Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  During the time I was in Florida, this guy was killed, and allegedly this young white woman was raped. I really don’t know what happened, because I wasn’t there. But I do know I am not the perpetrator of it. I think what happened was this girl was like sixteen, and as pretty as you’ll ever want to see, right? From Rhode Island. And she had been living with this photographer who was in his forties down in St. Pete.

  A young white brother from downstate Illinois, who just got out of the navy, comes through. She says she had been smoking grass for several days, and I really believe this young ex-naval guy was maybe transporting. People did a lot of that back then, and Florida was one of the places that you could pick up really good weed. So this young guy, the guy who was killed, comes and stays in the trailer court where the girl was living in St. Petersburg, with her older photographer. And when the young guy takes off, she takes off with him. She runs away from her old man. At one point during the trial, my lawyer, from Chicago, he said to her, “Isn’t it true that you ran away from this guy? The photographer, he pursued you and caught you on the highway and then killed this young man and threatened to kill you if you didn’t come back with him?” She broke down and went to crying. And the judge, great pale defender of white Southern womanhood that he is, called for a recess. And my old scary black lawyer didn’t bring it up when he came back because he didn’t want to make these white folks mad at him. And I understand it—I’m a Southern boy. My rationale to them for being in the state was just that I wanted to roam across the country, which is typical of writers and artists and so forth, but it’s not typical of black people. It’s all right for Jack Kerouac, but not for Delbert Tibbs.

  There’s another assumption: this is my country, I can go anyplace I like. This happened around the 4th of February, 1974. On the 6th of February, the Florida state police stops me. They asked me to let them see my ID. I let them see my ID. I told them I’d been down in southern Florida doing farmwork. They questioned me, I guess, because Ocala is, I believe, maybe two hundred miles from Fort Myers—which is near where the crime occurred. The cops questioned me and let me go, but before they do that, they ask if I mind if they take photographs of me. I say, “No, I don’t mind.” So they take four Polaroid snapshots. One of the cops said, “Mr. Tibbs, I don’t think you had anything to do with it, so I’m going to do you a favor.” In the meantime, they don’t know what to do with this nigger. I’ve got ID in my pocket from the University of Chicago, and photo ID and that kind of stuff, and yet here I am in Florida with these work clothes on. He says, “There’s been a serious crime, and you’re going to be stopped a number of other times because all the enforcement folks are going to stop people they see that are strangers.” He wrote me out a letter saying, “This person, Delbert Tibbs, was questioned by me on the 6th of February, 1974, and I’m satisfied he’s not the person wanted in connection with the crimes”—crimes, he never specified, which occurred around Fort Myers on such-and-such a date. And he let me go.

  I think I got stopped once more after that. I go into Mississippi where I have an aunt. I tell her what I’m probably going to do is walk to Memphis, which is a hundred miles away, and stay at my uncle’s house there. Then I’m going to call Roy, that’s my brother who at that time was a lieutenant in the sheriff’s department, and tell him to send me a hundred dollars. They think I’m crazy, ’cause I’ve left this job and I’m just roaming around the country. That’s not typical for black young men to do. But I’m me and I don’t always choose to follow the path that everybody else follows—which is what got me into trouble. I wasn’t behaving—quote—the way a nigger ought to behave—end quote.

  After a couple of weeks at my aunt’s house, I get back on the highway. About ten miles from my aunt’s house I see a Mississippi highway patrolman driving in the opposite direction. He goes past, turns around, and we go through the thing, “Let me see your ID.” I show him my ID. He says, “You’re Delbert Tibbs? You’re wanted for rape and murder.” He said, “There’s a warrant for your arrest.” I said, “Here’s a letter I have.” He said, “I don’t know nothing about no letters, I don’t know nothing about nothing. All I know is there’s a warrant for your arrest.” He puts the cuffs on me and takes me to the nearest jail, which is a little place called Clarksdale.*

