Chrishona Hodges eyes her cellphone, waiting for the black square on the screen to come to life. For the moment, she can see only herself — the oversize tortoiseshell glasses that frame her face and the large, gold hoops that catch the light and jangle as she weaves her way through Jewel-Osco. Holding her phone in one hand, pushing a shopping cart with the other, she moves hurriedly, hoping to make up time. She lost three hours earlier in the day sitting in the waiting room at Cook County Jail, only to find out her visit had been canceled because of short staffing.

Her phone lights up. It’s the video call she’s been expecting from her son Jerryon Stevens. He’s wearing a tan jumpsuit over a white undershirt. His twists fall just below his shoulders. The sizable red tattoo on his cheek of a script W, an homage to a slain friend, is muted by the slightly blurry feed. He sits in a blue plastic chair, his hands cuffed behind his back.

Chrishona smiles when she sees her boy. The jailhouse setting doesn’t jar her; she’s witnessed versions of this for the past three years.

“Hey, Ma,” Jerryon says, looking down at the screen in front of him.

“Happy birthday, Mank,” she cheers, using the family nickname for Jerryon.

Soon several other family members join the call, their attendance announced by the familiar Microsoft Teams ding. They dial in from different cars, all of them making their way to Humboldt Park, where, despite Jerryon’s absence, they plan to celebrate his 24th birthday on this May evening. The call has become a jubilant, chaotic reunion.

“Mank, look what kind of cake I got you,” says Chrishona. “Strawberry shortcake.”

“I don’t like no strawberry shortcake,” Jerryon cracks.

Chrishona ignores the complaint. “And I got some chicken and cornbread,” she continues.

“Y’all gonna have a party over there.”

Chrishona is now in the parking lot. A foreboding gray cloud inches across the Creamsicle sky. When she opens her car door, she pans her phone across the cabin so Jerryon can see his aunt, cousins, and sister and his 5-year-old daughter, Malani.

“Stank,” Jerryon says to Malani with a smile, craning his neck toward the camera for a better look at her. “What’s up? You grown.”

Malani recently had her hair braided for the first time, and Jerryon is still adjusting to her sophisticated new look. The girl smiles shyly, her face obscured by the back seat shadows. Jerryon asks her if she’ll sing him “Happy Birthday.” She remains mute, but after several attempts, Chrishona conducts a spotty group rendition, sung in no fewer than three keys. Even Malani joins in.

Chrishona heads to the home of her mother, Jackie Hodges, letting the others talk to Jerryon as she drives. By the time she arrives and plops down on a sofa, only two minutes of the allotted 30 remain. Everyone but Chrishona has signed off.

“Hey, Ma, you there?” asks Jerryon.

Chrishona takes off her glasses and wipes her eyes. “Yeah,” she answers after a pause, her voice faded, as if someone turned the volume down. “I just wish you was here.”

Jerryon reassures her that he should be home soon. It’s a refrain he repeats often, seemingly both for Chrishona and for himself. Just then, a guard tells Jerryon his time is up. In a matter of seconds, he’s gone. Chrishona sinks into the cushion and cries.

I met Chrishona in 2016 while working on a story for Chicago about Jerryon. He was a sophomore at Orr Academy High School at the time. I had decided to profile him as an example of a young man at an inflection point in his life. A former straight-A student, he had fallen in with a gang in his neighborhood of Humboldt Park and had started selling dope. He was awaiting sentencing on two felony drug convictions. I was interested in exploring what was personally at stake for him, but I also wanted to understand how his choices were influenced by the pressures of living in a struggling community on the West Side.

He’d grown up in a house full of women. Three generations of men in his family had been incarcerated or killed. Jerryon’s father, a thrice-convicted felon, spent most of the boy’s life in and out of prison. Jerryon himself was a smart, big-personality kid who was close to his relatives and fiercely loyal to his friends. But he was also insouciant about his future.

Back then, Chrishona was spending an inordinate amount of time trying to track down her son’s whereabouts as he ran the streets. The most common refrain I heard in the months I spent with Jerryon and his family: “Where’s Mank?” His mother worried constantly that her son might end up in prison or worse.

