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College student.

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A college student must pass through grade school, middle school, and high school. That’s a whole lot of schools. Then the student must pass some sort of admittance exam before a university of higher learning will accept them.

One would think that a student who makes it through these education gauntlets would have the sense to pour “piss out of a boot.”

But that is not always the case.

There have been a ton of recent stories reported in the media about college openings, mass gatherings, unmasked partying, increased Covid infections, and college closings.

During one of these news reports, a college student (a supporter of mass partying) gave a sound bite to a reporter that the Covid pandemic is a “hoax.”

Nearly 180,000 people dead and more than five million people infected and this moron had the audacity to not only tell the world but the parents paying for his college education that the Covid pandemic is a “hoax.”

I wondered how his parents felt: it cost them somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000 to underwrite his education only to have him embarrass them with a “hoax” sound bite that messaged his idiocy to the entire world.

I feel more than certain that the student’s daddy felt much like Sheriff Buford T. Justice did toward his son in Smokey and the Bandit—that boy “did not come from my loins.”

It doesn’t bother me if a person pursues stupidity as a way of life. I live by the tenet that every person has a right to go to hell in their own way.

But to call a pandemic that has killed nearly 180,000 people and infected more than five million—many of whom will take years to fully recover—a hoax is beyond the pale. It is so offensive that it defies all bounds of social decency.

America has become the “first” nation to express its “greatness” by having a significant portion of its population actually believe that the Covid pandemic is a “hoax.” No other point in history when the world has suffered from a pandemic did people call the plague killing them by the millions a “hoax.”

I’m sure most of these pandemic “hoaxers” also believe in the QAnon Conspiracy.

They also probably believe in the Moon Landing Conspiracy; that NASA is a lie; and that the earth is flat.

Forget politics for a moment.

Think only about the hoaxer college student and the number of people he is likely to infect, and ultimately kill, through his irresponsible and negligent actions. Think about the physical pain before possible death or at the very least the physical pain associated with the slow recovery process from the Covid virus that the individuals he infects will experience because of his “hoax” belief.

The government can legitimately be criticized for its incompetent, delusional, and partisan political response to the Covid pandemic.

But the bottom line is this: most of the nearly 180,000 people who have died are victims of the hoaxer idiocy. Irresponsible people, like the college student, killed these people with negligent, borderline criminal behavior that had absolutely nothing to do with “my rights.”

The tragedy is the hoaxer college student is too amoral and stupid to comprehend the social impact of his behavior.

But there is a real possibility, if you believe in the law of karma, that this same college student, gasping for air and feeling a searing pain eat away at his insides, will hoarsely whisper from his ICU bed, “please help me, doctor … I thought it was a hoax” before he closes his eyes for the last time.

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The execution

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In the first hour of December 14, 1983—a Wednesday—Robert Wayne Williams was put to death in Louisiana’s electric. His execution marked the first carried out by the state after the U.S. Supreme Court’s reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.

Like so many others before and so many others after him, Robert should not have been executed. He was executed for no other good reason than to fulfill Republican Gov. Dave Treen’s “law and order” bona fides at the time.

I knew Robert.

As an inmate journalist for the Louisiana State Penitentiary’s newsmagazine, I interviewed Robert several times on death row about his scheduled execution. Two things I took away from those interviews with the slight, soft-spoken man: he did not want to die and he was afraid of dying in the electric chair.

The Tuesday afternoon before Robert’s execution, Gov. Treen issued a statement rejecting a plea of mercy made by some of the state’s religious leaders:

“I have reviewed and given careful and prayerful consideration to the many arguments that have been advanced by those who seek Clemency for Robert Wayne Williams. I do not find that the judicial system has failed, or that there is any other justification for the extraordinary clemency power given the governor. It is my decision not to grant a reprieve or commutation of sentence.”

That night as the waiting reporters and witnesses prepared for the death ritual the sky suddenly grew dark. Heavy rain began to fall, whipped about in a criss crossing frenzy by unusually high winds. Lightning darted, electrifying across the sky. It filled the darkened night with flashes of intense light. For a half hour, the turbulent electrical storm unleashed a raging fury over the prison. The night seemed touched by evil, as if something sinister had risen from the bowels of the earth. Then, just as suddenly as it had hit the prison, the turbulence died. It had been ominous and foreboding, just as was the silence that followed.

