The Mother of Lamont

by Percy D. Luján

When Kenneth Lamont Kemp moved from Virginia to Westchester County, New York, in the fall of 1993, he paid his last visit to his mother in the Bronx.

The morning after, at around 7 a.m., Lamont’s girlfriend called to tell his mother – Nellie Kemp – that her son had been arrested.

“I didn’t even know what to think at that point,” Nellie said. “I felt completely destroyed.”

Her son was served a federal indictment for involvement in a conspiracy to traffic crack cocaine from the city of Norfolk, Virginia, to New York.

After a six-day jury trial, which began on December 29, 1993, and ended on January 6, 1994 – right around New Year – Lamont was given four life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Nineteen years have passed since Lamont was imprisoned. Last December, Nellie and her friend, Ardella Wilson, went to visit Lamont in a federal prison in upstate New York.

Ardella remembered not being able to wish Lamont a Happy New Year, but that she also told him they were trying to make the coming year different for him.

“I think it is a universal feeling,” Ardella said, remembering the period of silence that accompanied them as they drove away from the prison. “It is a primal feeling.”

In an effort to bring attention to the case, Nellie, Lamont, and a few supporters created a website called The Lamont Kemp File to which they uploaded 63 PDF files containing the transcripts from the case.

They argue that four life sentences without parole for a non-violent drug offense should be considered a “miscarriage of justice.” Also that, given the enacted Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the judicial disparity between cocaine powder and crack, Lamont’s sentence should be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

Feeling like herself

Nellie lives in a five-room apartment building erected around 1922 in the High Bridge neighborhood of the Bronx, to which she moved in 1981.

On her walls and refrigerator door hang pictures of her children and her grand-daughter, Lamont’s daughter. In one corner, four Army chests are piled, one on top of each other.

A brown, 150-pound shepherd and pit-bull mix by the name of Bear follows her around, begging for bacon.

Nellie used to live in Harlem until 1963. It was December 3^rd – the day of her 13^th birthday – when her mother told her she had a birthday present for her: they were moving to the Bronx.

She says felt she was going to die because she loved Harlem. “I felt so comfortable in my skin in Harlem. It was heaven,” she said.

Even though it was a big apartment, Nellie didn’t know the neighborhood. The Bronx was much more culturally diverse and Harlem was so familiar to her. When she moved, it was her first year of junior high.

“It took me a lot of years to get back to feeling like myself,” she said. “Everything was completely new, and I wasn’t a fan of new unless it was a pair of shoes.”

Even her family was very poor, Nellie said they never felt deprived because her mother provided unconditional love and they had each other.

Nellie has three sisters and one brother left. Her favorite brother died of cancer on 2001.

It is a grey afternoon. The bacon sizzles in the pan where her daughter, a police officer and Iraq veteran, stands frying it. The aroma floats out of the kitchen into the living room.

A friend Ardella walks in and is welcomed by Bear, who paces back and forth wagging his tail. “He is a honey bear,” Ardella tells Nellie.

Ardella has known Nellie since 2008. She was seeing somebody who had been imprisoned with Lamont. When her partner left prison, Lamont used to call her house to speak with his friend, and she sometimes picked up. He once spoke about his mother. That is how she and Nellie met.

An empowering time

Nellie graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School, during which she had Lamont on January 22, 1969. She said that she never missed a day. She went into labor during the mid-term break and immediately returned to school.

“He was a good baby,” she said, “As a matter of fact, I didn’t know I was pregnant until I was seven months.” She said she neither lost her shape nor developed stretch marks. She did not even have symptoms of pregnancy.

In September, Nellie enrolled in City College. She said it was hard to leave her baby and start a new life. Few of her friends were in college so there was no one to guide her.

She attended City College for two years. The previous spring, a group of black and Puerto Rican students occupied the college for two weeks, demanding the implementation of open admissions in order to open the university to more black and Latino youth.

She remembers it being a time when a lot of things were being done to empower people of color. Jessie Jackson and Angela Davis were in their prime, and there were a lot of protests.

Nellie said she wasn’t as interested in school as she was interested in what was going on around her.

