He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  When it first opened in 1923, the facility was hailed as one of the country’s most modern prisons. Named for Alabama’s reform-minded governor Thomas Erby Kilby, the twenty-seven-acre complex was enclosed by a twenty-foot-high white concrete wall topped by a fatally shocking 2,400-volt electrified barbed wire. Constructed in thirty-foot sections and then pieced together, the wall was twenty inches thick at the base and tapered to a width of twelve inches at the top, which discouraged any prisoner from digging through the wall.

  The final cost of constructing Kilby was $2.5 million, almost three times the original estimate of $728,864. The facility was built on the site of Camp Sheridan, some four miles northeast of the state capital, at the intersection of the Seaboard Air Line Railway and the upper Wetumpka Road. During World War I, Camp Sheridan served as a training facility for infantrymen, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, while stationed there, fell in love with a local girl, Zelda Sayre.

  The vast prison complex was a gloomy and symmetrical series of uniform buildings surrounded by a vast grassy yard, enclosed by a colossal white wall, and guarded by a squat red-brick administration building. High above the gate was a circular terra-cotta display of the great seal of Alabama and the boldly lettered words KILBY PRISON etched in stone. Inside, a short concrete corridor connected the administration building with the first of the two identical main cell houses covered in a uniform red shale brick veneer.

  The main cellblocks were monolithic structures with five tiers of cells—an archetypal “big house” as in 1930s prison movies—with an open well from the bottom of the cell house to the top. The first-floor cells were seven-foot-wide singles. The second- through fifth-floor cells were eight feet long, ten feet wide, and six feet high. Guards could stand on the ground floor and gaze upward to the cement walkways and light-green iron railings on each floor. The few plastered walls were painted a bland cream color, and all the ironwork in the prison was painted light green. Most cells had barred windows and a giant locking iron door for entry. Six-inch concrete divisions separated each cell. By the 1950s, this type of prison construction was outdated because of the cell positioning that required large numbers of guards to maintain security. In addition to the personnel problems, Kilby suffered from inadequate maintenance, which left water pipes rusting, walls crumbling, and foundations decaying all over the prison complex.

  All but the death row inmates lived in the two large cell houses. All prisoners wore white, nonstriped, lightweight cotton uniforms—barely sufficient covering during Alabama’s winter months. Their daily routine began at 4:30 a.m., when the first breakfast bell rang. The cell doors clanged open, and almost a thousand prisoners made their way to the mess hall. They had until 6 a.m. to eat, dress, and “straighten their cell.” Once completed, the inmates reported for work in the large prison yard, where guards escorted groups to their respective workplaces. Prison officials assigned each prisoner a specific job: some worked in the cotton mill, others in the tag plant; some helped out in the hospital; many farmed the Kilby lands, and others served as day laborers outside the prison walls.

  The cotton mill and tag plant were the only industries inside the walls of Kilby. The cotton mill was the prison’s most profitable and self-sufficient industrial venture, producing all textile products for the other prisons in the state and turning a $1.6 million annual profit. Working conditions, however, were poor. “I don’t really know what to think of the work in the cotton mill,” a visitor once concluded, “but I believe that hell looks something like it and has something of its temperature.” Nearby, more than two hundred inmates worked in the tag plant, producing all of Alabama’s automobile license plates and road signs. Other, smaller industries existed at Kilby, such as a woodwork shop, a blacksmith shop, and a leather goods shop, in which many of the inmates worked during their “off hours.”

  Each day, prisoners worked until 11:30 a.m., when they were escorted back to the mess hall for their noon meal prepared by the convict kitchen staff. Much of the food came from the two-thousand-acre farms worked by medium-security convicts. The farm not only grew staple crops like corn, soybeans, and wheat, but it also produced over fifteen thousand gallons of syrup, extracted every year from its sugarcane crop by the workers in the syrup mill. The Kilby complex also included a large canning plant that preserved the foodstuffs grown on the farm. The state’s food allowance, however, was the lowest in the nation, as prisoners received sixty cents each for a day’s food. This allotment remained unchanged from the 1940s through the 1960s, even though consumer prices rose some 28 percent. The typical lunch menu was plain and filling: Monday, creamed potatoes, butter beans with cured meat, and corn muffins; Tuesday, frankfurters and beans; Wednesday, macaroni and cheese, and black-eyed peas with seasoned meat; Thursday, ham hock with cabbage; Friday, fish. All meals were served on metal trays with separators.

