Death Sentence (50 page)

“I’d feel better just knowing you were close.”

“We’ll be here,” Ronnie said.

Brother Hoyle had promised he would be with them, Velma told him. He would be a great comfort. He always knew the right things to say.

Another silence followed, broken only by Pam’s soft crying. Then Velma asked if there was anything from the past that they still needed to discuss.

“No, I think we’ve talked about everything that’s been on my mind. That’s one good thing that’s come out of this. I’ve often thought that if you’d died from an overdose, we wouldn’t have had the chance to deal with some of these things like we have.”

“Ronnie, your daddy was a good man, you know that,” Velma suddenly said.

“I know,” Ronnie said, “but it was you who was always there for us, and he wasn’t.”

“Don’t be too hard on him,” she said.

“Let’s don’t dwell on the bad things,” Ronnie told her. “Let’s just talk about the good times.”

“We did have some, didn’t we?” Velma said, forcing a smile.

Ronnie brought up his and Pam’s early school days, when Velma was grade mother for both, the happiest period of her life.

“Automatic arms!” she said with a chuckle. “Every time a teacher asked whose mother would volunteer to help out, your’s and Pam’s arms shot straight up in the air.”

“Remember those field trips?”

“Yeah, all your friends always wanted to ride with me.”

“Because you were so easy on them.”

“We couldn’t even get all of ’em in the car.”

They went on to reminisce about Pam’s basketball days and how Velma never missed a game, always cheering louder than anybody.

“Boy, you used to yell at those referees,” Ronnie teased.

“They deserved it,” she said, and both laughed.

Velma looked down at Pam, still stroking her hair, and Ronnie saw tears coming to her eyes again.

“You know, I’ve had people in here all day telling me what great kids I have. Y’all have stood behind me through all these painful years. A lot of kids wouldn’t have done that. You don’t know what that means to me.”

“If you’re proud of the way we turned out, then you should be proud of yourself,” Ronnie said, “because whatever good qualities we might have all came from you.”

Velma took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her tears.

Ronnie reached for her hand, and he was reminded of his graduation night when he’d given up his trip to the beach to stay home with her. That had been the first time he had truly told her what she meant to him. Now he had only this last opportunity.

“You’re the best mother that I or anyone could have ever had or ever wanted,” Ronnie said, and now he was crying, too.

“I’m sorry for the embarrassment I’ve caused you,” Velma said.

“It hasn’t been any embarrassment. I don’t understand a lot of what happened, and I don’t think you do either. It has never affected the way I feel about you. I’ve always loved you and I always will. Nothing will ever change that.”

Ronnie noticed that one of the guards was pointing at her watch, and he stood. “They’re going to ask us to leave,” he said.

“Pam, honey, sit up,” Velma said. “You’ve got to sit up, you hear?”

Velma stood when Pam was free of her lap, and Ronnie hugged her, trying to fix in his mind how it felt to hold her this last time. “You’ll be in my heart for as long as I live,” he told her, and he was barely able to get out the words, he was crying so hard. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Ronnie and Velma helped Pam to her feet. She was wracked with sobs, and she enveloped her mother in a protective embrace, bent over her like a shield, clinging desperately.

“Oh, Mama, I love you so much.”

Velma stroked her and whispered to her, and they clung together, both crying, both unwilling to let go.

“You’ll have to take her,” a guard told Ronnie.

“Come on, we’ve got to go,” Ronnie said, taking Pam by the shoulders, but she would not let go, and he could not pull her away.

“No!” she cried. “No!”

“You’ve got to let go,” he said through his own tears, and still she wouldn’t break free.

“Pam, come on,” he said, prying on her arms, and his mind flashed back to the time his mother drove his car head-on into a rental truck before Michael was born, and as he was trying to pull his sister’s arms from his mother, he was again prying his mother’s hands from the steering wheel to free her from the wreckage. But Pam’s strength was fierce and it brought him quickly back to the present.