“These white folks are crazy,” a tensed black correctional officer said. “They don’t understand this weather. They think it’s a storm. But that’s the Lord letting them know He doesn’t like what they’re about to do here. It’s evil – and you can feel it – the air is full of it. And it ain’t got nothin’ to do with the death penalty – this is about that dude over there on death row and the people who want to kill him. There’s something that ain’t right about this thing. They can call it a storm if they want, but it ain’t natural.”

Approximately thirty demonstrators braved the cold winds outside the prison and occasional rain to protest Robert’s execution. They sang and prayed for Robert’s soul.

Robert’s mother had joined the protestors. A minster close to the Williams family also took note of the weather, saying:

“This total darkness speaks well of the shame we’re witnessing here tonight.”

At 10:30 p.m. the lights were turned off in the prison, signaling an end to the day. Robert’s personal minister was sitting in front of his death cell. The minister had been talking to the condemned inmate about many things from his childhood to adulthood.  Robert was a troubled man at the moment.

“He had a problem understanding how inadequate, how unfair the justice system is,” the minister explained. “He didn’t understand why Mr. Treen, who is a Christian man, didn’t step in and stop the execution. I had to show Robert that Mr. Treen had his own convictions, that he was following the law, that he had sent his pardon board to the prison to hear his case, and that two of those board members voted for clemency.

“The next thing that bothered Robert was the fact that there had always been judges besides the pardon board member who had voted to give him relief; that there had never been a unanimous vote to see him executed. ‘Why don’t they stop this thing,’ he asked. ‘Why me?’ Why doesn’t someone stop this and see I didn’t intend to kill that man?’ But I was able to calm him down – and we went over the Psalms again.”

At approximately 11:30, as they were talking, Robert suddenly told the minister:

“Stop! I want you to cease saying anything else. Get me ready to die. I want you to really prepare me to walk into Heaven. I want you to tell me what it’s really like – tell me what I can expect when I get there.”

The minister began to prepare Robert for death by taking him through the Psalms again.

“We began to repeat the Lord’s Prayer – and when we got to ‘forgive me my trespasses, as I forgive those who trespass against me’,” the minister said, “we paused and he repeated it over and over again. He said that ‘in order for God to forgive me, I’ve got to get everything clear in my mind’. Then he said, ‘thank you for letting get that clear’ and at that point he said, ‘I don’t hold nothing against Mr. Treen or anybody else.”

At 12:45 a.m. Wednesday morning prison guards entered Robert’d cell. They placed shackles around his ankles and handcuffs on his wrists.

“Robert began repeating the Lord’s Prayer again,” the minister said, “and then he stopped repeating it and followed me in repeating the 23rd Psalms. A halo came over him and he was not himself. He said these words to me: ‘You’ve talked to me about Jesus bearing my burdens, that Jesus is going to sit in that chair instead of me’. He paused and said, ‘I definitely believe and feel that it won’t be me going to the chair – I believe that Jesus is going for me’. When I saw that halo, I knew he had become embodied in Christ.”

At 1:00 a.m. the Warden walked into Robert’s cell.

“Robert, it’s time for us to go,” he said.

The Warden led the procession off the tier, down the hallway, through a lobby, and into another hallway that led to the death chamber. The minister accompanied the procession until it reached the witness room at which point he left Robert’s side and joined the other witnesses.

The procession took several more steps down the narrow hallway, turning right into the death chamber. There the electric chair sat, forbidding, in the middle of the room. It had been refurbished and polished since it was last used in 1961,but its crude ugliness still dominated everything. A large clock was mounted on a wall directly behind the chair with an exhaust fan positioned slightly to the right of the clock. In front of the chair was a rectangular window to allow the witnesses to observe the execution. A microphone was attached to a small podium to allow the condemned inmate to make a final statement to the assembled witnesses.

Two prison guards escorted Robert into the death chamber with the Warden. Two other guards remained outside the closed death chamber door. Robert stopped in front of the podium and looked the witnesses directly in the eyes. The Warden held the microphone for Robert to speak into.

“I believe and feel deeply in my heart that God has come into my life and saved me,” he said in a firm, strong voice. “I told the truth about what happened. If my death do happen I would like it to be a remembrance for Louisiana and the whole country who think that it would be a deterrence that capital punishment is no good and never has been good. I would like all the people who fought against capital punishment to keep on fighting not just on my behalf but on behalf of everyone else.”

Behind Robert, in a small concrete enclosure, the executioner waited. No one would see the man who was being paid $400 to carry out the politically motivated execution. He faced a panel of instruments, and through an opening in the wall, he would be able to see the Warden’s signal to carry out the execution.

