The Moth Radio Hour: Changes of Heart

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This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX, and I'm Suzanne Rust, the curatorial producer at The Moth.

This time we'll hear stories about about changes of heart, those moments when something shifts and alters your perspective.

We'll be hearing from a writer whose sense of self has changed in a flash, a story about a man who made it across the finish line despite the obstacles, and a mother who realized that sometimes it's more than okay when your life goes off script.

Which is exactly what happened with our first storyteller, Andrea King Collier.

She shared her story at the West Virginia Culture Center in Charleston, West Virginia, where the theme of the night was a more perfect union.

Here's Andrea live with them all.

I got married in 1982

and we were so cute,

but we couldn't have been more different.

I was a privileged little only child.

a princess of quite a lot.

And my husband was one of six.

When I first met his parents I said

how do you remember six names

and that did not go over well

but we did have something in common.

We were kids of the 60s

and

we did civil rights marches.

We helped register people to vote.

We knew about segregation.

and we knew that our folks expected a whole bunch out of us.

We were their legacy

and they had a script for us

that we passed on to our two kids when we got married.

Our whole family unit was the Huxtables before they were Huxtables.

In fact, our motto was, I brought you into this world and I will take you out.

And the kids knew it.

My daughter

followed the script.

She got her dream job after going to her dream school, married her dream man and had her dream baby,

and then quit her dream job to take care of the dream baby.

My son, on the other hand, had a script of his own.

What he did, though, is his script involved living in the basement and never coming out.

And no matter how much we tried to get him out of the basement, it wasn't happening.

We threw money at it, we threw exterminators at it, still in the basement.

Except for one day,

he just left.

And he stayed gone for a couple of weeks.

Now,

a young man goes off and does his thing and you wouldn't think anything about it, but without any notice, no text, no phone calls,

I, as his mother, got worried because it's not a good thing for a black man to go disappearing.

It worried me.

And just as when I was about to call the police, He calls me

and he says, Mom,

I need to come over because I have something to tell you.

Now, if you have a kid who's of a certain age and they say, I have something to tell you, what you know is nothing good is going to come out of that conversation.

When these conversations come up, they do not say, Mom, I hit the lotto.

And I have enough money to move out.

Mom, I got a new job, and I have enough money to move out.

You see where I'm going with this move-out thing.

Mom, I have met Beyonce.

She has fallen in love with me.

She's leaving Jay-Z,

and I'm moving out.

None of that is happening.

I started thinking about all the things that it could be.

And I get really worried.

I go tell my husband that he's on his way over.

And he says, well, it won't be that long.

I'm looking out the window, and he's pacing up and down the driveway.

He's rehearsing.

It's going to be a doozy.

So he comes upstairs

and he says.

Mom, we're going to have a baby.

Who's going to have a baby?

He has a girlfriend, but I have only seen her from the waist up in the car.

Now, under ordinary circumstances, because this is not the script,

you've got a simple script.

Go to college, get a good job, don't go to jail, don't get anybody pregnant.

And they said,

we're going to have a baby.

So my head could have popped off my shoulders.

But something happened.

It was either the God voice,

the good voice, or the crazy voice

said,

ask him to say it again.

And I say, will you say that again for me?

And he says,

we had a baby yesterday.

You know, that could have gone all kind of wrong.

Instead, because I'm in shock, I say, How nice for you.

I'm thinking in my head,

calm this down, ask nice basic questions.

Are mama and baby fine?

Are they home from the hospital?

And then the thing that I want to know for some reason is what's the baby's name?

Because

millennials can come up with some hell of names.

and black millennials can really come up with some names

you know they could be Jack Daniels Wakanda

Apple

what's the baby's name

the baby's name is Miles

okay that's good

That was the best thing out the whole damn thing.

And as I was trying to explain to him that we have colds, so we can't go that day to see the baby,

he gets the hell up out of there before I figure out he's gone.

He is gone.

And so, what do you do when you are a new grandmother, there is no baby to see,

and you don't have a nine-month gestation period?

I get in the car and I go to Target.

Then let me tell you something about Target.

You can work out a whole lot of shit in the aisles of Target.

So I get there and I don't go to the baby section.

I'm everywhere else.

But the God boy says to me,

call Gussie.

