Coming Home

by Brittney Griner

My dad was military, law enforcement. If I’m on time, I’m late.

When you’re six foot nine and wear size 17 men’s sneakers, you don’t fit. Not in cars. Not in chairs. Not in beds. Not in crowds.

definitely not in a world that mistakes you for what it most fears: a Black man. Your presence is a threat. Your Blackness intimidates. Your height and swagger add to the alarm. You walk through the world on high alert, scanning your surroundings and holding your breath. Lower your guard for even a second and boom, you might get taken out. Many have. More will.

exciting. That’s the upside of distance. You meet your lover fresh each time you come together, and then while you’re apart you support each other’s grind. The downside is the longing, the absence of touch.

Every sport has an off-season, but pro women hoopers often work year-round. We earn about 250 times less than NBA players and have a hard cap on our salaries. In the WNBA that year I made around $220,000. Overseas, I earned a million plus. That pay gap is why I was in Russia in the first place.

I take pride in being a breadwinner, promised Relle I’d always provide.

short time later and a world away, I wake up in an after I’d wish on no one. My horror begins in a land I thought I knew, on a trip I wish I hadn’t taken.

The system put a mark on us. You’re not the same as everyone else. And nobody ever asked who we were. As Black and brown people, it’s as if we were born guilty.

my wife and I lingered in bed till the last minute because something in me kept whispering, Don’t go.

She threw on a sundress as I dragged myself out of bed. From then on, everything went sideways.

and I can practically block a shot in my sleep, but please don’t ask me to organize anything. Not a closet. Not a pantry. Not a schedule. And for damn sure not a suitcase. That’s my wife’s territory and also her talent. I do the hooping, she does the planning. I do the driving, she does the shopping. I open doors, she walks through them.

Most of the Russians flew through the metal detectors, but us foreigners were being flagged for additional search.

When I saw those cartridges, not one but two, a different type of fear shuddered through me. There was no instinct to fight, flee, or freeze. Instead, my body went into a major free fall, as if I’d stumbled off a cliff and plunged into the ocean.

Fear is one thing. But uncertainty, the unknown, a free fall into mystery—that’s much stronger than fear; it’s terror.

My baby had studied the law in the United States, knew our Constitution inside out. Yet while due process runs the show in the land of the free, this was Russia. This was Putin’s house. This was hell.

February in Russia is no joke, often below freezing.

The real blow came when I heard my charge, Article 229.1, part 2 in the Russian criminal code. I’d been accused of smuggling a significant amount of narcotics into the country. Significant amount? They’d found 0.2 grams in one cartridge, 0.5 in the other—a total of 0.7 grams, such little oil that it’d be gone as soon as the pens were warmed up.

in Russia it’s considered a “significant amount,” punishable by five to ten years and a fine of up to a million rubles—just over ten grand in U.S. dollars. And that was just the initial charge. As the investigation progressed, additional allegations could be added.

I truly felt my life was over that night. If only I’d known what was coming.

There I stood in a foreign country, under arrest in the wee hours. I was on my way to jail with no clue as to how long I’d be there or what conditions I might face.

They also seized my most valuable possession: my phone, my lifeline, my only connection to home.

On February 15, I left Phoenix in a frenzy, my heart full of Relle, my bags stuffed with seasonings. Three hellish days later, just before dawn, I lost my freedom, my peace, my life as I’d known it.

almost declined the water when I saw the calcified kettle it came from. But boiled water was semi-clean water in a place where that was scarce.

I’d become a spectacle, the guards’ entertainment, a freak show to liven their shift.

In the Russian prison system, I was marked for a different reason. In a nation long at odds with my homeland and the West, I was, to their disgust, an American.

You don’t realize how much you rely on human contact until you lose it. You know you need love and friendship, but you can forget you also need brief interactions: a smile from a cashier, chitchat with neighbors. Those people aren’t in the front row of your life, but they’re still part of what keeps you sane. They show you that you matter by lighting up when they see you. They make you feel less alone.

I had no clue where I’d end up after county, but if I was going to the tank, one of those rat-infested Russian prison camps I’d seen on Netflix, I had to be ready to fight.

When you’re caught between before and a month of tomorrows, your eyes won’t close. Uncertainty keeps your lids on alert.

Dad moved back to Jasper, where the Griners owned a Black funeral home and cemetery; in those days, even death was segregated.

With a wingspan of seven-four, I’m a damn giraffe, not some cute little bug.

Most folks mistook me for a guy anyway. That’s how flat chested I’ve always been.

At home, WNBA players were often treated like NBA afterthoughts. In Russia, we were sports royalty.

From my place on the porch, I couldn’t see the dirty politics, the corruption, the old-school views of women. The club handled all my business and kept a bubble around the players, which kept a lot of the real Russia out of view.

They were in the stands, cheering us on, or lined up at my locker room after. But that was Russia from the outside, not up close. Inside, I was learning, was another story.

My agent heard the same advice from every quarter: Keep the arrest quiet. Because if we got loud, things would escalate, which would make it harder to cut a deal to bring me home. She didn’t know if Putin even knew about the incident at that point, so it was better not to draw attention to it.

And then came February 24. Exactly one week after a dog sniffed my suitcase, Russia invaded Ukraine.

The invasion changed everything for me. Suddenly, my arrest wasn’t just an arrest, and I wasn’t just another prisoner. I was a possible chess piece in a showdown between superpowers. The timing of my episode couldn’t have been worse. The stakes had just been raised.

The takeaway was clear: my case was already at the Kremlin.

day three, I decided to go vegan. Why not? If you saw the food they brought me, you’d go vegan too. Suddenly I wanted to save the fish, the chicken, the cows, the whole damn planet.

Sometimes loving a person means telling them everything. Other times it means leaving them with hope.

Once you lose language, your isolation is absolute.

Alex had given me the lowdown on Correctional Colony No. 1, or IK-1, as it was known. It was a former orphanage the Russians turned into a massive women’s prison.

Every day at lunch the guards bring a knife so you can cut your own fruits and vegetables. Similar thing on Scissor Sundays, when they dropped off nail clippers and hair trimmers for grooming. The guards were supposed to pick up the sharp items.

“If you try to escape, they can’t shoot you because you haven’t been sentenced yet. You have to have a verdict to get shot.”

At six foot nine with tats and dreads, I don’t exactly blend in.

Olya talked me through the rest of the prison playbook. Two cell searches a day, 6:00 a.m. before showers, 9:00 p.m. before lights out at 10:00. You got an hour a day “outdoors,” in a caged space called the Yard. The other twenty-three hours were spent in your cell, bored as hell on that bed. No napping, though. I guess they wanted you awake for your suffering,

Every room had a small TV, which guards controlled. It mostly stayed on the Russian propaganda channel, except on the weekends, when we could watch whatever. You got three meals a day, prepared by the convicts in the many buildings near ours.

Once a month you got a single roll of toilet paper, and good luck if you ran out.

She also gave me my TP and a tiny tube of toothpaste. I pulled the tube close to my face and read the words on the back: “Best if used by September 2007.” Holy fuck. If I didn’t die of heartache first, I’d be killed by mildewed white paste. A

In the WNBA, my teammates and I joked about our so-called prison showers, a big space with spouts spread around. This was the real thing, and it was nasty: exposed pipes on every wall. Long hair strands all over the tile floor and gathered in the drains.