In the years after that story was published, Chrishona would occasionally share updates with me about her three children. Jerryon’s older brother, Jacques Williams, attended Northern Illinois University for a year before joining the navy. And her youngest, Ja’Ziyah, a zany 3-year-old with energy to burn when I first met her, excelled in school and gymnastics. In 2019, Chrishona married her longtime boyfriend, Ja’Ziyah’s father, and moved their blended family into a townhouse in North Lawndale. Jerryon’s world, however, proved more fractured, unfolding in the borderlands between street life and jail.

In June 2021 came devastating news: Jerryon had been charged with murder for his alleged role in a West Side shooting. Several local outlets reported his arrest with headlines like “Man Once Featured in Chicago Magazine Profile Charged in East Garfield Park Murder.” The mug shot that accompanied the stories was a shock: Jerryon looked so different than he had the last time I saw him. His eyes were stony, and he had several new face tattoos, including a cross between his brows and one on his forehead that spelled “Chrishona.”

I reached out to Chrishona in the days following Jerryon’s arrest, telling her how sorry I was to hear the news. We exchanged a few texts over the next couple of years and started talking more regularly again in the summer of 2023. By then, Jerryon had been in jail for two years, awaiting trial. He’s still waiting. In the meantime, his daughter has grown from a toddler to a girl, and at least 13 of his friends have been killed, Chrishona estimates; others have started families of their own. All while Jerryon, only newly an adult himself, stagnates in his cell, suspended in time.

When I first connected with Chrishona in person again, we both ended up in tears. Now that I’m a mother myself, Chrishona’s struggles hit me in new and personal ways. As we discussed Jerryon’s life in jail, Chrishona kept repeating one word: “irritates.” It irritates her that her 24-year-old son will disappear for days or weeks when he is put in solitary confinement for fighting. It irritates her that he is languishing behind bars for years simply awaiting trial. And it irritates her that if convicted, he could spend decades in prison.

“Incarceration reverberates through the family system,” says Reuben Jonathan Miller, a professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. His research on mass incarceration earned him a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2022. “It’s more than emotional. There are jobs you might avoid because of the hours you need to be available for calls. Loans you take out to pay for legal bills.” The list goes on. “Families experience their own collateral consequences — their own form of incarceration.”

Over time, the impact of cumulative stress can be profound. Research shows that those with loved ones in prison suffer higher rates of heart attacks, strokes, and heart failure. Chrishona, 44, already sees the fingerprint of stress on her medical charts. She’s had to take several leaves of absence from her remote job as a patient access advocate with Endeavor Health because of high blood pressure. And her arthritis has been acting up, too. “At the end of the day, mothers are sitting with the weight of their child’s health as they sit inside cells,” continues Miller. “They bear that burden.”

For Chrishona, the toll of Jerryon’s incarceration takes many forms. There’s the money, for one. To raise $25,000 for a lawyer to represent Jerryon, she had to borrow from her siblings and cash out some of her 401(k). She’s also spent thousands of dollars more for phone and text communication with her son in jail and for deposits for him in the prison commissary. Then there are the hours spent consoling Jerryon and passing along his messages to friends and family he cannot reach directly. The sleep lost from worrying about Jerryon’s mental health. The time spent splitting childcare with Jerryon’s ex-girlfriend to help raise Malani, who calls Chrishona “Ma.” And all the while, there are the ever-accumulating painful moments that rise up when she feels her son’s absence most sharply: an empty house, missed birthdays, holidays without him. But despite the relentless hardships, Chrishona still holds her family together, keeps Jerryon connected to Malani, and fiercely cultivates joy — not just for herself, but for everyone around her.

Chrishona’s reality reflects a staggeringly common one: In the United States, one in four women have a loved one behind bars. And for Black women, that number jumps to one in two. That means more than 42 million women, and 10 million Black women, in America are currently drawn into the punishing ambit of the country’s carceral system — 42 million women left with just the blurry contours of a person, a pixelated face on a screen.

“You straddle the fence between two different worlds, the unfree world and the free world,” says Keeonna Harris, an activist and researcher who is chronicling her own experiences with mass incarceration in a forthcoming memoir. “Women are often left out of the conversation because we ourselves are not the ones in prison, but prison doesn’t just punish one person.”

As long as Jerryon sits behind bars, Chrishona feels trapped, too.

