After what seems an interminable drive, Tim turns the big Yukon into the prison entrance, we pass the gate, and I remember that Pollock’s not that bad, as prisons go. Nothing remotely like a state facility—Parchman, for example, which for a visitor is a shitty experience from start to finish, and for a prisoner can be hell on earth. The Pollock FCI feels more like an inexpensive but clean motel, one that happens to have bars, barbed wire, or mesh over every opening big enough for a human hand to pass through.

Being processed in reminds me of my years as a prosecutor, and it also makes me wonder how Annie has felt going through this, week after week. But if experience has taught me anything, it’s that kids seem to do very well handling prison visits; it’s the adults who seesaw between high anxiety and depression.

Before long, I find myself seated alone in a room the size of a large office cubicle. I was searched twice, despite my father being supposedly held in protective custody. But prisons have their procedures, and woe betide any guard who dares to break them—at least publicly. Annie and my mother must be very familiar with this sterile room.

I’ve visited a lot of witnesses in a lot of prisons, but seeing my father in this place will not be easy. When I hear the door open, I turn, my neck and back painfully stiff from last night’s action.

But it’s not my father who comes through that door.

First I hear an electric whir. Then a wheelchair scoots through the opening, bearing a man who was six feet four inches tall when he still had his legs. Now a crocheted comforter covers his lap, and also the space where the lower extremities that diabetes took from him would normally rest.

I wasn’t expecting Quentin Avery, since he divides his time between Washington, D.C., and a palatial home in Jefferson County, Mississippi, which is a good hundred miles away. But something obviously drew Quentin here today, and I’m pretty sure it was me.

Expertly manipulating the wheelchair’s joystick, he rolls to within inches of my chair and gives me a fond smile. The tight white Afro and skin light enough for freckles always give his face a friendly cast, and his greenish eyes often have a twinkle in them. But I have also seen those eyes blaze with fire, and ice over into opacity. The voice usually emerges as a soft southern drawl, but this man has argued landmark cases before the Supreme Court, and in such venues he can call forth a booming God-from-the-burning-bush bass that shakes judges in their seats. Today, though, he’s my benign uncle Quentin, ready to dispense wise advice for those smart enough to take it. Or so he would have me believe.