Now, Gussie is my mother's oldest friend.

And when my mother died, she and several of her other friends stood in the gap for me.

And when I need to figure out something, I call.

So I call and I'm fine until I hear her voice.

And I am hysterical.

I am like having a fit in the store.

He had a baby I didn't know.

I just saw it from the head up.

This is awful.

He didn't follow the script.

I'm just going.

And people are walking by me in Target trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Lady, are you okay?

My mother's friend says,

Let me get this straight.

Christopher has a baby.

Yes.

Had it yesterday, yes.

You didn't know?

Yes.

Is the baby going to live with you?

No.

Okay, good.

Let's start with that.

Then she says,

okay, this is what you're going to do.

You're going to stop crying.

You're going to put on your big girl pants.

And you are going to be the best damn grandma you know how to be because that's what you had.

Okay.

And then I had questions, but she hung up the phone.

She had said everything she needed to say, so she was gone.

She was out of there.

So what do I do?

I start buying up everything in the baby section.

I bought so much stuff that my husband had to go back and get the rest of the crap.

But on the way home, I got really upset.

So I come in, and my husband is there, and my daughter is visiting.

And I said, Why the hell did anybody not tell me?

And my daughter says,

Well, you are really scary.

What do you mean I'm scary?

You are Oprah scary.

And I'm thinking, Oprah, that's not bad.

She says, no, no, no, not you get a car, you get a car, you get a car, Oprah.

You are Miss Sophia, Oprah.

You told Harpo to beat me, Oprah.

And I had a little problem with that, but

she goes on to explain.

She says, you know the Wiz?

Yeah.

You know Evelyn, who says, don't bring me no bad news?

Yeah.

You Evelyn.

You are Claire Huxtable.

From the day we were born, you got the Claire Huxtable side eye before she did.

There wasn't nothing I could say about it.

Sometimes you just got to give it up.

So I waited and waited a few days so we could actually see the baby.

We'd go to see the baby and I had never met her folks before.

In fact, I'd never had a conversation with her.

So we get there, they bring the baby out,

put the baby in my arms,

and my heartbreak broke wide open.

I'd never experienced anything like that, not even with my own kids.

This beautiful baby.

And I looked at him, and I saw my husband, and I saw my daughter.

I saw me.

But I also saw my son, the baby's father, and I saw all the people in my life who had ever loved me in this baby's face.

So I started looking at my purse and I started looking at the baby and I looked at the purse purse again.

How long do you think it would be before I put the baby in the purse and left

that they would figure out he was gone?

So

my daughter had been texting me the whole time to tell me not to do anything crazy.

And just as I was about to try to bust that move,

I heard the text noise.

I said, okay, I can't do that.

But it was weird.

So I'm looking at the baby and I'm thinking about Toni Morrison.

When my kids were teenagers, I heard Toni Morrison say,

when the child walks into the room, does your face light up?

Okay, they were teenagers.

Nobody's face was lighting up for them.

But with Miles,

my face was all lit up.

And I remembered the rest of it, which is

when your child walks into the room, does your face light up?

Because

that's how they know how you feel about them.

And I was determined.

at that moment for the rest of my life, whenever he walked into the room, my face was going to light up because I want him to know he is just that loved.

Thank you.

That was Andrea King Collier, a journalist, photographer, and author based in Lansing, Michigan.

Andrea and her husband Darnay have been married for over 40 years before he died sadly in 2023.

In addition to Miles, Andrea's daughter has given her another grandson, Bryce.

And when Andrea talks about her grandchildren, she says, I look at them in wonder.

They take my breath away.

Fun fact, Andrea's two grandsons call her Gogo.

And once you get to know her, Gogo seems like a very appropriate title.

She is a force of nature.

I was lucky enough to spend some time with Andrea when we did our main stage show in New Orleans.

We had a great time hanging out and buying way too many bottles of hot sauce.

I caught up with Andrea again a few years ago, and serious topics couldn't be avoided.

The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmed Aubrey had all become part of a battle cry, forcing America to confront the racism of its past and present.

So, I just wanted to ask you honestly: how are you doing, and what are your thoughts on this moment we're living in?

It's

crazy.

So, I was born in 1956, and so I lived through the first big wave of the civil rights movement.

And this is different.

This feels totally different.