Chrishona’s phone never stops buzzing. It’s the first sound she hears when she rises at 6 in the morning and the last one before she closes her eyes at night. She even dreams about it, often waking up from uneasy sleep to check her text notifications from Jerryon. When her son first went to jail, “every day, all day, he’d be calling me, saying, ‘Ma, I’m ready to come home. Ma, I don’t like it here,’ ” says Chrishona. “I told him, ‘If could get the key and come bring you home, I would.’ ”

Her day usually starts with a text message or call from Jerryon. Most are variations on “WYD” (What you doing?), followed by questions about her work or her plans for the day. Their messages bounce between quotidian details — breakfast menus, family outings, errands — and fantasies about the future. Jerryon likes to dream up moneymaking plans like starting a real estate development company and running a long-haul trucking business. Chrishona has her own ideas, like opening an in-home daycare or launching a party-planning venture.

Sometimes Jerryon will ask his mother to text girls for him — “He got more girlfriends in there than when he was out,” she muses — and Chrishona will send them an old photo of Jerryon. In it, he wears a Christmas-themed raglan shirt, his head cocked slightly down and his eyes looking curiously up at the camera. Matchmaker is just one role Chrishona plays for her son. She’s also his accountant, therapist, life coach, mediator, and dogsitter. It’s exhausting. But still, Chrishona answers the phone.

After thousands of conversations over the past three and a half years, two weigh heavily on Chrishona, haunting her like a grim specter. The first came a little over a year after Jerryon had been in Cook County Jail. He was grappling with depression and separation anxiety. When Chrishona visited him one Sunday, his hands remained chained behind his back. The reason, Jerryon later admitted to his mother, was that he had tried to hang himself. Then, a few months later, during one of their daily calls, Jerryon told Chrishona, “Ma, I can’t do this.” His voice sounded weary and defeated. The next time he called, Jerryon explained that he had been placed in protective custody after a second suicide attempt.

“Sometimes he feels like he’ll be in there for the rest of his life, and it really irritates me as a parent because I’ve always tried to help him,” Chrishona says, her voice small, as if holding back tears. “But now I can’t.”

In the first couple of years after I wrote about Jerryon, he flourished. A woman in Barrington who’d read the story reached out to me, wanting to help. She ended up connecting Jerryon to a coach at a competitive boxing gym in Mundelein, figuring the community of boxers and trainers might keep him out of trouble. Jerryon quickly took to the sport. He commuted to the gym by Metra twice a week. He won his first several fights and displayed great promise in the ring. “His coach was like, ‘You can be better than Floyd Mayweather,’ ” recalls Chrishona. As his grandmother Jackie puts it: “Everyone has a gift, and Mank’s gift is his hands.”

I attended one of Jerryon’s fights in 2017. When he showed me around the gym, his eyes were bright and alert, and he moved with an unencumbered lightness that I hadn’t seen before. As we made our way through the packed space, Jerryon was treated like a celebrity. On this particular night, he was trailed by a group of enthusiastic high school documentarians planning to make a film about his rise in the amateur boxing world.

When Jerryon stepped into the ring, his royal blue headgear vibrant under the spotlight, the room erupted in cheers. Over three rounds, Jerryon’s gestures were lithe and his punches taut and precise. He easily won the fight. To me, he looked like someone with purpose.

For a while, boxing kept Jerryon off the streets. “It was his way to something better,” recalls Chrishona, who had proudly sent me his report card of all A’s and B’s during his junior year. Jerryon won his first nine amateur fights and was planning to compete in the finals of the Chicago Golden Gloves tournament. But a week before that event, in May 2017, he was knocked off his motorbike by a car in a hit-and-run. The accident left him with 12 stitches on his head and a concussion. When he returned to the gym three months later, he seemed more hesitant in the ring. After he lost his first bout, he stopped fighting. He’d sometimes show up at the gym to train, but never with the same enthusiasm or consistency.

At home in Chicago, Jerryon fell back into old habits and would disappear for days at a time. “I was like, ‘You have to be mindful of what you do, because if you get in trouble, it won’t be easy for me to help you,’ ” says Chrishona. But Jerryon, then 17, brushed her off.

Between May and October 2018, he was arrested twice for drug possession and once for driving on a suspended license. One of the drug cases was a felony, but he didn’t serve time. Then that November, the stakes escalated. Jerryon was sitting in a parked car waiting for a friend in Humboldt Park when someone jumped out of a vehicle and started shooting at him. “There were 17 bullets found in the car,” says Chrishona, who believes the incident was gang-related. “And 70 bullets outside of it.” Jerryon was shot twice. He still has a bullet stuck in his left leg and one directly next to his spine.

