Snap Studios. Welcome to Snap Judgment, the Fire Escape Special. If you haven't listened to the Fire Escape previous episodes, you're going to want to start at Episode 1. Friends of listeners are advised. When it's time for someone to parole from the firehouse, the whole team and the captain gather outside and there's a ceremony. What the firehouse girls would do for you was when they see the parole van coming through the gates of the prison, they would line up all of the fire trucks and turn on the lights and sirens and everybody would be out there, like, loving you out there, waving and crying. We had, I've seen so many people parole before me and so for my day to come was, it was a big thing. After seven years in prison, four and a half in the main prison and more than two years of the firehouse, Amika's day did come. What I envisioned the whole, I'm probably going to cry on this one. What I envisioned the whole time I was in prison, how I would reconcile with my kids. I envisioned myself giving them a lot of love to make up for all these years that I'd been gone. She was shaking as she walked from the fire station to the parole van. Lord. I am definitely that kind of endorphin rush, definitely butterflies in my stomach, palm sweating, just those visceral feelings of you could feel the nerves, the anxiety, the excitement. You always expect the worst to happen. You don't want to go in thinking everything's going to be smooth because— What do you mean worst, the worst? I don't know that no one will be there for you or that they'll be like just kidding, head back in. You just never really know. In the holding area, Amika was given her release clothes, sent to her by a friend. It was sweatpants and a sweatshirt from a skate shop in Ukiah that said freedom on the back. She tried to put on a pair of heels, but it didn't work, so she went with flip flops. The plan was for her family to wait in the parking lot. And then my kids were in the parking lot waiting for me with my papa. And so I told them, listen for the fire trucks and the sirens, and when they go off, it'll be—you know, it'll mean the van is coming. And so it was kind of a beautiful thing because, you know, I could see it from the parole van, my kids could see it from the parking lot. The three fire trucks lined up. I saw the girls lined up in front of the fire trucks, people sitting up on the fire trucks, people clowning behind the wheel, you know, laying on the horns, sirens blazing. I was so surreal, you know, it was just kind of one of those things that you've been imagining for years and years that that'll be you one day and then it's actually you. And it's almost the same as when you walk in the gates. It just feels like a dream and, you know, you can't even imagine what's next. From Wondry and Snap Studios at KQED, I'm Anna Sussman and this is Firescape. The story of a woman whose world burned down and then she learned to fight fire from behind bars. This is Episode 6, Worthy. It was finally the day of her release, the day she had imagined for all these years, the day she could begin to be the person on the outside she planned to be, starting with Milo, Soleil and Blossom. And it seemed like it would just be forever, but it was like really happening, you know. I saw her, I hugged her, like there was no guards watching, there was no... We weren't going to leave at two or, you know, it was like... It was just like super exciting. Oh, the whole ride, my kids were like, look at this and look at that and look at... I had no idea what they're talking about. It was like phone stuff or pictures on Instagram, like none of that. I didn't know about any of this. Just like looking out the window and just having my kids kind of like curled up on me and just holding on. That was sweet. And then... When she was inside, we talked a lot about what we were going to do when she got out. And it wasn't all like big things, it was just... Like our plans, like... Mom and daughter thing, painting our nails together, going on trips together, watching movies, showing our music, listening to music together. When they got home to Amika's papa's house, she put her one bag of belongings down on the patio where she'd be sleeping. She called her mom and she made plans for her boyfriend Jose to call her from prison, collect when he could. And then they all sat down on her dad's couch and she put in a DVD with pictures of her work at the firehouse. We're on papa's big red couch and we're all cuddled together. That was probably one of the first moments and we all just, you know, I had a girl on each side. There were pictures of Amika doing vehicle extractions, climbing ladders and hosing down burning buildings. And they were... My mom's a gangster. Oh my God, my mom. You know, that's how my girls were like, whoa. You know, it was kind of unbelievable. They were proud of you? Yeah, they were really proud. And my papa was too. My mom was. I mean, it was pretty amazing. I just felt like I was getting to share my life with them and bringing it home to them about what I really did. The first day together on the couch being proud, being hopeful, that was the easiest day. It was like this goal. It was like, when she got out, everything would be perfect. It was like this, it was just this thing that we were waiting on. Once she got out, everything would be perfect. Life would be perfect. But it wasn't like that at all. It wasn't like that at all. I mean, coming home and having two teenage girls in the house who loved me and were hurt and that had placed me on a pedestal for all the years I was gone. Coming home to those girls and