The Feast - Snap Classic
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When I was a kid, five years old, we lived in what they called a transitional neighborhood. And in our transitional neighborhood, people kept getting their batteries transitioned right out of their cars. And my father says, it ain't about to be no Mark. So every evening, he starts carrying a battery out of our Chevy Nova and inside the house.

And one evening, my mama's making my favorite fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and red bean gravy. My mama makes the best mashed potatoes and red bean gravy. Pops grins over at me. You ready to tuck in, boy? Yes, sir. Pops walks out of the front door. Sis will be right back. Just got to get the battery first. Okay.

Mama sets the plate down. I can see the heat wafting off the crispity chicken and I'm waiting, waiting, waiting. Everybody knows mashed potatoes only taste good when they're hot. But I don't say nothing. Still, he doesn't come back from outside. I'm staring at the food, stomach rumbling. My mama tells me to go ahead and eat, baby. But I don't want to go ahead and eat. Through the window, I see our car hood popped open. My mother opens our front door.

Bill? Bill! She sits back down, gets up, sits down again, then slightly higher pitch. Bill! We wait. Wait a half an hour, an hour. Two hours later, she calls my uncles, the neighbors, the church folk. People start filling the house and telling me it's going to be all right. My auntie wraps our untouched dinner plates in saran wrap. We'll save this for later, baby. In the morning...

The hood of our car is still popped open. My mother sits next to my auntie, red-faced from the crying. My uncles have taken to knocking on doors. Church ladies moan in the living room, gathered in a prayer circle. Pops doesn't show up that afternoon. Doesn't show up later that evening. Finally, wailing, my mother picks up the phone to actually call the police. My father walks into the house. Bill!

He looks angry and dirty even as we hug him, me crying, my mama praising Jesus. Lord, Lord, Lord. A scowl stays etched on his face. Where you been? One of my uncles asks, what happened? What happened? Five-0 locked me up. Said I stole my own damn battery out my own damn car. That's what happened. A heavy quiet freezes everyone in place as my uncles take several moments to digest the words.

The silence stretches, twists, expands, and finally, looking first to each other, then back at my father, my uncle's howl. Sighs spilling guffaws, tears streaming down eyes, slapping each other on the back, laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing, then growing still, only to erupt laughing again at full strength. "'Dummy!' says Uncle Elders. "'How you gonna be arrested for stealing your own battery? Get out!'

They can't stop laughing. Get out! My uncles shuffle away, cackling, leaning on each other for support. House empty. Me still clinging to my father's leg. My mother retrieves the plates of dinner, first places them in the oven, then sets the reheated food on the table. Then as a family, we sit down to eat my favorite, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and red bean gravy.

Today on Snap Judgment, we proudly present, my name is from Washington, dig in, because you're listening to Snap Judgment. We begin behind the walls of a level two prison in western Michigan, and since the listeners should note, this story does reference police violence and contains strong language. We'll hear first from Michael Thompson, who was recently released from incarceration, and he spoke to us from his home near Flint.

Snap Judgment. Within the prison system, as soon as something hits the TV, they run out of their rooms. They run out of their room and get to talking to each other. Michael Thompson was alone in his cell at Muskegon Correctional Facility when he heard men shouting. They was talking in anger. Said, them been killing us for years. I knew what they was talking about because I seen it myself. So like everybody else, witnessed a murder on TV.

The men were watching the breaking news of George Floyd's murder. They played it all day. They played it every 15 minutes. I just got silent. I mean, what is it for a person to say after you're witnessing something like that? Michael needed company and went to find his closest friend at Muskegon, Robert Cannon Jr. Hello, this is a prepaid debit call from Robert.

Robert and Michael ran workshops together in the day room for the other men.

Robert's a writer. Everyone calls him Silk because he's good with words. He's written books and books of poetry, screenplays. At the Roundtable, Silk taught creative writing. Michael also led a breathing class, and the two ran a workshop about forgiveness. We sit together and brainstorm about ideas, you know, about the future. But the day Silk saw George Floyd's murder on TV, he avoided the Roundtable.

