As Kansas City’s HIV infection rate rivals Africa’s, some black ministers admit that silence equals death

Sometimes, social workers would take troubled junior high or high school kids to meet with prisoners. Robinson would talk to them about the choices they were making. Seeing the kids reminded him of his own childhood. His dad hadn't been around. His mother worked as a seamstress to support him. He was angry most of the time, and when he was old enough, he started drinking, doing what drugs he could and spending time at clubs.

"I wanted to find a way to give young men the role model I didn't have growing up," he says. "I wanted them to know someone would care about them, because I didn't have that."

After he got out of prison, the Missouri Department of Corrections put him up in a dormitory-style room at the Kansas City Community Release Center at 651 Mulberry, a halfway house. He had a top bunk and shared the room and one bathroom with two other men.

Every former inmate is given a physical examination. Three days after he arrived at the center, Robinson was called from his dorm to the Kansas City, Missouri, Health Department at the corner of 19th Street and Holmes.

In the waiting room, he laughed about it. Didn't these fools know he'd been locked up, safely away from the problem? He was still chuckling when he went to see the doctor in a room where dust covered the windowpanes. Then he heard his diagnosis.

"I done had pistols pulled on me. I been in car accidents. I never felt as afraid as I did then," he says. "All I saw was three months in front of me. Things weren't advanced then. No one who got this diagnosis lived past three months."

He couldn't stop crying. By the time he left the office, his face was so swollen from tears that he didn't want to take the bus. So he walked back to the center.

Back in his room, he barricaded the door so his roommates wouldn't walk in on him crying. Then he crawled onto the top bunk and lay there with his arms folded over his chest, praying. He figured he'd been infected before he went to prison and just never knew.

He spent the next week talking to God. He prayed on the bus, which he took to jobs moving boxes around warehouses. He prayed whenever he walked anywhere. He prayed in his bed. He spent six more months in the center with his roommates, never saying a word about his infection. As soon as he was released, he got in touch with the social workers who had taken the young men into his prison, and he began volunteering for agencies that helped unfortunate children.

"I got involved in everyone else's problems. That way, I didn't have to think about mine," Robinson says. "And I kept it to myself for seven and a half years."

He moved in with his mother. Before he went to prison, she'd seen him as a troubled young man, though she never turned him out. Shortly after arriving in her home, he got sick with what appeared to be the flu. She went to the store and brought back juice and over-the-counter medicine. While she was at work, he passed the time trying to keep his eyes open, worried that if he fell asleep, she'd come back and find him dead.

In 1993 he joined the Palestine Missionary Baptist Church at 3619 East 35th Street, where the Rev. Earl Abel became his spiritual mentor. Before Abel's death in 2005, he became a father figure for Robinson. One day, the two met in the church hallway. Robinson had been eating potato chips, and he started to wipe the crumbs off his shirt before they shook hands. Abel stopped him. "He said, 'Don't ever do that. Just give me your hand,'" Robinson recalls. "And something like that meant a lot to me."

Still, Robinson kept his diagnosis to himself.

He got sick again in 1999. This time, he was living alone. He managed to get to a store and buy a bottle of NyQuil. Then he spent the next three days in bed, alone, waiting to see what happened. How's your mother going to feel if you die from this and she didn't even know you had it? he recalls wondering.

He went to Abel's office. Behind a closed door, the two prayed together. Then Robinson told him. "There wasn't any trying to find the right words. It just came out," he says. "He wasn't the type of man to give you advice. He'd just tell you to pray. The scriptures he led me to were always the ones I needed to know."

Robinson wouldn't have to wait long before telling his mother. It was time to renew his medical insurance, which was in her name. After the insurance representative came to her house to update the information, Robinson sat her down.

"I told her I probably wouldn't get it renewed because of my status, and then she knew," he says. "And she was always a strong woman, so she didn't show any pain, but it was there. And she was like, 'OK, you should have told me earlier. We could have worked things out. But it's OK, and we'll get through this.'"