The Wrong Man

One young dealer whose hair Fishburne was twisting into dreadlocks confided that his girlfriend was pregnant with their third child and that he wanted to be out just to see his new son being born.

"You going to marry her, man?" Fishburne remembers asking. The reply took him aback:

"No, she'd never marry me. She's so pretty, man. She wouldn't want someone like me."

"She does want you," Fishburne insisted. "She's carrying your child. This girl could've easily had an abortion. She's chosen you already; why are you feeling so unworthy, dude?" He urged the inmate to ask the girlfriend how she felt, to lay his own feelings bare.

"A lot of these boys in there are sacrificing their lives because no one tells them they have self-worth," Fishburne says. "Society's not breaking them down. They do it themselves."

He remembers the 19-year-old who had been driving his cousin around and was arrested as an accomplice when police pulled over the car and discovered drugs on the cousin. The driver was offered immunity if he testified. Waiting for his hearing, the jailed teen bragged that he would serve the five-year term hanging over his head rather than turn against his cousin. Braiding in his bathroom salon, Fishburne pressured the teen to cooperate, telling him he had to save himself.

"Five years is a long time," he remembers admonishing. "and if you're willing to do five years now for some BS you didn't do, you'll just get out and be right back doing even more time for your own [expletive]." Fishburne had been in jail for nearly three weeks, and his initial wariness was dissolving. The empathy that replaced it surprised him.

He is still amazed by the emotional connections among men whose strongest bond is a life on hold, a future unresolved. "Black men don't have conversations like that on the outside," Fishburne reflects now. "We don't talk to each other. The black men in jail share ideas and thoughts and feelings with each other. It was so surprising to me, as a black man, to see another brother sit and talk. You tell a little about your life, they tell a little of theirs. They have conversations about sports, about religion -- not arguing or fussing or fighting.

"If they bumped into each other, they'd say, 'Excuse me.' Put you in a fly outfit, put you in a club and the same thing happens, they'd be willing to rip each other's head off. I don't get it."

Nineteen days after Fishburne's false arrest, the prison bus arrived to take him to Atlanta, where Fulton County wanted Jarvis Tucker to stand trial on the charges against him.

Shackled to another prisoner on the bus, Fishburne learned to choreograph every bite of food, every trip to the bathroom with the stranger who had killed someone and was now chained to him. The bus zigzagged slowly around the Northeast, picking up and dropping off prisoners. The air on the bus was hot and stale. The men ate fast food three times a day and slept sitting up save for the occasional overnight at another jail. The video monitor on the bus showed prison movies. "Bad ones, all that Jean-Claude Van Damme stuff," Fishburne remembers.

In Florida's punishing heat, the bus broke down, and there was no air conditioning. Fishburne had suffered from asthma since childhood. Now he could feel his lungs grow heavy and sodden, fighting for each breath. The prisoner chained to him alerted the driver. Fishburne recalls his desperation as the guard hovered over him, asking him if he was having trouble breathing. By then, he was wheezing too hard to speak. I'm going to die on this bus, Fishburne thought. Panic made it worse. At least 20 minutes passed, he believes, before an ambulance showed up and rushed him to the hospital. Medication quickly relieved his symptoms. He was given an inhaler and put back on the bus to Georgia. He remembers the driver complaining loudly about the few hours Fishburne had cost them.

* * *

'It Doesn't Add Up'

"I'm not Jarvis Tucker." Elias Fishburne entered the Fulton County Jail with the same declaration that had been ignored in Prince George's County. Nearly a full month had passed since the wrong man was arrested on Route 50. The deputies in Atlanta mocked Fishburne's entreaties. Every criminal facing jail claimed to be the wrong man.

"I was so upset," Fishburne recalled. "I was getting all teary-eyed and cotton-mouthed, and the cop says, 'There he goes with his acting again.' " Fishburne appealed to the woman taking his fingerprints. The prints of Jarvis Tucker were on her computer screen with his warrant data.

"Can't you see they're not the same?" Fishburne implored.

"It doesn't add up," he remembers her agreeing as she processed him anyway. "Someone will talk to you about it."