He needed to be alone in his feelings.

The poem that I tried to write, it was, I think it was too militant, you know what I'm saying? Because I was expressing all my anger and stuff. And so I tore it up a couple of times. You know, I wrote it twice and I tore it up twice because I didn't like the way it was flowing. I felt that I was just too close to it. The reason why I couldn't generate my thoughts the way they normally come so easily. Emotionally, I was too close to the situation.

On the day of George Floyd's funeral, the two men watched together at their roundtable. What happened to Floyd happens every day in this country, in education, in health services, and in every area of American life. It's time for us to stand up in George's name and say, get your knee off our necks.

I said, man, now people are finally saying enough is enough and standing up in their ties, you know. I said, well, this may be the spark that light the catalyst, you know, make people become more aware of what's really going on. I said, man, we need to do something. I want to do a celebration. I want to do a celebration because I felt that was my, that's my duty to do that. A celebration of life inside the prison to grieve George Floyd's death together.

But not actually together. You got to be careful during a celebration inside the prison because what they can do, they can say that you are trying to form some kind of organization. And that's when you can't congregate. It's forbidden for men at Muskegon to congregate in groups of more than five. But Silk and Michael had a workaround. The idea? A feast that men would take back to their cells and eat on their own.

You know, we can all come together with food. We're not getting grade-A food, you know what I'm saying? The prison chow hall is known to be pretty rough. So for this celebration, they decided to cook up their own feast with their own food. And so when you come together and you're buying food, they want to be a part of something that's bigger than themselves. I kind of figured that nobody, no other prisoner within the United States

is gonna celebrate George Floyd like the way I wanted to do it. Michael and Silk put their own money in, and Michael got a friend on the outside to donate enough to cover chips and soda. They invited about 60 people to the feast, the feast they'd be eating individually in their own cells. Everybody wanted to be on the list.

Silk took on the role of logistics guy. His first task: enlist kitchen help. The microwave kitchen at Muskegon is a 12 by 8 foot room with three microwaves and a sink.

When Silk was in there, he had this thing where he watched people closely. How they're cleaning their hands and dishes and stuff like that.

Earlier that year, he noticed this one guy making nachos, carefully layering cheese and meat in between stacks of chips. When you take pride and put love into your cooking, it tastes a whole lot different than you just putting something together and throwing it in the microwave. So that's when I picked P.E. Silk realized this guy, P.E., was kind of a microwave wizard. He tapped P.E. to be the lead chef for the feast.

P.E. learned to cook from his grandma. My grandmother did macaroni and cheese. I ain't never tasted nothing like it in my life. So I was a little fat kid. So, you know me, I want to hang around the kitchen while they cook. P.E. is a meticulous chef and a clean freak. When I see a piece of hair in my food, I throw the whole bowl away. I just, it's just certain things just, just, just.

You don't supposed to do it while I'm full. You supposed to be clean, you know, and take your time. If you don't take your time, then how can you enjoy it? He makes his own food with ingredients from commissary, basically an overpriced convenience store where people living in prison can buy pouched meat soaking in preservatives, an 88-cent bar of soap, deodorant for $3.75, shelf-stable crackers.

Beyond P.E.'s compulsive cleanliness and knowledge of edible commissary items, he's like the superstar of the Muskegon kitchen. He has a sort of famous pizza recipe with a crust he made from saltine crackers.

You just crush them up and slowly add cold water, turn it into a ball, and you shape it out. He makes lasagna with cup of noodles and cream cheese, pecan pie with a cookie crust, cheesecake with mozzarella cheese and a lemon mousse. Lemonade, lemonade, kool-aid. The powdered milk with a little bit of regular milk, and you get the whipping, and it's going to fluff up. And it tastes just, I swear it tastes just like cheesecake in the street. This guy thought he was a real five-star chef, you know what I'm saying? With that cheap meat.

