Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

  I was twelve years old the first time I witnessed physical violence against a black person. Elise Gauthier, my friend and classmate, and I rode the bus one December day in 1952 to Third Street to do our Christmas shopping. We were in seventh grade; everything was funny that year, and we had a great time on the bus, teasing and laughing uproariously over twelve-year-olds’ jokes. The bus stopped at the end of Third Street and everyone on the bus was getting out when Elise and I heard the bus driver shout an obscenity to a young black woman and saw him kick her with his foot off the bus and onto the sidewalk. She landed on her hands and knees and her purse flew open and coins rolled all over. She didn’t say a word, did not even look at the bus driver, just picked herself up and walked away.

  I felt awful. My parents never acted mean to black people, even though they never questioned the system of racial discrimination that permeated every aspect of life. Daddy, an attorney, represented a slew of black clients, charging them five dollars for his services, and he helped several families buy property and, eventually, own their own homes. It would take me a long time to understand how systems inflict pain and hardship in people’s lives and to learn that being kind in an unjust system is not enough.

  Now, here in St. Thomas, I am learning plenty about systems and what happens to the people in them, here in a state whose misery statistics are the highest in the nation — where residents bring home an average yearly income of $10,890, where half the adult population has not completed high school, where one in every six persons is a food-stamp recipient, one of every three babies born has an unwed mother, and the violent crime rate is ninth highest in the nation.2

  I am meeting seventeen-year-old girls who have had one, sometimes two children. Without a chance for college, a senior trip to Florida, the possibility of a career, and the independence and mobility that a car gives, they are vulnerable to the first young man who looks at them. Sixteen-year-old Lily, swaying with the blanketed bundle in her arms as if she were holding a doll, tells me the familiar story that she wanted a baby so she could have “something of my very own.”

  With paper and pencil I am helping Shirley, a single mother, compute how to make ends meet for herself and her child on an AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) check of $138 a month and $123 in food stamps. I witness her agony of deciding if she should give up AFDC and get a job, which means losing medicaid, the only health insurance she has for her child. The cashier’s job at a supermarket which she is considering pays minimum wages and is part-time — thirty-five hours a week (the policy of most supermarkets in the city), which means that she won’t get medical or retirement benefits. The St. Thomas residents who do find full-time work usually receive minimum wages, which amounts to about thirty-five dollars a month above the AFDC income level. (1990 Census Bureau statistics reveal that full-time minimum-wage earners received $8,840 a year.) Plus, mothers like Shirley, who choose work instead of welfare, face additional costs of child care, medical bills, an increase in rent (proportionate to income), and transportation expenses. I had always thought that jobs were the way out of poverty. Now I’m learning the meaning of working poor. (In 1989 37.3 million working Americans, accounting for 39 percent of total tax returns, received incomes below $15,000.)3

  At the supper table at night I am listening to the stories Sister Therese St. Pierre tells of the three- and four-year-olds in her preschool group who do not know words like “over” or “lettuce” or “sofa.” Most of these children will hit the overpopulated, understaffed, ill-equipped public schools with “failure by third grade” stamped on their foreheads.

  I am watching how easy it is for a teenage boy to “run a bag” of cocaine down the street for an easy twenty bucks. (If he gets an after-school or summer job, his income will be deducted from his mother’s AFDC check.)

  I am seeing, with my own eyes — shocked, disbelieving — bags of white powder peddled in the open with no police in sight. Sister Lory Schaff, who began Hope House in 1969, tells of meeting in 1972 with a high-ranking city official to express her concern about the freewheeling dope peddling in St. Thomas, and of being met with, “Well, now, Sister, we know drugs are going to pop up somewhere in every city. At least we know where they are.”

  I also notice that when residents of St. Thomas are killed, the newspaper barely takes notice, whereas when white citizens are killed, there is often a front-page story.