So I'm really interested to see what comes out of this.

Yeah.

That's just me sitting there waiting.

It does feel different, though.

I hope we're going to make progress here.

I really do.

I wanted to ask you something you mentioned in your story.

You talk about being raised to be a positive reflection on your race and passing that along to your kids.

You talk in your story about following a script.

And, like, we all know that all parents have a script in mind for their kids, but as black people, the stakes are higher.

I really think that it was probably a bigger burden for my kids than it was for me.

I don't know that I really had any choice.

I followed the script.

I was the first one in my family to get a college degree, and there was no,

I mean, we never had any conversation about, hey, when you get out of high school, what are you going to do?

I already knew what I was going to do.

And my friends, sometimes when we're sitting around talking about how we were as kids, somebody said the other day, oh no, nobody was going to get close to you and derail your folk script for you.

Everybody knew that.

And I'm like, oh, okay.

The most militant thing that I did that was off script was I did not go into politics.

Oh, was that expected of you?

I think so.

Well, there's still time, my friend.

I think the world can be total and fear right now.

And no, but

you can make your announcement here for the month.

Yeah, no.

But I think that my grandparents would have loved that.

That would have been the American dream for them.

Yeah.

But storytelling's pretty great.

Yeah, they wouldn't have quite understood that.

They're like, no, what is it?

Because I know my grandfather used to say, no, what is it that you do?

That was Andrea King Collier, aka Go-Go.

You can hear more of our conversation at themoth.org.

Coming up, what's in a word?

A writer from Pittsburgh reflects on a life-altering experience he had with one of the most toxic words in our history.

That's when the Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX.

I'm Suzanne Rust.

In this show, we're talking about changes of heart.

Now we're going to hear from writer Damon Young.

I want to give you all a heads up.

This story contains multiple uses of an historically heavy, controversial word that stirs up a lot of pain and emotion.

It always has, and it always will, but we'll let Damon speak for himself.

And another heads up, Damon told the story at our Moth Main Stage at the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, an outdoor venue obviously.

The evening was filled with firefly light and the sound of crickets, but also, and you'll hear this, the sound of jets flying overhead.

Here's Damon Young live with the moth.

Thank you.

So before I begin, like I have to say that between the setting, the abbion, and the audience, this kind of feels like a deleted scene from Get Out.

Like, um...

Like, I don't know if I'm up here to tell a story or get auctioned off.

So.

All right, so I'm from Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA.

Born and raised, and I still live there now.

And for people who haven't been there,

it's a city that is so

spiritually, culturally, politically,

atmospherically white

that Rick James once tried to snort it.

Like it gets, it's a city that gets these

national laws for being like the most livable city and the next Brooklyn or the new Seattle or the 21st century's Austin.

But what it really is, is Wakanda for white people.

And again,

that provides necessary context for a very quick story about my parents who love to tell stories.

Okay, so it's 1985.

I'm six years old.

I'm actually being babysapped by my sister.

And my mom and my grandmother, who I called Nana, they were post-Sunday brunch browsing at this deli in Pittsburgh, in this neighborhood called Squirrel Hill.

So there's some sort of altercation or disagreement with the cashier, who was a white boy who was maybe about 18, 19 years old.

And it ends

with him calling my mom and my nana black nigger bitches.

Furious,

My mom and my Nana leave the store,

go up the street to a supermarket, Chineagle, to get my dad.

And my dad is doing what dads do, you know, in produce, probably, you know,

tasting steak, or even doing whatever dads do in supermarkets, and get him.

So they all go back to the store.

And my dad very calmly approaches the cashier.

My wife and my mother-in-law said that you insulted them.

And I would like for you to apologize to them.

Cashier refuses.

So then my dad says, okay, well, I'm going to count to 10.

And by the time I reach 10,

if you don't apologize, I'm going to come behind that counter and kick your ass with this baseball bat.

I forgot to mention that, that my dad had a baseball bat with him because my dad is apparently black beating it John Wick.

And so My dad counts, literally starts counting.

Cashier doesn't apologize.

My dad swings the bat at him.

Cashier picks up a knife, swings it at my dad.

So they're knife fighting and bat fighting, and this is happening

over the register.

In the meantime, my mom and my nana, and again, my mom,

big fan of Pat Matheny,

Steely Dan.

