In The Place Of Justice Part 2

Hickman responded as he did-"Okay, I'll be down in a few minutes"-hoping Kyle would realize his answer meant something was amiss, since Hickman never went down to the main branch after hours.

"Do you need a cop there?" Kyle asked. "I'll send a car."

"Well, maybe. I don't know. I'll call you right back," Hickman replied, hanging up the telephone.

Kyle immediately called the Calcasieu Parish sheriff's office and the Lake Charles City Police and asked them to investigate "goings-on" at the bank. A minute or two later, Murl Cormie, a radio dispatcher for the sheriff's department, sent to the bank one deputy from the station and one in a car nearby. At the same time, Mike Hogan, chief of detectives for the city police in Lake Charles, was called at home and told to go investigate a possible problem at the bank. Hogan lived about four or five minutes from Southgate Shopping Center, but he testified that because it was raining so hard, it took him maybe seven, eight minutes to get there. We were gone by then.

On the witness stand, Hickman's version of what happened on the night of the crime was essentially the same as mine-until we reached the bridge at English Bayou.

Both he and Dora McCain testified-in virtually identical language and phrasing-that I ordered them out of the car, lined them up facing me on the shoulder of the road, and, as they stood still with their hands at their sides at point-blank range, I opened fire. The bullet that struck Hickman traveled upward in his right arm, a trajectory one would find if his arm were extended outward, parallel to the ground, not at his side, when the bullet entered. Hickman, supposedly standing directly in front of me at point-blank range, suffered only a superficial flesh wound. After being shot, he ran to his left and fell into the bayou about twenty-five feet away, they said.

McCain testified that after I fired a single shot at Hickman and he ran, I ran after him. She said this after saying she had dropped face-first to the ground and pretended that she had fainted. Still, she said she was able to see Julia Ferguson about ten feet away, in the opposite direction from the bayou. McCain said that I returned from the bayou, struggled physically with Julia Ferguson, shot Ferguson twice during the struggle, then knifed her as we continued to struggle and as the older woman begged for her life. My response, she testified, was, "It'll be quick and cool."

McCain said that after I finished off Ferguson, I literally stumbled into McCain as I ran toward the car. Then, she said, I put the gun up against the back of her neck and shot her. She testified that, having just been shot at point-blank range right below her ear, she heard my footsteps on the wet gra.s.s and could detect from their direction that I had gone back toward the bayou. She said she then heard me call out to Hickman.

Hickman was no more than thirty-five feet away from the crime scene when he was in the bayou, he said, holding on to branches, treading water, and listening for every sound. Thirty-five feet is less than twice the distance of an average living room. When asked what he heard after he ran and fell into the water, Hickman said he heard two more gunshots and thought "one was for Julia and one for Dora." He also said he heard a rustling in the weeds fifteen or twenty feet away from him, which he said he thought might have been a woodland creature or me, looking for him. He testified that he heard the Vauxhall's engine start and, after a moment, heard it accelerate as the car pulled away; he heard no struggling, no begging, no talking or calling out.

McCain, however, testified that after she heard me run to the bayou and call out to Hickman, I came back to her and kicked her twice in her side, so hard that I lifted her up like a rag doll with my foot. She said that I told her, "Woman, you had better be dead because I'll run you over if you're not." McCain said that she waited a bit after I drove off and then moved toward Julia Ferguson, calling to her. Hickman heard none of that, either.

McCain testified that after I fled the scene she took off her shoes and ran barefoot down the gravel road until she found a house, and help, about half a mile away. Hickman, too, headed away from the crime scene, looking for help. He found it about three-quarters of a mile away, at the B & J Oil Well Service. He, like McCain, ended up at Memorial Hospital for treatment. Julia Ferguson reportedly died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

McCain's graphic details of what she said she saw and heard, if allowed to stand, closed the door on the possibility that the crime might have been manslaughter-that is, a homicide committed in the heat of pa.s.sion or a state of panic rather than a premeditated murder. Her testimony was a sensational finale to the state's case, and when she finished, Salter immediately rested his case. It was Monday morning, April 17, 1961. My lawyers did not cross-examine Dora McCain. Nor had they cross-examined Jay Hickman. They made no attempt to point out even the obvious faults and inconsistencies in their testimony or even to suggest suggest that it might not all be true, although I told them it wasn't. I don't think they ever believed me. that it might not all be true, although I told them it wasn't. I don't think they ever believed me.

The court adjourned for lunch. When the trial resumed at 1:30, it was time for my attorneys to present my defense. In a move that probably surprised everyone, and certainly surprised me, they immediately rested without calling a single witness. The prosecution's case against me had not been challenged.

Both sides gave closing arguments. Salter told the jury the bank employees had been lined up, shot execution-style, and that I had slashed Julia Ferguson's throat. He said the crime was heinous and calculated and demanded the death penalty. Sievert and Leithead each spoke to the jury, arguing that there was no evidence I deliberately planned to harm the three bank employees when I robbed the bank and fled with them. They reminded the jury that Dora McCain testified that I told Jay Hickman he would be cold walking back to town without a coat.

