This notion of mercy—the one of compassionate clemency, of divine forgiveness—requires that we believe people deserve to be punished. The deacons’ wives, with their loose navy dresses, taught me and all the other girls that we deserved whatever pain was unique to our experience as punishment for the sins we’d committed, or those we hadn’t committed yet but might commit later, or any sins committed by others on our behalf. It didn’t really matter how pious a life we led because we could expect pain, that great equalizer, to arrive at any moment to punish us for the sin of being born.
* * *
“Tonight the state of Georgia legally lynched an innocent man,” one of Troy Davis’s defense attorneys tells the media. Hundreds of protesters have gathered outside the prison, quieted by the pronouncement of Davis’s death, chanting and singing as they face an army of sheriff’s deputies, state police, and baton-wielding prison guards in full riot gear: We shall overcome someday. Only members of the slain officer’s family, resolute in their certainty of Davis’s guilt, express relief about his death, having consistently fought his efforts for clemency. They leave the chamber with smiles on their faces. Anneliese MacPhail, mother of the victim, tells an interviewer outside her home that, yes, Davis’s execution has brought her relief: “Twenty-two years we’ve been going through this, and he is gone now.” To her, Davis’s execution is a victory.
But six months later, MacPhail admits that some of her hatred for Davis might have been fueled by resentment that his story—the story of racial injustice in the justice system—became the prevailing narrative of the case. “It was always poor Troy Davis,” MacPhail says. “There was never anything about Mark, his wife, and the babies he left behind.” Ultimately, Davis’s execution doesn’t fill the hole left by her son’s murder, and now MacPhail is blamed for the execution of an innocent man. She receives hate mail from Davis’s supporters, who also continue to call her house. “I didn’t sentence him to die,” MacPhail says. “He was found guilty and that was the state—not me.”
* * *
“The contention that violence is inevitable is one of the great unexamined assumptions of society,” write Bible scholars Stephen P. Wink and Walter Wink, who argue that every myth of creation requires a story of destruction, and this cosmology, in which violence is redemptive, legitimates systems of domination and oppression. Consider the words of Justice Potter Stewart, writing the majority opinion in Gregg v. Georgia, the 1976 Supreme Court case that re-legalized the death penalty: “Capital punishment is an expression of society’s moral outrage at particularly offensive conduct. This function may be unappealing to many, but it is essential in an ordered society.” Gary Gilmore was the first death row inmate to be executed after this decision—in Utah, by firing squad. Three years later, John Spenkelink would be executed in Florida, by electrocution. He often signed his letters, “Capital punishment means those without capital get the punishment.”
Spenkelink’s words point to a disturbing truth about the administration of capital punishment in the United States. Time and again, studies show that an overwhelming majority of defendants charged with capital crimes cannot afford their own attorneys to represent them. As a result, they are much more likely to be represented by public defenders and to be convicted of the crimes with which they are charged. Clear evidence shows that the harshest sentences are often reserved for the poor and for people of color, who are less likely to be offered probation, more likely to be sentenced to prison, more likely to be sentenced to longer prison terms, and more likely to serve a greater portion of their original sentence. In murder cases, they are more likely to be sentenced to death.
In 1987 Warren McCleskey, an African American convicted of murdering a white police officer in Georgia, appealed his death sentence to the Supreme Court, arguing that his sentence should be nullified because his race and the race of his victim had played an unconstitutionally significant role. He based these claims on what has become known as the Baldus study—a comparative review of more than two thousand murder cases in Georgia—which concluded that the single most reliable predictor of whether someone will be sentenced to death is the race of the victim. Despite this evidence of racial bias in the administration of justice, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence for McCleskey, arguing that “apparent disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.” Before McCleskey was executed by electrocution, he told the room of witnesses: “I pray that one day this country, supposedly a civilized society, will abolish barbaric acts such as the death penalty.”
Soon after, states across the nation would abandon electrocution in favor of lethal injection as the preferred method for maintaining an “ordered society,” because at that time, it was considered the most humane of all the variously gruesome ways we execute our condemned, and, if not humane, at least the most painless. Painless because it relies on a combination of three drugs: an anesthetic that sends the prisoner into a deep coma; a paralytic, which prevents the prisoner from involuntary movement; and finally, a dose of potassium chloride sufficient enough to stop the prisoner’s heart.
This manner of dying—a heart attack in one’s sleep—is what the historian Suetonius might call a “good death,” describing how the emperor Augustus died quickly and without suffering—in the Greek, euthanasia, from eu, “good,” and thanatos, “death.” The word first appears, in this “good death” sense, in the writings of Francis Bacon, who described medically induced death as “a kindly and pleasant sleep.” Bacon argued that a doctor’s role was “not only to restore health, but to mitigate pain and dolours; and not only when such mitigation may conduce to recovery, but when it may serve to make a fair and easy passage.”