After Robert finished his statement, he turned and walked over to the electric chair and sat down. The two guards began to fit and tighten the straps on him – one for the chest and the other for the left leg where one of the electrodes was attached. One arm was taken out of the handcuff and secured to the chair, with the same procedure employed for the leg. Then the cuffs were removed from the other arm after which it and the leg were secured to the chair. Williams looked quizzically down at the two guards who worked methodically and efficiently.

Secured to the chair, the electrode was placed on the top of Robert’s head. As the hood, a piece of leather, was being lowered over the electrode and his head, he asked the Warden if it was necessary to use the hood.

“Yes, Robert, we have to use it,” the Warden replied.

The hood was lowered. The room fell deathly quiet. It had taken 4 minutes and 20 seconds to walk from the holding cell to the death chamber. The Warden turned and nodded to the executioner. The executioner pulled the switch, sending a charge of 2,000 volts of electricity surging through Williams’ body. He then lowered it to 500 volts. It took ten seconds to lower the charge. Then it was again increased to 2000 volts before being lowered to 500 volts. The entire execution process took one minute and ten seconds.

“As I looked at that execution,” the minister said, “there was a strong anger coming deep from within. As I watched Robert being executed, I realized that we, all of us here in America, are guilty of his death. We legalize alcohol and let our big politicians, our millionaires, control the drug traffic in this country, and it’s them, if anyone, who should be electrocuted – not the person who is down at the bottom. We only execute the ones down at the bottom, the ones who can’t afford a lawyer, the ones the state must furnish a lawyer. People with money who can hire the best lawyers are not on death rows. When I witnessed Robert’s execution, I was looking directly at the injustice of the system – and I was appalled. A deep dedication came over me and I said, ‘Lord, help me wake America up’. I was so hurt to know that I live in a country that’s suppose to be a Christian country yet so much injustice prevails; to know that men in high office are responsible for these injustices and they are so corrupt themselves.”

The minister walked out of the prison and embraced Robert’s mother. Her son was dead. His body had been destroyed but not his memory. That provided small solace for her grief.

“They used my son,” she told the assembled media, “and they’ve abused my family.”

She was composed, her voice even, despite the grief. Her son had been strong in death and, as his mother, she would not dishonor his spirit by being less. It was all she had left of him. The tears would come later, but not there, not with the world watching.

Sam Dalton, a New Orleans-based criminal defense attorney who had waged a courageous pro bono effort to save Robert’s life, had this to say:

“I felt like I had been amputated when I heard that the execution had been carried out. It was a loss that I just couldn’t believe. We got two votes from the pardon board, and while I think their decision was pre-ordained, we still got two votes. We simply made a straightforward presentation of the case to them. Now, Jesus Christ, what would have happened if that same presentation had been made to the jury? I can’t help but believe that he would have persuaded at one juror to vote for life – and that was all he needed.”

Robert’s mother was gracious in grief.

“My son did not ask to be released from prison,” she said, “but only that he be given a life sentence where he could help others.”

I think of Robert from time to time – just as I do other men I knew that died in prison. Any prison experience inevitably leads human carnage behind. Some died by their own hands, some by the hands others, and a few by the hands of the state.

If I was a betting man, and there is indeed a Heaven, I would wager that Robert is sitting at the right hand of the Lord while Gov. Treen is still trying to get his tender ass adjusted to the hot metal seats in that world down below.

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The siege mentality

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I was placed on Louisiana’s death row in November 1966. The state’s last execution had occurred in June 1961.

The state’s death row in 1966 had gained international attention because of the Edgar Labat and Clifton Poret case—two black men convicted of the 1950 rape of white woman in New Orleans. The convictions of the two men were reversed that year by a federal appeals court. They had spent more time on death row than anyone in the U.S., eclipsing Caryl Chessman’s previous record of 12 years.

One execution was carried out in the U.S. in 1966. James French was put to death by Oklahoma in August that year. Two executions were carried in the U.S. the following year—the last being Luis Monge who was put to death by Colorado in June 1967. That execution marked an “unofficial moratorium” on the death penalty in the U.S. that would last until Gary Gilmore was executed in Utah in January 1977.

There were roughly 30 men on death row when I arrived. I was one of seven white inmates housed there. It was a dark, dank world in which inmates lived in a perpetual limbo between life and death. Execution was not an imminent threat but it hung over every thought each day like a Damocles Sword.

