So much for kindergarten.
* * *
A couple of strange incidents occurred during this period of my life, both of which I remember vividly, but neither of which I can explain. The first happened while I was still living in the Mayfair apartments.
One evening as dusk approached, my mother told me not to leave the walkway right in front of our apartment door. Being the undisciplined heathen that I was, I beat a hasty departure the moment she was out of sight. I ran around to the very back of the complex, where a huge mound of sand was located, and proceeded to dig a hole with my bare hands. This was one of my favorite activities, in which I invested a huge amount of time as a child. I would get out of bed in the morning, have a bowl of cereal for breakfast, lick the spoon clean, and carry it outside with me. I spent the day digging, nonstop. The front yard looked like a nightmare, and my mother would always step out on the front porch and screech, “Boy, you fill in them holes ’fore somebody breaks an ankle.”
I looked up from my digging that evening only to realize it had become completely dark. I could see the streetlights on in the distance, and the night was deathly silent. No crickets chirping, people talking, or cars driving by. Nothing but the silence that comes once the movie is over and the screen goes blank. Knowing that I was now officially in trouble, I dusted myself off and started to make my way back to our apartment.
As I walked home I had to pass a place where two sections of the building came together to form a corner. The last time I had noticed this corner the apartment there was empty. Now it was dark, but the front door was open.
The inside of the apartment was as void of illumination as some sort of vacuum. Standing in the doorway, propped against the frame with his arms folded across his chest, was a man in black pants and no shirt. He had black shoulder-length hair and wore a shit-eating grin. His eyes followed my progress as I passed, until I stood right in front of him. “Where you goin’, boy?” he asked in a way that said he was amused, but didn’t really expect an answer. I said nothing, just stood looking up at him. “Your mamma’s looking for you. You know you’re going to get a whipping.”
After a moment I continued on my way. When I encountered my mother, she had a switch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I did indeed receive a whipping.
I didn’t think about this incident again until a day or so before I was arrested and put on trial for murder. I was eighteen years old, and the cops had been harassing me nonstop for weeks. My mother asked me one day after lunch, “Why don’t you take your shirt off and go in the backyard so I can take pictures? That way, if the cops beat you we’ll have some before-and-after photos.” Nodding my head, I made a trip to the bathroom, where I took my shirt off. When I looked in the mirror over the sink, it hit me that I looked exactly like the man I’d seen all those years before in the dark apartment.
When I was seven or eight, I saw a man shot in the head. We had moved recently to a two-family house in Memphis. One summer afternoon we left the front door open so a breeze could blow through the house. I was standing right at the threshold looking out at my father, who was standing in the front yard. His hands were in his pockets and he was staring at the ground but not really seeing it. I’d been watching him for a good amount of time and he’d never blinked even once. In his mind he was a million miles away, doing who-knows-what. He did this quite often, but it was different this time. Like an omen.
We heard a small, distant-sounding popping noise, nothing like the gunfire on television. My father later said he first thought it was a car backfiring on the next block. We both looked up at the same time to see a man crossing the street, coming toward us. His hands were holding his head and he was covered in blood.
My father turned toward me and started barking like a Marine drill instructor—“Go! Go! Go! Move your ass!” I retreated into the house with my father right behind me. No sooner had he closed and locked the door than the man hit it running full force. There was a tremendous impact, then nothing. All was quiet. My father stood looking at the door while my mother ran into the room with a scared but questioning look on her face. When he told her what had happened, they stood around trying to figure out what to do next.
We didn’t have a phone, so it was decided that my mother would run out the back door and over to the neighbors’ house where she would ask to use theirs. The only problem was that the neighbors wouldn’t answer the door. My mother stood on the porch hammering and yelling, “We need help! Please let me use your phone!” It was all to no avail, as the neighbors refused to respond. After the cops arrived, the neighbors said it was because they thought my mother had shot my father and was trying to get in to them.
In the meantime, the man smeared blood everywhere. By the time the cops showed up with an ambulance, the man had collapsed on our steps. There were bloody handprints all over the front door and all over our white station wagon. The ambulance drove away with the man in the back while the cops questioned my mom and dad. My paternal grandmother and grandfather, Doris and Ed Hutchison, arrived to take my sister and me away for the night, and tried to keep us from seeing as much of the mess as possible.
My young mind bounced back from the incident without a mark on it. The next day I was able to go back to playing childhood games with all the other kids. There was zero lasting trauma. However, if I were to undergo the exact same experience at my present age I would need counseling for the rest of my life. The nightmares would rob me of precious sleep, and my nerves would be frazzled.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when I began to lose my flexibility, my ability to bounce back from an unsettling incident; I can only look back and see that it’s gone. Going on trial for a crime I didn’t commit screwed me up a bit, no doubt. But I survived it intact, more or less. Don’t get me wrong—my heart, soul, body, and mind all have scars that will never properly heal. Still, I survived. I’m not so sure I could do that if the whole thing had happened to me later in life. I believe it would have been entirely possible for me to drop dead of shock and trauma right in the courtroom.