He meant pain in the physical sense: chronic pain, acute pain, physical pain—pain that “destroys language,” but for which we do in fact have words. We have hundreds of pain words—words like burning, searing, penetrating, radiating, punishing, suffocating—that doctors use to classify and alleviate pain and, whenever possible, offer mercy.
* * *
“I’m ready to be released. Release me,” says Kenneth Allen McDuff at his execution in Texas in 1998.
“I feel my whole body burning,” says Michael Lee Wilson, one of the first death row inmates to be executed by lethal injection after the drug company Hospira refused to continue manufacturing sodium thiopental, a barbiturate and anesthetic, because it was being used for lethal injections. Prisons, so desperate to execute their condemned, have turned to other anesthetics: to pentobarbital, and then, after European manufacturers refused to sell pentobarbital to the United States for executions, midazolam; to drugs manufactured under lax regulations, to drugs imported from overseas, to drugs bought with petty cash by prison officials and smuggled into the country illegally.
“Man,” says Clayton Lockett in 2014, in Oklahoma, as he writhes in agony on the gurney. The IV has been placed incorrectly; his vein has ruptured; the midazolam has entered his tissue rather than his bloodstream; he is pronounced unconscious; he is injected with vecuronium bromide to paralyze his body and potassium chloride to stop his heart; and yet he wakes up, raises his head, and tries to rise from the gurney. A pool of fluid bulges under his skin. He twitches and convulses and tries to speak but cannot. He dies of cardiac arrest ten minutes after the warden halts the execution.
“Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted,” says Larry Donnell Davis, executed in Texas in 2008. He is quoting from the Beatitudes, the eight blessings in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. The sermon, recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, continues:
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
* * *
Today I learn that the girl who wears a bright neon wig has had surgery to remove the tumor from her back. When I knock on the door to her room, the nurses are t
rying to move her in the bed and she cries out in pain. No words: only a single, involuntary wail. She is skeletal, bald, sobbing while they lift her on a white sheet and move her only slightly. I don’t understand why they are moving her at all. I ask if I should come back later. “No no no,” her father says. “Please don’t go.” I say, “I’ll just go get a book and come right back.” When I return minutes later, the girl is a little more comfortable. She realizes I’m in the room this time and smiles. She is so happy to see me. I ask if she’d like me to read her a book. “Let’s read it together,” she says. As we’re reading, her older brother and younger sister come into the room and climb onto the bed with us. I’m hamming it up as best I can. It’s a silly book, and the kids laugh, even the very sick girl. We write the most ridiculous story we can think of, in which we fill the top floor of the hospital with water in order to give everyone on the lower floors a shower. An elephant comes into the room and tries to talk to us, but elephants don’t speak English and it’s all very frustrating, especially for the elephant, who has something important to say. The children’s mother comes into the room with their grandmother and grandfather. When they ask who I am, the mother calls me a tutor. The error couldn’t matter less.
* * *
We hear reports of the children’s health mostly through rumor. The classroom teacher tells us that the teenage girl who sometimes wears a hijab has checked out of the hospital, which seems like good news. But the following week, I see her being wheeled through the hospital by her mother and another woman. The girl slouches in the wheelchair, her body folded over onto itself, her eyes looking at nothing in particular. She doesn’t recognize me. She doesn’t even see me. And then we hear that she has been admitted to the ICU. And then that she has stopped eating. “Nauseated by the chemo,” the teachers say. She is thirteen or fourteen years old. They say, “It is only a matter of time.”
When the girl in the neon wig comes back to class, she does not feel like writing the story everyone else is writing. She doesn’t feel well and swivels in her chair with her head on the table while the rest of us are writing. Suddenly she bolts upright—an idea! She retrieves a piece of white paper from the pile at the center. She writes: “Thank you, Mom, for taking care of me, for cooking good food for me, for hugging and kissing me. Thank you for your love.” It’s the last line that sends me to the window to collect myself, where I remember this child is not my child. Her mother’s grief is not my grief.
My teaching partner and I don’t ask the children to write about their pain. Unlike the doctors and nurses who visit them every weekday to check their catheters, to poke and prod them with frightening-looking instruments, or to inject them with toxic chemicals that make them suffer in order to make them well, we don’t treat what ails their bodies. Asking children to write about pain does nothing to alleviate it, so instead we write about islands of our own invention, the imaginary landscapes of our brains, or the future economies of child rocket transportation. We pull board games from the shelves and throw out the rules. We become way too excited and make far too much noise. Official-looking adults in scrubs keep opening the door to investigate our commotion. We clap and cheer. In our games, everyone wins.
At lunchtime, when the mothers and fathers come to pick up their children, they speak to us with tears in their eyes. They thank us very sincerely for the poems and stories: artifacts of a life that has not yet extinguished. I do not want their teary thank-yous. The children are right here, smiling and waving good-bye.