Tina Turner, she was a bank teller at this time.

My grandmother, my grandmother, my nana wasn't just white gloves on Sunday.

She was white gloves like a Burger King on Wednesday, like white gloves, you know, to, I don't know, to wash her hands.

Like, this was who she was.

And they're, and, and again, they're in the store throwing,

throwing jars of MMs and bigoted pickles and

racist, you know, Reese cups and, you know, just making this huge mess in the store.

After about four or five minutes, you know, it spills out into the sidewalk and the police come.

And my parents and my dad are arrested,

and then they're taken to the police station or whatever.

And they're approached by some black woman with some sort of authority, a sergeant or lieutenant or something like that, who takes one look at them.

And it's like, okay, you brunch-attending, Bonneville Drive-I mean, black people are not supposed to be here.

Just tell me what happened.

So they say what happens,

and the sergeant says, Okay, well, you're free to go.

What?

You are racially harassed.

You're free to go.

So, what about the stored?

If you black people and get the fuck out of here before these white people figure out, I'm letting you go.

So, again, my parents love to tell stories, and they repeat this story

at barbecues, at funerals,

carpool, taking me to AU basketball games while sitting in the living room

during commercial breaks.

And while this happened,

I realized that being called a nigger was like this terrible, awful thing.

But a part of me kind of wanted to be called one by a white person

just so I could fight them and beat them up and then have a cool story like my parents had.

And even my sister, who's nine years older than me, you know, had this cool, I'll call it a fight story about a time when she was in high school choir practice.

And this white girl in the band called her a nigger.

And then my sister kicked her ass and then got suspended from school.

And she was terrified, you know, that once my parents found out she got she got suspended, she would get in trouble.

But once my parents found out why she got suspended, she didn't get grounded.

She got butter pecan ice cream.

And I wanted

I wanted my own,

you know, post-nigger fight story ice cream party with Polaroids,

you know, clowns, a pinata, the whole shebang.

But I didn't get it.

So I moved through adolescence, nine years old, 10 years old, 11 years old, 12 years old, still doesn't happen.

I'm a teenager now, 13, 14, 15, 16.

Still doesn't happen.

And this

induced this really deep anxiety and self-consciousness and even like a neurosis in me where I started to doubt my own environment.

Like, why hadn't I been called this before in a city that is so white?

You know,

am I not black enough?

for a white person to call me a nigger?

Like, what the fuck is wrong with me?

You know, was I,

like when, you know, when white people are called on to racism and then then they say, you know, well, you know, I had the one black friend, you know, Bob, you know, who, you know, I carpool with and I fight over, you know, to watch NBA games.

Was that, was I Bob?

Was I like that one black?

Was I like that,

you know, that one black friend, like basically the character Rashida Jones plays in every movie?

Was that, was that me?

And again, I realized how absurd it was

to have this anxiety, to have this neuroses about something that is so violent.

But it was my reality.

And then when I'm 17, it finally happens.

I'm waiting for a bus.

I'm in, let me see, it's nighttime,

like 7 o'clock.

It's September, so it's dark.

I'm waiting for a bus by myself.

I was going to go downtown to go play basketball for rest in the night.

And as I'm waiting there this Ford F-150 comes speeding past

and a person driving a car leans out the passenger side window screams nigger

keeps speeding away

and so when it happens I even kind of do a double take like

I guess he's talking to me.

I'm the only person standing here.

And adding to the, I guess, this real nature of the whole experience is that he looked exactly like Ricky Schroeder.

If you remember him from Silver Spoons and NYPD Blue, like I

am not convinced it wasn't Ricky Schroeder even 25 years later.

Like Ricky Schroeder, if you're out there listening, I remember what you did that fall.

I'm waiting for you.

And so this thing that I've been building up, you know, this experience I've been wanting to have, you know, is finally here.

And this guy's in a car and he's speeding away.

And I almost, I was tempted to scream at him to come back because this is it.

This is what I've been waiting for.

This is like the black bar mitzvah.

This is him, you know, this is him

calling me this.

I get a chance to fight him.

I finally have a story, you know, when it's time to share the story.

But

he's past like two lights, two intersections.

He's gone.

So it's not going to happen.

And then something happened to me.

It felt like something broke inside of me.

