by J. B. Turner
‘Got you.’
Goldberg went quiet for a few moments as if thinking of something else to say. ‘You gotta remember this is a helluva tough place you’re going to.’
Deborah wondered if she was up to it. This was no fluffy feature on Ricky Martin. This was the real deal. Could she handle it?
She tried to imagine Craig. Would he be in the same room as her? Would he even want to be interviewed?
‘One final thing.’ Goldberg looked straight at her. ‘I want you to communicate only with me on this story.’
Had she heard right?
‘This is a potentially sensitive scenario. If you want to talk about your story, you phone me. You wanna e-mail the features desk, you e-mail me. Is that clear?’
Deborah nodded, unconvinced.
‘Don’t speak to anyone in the office until I say.’
‘Anyone?’
Goldberg sighed. ‘Look at it from my side of the fence. With the election nearly upon us, and you trying to interview the guy who killed a senator’s son, we could be accused of bias. That’s why only a few editors and a couple of senior journalists know about this.
‘Look, this isn’t some small-town paper in Mississippi, Deborah. The Miami Herald breaks major stories and occasionally runs into trouble with the rich and powerful. We’ve got to box clever and keep this under our hat, unless Craig speaks.’
Only now was the full magnitude of the story becoming clear.
Deborah understood the logic although it seemed slightly over the top. ‘When do you want me to start?’
‘Right away. I want you up at Raiford by tomorrow afternoon.’
‘That might be a problem as I don’t fly.’
‘Well, you’ll have to drive up overnight. I’ll clear things with Michelle, and arrange things with the warden. Oh, before I forget—one final thing.’
‘What?’
Goldberg stared across at her, his eyes dead. ‘Be careful. Florida may be the Sunshine State to most people, but it’s not. It’s a swamp. Don’t ever forget that.’
2
It was mile after mile of loblolly pines between the odd homestead as Deborah drove deeper and deeper into the backwoods of northern Florida. She yawned as she sped on through another small town, her convertible eating up the miles. She’d driven through the night from Miami up I-95 and had stopped twice for gas. Her fear of flying was something that she had tried to conquer with hypnotism and special relaxation exercises devised by her therapist but, in a way, she was glad to take to the road.
Deborah looked out over the fields and wondered how people around here survived. This was cracker country. Poor white farmers tried to scratch a living from the barren sandy soil of Bradford County. Baseball caps pulled down low to shield their eyes from the fierce sun.
This was a tough part of the Sunshine State. Old Victorian towns like nearby Starke were rooted in the penal culture. Whole families worked in the state pen. She was a long way from her nice Miami condo.
In this piney swatch of redneck villages and towns, there were no chic restaurants, dazzling nightlife, or relaxed vibes like in South Beach. Here, people had to work hard for not much. People like her ex-boyfriend’s parents, who ran a Seven-Eleven.
Deborah’s thoughts turned to Brett, her one-time college sweetheart.
It was less than two years since she’d followed him back to Florida like a dutiful lapdog after they’d graduated from Berkeley. She’d just wanted to be near him. He got a job in a law firm and she got a job at the Orlando Sentinel, but she could see in his eyes that he didn’t love her any more. He had changed. Sure enough, before long he dumped her, leaving Deborah all alone in a part of the country where she had few friends. She felt as though her world had collapsed around her.
She didn’t tell anyone for a month. Not a soul. Her mother seemed glad that he’d left. Her father? Well, he never did much care for him. Thought she should hold out for a black lawyer or doctor. Brett, a handsome white boy from a poor background who won a football scholarship to Berkeley, didn’t fit the bill. It was like she’d never please them. Her happiness seemed incidental.
Deborah sped on. She passed sodden fields of strawberries and sweet potatoes drying out in the sun after an overnight downpour. The area seemed to be stuck in another era. Life was agriculture-based and slow.
I-95 gave way to the old pre-Interstate federal highway. She was getting closer. An old country song—‘Okie from Muskogee’—played on the radio.