* * *
I think there are different kinds of mercy: big Mercy and little mercy. Big Mercy is so big because it is made out of suffering and ultimatums, out of saviors and omnipotence, and out of stories that are brutal and where almost nobody wins. It’s big Mercy that annihilates the many to redeem the few: a whole world purified by fire, rinsed by flood, and made perfect and shiny and new. Big Mercy decides who lives and dies and how. It cleaves humanity in two: the few chosen to be powerful, the many they render powerless. Big Mercy teaches us the first lesson of righteousness: that other people are not as human as we are. No one deserves to receive big Mercy, and no one deserves to offer it either.
But maybe there’s another kind of mercy—mercy so little that it costs almost nothing. So little most of us never notice it. The kind that arrives as a child sitting briefly on your lap, as a poem, a letter, a loving hand on your hand, a piece of paper cut with tiny scissors, held by strips of tape to a wall or window. Little mercy teaches a lesson too: that everyone is human, just as we are. There’s no one—no one—who doesn’t deserve that kind of mercy.
* * *
It’s mercy, a little one, that I want for the girl in the bright neon wig, who is now not expected to live, who checks out of this hospital and is moved to another hospital in a faraway state, where she will undergo an experimental treatment that requires her to be in quarantine for thirty days. I’m furious with her parents for choosing this when the odds of saving her are so slim, though I know it’s unjust of me to judge them for making a choice I could not. This child is not my child. Every day her mother posts pictures of the girl on Facebook: without her wig, wearing only a hospital gown, lying in a hospital bed. In these pictures, which I visit often, she is completely alone, perfectly preserved behind a window, staying exactly the same: bald, pale, skeletal. Her younger brother has outgrown her. In one photo she’s pressing a hand to the glass of the quarantine room; outside, her younger sisters stand together—their blond ponytails, their T-shirts and leggings and mismatched socks, their hands on the glass—pressing back.
* * *
On James Russell Brewer’s last day, he speaks to his friends and family by phone in a booth no bigger than a water heater closet, separated from the people he loves by a pane of glass, by armed guards, by a sentence that is coming to an end. For his last meal, he has asked for two chicken-fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra with a side of ketchup, a pound of Texas barbecue (meat unspecified), three fajitas, a Pizza Hut Meat Lover’s pizza, a pint of Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream, and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts. He eats none of it, claiming he has lost his appetite.
Around 6:00 p.m., Brewer is taken to the execution chamber: a tiny room with turquoise walls, made tinier by its emptiness. The only thing inside the room is the gurney, to which he is quickly strapped by thick leather belts buckled across his arms, legs, and torso. Two windows look into the chamber from opposite sides of the room: one for the family of James Byrd Jr. and the other for his own family, where his father, mother, and brother, and two friends look on. He offers them a little smile.
After the execution, one of James Byrd’s sisters addresses the media, saying, “It didn’t bring me any sense of peace or relief.” Another sister stands behind her, nodding, looking down. “It’s just a matter of saying that this one chapter in the book was now closed, and we can move on.” Noticeably absent from the crowd gathered outside the prison is the victim’s only son, Ross Byrd, who opposes the execution, telling interviewers that Brewer’s death is simply another expression of the hate shown toward his father on that June night in 1998: “Like Gandhi said, an eye for an eye, and the whole world will go blind.” He wishes the state would have shown his father’s killer mercy.
* * *
The girl who no longer wears a neon wig has one last wish: to go to Disneyland. The experimental treatments have failed; the cancer has spread: to her bones, her blood, her head. In the photographs of her final days, she looks peaceful: a wide smile spreading across the pale mask of her face as Disney princesses kneel and smile beside her. She reclines in a three-wheel stroller, her head propped up on pillows, her hands resting on blankets tucked around her lap. Her family crowds around her: always a hand placed on her arm, her leg, her cheek. I don’t know anything about her final moments—whether there was a gasp, or a sigh, or the last gift of an injection—only that they come during the third night. Her mother writes, “Our girl has found p
eace.”
* * *
“Life becomes death,” writes Paul Auster in The Invention of Solitude, “and it is as if this death has owned this life all along.”
In the comfort of my own home, I cook dinner for my healthy children. I sing to them as they drift off to sleep. I plan lessons to teach in the pediatric cancer ward: little poems and drawings for the families to keep after their children are gone.
“Poetry has its uses for despair,” writes the poet Christian Wiman of his own battle with cancer. “It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting.”
My husband says time heals all wounds. I nod my head. But deep down I know this isn’t really true. The wounds change shape, change forms. Pain appears as a gash, then a cut, then a scab, then a scar—all near-synonyms extending on and on along the signifying chain.
The Reckonings Page 5