Less than an hour after the jurors retired, they returned a verdict of guilty, which carried a sentence of death.

I was to be sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, well-known as a house of horrors. I was terrified.

2.

Tribulation.

1962-1970.

As soon as the verdict was read, three white deputies grabbed me. They took me back to the Calcasieu Parish jail, where I was moved from total isolation on the second floor to the third floor, where the colored male prisoners were housed, and put in one of four small maximum-security cells sandwiched in the center of the building by "bullpens"-large, open rooms where sizable groups of inmates spent their days-on each side. The only other prisoner in maximum security was Ora Lee Rogers, a soft-spoken, twenty-five-year-old giant of a man sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a white woman in Evangeline Parish during an early-morning robbery in May 1959. White hostility ran high against Rogers. The Evangeline Parish coroner told newspaper reporters he didn't believe Rogers would have lived through the day at the parish jail in Ville Platte, so he was sent to Calcasieu to evade homespun justice. The day after the crime, the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate Morning Advocate speculated that the attempt to hide Rogers from the public "apparently was spurred by last week's lynch-mob kidnapping from jail of Mack Charles Parker at Poplarville, Mississippi. Parker, a 23-year-old Negro, was accused of raping a white woman." The FBI found his corpse floating in the Pearl River, which divides Poplarville from Bogalusa, Louisiana. speculated that the attempt to hide Rogers from the public "apparently was spurred by last week's lynch-mob kidnapping from jail of Mack Charles Parker at Poplarville, Mississippi. Parker, a 23-year-old Negro, was accused of raping a white woman." The FBI found his corpse floating in the Pearl River, which divides Poplarville from Bogalusa, Louisiana.

Louisiana executions historically had taken place in the community where the crime occurred, both to satisfy the local pa.s.sion for vengeance and to serve as a deterrent to potential wrongdoers. But dwindling public support for capital punishment prompted the legislature in 1956 to transfer executions to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, in the wilds of central Louisiana. Under the new protocol, a condemned prisoner remained in the local jail until the Louisiana Supreme Court reviewed the appeal of his trial. If it was found to have been const.i.tutional, the governor was then free to schedule an execution date, and the prisoner would be transferred to Angola.

Rogers, in the cell two doors down from me, had been there two years. Our quarters were about the size of a small bathroom, each containing a bunk, face bowl, toilet, and shower. The walls of the cells were made of solid steel, except for the back wall, which was made of bars, enabling us to talk to one another across the empty cell between us. When either of us was permitted out of the cell to go to court, to see lawyers, or for some other business, we would walk over and see the other through the small hatch in the front door of our cells. We were each other's only company, segregated from the rest of the jail population and allowed only a Bible and religious material. Neither of us asked the other about the circ.u.mstances that brought us there. We accepted each other without judgment, glad for companionship.

Rogers had valuable advice for me about how to survive life in a cell, where the struggle against isolation is a battle for one's sanity. I had already slipped to the edge of madness when I first met him. Without him I would not have survived. When I'd slide off into fantasy, he'd engage me in laughter, conversation, argument, whatever it took to pull me back to reality.

He did that for nearly eight months until he lost his appeal in the Louisiana Supreme Court and was transferred to Angola in advance of his December 1, 1961, execution date. I had grown close to him. When we hustled a candy bar through a sympathetic guard or orderly, we'd split it. When we were down to our last cigarette, one of us would smoke half and toss what remained down the walkway outside the bars to the other. He was my first real friend; I finally had someone I was able to confide in and talk to about my likes and dislikes, my problems, my failings. No one had ever known as much about me as Rogers did. We were both failed human beings, social outcasts who shared the same life experiences and were now facing the same fate. When they took him to Angola, leaving me in solitude and silence, I cried-for his loss and my own.

Without a court reporter's verbatim transcript, it took Leithead and Sievert more than seven months to piece together what they felt were thirty-four const.i.tutional violations during my trial. On November 29, 1961, they filed my appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which advanced the case to the top of its docket. On January 15, 1962, the court's seven white male justices unanimously declared that I had had a fair trial.

No other inst.i.tution has so fueled the imagination of the Louisiana public as the Louisiana State Penitentiary, more popularly known as "Angola," the name of the largest of several plantations merged at the turn of the century to create the inst.i.tution. Its name conjures up a cacophony of horrors. It was called "the Alcatraz of the South" in 1939 by a New Orleans Sunday Item-Tribune Sunday Item-Tribune reporter; its history, which has been written in the blood of those locked within its bowels, earned it infamy throughout the mid-twentieth century as the most intimidating prison in America. When deputies shackled me and put me in a car for the trip there on April 11, 1962, I feared the prison far more than my death sentence. reporter; its history, which has been written in the blood of those locked within its bowels, earned it infamy throughout the mid-twentieth century as the most intimidating prison in America. When deputies shackled me and put me in a car for the trip there on April 11, 1962, I feared the prison far more than my death sentence.

