Annapolis native in the process of personal renewal
Other than the scrape and shush of two young men sweeping leaf litter out of the street and into a garbage bag, all is quiet when Keo Williams comes down Clay Street at an easy pace, a little smile of recognition over a clipped chin beard.
Keo, 24, went through all of his school years with my eldest son Owen. On their first day at Bates Middle School, Owen, a walker, stepped into a sea of students, alone and overwhelmed. It was Keo who stood up in the cluster of his tight-knit group of bus-rider friends and beckoned Owen to his side. I had always loved him for his warmth and kindness, but that generosity is something I will never forget.
He smiles when he sees me but makes a quick detour to hug a neighbor who is sitting on her porch.
“Let’s go to the playground,” he said while leading us up the street to a large courtyard with benches and playground equipment. The townhomes on three sides of the courtyard were where Keo grew up.
He lives a few blocks away now, but as we walk the block from Clay to the playground, he introduces me to friends who get off their bicycles, out of their porch chairs and walk across the field to say hello and are all pulled into a quick hug. At 6-foot-2 and still with a football player’s build, Keo has to lean down into each embrace.
This spring, the Clay Street community — already reeling from the COVID death of Robert Eades and the recent spate of violence — was staggered by the sudden loss of Keo’s mom, Traci Johnson, 53. Traci, known as “Candy Lady” in the neighborhood, was the matriarch of a sprawling Annapolis family who brought friends and cousins with her to everything from elementary school spaghetti nights to high school graduation.
So even though Keo occasionally brought policemen he knew through the city fishing program with him to daytime school events that required a guardian, it was always clear Traci was the most special person in his life.
I remember clearly when Keo was in fifth grade, both he and Owen had their own paper routes. I asked Keo what he did with the cash he made in tips. He looked astonished I would ask.
“I give it to my mom,” he said. “I help out.” He tears up when I ask about her now. “She never said goodbye,” he says haltingly.
He tells me that Traci spent the last day of her life attending classes with the sisterhood of My Sister’s Keeper, and she had proudly told her five children she would be graduating from the female empowerment program that week.
Since her death, Keo’s siblings Kolby, 30, Kelsey, 26, Kameron, 22, and Kemari, 17, have tightened their knot, and Keo has redoubled his efforts to help provide for his family. He is apprenticing with his best friend’s Mobile Carwash and trying to get his musical group, C.A.B. Cheek, off the ground and onto the airwaves.
“But it’s hard,” he said, shaking his head. Losing a parent in young adulthood would throw anyone off their game, but I remember hearing about Traci’s death and worrying about her big, sweet son, who in the six years since his and Owen’s high school graduation had already overcome overwhelming challenges, including the dismissal of a state indictment, two gunshot wounds and a trip to Baltimore in a Medevac that saved his life.
As our boys were nearing graduation, Traci told me how proud she was that her son was going to Morgan State University. It was heartening news to me and all the many friends, teachers and coaches who loved Keo and knew he was dealing with more than his share of challenges, including an absent father, a stepfather who “was caught up in the streets” and the kind of learning difficulties that poverty can exacerbate.
“I was the one who took him to Morgan State,” said Ken Starkes, an Annapolis community advocate who met Keo when he was a seventh grader at Bates.
In his senior year, a football recruiter from Morgan State had seen Keo play and told Starkes that Keo’s “size and his nastiness on the field, combined with how coachable he was…” made him a good prospect and, Starkes said, “made us all think he could have gone to the next level.”
It’s unclear to Keo and Starkes whether an offer might have still been in play a month after the campus visit, when Keo’s prospects changed dramatically and his life took a different course.
He was arrested on the night of Aug. 25, 2015, caught walking down the street, along with 24 other people in what headlines announced the next morning was among the biggest heroin busts of all time in the city of Annapolis. I woke up the next day to see his bedraggled face staring at me in a kind of front-page lineup.
A year after the arrest, when Keo was able to pay for a defense attorney, the charges were dismissed and Keo was exonerated. But by then, Keo’s shot at Morgan State was long gone and his life revolved around the rhythms of Clay Street, that time and again, put him at the wrong place at the wrong time. That included a harrowing day in 2017 when he was shot in the knee, hip and gut and taken by life-flight to Baltimore, where he underwent multiple life-saving surgeries. In tragic succession, he lost close friends Elijah Wilson, Jaylin King and Marquis Weems to gun violence.
Best-selling author, Maryland gubernatorial candidate and champion of personal reinvention Wes Moore calls those kinds of experiences part of “life’s impermanence” that force people in many low-income neighborhoods to constantly “distinguish between second chances and last chances.”
Keo does that through his music, paying homage to his friends, his mom and “life’s impermanence.” C.A.B. Cheek’s videos show a toughened Keo, posing with friends on the corner by the liquor store with piles of cash, smoking, in front of iconic Clay Street locations. The first song, now with 13,000 views on YouTube, was one he wrote about collecting carts at the grocery store to pay legal bills called “I Was Broke.” Off camera, he projects another image. He works to mentor the kids in the neighborhood growing up like he did, with few pathways out of the courtyard and crossroads that have marked his experience. He tries to coach them to “follow their dreams.”
“Every move he made, it’s for his family, good or bad. He’s got the purest heart,” said Starkes, who sees Keo’s efforts in the neighborhood and his music as attempts to “change his narrative… He’s a blessing. I’m proud of him. He’s a story in progress.”
It’s clear that that’s how Keo sees himself: in the process of renewal. I see it too, sitting beside a giant of a man who wants to be treated gently in his grief, a man who has come to appreciate that his second chances are not his last.
“I was hoping to be one of the people who could make it out,” he said as we leave the playground behind. He bends over to give me a quick hug.
“It might not be too late,” he said. “I might make it out.”