Henry looked around the group. “I’m not sure they’re going to want me in there—you know, not everyone is like you guys.”
“Well, we will have to show them, won’t we? We will have to show them how a man can change.”
Henry smiled at me and kind of shook his head and shrugged a little. We all knew the row was different. Outside of here, the world was still different. Henry was a white man who’d lynched a black teenage boy. I was a guy who would blow a man’s brains out for a few hundred dollars. Brian and Ed were the kind of guys who would kidnap and kill a sixteen-year-old girl. Larry had his pregnant wife murdered. Victor could rob and rape an eighty-six-year-old woman. Jesse would shoot a woman for five dollars, according to his case. I looked around at our unlikely group, locked in a library in Holman Prison. A few of us were innocent, a few were not. It didn’t really matter.
“This is what I liked,” said Baldwin. “The part where John’s having to clean the house. Do you remember? Right in the beginning?” Baldwin unfolded a piece of paper he had brought with him. “I wrote it down while I was reading.” He straightened out the paper and cleared his throat.
John hated sweeping this carpet, for dust rose, clogging his nose and sticking to his sweaty skin, and he felt that should he sweep it forever, the clouds of dust would not diminish, the rug would not be clean. It became in his imagination his impossible, lifelong task, his hard trial, like that of a man he had read about somewhere, whose curse it was to push a boulder up a steep hill, only to have the giant who guarded the hill roll the boulder down again—and so on, forever, throughout eternity; he was still out there, that hapless man, somewhere at the other end of the earth, pushing his boulder up the hill.
Everyone was quiet when Baldwin finished reading. He had read softly and carefully, like he had been practicing and didn’t want to get it wrong.
“Are you like the guy pushing the boulder up the hill?” asked Victor.
“Yeah, pretty much.” Baldwin cleared his throat. “Aren’t we all pushing the boulder? Every day, all day, week after week, year after year, we push that boulder up, and then the giant just pushes it back down. And we’re going to keep doing this until the giant crushes us to death with that boulder, or someone comes along at the top of the hill and gives us a hand. Someone tells the giant to make way, and we get to push our boulder up and over and then sit down and take a rest or something? Isn’t that just how it is?”
A few guys laughed, but I nodded at Baldwin. Horsley just looked down. I had been pushing my boulder up the hill hoping that Perhacs, or Santha, or now Alan Black was going to move the giant out of the way. Or at least hold him back so I could get to the top. I knew what Baldwin meant. I knew how helpless he felt. I felt the same way.
“That’s a good quote, Brian,” I said. “That’s something we can all relate to.”
The others nodded.
Horsley raised his hand to speak, and we all laughed.
“What you want to say, Ed?” I asked.
“I like how you think the people are all a certain way, but then you find out their stories, their histories, and you see how they got to be that way. Yes, maybe the father is an ass, but he’s had some loss, and it seems like the more you know of their story, the more you kind of forgive them for what they do. You know? It’s kind of like that here, right? We all got a story that led to another story and led to some choices and big mistakes. All these characters make mistakes, you know? Nobody is living this life perfect.”
Larry hung his head, but the other guys grunted in agreement. Then it was quiet, and I wondered who was thinking about their own mistakes. I had made mistakes, no doubt about it. Wouldn’t we all do things over if we could if we knew now what we didn’t know then? There wasn’t a guy in this library who wouldn’t have chosen differently if he could have.
“Who else read a passage that meant something to them?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if this is how a book club was held in other places, but I didn’t have a study guide or a printed list of questions from anywhere.
I had talked to Sia and Lester about it on my last visit, and Sia had said to just let people talk about what moved them. “Everybody feels something different when they read the same thing. You just have to see what made people feel something and then talk about that,” she’d said. “Don’t try to be the teacher; just talk about whatever the guys want to talk about.” I had nodded. The point was to get them thinking about anything but the dark, grimy, hot hell of the row. It was a gift to spend time in your mind away from your own reality. I could take my private jet anywhere around the world. I spent my week between visits having dinner with the most beautiful women in the world. I had already won Wimbledon five times. I was just this week being recruited by the New York Yankees. I was busy in my cell, too busy to think about the giant at the top of the hill pushing my boulder down. That’s all I wanted for these guys, an hour of freedom and escape. An hour away from the rats and the roaches and the smell of death and decay. We were all slowly dying from our own fear—our minds killing us quicker than the State of Alabama ever could. Men would do all kinds of crazy things rather than spend another night with their own thoughts. Bring in the books, I thought. Let every man on the row have a week away, inside the world of a book. I knew if the mind could open, the heart would follow. It had happened to Henry. Look at him sitting here in a locked room with five black men who had nothing to lose. He had been taught to hate us and fear us so much that he had thought it was in his rights to go find a teenage boy and beat and stab and lynch him just because of the color of his skin. I had no anger toward Henry. He had been taught to fear blacks. He had been trained to hate. Death row had been good for Henry. Death row had saved his soul. Death row had taught him that his hate was wrong.