  Once lunch was completed, inmates worked another shift until 5 p.m. Following the evening meal, prisoners reported to their cells for lockdown and the daily count. After the completed count, and provided no one was missing, prisoners had free time until lights out at 10 p.m. Inmates often gathered in the main recreation room, where they played pool, dominoes, chess, checkers, bridge, pinochle—even poker. Gambling was “legal” only under the supervision of guards within the recreation room, and prisoners could use only poker chips in the games, redeemable for “jugaloos”—plastic disks worth five, ten, twenty-five, and fifty-cent pieces. By the late 1950s, prisoners purchased television sets from their welfare funds—money obtained from the sale of handmade items produced during the inmates’ free time. Prisoners also purchased athletic equipment for baseball, football, softball, tennis, basketball, handball, and boxing in the prison yard.

  WHERE CALIPH WASHINGTON lived, however, the busy hum of prison life at Kilby was never heard. Just beyond the main cell houses, down a narrow concrete corridor, was the heavy iron door entrance to the detention and punitive cell house. Here was “Little Alcatraz,” where the incorrigibles and the death row inmates were separated from the rest of the prison population. Here the sounds of prison life were replaced by the oppressive silence of those awaiting death. Here the sun never shined. It was a world of gray steel, one newspaperman wrote in the late 1950s, where the days and nights were no different. “There are no windows in death row,” he added, “only time, and the everlasting glow of electric lights.”

  Unlike the main cellblocks, the detention center was only two tiers high. Death row contained four to twenty men at any given time, and their lives differed drastically from those of the regular prisoners. During their daily routines, they remained entirely apart from the main prison population. Their cells were essentially the same as those in the main prison, but each prisoner had his own cell, depending on the size of the death row population at the time. The inmates were fed only twice a day, at 7 a.m. and 3 p.m., inside their cells—they were never allowed to eat in the mess hall. Prison officials allowed them to order special food twice a week, such as peanut butter, bread, candy bars, or milk.

  Death row inmates received visitors every Saturday, whereas general inmates saw visitors every other Sunday. Death row inmates could not see more than eight visitors at a time, and only three could be adults. Of the eight, only one could be listed as a “friend”—the rest had to be close relatives. To guard against further conflict among prisoners, married inmates could not receive female “friends”; only single or divorced inmates had that privilege. Before an inmate received visitors, he filled out a request form with the visitors’ full names, addresses, and relation. Caliph’s list included thirty-two potential visitors: his mother and father, four aunts, four uncles, two cousins, five friends, eight sisters, six brothers, and one grandmother, Pearl Walker. A guard approved the list, and then sent copies of the form to the warden, deputy warden, and commanding shift warden, as well as the information tower and the office for filing.

  Death row inmates never worked. They waited in a small cell where every moment s
eemed like a day. “You had to find work for yourself,” one of Caliph’s fellow inmates said. “There was no air, no sight of the sky, no exercise. You were let out only once a week to walk six or eight feet away, handcuffed, to get a quick shower. Then you walked back to your cell.” They spent most of their time reading, sleeping, and talking to other inmates; a few wrote poetry or songs. Ideally they had two hours of “exercise” every day. “Exercise” consisted of walks inside a small wire enclosure, another measure to keep the condemned men away from the rest of the prison population. Those on death row could not join the sports teams or visit the recreation rooms, nor could they watch television. They just sat and waited for death. While the guards turned out the lights at 10 p.m. for the general population, the death row inmates usually went to bed anywhere from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., depending on the guard. This small group of men awoke later than the rest of the inmates and went to bed earlier—there was nothing else for them to do but sleep.