to the reality of like, we had different visions actually. I didn't, what had happened when she came home, I didn't expect that. Amica's son, Milo, was in his 20s and already out of the house. She had two daughters. Her older daughter, Sir Leigh, was turning 18 and there was a lot of pain in that mother-daughter relationship. And her youngest, Blossom, was 13. I mean, 13 is like where you're first. Like, you're just starting to be a teenager. I think the first like crazy thing that happened was when she first got home. I just remember like this one night, it was a school night too. I went out with my friend and I didn't come home until like six in the morning. When Blossom came home, Amica knew exactly what she had been doing. I mean, I knew she was using because I could tell in her eyes. I could see it in her eyes. I knew, I knew she was off. I knew she wasn't fully there. That scared the shit out of me. I just didn't know what to do. I didn't, I didn't know what to do. As a mom at that point, she was like all I had left and the idea of me losing her to some fucking drugs or some bullshit was so terrifying. I was so sad and afraid for my daughter. And it came across as just anger, you know? And I think that just set her off. And I got, yeah, after that got violent and then I picked her up by her jaw. And I picked her up kind of by her neck and her jaw and I, you know, put her head up against the wall. And I don't even remember what it was I said, but that touch alone was not a touch she had ever felt for me. And it was extreme. It scared her. It scared me. It scared all of us. I have never put hands on my kids like that, you know what I mean? So it was just so shocking to me that that happened. And it was, it was disappointing. I wasn't able to let my kids, the same way when I called him. I wasn't able to be the kind of mom that they wanted. I wasn't able to be like a soft and gentle loving mom. I had a different shell on me at that point. And it wasn't, even though I was always felt like I was a touchy feely person, I was like, you know, I wasn't anymore. And like, you know, there's times when like my kids would like want to cuddle with me and and it was like too much. I didn't, I just, it freaked me out a little bit. Like I just, I don't even have a words or a process to put to that. But I knew that I wasn't accessible in the way that they had wanted me to be or that I hadn't wanted to be when I got home. This is what I keep thinking like, it was interrupted. I could, my bond with my kids was so interrupted that it's changed forever. You know what I mean? There is no going back to what was before. And I spent most of my prison life thinking I could go back in ways or I could make up. And it's taken me as long out as I was inside to realize that that's not the case. Like I can't go back. I can't fix. I can only move forward. I think because I was so young when she went away, like I was used to not having one. I knew she was my mom, but it was also like, no, she was kind of a stranger. Yeah. And it's like, we didn't say that, but it is like she was a stranger. I don't know. This is fire escape. The story continues right after this short break. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Snap Judgment. This is fire escape. The story of a woman whose world burned down. And then she learned to fight fire from behind bars. In some ways, I feel like I over promised my kids when I was inside. Like when I was in prison, I didn't have a choice. I didn't have a choice. I didn't have a choice. I didn't have a choice. I didn't have a choice. I didn't have a choice. I didn't have a choice when I was inside. Like when I was trying to get right for them or I was trying to redeem myself, I over promised. I really did. Because like I had no idea how hard it would be out here. Did she ever ask you how you process your accident? Um, I mean, she, she didn't ask me a whole lot. She's, you know, but she would say things like, it's hard for me to believe that that is part of you, right? She's like a girl, a few words. She watches a lot more than she asks questions. And she was definitely paying close attention to me over those years. About a year and a half after Amika was released from prison, she was still living at her papa's house when she got a phone call from her mom, Joanie. She was like, are you, where are you? Sit down. Like you need to be by yourself and be somewhere okay right now. And that was when she told me that she had pancreatic cancer and that the, it had spread. So they found, you know, a lesion on her liver. And so yeah, we knew it was spreading. I think we had found out that she was sick. What I can really remember is when she came to visit us, she came over to my papa's house and she was the cutest little thing ever. She had purple dress on and her purple hat and a little suitcase. We knew pancreatic cancer is, you know, as she was diagnosed at a really late stage. She told me that she was going to die and that she probably had about six months left to live. She had told us that, yeah, she didn't want to do chemo. I think the doctor estimated like six or seven months. And so my mom was like really excited because she thought, you know, I have the option to choose to die if I want. But I also remember she was really terrified about that because of my criminal history. And she knew I would be with her and be tending to her. And so I know my mom went into this mode too of trying to protect me. I mean, she started kind of like getting everything, all of her tees crossed and eyes dotted and making sure she had legal paperwork and that neighbors