The long term cell confinement of death row produced its own sources of madness—one inmate severed his penis, another slashed himself dozens of times with a razor, and two men daily engaged in a “fart war” with animus in their hearts. One inmate believed the Russians were monitoring his thoughts through Sputnik satellites while another 350-lb inmate went naked all the time as a form of “protest.” Another inmate, convicted of rape, believed that every time the word “rape” was spoken it was somehow directed at him.

This is what life and death uncertainty in a closed custody confinement can produce—so much more than a “low grade depression” Michele Obama recently spoke about.

Home confinement because of the Covid-19 pandemic bears some resemblance to that period when the nation’s condemned inmates lived in a world suspended between life and death as the unofficial moratorium played itself out. This pandemic crisis has created its own unofficial moratorium on living life in a normal manner.

We all now live with a siege mentality under Damocles Sword—knowing that the suspended sword could drop at any moment. One mistake, one miscalculated step could lead to infection and a horrible execution.

Covid-19 is now our death row custodian. We can try to escape it by pretending it does not exist or that its threat is not as imminent as experts tell us.

But we really know better.

One death row inmate would scream out in the middle of the night, “fuck, please hurry something.”

We all know that feeling of frustration. Life as we knew it has receded. Our relationships, our work, our play have all changed dramatically—and we don’t know when, or if, they will ever come back.

I was 21 years of age when I heard that death cell door slam behind me. Six years later, in November 1972, it opened and I was released from a death sentence to a life sentence. I had survived the siege mentality of death row.

Now in the twilight of my life, I must navigate myself and my wife through the siege mentality produced by social isolation. That fucking sword hangs suspended over our lives—masks, gloves, goggles, face shields, and six foot social distancing between us and all other forms of human life keep us safe in this uncertain world between life and death. Family communication is done through Zoom, face time, or cell phone—artificial contacts.

Michele Obama is right.

This nation is suffering from low grade depression—and so much more; more than we could ever have possibly imagined.

We now live, and survive, with a siege mentality.

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Pictures

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An ancient Japanese philosopher once said that, “One look is worth a thousand words.”

I recently saw a picture in the July 21, 2020 edition of the Texas Tribune. It accompanied an article about how crematoriums in the state’s Rio Grande Valley are running overtime dealing with bodies of deceased Covid-19 victims.

The picture, which is actually a collection of three photos, shows two men rolling a body into a crematorium in Donna, Texas; a second photo shows a man standing by an incinerator; and the last photo shows smoke billowing out of one of the two smoke stacks at the facility.

The smoke billowing out of the smokestack reflected an image of “black death” body collectors hauling infected bodies to mass “plague pits” where they were dumped; and when the land ran out, the Pope ordered them thrown in the nearest river.

Body disposal in pandemics has never been a pretty business, although well-paying.

There have been more than 150,000 bodies which have already been disposed of during the current Covid-19 pandemic in the United States—more than in any other nation. Bodies have lined the hallways in intensive care units before being hauled away to freezer trucks for storage until claimed by a loved one or until a county decision was made as to how to dispose of it.

The smoke billowing from that crematorium smokestack was once a human being who walked into the local post office without a mask; or who once attended a large family gathering without a mask; or who once sang at the top of their pre-infected lungs during a church service without a mask; or who once sat on a bar stool in a crowded Texas salon tapping his foot to “there’s no place I’d rather be than right here with my red neck, white socks and blue ribbon beer” without a mask; or who once left behind hospitalized grandparents they infected with the virus by not wearing a mask.

The smoke billowing from that crematorium smokestack was the residue of, most probably, a life well-spent but wasted in its final moments by not taking precautions to avoid the horrible, life-sapping little Covid virus.

The smoke billowing from that crematorium smokestack mirrors the tears of children left behind; the grief of a wife that will never heal; the hug from a brother that will never again be felt; the face of a sister that will never again light up; and the sorrow ridden eyes of parents who in the dusk of their lives pray only that the end will come sweet and peaceful.

The smoke billowing from that crematorium smokestack is from the shallow, skin-thin bodies of those elderly people trapped in nursing home facilities who never understood the calls from politicians in the early stages of the pandemic suggesting that they should be willing to accept the high risk of death posed by the Covid virus for the sake of the economy.

That second smokestack at the crematorium from which no smoke billows is waiting to spread the smoke-dust ashes from the small, defenseless bodies of school children forced back into dangerous classroom settings—sent there by parents under government pressure to get back into a Covid infected chicken n’ sausage producing plant needed to boost the economy.

Those three crematorium photos represent the heartbreak of a nation caused by so many unnecessary deaths—so many of which could have easily been avoided or prevented.