“Pam, please…”

Then his mother reached up and calmly and gently began unwrapping Pam’s arms from her body. And as she did, Ronnie looked into her tear-filled eyes for the last time and knew that if remorse could be made physical he had just seen it.

Suddenly, he had his wailing sister in his arms and was leading her toward the door.

“Don’t look back,” he told her. “Just don’t … look … back.”

Velma had composed herself by the time she got back to her cell at five-thirty. Her visit with her children had marked the first time that any of her guards had seen her cry, and now she seemed morose and remote. Her supper was waiting: fried chicken livers, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, lima beans, pound cake with white icing. But she touched none of it.

For a few minutes she lay on her bunk in her pink robe, looking up at the concrete ceiling, but she was interrupted by the warden, who came to talk about the schedule for the rest of the night. Then a nurse was there with medicine.

There was no idle chatter now. The deathwatch area remained silent, everybody consumed by the seriousness of the moment.

At 6:13, Velma sent for a canteen order: Cheez Doodles and a Coke. When it came nearly a half hour later, she asked for a pen and for two small white Bibles among her possessions. While she ate the Cheez Doodles and drank the Coke, she sat writing in the Bibles.

At a little before seven, a guard came to remind her that she’d better get dressed. Her lawyers were there, waiting to see her for the last time.

Richard Burr had flown back from Richmond on the state plane Thursday afternoon at the invitation of the lawyers from the attorney general’s office who had opposed him in court. It had been a somber trip. Anybody could see that Burr was taking his defeat hard.

Burr was enduring one of the most difficult years of his life. In just the past six months, he had lost three clients to Florida’s electric chair. Velma’s death, though, was far harder to face than the others. He had come late to the cases of the three men, had not known them nearly as well. Velma had been his first death-penalty client, and his attachment to her had grown with the years.

He was a lawyer who believed it necessary to commit personally to a client. “You can’t have an arm’s-length relationship with somebody whose life is in your hands,” he would say years later, after he had become perhaps the country’s top death-penalty lawyer (he handled the sentencing phase of Timothy McVeigh’s defense in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building).

His relationship with Velma, however, was closer than any he’d ever had with a client—or ever would have. In recent years, he’d never left a meeting with her, or closed a telephone conversation, without telling her he loved her. Seeing her for the last time, he knew, was going to be one of the hardest things he’d ever done.

At 7:15, as the guards brought Velma to them in handcuffs, Burr and Little stood waiting, each holding a rose that Mary Ann Tally had bought, each forcing a smile.

Velma spent more than an hour and a half with her lawyers, and it was an emotional time for all. Both lawyers knew that Velma had only agreed to the final round of appeals because she realized how important it was to them, and that had made the courts’ rejections even harder, especially for Burr. “I had a terrible sense of failure,” he recalled years later. “I was crying and telling her how sorry I was.”

“He was really beating up on himself,” Little would remember. “Velma was being very comforting to both of us. She was the glue that held everybody together. I’m talking family, I’m talking lawyers, chaplains, guards, everybody. There was Velma steadfast and serene as she could be. You knew it was the sheer force of her faith. I’ve never seen anything like it. I knew exactly what was going through her head: my next step is with Jesus.”

Near the end of their visit, Velma told her lawyers something Little would never forget. “She said, ‘You know, I’m going to be going before the judge of all the judges, and he doesn’t wear black robes, and he treats people alike, whether they’re rich or poor, whether they’re black or white. And this one has compassion. This one has forgiveness.’”

As he and Burr were leaving, Little asked if they could do anything else. Velma said she’d like to sing with the Roanes one last time, if only for a few minutes. Little asked the warden and he approved. Little called Sam Roane, who said that he and Gales would be right there. As he was returning to his car after telling reporters he would be a witness at the execution, Little saw the Roanes arriving with their portable organ, hurrying to the prison gate.