  I didn’t know at the time, but the photographs had been sent to Fort Myers. Initially, the girl had given a description of the rapist and murderer as a black man about five-six or -seven, with a great big Afro. I had a small Afro and I’m six three and relatively light-complexioned. The police are desperate to find someone, because there’s a black murderer-rapist running loose. The cops take the Polaroid snapshots of me and by now I’m sure they’ve scared the pee out of her because she ain’t come up with nobody and here’s the corpse here, right. And they said, “Is this the guy?” And she said yes. So that’s when the warrant went out. But now she’s changed her description of the guy, right? I didn’t know that at the time, but that’s what’s happened.

  By then I had gone through a spiritual breakthrough where I almost didn’t see people as black and white anymore. I had spent two years sleeping under the stars. I called it my “wilderness” experience. Two years more or less at the mercy of the world. I was someplace one evening, sitting in the doorway of this freight train, and folks in their cars and pickups were pulled up waiting for the train to go by so they could cross the track, and I see this little boy. There was a guy sitting in a truck, probably with a rifle in the back, and this little white boy jumps out, eight- or ten-year-old kid, and runs towards where I’m sitting in the door of the freight train. I’m thinking, What is this? He’s running to bring me a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken, ’cause his daddy done told him, “Go take this to the guy, the hobo man, and feed him.” You know what I’m saying? What he saw was a hungry man, not a black man.

  Incidents like that, there have been many of them—I saw individuals, I saw human beings. And that’s both liberating and dangerous. So I think, Why not go back to Florida? Obviously, it’s a case of mistaken identity. This stuff ain’t gonna go away if I just sit here. If I were being pragmatic, I’d have let the states of Mississippi and Florida argue about it, and Florida would have had to prove that they had a reasonable cause to want me back. They didn’t have anything except the girl said I did it. But I went back to Florida.

  I should have known that something was crazy. It must have been a fifteen-hour car trip, handcuffed, chains on my legs. As we’re going into the station, there’s somebody out front with a minicam taking pictures. They take me in, fingerprint me, give me my blankets. Get up the next morning and they feed you the stuff they feed you, and I’m watching TV and I see myself coming into the station on TV. After that, they call me out to go into a lineup. I said, “Well, shit, everybody in town knows what I look like now.” Sure enough, I go in the lineup with five or six other guys and the girl say, “Yeah, that’s that fucker.” That was her word. Oh boy, game’s afoot now. So they have good cause to keep me. They bind me over, and I’m in Lee County jail waiting to go to trial for rape and murder. Irony abounds. My middle name is Lee and I’m in Lee County Jail. I spend the next nine months there. The first couple of weeks, I don’t do anything ’cause I figure they’re going to let me out of here, so I don’t even bother my family. But that ain’t happening. They say, “Hey, shit, you’re it.”

  In a sense, I integrated the jail. This place was kind of like time had passed them by. This is Fort Myers. They do what they want to do down there. My presence there focused so much attention on it. This young woman I’d been involved with for five years, Julie Tyler, started the Delbert Tibbs Defense Committee, and they began raising money for lawyers. Folks started visiting me. A lot of my friends had been movement folks, so there was a lot of scrutiny on the town. They began to kind of get themselves together so they didn’t look bad to the rest of the world.

  I was slightly bewildered, but I still wasn’t worried at all, which was stupid. I should have bee
n. I had reached a stage in consciousness either where something deep in me knew that it ultimately was going to be all right, or where it didn’t matter, kind of like Socrates . . . I’ll drink the hemlock, ain’t no big thing.

