My pen pals were all great friends, but with some I became especially close. Isabelle Perin from France was my rock, my superwoman from across the pond. She became my best friend during the long years I endured, my lover in letters and my heart, and my angel in fighting for my life. She visited me at least four times a year and would stay at my mom’s home for weeks at a time so that she could see me. Together we would create a foundation called Join Hands for Justice, which raised funds in support of my legal defense and global awareness about my case. Isabelle sent her own money to me, too, so I could afford stamps, envelopes, and personal hygiene products, thus raising my standard of living in an otherwise hellish existence. I watched this beautiful lady dedicate her life to helping me save mine. I loved her for what I thought love could be from behind bars, but I knew I never wanted to get married as a prisoner, and I never thought of her as my girlfriend while incarcerated. I didn’t want to commit myself to someone who was more of my fantasy than my reality. I wanted to be free to choose someone I could get to know under normal circumstances. However, inmates were trying to survive the best way they could, and if that meant marrying someone who would be willing to take care of them and help fight for their lives, then let the wedding bells ring. I understood the benefits even as I decided not to pursue it.
I had another close pen pal, in Germany, who worked tirelessly to help save my life: Mrs. Marina Vorlander. She would also travel many miles twice a year to come see me. We had a unique relationship because she was married, but we became special to each other out of circumstance. She would do things over in Germany to help bring attention to my case.
Nick Bell from Switzerland was the first guy friend I became close with. He showed me the meaning of true friendship. He traveled over to see me only once, but when he did he also visited a really good appeals lawyer named Roy Greenwood at his house on a Sunday while he was watching football. That got Roy on my case, which was super valuable.
And then there were Lars and David Augusston, a son and dad who would travel every year to visit me. They became close friends too. Lars started helping raise awareness in Sweden about my case.
There were others from other countries that came into my life and became close friends as well. I was very fortunate to have such great support from around the world, and they—in addition to my family—were a big part of my strength and courage to wake up determined every day. With all my pen pals, our letters to one another were so full of life. We talked about the death penalty, relationships, sex, the needs of a woman versus the needs of a man, family, our own lives. I would ask Sarah, one of my friends in London, to wake up on a Saturday morning and spend the day with me. This meant that she would get up and walk around town taking pictures of Buckingham Palace, or whatever she would see that day with her eyes. She would then number all the pictures on the back, write a letter describing them all to me by numbers, where she was when she took it, what was going on around her and why she took that particular picture. I was learning to live life through the eyes of my friends. Death row is all solitary confinement unless you were fortunate enough to make the work program or you got a cellmate, which was rare. But thanks to my pen pals, I started traveling to other countries through their stories and pictures. Eventually my network would reach several different cities and countries around the world, with friends in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and London. My friends in Europe would become my extended family over all of those long hard years.
Also occupying my days was recreational time, which I quickly discovered was relief courted by danger. I was often stripped naked again, and my clothes were searched, which was standard practice for all inmates. Two officers escorted me to a small holding room that separated the hallway from the day room where inmates spent their hour. The staging area was set off from the day room by a locked door. I later learned that this was to protect handcuffed inmates from being attacked by uncuffed rivals. It all seemed like theatrics to me. If an inmate wanted badly enough to get after you, he’d find a way either there or in the day room.
During rec hour, guys found their own entertainment. Lively Scrabble games separated the hard-core readers from the guys who just pretended. The library would allow us to order books from a list, and a population trusty would walk onto our wing with the officer working the library. They would pick up the inmates’ library lists, bring back the books the next day, and then within forty-eight hours you would have to return the book by the same process. There were some other diversions too. Chess seemed an unlikely pastime given the crowd, but the worn set in the rec room got its fair share of action. A small television played whatever sports game happened to be on. Some inmates inflicted savage beatings on the boxing bag that swung in the corner. An outdoor area gave the illusion of more freedom. If you didn’t pay attention to the razor wire atop the chain-link fence, you might think the basketball court was pulled from the famous Rucker Park in Harlem. There was handball, too, but on that first day, I didn’t care to play. I had been told that death row housed the worst of the worst, and even though I’d received an unexpected housewarming gift, I wasn’t sure what to make of rec time. It seemed dangerous. The outdoor space offered more room to maneuver in case I needed it, however, and I wanted to give it a shot.
The outdoor rec yard was a fiction writer’s dream. There, I found men who had honed their own unique coping strategies. It was there that I first met Granville Riddle, who occupied one of the cells next to mine. Riddle was a young white guy whose hippie sensibilities suggested that his crime might have been a weekend at Woodstock gone tragically wrong. He self-medicated with cold busters, often paying inmates and trusties to hoard extras from the infirmary. He claimed to take ninety at a time, just enough to knock him out until six in the evening, when The Simpsons came on television. He loved Homer. Riddle’s cocktail of low-brow comedy and high-cost medication helped ease the pain of years spent on death row for the vicious murder of a man Riddle intended to rob.
“You ever think of breaking out of this place?” I asked him one night, mostly kidding, while talking from our cells.
