paint. Instead, he shoots from the perimeter where he can’t hurt people, can’t get into any altercation.
This is how jail has changed him. He is constantly cautious, even in a pickup game.
The poisonous decision he made, the one that held him down like lead, sometimes feels attached to Smith, but he finds ways to lift himself and live.
He simply wants people to see mistakes for what they are and have mercy on those who failed and are striving to turn those mistakes around — to turn them into a second shot.
He is thriving with work and family and feels at peace with where he is now, he said.
The kids have left the court, the sun still beams. Pushing the metal button on the water fountain burns, and the room-temperature water gushing out barely refreshes dry throats.
The critters chirping in the tall grass behind the rec center sound louder without the game, and for Smith, this is the sound of freedom.
“Right now, I’m going home, I’m showering and I’m watching Auburn get its second win tonight with my family,” Smith said. “I dreamt about days like these.”
Many of those incarcerated still do.
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