After that, Jerryon feared getting shot again and started carrying a gun. In January 2019, he was arrested and charged with the unlawful use of a weapon when he pulled out an unregistered semiautomatic pistol while running from police. Chrishona posted his $1,000 bail, and he returned home. Then, that May, Jerryon was pulled over by police and found with another unregistered handgun. That was also a violation of his bail, and the combined crimes landed him a year in prison. Malani, Jerryon’s daughter, was born that August while he was locked up.

After Jerryon was released in April 2020, Chrishona, fearing he’d be targeted again and concerned for her own safety, rarely spent time with him outside the house. For the same reason, she never let Jerryon take Malani anywhere. Jerryon understood why, but the reality of having to keep his distance gnawed at him. It hit particularly hard during one family visit to a mall. “He went with us, but he never got close to us,” says Chrishona. “When we got home, he was teary and said, ‘I hate that I have to be like this. I want to be with my family.’ He wanted to change.”

Malani and her two cousins have turned one corner of Chrishona’s sister’s South Austin apartment into a fantasy beauty salon. The nook is littered with rainbow hairbrushes of every size and shape and a collection of lip glosses that rivals any cosmetics store. One cousin samples a blush, while another tends to a wig she holds between her thighs. As the girl moves the plastic comb back and forth across the synthetic hair, Malani watches carefully, a stylist in training.

The last time I joined Chrishona’s family for a meal, in 2016, this generation of girls wasn’t yet born. Back then, Jerryon and Jacques were the young ones, playing video games and watching YouTube prank shows. They were the ones who grappled with absent fathers. Now they are the absent ones. Jacques, I was heartbroken to learn, had been locked up, too.

On this early June night, the family has gathered for nachos. Chrishona and her three sisters, cousin, and mother are packed into the apartment’s narrow kitchen. Chrishona is considering her options: buttered shrimp, seasoned beef, melted nacho cheese, and a Costco-size vat of pickled jalapeños. Her sisters poke fun at her indecision. Chrishona, a self-described spice addict, takes the ribbing as she piles hot peppers on her plate. The other women, too, make up their plates while holding their phones in one hand. Like Chrishona, they are tethered to their phones for fear they might miss a text or call from an incarcerated family member.

Just then, Jacques’s girlfriend, Aris Haskins, walks into the room. She’s visiting from Lafayette, Indiana, and holds her newborn daughter, Jacques’s first baby, Jersi, in one arm. Wide-eyed with marshmallow limbs, Jersi looks into the phone in her mother’s hand. On it, Jacques’s face fills the screen. He’s calling from Tippecanoe County Jail in Lafayette.

“Wassup, fatso?” he goofs. “Wassup, J-beans? Dadda love you.” He repeats this several more times — “Dadda love you” — until Jersi laughs at the performance. “Look at your dadda,” he tells her, as though she can understand him. “Here I am. Here I am.”

It’s jarring to see Jacques on Aris’s phone, his nose and brow exaggerated as he leans in to better hear his baby daughter. I liked Jacques from the moment I met him. He was a lanky, serious kid who kept his white sneakers pristine and was an honor student and football player. While Jerryon had an edginess to him, Jacques, who is two years older, exuded a quiet ease. He listened before he spoke, and when he did share, he chose his words carefully. “Jacques always felt like he had to be the head of the household,” says Jackie, Jacques’s grandmother. “He really wanted to build himself up so Chrishona wouldn’t have to work so hard to provide for them. That’s how Jacques was ever since he was a little bitty kid.”

After spending three years in the navy, stationed in Virginia, Washington state, and California, Jacques moved to Indiana, where one of Chrishona’s sisters lives, and started working in construction. In 2022, he met Aris, a stylist at his barbershop. Jersi was born last January.

I had seen Jacques in May when I accompanied Chrishona to Zion Temple Church of Christ, a storefront church in South Chicago. Jacques, who regularly drives in from Indiana to meet his mother for Sunday service there, had gotten taller and bulked up since I’d last seen him, years before. Like Jerryon, he now wore his hair in shoulder-length twists. The pastor’s armor bearer since boyhood, Jacques spent that service just a few feet from the pulpit, where the pastor gave a fiery sermon. Afterward, Jacques was agitated. Why, he lamented, had the pastor admonished those who strayed from the righteous path? What about those who tried to do right? Why come to church if the pastor was going to castigate his congregation?