“I tried that once, right after they arrested me,” he said. His answer caught me off guard. “They caught me three days later. I had a rifle and everything.”
We would often talk until I fell asleep. Then he would paint on his canvas all night and sleep during the day.
In another world, Riddle might have been the sort of industrious next-door neighbor who could help me mount my television. As it turned out, he was just the man in the cell next to mine, in one of the oddest places on earth. He said he’d look out for me.
The men on death row surprised me. As I grew more familiar with them and their stories, even the worst of Texas’s death row didn’t scare me so much. I’d arrived expecting to keep to myself, but the intolerable cruelty of solitary living drove me out of my shell. I decided to take a chance. The underappreciated harshness of a Texas winter made the rec yard less than hospitable. In my first weeks there, I walked around, shaking hands and learning more names. There’s a misconception that all men in prison claim they’re innocent. It’s a convenient fiction that makes it easier for those on the outside to ignore the gnawing guilt that comes with knowing that some men actually are innocent. In truth, death row featured a handful of men willing to describe their crimes in grisly detail. But it also had a few like Tony Ford, who’d been convicted of capital murder in the slaying of two Hispanic people in a home invasion gone wrong. Tony was eighteen at the time of the crime, and he swore up and down that he didn’t do it. I knew the feeling. We bonded over the discomfort of our aligned destinies. I was able to gain release eventually. Tony is still on death row. I hope one day the State of Texas will do right by him.
NOVEMBER 17, 1994:
RESISTANCE ON THE J-BLOCK
DEATH ROW SEEKS TO REDUCE PEOPLE to the worst thing they’ve ever done. But relationships aren’t built on conversations about a man’s depravity. I had to consider ea
ch man anew, to understand the person beyond his crimes. Riddle was a test case in this regard. He loved to paint, though he wasn’t great at it. He often ordered books on watercolor painting from the library. Like a prison yard Picasso, he’d stay up late at night, painting pictures for hours after the rest of us had gone to sleep. Sometimes he’d paint landscapes, creating his own national parks. It seemed as good an escape as any for a man trapped in a cage. This wasn’t his first exposure to paint—he’d learned to use it long after it learned to use him.
“What’s with this painting, man?” I asked him one night on the block.
“I just like it,” he told me. “Used to be, I’d get high on paint with my girl. We’d sit out in the middle of a field and huff all night. It was my retreat from life on the streets.”
Once, he said, the paint took hold and he dipped off planet Earth into the depths of a bad trip. Dogs chased him in his waking dream, and he ran so far he ended up in a tree. Those trips were routine for Riddle. He’d become addicted to drugs at a young age, succumbing to the uncertainty of his surroundings.
Riddle’s story was typical. Lurking behind almost every heinous crime was a backstory seldom told. Children growing up in crack dens, exposed to violence and harsh living. Many were abandoned, forced to face the world alone. They’d sought shelter in gangs, starting criminal careers that ended in some gas station holdup, some home invasion, or maybe a drug deal gone bad in a park. Their backstories didn’t make their victims less dead. But those stories did partly explain how once-normal kids ended up facing the final weeks before being strapped to the gurney.
I was three weeks into life on death row when a killing came calling. Over the course of my twelve years on death row, I’d eventually see the state kill more than 350 men. The first was Warren Bridge, known then as inmate number 668. Warren was white and tipped the scales at less than 140 pounds. He was only nineteen when he’d robbed a convenience store and killed the clerk. At thirty-two he’d exhausted his appeals and had an execution date looming. Warren’s execution offered a chance to consider the death penalty not in its abstract form, but in the reality laid painfully bare in front of me. Platitudes retreated at the sight of what was actually happening there on that day. The state was preparing to kill a man.
I didn’t know how I felt about the death penalty at the time. Most people don’t give much thought to capital punishment, and prior to my time on death row, I was among that lot. I never had time to consider the death penalty in its general sense. The moral and economic hang-ups were discussions to be had by policymakers and lawyers. I knew only that I didn’t support it in my case. Advocates suggest that the penalty of death is a deterrent to crime, but I can’t imagine that Warren thought much about the gurney when he decided to rob that store. As they strapped him in and carried him away, he uttered his last words: “I’ll see you.” It was a painful reminder of the inadequacy of final statements for summarizing even the worst-lived human lives.
The soon-to-die were allowed inmate visitors in the hours before their execution. Over the years, a few men chose me as their visitor, based on relationships that I had developed during my time there. Maybe I was a good listener, because I never knew exactly what to say. It was a sort of rapid-fire hospice, counseling men in their last hours and just being a friend. I think my life experiences—having a child at an early age and not having a father figure in my life—had equipped me for this odd role as counselor-to-the-condemned. I was twenty-nine years old when I entered death row. What I soon realized was that I had a lot of younger guys around me that the state had sentenced to death. I was quickly thrust into the role of giving this sort of advice because so many of them had come down there and had never heard nor had ever engaged in a positive and constructive conversation. Their whole world had been negative. My experience of having to be the father figure to my siblings at a young age gave me some insight and confidence to take that role on. One man I met with oscillated between readiness and defiance in those final hours. I watched as he struggled with the reality of the day, knowing the precise moment he’d leave the earth. Some might say it was worse than cancer. Those with terminal illness have their own death sentence, but they can wake up each day pretending it’s not their last. There was no such option for my friend, as I watched his last hours tick away.
