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I met Larry at a birthday party in Englewood when we were teenagers. We sat up talking that first night, and we have been talking ever since. He was 22 years old the last time he came through the door of a home we shared. He is 75 now. So am I.
Fifty-three years. I want you to sit with that number the way I have had to sit with it.
I have lived in the same two-flat on the South Side since 1973, the year the State of Illinois took my husband. I was pregnant with our son, Larry Jr., when we moved in. Larry has never walked through that front door. He has never sat at our kitchen table. The only reason he ever held our baby is because a warden at Cook County Jail had a heart, and let me carry our newborn through the gate so his father could meet him for the first time.
He was not at our boys’ graduations. He was not at his grandchildren’s graduations. He was not at his mother’s funeral. He was not at my mother’s funeral, or my father’s, after they spent decades loving him as their own.
For 30 years, inside the federal supermax in Colorado, I could not touch him. We sat in cold rooms and talked through telephones, with plexiglass between us. Our grandchildren learned what their grandfather looked like through that glass. A few months ago, after they finally moved him out of that place, I held my husband for the first time in three decades. I am 75 years old. I do not want to spend the rest of my life waiting for the next hug.
I know the headlines. I have lived with them longer than most people reading The TRiiBE have been alive. But I know the man, and the man is not the headline.
The boy I met could not read. He had dyslexia nobody in our day bothered to name. For years after he went away, he never wrote me back, and I could not understand why. One day he told me the truth. He could not read what I was sending him.
So he got to work on himself. He earned his GED inside, and then he started teaching the GED class to other men. He earned an EMT certification. He read the Bible. He read the Qur’an. He read every book I could mail him, and when he ran out, he asked me to send him fun books, just so he could keep going.
While he was changing himself, he was asking the young people on the outside to do better. When Chicago tried to close our schools, the young people he mentored walked the streets to keep them open. When the city moved to shutter clinics that served Black families, those same young people showed up. They registered our neighbors to vote. Some of them have college degrees today. Some have doctorates. Some run the community organizations that, right now, are caring for children whose own parents cannot. Nobody wants to credit a man named Larry Hoover for any of that. But I watched it happen with my own eyes.
Larry was 22 years old when the State of Illinois decided he would never come home. He is 75 now. People have lived whole lives in the time my husband has been gone. Babies have become grandparents. Whole neighborhoods have been built and torn down. Presidents have come and gone. Fifty-three years.
I am writing this letter as his wife, not to argue the law. There are people more qualified for that. Earlier this year, Algis Baliunas, a former state prosecutor who spent his career on the other side of cases like Larry’s, made the case in The New York Times that the time has come to end my husband’s sentence. Other former prosecutors, judges, and faith leaders have said the same. I will leave that argument to them.
What I will say, as his wife, is this. Whatever purpose was once served by my husband’s punishment has been served many times over. He is 75 years old. He has spent more than two-thirds of his life in a cell. He is not a danger to anyone. He is a grandfather who would like to come home.
I trust the Illinois Prisoner Review Board to look at the man, and not the myth. To weigh who Larry has been for the last 30 years, and not the caricature built in the first 30.
And I trust our Governor, JB Pritzker, who I know to be a thoughtful man carrying a heavy decision, to find the mercy this moment is asking of all of us. I am not pleading. I am hoping. I am hoping he sees an old woman in a two-flat on the South Side who would like to cook her husband dinner before the Lord calls one of us home.
Larry is not a monster. I would not have stayed 60 years with a monster. I came from a solid family. I know what love looks like, and I know what it does not. My husband has strong opinions and no patience for foolishness. He is also the man who taught our sons to open doors for their mother, who told them rap music was entertainment and not a life, who told them their voice mattered at the ballot box. He is the man who learned to read in a cell, and used that gift to teach other men to read.
He has served. He has paid. He has changed.
Bring Larry home.