So Silk, the writer who wanted to bring everyone together, summoned P.E., kitchen superstar, into the day room to discuss his plans for the George Floyd celebration of life.

$300. Yeah.

What's the menu? It all depends on what the menu is. The menu. So we're limited by some of the stuff we can do. Silk knew the options. DIY meals in prison typically take shape as a wrap, a bowl, or nachos. So I said, listen, man, I don't want to do wraps this time. I don't want to do bowls because everybody's always doing bowls. I want it to be something a little bit special that nobody normally does.

Let's get him a bagel. A bagel sandwich loaded. Once Michael and Silk decided on bagel sandwiches,

P.E., the wizard of prison food, got to work, plotting a celebratory feast on a bagel. It's prison food, so how can you make it taste like this? So you go through, you've tried a few times with different things and seen how it tastes. So this is what I do. I experiment to see if I like it. And if I like it, I figure like, hey, everybody else will like it as well. P.E. put his headphones on and got a notebook out and listed every type of meat, sauce, and cheese available from the commissary.

And I start making combinations about what I think that goes together. Like maybe salami meat doesn't go good with ranch dressing or something like that. But onions and peppers... To me, that brings out a lot of flavor in a lot of types of meats like salami. P.E. chose his favorite combinations on paper and then went to the microwave kitchen to start testing them out. Cheese with meat sticks, mackerel and garlic pickles, rice cooked with jelly...

I did a lot of spirit mitten with bagels and stuff before I decided on which ones I was going to use. He got his hands on every kind of bagel in the store. We had a bagel called Everything, and we had a plain bagel. But to me, those only got the type of flavors I was looking for. He went with cinnamon raisin. Why cinnamon raisin? It all got just like this, let me just try to describe it to you, like a cereal taste to it.

The final dish P.E. came up with was a groundbreaking fried rice bagel sandwich layered with meat, cheesy noodles, fried rice, chili, sweet onions and bell peppers, all layered on two halves of a cinnamon raisin bagel topped with a pickle. "Dill pickle. You get that plain old vinegary taste. So you add that to something sweet.

A little bit of spice, a little bit of bread, some cheese, some meat. That's all your flavors marinating together. You know what you get already. An explosion. An explosion. P.E. wrote the recipe down in his notebook,

And then he started to worry. Everybody don't have the same taste buds. So when I come up with these different recipes and stuff like that, I do worry and have concerns that people might not like it. So the next day, he went around to every participant. With a pad of paper, rather, and pen, and I go around and ask those guys, anything that you don't like. Do you eat onions, pepper, fish? For those who don't eat red meat, we use turkey meat sticks for it. And...

Are there a lot of guys who don't eat red meat? P. chased down around 60 different men about their dietary preferences and kept tabs in his notebook.

But he had another, kind of bigger concern. My main worries and concerns were about the officers, because a lot of officers don't like to see us grouped up doing something positive. They'd rather see us going at each other's throats and beefing or going to war with something from garbage. They don't want to see us unify, because they believe that once we start to unify, we'll start tackling issues that...

P.E. had gotten a write-up for congregating before. It was called "Failure to Disperse," and he was sent into solitary confinement. He didn't think the George Floyd celebration would get that tense.

But if it did? A week and a half before the celebration, Silk and Michael started buying ingredients from commissary. Noodles, rice, meat.

Silk bought over 60 cans of soda from the soda machine.

And was it crowded? Like, how much space did that food take up in your cell? Meanwhile, P.E. was in charge of getting onions and bell peppers. And how do you get those from the kitchen? That's illegal.

Plus,

P.E. says most officers don't really care if they see you with a bell pepper. Over the course of a week, men smuggled onions and bell peppers out of the Chow Hall kitchen. They got a dollar per vegetable for their hustle.