“What about you, Ray?”
I looked around at the guys. “You know how he’s walking in the city, I think on Fifth Avenue, and he knows it’s not the place for him?”
“Where’s that part at?” asked Victor.
“I don’t remember exactly, but he’s being taught that the whites don’t like him, but he remembers a white teacher being nice to him when he’s sick. He thinks someday that the white people will honor him. Respect him. Do you guys remember that?” I said.
Henry cleared his throat. “I remember that part because it was like the opposite of what I was taught, but just the same, you know?” He looked around a bit nervously. “I wrote it down too.” Henry took out his own paper—a piece of inmate stationery with the lines printed on it as if we were too dumb to write straight. “Can I read it?” he asked.
Everybody nodded. “It reminded me of my dad. I thought of him, so I wrote it down.”
“You go ahead and read it,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”
Henry began:
This was not his father’s opinion. His father said that all white people were wicked, and that God was going to bring them low. He said that white people were never to be trusted, and that they told nothing but lies, and that not one of them had ever loved a nigger. He, John, was a nigger, and he would find out, as soon as he got a little older, how evil white people could be. John had read about the things white people did to colored people: how, in the South, where his parents came from, white people cheated them of their wages, and burned them, and shot them—and did worse things, said his father, which the tongue could not endure to utter. He had read about colored men being burned in the electric chair for things they had not done; how in riots they were beaten with clubs, how they were tortured in prisons; how they were the last to be hired and the first to be fired. Niggers did not live on these streets where John now walked; it was forbidden; and yet he walked here, and no one raised a hand against him. But did he dare to enter this shop out of which a woman now casually walked, carrying a great round box? Or this apartment before which a white man stood, dressed in a brilliant uniform? John knew he did not dare, not today, and he heard his father’s laugh: “No, nor tomorrow neither!” For him there w
as the back door, and the dark stairs, and the kitchen or the basement. This world was not for him. If he refused to believe, and wanted to break his neck trying, then he could try until the sun refused to shine; they would never let him enter. In John’s mind then, the people and the avenue underwent a change, and he feared them and he knew that one day he could hate them if God did not change his heart.
We were all quiet when Henry finished. We all knew why Henry had picked that passage. His family was KKK. And here was this kid’s dad teaching him the same exact thing, only opposite.
“It’s a shame,” said Henry. “What fathers teach sons. It’s a sin to hate, ain’t that right, preacher man?” Henry looked over at Heath.
“That’s right. It’s a sin to hate, but God can forgive our sins. And the sins of our fathers.”
“That was a good passage, Henry,” said Victor, and both Horsley and Baldwin nodded. Everybody knew Henry had shame, and here we were, five black men in the South trying to comfort the white man who would forever be known for doing the last lynching of a black boy.
“I don’t believe the world is not for him,” I said. “Or for anyone. We are all God’s children, and this world belongs to all of us. I know the sun will never refuse to shine. We may not see it, but I know it’s there. I’m not going to have hate in my heart. I spent some dark years here with nothing but hate in my heart. I can’t live like that.”
“You are not a hater, Ray,” said Jesse.
“My mama didn’t raise me to hate. And I’m sorry for anyone who was taught to hate instead of love, to fight instead of help. I’m sorry for that and for anyone in this room who feels shame for what they were taught.” I looked at Henry. “God knows what’s in each man’s heart. What someone did or didn’t do is between a man and God and is none of anyone else’s business.”
Everyone nodded, and I could see the guard walking up to unlock the door. Book club had been a success. We had spent an hour talking about something that mattered.
“Someday, when I get out of here, you know what I’m going to do?” I asked.
“What you going to do, Ray?”
“I’m going to tell the world about how there was men in here that mattered. That cared about each other and the world. That were learning how to look at things differently.”
“You’re going to tell it on the mountain, Ray?” Jesse asked.
The other guys laughed.
“I’m going to tell it on every single mountain there is. I’m going to push that boulder right on up and over that giant, and I’m going to stand at the top of that hill, and on the top of every mountain I can find, and I’m going to tell it. I’m going to tell my story, and I’m going to tell your story. Hell, maybe I will even write a book and tell it like that.”
“Everybody up. Back in the cell. This here is over right now.” Two guards, one at the door, one in the library, rounded us up and walked us back over to our cells. I watched as Henry grabbed his paper where he had carefully copied down a whole page of James Baldwin’s writing and folded it back up. Who would have thought those words would have mattered so much to him?
Larry Heath was the first member of book club to die. He didn’t have a last meal for dinner, and when Charlie Jones asked him for any final words, he said, “If this is what it takes for there to be healing in their lives, so be it. Father, I ask for forgiveness for my sins.”
On March 20, 1992, at a little after midnight, the guards put a black bag over his head, and the warden who had allowed him the privilege of reading a book and meeting with six other guys to talk about what that book meant to him turned the switch on and sent two thousand volts of electricity coursing through his body for a minute until he was dead.
At the next book club, we left his chair empty.
16
SHAKEDOWN
I love you.