knew that, you know, what her plan was. And yeah, she was afraid that I could be held responsible for some, in some way if she chose to die on her own. It was a real risk for Amika to put herself at the scene of someone's death. But she told herself all those years in prison, the kind of person she wanted to be when she got out, the kind of mom she wanted to be. She wanted to be there for people and to show her daughter how to take care of others. So Amika took Blossom and they moved into Joni's apartment in downtown Oakland. She was getting sick fast. I made the decision to go and live with my mom knowing she was dying. And Blossom from the beginning was like 100% on board. And we just were with her. We, you know, what we did was we set her bed up in the living room. It was like a studio apartment. The other thing that really stood out to me at that time was how vulnerable my mom became. Because my mom is not like that. My mom is like this. She's fierce. She's loud. You cannot shut my mom up in a room. But I think that's what she did. She put her mom up in a room, but she needed us in a way that she's never needed us. Amika would call her mom's friends on the phone and then lay the phone down next to her. They called the women who helped her start good vibrations. They called the photographers she had collaborated with for down their press. But there was one important person they couldn't call. They had to wait for him to call them. Jose called from prison and he was able to spend some time talking to my mom. And she'd known about him for years. But the last conversation that they had was my mom giving him her blessing. Even when he sat inside prison, my mom believed that we were making the right decision and that he would take care of me. The other thing that my mom had on her finger when she died was a little ring that he had sent her from inside the county jail that had my name on it. And she wore that on her wedding finger. This little ring made from jail that Jose sent to her. And it was like her my prized possession at the end. It was hard. I mean it was like hard and beautiful because I had never seen this side of my mom too. All of us had blocked off this tenderness, myself, my mom in many ways. Blossom had that too. It was like once I was gone, I remember my friend that was taking care of her. Just she would write me and be like, she doesn't want to hug anybody. She doesn't want people to touch her. She only wants her mom. I think she was reminded about a part of me that wasn't front and center most of the time, right? Which was the ability to be soft and nurturing and loving. I think I saw for the first time the nurturing, the true nurturing side of my mom. Seeing how good she is at taking care of people and making that space for spirits to pass through. So we were figuring it out together. And yeah, Blossom was a natural. Just like right there. We just kind of kept her cozy and warm and then we just knew it was coming. We just got in bed with her and Blossom and I just kind of took turns cuddling with her and you know keeping a cool rag on their face and things like that. I remember hearing her take her last breath. Me and my mom, we just sat there for a long time. I think actually I did think when she passed, she actually did kind of have like a half smile on her face, like a soft smile, you know? We got some music going, gupa burning and then we decorated her body. We had some henna and so we painted on her and we covered her with these flowers from her garden. We laid the flowers all around her and just sat with her. We felt proud that my mom got to die the way she wanted to die in her home and that she didn't suffer too much at the end. I think when she died, it was just a really... You can't put it into words. It's the same feeling that you have had a birth. You know, birth and death are so similar. So it didn't feel scary, it didn't feel strange, it just felt normal. The story continues right after this break. Welcome back. I'm Anna Sussman and you're listening to Fire Escape from Snap Studios at KQED. A little while after Joni passed away, a few months later, Jose was released from prison. He was working the fields in Central California, picking strawberries for not much pay. Well, what I saw was that he actually, like he also started like studying for his GED. He got his license. So those were like indicators like, okay, well, he seems pretty serious, right? And but it became more and more clear how serious he was. And then he and Amika and Blossom were able to move into Joni's apartment together. It was in an intentional community where folks ate meals together, gardens together, generally took care of each other. And that was also life changing for him as well, because for the first time ever, he'd been, he was in a community where there was resources and support and like he had never experienced any of those things in Central Valley. Because it was an intentional community? What do you mean? No, because I was so tapped into, I'd say, the kind of reentry community and people that had got out and made it. He had never seen anybody that had made it before. Like, that's actually pretty normal is like, to not have people in your community that have come back and done well for themselves, right? Or survived it. Like, they lived together for more than a year, just trying to slowly and quietly build a life together. I knew I had the feeling I was pregnant. How did you feel? Um, a mix of everything. I knew there was going to be people that judged me or didn't want, you know, they didn't think this was the right decision. And all of that, and