  Adjoining death row were the punitive cells for solitary confinement. A prisoner was put into solitary confinement for any number of crimes: fighting, encouraging a fight, being found with a weapon, disrespecting a guard or other authority, engaging in illegal exchanges of possessions (drugs, weapons, or simply personal possessions), possessing paper money, engaging in aggressive homosexual behavior, refusing to work, or even criticizing the rules. The maximum time that an inmate could spend in solitary was twenty-one days. Prisoners had various nicknames for the punitive cell: snake pit, doghouse, and the hole. Whatever they called it, this was an unusually small cell, reportedly anywhere from five by eight feet to eight by ten feet. The walls were not plastered, so the concrete remained bare and uninviting. There were no windows, and the only light seeped in through the inches between the ground and the bottom of the steel door. There was no lavatory or toilet, no bed, no mattress. Some cells were equipped with a hole in the ground as a toilet; others simply had a slop bucket. Most had a handcuff bar attached to the wall for prisoners who needed restraint. Those in solitary confinement were given bread and water three times a day, and every third day a full meal—all through the gap between the floor and the door. A doctor checked the conditions of the prisoners daily, but the prisoners were allowed only twenty minutes of “exercise” in the same wire enclosure as the death row inmates. If the weather was bad, they never left the cell and never saw anyone.

  The abuse from the guards was worse in the segregation unit. One prisoner compared Atmore’s guards to those in the Kilby segregation unit:

  Atmore had the reputation of being a murderer’s home, and it was. But the guards and prison officials at Atmore were kind compared with these at Kilby. Atmore set way back in the country . . . and it was uncivilized. In a way uncivilized things can be better than the civilized. Kilby was near Montgomery. Kilby was modern. Kilby went at its inmates like a machine. The punishment and the beatings rolled off the guards there like the cotton off the machines.

  Caliph and the other condemned black inmates found little time to adjust to life on Kilby’s death row. In a few weeks prison officials handcuffed each of the convicts, led them to the long train prison transfer truck, and took them back to Atmore. A few weeks later, they returned to Kilby. Back and forth they went for almost three years. Most of the reasons for placing the black prisoners on this circuit-riding death row were unclear. Nevertheless, many of their return trips to Kilby coincided with the scheduled execution of one of their numbers. Perhaps state prison officials believed that all the black prisoners should witness the violent death of one of their own. Another death row prisoner remembered the nights someone died in the chair: “If I live to be a hundred I will never forget that day because the juice was turned on in the death chamber. When they turned on the juice . . . we could hear the z-z-z-z-z-z of the electric current outside in death row.” After the “juice was squeezed into him,” a guard came out and told the other death row inmates that the prisoner had “died hard” and they “stuck a needle through his head” just to make certain he was dead. “I sweated my clothes wet,” the inmate recalled. Caliph Washington undoubtedly sat nearby and sweated too.

  11

  “PLEASE SPARE MY LIFE”

  Alabama’s electric chair, dubbed “Big Yellow Mama.”

  IN LOUISIANA, THEY called it “Gruesome Gertie.” Tennessee officials named theirs “Old Smokey.” Several states, including Georgia and Florida, used the moniker “Old Sparky.” Other states dubbed the electric chair “Sizzlin’ Sally.” After Alabama prison officials painted theirs with five gallons of shocking, reflective-yellow, center-stripe road paint, someone said, “That’s one big yellow mama.” The name stuck. Since it was first used on convicted murderer Horace DeVaughn in April 1927, some 144 inmates—121 black, 24 white—had died in “Big Yellow Mama” by the time Caliph Washington arrived on death row in the late 1950s. Alabama law was clear on the matter: a convict sentenced to death would be killed by electricity of “sufficient intensity.”

  First introduced in New York in 1890, the electric chair was seen as a humane and modern alternative to hanging in an era driven by new technologies and a progressive impulse to reform. Over thirty-five years later, when Alabama changed from hangings to electrocutions as the favored method of state-performed executions, Kilby warden T. J. Shirley promised Ed Mason furlough or perhaps a parole if he built the state’s electric chair. A native of London, England, the forty-two-year-old Mason was serving a lengthy sentence for burglarizing six homes in Mobile to pay off his gambling debts. “I had lost a large sum on the races in New Orleans,” he told a reporter in 1927. “It was a sort of gambling fever that had me, I guess, but I never harmed anyone bodily and never intended doing anyone bodily harm.” A master carpenter, Mason arrived at Kilby soon after the prison opened its doors in 1923 and spent his days building cabinets, desks, cradles, and caskets. In November 1926 he selected several giant pieces of wood from a maple tree and set about crafting the state’s instrument of death in the prison’s woodworking shop. As he worked, he gave the chair little thought. “Every stroke of the saw meant liberty to me,” he later said, “and the fact that it would aid in bringing death to others just didn’t occur to me.” But those working in the shop with Mason understood the purpose of the big maple chair. “I’ve called on each one to help me,” he said at the time, “and each one refused to touch the chair.”

