Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

  It amazes me that Robert actually thought he could transcend feelings of stress here in this death house on the day he’s scheduled to die.

  “Robert, you’d have to be a robot or insane not to feel stress,” I say, and I tell him that mothers have a way of knowing the truth about their children, and that surely his mother is not going to rely on a semiscientific test to determine whether she believes him or not.

  “Man!” he says. “I just can’t believe that test didn’t come out right.” (I realize he must be struggling to clean up his language for me. In his disciplinary reports, which include verbatim accounts, “man” was certainly never included in his personal arsenal of expletives.)

  I can see that he needs time to work through his disappointment and nothing I can say will help. I decide that maybe now’s a good time to bring up the “niggers, spies, and chinks” discussion and I say he’s got to be kidding, that he can’t really buy all this Aryan white supremacy garbage, and doesn’t he think it just a bit ironic that he, of all people, with his track record of crimes, should be claiming supremacy over anybody? Him?

  “Forget the ‘spies’ and ‘chinks,’ ” he says. “I just sorta threw ‘em in. It’s the niggers, really. I never have gotten on too good with ‘em. Me and my cousin used to ride our bikes down the road and throw rocks at ‘em and Junior kept warnin’ us that they were going to beat us up, and, sure enough, one time they waited their chance and got ahold of our bikes and tore ‘em up.”

  What he says about black people is classic racist stereotype. It’s all about blacks being lazy, content to be on welfare, having babies out of wedlock, committing most of the crimes, and using up tax dollars in the process. “Slavery’s long over,” Robert says. “They keep harpin’ on what a bad deal they’ve had. I can’t stand people that make themselves out to be victims.”

  And I talk about the pervasiveness of racism in our society and how it’s been with us from the beginning of this nation, which has built itself economically, at least in some measure, from the slave labor of blacks, and how, even when the slaves were freed through the Emancipation Proclamation, they were only partly freed because most of them were not allowed a chance to compete. In an agricultural society, most of them had no way of getting land. I tell him stories of black people I know in St. Thomas — good, hardworking people — and I argue that he ought to take a closer look at Reagan’s economic policies — taxing working people while exempting the rich, bankrolling defense contractors while abandoning the cities — to see if poor blacks are the real culprits “gobbling up” our tax dollars.

  I ask him if he’s ever been the object of prejudice.

  He says, no, not until he got to prison, and he says how people in society “talk bad” about prisoners, saying they’re monsters or animals or without human qualities of any kind. “What do they say about us?” he says with a laugh. “That we are without socially redeeming qualities, isn’t that the way they put it?”

  But mostly, he says, he doesn’t like people who act like victims. He likes people who put up a fight. “And that includes inmates, too,” he says. “Some of these sad-asses around here won’t lift a finger to stand up for their rights or better their condition, so they get what they deserve, in my opinion. I think it was a great moment when Martin Luther King led his people and they marched in the streets all the way to the nation’s capital and kicked the white man’s butt. I liked seein’ that. They just didn’t lie down and moan ‘racism, racism.’ I wish they’d do more of that.”

  I am surprised when Captain Rabelais and the warden appear with Robert’s last meal. It’s six o’clock.

  His last meal.

  When Robert sees the trays of food, he smiles and rubs his hands together and says this is one meal he’s going to enjoy.

  I say, teasing him, “Hey, what about your saying you wouldn’t accept any favors from these people?”

  He says that principle applies to everything but fried seafood. He loves fried seafood.

  A guard places three trays of fried shrimp, oysters, and fish, fried potatoes, and salad on three chairs in front of him. Pat had sat inside his cell to eat his meal so the handcuffs could be removed, but Robert remains here by the door with the handcuffs on but detached from the leather belt, so he can move his hands to eat.

  Captain Rabelais serves me a tray of beef stew and corn, but at the sight of it my throat closes and I fight back a wave of nausea. It is 6:00 P.M. and it’s been dark outside for some time, and all the lights in the building are on and will not be turned off until tonight’s “task” is completed, and as some of my black friends say, “I know what time it is.”