  I was locked up for nine months and then the trial. All-white jury. In Chicago, my lawyer, he was with a prestigious law firm, very successful. But Chicago ain’t Lee County, Florida. He was intimidated. He was scared, and I don’t much blame him, because the judge was quite capable of locking him up too if he displeased him. When he had an objection, the judge would overrule it; when the prosecution had an objection, the judge would sustain it. It was obvious to me what was happening. We had one black person who made it through the peremptory challenges for selection on the jury and then got disqualified at the last minute. I think he said he didn’t read or write too good and the judge maybe thought that was enough. You have this arrogant Negro dash nigger, from up North someplace, who tended to look white folks in the eye and who would not let them put words in his mouth. I can’t stop myself. I said, “Delbert, they see you as an arrogant, crazy nigger.” Actually, I was just being me.

  The courtroom was packed. My folks had come from Chicago in large groups, probably every black person in the town had come to the trial because they knew about the brother from Chicago. The police department have marksmen on the roof because they think that some of these black militants might come down and try to bust me out. After a day and a half, they find me guilty.

  At that time there was a moratorium on the death penalty and the judge said, “Well, if the moratorium continues, then you will serve two life sentences consecutively. If not, then you are to be executed by the State of Florida.” Before that, there’s a presentence investigation, where they check your background to see if you have a criminal record, if there are mitigating factors.

  I’ll never forget, one of the investigators came to see me after the trial and he asked me, “Delbert, I know you say you dated white girls—did you ever have sex with one?” I’m saying, Why would he ask me that? I’m such a fool. I was inclined to ask him had he ever slept with a black one, but I answered his question, I said, “Yes, I’ve had sex with white females.” He turned as red as your socks and again something said, You fool—you were supposed to say no. So I got sentenced, and then they shipped me off to the Death House. The electric chair is up at a place called Starke. Right next door is Florida State Prison, the regular penitentiary. The max joint is Starke and it’s right next door to Raiford, the Big House. That’s where the Death House and the electric chair is—Old Sparky, as they call the chair. Sometimes they refer to it as the Iron Lady. A couple of things stuck in my mind. When they got ready to take you from the county jail to the state jail, they always did it in the middle of the night. I remember reading about the camps in Germany, how when they’d come to take people to the gas chambers, they’d come and get you in the middle of the night. It was almost as scary because I didn’t know where the hell I was going. For all I knew, they could have took me and executed me then. My rational mind told me they weren’t, but it was just scary.

  They put you in a van with no windows in it, and you’re chained up, I would say maybe ten of us. Some guys are going to one place and some are going to another. I’m going to death row. There’s a bench on each side and chains, one around your waist and another one around your feet, so you ain’t going nowhere. I remember the guy saying, “Well, you got five over here for Raiford.” He comes to me and says, “What’s your name?” I said, “Tibbs.” He said, “You’re to go to the Death House.” The moratorium ended. Now the State of Florida’s free to execute all the folks they want to. So they take me there and put me in my cell. The food was much better—cons always think about food.

  I was there two years, until the Florida Supreme Court overturned the conviction. In the meantime, the Delbert Tibbs Defense Committee and Miss Julie Tyler, they’re working. Pete Seeger did a concert for me. Angela Davis spoke at Operation Push and raised money. I sometimes tell people when I do lectures: If you really want to punish a guy, lock him up on death row for twenty or thirty years. After five years, he’ll probably beg you to put him in the chair or strap him to the gurney. I have friends now, like Rolando Cruz, who did eleven years. I said, “Man, you’ve got to be the strongest man on the planet.” Each day, each day . . . It was getting harder and harder by the time I got out. Each day it was like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the mountain. Tuesday might as well be Wednesday. The only kind of change was on the weekend, when people would come to visit.

  I was convinced that they were not going to kill me. I didn’t think that they were worthy of my death, to put it in those kind of terms. Somehow, deep down, I knew that that wasn’t my fate. But, the reality is, in a sense, they create your reality. I am behind the bars, I have to ask to be let out, they feed me, they turn out the lights when they want to turn out the lights. I don’t run anything there.