I still felt like, sweet baby, I was so excited. She told Blossom first, and then they took Jose out for her birthday dinner at a buffet place and handed him a little box all wrapped up, a pregnancy test. We both, he had never been in his kids' lives the way he wanted to be because of incarceration, right? And addiction. And so, for him, it was kind of a dream to like have a new, a chance to do it again. And for me too. More so on choosing to bring another child in, right? Especially with wounded children that we had let down and hurt. And I'm sure it was really hard for them to see us starting over. Everybody was like, really? This is where you want to put your energy instead of us? We have our own insecurities about becoming parents this late in the game and after having like, you know, left and abandoned our children in many ways. You know, the truth is that we went from a death in our home when my mama died at home to a year and a half later, our daughter, Jose and I, were married and we were giving birth to our first baby girl together in the same spot that my mom had passed in a year and a half earlier. In this small loft that her mother had painted lavender, the same loft her mother had passed away in. In a blow-up birthing tub surrounded by women she had known for decades and Jose and Blossom, Amica began to birth her fourth child. I remember thinking that I wish I could take her pain away. It's like whatever I could do to make it better for her. My mom bent over and I'm like, oh my god, oh my god, what do I do? Like, you kind of don't, like, I did not know what to do really. I was trying to feed my mom popsicles. Smudging her down and she's beautiful. My husband and Blossom and myself, we all touched her head as she was coming out. So yeah, she was in the tub and we were all just watching her and saw her little head poke out. Oh, there she goes, there she goes. But Blossom was the first one to have hands on little Gloria and lift her up to our chest. And I caught her. She finally came out and I caught her. And I handed her to my mom. We're going to bring you up. It was a very full circle moment on so many levels. Blossom was my baby before Gloria, right? And she was the youngest. And so it was her first experience of like being at a birth, catching a baby, which has always been something that I thought a kid should experience. Like I felt like I had given her a bit of a cycle that a daughter deserves, right, to understand birth and death closely. And you know, as my mom says, like the one that's there at the gates, they're passing through. As an honor, like I feel like I feel like I was really, really lucky to be the one to catch Gloria to be the one to be there with my grandma as she passed on. What I envisioned the whole time I was in prison about how I would reconcile with my kids, I envisioned myself being there for them all the time. I envisioned myself like giving them a lot of love to make up for all these years that I'd been gone. And I envisioned myself setting an example of the new person I would be when I came home. I can say I can do one of those. And it's set an example. It's like how do you pass on and translate, especially when you've been removed and interrupted, you know, your relationship. And so this was all those things without speaking a word. The community we lived in, that was what they wanted us to do when the baby was born, was they asked Blossom, please come ring the bell so people could pay their respects. And that was how we got to announce to our people that she had made her way and that she was there. We had so much joy and we were celebrating Gloria. And we sure did tell the world that she was here and we had just did that, you know. Ringing a bell is like the opposite of shame. That is so real. That is so real. If I didn't rise up a bit out of that, the shame or the looking back and regret, I couldn't have done what I did. Like I could not have, I couldn't have parented them in the ways that I did when I got out. If I didn't believe I was doing the right thing, if I didn't believe that I was worthy of being their mother, or a new child's mother, right? Like I had to decide that I was worthy of living my life again. Music Firescape is a production of Snap Studios and Wondry. We want to thank Amika Mota for sharing her story with us. We have the stories of four more incarcerated firefighters in our bonus episodes. You'll also hear from some special guests in those episodes including Anna Sayle of Death, Sex and Money, Erlan Woods of Ear Hustle, New York Times bestselling author Stephanie Fu, and Suki Lewis from On Our Watch. Firescape was created, written and produced by me, Anna Susman. For Snap Studios, our senior story editors are Mark Ristich and Nancy Lopez. Marissa Dodge is our director of production. Original music by Renzo Gorio and Doug Stewart. Doug Stewart also created our theme song. Sound design and engineering by Miles Lassie. For Wondry, our senior story editor is Phyllis Fletcher. Our development producer is Eliza Mills. Claire Chambers, Lauren D and Mandy Gornstein are our senior producers and Sarah Mathis is our managing producer. Our executive producers for Snap Studios are Glenn Washington and Mark Ristich. Executive producers for Wondry are Marshall Louie, Morgan Jones, George Lavender and Jen Sargent. Special thanks to Adiza Egan and Katherine Steyer Martinez, Pat Mercedes Miller and the San Francisco Fire Department. On Team Snap, the union represented producers, artists, editors and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communication Workers of America, AFL, CIO, Local 51.