  I take a sip — a tiny one — of the iced tea. Robert, occupying a universe of his own, picks up a fried shrimp with his fingers, smells it with obvious delight, and eats. And eats and eats and talks and eats, and it is hard for me to realize that this is his last meal. He seems to have found some space, some grace, some kind of lagoon in the present moment, even though close by are white, crashing rapids.

  Maybe his experience in life has taught him early on that life is waves, not particles, that nothing is really solid, that everything is flow. Or maybe his fierce “macho” stance has inured him from appropriate feelings. “Electric chair don’t scare me, man.” I quietly ask God to help me let go of life freely when it’s time for me to die. Ignatius of Loyola, Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Frands of Assisi — every saint has taught the paradox that lies at the heart of the spiritual life: to love passionately but with freedom of spirit that does not cling even to life itself.

  Robert says, “I feel kind of high but not like it was with the drugs. I know I’m going to a better place.” And I move into the space with him and relax and my throat is not so tight and I sip the iced tea and take a taste of the stew.

  Talk turns to family.

  He talks about how “Junior,” his stepfather, tried his best to be a father to him, but he was a rebellious teenage kid. He was using drugs and not taking orders from anybody.

  “When we got the house my family has now,” he says, “I had my own room and Junior said I could decorate it any way I wanted to, so I was hammering away, putting up my rebel flag on the wall, when Junior opened the door and said, ‘but no putting nails in the wall.’ ” And he smiles at this and says how Junior had “a big thing about working for what you wanted and not expecting it just to be handed to you,” and when he was thirteen, Junior bought him a lawn mower so he could get jobs cutting lawns. “He’d pay me a dollar to cut our lawn,” he says. “That would give me twenty-five cents to get in the football game and seventy-five cents to spend.”

  But he could never hold a job for long, he says. He’d get a job, make some money, then stop working so he could enjoy the money he had earned. He drove trucks, worked on barges, grew marijuana and sold it.

  I ask how he could grow marijuana without being caught, and he explains that he set his “patch” deep in a wooded area near Covington. “You have to be sure you have enough landmarks to find it yourself but without others being able to find it — either the law or other dealers, because the other dealers will get in there and steal your crop from you.”

  There’s big money in drugs, he says, but it’s dangerous, and after he and his cousin had drowned the drug dealer, he had made a resolution to get “regular” jobs. That included working on a push boat moving forty-eight barges from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Cairo, Illinois, and he says how scary it was to walk on the barges at night, stepping across the open spaces with the barges rocking and swaying even though cables through iron loops were there to steady them and keep them all hooked together.

  “One night,” he says, “me and another dude had to go up to the first barge to set up a light, and afterwards, we sat on the front awhile and smoked a joint and calmed our nerves before making the trek back. The river is real, real mysterious at night with the lights makin’ little flicks in the water and the swish of the current under you and you have this feeling
and it’s like an adventure, being away from home and on a long river like that, which you know goes by cities and towns and different parts of the country and finally to the sea.”

  The job, he says, included opening the hatches of the barges to check on the grain inside, and there would be rats “as big as dogs or cats” in the grain and so they would always bang on the lids before opening them to scare off the rats.

  He holds an oyster up. “The last of the oysters,” he says, and he recalls how they fed them well on the barges. “You shoulda seen the food we ate — big juicy steaks fixed any way you liked every single day if you wanted it and when you got off duty at night, cakes and pies and quarts of milk, which if you didn’t finish, you were supposed to throw over the side, but I hated to waste food like that, knowin’ there are people starvin’ in the world. I’ve always been like that about not wastin’ food.”

  He tells how it was dangerous work because you could fall between the barges and be crushed, or if the barges strained too hard the cable connecting them could snap, and once he had witnessed with his own eyes a cable snap and whip around and cut a man in half.