“I thought it was a very…” she paused, trying to find the words, “ignited time in history,” she said. “We no longer were going to take people putting us down or beating us up and calling us the N-word.”

Lamont was a toddler then. Nellie said he was an inquisitive young man whose mind was blossoming. Her aunt still remembers one day when she was peppering three-year-old Lamont with questions, and he looked at her and asked, “Don’t you know anything?”

Trying to better herself

It was 1971 and Nellie thought she needed to do something else because she needed to support a young child and had no money.

She had been in college for one year and three more seemed too long. She said it was hard going to college and she did not take out loans because she did not want debt.

By that time, she was living with the man in the Dunbar Apartments in Harlem. She met him while pregnant with Lamont and he was the only father Lamont ever knew because his own father didn’t remain in Nellie’s life.

Nellie said he was a handsome, college-educated, acoustic bass player who introduced her to archery, which later became a favorite sport. “I was always attracted to the artsy-crafty folks,” she said.

She did not want to depend on him, though. He was a motion picture projectionist, better known as the person who handles film in the movie theater.

One day, she came to him and told him that she wanted to get a job like his. “He said, ‘No, you can’t’” Nellie remembers, but that motivated her to pursue it. The job paid well and Nellie wanted to better herself.

Lamont had started going to school in a head start program in lower Manhattan. Nellie’s mother had moved to housing projects in Avenue D and was helping Nellie taking care of Lamont.

After taking a motion picture course for about a year, getting her license and joining the Motion Picture Projectionist Union – Local 306 – Nellie landed her first job at an all male porno house in 55^th Street owned by a nice Greek guy.

Raised Catholic and hearing the mass in Latin, Nellie had the Ten Commandments ingrained in her head. She did not know what porn was.

Upon seeing her, the manager asked her if she had ever worked in a theater like this before. She cheerfully told him that it was her first job.

Then, the manager told her what the job was about. “It still did not sink in my head how profound this situation was going to turn out to be,” she said.

Nellie remembers looking at the audience through the hole for the projector. The lights were down and she believed she could see the men doing some strange things in their seats. “Okay, pay attention to what you are doing, Nellie,” she told herself.

Then, she began showing the movie. “Oh my God, I was completely mesmerized. I had never seen stuff like that in my whole life. I hadn’t even seen stuff men and women did together, so forget about what men and men did together.”

She only lasted a week, after which she asked the union to give her another job. They did. They sent her to Riverdale, where she projected cartoons.

“And my life has pretty much been like that, from one extreme to the other,” Nellie said. “Here I have a daughter who is a police officer and in the military, and here I have a son who is locked up in jail for 19 years.”

Therefore, she said, she cannot say all police officers are bad, and having her daughter involved in the judicial system showed her there are wonderful people there too.

“What he did to me”

After a year working in the theaters, Nellie used her savvy to join a program called Third World Cinema Productions.

She has a picture of her time at there. She has the “Angela Davis” look. Next to her are New York City Mayor John Lindsay and actor James Earl Jones.

Nellie then heard of a summer vacation job opening at NBC. To her surprise, they gave her the job becoming one of the first African American women working at NBC doing what she did.

Her career at NBC lasted for 15 years, where she used to work in the David Letterman Show. She entered as a projectionist and exited being a video tape engineer.

Wanting to provide a good education for their children, Nellie sent them off to study in Mamaroneck, Westchester, where Nellie’s mother-in-law lived.

Lamont attended Rye Neck Junior High and Rye Neck High School.

Nellie said he used to be a star athlete who once scored five touchdowns in one game. She used to have many of his trophies, but she just took them down.

Eleven years into her relationship, she married her boyfriend. After that, Nellie said, he changed. “I decided that I loved him, but that I wasn’t in love with him,” she said.

One day, he had left the children at her mother’s house in Cedric Avenue. She was in the apartment where she now lives and she remembers ironing inside a room that used to be Lamont’s, who was 14 at that time.

On that day, he beat her up.

“It was so unexpected,” she said. “I could not understand it. My mother never beat me. I’ve never been beat. I didn’t come to this world with scars.”

She remembers screaming at the top of her lungs. The next day, she was in court trying to figure out how to get a divorce.

Her husband died of a stroke at the age of 48. She regrets not being able to ask him why he did it.