Only later did I learn that Jacques was out on bail that Sunday. He had been charged with reckless use of a deadly weapon at a gas station in Lafayette. The surveillance footage shows a young man walking over to Aris and chatting her up through her passenger-side window. Jacques, in the driver’s seat, joins in the conversation, which appears to grow heated. (Aris says Jacques asked the man to leave.) Jacques opens the car door; Aris attempts to restrain him. But when the man approaches the open door, Jacques fires a gun near him. Chrishona raised $20,000 for Jacques’s bail and another $25,000 for a criminal defense lawyer. And though she later got the bail money back, she had drained her savings and her extended family’s, too. “We all exhausted everything, all the money I had,” says Chrishona. Two weeks after that Sunday service, Jacques was convicted of attempted battery with a deadly weapon and intimidation. He was handed a three-year sentence: one year behind bars, then two of supervised probation.

The sentence enrages Jackie. She believes Jacques, who had no previous offenses, was given an unfair punishment for firing warning shots. “Jacques always did everything right,” she says. “He had his own business. He was in the church all his life. He’s a good father. But he never stood a chance in that courtroom. Not a chance.”

In the South Austin apartment, the girls have turned their attention to a collection of ride-on cars, and they zip around the dining room like it’s a miniature bumper car track. Every crash comes with a shriek of delight.

Aris has moved to a couch. Through the phone screen, Jacques peppers her with questions about Jersi’s well-being. “What time did she take her medicine?” “Is she cold?” “Did she eat enough?” Aris patiently answers every query.

Chrishona sits down beside her. Jacques will call her phone next. And then her sister’s. And Jackie’s after that. Each family member has paid for a 20-minute window so Jacques can spend the evening with his daughter.

Even after Jacques signs off, Aris finds ways to keep him present for Jersi. She wears an old sweatshirt of his that still smells like him and plays a recording of him saying good night as she rocks Jersi to sleep.

Soon Jerryon will dial in, too. Chrishona will get notified only a few minutes before he rings, but he typically gets one of his twice-weekly video calls on a Saturday like this. Chrishona tries to include both boys in all the family gatherings. “I know my kids made some bad decisions, but they still want to be part of things,” she says. “They like to be with us, and I don’t want them to be missing out on stuff.”

When Jerryon does call, he will be one of only three men in attendance tonight — and the second joining from a digital liminal space, his face carouseling around the apartment, moving from hand to hand until the screen inevitably goes dark as his time runs out.

As the primary keeper of Jerryon’s family photos, Chrishona takes special care to show Malani pictures of herself and her father together. In Malani’s favorite photo, taken shortly after Jerryon got out of prison, a grinning Jerryon holds his daughter, then 18 months old, her left arm draped around his shoulder. Malani likes the image so much she insisted that Chrishona make it her iPad’s wallpaper so she can easily look at it dozens of times a day. And when she shows the photo to others, she proudly says, “That’s my daddy.”

Jerryon had just over a year with his daughter before he went back behind bars, and now he has an insatiable appetite for details about her life. He wants to know her favorite school subjects, her birthday wishes, and the names of her friends. He has friends deliver money to Chrishona for gifts for his daughter. He’ll even have his mother call him from outings to Chuck E. Cheese just to hear echoes of laughter as Malani crashes into the ball pit. Those moments buoy Jerryon. They are a wellspring of happiness for Chrishona, too. “Jerryon never spent time with his daddy’s side of the family, but I refuse to do that to her,” says Chrishona. “My son is in jail, and she’s the closest thing I have to him.”

When Malani stays with her grandmother on weekends, she sleeps in Jerryon’s former bedroom. (Malani lived with Chrishona full-time until she started school in 2023. She now stays with her mother Mondays through Thursdays.) Jerryon’s dresser drawers are full of Malani’s clothes, and the floors are covered with dolls and princess accessories. Soon the last vestiges of Jerryon’s presence in the room — his furniture set — will be gone, too. “She wants to turn it into a full Barbie room,” Chrishona says with a laugh.