  I had gotten so when I got up out of the bed about seven-thirty in the morning, I would reach for the TV. You automatically turn it on because it was something coming in from out there, and there were people on the TV, right? Then I’d eat breakfast and I’d sit up and watch TV, maybe doze off, go to sleep. At eleven-thirty, they serve lunch. And I would watch TV through lunch. Then some days I’d work out in the cell, do push-ups and sit-ups like most of the guys did. Then you look around and it’s four o’clock and they served dinner. Everything was focused around mealtime. Because that was the only pleasant thing in your day, the food. You eat dinner and then you’re up until lights-out at eleven o’clock. Turning on the TV was automatic. Before I’d go to bed at night a lot of times I would tie a towel around the knob on the TV, so that when I’d go to hit the knob, the towel would be there and I’d go, “Oh, I didn’t mean to turn this image on this morning.” It was one way of my taking control of at least that action.

  When I meet people now, if they try to make a big deal about me having been on death row, I sometimes gently remind them that we’re all on death row. The difference is that here the state’s gonna do it, and at some point you’re gonna know the date and the hour, but that’s the only difference. I mean, if you’re walking around here, shit—you’re on death row, ’cause you’re going to have to leave here. You’re going to lay down and they’re going to throw dust in your face. They never set a date for me. And I thank God for that.

  The Florida Supreme Court finally overturned the conviction. They said that there was no evidence. The jury convicted me and they shouldn’t have. The jury convicted me because a white woman said I had raped her. This is the politics: the state appealed the overturning of the conviction. But they had to let me out. They got every pound of flesh they could: they let me out on ninety thousand dollars’ bond, so I would come back for the trial. The case was overturned a couple of times. I came to Chicago. In the meantime, the state was gearing up to retry me. At one point, there was a circuit court judge who overturned the whole thing and dismissed it. The state got the case reinstituted.

  The case was overturned in 1976, I got out in January of 1977. That should have been the end of it. But the country was moving further and further to the right. Initially, when the sentence was overturned, it was a four-to-three decision. Four justices said we believe he’s innocent, three said we believe he’s guilty. All seven are very well educated people, why is it that these guys look at the same evidence, the same data, and come to diametrically opposite conclusions? It can’t be based on intellect or reason, it has to be based on something else. I suggest to you it’s based on that cultural conditioning. To folks of this particular mind-set, I’m guilty because that white woman said I’m guilty. And because I’m a big old black buck.

  In 1982, the DA dropped the case. He said his witness wouldn’t be credible before a jury because she had lived a life of alcohol and drug abuse and so forth. The girl admitted that she’d been smoking marijuana the day that the crime occurred. It certainly can impair your identification of so
mebody. The real reason he dropped the case was because, during the interview, the young prosecutor who had sent me to death row had said—this is the crazy part—I had made friends in Fort Myers. One of my white friends was talking to the DA’s wife, and she says, “What your husband did to Delbert Tibbs . . .” The wife said, “What did my husband do?” She said, “They convicted that man on just four Polaroid snapshots.” When he came home from work—he’d gone into private practice—she asked if that were true. And he said, yeah, but if he had known at the time, he would not have prosecuted the case. If we had gone to trial, he was going to be the first witness for our side.

  I believe life is endless. We can’t talk about life without talking about death; we can’t talk about death without talking about life. I was listening to the Dalai Lama, I read his autobiography, and he says that Buddhists often meditate on death. That’s total anathema to the Western mind, right? I think it has something to do with Greek culture, with its bifurcation of existence—this is life and this is death. I learned to meditate before I went to death row. That’s one of the things that helped get me through, but it was very difficult. Otherwise, I read mostly, as much as I could. I can go home with a good book today and I’ll spend the whole day reading it. On death row, I couldn’t focus my mind on anything. I couldn’t lose consciousness of my environment for more than forty-five minutes. If I did, I would find myself getting up, pacing, looking out of the bars. I remember saying to one of my homies who was executed by the State of Florida, I’d say, “Hey, Shango, I believe there are spooks in this goddamn place.” He’d say, “Well, if there’s any such thing, Brother Tibbs, this is the place for it.”