Jean Freeman Ballard expected raised eyebrows and smirks when she hooked up with a dude who'd already done a stretch in prison for armed robbery.
The registered nurse also knew that friends and family would question her sanity when she married him in prison after he was sentenced again for the same crime.
The problem was, she told me Wednesday, it was his family, not hers, who tried to warn her to stay away from Harlee Ballard. "They told me I was a fool," she said, laughing now. "I went home to Mama, crying. She said, 'Do you love him?' She knew I did. She said, 'Well, stick by your man.' "
She stuck, and now the couple has been married for 28 years. One daughter just graduated from Elon University, and another is scheduled to graduate next year from Spelman College in Atlanta.
The 34 years the Ballards have been together is a timeless testament to the power of love. "I was a 14-karat fool," said Ballard, 64, a U.S. Marine vet who served in Vietnam. "I was a volatile dude - on drugs, in the street."
The couple met in 1979 over the telephone while he was in between trips to the pokey. He worked with Jean's sister, who told him to keep Jean entertained while she was busy. "We talked on the phone every day for six months before we actually met in person," Harlee said.
Snuggled on the sofa beside him in the book-lined study of their home in northern Durham, Jean, 58, said, "Within that six months, we had established a relationship. Our conversations just flowed."
Oh sure. It's easy to dig somebody's phone rap, but what happens when they see you're not really 6-foot-4 and look nothing like Denzel? (Hmmph, so I'm the only one who's said that?)
"After our first date, we went back to her house, and she went upstairs to get dressed for work," Harlee said. "When she came down in that nurse's uniform, her hair all poofed up, I said to myself, 'That's gonna be my woman, there.' "
"It's so funny," Jean said. "I went to work that night and told my co-workers, 'Well, it looks like I met my husband.' "
She had, but she had no idea what it would take before they walked down the aisle - or that the aisle would be inside New York's Auburn Correctional Facility.
While they dated, Ballard was sentenced for yet another armed robbery. "Nurses are caring people," Jean said. "We want to save everybody."
But she told him this would be the only time she'd wait while he was in prison. They decided to leave New York when he got out of jail.
They moved to Durham in 1989, and Jean quickly found a job as an R.N. at Duke Hospital. While he was locked up, Harlee made sure he did time - he got a bachelor's and a master's degree - as opposed to letting time do him. Now retired, he worked at the Guess Road Prison as an adult basic education teacher and co-founded a highly regarded mentoring program for young boys.
The moral to this story? Love can conquer skepticism and the joint. Another could be that thugs need love, too. Sometimes, that's all they need to stop being a thug.