Nellie said that she still loves him. “He was a good man,” she said. “He was good father to both our children.”

“At that time I felt that I hated him,” she said. “Now I know I hated what he did to me. There is a difference.”

Laughing differently

Unlike other mothers who might abandon their sons in jail, Nellie is there for Lamont, Ardella said. “She’s loyal,” she said. “She is there. She’s showing her love.”

Nellie said that the family and loved ones also serve time with the person in prison. You laugh differently and feel that you should not enjoy yourself. “How can I smile?” she said. “How can I laugh and be happy?”

In front of the refrigerator door, Nellie is looking at pictures of her son, her daughter and some pictures of her foster children. She was a foster parent from 1988 until 1999 and has one adopted son.

There are also pictures of her granddaughter as a baby, the child that Lamont fathered while in high school.

The girl now is 21 years old. She lives in Virginia and has to journey to up-state New York to visit her father. Nellie said that Lamont has also been housed in federal prisons in New Jersey, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.

The visiting hours have been limited to Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, between 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The wardens check all the mail and prisoners are not allowed to receive any packages except for books sent directly from the publisher.

Conjugal visits are not allowed in the federal penal system, unlike in some state penitentiaries.

“What man should go through life by choice not having an intimate relationship with the opposite sex?” Nellie said. “What kind of frustration must that cause to inmates, a bunch of men together, who cannot have the human touch of a female?”

Crack in the justice system

Prior to 2010, the mandatory minimum sentence for possession of crack cocaine was at a 100:1 ratio to that of powder cocaine.

This meant that a person caught with 50 grams of crack was given the same mandatory minimum sentence (10 years) of someone caught with 5 kilograms of powder cocaine.

The Fair Sentencing Act signed on August 3, 2010, by President Obama reduced the ration to 18:1.

On June 30, 2011, the U.S. Sentencing Commission decided to make the law retroactive for those people serving time before the law was signed.

Alternet.org, an online news magazine, reported that as many as 1,800 prisoners were eligible for early release, and 12,000 for a sentence reduction.

But according to the Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a non-profit that advocates for sentencing reform, this did not make the law retroactive for those sentenced with mandatory minimums. As it stands now, Kemp will die in jail.

For some change to happen Congress would have to make the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 retroactive and this is what the Fair Sentencing Clarification Act would do.

Introduced on June 23, 2011, by Democrat Representative Robert Scott from the 3^rd District of Virginia – which includes Norfolk – this act has been referred to a committee where it is to this day.

During the trial, Lamont was appointed a legal aid attorney. He could not have the lawyer of his choice because he was representing the other men involved in the conspiracy with him. Nellie said they testified against Lamont in exchange for a reduction of their sentences.

Nellie felt that the judge was trying to hurry the process because it was close to a holiday, and that he was leaning toward the prosecutor’s side.

“I thought they were very prejudiced in that area where the trial was heard,” Nellie said.

She remembers being in an elevator during the lunch recess of the third day of the trial. Then, a woman entered the elevator and looked at her from head to toe.

Ardella asked her to describe how the woman looked at her. Nellie stared at the ceiling trying to find the words. She then said the look was the one of somebody who thought she was superior. She said she did not feel the community was friendly toward a woman, let alone a man, of color.

What can a mother do?

Nellie is sitting on a battery-powered wheelchair beside the table. She began using it after a total hip and knee replacement surgery in 2010. She no longer uses the walker she had during a talk Communist Carl Dix gave about mass incarceration last February.

After the talk, Nellie stood in front of the audience and began describing her case. “What can a mother do?” she asked everyone.

Nellie said she did not know how to answer her own question. She said she was just a mother, “A mother of very little means, but a world for desire.”

Nellie said that she is proud of her son because he is a man that has respect. She said he has good sense and cares for people.

She said that one of the guards once told her, “I have respect for him. I don’t know how he got here, but he does not belong here.”

Nellie said that Lamont is not a negative person. “He is not sitting there being mad at the world.”

“Kenneth is special,” Ardella said. “He knows he is going home soon.”

“I don’t know the day,” said Nellie. “I don’t know the hour. But I know that he’s coming home.”