Deborah looked to her right and saw dozens of mostly black and Hispanic inmates, heads down and all wearing blue prison-issue pants and tops. The men were bent double in the blistering sun as they picked vegetables. She wondered if they were from the nearby New River Correctional Institution—also known as the ‘0’ Unit—which housed minimum and medium security-risk inmates. Four white guards on horseback watched over them with shotguns at the ready. It was as if things hadn’t changed since Civil War days.
It was common knowledge that black people made up a large percentage of all those incarcerated in penitentiaries across America. Were they far more likely to commit crimes than whites were? Why did black killers have a significantly higher chance of ending up on death row than white killers? Double standards, that was what it was. In many respects, Craig was the exception. The disparity was striking, especially in the South. Deborah remembered what her father had said about Florida: ‘It isn’t the Deep South. It is the deep Deep South.’
She gazed down the shimmering road as Hank Williams’s ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ played. She smiled at the irony of being a twenty-something African American woman who preferred country music to Destiny’s Child, Jennifer Lopez, and the rappers favored by her peers.
What would she choose if she were a prisoner? Stuck in a concrete cell for twenty-three hours a day or back-breaking work in the sun? She figured that the open air was better than suffocating in a stifling cell like Mr Craig was.
Deborah drove on for around two hundred yards, turned a corner and there it was—Raiford. A metal archway proclaimed ‘Florida State Prison’. It looked like the entrance to the TV ranch owned by the Ewings in Dallas—secure, comforting, and imposing. It could’ve been an entrance to a gated community.
Deborah took off her shades and drove on through. A chain-link fence topped with razor wire encircled Raiford. High up in towers at the four corners of the jail, armed guards stood watch. Behind the fence was a combination of old and new mostly wooden—prison buildings. More prisoners tended the grounds. Some mowed lawns, while others hoed the gardens. Everyone’s head was down.
She squinted as the concertinaed razor wire glistened in the sun and wondered how many men had ever left Raiford rehabilitated. Probably very few. The thought depressed her.
Deborah pulled up outside a red-brick administration building. She walked through a series of checkpoints, pat-downs—which she hated—and metal detectors. A uniformed guard examined her ID and passes, and her briefcase containing notepads and background notes. She lifted her arms and a female guard with peroxide hair patted all the angles for contraband.
The guard said, ‘She’s clean.’ She chewed her gum and stepped back to allow Deborah through into the administration block. She fixed Deborah with a blank stare, arms folded, as if trying to intimidate her.
It worked.
Insides churning, Deborah walked on. She felt self-conscious wearing the overpriced black Versace suit she’d bought on Washington Avenue. She turned and saw that the peroxide guard had taken her shades off and was staring back, mouth tight. She knew how insular this part of Florida was. The fact that the prison was a major employer in the area probably heightened the effect.
Take it easy, Deborah.
A black officer escorted her into the building. He said nothing.
Deborah climbed several steps and walked through a shiny maze of corridors. The smell of bleach hung heav
y and reminded her of public toilets. Inmates wore jumpsuits and mopped the shining halls as uniformed guards looked on. Occasionally, an inmate would wink at her. One whispered, ‘Anytime you like, sister.’
Do not run.
Deborah resisted the instinct to do so and walked on in a businesslike manner. These prisoners were probably low-security and allowed to mingle near visitors. Nonetheless, she was glad to have the guard escort her to the warden’s office. Deeper and deeper into the bowels of Raiford . .. The walls seemed to close in. The clanging of keys and doors and incessant noise threatened to overwhelm her.
Breathe in, Deborah. Breathe.
She recited the relaxation exercises her therapist had given her. She wondered if she should have told her editor about the occasional panic attack that stopped her from flying. Probably not. It would’ve killed her chances to meet Craig.
She moved down a wider corridor and felt the cold blast of an air-conditioning unit. It was a relief. She knew there were none on death row.