Over the years, she and her granddaughter have developed their own rituals. On weekends, they go to McDonald’s, where Malani orders a cheeseburger Happy Meal with a mango-­pineapple smoothie. Sundays are for Dunkin’ Donuts; Malani gets a bacon wrap, which she eats before church. Once a month, Chrishona takes her to get her hair braided, though Malani cries throughout the six-hour process. Chrishona also loves shopping for her. In August, she took Malani to Walmart for back-to-school supplies. “That girl wanted everything she see in the store,” recalls Chrishona. “She wanted a belt, some bows, a Tinkerbell dress, bracelets, a necklace, earrings. And I’m like, ‘Girl, we going school shopping. None of this stuff you can wear to school.’ ”

But Chrishona bought it all anyway. And when Jerryon called later that day, Malani proudly showed off her loot. Despite the warm weather, she wore pink-and-white-plaid pajama pants, a Hello Kitty backpack, and a black faux fur jacket. “She put it on and was like, ‘Ma, this look cute together?’ ” Chrishona laughs. “That girl is something else.”

When Malani was younger, Chrishona used to tell her that Jerryon was away at school. But when Malani turned 4, Chrishona told her the truth. Or rather, she confirmed her granddaughter’s suspicions after getting a text from the girl’s mother with a string of crying emojis and a report that Malani had taken her seat belt off and stood up in the back seat of the car. Trying to get her to sit down, the mother told her daughter she’d end up in jail if she continued to misbehave. Malani’s response? “I want to go to jail because I want to be with my best friend, my daddy.”

I remember exactly when I got the news about Jerryon’s arrest on murder charges. I was driving on a wooded road in northern Wisconsin. I was four months pregnant, and my husband and I were visiting our favorite Midwest retreats before the blurry days of new parenthood arrived. We’d spent the previous months immersed in the familiar conversations of first-time parents, wondering what our daughter would be like and how she might navigate the world. My phone dinged with an email from a Chicago Tribune reporter. She asked whether the Jerryon Stevens who had just been charged with murder was the same young man I’d written about in 2016. I Googled his name, and there he was, standing against a gray wall, staring into the camera for his mug shot. It was a gut punch. I immediately thought of Chrishona. The nightmare that had swirled in her head since Jerryon was a boy had become real.

According to the police report, in December 2020, Jerryon was behind the wheel of a stolen Honda in East Garfield Park when two of the passengers got out and started shooting at two young men on the sidewalk. One of them was hit in the abdomen and was pronounced dead later that night at Stroger Hospital. The shooting was recorded by a convenience store security camera, and police say the video shows Jerryon in the driver’s seat.

It was more than a week after his arrest, Chrishona says, before Jerryon learned of the specific charge. Chrishona was on Jackie’s porch when he called from jail to tell her he’d been charged with first-degree murder, with the possibility of life in prison. When she heard the words, Chrishona’s heart raced and her vision blurred. She tried to inhale, but her breath was shallow. She was having a panic attack. “It felt like a brick went through my chest and started crushing my heart,” recalls Chrishona. “It hurt so bad. I had tried and tried and tried to tell him.”

On the phone, Jerryon told her he hadn’t been driving the car that night. She believes him, especially after watching the security footage. The driver, she says, had no visible face tattoos. Jerryon plans to plead not guilty. As of late November, no trial date had been set.

Looking back, Chrishona wrestles with the fear that she may have taken the wrong approach with her boys. “I tried to work so much to make sure they had everything, but that left Jerryon and Jacques with so much free time. Maybe if I cared more about the time spent with them versus being able to financially take care of my kids, my baby probably wouldn’t even be in jail.” Chrishona pauses. That thought is difficult to endure. It also forces her to consider something so profoundly painful, Chrishona rarely articulates it. “If they do convict my son, I can never fix that. I can never, ever go back and fix that.”

It’s a few minutes before 11 a.m., and Chrishona sits between her daughter, Ja’Ziyah, now a tall, athletic 12-year-old, and Malani in the tin box lobby of Cook County Jail. Chrishona is agitated. She’s been waiting for over an hour, her phone and car keys locked in a cubby.

Malani is dressed in purple pants, a pink jacket, and high-top shoes with purple accents, an outfit she carefully picked for this occasion. As the kindergartner tugs at Ja’Ziyah’s long braids, Ja’Ziyah radiates a gentleness that lends her an air of wisdom. She seems content to serve as her niece’s plaything.

The room is crowded with visitors, most of them women and children. Officers sit behind a sheet of plexiglass. A sign taped to it outlines codes for both dress and decorum. Chrishona notes that several visitors have already been turned away because of bare shoulders or knees. After three years of visits, she is well practiced in the art of dressing for jail.

