“Turn around and look at the wall!” one officer yelled. The officers didn’t want general-population inmates looking at me. I’d later learn it was for my own protection. Even inmates in prison have an opinion about those sentenced to death, one officer said.
You didn’t have to guess when you’d crossed the line between the ordinary prison and the place where Texas placed the worst of the worst. At the end of a hallway that seemed to go on forever, a gate with an emblem spread the news, seeming almost proud with its pronouncement: TEXAS DEATH ROW. I was scared. Thoughts of my family flooded my mind. No place contrasts as hard with home as death row. When I crossed over that threshold, it was hard to believe I’d ever make it back. I thought of my children. I thought of my mom.
Death row has rules. A captain sitting behind a desk inside the gate peered at me over a stack of papers. He must have been trying to determine if I’d cause him problems or not. His expression never changed as he looked through my file. Finally, he reached for a handbook that sat amid the mess on his desk.
“Read this,” he said. “All of it.”
I thumbed through the first few pages as he explained the dos and don’ts of death row. I nodded because nodding was the only thing to do. He handed me a sheet of paper that included my housing assignment. I’d be living on Wing J-23. It all seemed the same to me, but as it turns out, death row has its share of troublemakers too. That’s where they put me, right in the middle of known gang members and those who’d opted out of the prison’s work program. The work program was an incentive for good behavior. We could become eligible to work as trusties around the officers. The prison also has a garment factory where, as part of the program, death row inmates were allowed to make and sew the officers’ uniforms. You had to be there at least six months before becoming eligible for the program, so it was too early for me to opt in.
The captain explained our schedule. On the weekdays, we’d spend twenty-two hours alone in a small cage, only a few feet long and wide. Weekends brought twenty-four hours of solitary confinement because many officers took the weekends off. To save money, the prison would simply reduce manpower and keep us in our cells all day Saturday and Sunday. We weren’t worth the substitute guards’ wages that would be required to move us to the rec yard and back.
As an officer led me to my wing, I asked him why I landed on J-23. “It’s the only place we’ve got, Graves.” Texas’s death row was almost out of vacancy. Five hundred men were waiting for the State of Texas to kill them. My cage had an address of sorts: Tier 3, Cell 10. The cage doors had bars and wire. They seemed designed not only to keep me in but also to make it as hard as possible to see the television. Maybe it was just my part of the neighborhood, but the third tier in J-23 was far from quiet. I looked around at the sparse accommodations as my neighbors hollered. It reminded me of the jails that held me while I’d waited for trial. Every inmate had something to say, and most wanted to say it louder than the guy next to them. One guy wanted aspirin. Another screamed for an officer to bring him a sick-call request. A few whispered to the trusty, himself a general-population inmate, to bring them newspapers, magazines, food. The trusties often became couriers, moving items from cell to cell out of view of prison personnel.
My neighbors went to great lengths to devise any source of entertainment. Rivals bet on whatever sporting event happened to be on television. It wasn’t just the outcome of the game either. They bet on every single play with whatever currency they’d bartered for. I remember thinking that they’d bet on two crippled cockroaches racing on crutches if ESPN was foolish enough to put it on television. Death row was alive with men doing whatever they could to stay sane.
The sound of my cell door slamming closed behind me cut through the surrounding noise. I backed up to the door and placed my hands through the bean slot, the horizontal opening that would later serve as a portal for daily meals. An officer removed the cuffs. I was at least free to roam my space. There were no windows in my cell; the little light that filtered in came from small windows out in the hall area, through which I could just see a pond in the distance. The cage was filthy. Wet toilet paper and trash covered the floor. It seemed that whoever had the room before me didn’t know what toilet paper was for, because the toilet was smeared with feces. I tried not to think about who might have left the mess. My emotions were already all over the place. There were so many things I missed. I missed home, I missed my life, I missed having sex; it had been two and a half years since I’d had the company of a woman, and I longed for it. If this continued, my penis would be sharp as a needle or as dull as a cucumber; I wasn’t sure which, but I didn’t want to find out. But more than anything, I was sad and confused in between bouts of determination.
I had been given powdered soap and a rag. At least I had something to do. Cleaning that awful filth wasn’t the sort of task I’d have signed up for in my previous life. But that cage was going to be home, and I’d have to make the best of it.
My tiny cell didn’t take long to clean. I scrubbed the floor while the floor scrubbed my knees. After twenty minutes of this labor I’d worked up an appetite. An officer and trusty brought by my first meal on death row: chicken and dumplings. This homey dish combines meat, dough, and gravy in a charming little glop. The way death row served it up, the chicken must have been of advanced age and a long time dead before its guts went to make that meal. Something passing for juice accompanied the meal, offered in a plastic bucket. I later learned that the juice served many purposes on death row. Some inmates used it to clean the stains from their coffeepots.
I couldn’t have been more than two bites in when I decided I’d rather go hungry that night. I walked to my cage door and slid the tray under it, passing my uneaten food to the porter, the trusted prisoner lucky enough to have been given the job of clearing my tray. It was his problem now.
