Kambri Crews Finds Way To Forgive Her Father
Trigger warning: This episode may be disturbing for some listeners.
Kambri Crews is up at a cabin in the Catskills. And she just received all of her dad’s personal belongings in the mail.
KAMBRI: So my dad’s entire life is all in this one box (sound of opening box) let’s see…
She pulls out his books, his towel, his prison issued clothes ...
KAMBRI: And they all look pretty worn. Here’s a roll of toilet paper with a disposable razor…
File folders with legal papers, recipes, his letters...
KAMBRI: And he wrote me this in a letter. It’s from Sonya Taitz, ‘what children take from us they give. We become people who feel more deeply, question more deeply, hurt more deeply and love more deeply.’ My dad wrote that to me and he said that that was us that was you and me.
In a separate package Kambri also receives his ashes. Her dad died in July in a Texas prison.
KAMBRI: (Sigh) oh boy.
It’s taken years for Kambri to reconcile with her dad but they finally had. They were even planning to go on a road trip when he was paroled. Now she’s wondering whether she should go anyway ... with his ashes riding shotgun.
Kambri is 49. She grew up in rural Texas with deaf parents. They met at a school for the deaf. Her mom had partial hearing. Her dad was completely deaf. Mom worked factory jobs while dad worked construction. Money was tight, at times. But Kambri says she and her brother had all they needed (pause) living a feral life.
KAMBRI: Running through the woods and killing snakes and swinging from trees and swimming in the creek and fishing and stuff.
Kambri looks like her parents. She shares her dad’s dark eyes and mom’s blond hair. Her mom’s name was Christy. Her Dad was Ted, but everyone called him Cigo, short for “Can I Go Out.”
Cigo built a tin shed for the family while they saved up enough to lease a trailer. When their trailer was repossessed they moved back into the shed. We’re talking no electricity. No indoor plumbing. A concrete slab floor. One bunk bed to sleep in -- mom and dad on bottom, brother and sister up top.
KAMBRI: In Texas heat, living in a tin shed is not comfortable (laughs) to say the least.
But being the daughter of deaf parents had its advantages. Take for instance the vulgar comedy records that she listened to.
KAMBRI: I had subscribed to Columbia Records. And I ordered things like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, wildly inappropriate for my age …
Kambri and her brother would also have full conversations in front of their parents without moving their lips.
KAMBRI: So at dinner he’d be like, ‘Alright I’m going to sneak out. You tell mom and dad I’m gonna hang out with Jimmy OK?’
Kambri remembers her dad always doted on her. One time after a long day at the beach Kambri and her brother were riding home in the back of the pickup truck. Her flip flop got sucked out through a rusted hole in the truck bed. Kambri broke down in tears. Cigo saw Kambri so upset he pulled over. Ran across four lanes of traffic, cars swerving and honking at him. Of course he couldn’t hear them.
KAMBRI: And he runs back like he’s carrying the Olympic torch and people are hootin’ and hollerin’. And he rescued this maybe a dollar’s worth of a Flintstone flip-flop ... And he gave it back to me. He's like, ‘don't you cry, baby girl. Don't cry.’ Yeah, he would've done anything.
When Kambri was a teenager the family moved from the woods to the big city ... Fort Worth. That’s when she learned her dad’s drinking was a problem.
KAMBRI: I would ask my mom when’s he coming home? And she wouldn’t give me the answer and that made me so anxious just balls of anxiety.
Even though he was a talented builder, Cigo had a tough time holding onto a job. And when he was out of work, he’d get paranoid. See Kambri’s mom Christy could hear pretty well with hearing aids but Cigo could not so he often felt left out.
KAMBRI: He’s like convinced that we’re talking about him.
Kambri really got into theater when she was in high school. There was one play she was in. It was so well-received the school’s drama program made it to a statewide competition held at the University of Texas.
KAMBRI: So it was a huge deal. It was like every single parent came out on the buses and caravans of cars.
After all of the schools performed, everyone waited in the auditorium for the judges to tally the scores.
KAMBRI: That's when we just hear this guttural, like (imitates the sound) and everybody's like, ‘what is that noise?’ I immediately recognize it... It's my dad on stage doing his best Elvis impression was swinging his arm around and doing his gyrating hips.
One of the adults in charge finally chases Cigo off the stage.
KAMBRI: And I'm just like slunk down in my seat. I was mortified because all my friends were like, ‘wait, Kambri isn’t that your dad?’ I'm like, ‘no, no, no. I've never seen that man before in my life. What are you talking about?’ But of course it was. LAUREL AND KAMBRI: Laughing
I was so mad at him.
Despite that embarrassing moment after the play, Kambri has stayed with the theater. In fact she’s even shared parts of her life on stage. Here she is last year talking about how noisy it was in her house.