After I'd been on the road for half an hour, my mind fastened on the pa.s.sing landscape and I calmed down. Dead stalks of the previous season's sugarcane harvest filled mile after mile of flat fields. Cows roamed free in pastures. Overhead, an occasional flock of birds took flight, whirling and turning in unison, then settling in another tree. I envied them their freedom.

Not long after we pa.s.sed the state capital, Baton Rouge, the flatlands slowly gave way to rolling hills, and we came to the quaint antebellum town of St. Francisville, dotted with plantations worked by slaves a hundred years earlier. We left the main highway for a narrow, winding, rutted road that snaked through twenty-two miles of some of the most rugged and forbidding terrain in the state-a wilderness of lush foliage, swamps, and deep ravines. Some of the shrubbery lining the road was deceptive: It was the tops of tall trees rooted in the bottom of an abyss far below. The dead-end road had a singular purpose-to deliver human cargo to the front gate of the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

About sixty miles northwest of Baton Rouge, the maximum-security prison sprawls on an eighteen-thousand-acre enclave surrounded on three sides by the muddy Mississippi River. The rugged Tunica Hills, replete with snake-infested woods and deep gorges, border the prison on the remaining side, completing a formidable natural barrier that makes escape extremely difficult and isolates the prison, which is accessible only by boat, plane, or this one treacherous road. The prison has twenty miles of levees, built long ago by inmates, many of whom died from the grueling labor. The levees don't always protect the prison when the Mississippi becomes swollen from melting snow and ice up north each spring.

After miles of hairpin turns and breathtaking scenery, a ma.s.sive dull gray, two-story building crouching against a bluff rose out of nowhere. Its sudden appearance jolted me like a crack of lightning. The prison loomed ominously against the skies, an image of awesome power. Dread replaced shock as we grew nearer and the cast-iron front gate came into view. To the right of the gate stood a wooden guard tower that looked like an outhouse on stilts. Others were scattered nearby. My stomach clenched when I saw the colored guards. These were the infamous khaki-backs, whose rumored brutality was the stuff of legend. They were trusty prisoners armed with rifles and pistols, vested with the power to kill.

Nineteen sixty-two was an especially bad time to be entering Angola. The legislature had slashed the prison's operating budget by one-third, shutting down what few educational and vocational programs existed there and laying off 114 employees from Angola's all-white staff. The penitentiary was manned and operated by an army of khaki-backs supervised by a small contingent of actual employees, generally referred to as "free people." The Baton Rouge State-Times State-Times predicted that the reforms gained in the 1950s after 31 white prisoners slashed their Achilles tendons to protest conditions at Angola would be lost, and the prison would deteriorate to the point of once again becoming the nation's worst. The predicted that the reforms gained in the 1950s after 31 white prisoners slashed their Achilles tendons to protest conditions at Angola would be lost, and the prison would deteriorate to the point of once again becoming the nation's worst. The Shreveport Times Shreveport Times saw it returning to "the medieval slave camp of the past." saw it returning to "the medieval slave camp of the past."

Eleven men were executed at Angola from 1957 to 1961, only one of whom was white. The most recent execution had taken place in June 1961.

We drove through the front gate and parked. The deputies took me down a long walkway and into the office of the security captain for the Reception Center. I stood silently, cuffed and chained hand and foot, dreading whatever would come next.

"Well, Cap'n, we brought you another boy," one deputy said, handing over some paperwork and removing my shackles. The other deputy set down the sack of belongings I'd brought from the local jail.

"What'd he do?" the captain asked.

"Murdered a white woman."

"Okay. We'll take him off your hands."

I knew from the jail grapevine that Negroes convicted of raping or killing a white person typically got a brutal a.s.s-whipping by Angola's white guards and their khaki-backs to "teach them their place." So when a white guard and his two trusties came to the captain's office to take me away, I was terrified. But I was spared the whipping, as I later learned, because I was going to death row. I picked up my sack, and the khaki-backs guided me down the hall, where other trusties collected vital data on me, took fingerprints, and made an official mug shot. After stripping and squatting so the khaki-backs could make sure I wasn't smuggling any contraband in my body cavities, I was given a blue-and-white pin-striped denim uniform and a new ident.i.ty. I was C-18, the C C signifying "condemned," the signifying "condemned," the 18 18 signifying that I was the eighteenth man to be housed on Angola's death row. We headed there. signifying that I was the eighteenth man to be housed on Angola's death row. We headed there.

