Coming Home

by Brittney Griner

undressed, found the cleanest part of the floor, and turned on a faucet. Rusty brown water came spouting out.

You didn’t shower daily, just twice a week, and only with your cellmates.

That was life in the gray zone. Most everything was negotiable; you just had to find the right price.

We showered together every Wednesday and Sunday, our designated days. Three times a day the guards came through with gumbo-size pots of grits, noodles, and that funky fish.

Our laundry day was one of our shower days, Sundays. We were supposed to hand-wash our clothes in the sink and dry them on top of the tiny radiator in our cell.

Honestly, when I hear the word propaganda, I think of a past era, with Nazis spreading lies about the Jewish people. Well, the past is very present on Russian TV, where Putin claimed the Nazis controlled the USA.

Sometimes it takes a while to realize you’re fucked.

The New York Times summed it up this way: “Russia said on Saturday that it had detained an American basketball player—quickly identified as Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner—on drug charges, entangling a U.S. citizen’s fate in the dangerous confrontation between Russia and the West over Ukraine.”

And now, before I could even talk to E.J., the Russian media had slandered his auntie with three ugly descriptions: Smuggler. Criminal. Prisoner.

Blackness doesn’t make you less, but it does frame your life. When you walk into a room, so does race. Frankly, it shows up before you do.

For Putin, my worth was as a pawn. My arrest gave him leverage in his clash with the West. He was well aware of America’s long history of racial tensions, and he knew how to use that to his benefit.

When you’re Black, your behavior is never just about you. It’s about your entire community. You live with this responsibility to represent the best of us, to prove the haters wrong.

If someone white messes up, most folks just shake their heads. But if a Black person makes the same mistake, it’s like, “See, I told you they were worthless.”

The FSB has been manipulating U.S. racial politics forever, meddling in our elections to get its way. As I saw it, the clip release was Putin’s way of saying, “Game on, Biden. Your move.” It was also a sign that the Russians intended to control the story, to tell it their way.

“But we can’t get our hopes up,” he said. “This is Russia.”

You could be on the verge of going home, he said, and then, Oops, end up rotting in jail. Nothing was ever certain in the gray zone. Nothing was done until it was actually done.

When war broke out on February 24, flights between Russia and the USA began drying up. FedEx, UPS, and other corporations suspended services into and out of the country. Then, on the same day Russia released the clip of me, the State Department urged Americans to leave the country immediately.

In our two-person crew, I’m the face of the ship. She’s the one steering in the background.

I’m her anchor, the one place where she can be a mess.

Hope is a funny thing. It can be comforting. It can also be a mindfuck.

a country with a 99.9 percent conviction rate, a defense attorney is more like a friend, advisor, and legal guide,

The judge’s biggest reason for overruling us was the one she couldn’t state: she’d been ordered to keep me detained, likely as leverage for Putin.

And I knew by how quickly the judge closed her notebook that my verdict had been decided in advance. My detainment would be extended, she ruled. Not one month this time, but two.

the Kremlin didn’t need a reason to hold Americans. All they needed was their word against ours.

based on criteria in the Levinson Hostage-Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act, which had been signed into law in 2020. By declaring an American “wrongfully detained,” the U.S. government asserted that one of its citizens was being unlawfully held as a political prisoner, as a way for a foreign country to meddle in U.S. policy. The secretary of state—in 2022, that was Antony Blinken—made the determination.

Two things I’d figured out about Russian officials: First, cannabis was the devil in their eyes. They saw all forms of cannabis—marijuana, hashish, hash oil, edibles, sprays—like they saw crack cocaine. And in their view, cannabis was definitely more criminal than the synthetic drugs popular there.

The second thing I know about Russia: being gay is frowned upon. That disapproval often isn’t voiced. It’s understood.

When you’re born in a body like mine, a part of you dies every day, with every mean comment and lingering stare. You’re the biggest person in the room, but you’re also the loneliest. That was what it felt like to be me in middle school. That is sometimes what it feels like now.

“Just do what you have to do to get out of there safely,” Alex reiterated.

“Do you understand that you are guilty?” she said, in a statement masquerading as a question.

Ned Price from the U.S. State Department told the world I was doing “as well as can be expected under these very difficult circumstances.”

I’d been praying I’d be declared wrongfully detained. By late March, I’d heard nothing.

When I was arrested in February, it was freezing. As winter melted into spring, daytime temps rose from the twenties to the fifties—not

On April 27, Trevor Reed walked free. Trevor, a U.S. citizen and marine vet, had been arrested in Moscow in August 2019 while on a trip with his Russian girlfriend.

The U.S. government declared him wrongfully detained and bargained for his release. Meanwhile, in a forced labor camp, Trevor endured solitary confinement and such horrid conditions that he went on a hunger strike. Nearly three years after his arrest, he was traded for Russian cocaine smuggler Konstantin Yaroshenko. Frail

Only someone who has lived, prayed, cried, and slept in a Russian prison can truly comprehend the daily indignities, the deep isolation that weighs on your spirit.

Trevor’s release signaled that a trade was even possible.

Russia and America have a long history of prisoner swaps stretching back to the Cold War, but before Trevor’s trade, t...

sports journalist Tamryn Spruill posted on change.org. She appealed to the White House for my release. The Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) would later join that appeal. “We ask that you take action today—doing whatever is necessary—to bring Brittney Griner home swiftly and safely,” read the plea. I didn’t know it, as I sat cut off from the world in my cell, but that petition went viral, with more than four hundred thousand signatures.

From then on, she and the team would slowly and methodically turn up the volume in their efforts to bring me home.

You can withstand just about any shame so long as your tribe stands with you.

The problem with Russia is not corruption per se, or even Putin per se. Russian government is not corrupt because Vladimir Putin has absolute power. Russian government has been corrupt, and will always be as long as anyone has absolute power.

“You’ve been reclassified as ‘wrongfully detained.’ ” It was stunning. It was game-changing. It was May.

my only way home was now through a trade—and a trade would be possible only following a conviction, said Alex and Maria. No way would Putin swap me before one of the judges in his pocket slapped me with a guilty verdict. He needed to show the world he was a political strongman.

My third hearing went like the previous two—short and predetermined.

It’s ludicrous in America, but those evals are mandatory in Russia. My lawyers didn’t even expect they could defend me using the same tactics a defense attorney in the United States can employ. The best they could do was minimize my sentence.

From May through the end of summer, big pieces of white pollen called Betula fill the air in Russia. It looks like someone has blown a million dandelions. There were heaps of this pollen in the corners of the Yard, piled up like snow.

To see the doctor I had to write an “application,” a short note (in Russian) explaining my condition. Alena wrote mine and gave it to the guard, who then gave it to the warden for review. That process took a week.

was elated SPEHA was now handling my case. On the other, SPEHA was also overseeing Trevor’s and Paul Whelan’s cases. Trevor served 985 days. Paul Whelan was arrested in 2018 and was still locked in hell.

I might’ve been the female LeBron in Russia, but many in my homeland hadn’t heard of me until Putin released that footage.