  But as Mason completed his task, an overwhelming sense of hopelessness enveloped him. “This is my first electric chair,” he lamented, “and if I were called upon to make another I’d flatly refuse and pay the penalty. Whatever it might be, it could be no worse than a troubled conscience.” The squat, stiff-backed electric chair stood four feet, five inches tall and weighed 150 pounds. It had smooth flat armrests, a sliding back, and an adjustable headrest—like a barber chair for a man the size of Jack’s giant. The master carpenter also fitted the chair with heavy leather straps for securing the doomed inmate. Mason finished the project in six weeks and named the unadorned smooth-sanded chair “Plain Bill,” after Alabama’s sawed-off, five-foot-one governor, W. W. “Plain Bill” Brandon—a man of quiet generosity who handed out paroles like Bible tracts. Everyone deserved a second chance, he believed, and to blunt criticism of his leniency, he often quoted the motto of the Salvation Army: “A man may be down, but he is never out.” Nevertheless, when Brandon left office in early 1927, Mason found himself still in, and not out. “Plain Bill” forgot to grant Mason’s free time. In response, the irritated prisoner changed the name of his chair to “Plain Bull.” When he finally received his furlough from Governor Bibb Graves, Mason left the state and was never heard from again, despite efforts to locate him.

  Mason completed only the woodwork on the chair—the job of wiring fell to state engineer Harry C. Norman. Norman, having never tackled a project of this sort, traveled to neighboring states to see how other electric chairs were designed and wired. The architect of Florida’s chair told Norman to keep it simple: “The desired proce
ss of electrocution requires that a sufficient voltage be applied to cause instant death with the least burning.” Alabama’s engineer drew up plans for the chair with semiautomatic controls; once the switch was thrown, a prisoner would get a first fist-clinching jolt of power; the current would then reduce and automatically build back up to 2,250 volts for a second shot of electricity.

  On April 8, 1927, Horace DeVaughn, convicted of murdering two lovers on a lonely road near Birmingham, would be the first to test Mason’s and Norman’s handiwork. Engineer Norman knew so much about the workings of his device that prison officials tapped him to apply the electrodes to the condemned prisoner. After the prisoner sat in the chair and guards secured him with the leather straps, Norman was to take a sponge, which had soaked for almost two days in a saltwater solution, and fit it inside a band he made of screen wire and a few strips of brass. He would then place this atop the condemned person’s head and strap it around the chin. This flexible but snug-fitting crown would prevent the flesh from burning and allow for good conduction. Norman would repeat the same process on a smaller band that would attach to the lower left leg. He would then connect the electrodes and create an electrical current between the head and leg. Norman, however, quit the job just days before DeVaughn’s date with the chair. “A few nightmares persuaded me,” Norman later recalled, “to quit the prison post” because he didn’t like the “idea of electricity shooting through a man.” DeVaughn didn’t like it much either when novice prison officials turned the juice on over and over again, four shots in all, to get the inmate well done and well dead.

  The history of electrocution in the United States was characterized by, as Supreme Court Justice William Brennan wrote years later, “repeated failures” to kill the prisoner on the first try. It was “difficult to imagine how such procedures constitute anything less than ‘death by installments’—a form of torture [that] would rival that of burning at the stake.” Evidence suggested, Brennan argued, that death by electrocution was a violent, inhumane, and painful indignity “far beyond the mere extinguishment of life.” When the switch was thrown, eyewitnesses reported, the doomed criminal would lurch, cringe, leap, or “fight the straps with amazing strength.” At times the blazing electrical current would pop a prisoner’s eyeballs out of their sockets like a cork from a champagne bottle; their stomach, bladder, and bowels would empty all contents; their body would contort and twist as their skin turned red, swelled, and stretched “to the point of breaking”; the sizzling sounds and pungent smells of bacon frying in a cast-iron skillet filled the room of death as the condemned convict’s body would boil on the inside and fry on the outside.