It was a makeshift affair. In 1957, when executions were moved to the prison, the expectation was that the condemned would be brought here only to die. Seven did meet their end in the electric chair that year, but three New Orleans Negroes were unexpectedly spared. Thomas Goins's execution was halted by Justice Hugo Black to allow an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Alton Poret and Edgar Labat, abandoned by their attorneys, smuggled out an appeal for help that was published in the Los Angeles Times; Los Angeles Times; a sympathetic reader hired new lawyers, who rescued them from their date with the electric chair. No one had antic.i.p.ated this wrinkle in the new execution protocol. Nor had anyone antic.i.p.ated that the federal courts, historically reluctant to interfere with state criminal cases, would begin staying executions frequently so they could review the fairness of state proceedings. Angola authorities were forced to create a place to house the surviving condemned, as there was no legal provision to return them to the local jails. A tier of fifteen cells on the first floor of the Reception Center building facing the bluff was designated "Death Row." a sympathetic reader hired new lawyers, who rescued them from their date with the electric chair. No one had antic.i.p.ated this wrinkle in the new execution protocol. Nor had anyone antic.i.p.ated that the federal courts, historically reluctant to interfere with state criminal cases, would begin staying executions frequently so they could review the fairness of state proceedings. Angola authorities were forced to create a place to house the surviving condemned, as there was no legal provision to return them to the local jails. A tier of fifteen cells on the first floor of the Reception Center building facing the bluff was designated "Death Row."

To get there, we pa.s.sed through several gates and doors unlocked for us by khaki-backs. After the final door, we entered a narrow steel-and-concrete netherworld. At the free man's instruction, the khaki-back worked a crank that opened one of the cells.

"Okay, Rideau. Go down to number nine. That's your cell," the free man said.

I picked up my possessions and pa.s.sed by the cells of somber men who nodded to me as I pa.s.sed. I was startled when I got to Cell 5 and saw Ora Lee Rogers sitting on his bunk looking at me. The governor had stayed his execution when his lawyers filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Man, I thought you were dead," I blurted out. "They told me you were dead. You're here!"

"In living color," he said, flashing the broad smile I remembered so well.

"Rideau!" the free man yelled. "Move on down to Cell 9."

I didn't move. I wanted to talk with Ora Lee.

"Go on," Ora Lee said softly. "Go on, and we'll talk later."

I went to Cell 9 with a spring in my step, as hard as that may be to believe. My best friend, my only friend in the world, was here. I wasn't alone.

Seventeen men had escaped death since executions were moved to Angola, but only twelve were on death row. The other five, all blacks, were at the state mental hospital at Jackson, in a wing for the criminally insane. Moreese Bickham was one of them. He'd been transported to Angola for execution in 1961 for killing two white police officers. His lawyer told him the only way he could see Bickham surviving was for him to feign insanity; the state wouldn't execute an insane man. So he played crazy. Judge H. R. Reid halted the scheduled execution and ordered a lunacy hearing for Bickham, who was transferred to the state mental hospital. In 1963 he was returned to death row.

On April 11, 1962, the day I walked onto death row, there were nine colored and three white men in the cells for the condemned. The whites were all there with murder convictions.

Delbert Eyer had shot a woman in the back of the head at point-blank range during an armed robbery of a dime store. He had managed to garner considerable outside religious support because he had since "found G.o.d;" an effort was being made to get his sentence commuted based on his "rehabilitation." He was a clean-cut but standoffish young man who kept his interactions with colored prisoners to a minimum.

Brodie Byron Davis was a burly, six-foot, 220-pound ex-convict on parole from Angola when he killed an elderly man during an armed robbery. The victim was bound and beaten to death, then thrown in a river. An ex-GI, Davis was friendly and the wealthiest man on the row by virtue of a monthly disability check from the Veterans Administration.

Roy Fulghum killed four people: his wife, both of her parents, and her teenage brother. He was just a typical, everyday working stiff-until he "lost it."

Those condemned for rape were blacks: Andrew Scott, Alton Poret, Edgar Labat, and Emile Weston. Their victims had been white.

Of the other blacks there the day I arrived, Edward "Bo Diddley" Davis had been convicted of murdering a white police officer who had gone to Davis's home with other officers after Davis's wife called during a domestic dispute. Davis had previously served time in Angola for shooting his father-in-law.

Freddie Eubanks was condemned for beating and stabbing to death a seventy-year-old white woman during a burglary. He was fifteen at the time of the crime.

Thomas "Blackjack" Goins was convicted of killing a white man during an armed robbery that netted thirty-five cents.

Parnell Smith had come to Angola with a life sentence for a murder in 1956, and killed again while in prison, for which he was given the death penalty.

And, of course, there was Ora Lee.

Cell 9 was six feet wide by eight feet deep, smaller than my cell at the Calcasieu Parish jail. It contained a white ceramic face bowl, a lidless ceramic toilet, a metal table and bench affixed to the wall, and a narrow metal bunk, its hardness barely relieved by a one-inch-thick, cotton-batting mattress made at the prison factory. An electrical wire threaded its way into my cell from the hallway, connecting to a bare bulb that lightened or darkened my s.p.a.ce as I screwed it in or out. The cinder-block walls of my cell were white on the upper half, gray on the lower. The front of the cell consisted of bars facing a ten-foot-wide hall that ran the length of the tier. On the far side of the hall there was a wall of windows that looked out onto a small gra.s.sy area directly in front of us, then the prison fence, beyond which lay the bluff. Occasionally I saw a cow or two, or an armed khaki-back walking outside the fence. Most of the prisoners would hang a sheet or blanket across the front of their cell to spend their day free from the eyes of pa.s.sersby in the hall, shutting off the view outside the windows. The guards respected the crude attempts at privacy; when they needed to talk with a prisoner they would stand in front of his cell and ask the occupant to move the curtain aside.