But not something bad.

It was...

I started laughing.

And...

Not even like a like a chuckle or like a nervous laugh, but like, oh my god, like like tears, snot, the ugly face, like like like the ugly, like the Steve Bannon face of laughs.

Like that's how ugly this laugh was.

And

I just realized in that moment how ridiculous it had been for me to want this to happen, to want this terrible, awful thing to happen,

and to assign any level of my racial identity or my blackness to how white people treated me.

And that's the last time I did it.

Thank you.

Damon Young is the author of What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker, a memoir in essays.

He's also the founder of the culture blog Very Smart Brothers.

Damon was a contributing columnist for the Washington Post magazine and the creator and host of the crooked media podcast Stuck with Damon Young.

Currently, he's a writer-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh.

Several years ago, I was moved by Damon's writing, so I reached out to him to tell a story.

Now, when he came back to me with the idea of this story, I'm not going to lie.

As an African-American woman who has a deep problem with the word, I was shaken up.

I love the story, but should we do this?

Several discussions took place in the office, and feelings were mixed among black and white staffers alike.

But Damon's story speaks truth about race, identity, and power power in this country.

It felt right.

So what does it say about us as a country that an intelligent young man places the value and definition of his identity on this word?

I look at it as one of the many complicated pieces of the uncomfortable conversations that Americans need to be having in order to grow and move forward.

That night of the show, As I sat in a primarily white audience, I could sense that many people weren't sure how to react.

There was some awkward laughter, laughter, people shifting in their seats, and I wish that in the crowd there had been more people who could have related to Damon's story, lifted him up, and made him feel seen.

He was so exposed.

I was very grateful that CJ Hunt was our host that night and was able to give Damon's story the loving and supportive landing that it deserved.

Here's what CJ said after Damon's story.

I can also tell by the applause who is is a person of color also, because my clap, it was hard for me not to clap for you while you were telling the story of just, I feel

so

seen by that story.

I've waited my whole life to be called the same.

I just loved your story because the way you capture the absurdity.

of having violence be part of your identity and a rite of passage,

I think is resonant to anyone who is black,

and I imagine partly resonant to any of those who have an oppressed identity, this like wild way where

you need a confrontation as a to see yourself.

And I also love the story because it makes me think about a theme that has been running through the stories tonight about what it means to know who you are without depending on seeing a reflection of yourself and other people.

So I just want to say thank you again.

That was wonderful.

That was Moth host CJ Hunt.

For more on Damon Young, check out my interview with him on our blog.

And to see a picture of a young Damon, go to themoth.org.

Coming up, a man finds a path to freedom.

That's when the Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX.

I'm Suzanne Rust.

We're hearing stories about changes of heart.

Our next story is from Hugh Burton.

We first met Hugh in our annual workshop with the Innocence Network Conference back in 2018.

He told this story at our first virtual main stage, which we produced over Zoom right as the pandemic took hold.

And while the COVID-19 lockdown wouldn't allow us to have our usual live shows, there was something raw and intimate about having tellers like Hugh sharing their stories from their homes directly to our screens.

The audio isn't perfect, but the emotions come through all the same.

We call the show All Together Now, The Moth in Your Living Room.

Here's Hugh Burton live from his home.

How are you?

In 1989, at the age of 16, I was wrongfully arrested and charged with second-degree murder.

Ostracized by many, believed by a few, I still had one person who had an unwavering belief in my innocence.

and would dedicate everything

to prove that he was innocent, and that was my father.

We fought a great fight, but we lost trial, and I was sentenced to 15 years to life.

As I was shuttled from facility to facility, my father was there every visit, every week.

The visits would fill with us strategizing how we were going to reverse what had happened.

We would also talk a lot about him playing a saxophone and me playing piano and how great it would be when one day I would be free and we could sit down and we could play together.

As time would go on,

the visits were less and less.

His health started to become an issue and the normal seven and eight hour journeys that it took him to come upstate New York and visit me were becoming a little bit harder to do.

In 2000, my father had to sell a house and he moved back to his native Jamaica.

Although we kept in contact through writing and we still did our strategizing about proving my innocence,

we weren't on the visit.

We weren't in the visit room.

It wasn't like the visit room.

Nothing could replace those visits.