“Brother Jimmie, we’re going to sing her into heaven,” Sam called out.

Governor Hunt, who was now trailing in the polls, had begun his day campaigning in Brevard in the far western mountains of the state. After learning that the Fourth Circuit Court had denied Velma’s appeal, he cancelled his afternoon campaign stops, telling reporters that he thought it appropriate to make himself readily available in the event of late developments.

Hunt flew back to Raleigh, where in late afternoon he had found the capitol surrounded by nearly 150 protesters against the death penalty holding signs saying such things as: NOT IN MY NAME, WHY DO WE KILL PEOPLE TO PROVE KILLING PEOPLE IS WRONG?, and GIVEN A CHOICE, JIM HUNT CHOSE TO TAKE A LIFE.

Vigils for Velma would be held in cities across North Carolina Thursday night. One service, sponsored by the Robeson County Clergy and Laity Concerned, had begun at seven in a cramped room in a downtown building in Lumberton. More than twenty people, black, white and Indian, including several children, sat on folding chairs in a loose circle, each rising one by one to light a small candle from a large “candle of life” on a small, cloth-covered table in the center of the circle.

Mac Legerton, a young minister who afterward would drive to Raleigh to join the vigil outside Central Prison, read from Romans, and the group sang, meditated, prayed for all victims of violence, and spoke their feelings about the death penalty.

“We believe that for Christians, justice means the justice of God, always a merciful justice,” said Legerton. “Without mercy, justice becomes revenge. The death penalty, in Christian terms, is actually a form of revenge, not justice.”

By seven-thirty, the sanctuary of Sacred Heart Cathedral, a great, gray-stone edifice on Hillsborough Street in downtown Raleigh, was packed with people opposed to Velma’s execution. They wore green ribbons on their lapels, white bands on their arms and tags listing the names of North Carolina’s condemned and their victims. They sang and prayed and listened to many speakers.

“Today is the Feast of All Saints,” Sister Teresa told them. “Tomorrow is the Feast of All Souls. By tomorrow morning, we will have another saint. Velma will be in heaven.”

Velma’s brother Jimmy told the crowd that he wanted to remember Velma as she was now, not as she had been when she killed. “I never try to remember the bad parts. As long as we put the good parts first, we don’t have to worry about the bad.”

Wade Holder said he was having trouble finding words to describe his feelings, but he soon sounded like a country preacher, his voice rising and falling rhythmically.

“Her last words to me were, ‘Wade, when I enter into the gas chamber, do not think of it as that. Think of it as my gateway to heaven.’ The gas chamber. Oh, how horrible! Oh, how horrible! What a shame. What a disgrace to our state. But wait—that is the gateway to heaven and our Lord Jesus Christ.

“Just a few seconds after two o’clock, Velma Barfield will be in heaven. Heaven is a real place, and there’s joy and peace in her heart because she knows where she’s going.”

He broke down, couldn’t continue, and had to be helped away by John Frazier, the chaplain who had first gone to see Velma when she arrived at Women’s Prison nearly six years earlier. Frazier had left the prison a year later to become a special assistant to Governor Hunt, then had worked for four years as a chaplain at Central Prison. Now he revealed to the congregation that he had resigned in protest after the execution of James Hutchins in March.

“Capital punishment is evil,” he said. “I choose not to cooperate with that.” And the entire assembly rose as one, applauding and shouting its approval.

Frazier commended them for the candlelight march they soon would make to stand vigil at Central Prison. “Those of you with a little light will help somebody on death row to get through,” he said.

At the end of the service, more than 300 people lighted candles held in holders of upside-down paper cups and filed from the church, singing to strumming guitars.

Soon the marchers had spread over two blocks, shepherded by twenty Raleigh police officers, some on foot, others in creeping cars with blue lights flashing. One marcher carried a poster that said, AN EYE FOR AN EYE MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD BLIND. Another’s bore a drawing of a giant syringe, INJECT COMPASSION, it said.