There were few avenues of relief from the boredom and idleness of life in a tiny cage. We spent every minute of every day in our cells, except twice a week when we were permitted out one at a time for fifteen minutes to shower at the head of the tier, near the entrance. In those precious minutes, men would take a quick shower and rush down the row to talk to other prisoners. If the need to talk or conduct business was urgent, the shower was skipped. The guards didn't care how you spent your fifteen minutes.

To feed the body's need for exercise, some of us did sit-ups and push-ups or paced the small patch of floor beside the steel bunk. Full of youth and testosterone, we found masturbation a daily necessity as we pa.s.sed sunless days and sleepless nights in too-hot or too-cold gray cells, waiting to die.

We were allowed visits only from our immediate family and our religious advisors. Many did not have these specific visitors and had to obtain a court order from a judge to enable others to come. A chair or wooden bench would be placed in front of our cell for visitors to sit on. There was minimal security supervision, which allowed a couple of the white guys to occasionally sneak a little s.e.x through the bars. Unfortunately, the rest of us either had no wife or court-approved girlfriend, or the woman couldn't afford the trip. Getting to Angola was a costly endeavor for poor people, and we all came from impoverished backgrounds. The ride in 1962 was a long one over bad roads: six hours or more round-trip from New Orleans, eight from Lake Charles, ten from Shreveport. Lawyers, understandably, came only when they had to. Visitors were rare.

When my mother visited, she usually brought along one or more of my siblings. My baby sister, Mary Arlene, a toddler, would run up and down the hall, playing peekaboo with some of the guys. Visiting me on death row would become a natural part of the social context she grew up in.

We were permitted to write and receive an unlimited number of letters, but they were monitored and confiscated if authorities found them offensive. When prison officials realized in 1963 that Edgar Labat was corresponding with a white Scandinavian housewife who was trying to help him, they ended the three-year pen-pal relationship by declaring that death row prisoners could have contact only with members of their own race. The ensuing furor created an international flap and a flood of letters and pet.i.tions from tens of thousands of Scandinavians to President Lyndon Johnson and Louisiana governor John J. McKeithen requesting Labat's freedom. To avoid the charge of racism and similar problems in the future, state authorities thereafter restricted our correspondence to only those permitted to visit us-our immediate family, lawyers, and a religious advisor. While that reduced mail considerably for some, it didn't affect me. My mother, who struggled to write letters with only a fifth-grade education, was my only correspondent. Except for her occasional visits and notes, I was completely cut off from the outside world. Never had I felt so lonely; never had life seemed so futile.

We were allowed to have a small electric radio, and a small electric fan to combat the stifling summer heat in the cells. With the two-story cinder-block building at our backs and a bluff looming up in front of us blocking any possible southern breeze, death row was an inferno from May to September. During the winter, icy north winds scooped up dampness from the Mississippi River and dumped bone-chilling cold into the cells. That's when a curtain across the front of the cell proved its worth by keeping the air at bay. Our other trick for keeping warm was putting a layer of newspaper over or between the thin blankets on our steel bunks.

The radio and fan, and tobacco, were luxuries. The prison provided food, toothpaste, toothbrush, and toilet paper in restricted quant.i.ties. Everything else-deodorant, soap, hair cream, canned meat, and tuna-we had to purchase out of whatever small funds we received or could muster. My mother would send a couple of dollars regularly so that I could buy Bugler tobacco, my only indulgence. I tried to quit smoking several times to eliminate the expense, but failed. I needed the fleeting relief of a cigarette.

Death row operated independently of the rest of Angola. All files and paperwork on us were maintained in the captain's office, which was responsible for the direct management of the row. Our mail bypa.s.sed the normal process and was delivered directly to the captain's office, and our money was kept in a safe there as well. Clyde "Blackjack" Morgan was the captain when I got there, and his word was law. Morgan was a clotheshorse who favored spit-shined shoes and was also rumored to drive a Thunderbird-all on a 1962 prison salary. Like all other prison security officers, he was a white man and a staunch segregationist, but he was also basically fair, treating everyone on the row, colored and white, the same. And he'd help us if he could. He routinely informed us whenever his wife planned to go shopping in Baton Rouge, so that if any of us needed something permissible, she would buy it and be reimbursed from the money his office held for us.