—HENRY FRANCIS HAYS, FINAL WORDS
I married Halle Berry on a Sunday. It was a beautiful wedding, and she wore a slim white dress made up of the finest lace hand sewn in Paris by a hundred seamstresses. The train of her dress stretched out ten yards behind her and was covered in the smallest and finest pearls from the ocean. She looked up at me, her big brown eyes shiny with tears that threatened to spill over as I gazed at her beautiful face with a love so big it was impossible to explain.
We promised to love each other in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, until death do us part, and my heart felt like it was going to burst open with happiness and joy. “Oh, Ray,” she murmured, “I love you so much. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t met you.”
“Halle, my Halle,” I said, gazing down at her smooth brown skin and full red lips. “I will never leave you. I promise. I will take care of you.” The preacher pronounced us man and wife, and I smiled as Lester and my mama threw wedding rice at us as we ran to a white stretch limousine.
“Goodbye, everyone,” I said. “We are traveling around the world, but we will be back in a year to see you all again.”
“Goodbye, baby,” my mama said as she wrapped her arms around me and squeezed me tight. “You bring me home a grandchild, you hear me? I want twin grandbabies. A boy and a girl.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, laughing and kissing her on the cheek.
Lester shook my hand and then patted me on the back. “You did it,” he said. “You found the perfect woman for you. You are a lucky man, and Halle is a lucky woman.”
I knew Lester was genuinely happy for me. We didn’t compete with each other, and I knew he was glad I had finally found a love like he and Sia had found. Life was good. I picked up Halle, and I could feel her arms wrap around me, and then I slowly lowered my mouth until my lips were only an inch from her lips and she was pressing up against my body and I could feel her breath slowly blowing across my face …
“Hinton! Get your ass up, Hinton! Now!”
The door slammed open, and four guards rushed into my cell and grabbed my arms just as they were wrapping around Halle Berry’s body. I felt myself pushed up against the wall, my head turned to the right so that my cheekbone pushed into the cold cement. One guard’s hand was on my upper back, and they were outfitted in full riot gear with vests and weapons.
I didn’t recognize these four guards. They started turning over my books and throwing my shorts and socks into the hallway outside my cell. Up went my mattress, and my perfect pressed whites that I had been working on creasing for the last few days were thrown to the ground and stepped on by a black boot. I watched as the pictures of my mama and of my nieces were thrown out into the hall as well.
“You don’t like this, do you?” one of the guards asked.
I didn’t answer.
“You got a television in here and everything. Seems like death row is pretty cushy here at Holman.”
I waited to see if they were going to break my TV or throw it out in the hall, but they just looked under it and checked to see that there was nothing hidden behind the cord or that none of the electronics were loose.
“You got too many clothes in here. We’re going to take half of them. You’re not allowed to have so many shorts and socks. This isn’t summer camp.”
I watched them throw more clothes out into the hall.
“You don’t like this, do you?” the guard asked again.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“We might come back in five minutes and do this all again. We are here in your prison for twelve hours today, and your staff is over at Donaldson going through our prison. Fresh eyes see new things. Hell, we might do this every hour on the hour today, and what you gonna do about that?”
I could feel his elbow against my back, and he was pressing me harder into the wall.
“Why don’t you just move in here if you want to do that? You can throw stuff around all day, then. I’ll go out, and you just stay here and do what you need to do.” I said it quietly, almost politely, and the three guards going through my stuff stopped f
or a second and turned to look at me.
One of them laughed. The other two shook their heads, and the one who had me up against the wall pressed in even harder.
“Strip search. Take it all off.”
I looked down and shook my head. This was the worst of what they could do when they came to shake you down. Our regular guards rarely strip-searched us on the row—there had to be a good reason. A weapon found somewhere or a big drug bust in general population. Usually, they left us alone, and we kept the peace. All the warden cared about on the row was keeping the peace. We negotiated with him. Each tier side had a representative who met with the captain of the guards, and he told us what he needed and we asked for what we needed. Usually, we met somewhere in the middle. We didn’t want trouble, and they were understaffed and didn’t want trouble either.
But these were guards from another prison, and they liked coming here and flexing their muscle on death row. It made them feel big and powerful. I knew these guys. They were the guys in high school who were really short or bad at sports or who felt powerless and picked on, and now they had some small bit of power in their little worlds.
“Strip!”
I took off my whites and my socks, and I stood there naked. Two guards left, and two stayed behind.
“Stick out your tongue.”
I opened my mouth and showed them I had nothing hidden under my tongue or in the cheeks of my mouth.
“Show us the soles of your feet.”
I lifted up each foot and showed them the bottom.
“Spread your legs.”
I spread my legs and kept a wide stance.
“Lift up your testicles.”
I lifted up my testicles and let them drop back down. I wasn’t hiding anything under my testicles. They knew it, and I knew it.
“Bend over and spread your cheeks.”
I turned around and bent over in half. I grabbed my ass cheeks and spread them wide.
The Sun Does Shine Page 18