One day I had gotten a letter and it said that my father was coming back to the country.

I was excited.

The guy who had been in every visit room with me, had been in every courtroom, was finally coming back.

The day came.

That Saturday morning, I was up early

and the cell door opens and you can hear the metal on metal.

But I heard this one thing that I had longed to hear.

Burton, you have a visit.

I made my way out of the cell and out into the hallway.

The hallways normally have this gray battleship kind of color that's very depressing.

But today they didn't feel, they didn't look the same.

They looked like they had a lot of life.

I had an extra bop in my step.

I knew what it was.

I was going to see my guy.

I finally get to the visit room where I get Frisk, and there are two doors.

And I went through the first door, and then there was like a vacuum before you got to the second door.

Because once the second door opens, it's just a flush of noise.

There are wives talking to husbands, mothers talking to sons, and children running around.

It was all great.

It was a sound that I hadn't heard in a while.

Finally, I saw my father and I made a beeline to him.

As I'm drawing closer to him I notice wow he has aged considerably since I'd last seen him.

Wow and his hair is completely white now and he's a bit hunched over and he uses the assistance of a cane.

But none of that mattered.

I know what time does.

My guy was here to see me.

He traveled all of this way and his first stop was here to see me.

I embraced him and when I held him he felt much much more frail than I remember but it was okay.

I embraced my cousin who came with him

and we spoke and I thanked her for bringing him up.

So we all sat down.

As the visit started, my mind was racing.

There were so many things I wanted to ask him.

How was the transition?

How was everything going when he was down there?

Did he get a chance to do any practicing while he was there?

And I wanted to tell him how good I had gotten playing the piano.

I kind of felt I was a little bit better than him, but, you know.

So I was excited.

So as we're talking, or I'm doing most of the talking, I'm noticing that he's not really as engaging as I remember our visits to be in the past.

I'm thinking maybe he's just overwhelmed with being here.

So, you know, it doesn't matter.

So I said, well, let me ask something that is that he has to give me a more definitive answer, a more explained answer.

So we began to talk about music.

And I know with music, that could usually take us maybe two or three hours on a visit.

When I asked him about music, his responses were still

yes, no.

And I turned to my cousin and I asked her, I said, is everything okay?

What's going on with him?

And she said, well, you know, as of late, his memory has been beginning to slip and fade.

I knew he had dementia before he left, but this was a bit different.

This felt different.

But

I didn't want to let the day be dampered.

I continued to keep talking and talking.

And I noticed he asked me for a cigarette.

But at first, I didn't really pay it any mind because I thought he just, well, maybe he just wanted to smoke.

And

we continued to visit, and he asked again.

But I knew, I said, my father knows the policy with cigarettes.

If you leave, you cannot come back in because the visit is terminated.

He knows this.

I know this.

He has been in these visit rooms for 13 years back and forth.

But still, I said, okay, well, we'll just continue with the visit.

And then...

everything kind of came full circle is when we're still talking and he referred to me as Wayne.

Wayne is my brother's name

and I knew in that moment that the guy who was championing my cause from the age of 16, who was in every courtroom, in every visit room,

didn't know who I was.

Crushed

because this is the only one that I knew who was believing in me and would never stop.

So as we went on, when he asked for the cigarette again,

I told my cousin, I said, you know,

allow him to have the cigarette.

And she said, are you sure?

And I said, yes, I'm sure.

I said, with all of the service I said to myself, with all that he has done, with all that he has sacrificed,

just allow him to have the cigarette is not much.

I couldn't be so selfish as to just want to keep him here in the visit room, although that's what I wanted to do.

I told her, allow him to have his cigarette.

So we ended the visit and as we got up, I embraced him and I just held him.

And it was so much I just wanted to convey that words just couldn't express how much I just thanked him and appreciated for him just being a rock for me.

I hugged my cousin and I told her take care of him and watch over him.

And I'm watching them leave.

And I'm supposed to leave the visit room first, but today I didn't want to leave first.

I needed to watch him leave

because there was something in me saying that when he leaves this visit room, you may not see him again.

And I could hear the officers in the background calling to me, Burton, Burton, but I just needed to see him leave.

So as he left and I went through the other doors and I made my way back down the hallway, the hallways returned back to their normal drab color.

And I got back to the cell

and the door closed.