Around 11:40 a.m., the three are shepherded through the metal detectors that open up into a dim hallway — a familiar choreography. An officer informs them that they will be able to hug Jerryon at the end of the visit. Such contact was banned until recently — a policy that lingered from the days of COVID. This will be only the second hug Chrishona has given her son since he was put in jail back in 2021.

They are led into a gym, where basketball hoops hang above long picnic tables marked with paper numbers. Chrishona’s group is assigned to table 9. A set of plastic lawn chairs waits for them. The booming acoustics of the large room make it hard to hear, especially near the play mats the jail provides for kids.

When Jerryon enters, Chrishona’s whole body smiles. He looks jarringly older to me. And he’s taller, too. As a young man, he’s grown into his features. Nine years ago, the teenage Jerryon never seemed to sit still. His fingers fidgeted and his eyes darted around the room in every conversation. Now he emits a calm and confidence that defy the years spent behind bars. The change unnerves me. How is it that after all this time in a cell, Jerryon seems more content than before? And then I see the answer.

“What’s up, Stank?” he says, leaning toward Malani. Jerryon’s face stretches into a mischievous grin, his teeth bright pearls. Malani shrinks in her chair, contracting at the attention. She doesn’t answer.

Jerryon keeps trying. “Your birthday coming up. What you want?” Still nothing.

For all the excitement she exuded ahead of time, Malani stays quiet throughout the visit, overwhelmed by the moment now that she’s actually with her dad. Watching Malani reminds me of my own daughter, who will spend days anticipating a visit from a favorite family member, only to clam up when they arrive. (In the weeks that follow, Malani will repeatedly ask her grandmother to recount in exact detail the 20-minute visit.)

Leaning back in her chair, Chrishona launches into what feels like a conversation she and Jerryon started long before this visit began. She tells him about an old video she unearthed of him as a teen, dancing in front of the TV in his Gucci slides and sweatpants. “You was so funny,” she says with a chuckle. The memory makes her son laugh, too.

Ja’Ziyah promises to record her upcoming school drum line performance. Then the three lose themselves in gossip about a problematic neighbor who refuses to vacate his apartment. It’s almost as though they aren’t under harsh fluorescent lights in a boomy jail gym but back on their front stoop in North Lawndale watching cars and people pass by.

As the end of the visit draws near, an officer instructs the three to line up for hugs. Malani approaches Jerryon first. Jerryon crouches down, nuzzling his face into hers. He whispers into her ear and gives her a kiss. Chrishona follows with a hug, then Ja’Ziyah. I give one, too.

Once back in the hallway, Ja’Ziyah stops at a narrow window that looks onto the gym. She catches a final glimpse of her brother at the table and waves. Seeing her, he brightens. His smile is visible across the room.

No one is more attuned to Chrishona’s labors than her mother. For two decades, Jackie has watched her daughter work multiple jobs as she tries remain a ballast for her three children. “I saw her strive so hard to really be a good mother and provide for her kids,” says Jackie, sitting on Chrishona’s porch on a cloudless Saturday in October. “Neither dad was any good, so it was really on her. Sometimes she blame herself, but I let her know that she was always a good mother to them, a hardworking mother.”

Chrishona’s calendar is packed with parties and family gatherings, but Jackie believes the unrelenting heartbreak is eroding her daughter. “It’s like she keeps herself busy so she doesn’t have to think about it,” says Jackie. “She’s trying to keep it all together, but inside it’s killing her.”

I’ve seen it as well in the late-night texts Chrishona sends me during stretches of her anxiety-induced insomnia. “I miss them so much,” she’ll write. “I just want my babies to come home.”

At 63, Jackie knows the long shadow of incarceration. Back in 2016, I asked her how many men in her family had wound up in jail or killed. It took her three attempts to tally the total. In the end, she counted 20. When I ask her now how that number has changed in the intervening years, her answer is more circuitous, often detouring into details of family members who have been imprisoned for more than two decades. She figures the number now sits closer to 35. In those eight-plus years, eight more family members have been killed and another six have served time. “I’m waiting on this cycle to break,” says Jackie. “I just really want it to break.”