Fishburne's mother, friends, pastor and frantic clients back in Maryland had pooled money and had an attorney waiting to hear from him in Atlanta. But his mortgage was unpaid, and clients unable to find him were no doubt finding new hairdressers. Just a month in the system had already caused a stable life to wobble. Fishburne wondered if he would still have a home when he got out. Or a job.

Fishburne figured God was testing him, and he jokes bitterly now about how he wishes that test could have been in Palm Springs, but it was in Atlanta, where he remembers how a black female guard stood outside the cell at meal time and called inmates filthy names. When Fishburne didn't respond, she zeroed in. "You going to eat or what, nigger?" she demanded. The racial slur was the most common form of address, Fishburne said; that black guards were using it to address black inmates only made the humiliation worse. The transformation was complete: He was not Elias Fishburne, not Jarvis Tucker, not even a case number. Not a homeowner, not a hairdresser, not a good citizen living a worthy life. Nigger . That's who he was now.

So stripped was his identity, so thorough the loss of self, that he didn't even recognize his own name -- his real name -- when a guard shouted it out in the day room on his third day in the Atlanta jail. He called again and again, then stalked off when no one responded. Another inmate turned to Elias.

"Isn't that you, man? Didn't you hear him? He kept calling: Elias Fishburne, Elias Fishburne, Elias Fishburne."

The background check Fulton County authorities had performed took 36 hours to determine that Prince George's had sent them the wrong man. Fishburne was handed the gym clothes he had been wearing the morning he crashed. He was issued a check for the funds his friends and mother had deposited in his commissary account. He was freed. No apologies were offered, he says, no ticket home provided. He stood outside the jail with no cash, no transportation, no explanation. He looked at the commissary refund. The check was for $80. It was made out to Jarvis Tucker.

He called a friend he knew in Atlanta to come get him. His friends back home paid for his airfare and let the attorney they had lined up in Georgia know that he wouldn't be needed.

* * *

'I Found Myself Crying'

A year has gone by, and Elias Fishburne still struggles to reclaim his life. The hospital in Florida just sent him a bill for his visit to the emergency room there. His BMW was totaled but the insurance won't pay him enough for a decent car, so he relies on Metro and friends for rides now. He had to pay his own way back to Atlanta to appear in person and get the fingerprint card and sworn statement of his clean record from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He was charged $27 for the fingerprints. "You'd think," Fishburne says wryly, "that that would be complimentary." He carries this proof of his innocence in his day planner at all times.

Fishburne was listening to a client's woes one day while doing her hair. Her son was heading for trouble, and she told Elias that she wished the police would just arrest him. Don't let it happen, Fishburne urged the woman.

"I found myself crying in front of her," he recalls. "It was the first time I cried about it. I realized I wasn't giving her advice; I was giving her a warning. At that point, I realized I had been through something."

The conversations he has among black men are superficial again, banter and bluff.

Search the criminal court records in Prince George's County, and it is not Jarvis Tucker's name that produces a file, but Elias Fishburne's. The papers in the sunny yellow folder show that the state's attorney did not prosecute. They don't disclose that a mistake was made. A brochure from the District Court of Maryland explains that if Fishburne wants to expunge the record he shouldn't have, he will first have to sign a waiver freeing the state from any liability and forfeiting any right to sue. He hasn't decided yet whether he will sue.

Fishburne sums it up in a deadened voice. "It is what it is," he says.

Fishburne opened his own small salon not long ago, and says he can't afford the time or the emotional energy to fight this just now, to make the system erase all traces of Elias Fishburne, suspected criminal.

He wonders if the only way to live without fear of this happening again, to reclaim his identity, is to erase Elias Fishburne altogether. "I think about changing my name," he says.

He has stopped calling the police on the drug dealers in his neighborhood. Two of his old cellmates have called him since getting out. One wanted his hair braided but changed his mind when Elias told him it costs $60 on the outside; the other left messages Elias didn't return.

In his little front yard, Fishburne plants bright flowers. His BMW still sits there in his driveway because he doesn't have the money to fix it or the heart to junk it. He has no choice but to face it each day, and ponder the wreckage.