A personal reflection · Beyond the court record

To Understand the Man, You Have to Understand the Boy

There are things that happen to you in life that you learn how to talk about. And then there are things that happen to you that you spend the rest of your life trying to understand.

For me, the federal case was one of those things.

I was fifteen years old. Sometimes I say that out loud and think about just how young I really was.

I had already been around grown people, grown conversations, and grown problems. I believed I understood much more about life than I actually did. But none of that made me a grown man.

I knew I was in trouble. I knew I was scared. I knew I wanted to go home. What I could not understand was how far those decisions would reach into my life.

I trusted the adults around me because I thought they knew what I did not. I believed that if something was wrong, somebody would speak up. And for years afterward, I kept coming back to the same question: Did anybody really see me?

Not just a charge, a courtroom, or a story somebody had already decided to tell about me. Me. Carlos. A fifteen-year-old who had a mother, godparents, a family, fears, and a life he had barely begun to live.

I was convicted and I served my sentence. Those are part of the record. But the record cannot describe the feeling of being a young person when so much of your future is in the hands of other people.

When I finally came home, everyone could see that I had gotten older. What they couldn’t see was everything I had been carrying.

I was expected to pick up my life and move forward, but how do you explain what those years did to you when you’re still trying to understand it yourself?

There were memories I didn’t talk about. Feelings I didn’t know how to explain. Questions that followed me long after I walked out of prison.

And somewhere in the middle of trying to build a life for myself, I realized that getting my freedom back didn’t mean I had made peace with everything that happened.

I had learned how to survive. I hadn’t learned how to deal with what I survived.

I kept living. I built businesses in different industries, worked in promotions, brought people together, supported youth programs and sports, and learned things about myself along the way. Not because I needed those things to erase the past, but because there was still a life to live.

And then I became a father. Raising my son changed how I thought about what children need from the adults around them. It made me look at my own young years with an understanding I never could have had at fifteen.

Sometimes people only want to discuss one part of my life. I understand that I cannot control what they think. I am not writing this to ask them to change their minds.

I refuse to tell the story of my life as though one chapter was the entire book.

The legal records are available for people who want to examine them. Here, I want to give voice to the part those records cannot tell: what it felt like, what stayed with me, and how I continued growing into the man and father I am.

The deeper memories, the people, and the full story will have their place in my forthcoming memoir, The Making of Young Lace. This is one part of that journey, in my own words.