In the end, P.E. had about a dozen onions and a dozen bell peppers. The night before the celebration, P.E. gathered up the vegetables, silk unhooked bags of meat sticks from his wall, and slid packets of seasonings out from under his bed and brought them to the microwave kitchen.

The men head to the microwave kitchen with vegetables and meat for a groundbreaking bagel sandwich. But will they have enough time to chop and marinate it all? Stay tuned. Snap Judgment is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Feast episode.

Sensitive listeners should note, this piece does contain references to police violence. We rejoin the story, even as bagel sandwiches are being prepared. Snap Judgment. We was on a time constraint. They take count at 6 o'clock in the morning, 4 o'clock in the afternoon, 9 o'clock at night, then they take it again at 12 o'clock at night.

Three hours between 9 p.m. and midnight to dice onions, chop and marinate meat sticks, cut up bell peppers. Silk used plastic knives to cut the onions. But P.E.,

He had his own method. I use a pop card. It's like a credit card, but we call them pop cards because you put them into the pop machine, you get pops. They hurt like a credit card. You got to wash it off first, though, but it cuts a lot of stuff. But you can't cut onions with a card, can you? It's actually better. Really? Because it's straight. You can take your credit card right now and take an onion and it cut right down the center of it.

You might have to push on it a little bit, but it will cut right down the center. You peel off your outer bad onion that you don't want. After chopping, P.E. and Silk mix the peppers and the onions with browned sugar and butter in a foot tub. Please don't judge us, but there are actually foot tubs like you get in the doctor, like the big pink bowls. And we get them brand new. And we use them to cook and mix food in. So I have one of those damn near full. Yep.

After three hours in the kitchen, once everything was chopped, diced, and soaking in oils and seasonings, P.E. scrubbed the countertops while Silk wrapped up the food in plastic bags.

Let me reiterate, I said plastic bags, but what I did was, you know, they sell tortilla shells, a bag of tortilla shells. I had four of them and I secured all of them. Silk wrapped the food in those little cellophane wraps that come around taco shells. We double wrapped them to keep the smell down. Silk brought the meat and peppers and onions back to his cell, set his alarm for 4 a.m. the next morning, and drifted off to sleep, surrounded by bags of food.

Silk got to the kitchen a bit before 5 a.m. the next day. P.E. was already there, assembling popcorn bags that he had cleaned with toilet paper pieces and saved to use as part of his microwave magic. He filled each bag with rice and butter and seasonings and put them in the microwave.

He blasted the rice until it was brown and crispy. And then he added water to the bag a few teaspoons at a time. P.E. then seasoned cans of chili in foot tubs with the juice of jalapeno peppers, barbecue sauce, and a few packets of mustard.

He steamed the noodles with seasonings and cheese. Finally, around 9 a.m., P.E. and Silk started to assemble the 60-something bagel sandwiches. They had eight guys who didn't eat meat. So we made tuna for them.

But most guys got a bagel with meat sticks, fried rice, steamed cheesy noodles, and vegetables in a brown sugar butter sauce. Yeah.

It's not just a great sandwich. It's a gigantic sandwich. I'm trying to think of a good way to describe it. Maybe, uh, I'm really using my hand. How tall can I fit with my hand? What do you think? Like inches wide from right here.

When they were all done, the bagel was seven inches tall. You have one minute remaining.

I'm going to take you, I'm going to send it to you, step-by-step how to do it. And you try. Yeah, I would love to have the recipe. At 11 a.m., over 60 men lined up near the day room for their bagel sandwiches. One of them, who the guys call Picasso, had drawn a portrait of George Floyd with colored pencils on a piece of butcher paper and hung it in the day room. As soon as P.E., Silk, and Michael started passing out the bagels,

An officer approached them. Now, when he first came into the day room, he was very aggressive. Like, what the hell is this? And what the hell y'all think y'all doing? We had like four tables together packed with pops and chips and bagels and cookies and all types. So we gave out like a whole meal. He was upset that it was so much. The officer turned to Silk. He asked me the question, well, who paid for all this food? I said, I did. So he said, well...