KAMBRI (LIVE SHOW): Deaf people really don’t understand how loud they can be. Everything from bodily functions to clanging of dishes it all becomes just sort of white noise of life to a CODA a Child of a Deaf Adults like myself. I used to sleep with speakers in my bed with the volume turned up to 10. And would still sleep through the alarm. So I also never heard my parents fight.
But one night when Kambri was 17 she did hear them fighting. She got up, tiptoed down the hall to her parents’ bedroom:
KAMBRI: (LIVE SHOW) And she was laying on the floor, and my dad was straddling her with his arm cocked back ready to punch. And my mom saw me in the doorway so she turned her head. And just that fraction of a move (smack of fist hitting her hand) my dad’s fist hit the floor instead of her face.
Kambri had never seen her dad like this. Unhinged. Around the apartment there were about a dozen fist-sized holes in the walls.
KAMBRI: (LIVE SHOW) I ran to my bedroom and I called 911. And now my first instinct was to protect my dad because in the deaf community you would hear stories all the time about how deaf people would be mistakenly shot dead by the police because they hadn’t listened to the officers commands. So I made sure that the 911 operator knew my dad was deaf and please don’t shoot him.
The police came but this was Texas in the 1980s. There weren’t laws yet to protect Kambri’s mom from her husband. So all the police could do was escort him out of the apartment and back into his car even though he was clearly drunk. Kambri and her mom went back to bed, both in a state of shock.
KAMBRI: (LIVE SHOW) That’s when I hear a tremendous crash…
Cigo had kicked down the door. Kambri came out of her room and he charged her. She tried to call 911 but her dad yanked the cord out of the wall. Then he corralled Kambri and her mom into the dining room.
KAMBRI (LIVE SHOW): I would scream, ‘somebody call 911! Somebody call 911!’ ...Nothing. He turns his attention to me. And he wants to make sure that I know what a terrible human being my mother is saying your mother is an S-L-U-T slut! And he’s searching my face for a sign that I’m on his side.
She kept a straight face. Cigo snapped. That's when he grabbed Christy by the throat and slammed her up against the wall.
KAMBRI: (LIVE SHOW) Her feet are at least a foot off the ground and her heels are digging and writhing around like she’s trying to get some leverage on the wall. And her eyes are bugged out...And I get in between their faces and I make my dad look at me. ‘Look at me! It’s Kambri, your baby girl. Look at me. Why are you doing this? Why?’
Her dad’s eyes filled with tears and he let Christy go. That's when Kambri ran for the phone and the police arrived soon after and arrested Cigo.
All of this happened during Kambri’s senior year of high school. She stayed in school, did her best. Her dad wound up getting four years probation. Not nearly enough as far as Kambri was concerned. Between the attack on her mom and the sentence Kambri decided to leave. She married her boyfriend. Took his last name. Right after graduation they took off to Ohio.
Back in Texas Kambri’s mom managed to keep herself safe.
But for a long time Kambri was angry -- angry she didn’t go to college. Angry no one took her dad’s attack seriously.
KAMBRI: All that time that I'd felt like I'd been gas lit by everyone, everyone being like, ‘oh, it wasn't so bad. He didn't mean to hurt you. You just forgive and forget.’
But Kambri couldn’t forget. She had violent nightmares about her mom and dad. She coped by working. Hard. At 26 she became assistant vice president of a bank. But she wasn’t happy.
KAMBRI: Life was happening to me. I wasn’t controlling anything at all.
So Kambri ended her marriage and moved even farther away from Texas. To New York to reinvent herself. All the while keeping in touch with her mom. Kambri would also get occasional late night phone calls from her dad.
One night out of the blue Kambri’s brother called -- with staggering news. Cigo stabbed a new girlfriend. He almost killed her.
KAMBRI: Wakes up all those old memories and all those old nightmares started coming back.
The prosecutor asked Kambri and her mom to testify against Cigo. Kambri refused. No way was she going to turn her life upside down again. So she told her mom to do it.
CHRISTY: Of course I was nervous I’ve never been in a courtroom where I have to be on the stand.
This is Kambri’s mom, Christy.
CHRISTY: But when they brought him in, first thing I said, ‘oh, my gosh, he's aged.’ Alcohol has aged him. Of course, it upset me to see him. He kept his head down. He wouldn't look at me.
As soon as the judge gave his decision Christy called Kambri.
KAMBRI: And she said 20 years. I answered the phone and that was first thing out of her mouth. They gave him 20 years. And she was sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. Just it all coming out anger, rage, guilt, shame and all of it. Every single emotion. This horrible soup just came spilling out of her. When I went home, I went and took a shower, a long, hot shower and just wanted to just clean myself off and just cried and cried and cried just wailed.