• • •
Harold Erhert, the warden of Raiford, was a huge man. He sat slumped in his seat like he’d just had a big lunch. His face was round, his eyes blue. He wore a brown suit and matching tie. He seemed stiff, as if he hadn’t moved for hours. Nothing changed when Deborah entered his office. He just smirked.
He said, ‘Wasn’t expecting no lady journalist.’ His stare crawled all over her and she felt her insides turn cold. ‘Y’sure you’re from the Herald?’
Deborah gave a tight smile, exhausted after her twelve-hour drive. ‘Absolutely.’
‘Mind if I see your credentials and pass?’
‘Not at all.’ She handed over her papers and ID. ‘It’s all there.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ Erhert’s eyes scanned the papers in front of him.
Deborah could taste his hostility. She let it go, remembering what her father had once said. ‘No need to pick fights when none need to be fought.’
She leaned back in her seat and looked around the office. A huge American flag was positioned behind Erhert’s desk. The walls were painted a muddy beige. They sported a couple of pictures—one of the warden shaking hands with Billy Graham, the other of him with the governor. The room smelled of mothballs and bad breath.
Erhert handed back her papers. ‘Okay, seems fine. First time in a penitentiary, miss?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thought so. Any idea what kind of place this is?’
‘Top-security jail.’
‘That’s right, and we ain’t got no fancy ways of doin’ things.’ That didn’t surprise her.
Deborah nodded.
‘Y’know, we never had no Negro reporter in here, neither.’ Don’t take the bait.
‘I think the term’s “black” or “African-American”, sir.’ Was that part of his strategy to teach her who was boss?
‘I see.’ The warden gave a tobacco-stained smile. ‘No offense, miss.’
‘None taken.’
‘Usually the only young Negroes we have coming in my office are the wives or girlfriends of guys on death row, pleading with me to save their man. Kinda sad.’
‘I graduated Berkeley, top of my class.’
‘Is that right?’ Erhert said, a sneer at the corner of his mouth.
Deborah stared back at him, unwilling to be intimidated.
What a dinosaur. In the early 1960s Erhert had probably been the kind of young man that rode around nearby Starke in the back of his pick-up with his drunken friends, wearing Klan sheets and terrorizing black people.
She realized that she’d been fortunate. Having been educated in a private Baptist school in Jackson in the 1980s and 1990s, she’d been shielded from the racism of the street. The influence of the Klan in the South, or so it seemed to her, was on the wane. An internship at the Jackson Advocate was her wake-up call. The paper styled itself as the only defiant voice of poor Mississippi blacks, but it convinced her that things, in some ways, were as bad as ever. Firebomb attacks on the paper’s offices—yards from where her parents still lived in the historic yet run-down Farish district—told their own story.
Deborah realized that the illusion and upbeat talk of progress being made was coming primarily from the black middle class, people like her. Meanwhile, in the South, the poor blacks stared into the economic and social abyss. Segregation and racism were far more discreet. Substandard education paved the way for a life of welfare, drugs, and no future.
Just what the warden would want.
Erhert smiled and pushed his tongue round the front of his yellowed teeth as if he was searching out bits of chicken. Then he looked up at the pictures on the wall and pointed at himself posing with the governor. ‘Real proud of that. Y’know, that man came to speak at our local church out of the goodness of his heart. And him a Roman Catholic. But he’s a fine family man.’ He nodded his head. ‘Nice that us Christians can reach out and talk like that.’
Deborah smiled. Didn’t he realize how mixed-up he sounded?
‘Believe he’s heading a trade delegation out to the Far East later today.’
‘Is that so?’ Erhert grinned back at her like a well-fed cat. He was around the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound mark, rolls of fat hanging over his thick brown belt. She glanced up at the picture of the governor.
He looked the part. A handsome, rugged white man with a far-right stance on everything from crime to homosexuals, from crack-addicted welfare mothers to tax cuts. He could usually be seen on election posters posing with wealthy white hunters—usually corporate donors to his campaign—out in the wilds of Florida, holding up any bird or animal they’d killed that day, highlighting his macho image. No wonder Erhert liked him. The world of simple choices without any shades of gray would suit him.