Morgan was his own man. One weekend while the warden was away, a colored inmate reportedly raped or a.s.saulted the wife of an employee somewhere on the grounds. Morgan learned that some employees planned to lynch the prisoner, who was being held in a Main Prison "Dungeon." This was an era when captains were warlords, each commanding a small clique of employees and a larger crew of armed khaki-backs who stood ready to lie, steal, fight, injure, and kill at their captain's command with no questions asked. It was a macho, arbitrary world, and captains ruled like gangsters, jealous of others' power and territorial about their turf. Morgan's authority was limited to the Reception Center, but that did not deter him. He boldly went into the Main Prison, accompanied by his own handpicked khaki-backs, s.n.a.t.c.hed the offender, and immediately transported him to death row, locking him next to me in Cell 8. Angry employees stormed the Reception Center, but Morgan and his khaki-backs stopped them in the hallway, warning them that it was against the law for them to go onto death row. The employee mob dispersed unhappily. Blackjack Morgan had saved the prisoner's life.

On death row, living in such close proximity, we often got on each other's nerves. We argued, got angry, cursed and threatened each other, but since we were confined to cells there were no fights. There were, however, wars of words, of silence, and of noise, like turning a radio up to full volume to wake one's nemesis-not to mention everyone else. The biggest danger came when, on shower day, one inmate would come out of his cell and throw a gla.s.s jar or worse against someone's bars, sending shards of gla.s.s flying into other cells. Indeed, on my first night, Andrew Scott was using a tin can set over a ball of flaming toilet paper to boil his feces mixed with syrup to throw on Emile Weston, a concoction designed not only to burn but to stick to the skin. Weston, a couple of cells down from us, overheard my expression of amazement when I realized what was happening and had his blanket covering the front of his cell when Scott threw the jar of foul brew.

One condemned man tried to get another in trouble by telling Captain Morgan the other had contraband in his cell. That was a big mistake. Morgan put both inmates in the Dungeon, then came to death row to tell us he didn't like "f.u.c.king rats, 'cause if you'll snitch on your fellow inmate, you'll snitch on me, too. But you f.u.c.kers ought not be trying to make trouble for each other. You ain't got no business playing these little f.u.c.king penitentiary games. They sent y'all gawddam a.s.ses up here to kill you-all of you. The way I see it, y'all got too much s.h.i.t to deal with to be snitching on each other. Y'all all in the same motherf.u.c.king boat. You need to be trying to paddle together."

My first lesson in life about unity occurred shortly after my arrival. The death row inmates staged a hunger strike. At each meal, we were asked if we wanted to eat, and we all refused. After the second day I was really hungry. Good smells drifted down the hall, robbing me of whatever willpower I had. When the guard announced fried chicken for lunch and asked who wanted to eat, I surrendered. After lunch, I attempted to make a joke of my weakness, but no one laughed. My calls to various guys were met with silence. Finally, I said, "C'mon, fellas, y'all not mad at me about that, huh? I was hungry, and that smell was killing me."

"We all f.u.c.king hungry, and we all smelled the same d.a.m.n chicken you did," Bo Diddley said angrily, "but we didn't eat it."

"Rideau, they do this all the time," Ora Lee said kindly. "Whenever there's a hunger strike, they cook fried chicken or pork chops to tantalize you with the smell." Alton Poret yelled for him not to explain anything to me, but Rogers insisted this was all new to me, that I didn't know any better.

"I just got here," I said. "I don't know anything about how y'all do things. I don't want to be at odds with y'all, but somebody's got to teach me how things go and what to do." Several of the men began telling me about strikes, what was expected of everyone, and explained the need to act as a collective body and stick together. Afterward, I felt like a jerk and was ashamed of my selfish weakness.

Morgan eventually rose to become the head of Angola's entire security force. The captain who replaced him was a poor administrator, and we pet.i.tioned the local district court with grievances in a handwritten letter signed by most of us and sent through the mail. Then we staged a hunger strike and rebellious behavior that almost resulted in a physical confrontation with the guards. Morgan stepped in and resumed control of death row, resolving many of our grievances. He allowed us to get newspapers and magazines through the mail, and stopped guards from bringing inmates down from the second floor-where they were held in extended lockdown in isolation cells for disciplinary or security reasons-to scrub the death row hall at night, s.a.d.i.s.tically beating them before returning them to their cells.

Victor Walker was warden in 1962, but we rarely saw him except when he stood before someone's cell and read a death warrant. He would announce the date and time the governor had scheduled the inmate to be killed, then ask the inmate what he wanted done with his body. The warden performed this ritual twice in 1962, five times in 1963, and once in 1964. Executions generally took place two to three weeks after the issuance of the warrant, once as little as eleven days. They were always scheduled for a Friday, at midnight.

A hush would descend over death row when the warden departed, reflecting an unspoken understanding that Death had to be respected as it approached its prey. At some point, the executioner would come to look at the inmate and size up his physical dimensions in order to make the correct adjustments to the straps on the electric chair. Generally, the man scheduled for execution didn't sleep much. I could not fathom what he might be feeling, even though I was sitting on the tier awaiting my turn. But it was an experience that allowed some of the condemned, if they possessed any decency, to contemplate the damage they had done and feel true remorse. For some, it was a religious experience.