Both Jerryon and Jacques have plans for when they get out — assuming, in Jerryon’s case, that he isn’t handed a decades-long sentence. Lately, Jerryon has been talking about opening a boxing gym and starting to train again. Jacques will return to his construction job, which his boss has held for him. Chrishona plans to throw Jacques, whose sentence ends in January, a Grease-themed party. And for Jerryon, she’s considering a Looney Tunes one, since Tasmanian Devil was one of his childhood nicknames. “We always speaking Mank into existence in 2025,” says Chrishona. “He missed so much. He told me when he get home we doing everything all over again.”

But even when Jerryon and Jacques do return, it won’t be easy. They will stand among the 20 million Americans with felony records who remain forever partitioned off from parts of society. They will enter a new reality where their convictions mean they may struggle to find employment and secure housing.

On the porch, a few feet from Jackie, Chrishona decorates her iron fence for the season — string spiderwebs, felt tarantulas, and headless scarecrows. A two-story nylon Grim Reaper towers above her, occluding the front windows, its red talon fingers reaching out to the street.

Malani sits nearby on the sidewalk, drawing pictures with colored chalk. She pops a sour gummy in her mouth and tops it with a spritz of candy spray. She’s been looking forward all summer to dressing up for Halloween but hasn’t yet committed to a costume. A cowgirl, Barbie, a bumblebee, and a spooky bear are contenders.

Jerryon calls around 2. Chrishona seems relieved; she had been waiting all morning to hear from him. Someone hands me the phone.

“Hey, Jerryon, I finally reached you,” I joke. After my visit earlier in the year, Jerryon had only sparingly answered my texts. He also kept promising to call but never did. He kept changing his mind about doing a full interview. In the end, he decided against it, citing his ongoing case.

“What’s good, Elly?” he says.

“Your dog is really into me,” I say, petting his pit bull mix, Red. “She won’t leave my lap and now I’m covered in dog hair.”

He laughs. Red has lived with Chrishona for the past several years. The dog pees everywhere, but Chrishona will never give her up. Red is part of the constellation that helps Chrishona feel close to her son.

I describe for Jerryon the scene at home: Malani’s chalk-covered pants, creepy stuffed scarecrows slumped in a chair, candy wrappers strewn across the stairs. I realize that I, too, want Jerryon to feel immersed in today’s fun. But while playing narrator is a familiar task, this particular approach feels uncanny.

Nearly nine years ago, I wrote a story hoping to give people a glimpse into a world — Jerryon’s world — they might not otherwise see. It was an act of witness, showing what it means to survive, and even possibly thrive, against the odds. Now, sitting on Chrishona’s porch, I consider a new question. As I describe the happy setting to Jerryon over the phone, I reflect on a concern Chrishona contemplates in her quiet moments: Do her relentless efforts to create a stable, joyful home do anything to lessen the collateral costs of her sons’ incarceration? There’s no clear answer, but Chrishona’s fight for normalcy remains indefatigable.

I pass the phone to Ja’Ziyah, who shares the events of the day. Malani stands next to her, sheepishly chewing on candy while peeking at the phone screen. The conversation only lasts a few minutes, and Jerryon promises to call back shortly.

After Chrishona hangs up, she turns to her granddaughter. “Malani,” she says pointedly. “How much candy you eat?” Malani smiles devilishly. “Girl, you gon’ be sick.”

But Chrishona doesn’t take away the treats. Why spoil the fun? She shepherds Malani inside the house. The girl needs to get changed for a cousin’s birthday party. After that, the two have another gathering, an annual memorial celebration for Chrishona’s cousin, who was shot and killed in 2016. Tomorrow, Chrishona will take Malani and Ja’Ziyah apple picking and buy them ice cream for lunch.

By Monday, Jerryon still hasn’t called back. The brief afternoon check-in turned out to be his last for a while. Jerryon had warned Chrishona that he’d soon be placed in solitary confinement — a delayed punishment, he said, for a recent fight. No one informs Chrishona that Jerryon has indeed been moved to “the hole,” but she intuits the fact from his silence.

In the days that follow, the quiet continues. Chrishona doesn’t know how long Jerryon will be kept in isolation — days, weeks — or when he’ll call again. Malani and Ja’Ziyah don’t know either. No one does. While she waits, Chrishona clocks in at work and finishes her Halloween decorating. She carts Malani around for another busy weekend and prays at Sunday church. She checks on Aris and Jersi and takes Ja’Ziyah to school. Wherever she goes, Chrishona keeps her phone close. And whenever Jerryon finally does call, Chrishona will answer. She always does.