I toyed for a minute with the thin blue mattress that sat atop my steel bed. It seemed like everything was steel. Not the mattress, though. It was the kind of plastic that would stick to your skin when the temperature rose. I lay down and put headphones over my ears. I was surprised that the officers had given me a pair of headphones since, after all, this was death row. When I first arrived here, we were able to watch television, and the headphones were given to us to plug into a portal in the wall that would allow me to hear the television from afar. Or I could turn the knob and listen to a radio station that had been preset. I think the headphones were a little thing that they could give, with a pretty big impact on the environment in there: it made it a lot quieter, and caused the guys to chill out rather than be at one another’s throats all the time.
Music gave me some semblance of peace. I’d pull a blanket over my head. My fellow inmates might have thought I was scared. I was actually trying to escape the doom for a while, by blocking out the present, and thinking about exactly what I would be doing at home. Literally, I tried to live minute to minute in another place, rather than one second in this one. I spent most of those early days lying on my bunk with my headphones on, checked out. I thought that if I just resisted the environment, it might not feel so real. I didn’t want to talk or make friends. The food offered no distraction. I remained mostly a mystery to the men who weren’t immediately a cell door away from me. Who is this new guy? I heard them ask.
The following week, my mom came down to visit me. We were sitting in front of each other for the first time since I had been given the death penalty. We didn’t really know what to say, so I took control of the conversation and let her know that I was OK. I needed to assure her that people weren’t just back there trying to kill each other since this was the first time I did not have access to a phone to call her every day.
My first trip to the shower was better than I expected. A beautiful black woman approached my cage. “Are you ready to take a shower?” I was taken by her eyes. For a couple of years, the faces above the badges had been almost all white and male. She was different. Her hair wasn’t fancy. Her demeanor
suggested that it didn’t need to be. It sat in a bun, revealing light brown skin and perfectly symmetrical collarbones. She was more relaxed than most guards, smiling more than the men who believed that intimidation was a part of their job description. I walked with her to the shower, wearing only white boxer shorts and socks, with my towel and soap dish in my hands, which were cinched behind my back.
A door separated the interior of the shower from a makeshift viewing area in the hall outside. Little other than mesh obscured the view. She sat on a trash can just beyond the door and didn’t pretend to look the other way. It was a part of the deal down there. Privacy was not an option. I stood in a pair of white socks and nothing else, and the socks served as makeshift shower shoes to protect my toes from the fungus that surely lurked on the faux-tile floor.
As we walked from the shower back to the third tier, inmates catcalled her. They hollered whatever came to mind in the moment. All were in search of the same thing—a distraction from the tedium of our condemned condition. She turned to me, as if to explain why she hadn’t responded to their nonsense.
“I am not going down there just so they can look at my ass.”
I smiled.
“You can’t hold it against them.”
“Yeah, well, this is all day long,” she replied.
The place didn’t suit her. Back in my cell, I wondered how she got there, why she’d taken a job walking inmates from their cages to the showers.
I imagine this woman knew some of the things I was thinking about while looking at her, but she never acknowledged it. It was wishful thinking on my part that she would.
I later found out she wasn’t as innocent as I thought. She was trafficking in all the ordinary contraband that took on greater value in prison. Inmates paid her hundreds of dollars to deliver cigarettes and weed. One guy even arranged for her to bring him $500 from a friend on the outside. She had taken the money for herself. Those sorts of deals could be dangerous even for female officers. Some of the men on death row were there specifically because they didn’t discriminate in their crimes between men and women. Our trip to the shower was the last bit of meaningful time I spent with her. She transferred to another unit after a couple of weeks.
However, she got me thinking more about everything I was missing on the outside. I would often lie in my bunk at night listening to Majic 102.1, the radio station out of Houston. The DJ Rudy V, host of a program called The Quiet Storm, played all the old-school slow jams, like the O’Jays’ “Stairway to Heaven” and Prince’s “Scandalous.” When that song came on, you would hear guys holler out to one another from their cells. Being with a woman was definitely on everyone’s mind. I would lay there and imagine myself back at the little bar I used to go to and dance. I fantasized about the kind of life I wanted to live when I was free again. I envisioned having a wife and kids, and the great life we’d have together.
I had this one scene in my head that would replay itself over and over again. I would have a wife and daughter. I would be at the park playing basketball. My wife would pull up with my daughter, who in this particular fantasy was always about three. My daughter would see me and take off running toward the basketball court for me. I would stop and pick her up all sweaty while she would hug my neck. I used to think about my own sons and going to a game or them coming to talk to me about girls for the first time, and how I would respond. Now I was missing it all. I’d been kidnapped by the State of Texas.
EARLY NOVEMBER 1994:
SETTLING IN TO DEATH ROW
I KEPT TO MYSELF FOR THE FIRST WEEK. But even on death row, the burden’s a little lighter when it’s shared. I knew that I needed friends if I wanted to survive.
“Look out Three Row, Ten Cell,” a voice called out.