In my experience, the traditional last meal requested by a doomed man reflected the preferences of his friends on the row, because they would actually eat the meal; condemned men usually lost their appet.i.tes in the face of imminent death.

We discussed and debated how we would go to our deaths. Some vowed to force the guards to carry them physically to the chair, fighting and screaming all the way. "I'm gonna make them fight me, then drag me, 'cause I'm not going to cooperate with them killing me," Bo Diddley declared. Others, like me, pointed out that all we had left in life was our personal dignity and that we should not let anyone take that from us. "You don't give them the opportunity to later laugh and talk about how you squealed like a coward, afraid to die," Ora Lee said. "Make them respect you for at least being able to handle something that many of them doubt they could."

None of us died in 1962, marking only the fourth year since 1930 that no one was executed in Louisiana. All death warrants issued in 1963 and 1964 were also stayed. On a tour of the prison, newly elected governor John J. McKeithen stood before our cells and candidly told us, "If your DA doesn't push me to do it, I won't sign a death warrant and you can sit here as long as you want to, because this is not something I want to do. Do we understand each other?" We did. He advised us to get our relatives to enlist the aid of their ministers to lean on the district attorney to let our cases "just sit."

On death row, we had to build our day-to-day existence in a vacuum. The existence was senseless; we were just waiting to die. For a long time, indeed, I didn't care whether I lived or died. I had little reason to live.

Angola introduced me to the idea of reading just to kill time. The first book I read was Fairoaks Fairoaks, a historical novel by Frank Yerby that Thomas Goins recommended. "It'll give you an idea of how white folks been messing over our people as long as this country has been here," he said, handing me the paperback through the bars. "They wouldn't teach this in school." The enslavement of Africans in the American South had never received more than a pa.s.sing mention in the history cla.s.ses I attended. But this book brought it to life and ignited something in me. I wanted to know more-about slavery, about history, and, ultimately, about everything. From then on, I lived inside my head, in a world of books. It helped me survive the maddening monotony and boredom of the cell. Except for the unrelenting need for s.e.xual relief and the periodic need to stretch my legs and exert myself physically, I buried myself in books. Reading obscured the dismal future I faced. Initially, I read whatever was available on the black market-smuggled books-or those owned by other death row inmates. After a prison library was created, I could be more selective, choosing what I wanted from the book cart brought in by a trusty. The more I learned, the more I sought; the more I reflected, the more I grew and matured. There were no lightning bolts, instant revelations, or overnight conversions; it was a long growth process in which I began to shed the ignorance, anger, and insecurities that had governed my previous life. I learned more from my reading on death row than I had during all my years of formal schooling, which had left me literate but uneducated. Eventually I came to see that there was so much more to life and to the world, so many options available that, as bad as things might have been, I was never as trapped in life as I had believed. I realized that my real problem had been ignorance and, as a result, I had thrown away my life.

Reading ultimately allowed me to feel empathy, to emerge from my coc.o.o.n of self-centeredness and appreciate the humanness of others-to see that they, too, have dreams, aspirations, frustrations, and pain. It enabled me finally to appreciate the enormity of what I had done, the depth of the damage I had caused others. I came to understand that the problems that overwhelmed my teenage mind could have been sorted out but instead led to a spur-of-the-moment decision that had devastating, permanent consequences. That I did not mean to kill Julia Ferguson did not change the fact that she had died because of what I did. Her family and friends lost someone they loved-in a violent manner that would pain them the rest of their days. My own family also lost someone they loved and would find it much harder to live their lives in peace.

My father fled to California and my brother Raymond joined the army, but the rest of my family, their options limited by poverty, remained behind to face the repercussions of my rash act. It was a fearful time for my mother, her existence marred by obscene phone calls and white youths drinking, firing guns, and yelling obscenities in front of her home. Welton Semien had been trying to get her to marry him for some time, to no avail, but after one terror-filled night, she accompanied him to the courthouse, where they quietly married, and he moved in, giving her and the children a little protection. The presence of his car parked in the yard helped. But he couldn't shield her from the pointing fingers, the whispers, the hostility, or the shame she bore as my mother. Yet she never complained, never reprimanded or rejected me. She stood by me unflinchingly, demonstrating a commitment, courage, and fort.i.tude so powerful that I realized this woman loved me unconditionally, even when the world despised me and wanted to obliterate me from the face of the earth. The dreams of her girlhood had long ago been crushed by the ugly realities of her life. Like many mothers, she had transferred her aspirations to her children, especially her firstborn, and I had destroyed them just as surely as my father had done before me.

I knew there had to be moments when my mother wondered if how I turned out was somehow her fault. Once, feeling especially sad for her, I reached through the bars, put my hand over hers, and said, "You need to know that my ending up on death row-it had nothing to do with you or how you raised me."

"I had wondered," she said.