And in that moment, when it shut,

I knew I was alone.

I knew I was by myself.

But I knew I had to do something because we started out in a fight together.

And it was yet to be finished.

It was yet to be completed.

I laid there that whole evening.

Just numb, just kind of quiet.

My dad died 16 months later.

I got paroled four years after.

But when I got home, I knew again that only half of this fight was done.

Yes, we wanted me home, but it remained.

We needed to prove my innocence.

I went about trying everything that I could to prove my innocence.

And finally, one day, A little over a year ago,

I'd gotten a phone call about 9.30 at night.

And it was my attorneys, and they told me that the Bronx courts

have decided to overturn the conviction.

You've been exonerated.

The truth had finally come out.

I was happy.

I was relieved.

I was sad.

Happy because I had finally won.

Relieved because I could take a burden off that was not mine to bear, but sad because my guy wasn't here to see it through to the end.

Finally,

in 2019, January 24th, I was exonerated at Bern Bronx courts.

And the first thing they asked me, what is it that I wanted to do, I said I wanted to run the New York City Marathon.

And I wanted to run it for a few reasons.

One, because the marathon always represented for me a staying of the course.

And two, because I wanted to take a victory lap around the city that had taken everything from me.

And finally, the day the marathon came

and I ran.

And when I got about 17, maybe 18 miles in,

I was looking across the Willis Avenue Bridge

and I saw the Bronx courts.

The same building that had taken everything, my freedoms and everything.

I ran past it in a victory lap and then back down through Central Park.

And as I crossed the finish line,

I knew, I said, I didn't just cross this myself.

I crossed this with me and my father and for my father.

Thank you.

That was Hugh Burton.

At the end of his story, Hugh stood looking at the camera on his computer while thousands were watching from their homes.

Hugh Burton is an exonerie, marathon runner, writer, producer, public speaker, and advocate for the innocent.

Hugh was actually falsely accused and convicted of killing his mother.

This happened when he was only 16 years old.

The Moth's Jody Powell, who directed Hugh's story, sat down to talk with him.

listen to your story or will listen to your story.

I think maybe we should just address it.

It's about what happened to your mother.

Right.

Well, you know,

my dad was in Jamaica visiting his mom.

So I left for school that morning and I ended up coming back early that afternoon.

And I noticed that the master bedroom was ajar.

And when I went in, it's when I made the discovery there.

That's when everything kind of started to just snowball.

I was numb from that point.

You know, they questioned me, and maybe two days later, after they had taken me to my godmother's house, they picked me up again and said, you know, they wanted to ask me the same questions again.

And I hadn't eaten, I hadn't really slept, and because I can only keep seeing in my head what I came in the room.

to discover.

And

they were saying that they had evidence that I committed the crime.

And I mean, this goes on for hours until they finally convinced me that this was the best option for me would be to say that I did this.

If not, it was going to be much worse.

Knowing nothing about law,

never being in any type of police interrogation or custody or anything like that.

I didn't know.

And they got me to sign a confession, and that set off everything.

I tried to speak to people who are around the age that I was when this happened to me because

I know what those officers did.

I know what they played on.

And I never want to see anyone have to go through that again.

So I speak to let people, try to let people know who may not know what their rights are.

what they don't have to do, what they should ask for.

The other reason I speak wherever I get a chance to is to let people know what the adults, what the responsible adults did to a 16-year-old child and that they still need to be held accountable for what they did.

Holding people accountable is me giving my parents what they deserve.

So

that's why I speak.

And I remember times when

I would be hollering at the top of my lungs that I didn't commit this, but no one was listening.

That was Hugh Burton.

We at the Moth wish you all strength and resilience during challenging times.

That's it for this episode.

We hope you'll join us next time for the Moth Radio Hour.

Your host this hour was the Moth's senior curatorial producer, Suzanne Rust.

The stories were directed by Katherine Burns, Sarah Austin-Janess, and Jodi Powell.

The rest of the Moth's directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, and Meg Bowles.

Production support from Emily Couch.

Moth stories are true, as remembered, and affirmed by the storytellers.

Our theme music is by the Drift Other Music in This Hour from Land A.

C., Christian McBride, and Sonny Rollins.

The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

We get support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX.

For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us, your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.

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