“What’s up?” I said, both surprised and a little worried. The voice was coming from a cell below mine on the second tier. Someone had recently busted out the TV in front of my cell, and I could see, in the broken glass of the screen, a shadowy reflection of his cell. He introduced himself as Andre. That was unusual; most of the other guys I’d later meet went by nicknames or initials. I met plenty of AJs, DWs, Chili Bricks, and Chi-Towns. I had grown suspicious of friendly prisoners in the lead-up to my trial. But death row was different. The state didn’t have anything to gain. I wanted to trust Andre.
“Say, Graves, why don’t you come out to the rec with us tomorrow?”
I had been turning down rec time in favor of plugging in my headphones. Andre seemed to be looking out for me. He knew that an hour outside the cage could push back against the creeping insanity that charged toward so many like a beach-seeking tidal wave. I told him I’d come. He kept talking.
“The trusty gonna bring you a bag down there later on,” he said. What the hell will they put in this bag? I thought to myself. But death row inmates were a hospitable sort, I’d come to find. They had exclusive knowledge of the terror I’d be facing in those first few weeks. The inmates would often send bags to newcomers, a collective housewarming gift. It was a tradition the inmates there took seriously. I wouldn’t have any money in my commissary account for a while, so I couldn’t buy pens, paper, soap, stamps, and those damn shower shoes. When the trusty stopped by my cell an hour later, I was sure I’d find those items in the brown bag he held. I was wrong. The trusty had brought a book gifted my way from whichever inmate lived in 2 Row, 10 Cell. I didn’t have to wait long to meet my generous benefactor.
“My name’s Rudd!” he yelled up from the cell directly below. “They call me Young Lion. Check out that book and holler at me if you need anything.”
Human beings are linked by subcategories of pain. Addicts of all kinds draw strength from support meetings where they share stories of the temptations of bottle and needle. Even fans of the Chicago Cubs shared an agonizing connection with baseball nuts in Boston until the Red Sox thwarted the curse. The death row inmates at Ellis One Unit were no different. They looked out for me in those early days because I was one of the few who could feel their pain.
I pulled the book from the bag and gave it a once-over. The pages were crinkled. The first page was stained. I glanced at the cover, which was in good shape considering the book had lived its own life in a cage. A beautiful black woman with a proud afro stared past me from the blood-red backdrop of the book’s cover art. It was the autobiography of Angela Davis. During my early days on death row, it took me some time before I was able to really engross myself in the book, but I soon came to understand why Young Lion had sent it my way. “We know the road to freedom is stalked by death,” she wrote. I wasn’t quite sure if I found those words comforting or haunting, but I surely identified with them.
That Young Lion was a reader might have surprised many outside of death row. At the age of eighteen, he’d killed a man during the robbery of a seafood restaurant. He traded his life for the $800 that the restaurant owner had made peddling greasy shrimp to unsuspecting patrons. In prison, Young Lion developed a reputation for violence. It was like that on death row. The man sending a welcome gift one week might shank your neighbor the next.
I witnessed a lot of bad things in there. Stabbings, suicide, men going totally insane, a few killings. Some guys walked around like zombies because of the medication they were given to keep them calm. I saw scars on men’s necks, arms, and chest, anywhere they could cut themselves in self-mutilation. Death row was a dangerous place, all day, every day. Something was always going down. There were drugs, sex, and money, just like anyplace else. And the hustle was real. Officers were bringing in weed, crack, pills, cash, cell phones, and food from their home kitchen tables, all for a few extra bucks, and maybe a little for the thrill of getting away with it.
Meanwhile, more female guards started showing up for work. Some were having sex with death row inmates, often in the exam room where mail was sorted before it was distributed to the cells. The inmates all knew who had scored, but it was not common knowledge among the officers, as they had a different code. Some were selling s
ex to inmates who could somehow come up with the money. I saw guys get into fights over female officers they both claimed to be dating. When I became a porter and could move around, I gained firsthand knowledge of this information, which corroborated most of the hall stories passed around between the guys.
Most of the men, though, had female pen pals from overseas they’d developed close relationships with. I’d never been too far outside Texas, much less outside the country, so I didn’t understand why foreigners would want to write to me. As it turned out, there were pockets of people in various European countries who wanted to correspond with American death row inmates. Perhaps they viewed us as sociology experiments—trapped men in a monstrous system they sought to understand. Sometimes it went further. Men would fall in love with the words of their foreign friends. Some pen pals would visit death row from their home countries, making thousand-dollar treks to meet the inmates they’d been writing to. A handful even got married. Prisoners in Texas, it seemed, were more likely to find a friend in Europe, where the death penalty had fallen out of favor among the majority of western European countries, than in their own backyard, where most fellow citizens couldn’t muster a care for the condemned.
Encouraged by another inmate, I started corresponding with my first pen friend, and ultimately I had more than a hundred. It all seemed odd to me at first, but I wasn’t about to turn down any opportunity for human contact. Death row is a sick and unrelenting monotony. It’s writing the same letters to the same people to pass the same treacherous time. A new voice on the other side of a letter was never unwelcome.
Infinite Hope Page 14