‘Looka here, young lady.’ More rolls of fat wobbled around his neck. ‘Here’s what we have. We’ve got the worst of the worst, y’understand?’
Deborah nodded and wished this self-important man would just let her see Craig.
‘A pretty young Negro girl like you may not feel too comfortable with the Aryan Brotherhood jailbirds we have cooped up here.’ Erhert paused and stared at her as if wanting the word ‘Negro’ to sink in and annoy her. Then he slowly licked his lips, like he was getting turned on by the thought. ‘Would kill you soon as look at you. And we have Hispanic gangs. Real mean.’
Deborah nodded.
‘That’s just the bread and butter of the prison. To top it all, we’ve got the death-row inmates, caged up to twenty-three hours a day. Go everywhere in chains, for security—except the exercise yard and shower.’
‘Seems a little excessive.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew what these guys are like.’
‘Is it really necessary, especially for Craig? He’s in his early eighties.’
‘Doesn’t matter what age they are, miss—that’s the way it is and that’s the way it should be. They’re evil people, don’t ever forget that.’
Deborah stayed silent.
Erhert’s eyes grew hooded. ‘This ain’t no Disney World. We don’t pussyfoot around.’
Deborah nodded.
‘Some people get the wrong idea of this place.’ A beat. ‘You know the name Valdes, Miss Jones?’
‘Guy that was beaten to death?’
Erhert’s face froze. Had she said the wrong thing?
‘It was an accident.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘See, I say that guy’s name and suddenly we’ve got misconceptions about a place like this and some of our officers. Beatings and violence are a daily occurrence, some say. Well, it ain’t like that. We’re professional. Tough but fair, just like the Bible says.’
Deborah stayed silent again. Mustn’t jeopardize the interview with Craig. Wouldn’t put it past Erhert to turn her down flat without good reason.
‘You do believe in the Bible, Miss Jones?’
‘My father’s a Bapt
ist minister, sir.’
‘That’s good to hear, but that wasn’t my question. Do you believe in the Bible?’
‘Not any more.’ She couldn’t be bothered going into the reasons. Besides, it would take hours to explain.
‘I see.’ Erhert didn’t seem surprised. ‘Lot of non-believers these days. Guess that’s free speech for you, huh?’
Deborah smiled and crossed her legs—and caught the warden’s gaze on her crotch. She felt her insides move.
‘Big-shot newspaper like the Miami Herald must get a lot of our guys writing in, complaining ‘bout conditions, right?’
‘A few…’ That was a lie. The paper received dozens of letters each month from wives and girlfriends alleging torture and humiliation by guards. Some even claimed that they themselves had been sexually assaulted. She wondered if all the prisoners could be lying. ‘Tell me about Mr Craig. How’s he coping?’
‘Keeps himself to himself.’
‘Read somewhere that a guard lodged a complaint about the volume of the classical radio station he was listening to.’
‘Yeah.’
‘How else does he pass the time?’
‘Reads and writes letters, mostly. Cell’s like a library—every kinda book piled high. Think he’s the only one on the “row” that can write a sentence.’
‘What about the other prisoners on the “row?” How’s he treated by them?’ Deborah had found out from court transcripts, much to her amazement, that Craig had in fact been a senior policeman for many years in Scotland. ‘Can’t be too popular, him being an ex-cop after all.’
Erhert shook his head and pressed his tongue into his cheek. ‘They like him. That surprise you?’ He smiled and Deborah saw that he’d finally freed the small piece of food from between his two front teeth.
‘Sure.’ She tried hard not to look at his mouth. ‘I’ve read many stories about bad experiences for ex-policemen in jail.’
‘Let me tell you a story about Craig.’ He pointed directly at her. ‘And don’t be quoting me on this, okay?’