You can't just pay for food and give it away. I said, I can. I said, if I want to go to the store and spend $150 and turn around and give it away, I can do that.

P.E. tried talking the officer down. This was one of the more frustrating ones, but I was trying to control it because I know we was doing this for George Floyd. So I kind of, as I'm talking to this officer and talking to the other inmates, I'm trying to keep that out in front of my mind, like we're doing this for a very positive purpose. But what I was thinking was, please just don't escalate the situation, thinking about the officer or other inmates. I just didn't want them to escalate the situation. Then they want to know who giving all these sandwiches away. Where y'all getting these sandwiches from?

After about seven minutes of commotion, the officer left, went to the warden's office. I don't know what he said to him.

But he never came back. The officer causing the commotion was white. And Silk says when that officer went back to the warden's office, there was a black officer there. The other officer told him, they're not violating, now leave them alone. And he did. With the officer gone, the feast was underway. We get each and every one of them a bagel sandwich. They got more than enough meat in there. It was loaded to.

Before the men went back to their cells,

Silk made an announcement. I told these guys to go back to their cell. I said, all I ask is you go back to your cell for eight minutes and 46 seconds and give him a moment of silence because I want the reality of how long that is to set in. And every one of them came back and told me, say, Rob, man, you know eight minutes, man, that's a long time, man. It felt like I was standing in my cell for over an hour.

When Silk went back to his cell, he couldn't eat his bagel. He was too emotional. My emotions are across the gamut, you know, as far as up and down. When you look at the justice system, you know, and you say equality, it should be all for one. It's not like that. That hasn't been my experience, you know. I mean, how many more people have to die? It's sad.

Michael also went back to his cell after passing out the bagels. Well, I was thinking about the incident. You know, it was like a video camera in my head. And how could I go back to my cell wagging my tail? That wasn't going to happen. Everything feels sad when it comes down to unnecessary death. So everything started piling up on me. All the thoughts and the injustice I received.

I was in prison for some dumb stuff. That's what I was mad about. You know what I'm saying? You're talking about anger. That's what I was angry about. But the George Floyd thing, I was sad. But the only difference, I'm still alive. And George is dead. So that was a horrible thing that happened to me. And that ain't the first time that that didn't happen. It didn't happen all across the United States. And it's been happening for years now.

And I know friends of mine that then disappeared through the years of the same brutality that George Floyd experienced. So that's the reason why I wanted to do something because it had become personal to me. Silk ate his bagel sandwich later that evening. It was so good, he wanted to get the recipe copyrighted and sell it in restaurants across the country.

He really wanted me to make the bagel sandwich. I was going to ask you about this. What's the hold up now? I just, I haven't really gotten the chance to get all the ingredients.

But I was thinking it could be cool to have you on the phone while I make it, just in case I mess up. Just give me a day that you're getting ready to do it, and I'll definitely guide you through it. Okay. I definitely would do that. Awesome. It was good talking with you, and hopefully we'll talk again soon. Well, you enjoy the rest of your day, and give my regards to Mr. Parker. Thank you for using GTL. I never heard from Silk again.

And the next time I spoke to P.E., I had to tell him what happened. He didn't know because of COVID restrictions at the prison. Michael, Silk, and P.E. were separated from one another weeks after the bagel feast. Thank you for using GTL. Oh, you get my email? Yeah. I think today. That's how I found out she was going to be home right now. Oh, great. I just read your email. But sometimes it takes up to two days for us to get them.

Yeah. I don't know if you heard this news, and I hate to be the one to deliver it to you, but I got off the phone with Michael Thompson last week, and he told me that Robert Cannon actually passed away. No way. Silk died suddenly. Wow. Yeah. Was he still in prison? He was still in prison.