Cigo dried out in prison and he started writing Kambri. Sometimes he’d just ask for money. Other times he’d ask her to look up some fact he’d bet another inmate he knew. Every once in a while, a letter would rekindle something. Kambri would remember why she loved him so much.
KAMBRI: We always said he could charm the socks off a snake.
And then there were times when he’d deny the attack on her mom.
LAUREL: At what point... And I don’t know if you still hold onto some of that anger but him not owning up to those attacks I would be angry. KAMBRI: There definitely were moments where I would be like, ‘you cannot possibly think that I believe this … I’m like, ‘Dad, I was in the room. I called 911. What kind of horseshit are you trying to sell here?’ I think there’s a part of him that wants to believe it because he was a blackout drunk because he doesn’t remember the details and how could he have done something so terrible and not even remember it. He makes up lies to be able to live with himself.
As she’s wrestling with a tangled knot of emotions, Kambri kept busy. She opened a performance space in Queens and started interviewing her family to write a memoir.
KAMBRI: Researching his childhood and learning about his traumatic past was very helpful for me to gain empathy and to see him as a fully complicated person and not just this violent offender.
She found out he had a really high IQ but as a kid he had trouble communicating with his own hearing family. He’d looked for attention in other ways. And he was punished as a result. One time when he was little, they threatened to leave him in an unfamiliar part of town.
KAMBRI: He had been whipped with cherry switches until lashes on his back that would result in open flesh wounds and welts and just terrible.
Kambri’s book was published in 2012 and she mailed a copy to her dad in prison.
KAMBRI: And I was hopeful that he would read it like it was meant to be. It was a letter to him. It was just a really long letter.
SFX: Pages turning. KAMBRI: ‘I had wanted justice and had gotten it. Now I just wanted my daddy, the one I chose to remember, the man who rescued my flip flop because he thought it meant something to me. The father who danced better than John Travolta. The father who was my Daniel Boone…’
They kept writing letters to each another. After a few years Kambri visited him in prison from time to time. They got closer. Eventually Cigo owned up to the attacks. After more than two decades he wrote a letter to Kambri’s mom Christy asking for forgiveness.
CHRISTY: And I feel like that he served his time because after that letter he wrote, I honestly felt like he was going to try to change when he got out...You know, if he had not been an alcoholic, if he had just been the good guy that I married, you know, stay straight, he would have been a wonderful husband and a wonderful father.
In June of 2020 after serving 18 years of a 20 year sentence Cigo was paroled.
KAMBRI: I was like, ‘he got parole. Oh my God! He’s coming home! Oh my God!’
During his last year in prison Kambri and Cigo planned a road trip. Kambri even bought a red jeep just for the occasion. They had the whole thing mapped out. PAUSE
But the coronavirus halted their plans. The Texas prison system prevented thousands of inmates from completing mandatory pre-release programs. Everyone was put on lockdown. Inmates received just one meal a day in their cells.
KAMBRI: We're talking inedible food -- molded bread, cold meat like still frozen.
Cigo lost 25 pounds in a month. Kambri was livid.
Just a few weeks after the parole announcement Cigo collapsed and was taken to the hospital. The doctor diagnosed him with lung cancer. He died five days later. He was 73.
CHRISTY (on phone with Kambri): I was upset and I cried because there’s this man that I was married to for 23 years. KAMBRI: And you had two kids with him a whole life together yeah.
CHRISTY: Yeah, Well, how are you feeling? KAMBRI: I'm at peace. I feel like he and I said everything there was to say. I'm very disappointed that we didn't have time in the free world. He and I could have had a really long road trip so I'm sad that we didn't get that. CHRISTY: Yes, I'm sad for that, too. KAMBRI: Yeah.
A month after he died Kambri held an online service.
KAMBRI ON ZOOM: Yeah, so this is weird, right? 2020 zoom memorials. We’re gonna be winging this...
During the memorial she showed Cigo’s artwork, the scrapbooks he made of all the pictures and postcards she and her brother sent him. Friends shared memories. And Kambri read a letter she wrote to him in his final days.
KAMBRI: ‘Dear Daddy, I want you to be relieved of any pain and suffering... The world is better for you having been in it. You have given lessons to and inspired many.’
She thanked him for teaching her how to drive a stick shift. How to grow a garden. And less tangible things like empathy and forgiveness.
KAMBRI: (fade back up) ...You are my greatest teacher. You can’t begin to know how much I love you. Always have. Always will. -Kambri
Kambri has decided afterall to take her dad’s ashes on that road trip through the south. They’ll visit the school for the deaf where he met Kambri’s mom. Then they’ll drive to the Texas woods they called home. They’ll head north to Oklahoma to see friends and family. And finally they’ll head east to New York where Kambri will plant a pecan tree and shine a light on it.
This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.