  “Right at the waist, it cut him in two like a knife and his waist and legs dropped into the water, and he just looked down and died. I think the shock killed him, watching half his body drop into the water like that.”

  Robert reminds me of my cousins Jimmy and Wayne who worked on the oil rigs out in the Gulf and told stories like this. We’d be at our camp at Grand Isle, playing cards and talking, and they would tell us about the food and the accidents and about how they would go swimming in the clear green water and sometimes put on scuba gear and go down the steps of the rig way down deep where huge fish — two hundred pounds or so — would come right up to them. I envied boys who could get such adventurous jobs which were off-limits to girls.

  “Man!” Robert says, “I can’t believe I didn’t pass that lie-detector test.” He shakes his head, a fried potato between his fingers. “I wish I had been able to take the test sooner before I came in here.”

  He asks me to tell him exactly what the procedures are going to be — when they shave his head, everything, because he doesn’t Want to be surprised. He wants to be prepared.

  His question jolts me. He had caught me up in the stories of the barges and the river, but now here we are. He has finished the last meal he will ever eat in his life and it is seven o’clock in the evening and he has five more hours to live.

  I tell him everything I know: how they will shave his head, cut his left pants leg at the knee, give him a new white T-shirt, and put a diaper over his undershorts. I tell him about the walk to the chair, the opportunity to say his last words, and the straps they will use to fasten him to the chair, including his jaw, and the mask they will put over his face — everything.

  I feel scared and cold telling him this, knowing that in a few short hours this reality will be his. A couple of weeks ago he had decided that he would like his execution to be televised. “It would be a good thing for the people to see what they are really doing, executing people. I’ll bet if they saw it, it would change some minds,” he had said. But state rules prohibit televising executions, and there was no way to challenge the rules, so he had let it go.

  Now he wonders if he ought to shake Warden Blackburn’s hand, but he decides he won’t do that. “I don’t wanna say nothin’ to him like ‘it’s okay, I know you’re only doin’ your job.’ ”

  It’s on his mind, what he wants to say at the end. He knows for certain he wants to say something about the death penalty being wrong, and he’s considering other things too. I wonder what I would say with the microphone before me, knowing that the words I say would be my last. I wonder if I would even know what I was saying. With Pat, the words had been so ordinary, in a way. What made them extraordinary was knowing they were the last.

  Robert tells me he had called his lady friend in Texas, the one he loved, to tell her about the execution. He says he invited her to come see him in the death house, but she was shy about the publicity that might come her way. He had said that he didn’t want to put pressure of any kind on her and that if she didn’t want to come, it was okay, that he understood. Before he hung up he had thanked her for all the good times they had had.

  We get to talking about the earring in his left ear. “It means I’m heterosexual and not no homo,” he explains to me.

  “The Marlboro Man,” I tease him.

  “Well, actually, I don’t have a big thing about wearing an earring to assert my manhood,” he tells me, “but the wife of a friend of mine offered to pierce my ear for me, and she told me to put my head in her lap and she’d do it, and” — he smiles — “I just couldn’t pass that up.”

  Time is washing away now. It’s close to 9:30. Robert is getting ready to telephone his family. I tell him that tears are a sign of humanity and strength, not weakness, and that Jesus had cried when a good friend of his died and during the agony before his own death. “Marlboro men are only on cardboard,” I say.

  “When I talk to Mom I’m gonna let it flow,” he says.

  I walk back and forth in the foyer as Robert makes his phone calls.

  The last-minute preparations for the execution have begun. Chaplain Penton is here and approaches the door to let Robert know he’s available if he needs him. The secretary is setting up her typewriter in the room with the coffee pot. A number of the associate wardens with their walkie-talkies have arrived. No press yet, no witnesses. They’ll be brought over around eleven o’clock. After five executions they’ve got the protocol down pat.

