MY JAILBIRD
Joanna Catherine Scott
from The Rambler Magazine
March/April 2007 Vol. 4, No. 2
A couple of weeks before my novel The Road from Chapel Hill was published, the Raleigh News & Observer ran an excerpt. A few days later, a letter came for me stamped ‘Mailed at Central Prison.’ In the top left corner, a large round hand gave me the prisoner’s name and his number on Death Row. Henry—that’s what I will call him—had read the excerpt and wanted to know what happened to the slave Tom, and would I write his story too? I sent him a copy of the novel. So you can find out for yourself, I wrote inside it. The prison sent it back with a printed form: No Books Except Direct From Publisher. So I emailed my editor at Penguin, who sent another copy, which Henry was allowed to keep.
Meanwhile, he had written to me several times, adamant that the world should hear his story. Please come and visit me, he said, the application papers are enclosed. I asked my husband what he thought. He said, Don’t you dare go near that prison. That guy looks ugly at you, you will pass out on the floor. I asked my daughters. What if he puts a hit out on you? they said. I said, Don’t be silly, why would he do that? Anyway, they said, Dad’s right, you faint at anything. I said, If I faint you’ll just have to come across and haul me home.
Permission for a visit took almost three weeks to get. I had never in my life been in a prison. For some reason, probably the movies, I had an image in my head of walking down between a pair of high wire fences, catcalls coming from each side, and the leers of evil looking men. I imagined being body searched, my car turned inside out in search of something nasty.
The day arrived. I drove to Raleigh, allowing plenty of time in case I could not find the prison. In fact, I drove right past it and had to make a U-turn. The place was large, but looked more like a hospital than a prison. Sprawling, low slung, clay colored prefabricated stucco. Wire fences there were, off to the right, and looking as inconspicuous as wire fences topped by barbed wire can. Immediately inside the entrance was a polite sign pointing to the visitors’ car park. Behind it, a free-standing check-in office, where I was allowed a nervous pee, and after a nonchalant inquiry as to whether I had any weapons or electronic equipment about my person, I was given a plastic Visitor tag and waved up a long pathway to the main door of the prison. It had begun to rain.
Inside, I went across the waiting room to where a man in a bulletproof booth told me I was way too early, he would let me know when it was time. I fell into conversation with a trusty who served as janitor. What are you in for? I said. Drugs, he said, looking sheepish. Oh, I said, that wasn’t such a good idea. And they weren’t even mine, he said, I just happened to have them on me.
I walked around a bit, looking at photographs of prison system dignitaries, then sat down on a couch beside a thin, agitated woman of maybe forty years. Her hair was dyed dark black and her lips were very red. Your first time? she said, and I said, Yes. She was here for her fiancé, she told me, who was in for murdering his wife. He didn’t do it, though, just hadn’t seen her in couple of days and thought she’d gone off somewhere, and then they came with handcuffs to arrest him, with all the neighbors looking and someone’s coat across his head. She was a nice woman, small-built, and very interested in my story about Henry. You’re a good person, she said, and I said, I’m a novelist and I’ve never been inside a prison, it’s a valuable experience. She thought about that for a while and then said, I think you’re a good person. You’d think, she said, as though to cut off any protestations, they’d have a bathroom off the waiting room, but no, they don’t take us into account.
Several other people had arrived by now, all women. The man inside the booth called out and we went to stand in front of a solid-looking plate glass door that took its time sizing us up before it swung out of our way. The thin dark woman shepherded me around a corner and onto an elevator. Level two, she said, there’s a bathroom up there if you want one, you’d really think they’d have one off the waiting room.
On level two, a clerk behind a desk took away my plastic tag and called out, Number 22. What’s that mean? I said, and the thin dark woman pointed. Over there.
As I approached the visiting booth, I could see Henry waiting on the other side of a glass partition. No, that’s not quite right. I could see him, but I could feel him too. Intensity came off him like an arm reaching out to drag me in. At the doorway I hesitated, then shut the door behind me and sat down. The room was small and double, like a pair of telephone booths set one behind the other and separated by a bulletproof window about two feet by two, crisscrossed with reinforcing wire. Backing it, on the prison side, were cream-painted metal rods, set vertically at maybe three inch intervals. A narrow ledge ran below the window, and between the window and the ledge, a fine-holed rectangular grille for speaking through. A matching grille, I came to understand, was on the other side, the two separated by several inches of dead air.
This arrangement made for a curious intimacy, since it was necessary to lean in toward the grille in order to be heard, which meant that our heads were brought up close against the glass. At first we just sat there looking at each other. Then Henry swayed back on his stool and then leaned toward the grille. I’m nervous, he said in a small voice. I leaned in from the other side and said, I’m nervous too, and we began to talk. We went on without stopping for a full hour and a half, at which point a guard thumped back the door and it was time to go.