If I hadn’t been sent to prison at such a young age there’s no way I could ever have adapted to it. Prison is bad enough, but it’s a million times worse when you know you did nothing to be here for. That fact magnifies and amplifies the shock and trauma. As it is, I grew up in this place. Perhaps that’s what robbed me of my inner flexibility.
I no longer approach each situation in life with an open heart, ready to learn. Instead I come like a wary old man scared of being knocked on his ass again. An old man knows that at his age those bruises don’t heal as quickly as they used to. I used to learn as a youth because I was curious. I didn’t necessarily even think about learning; it was more like being one of those baby animals you see on the nature shows. They almost learn by accident, just from being wide-eyed and playful. Now I hoard knowledge out of fear. I figure the more I know, the more I’ll be able to control a situation and keep from getting hurt again.
* * *
I hate it. I hate the signs and symptoms of age I see more and more in myself as each day passes. I’m now the same age that Hank Williams was when he died. Our situations and circumstances made us both old before our time. Don’t think me cynical, though. I believe it to be wholly reversible. I believe love can fix damn near anything. Love and iced tea. I just need larger doses of both than I can get in here. Perhaps soon someone will correct this injustice and rescue me from this nightmare. Until then I have no choice but to struggle on as I have been. “Saint Raymond Nonnatus, hear my prayer . . .”
Three
The year, the idea of a year, has become paper-thin. I can almost reach out and tear a hole through it with my fingernail. December is coming. I can feel it waking up. It brings me a haunted place to rest my head and a clearer vision of all I see. The whole world seems to be putting on its holiday trim, and every day that passes is another mile traveled through the ice-cold desert.
* * *
When I was in second grad
e, a friend of Nanny’s decided to rent the tiny three-room brick building in her backyard to my family, because her Social Security check wasn’t quite enough for her to survive on. In hindsight it strikes me as incredibly odd that someone would have had such a structure in the backyard of a small suburban home. It was more like a bomb shelter.
Someone had wired the place for electricity, and the water worked well enough, but there was no heat. Sometimes it would get so cold in there that the toilet would have ice in it. To keep from freezing to death my mother would turn the oven on as high as it would go and leave the door open. We had a small cat who would hop up onto the oven door and make herself at home by curling into a ball and sleeping.
After a while my mother and father managed to borrow a small portable heater. My mother would stand my sister and me in front of it as we dressed for school in the morning, so that we wouldn’t shiver ourselves to pieces. One day as we were getting dressed, my sister backed into the heater. You could hear her shrieking all down the street, a loud, wordless wail of pain. I can still see my mother on her knees, clutching my sister and rocking back and forth as they both sobbed. After things calmed down my mother examined my sister, and nothing looked to be seriously wrong, so we were sent off to school.
As we walked back home that afternoon, the back of my sister’s shirt and pants were soaking wet. The parts of her that had touched the heater had blistered during the day, and all the blisters had broken open. When my mother saw it, she started crying again. That year was one of the poorest my family ever lived through.
There was much excitement one day about a week before Christmas when three older men in suits showed up at our door carrying boxes and bags of food. I think they were either Shriners or Masons, but I can’t remember. I do remember my mother hugging them all and thanking them over and over while my sister and I ran around their legs like hungry cats, anxious to see what treats were in those sacks. My mother was crying uncontrollably and kept hugging the men. They didn’t say much, just told her she was welcome and left as quickly as they came. This was our Christmas dinner. We received gifts from such groups more than once. Most often it was the Salvation Army.
My father was deeply ashamed for having to accept a handout. That’s something that gets drilled into the heads of white males in the South from the moment they can speak—never accept anything that you haven’t earned for yourself. Having to accept the handout deeply wounded my father in some way that pushed him close to the edge of an emotional cliff. I wasn’t old enough to really understand it; I just knew that my dad was acting strange, and that he was chewing his nails so viciously that sometimes it looked like he was going to put his whole hand in his mouth. Now I know it’s because a man who accepted a handout wasn’t really seen as being much of a man—especially by the man himself. Any man with two working arms and legs who signed up on welfare wasn’t seen very differently from a thief, a liar, or a rapist.
In the end I think that’s part of what caused my parents’ marriage to begin falling apart. The stress of poverty. I usually think of these things around Christmastime. Probably because there was a bag of hard candy in the sacks of food the men brought us, and my grandmother always called it “Christmas candy.”
As I grew older I learned to be ashamed of being poor, too. It became humiliating, something I’d do everything I could to hide from the rest of the world. I developed an overwhelming sense of being excluded from everything. Everywhere you look you see people with things that you do not have, and it has a profound mental effect. That’s mostly during the teenage years.