And they're doing an autopsy. So, yeah, I think we're just waiting to find out. Yeah. Yeah, he'll be in the story. We did eventually get a copy of the county's autopsy report for Silk.

The report lists the cause of death as acute fentanyl toxicity. P.E. believes the cause of death was the failure of the prison health care system. When Silk died, he had emphysema, renal cysts, heart disease. You can walk to the officer's desk right now and tell them that you got a headache, splitting migraine, you can't even open your eyes, they're going to tell you to drink some water. For real, that's what they're going to tell you to do. In George Floyd's case, they didn't believe him when he was saying he couldn't breathe and stuff.

And it's like a cry for help, not maybe literally, but sometimes speaking like it's a cry for help. Like I can't breathe, look at me, help me. But people don't see it that way though. People think we all cry wolf and it don't become serious until somebody did. Like in the case of George Floyd. You have one minute remaining. He asked for help and his help was completely disregarded.

So how can we ever take, how can they ever take us serious? Thank you for using GTL. Robert Silk, Cannon Jr.'s funeral, was in Detroit on a Thursday morning early in September. Michael was at the funeral, and he got up to talk. Say it.

As Michael spoke in front of Silk's friends and family...

He started to get so upset that he could barely get his words out. He's saying he and Silk fought for prison reform from inside. They did a celebration for George Floyd like nowhere in America. Some of them never had a pop. But Silk's death

was because the lack of treatment he was getting from health care. They both died. Thank you, Michael, for those words. Robert was awarded to the state, and the state did not take care of him. And George Floyd depended upon law enforcement, and law enforcement failed him. It's all a joke. It's all a game.

Silk's memory lives on, with his girlfriend and soulmate, Dolores, his sister and brother, cousins, nieces and nephews.

and all the men who gathered together to grieve George Floyd's death over a seven-inch fried rice bagel sandwich. This story is a tribute to Silk, Robert Cannon Jr.,

Robert was 62 years old when he died. May he rest in power. A study by venerable professor Evelyn Patterson shows that time served in U.S. prisons has a direct correlation to years of lost life. For each year lived behind bars, a person can expect to lose two years off their life expectancy. After spending 25 years in prison on charges of possession of three pounds of marijuana, Michael Thompson was released in January.

Since then, he's spoken about prison reform on the Montel Williams Show and with Snoop Dogg. Marijuana has been legal in Michigan since 2018. P.E. is serving the 24th year of his life sentence for a crime he committed two weeks after his 18th birthday. He loves getting email via his J-Pay account, specifically pictures of nature. Special thanks to William Welch and D.D. Kirkwood, who helped make the bagel sandwich a reality for the men in Muskegon.

Additional shout-outs to Catherine Newhand, Stephen Kermode, and Dolores Ingram. And to Tana Ganeva, a criminal justice reporter who has written extensively about Michael Thompson's incarceration and petitions for clemency. You can read more about the men's celebration of life for George Floyd in her article in The Counter. We'll have a link at snapjudgment.org. The original score for this story was by Renzo Gorio. It was produced by Shana Shealy. ♪

Now, when we return, a covert operation goes horribly wrong. When Snap Judgment, The Feast, returns. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Snap Judgment. You're listening to The Feast episode. My name is Glenn Washington, and we've been featuring amazing stories of grit and determination, but nothing like this. Snap Judgment's Anna Sussman takes us to China today.

to an orphanage where a young child is just about to meet her new American mother for the very first time. Snap Judgment. When we got there, it was a cold day in January, and all the older children came rushing out to see us. They knew that we were there to do an adoption, and very few children are ever adopted, and they had practiced saying hello.

They brought my child to me, my daughter Jacqueline, and she of course was absolutely terrified. She was four years old and then she basically was told, these are your new parents and get in the car with them. She was not about to do that. She planted her feet and she began to cry and make a sound, not even like a human cry. It was like listening to an animal.