  But the most frightening revelation is the treatment of neighborhood residents by the police. Story after story, incident after incident is told of people, especially young men, picked up, verbally abused, handcuffed, beaten, and sometimes killed. I’ve witnessed such scenes myself, watching young men thrown forcefully against police cars, handcuffed, pushed into the car and driven away. One called out to another Sister and me as we watched in disbelief, “Sisters, y’all are my witnesses. I got no drugs on me. They gonna stick it in my pockets. I got no drugs.” According to a 1984 — 1990 U.S. Department of Justice survey, New Orleans logged more complaints against its police than any other city in the country.4

  I think of lines from a poem by Langston Hughes:

  Negroes

  Sweet and docile,

  Meek, humble, and kind:

  Beware the day

  They change their mind …5

  Meanwhile, I watch Reagan slash funds for prenatal and child care, low-income housing, employment training, and food subsidies. And as social programs are slashed, new prisons are built. Between 1975 and 1991 Louisiana expanded its adult prisons from three to twelve, with prison populations increasing by 249 percent. Throughout the 1980s Louisiana ranked first, second, or third in the nation as the state incarcerating the greatest number of its residents — at an annual cost per inmate of $15,000, and that doesn’t include the cost of prison construction, about $50,000 for the average prison bed. Louisiana’s exponential prison expansion is part of a national trend. In 1980 about 500,000 Americans were behind bars; in 1990, 1.1 million — the highest confinement rate in the world. And if parole and probation systems are included, in 1990 the United States had in its criminal justice system 1 of every 43 adults, 1 of every 24 men, and 1 of every 162 women, at the cost of $20 billion a year. Between 1981 and 1991 the federal government cut its contribution to education by 25 percent (in real dollars) and increased its allocation for criminal justice by 29 percent.6

  Almost every family I meet in St. Thomas has a relative in prison. (In 1989 one in four black men in the twenty-to-twenty-nine age group was under the control of the criminal justice system.)7 As one woman put it, “our young men leave here either in a police car or a hearse.”

  I feel like I’ve entered a war zone or a foreign country where the language and customs and rules are different from anything I have ever encountered.

  “This ain’t no place to raise kids,” a mother says to me, her eyes glinting with anger. “But where can I go? Where else can I go and be able to pay the rent and light bill? This place is like a reservation.”

  Yet, it is from some of the residents themselves that I receive hope. They remind me of those plucky little flowers you see growing straight up through asphalt.

  Here is a young teenage boy who works in a drugstore after school to help his single working mother buy clothes for his younger sisters. Here is a twenty-two-year-old man who after a short stint in parish (county) jail steadily comes to the Adult Learning Center for fifth-grade reading lessons. Here is a young woman whose mother has worked at two jobs so that she can attend college. Here is an ex-convict organizing a boys’ club in the neighborhood. Here is a college-educated, articulate young man helping tenants organize self-help programs.

  I keep thinking of the gifts of my own upbringing, which I once took for granted: I can read any book I choose and comprehend it. I can write a complete sentence and punctuate it correctly. If I need help, I can call on judges, attorneys, educators, ministers. I wonder what I would be like if I had grown up without such protections and supports. What cracks would
have turned up in my character? What makes me think that I wouldn’t have been pregnant at seventeen? How law-abiding would I be?

  In some mysterious way my living and working in St. Thomas is paring me down to essentials and liberating my spirit. Even living without air-conditioning is good for me. Intense heat slows you down. You choose essential tasks. You become grateful for small breezes and seek the company of trees. You appreciate a cool bath, ice water. Simple things. Good things. And for the first time in my life I have the opportunity to enjoy the friendship of black people. I realize how deprived my life was in the all-white-just-like-me social circles I used to frequent.

  But I am out of joint with the times. This is the eighties, when social activists from the sixties are supposed to be experiencing the “big chill,” and here I am just warming up to the action.

  I am reading people like Gandhi, Alice Walker, Albert Camus, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King, and even the way I pray is changing. Before, I had asked God to right the wrongs and comfort the suffering. Now I know — really know — that God entrusts those tasks to us.