Later still, I developed a fierce sense of pride at having come from such situations and circumstances. I look at the people who have done horrible things to me, who have lied about me, abused me, and tried to take my life, and I know they would never have been able to rise above the things that I have. They would have died inside.
I’ve talked to some of the other guys on Death Row about our lives as children, and they laugh at my poor childhood. I laugh along with them. One guy will say he was poor because he grew up in the projects, and I become outraged. “Poor? You had water! You had heat! You were wearing shoes that cost a hundred dollars! That’s not poor! Let me tell you what we had. . . .” Everyone snickers when they hear that certain areas of the trailer park were considered to be where the “rich people” lived. Now that I can look back on it all, it’s funny to me, too. I didn’t always see the humor in it, though. It’s no laughing matter when you have to fight with the roaches to see who gets the cornflakes.
Now I believe my parents just weren’t meant to be together. Perhaps they weren’t meant to be with anyone, as my father has now been married and divorced several times, and my mother follows closely behind in her number of failed relationships. The trouble between them began when I was in second grade.
Nanny had gotten remarried to a respectable man named Ivan Haynes. He’s the one I always remember as being my grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. He could be a real asshole sometimes. I could always expect to hear his amused chuckle anytime he witnessed my pain and misfortune. Upon hearing tales of my childhood, some people have speculated that perhaps he didn’t like me so much. I don’t believe that. There was much love between him and me; he was just doing what comes naturally to members of my family. Laughing and teasing others helps take your mind off your own troubles.
I remember one sunny afternoon when I was about seven years old, and Ivan was sitting on our front porch in a lawn chair, drinking a can of beer. I saw him drink only once or twice a year, and he never consumed anything stronger than Budweiser. For some reason he always dumped a couple spoons of salt into the can before he drank it. He once gave me a tiny sip from his can, and I could taste nothing but salt.
I was playing out in the front yard wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. I was open for attack. “Hey, boy,” Ivan called out, blinking like a cat in the sunshine. “Bring me that board over there.” He pointed to a piece of plywood lying across the road.
I picked it up unsuspectingly and started to make my way back to the front porch. When the pain came, it seemed to inflame every part of my body at once. I began to shriek and flail about wildly. The pain was so intense that it short-circuited my logic. I spun in circles, slapping myself and stomping my feet, giving voice to one unending scream. The board had been sitting atop a nest of fire ants. This wasn’t the first time I’d been bitten, nor would it be the last, although it was the worst and most painful.
What was my grandfather doing while I was going into a frenzy? Sipping his beer and watching me in a half-interested way. My mother came running out of the house and grabbed me up. She already knew what the problem was, and she carried me in to the bathtub to pour cold water over me. As we crossed the porch and passed my grandfather, I heard him chuckle.
I heard that maddening chuckle again after one of his trips to an auction, which he loved. He would go through people’s garbage, show up bright and early at every garage sale listed in the local paper, and bid on ungodly amounts of junk at auctions all over the state. He took this rubbish and fixed it up, then sold it at his booth in the flea market.
One day he came home with a box of odds and ends that contained a pair of swim fins, or swimming flippers. They weren’t pliant and flexible the way professional-quality fins are. These were as hard as bricks, like petrified frog feet. They would have broken before they bent. My grandfather tossed them to me and said, “Put ’em on and try ’em out.”
I carried them out into the backyard, where a four-foot-deep pool had sat for a couple of years. It had never been drained or cleaned since its initial setup, so the water was dark green and disturbing. Odd-looking bugs skimmed along the surface, looking for someone to bite. I did not relish the thought of having to splash about in that muck.
I sat on the rickety ladder and attached the flippers tightly to my feet. Standing on the ladder, I launched myself out into the middle of the pool and began kicking. My efforts were
futile, and I quickly found myself thrashing around on the bottom. I began to wonder if perhaps these flippers were made for imaginary swimming and not intended for actual water wear. Whatever the case, I thought, To hell with this, and decided to get out. The problem was that I couldn’t stand up. The rock-hard plastic flippers made it impossible for me to get my feet under me. Frantic, I managed to get my head above the water one time for what I believed to be my final gasp of air. What sight did I behold as I was drowning? My grandfather, hands on hips, chuckling. Next to him stood my sister, also giggling, as she squinted against the sun. My terror evaporated in the face of the rage that swept through my small body, and I managed to get a hand on the ladder and pull myself up.
For a few moments I could do nothing but cough, sputter, and try to expel the water from my nose, which was making the inside of my head burn like fire. When I could speak, I snatched off the flippers and began to shriek in outrage, putting the finger of accusation on them both. “Stupid! You’re both stupid! I’m telling Mom!” I shot into the house like a scalded cat, my grandfather shouting after me, “Don’t you drip that water on the rug!”
Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row Page 3