I had expected ‘my jailbird,’ as I thought of him back then, to be a thuggish sort of person, someone ignorant and inarticulate, low-browed maybe, a murderer, no less. But I was wrong. This man was handsome, well-spoken, remarkably well read, and as intelligent as I was myself, maybe more so. He had been in prison almost all his adult life, he told me, and had turned thirty-nine last birthday. He was a child of rape, a white man on a black girl of thirteen who had been pimped by an older woman and paid for the encounter with a handful of small change. At nine he was taken from his mother, who by now had four more children whom she left in Henry’s charge, appearing occasionally to supplement what the neighbors fed them, or the food Henry had learned to steal from local stores. He was put into the juvenile correction system, which, he told me, was good preparation for Death Row since it was much more violent and he had to learn how to defend himself. One of the men here on the Row, he told me, cut off a little girl’s head. What would make a person do a thing like that?
Henry’s life is public. Anyone can read it on the internet. At fifteen he was put away for breaking and entering, an astonishing sentence of thirty-nine years in an adult prison. After ten years he was let out for good behavior. He broke parole in order to come down from Maryland to care for his old grandmother who had fallen ill. For two months he cooked and cleaned, fetched groceries and medicines, made her bed each morning, washed her clothes, and in his spare time made a friend, a young man about his own age who lived close by.
But friends have friends, and before he realized what he had gotten into, Henry was again under lock and key, charged with larceny, a double kidnaping, a double murder. In court, the friend and his two friends swore Henry did it. Henry swore the opposite. “The court noted the trial amounted to a swearing match.” By the time it was all over, it was not clear if Henry pulled the trigger or was framed. Either way, he ended up in an orange jumpsuit on Death Row, where for the last fifteen years he has spent most of his time reading. I have a whole cell full of books, he told me proudly, I have read thousands, and we went on to talk about the history of the Sunnis and the Shiites, the relevance of ancient Egyptian culture to the culture of the United States, the effect of organized religion on the slave trade.
In all Henry’s years in jail, he has lived in the light. The only times he has been in darkness were once when the ceiling globe burned out, and once when a lightning storm knocked out the power. I liked the dark, he said, nobody could see me.
Did anybody ever love you in your life? I asked him on my second visit. He set his elbows on the ledge, folded his hands beneath his chin, and turned his eyes aside and downwards in the way of a man thinking hard about a problem. My grandmother, maybe, he said. I said, Your mother? He seemed to flinch, way back inside his eyes. My mother was a child herself, she wanted fun. We hardly ever saw her. She brought us baked beans sometimes, I remember hot dogs once.
Did you read The Road from Chapel Hill? I asked him. He said Tom’s life reminded him in some ways of his own. This is interesting, I said, Tom was a slave, how could his life be like yours? Because, he said, Tom was taken away from his mother when he was very young and was always trying to figure how he could go back to her and be a family . . . and because . . . you know that part where he realizes he’s not stupid like everybody always said he was? I said, You mean when he ran singing and shouting through the streets? Yes, he said, I know how he felt.
Today another letter came, written on lined yellow paper in Henry’s signature round hand. He began it with a quote:
“Knowledge is power. Ignorance is the only 100% curable disease. It is not a crime to be ignorant; but it is a crime to choose to remain ignorant when knowledge is available.” Joanna, this is from a book I am reading. I will talk more about this when I see you again, OK??
Since your last visit I have been reflecting a lot on your views about education, and I do agree with you 100% that the best tool or weapon to face society again is Education.
All of us prisoners here on death row have something in common. We are all here because we made a bad choice, because we made a mistake. But being on this side of the fence does not mean that we can’t make a good choice. Good choices will lead us toward the ladder of success. On the other hand, bad choices will lead us to more suffering, frustration, tears and problems.
Unmentioned in the letter, but folded into it, is a certificate. Death Row Basketball, it says in bold black print across the top, and under that: Co-MVP Scoring Title, Spring 2006. Presented by Central Prison’s Recreation Department. I sit here with it in my hand, and for some reason think about the light remark I made to the thin dark woman in the prison waiting room. ‘I’m a novelist,’ I said, ‘it’s a valuable experience.’ I contemplate the truth of that, accede to it, and yet each time I write or get letter from Henry or go visit, it becomes less relevant, and he does not speak of it at all. So what is it he wants of me? And what do I owe him? He was the first person to reach out to me after I published a story about another black man in deep trouble. Call it karma, call it fate, call it what you will, I do owe him something, I am convinced of that.
I look down at the certificate. MVP: Most Valuable Player. Henry has had this since the spring. Why has he sent it to me after all this time? I think about my children, adults now, all six of them. I think about their soccer trophies, their football and baseball trophies, the gold stars on their kindergarten foreheads, the smiley faces on the pages on their workbooks, the ecstasy of making it onto the Dean’s list. Even today they call or burst into the house to tell me their achievements. A small thing that, someone to be proud of you, a normal family thing, and yet, I realize now, enormous in the scale of things that matter. Tomorrow I will buy a frame for Henry’s basketball certificate, and next week when I visit, I will tell him I have hung it on my wall.
Author’s note: Henry has always claimed his innocence, unwaveringly telling the same story. When I wrote this piece I was not prepared to believe or disbelieve. I told myself that if I sat eyeball to eyeball with him long enough, eventually I would know. And now I do. This man is innocent.