  After getting the name of the death-row inmate from Chava, that very night after supper I write my first letter. My new pen pal is a white man, a Cajun from St. Martinville. That’s a surprise. I had assumed he would be black. I tell Mr. Sonnier a little about myself and where I work and that if he doesn’t want to write back, that’s okay, I’ll keep writing to him anyway.

  I send him three photos. One is of me on a pony out in the woods (it is the only photo that I have and Chava had said to be sure to include a photo of myself). I also send a color photograph of the blue, shimmering water at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and a picture of Christ on the cross.

  As I address the envelope, I pause. What an address: “Death Row.” What’s it like to live on Waiting for Death Street? And what’s it like to have done something really bad, really evil, something irreparable? I can’t bear myself when I hurt someone. I had felt terrible in eighth grade when a group of us during a slumber party called up a fat girl and made fun of her. When I was eight I had had nightmares after I helped torture an opossum some neighborhood boys had cornered. I had wanted to be tough like the guys and I had taken my turn hitting the animal with a stick until the opossum had begun to bleed from the mouth. I dreamed that night of the bloody head. Perhaps there were baby opossums waiting for their mother to return with their food.

  But this is my sensitivity, not Sonnier’s. Maybe he doesn’t care about the pain he inflicts on others. Maybe he doesn’t even realize that his victims’ families, cursed with memory of their slain loved ones, will forever occupy a “death row” of their own because of him. Maybe violence is natural to him. Maybe he’s a brute.

  As I seal the envelope I wonder what his two young victims were like, and I think of their parents. I can’t imagine the pain of losing children to a wanton murderer. I think of how my mother would suffer if Mary Ann or Louie or I were killed. She would rather die herself. Those poor parents. I wonder what I might do to comfort them. But the murders happened five years ago, and I assume that by now the Bourques and LeBlancs have tried to put the pain behind them and want nothing to do with someone befriending their children’s murderer. Later, Lloyd LeBlanc will berate me for not seeking him out at the beginning, and the Bourque family will be outraged and hurt over the “Church’s” attention to their daughter’s murderer. “Why didn’t [she] come and talk to our family, to understand how we felt?” Goldie Bourque will say of me to a newspaper reporter.8 I will meet the Bourques and the LeBlancs a year and a half from now at Pat Sonnier’s Pardon Board hearing a few days before his execution. And several years down the road Elizabeth and Vernon Harvey, whose daughter, Faith, was murdered by Robert Lee Willie (another death-row inmate whom I befriend), will bring me with them to victims’ meetings and I will find a way to help the victims’ families, too. But not yet.

  A week after my letter to Sonnier I receive a letter from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. It is from prison authorities, who tell me I have not observed the rule which specifies the size of photographs that are permitted in inmate mail. The photographs of Christ and the scene of Bay St. Louis that I had enclosed with my letter have exceeded the required size and are being returned.

  A few days later another letter from Angola arrives.

  This is from the man who is never supposed to answer letters.

  In the letter Sonnier says that, yes, he would enjoy exchanging letters with me. He has tried going it alone, figuring he is going to die anyway, so why try to be close to anyone? But it is “just too hard” and, yes, my letters will be most welcome. He says that at first he had thought the guard had made a mistake when he flipped the letter onto the floor of his cell. Who would be writing to him? Helen? Did he see “Helen” in the corner of the envelope? His ex-“old lady,” Helen? He wanted nothing to do with her. Things were bad between them. If this was her letter, he would tear it up unopened. But then he had looked more carefully at the envelope. Sister Helen? A nun? He didn’t like the nuns who had taught him catechism in grade school. Plenty of hits with a ruler on young hands and knuckles.

  The fierce irony makes me smile.

  “Who is God?”

  Whack, whack, whack.

  “God is love. Remember that.” Whack, whack.