That billowing gut-wrenching, heartbreaking smoke will forever, and ever, be a stain—no, a blight—on the soul of this nation, and will bear witness throughout history of all those stupid motherf..kers who let it happen.

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Trains and dreams

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There I sat – no more than 10 or 11 years old – on the dock of a cotton warehouse. Cotton was indeed the “King” of the South in the mid-to-late 1950s. That was especially so in the small northeast Louisiana town of Rayville—just 80 miles west of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

My mother, with the help of her two gun-toting brothers, had just packed up all the belongings in our New Orleans home and relocated us away from our abusive father to the “green house” in Rayville—a dilapidated shack in the poorest part of town.

But at only $35 a month to rent, who could complain.

Mother had taken a job at the local Morgan and Lindsey for $18 a week.

In the afternoon my Uncle George, who worked for the State Highway Department, would stop by the green house, load me, my three brothers, and little sister in the back of his pickup truck and haul us to his house deep in the countryside for the night. We got a good hot meal for supper (fried chicken, real mash potatoes, and other good stuff), cooked all afternoon by my Aunt Marie on a wood-burning cast iron stove.

And the next morning there was stomach filling hot breakfast waiting for us the next morning. Aunt Marie had already milked the two cows, gathered the eggs, fed the mule, and wrung the neck of the chicken that would be served with dumplings for supper before breakfast.

Looking forward to those hot scrambled eggs, thick slices of bacon freshly cut from a recently butchered hog, and big white biscuits with maple syrup, made sleeping for me on the cold wooden floor, listening to the patter of rain hitting a leaking tin roof, so much easier.

Then back to the green house with a broken bath tub and plywood over the windows to keep out the winter cold and summer mosquitoes.

And back to my favorite place of sitting on the dock of one of those dozen cotton warehouses located just beyond our backyard.

Sitting there, I waited for the trains to pass—all loaded with timber, cotton, farm equipment and all sorts of other goods headed for only God and the Engineer knew where. Dressed in my size-too-large Happy Jack jeans or faded overalls and a scraggily t-shirt more often than not, I would jump up and start waving when I heard the train approaching as it was leaving town. The Engineer would sit down on his whistle and wave his thick work gloved hand back at me from his open window.

Life was so good, so simple.

Those moments were the best of my childhood as I thought of one day being able to go where the trains went. I dreamed of all those great, wonderful places that awaited me beyond youth and just before the edge of adulthood, where experiences of love, adventure, and money beckoned.

“Billy Wayne, get on back in this house and eat these hot white beans and hocks,” the raspy, nicotine-stained voice called out to me.

That voice belonged to the old “widow lady,” as we called her, who lived across the street from us. Each day on the front side of eleven o’clock she brought a steaming pot of big white lima beans and ham hocks to our house for lunch. I initially hated those damn white beans, but after awhile the stomach, which had long since done away with Aunt’s Marie’s eggs and biscuits, grew kind of fond of those “baby lima beans,” as the widow lady called them.

Our penitence for the beans was having to listen to widow lady tell us about a hard life of too much drinking, too many hard-partying men, and enough broken hearts to fill one of those cotton warehouses.

“I pray you boys never grow up and see what these eyes have seen,” widow lady would say every day.

Almost invariably, each day as widow lady got to that juncture in life’s terrible woes, my younger brother Pat would pass gas in a noticeable way.

“Boy, git yore ass out there on that front porch,” widow lady would say, grabbing her almost empty pot of white beans.  “I done tole you that you don’t do that boy stuff in front of a lady.”

As soon as widow lady left through the front screen door, I was out the back door, leaping down the five-step stairs, and running down a beaten path with my bare feet touching hard brown dirt headed for my place on the warehouse dock just in time to catch the 1:30 train barreling out of town toward Vicksburg.

Trains and dreams.

Never got to ride a train, and too many of those dreams turned into nightmarish realities.

However, looking back over the landscape of my life, I realize things could have always been worse – and here I sit today on my front porch with glass of ice tea in my hands trying to come to terms with the brutal uncertainty a pandemic has inflicted on all our lives.

As the breeze of approaching dusk passes through the air and as the birds gobble down their fill of bird seed before heading off to roost and as the deer graze on the grass of a nearby hillside under the watchful eyes of my three dogs, I do have one absolute certainly—there will always be trains and dreams, and, yes, those goddamn white lima beans.

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Copyright © 2019 Jodie Sinclair| Author