I may not have cared much about what happened to me, but I did care about my mother. As she scuffled to make the long trips to Angola and to provide for my needs out of her meager funds, I witnessed her quiet heartbreak, her suffering; and I experienced almost unrelenting guilt for having let her down, for having been responsible for her difficulties. In the wake of these feelings, though, as if one led inevitably to the other, was the blossoming awareness that the collateral damage my mother experienced paled in comparison to the loss suffered by Julia Ferguson and those whom she loved and was loved by.

Everything in me ached to make up for the devastation I'd caused, but of course I couldn't. Weighed down by guilt, remorse, and the impossible situation I found myself in, I contemplated suicide, seeing it as the least I could do, as it would not only end my mother's prolonged misery and allow her and the kids to move on with their lives, but it would also serve as atonement for the life that I had taken. Why postpone the inevitable? Why not give everyone relief, including me? Why suffer one day just for the sake of suffering the next?

"So you're ready to quit," Goins said angrily one day when I expressed these feelings. "You're lucky them white folks sent you to death row, 'cause your little a.s.s wouldn't survive this prison. You won't fight. That means you'd be p.u.s.s.y, some man's old lady. You got yourself in a situation that you don't want to deal with. So you want to creep out of it like a little b.i.t.c.h. How is your dying supposed to benefit your victim? Or your momma? You can justify it any way you like, but it's all about you, not the people you jerked around. How can you make up for what you did if you're dead? If you wanted to do something for them, you wouldn't let their suffering be in vain. You'd fight to make some good come of it, and try to make things right. Nothing's impossible, man-until you quit. That's what cowards do. They turn tail and run. Be a man, for once in your life."

Given who I was, what I had done, and where I was-as far down in life as a person could get-that seemed impossible. I could no more change my lot than I could change the color of my skin. My prospects in life were hopeless. I had no future, and my debt could not be repaid. Yet I knew Goins was right. Suicide was a coward's way out. To be a real man, an honorable man, meant to carry on.

His words resonated in my head: "Nothing's impossible-until you quit." I had read stories of men-Malcolm X, Otto von Bismarck, Mahatma Gandhi, the nameless English convicts exiled to Australia-who rose from ashes, faced great challenges, impossible odds, and won; scoundrels who had been as empty and worthless as I, who had gone on to re-create their lives, redeem themselves, and become respected by their fellow human beings for their good works. Maybe I, too, could be resurrected. I began to identify with these individuals and, through that newfound ident.i.ty, I found hope, a burning need to live to redeem myself, to do something meaningful with my life in partial payment of the debts I owed-to Julia Ferguson and her loved ones, to my family, to society, and to G.o.d, who gave me free will to make better choices than I had.

The world could define me as "criminal," but I did not have to live its definition of me. I resolved that I would not let my crime be the final definition. I knew there was more to me than the worst thing I'd done. I knew it wouldn't be easy. I would have to survive, and that was possible only if I regarded my present circ.u.mstances as a challenge, a test. I had to prove my sincerity and determination to redefine and redeem myself, to make amends.

In the face of the Louisiana Supreme Court having affirmed my conviction and death sentence, Sievert and Leithead appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, even though there was next to no chance my case would be one of the handful selected for review. It took them a year to prepare the pet.i.tion. The crux of the appeal was the covertly filmed interview Sheriff Reid and KPLC-TV had staged and the prejudice that flowed from it. They argued that "the film so permeated the people in this area generally that it made a conviction of the Pet.i.tioner an accomplished fact, and there was no need for a mob to pound on the door of the jail demanding the prisoner."

It surprised everyone when the Supreme Court accepted my case. I did not understand at the time that, with ma.s.s civil disobedience challenging racial discrimination and the fairness of government throughout the South, the high court-which formerly had upheld many racist practices and winked at others-needed to send a symbolic message to blacks about its readiness to step in, be fair, and ensure justice. A hearing on my case, with oral arguments, was held on April 29, 1963. On June 3, the justices issued their ruling.

Justice Potter Stewart decried what he called the "kangaroo court proceedings" in my case. He wrote that the Const.i.tution guaranteed every defendant basic rights: "Among these are the right to counsel, the right to plead not guilty, and the right to be tried in a courtroom presided over by a judge. Yet in this case the people of Calcasieu Parish saw and heard, not once but three times, a 'trial' of Rideau in a jail, presided over by a sheriff, where there was no lawyer to advise Rideau of his right to stand mute.... No such practice as that disclosed by this record shall send any accused to his death." My conviction was reversed and the case returned to the trial court in Lake Charles.

The Supreme Court ruled that I could not be tried within the broadcast range of KPLC-TV. That created a problem, because Louisiana law forbade moving a trial beyond an adjoining judicial district, and all of those districts were within the station's range. Judge Cutrer ruled that a judicial impa.s.se had been reached: I was beyond the ability or authority of Louisiana courts to retry me.

Salter appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, arguing that my const.i.tutional right to a fair trial must be honored. What he really asked the Louisiana Supreme Court for was permission to rewrite the law so that I could be retried in Louisiana. On June 8, 1964, the Louisiana Supreme Court was happy to oblige. Years later, the court would acknowledge it had acted contrary to law in making its ruling.