  He says that he chuckled, seeing my picture on the pony. Was that poor pony’s legs buckling from my weight on him? The other nuns he had known wore habits. Did I ever wear one too?

  He asks, “Can we just talk to each other in regular words?” He had had a spiritual adviser who had spoken to him in “scriptures” from the Bible. He couldn’t hold up his end of the conversation and the relationship soon ended.

  Sure, we can just talk regular, I tell him. It’s the only way I know how to talk.

  We soon become steady correspondents, and I begin to think of him as a fellow human being, though I can’t for a moment forget his crime, nor can I reconcile the easygoing Cajun who writes to me with the brutal murderer of two helpless teenagers. Sometimes I include newspaper articles about world events in my letters, sometimes clippings from the comics. He tells me about how he organizes his cell. His life is lived twenty-three out of twenty-four hours a day in a space six feet wide and eight feet long. On one wall is a bunk, on the back wall a stainless steel toilet and washbasin, a stainless steel plate above the washbowl instead of a mirror. He keeps all of his stuff in a footlocker under his bunk. He uses the footlocker for weight lifting. It’s hard not to gain weight in this place, he says. Plenty of potatoes, rice, pancakes, and beans. He is allowed out of his cell for one hour a day (the time of day varies; the earliest is 5:00 A.M.) and then he can visit with the other eleven men on the tier if he chooses, but relations are often tense. If another inmate has it in for you, he explains, he can throw hot water on you through the bars of your cell, or he can take batteries out of his radio and sling them at you, or he can sling feces.

  He says that he tries to keep pretty much to himself and that the man in the cell next to him is sometimes hard to get along with. “The black dude sees racism in everything. We argue.”

  I notice his letters are stamped “indigent” in a little red box on the envelope. I learn that he is given two such stamped envelopes a week for correspondence. He is not allowed to work as other prisoners are, and so has no income. If he were allowed to work, his pay would be two and a half cents an hour. (The abolition of slavery in the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution does not extend to the incarcerated.)9 I ask if I can send him stamps. “Sure,” he says, “then I could write to you more often.” He begins drawing pictures on his envelopes: alligators, ducks, squirrels.

  I learn that his mother lives in St. Martinville but seldom comes to see him. “Her health isn’t too good, and it’s hard for her to come to this place,” he says, excusing her. His younger brother Eddie is also at Angola, serving a life sentence.

  One day, after we have been writing each other for a co
uple of months, he includes in his letter a photo of himself taken after he was incarcerated. It is the first time I see his face: he’s not scowling exactly but there is something about the bushy eyebrows and the way they slant downward. I feel a sliver of fear. I feel safer knowing he is behind bars.

  So far he has not mentioned his crime.

  I telephone Chava and ask if I might come to the Coalition office to read the Sonnier files.

  When I arrive, Chava has several thick manila folders and a stack of trial transcripts waiting for me on a table. He says he doesn’t mind if I take the documents home, and explains that these word-for-word transcripts of the trial are what attorneys examine when they represent death-row inmates in their habeas corpus appeal, the review by federal courts to assure that state courts have upheld the constitutional rights of the defendant. (Federal court review of capital cases results in a high percentage of reversals — between 1976 and 1990, 40 to 60 percent of such cases were reversed.)10 Chava says that within a week of his arrival on death row, Patrick Sonnier had received two pieces of mail — one from the trial judge announcing the date of his execution in six weeks and one from his court-appointed attorney terminating his services. He explains that here in Louisiana, court-appointed attorneys are required to represent clients only in the state courts, not on federal appeal.11 “And of course, none of the guys on the Row can afford to hire their own attorney,” he says, “so you can imagine the frantic telephone calls we get from death-row inmates, begging us to find them attorneys. In this state only when the petition for postconviction relief is filed can there be a stay of execution. One of our biggest challenges here is recruiting lawyers to represent these death-row inmates — free of charge, of course — and these petitions take hours and hours to prepare. Attorneys aren’t exactly lining up outside this door for the job.”