  I go back to the white metal door. The phone receiver is back on its hook and Robert is in his cell. I can hear him blowing his nose. When he comes to the door I can see he has been crying.

  “I just let it flow,” he says. “I told my mother and Junior that I loved them. I talked to each of the boys.”

  “You’re a real man now, Robert,” I say.

  “I hated to say good-bye,” he says. “I told them if I get a chance I’ll call ‘em back right before I go.”

  I ask him if he would like to pray with me and he nods his head and I am reading the words of Jesus, “You will learn the truth and the truth will make you free,” when Slick with his shaving kit approaches the door.

  “You have a dignity, Robert, that no one can take from you,” I say to him.

  In the foyer I walk slowly up and down, just as I had done for Pat, and here again is the same circle of light and strength, and I pray to Pat and ask him to help Robert, and I ask God to help Vernon and Elizabeth Harvey.

  Back at the visitor door Robert rubs his hand on his shaved head.

  “Wow, they even took off the eyebrows,” he says.

  It’s the first time I’ve seen him without his long-sleeved denim shirt. His arms are covered with tattoos. He lowers his eyes and won’t look at me and says, “You’re gonna think I’m a bad person, seeing all these tattoos,” and I can tell he is very embarrassed. There’s a swastika and a skull, women’s names, and on one arm a naked woman.

  “Doesn’t it hurt to get tattoos?” I ask.

  It’s something to talk about.

  Robert tells me about the man in Marion that did most of his tattoo work, and that when you get it done you want to get it done by an expert so you don’t get infections. He says that on his chest he has the “Grim Reaper” on one side and a woman’s body on the other.

  It’s all stream now, the talk, weaving and flowing and not following any pattern.

  “I have to make a confession to you,” he says, and he explains that when he first heard I was a nun he thought he was really going to be “in for it.” “I thought you’d be doin’ nothin’ but preachin’ repentance at me, but after our first visit, I saw I could just talk to you like a friend, and I told my mother that I met this real nice lady.”

  I tell him that when Millard Farmer had first told me about his crime I thought he was some kind of sociopath. I thought he must be mentally dera
nged.

  “And now that you’ve met me, you’re sure of it,” he says and gives his little soft laugh. “I was deranged all right to let myself go along with Joe Vaccaro.”

  It’s a few minutes past 11:00. We can hear the front door opening and closing, opening and closing. The witnesses and press are arriving. Vernon and Elizabeth Harvey must be inside the building now.

  “Think I’ll call my family one more time,” he says. “Just stay here. Don’t go out there with all those people.”

  The guard at the end of the tier comes down to hand the receiver to him. The operator will say, “A collect call from Robert Willie at a correctional institution. Will you accept charges?”

  “Yes,” someone from the family will say, “we’ll accept the charges.” One more phone call. The last time the family will ever hear his voice. I wonder how little Todd is doing, and Mickey and Tim. Maybe there will be some sort of relief when it’s all over and the phone doesn’t ring any more. Not that they want him to die, but each time the phone rings, their hearts must race to their throats. The dread must be terrible.

  It’s 11:30 and the team of guards goes into the cell with Robert to put the diaper on him. I hear the murmur of voices. I hear the toilet flush. A clean heart create in me, 0 God, and a steadfast spirit renew within me … for you are not pleased with sacrifices … a heart contrite and humbled, O God, you will not spurn …

  Robert is back at the door and has the guard hand me his parting gift, the black knitted hat. “It’s probably pretty dirty,” he says. “You’ll have to wash it.”

  I thank him for the hat.

  He thanks me for teaching him about God. “I know God knows the truth about what happened,” he says. “I know I’m gonna be okay, and look, when I get in the chair, I’m gonna let you know I’m okay.”

  “Look at me,” I tell him, “look at my face.”

  He seems confident that he is going to a better place. “I’m not worried at all,” he says, but he shivers and the guard comes and puts his denim jacket around his shoulders.