“You can’t control what they do to you,” I told him. “You can only control you.” Maybe I was talking to myself, offering a measly bit of self-assurance in the face of the unthinkable. When the jailers came to take him, his legs went weak and his body limp.
“They might kill me,” he said. “But I’m not walking to my death.” I’d never imagined that choosing not to walk could be an act of preserving humanity. Some men on death row give up their appeals. They’re called the “volunteers,” a misnomer that suggests they want to die. In truth, they just grow tired of fighting. Their minds retreat to some dark space where death seems better than another failed appeal. My friend wasn’t a volunteer. He fought the unwinnable fight to the end, never signaling to the state that his death was anything other than forced.
If my life on the outside was an exercise in trying to live right, to stay as far as possible from the thought of prison that swallowed so many black men from my part of Texas, then life on the inside was anything but. I thought about prison and execution 24/7 now. On the inside, men were killed routinely, one after another. Familiarity breeds opinions. Camaraderie took the block in the days and hours before an execution. We’d join in moments of silence. Some inmates participated in hunger strikes, breaking only when the state carried out its execution or when the Supreme Court granted a stay.
I’d figured out that the one thing I could control on death row was my thoughts. They could tell me they’d kill me, but they couldn’t make me believe it. I stayed alive by living in the present, in the moment. This mind-set was revealed to me through my experience of living in a small confined space in a system designed to control you. I started to realize that they weren’t able to control my thoughts no matter what they did to me physically. And knowledge became wisdom. But the constant stream of executions challenged the strength of my convictions. As I watched the state kill all kinds of people—innocent, guilty, mentally incapacitated—I confronted in moments of weakness the possibility that I might be another number on the list. The state understood that the mind of a death row inmate was the only thing they couldn’t control, so the state did everything in its power to compromise independent thinking. Executions were dramatic by design. The trauma of those moments was every bit as real.
Staying in control of my thoughts was easy in the rare moments when death row was unencumbered by chaos. Too often, though, something stirred the halls. Men on the row were stripped of power and influence, which made them crave it that much more. The greatest challenges came when death row descended into induced insanity. I had been there a month when my neighbor gave me a courtesy warning, passing down a note to me. Notes could be passed several different ways, and one was just as common as another. Some officers would deliver letters for you as long as it didn’t contain any contraband. Trusties were also allowed to pass notes between inmates—they didn’t care if it was OK with the officers; they just did it and no one stopped them. And then there was the fishing line. This was a sheet that had been shredded and knotted into a makeshift rope. I’d tie something on the end that had a little weight, such as an empty toothpaste tube. Then I would crush up some state-issued soap, put it in the empty tube and flatten the tube so that it could slide underneath the bottom of the cell door and down the run to another cell. The inmate to or from whom I was sending or retrieving a note would take his stick—a piece of rolled-up newspaper—and attach a dental flosser at the end to use as a hook. Once my line was in front of his cell he would slide out his stick and hook my line with the dental flosser and pull it into his cell, and retrieve the message or attach one to my line. Then I would reel my line back into my cell. We all got pretty good at these metho
ds. We had time on our hands, and we were desperate for communication, any form of contact really.
One night, a few weeks after my arrival, I received a note that read in big bold letters: IT’S GOING DOWN IN THE MORNING, PICK UP EVERYTHING OFF YOUR FLOOR. I was still relatively new, so I didn’t know what to make of it. I turned to Riddle in the next cell.
“I don’t quite understand, Riddle,” I said. “What’s this all about?”
“Just what it says, my man,” he said. “Pick up everything from the floor because they’re flooding the runs in the morning.”
“Why would they do that?”
“These asshole officers won’t let the porters pass anything between us. If the porters won’t work for us, then we don’t want them down here. We’ll make the officers work.”
Their logic was surprisingly sound. The men on death row controlled only their flow of water, and their toolbox consisted of little more than the sorts of fabrics that might stop drains from working properly. Yet this gave the men the ability to create a mess. On death row, this qualified as leverage.
It was all exciting to me. The daily grind of the place inspired madness, and without a break, you could drift into aimlessness, or worse, despair. These men confirmed my suspicion that even condemned men need a purpose and something to work toward. I lay down in my bed to wonder how I got there. It didn’t feel real to me.
The next morning the 7 a.m. wake-up came shrieking. IT’S GOING DOWN! IT’S GOING DOWN! Guys at the end of each row had stopped up their toilets. Water raced down the runs, turning my cell into one of the steerage rooms aboard the Titanic. Water cascaded over the runs, pounding down onto the main floor below. Officers screamed too. Less than a minute passed before the officers themselves flooded the area. As officers worked to stop the flow of water, inmates shouted their demands.
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