And all the cajoling and all the encouragement couldn't get her into the car, so we literally almost kidnapped her. We had to pick her up. My husband picked her up and kind of put her in the back seat of the car where she just laid there stiffly across my lap. And she screamed and she screamed and she screamed. Shou shou. Shou shou. Shou shou.

And I kept believing, well, this will be, when she gets home, when she gets to the United States, this will end. What I didn't know was that it was, this shadow would live with us every day.

There was an interpreter there that was a guide for us and she told the interpreter to explain to us that she had a baby and she wasn't going to leave China without her baby. She called him Xiaoxiao, which is a Chinese nickname for very little. Xiaoxiao. She explained that if the kids were older than three, they were given jobs. So her job, her responsibility was to care for these two little toddlers that were basically a head shorter than she was.

She had potty trained them and she would help them eat. But what she was the most proud of really was that she had protected them from bigger kids. She said she gave all her love to this little boy she had nicknamed Xiaoxiao and that she was not going to leave China without her baby. We were there for about two weeks total. And then when we came back here within six weeks, she could speak and she could actually convey some pretty complex thoughts in full sentences.

She talked about him constantly. The only way I can describe it was it was like living with a very short mother who had had a baby ripped from her arms. She never stopped talking about him. We just said to her, we can't bring him here. And of course, she couldn't understand the sophisticated system of how all the paperwork that's required and the red tape and you can't just take a child out of there. To be honest, I never even thought about trying to bring him here. I just kept thinking that she would get over it.

One of the things I can remember most vividly was the first time I took her to McDonald's. She couldn't believe that not only did you get this cool meal, but that you also got this little toy, you know, in the Happy Meal. But then I noticed every time we went there after that, she wouldn't open her Happy Meal package. She'd hold the toy up to the light to see what it was. And then when she got home, she stuffed him in a little box. And finally I asked her what she was doing, and she said, Shoush, I've never had a little toy.

There was no logic that you could give her in terms of trying to explain why he couldn't come here. She had noticed that we only had five chairs around our dining room table and that they were already full. So she said one night, well, you know, he could just sit on my lap while we ate. And then one day she took me up and she showed me her bed and she said, you know, we wouldn't even need to get him his own bed. He could just slip right here on the other end of the bed from her.

I started writing an email to a small group of friends and telling them about Jacqueline and her baby.

Unbeknownst to me, and sometimes with my permission, these emails started to get forwarded to people who knew people who knew people. And then the responses started to come. I got emails from people literally all over the world saying, "My prayer group in New York is praying for Jacqueline's baby. Our Indian reservation is praying to our ancestors for Jacqueline's baby. Our synagogue has taken up this cause. Is there any news?"

A lady I've never met, I wouldn't recognize her if she walked into the room from Minnesota, put up all the adoption fees and said, I'll pay the fees if we could bring him here. A lady in Tennessee said, I'll buy him clothes until he's 18 years old. Someone sent a bike from Florida. And then her story got told to some powerful folks. It ended up with a United States senator who ended up cutting through red tape on the INS side of things. And then the story was taken to the Chinese officials.

and they worked together with the United States authorities. Fifteen months after she was adopted, Jacqueline walked back into that orphanage and grabbed the hand of her baby. Today he's her cousin. He lives 20 minutes away from us. He was adopted by my sister, and he's part of our family. The way I think about it is this. If you think about love being a state where you can't be happy if the person that you love isn't happy, this is the way she loved that little boy. She never could rest knowing that he was still there. Go ahead.

Go ahead, grab a tissue, wipe your eyes. Don't be embarrassed, Snappers. It just means you're a human being. Chow Chow's going to be all right. Many thanks to Cindy Chapanella for sharing her story with The Snap. She's written some remarkable books. I'm going to have a link to her work at snapjudgment.org. The sound design for that piece was by Renzo Gorio, and it was produced, like every other story on this show, was produced by Anna Sussman. ♪

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