Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (3 page)

Kobutsu was first in line through the door. I could see the light reflecting off his freshly shaved pink head. I also noticed he had abandoned his usual Japanese sandals in favor of a pair of high-top Converse tennis shoes. It was odd to see a pair of sneakers protruding from under the hem of a monk’s robe. Behind him walked Harada Roshi. He wore the same style robe as Kobutsu, only it was in pristine condition. Kobutsu tended to have the occasional mustard stain on his, and didn’t seem to mind one bit.

Harada Roshi was small and thin, but had a very commanding presence. Despite his warm smile, there was something about him that was very formal in an almost military sort of way. I believe the first word that came to mind when I saw him was “discipline.” He seemed disciplined beyond anything a human could achieve, and it greatly inspired me. To this day I still strive to have as much discipline about myself as Harada Roshi. Beneath his warmth and friendliness was a will of solid steel.

We were all led into a tiny room that served as Death Row’s chapel. Harada Roshi talked about the difference between Japan and America, about his temple back home, and about how few Asians came to learn at the old temple now; it was mostly Americans who wanted to learn. His voice was low, raspy, and rapid-fire. Japanese isn’t usually described as a beautiful language, but I was entranced by it. I dearly wished I could make such poetic, elegant-sounding words come from my own mouth.

Harada Roshi set up a small altar to perform the ceremony. The altar cloth was white silk, and on it was a small Buddha statue, a canvas covered with calligraphy, and an incense burner. We all dropped a pinch of the exotic-smelling incense into the burner as an offering, and then opened our sutra books to begin the proper chants. Kobutsu had to help me turn the pages of my book because the guards made me wear chains on my hands and feet. During the course of the ceremony I was given the name Koson. I loved that name and all it symbolized, and scribbled it everywhere. I was also presented with my rakusu.

A rakusu is made of black cloth, and is suspended from your neck. It covers your hara, which is the energy center about two finger-widths below your belly button. It has two black cloth straps and a wooden ring/buckle. It’s sewn in a pattern that looks like a rice paddy would if viewed from the air. It represents the Buddha’s robe. This is the only part of my robe the administration would allow me to keep inside the prison. On the inside, Harada Roshi had painted beautiful calligraphy characters that said, “Great effort, without fail, brings great light.” It was my most prized possession until the day years later when the prison guards took it from me.

The canvas on the altar was also given to me. Its calligraphy translates to “Moonbeams pierce to the bottom of the pools, yet in the water not a trace remains.” I proudly put it on display in my cell.

I ventured into the realm of Zen to gain a handle on my negative emotional states, which I had learned to control to a great extent, but I now approached my practice in a much more aggressive manner. Much like a weight lifter, I continued to pile it on. On weekends I was now sitting zazen meditation for five hours a day. My prayer beads were always in my hand as I constantly chanted mantras. I practiced hatha yoga for at least an hour a day. I became a vegetarian. Still, I did not have a breakthrough Kensho experience. Kensho is a moment in which you see reality with crystal-clear vision, what a lot of people refer to as “enlightenment.” I didn’t voice my thoughts out loud, but I was beginning to harbor strong suspicions that Kensho was nothing more than a myth.

A teacher of Tibetan Buddhism started coming to the prison once a week to instruct anyone interested. I attended these sessions, which were specifically tailored to be of use to those on Death Row. One practice I and another inmate were taught is called Phowa. It consists of pushing your energy out through the top of your head at the moment of death. It still did not bring about that life-changing moment I was in search of.

Two

M
y memory really starts to come together and form a narrative once I started school. I can still remember every teacher I ever had, from kindergarten through high school.

My parents, sister, and I moved into an apartment complex called Mayfair in 1979, as far as I recall. We had an upstairs apartment in a long line of identical doors. When I went out to play, I could find my way back home only by peeking in every window until I saw familiar furnishings. My grandmother also moved into an apartment in the complex, one row behind us. This was the year I started kindergarten, and I remember it well.

Mayfair was located in a run-down section of West Memphis, Arkansas, although not nearly as run-down as it would later become. We were in the worst school district in the city, and on the first day I saw that I was one of only two white kids in the entire class. The other was my best friend, Tommy, who also lived in Mayfair. Our teacher was a skinny black woman named Donaldson, and I’d be hard-pressed to find a more hateful adult. She wasn’t as bad to the girls, but seemed to harbor an intense hatred for all male children. I honestly don’t know how she ever became a teacher, as she seemed to spend all her time racking her brain to come up with new and innovative forms of punishment.

I was very quiet at this age, almost to the point of being invisible. I managed to avoid her wrath most of the time, but twice she noticed me. Once, for a reason I never understood, a girl told her that I had my eyes open during nap time. Every day after lunch we were to pull out our mats, lie on the floor, and sleep for half an hour while the teacher left us alone. No one knew where she went or why. For her it was not enough that we lay still, she wanted us to sleep, and expected us to do so on command. She would appoint one person to be the class snitch while she was gone, and whoever she chose got to sit at the teacher’s desk like a god and look out over everyone else sprawled facedown on the floor. The chosen person was always a girl—never a boy.

So one day after lunch I was on the floor as usual, breathing dust and hoping for no spiders. The teacher came back half an hour later and asked the girl at her desk for the daily report—who had and had not been sleeping. The girl pointed straight at me and said, “His eyes were open.”

I had not stirred from my mat or made a sound, yet this teacher made me stand before the class as she hit my hands with a ruler. It hurt my hands, true enough, and then there was the shame of having this done in front of the entire class, but the most frightening and traumatic part was the vengeance and hatred with which she carried it out. She was wild and furious, gritting her teeth and grunting with each smack of the accursed ruler. The one other time she noticed me I can’t remember what, if anything, I had done wrong. I do remember the punishment, though, and this time I was not alone. Once again I had to stand before the entire class, this time along with two other boys, and hold a stack of books over my head for half an hour. All three of us stood with our arms straight up in the air, shaking with effort as we held a stack of books aloft. During the entire punishment she howled at us in a rage, saying things like “You’re going to learn that I’m not playing a game with you!”

So much for kindergarten.

*  *  *

A
couple of strange incidents occurred during this period of my life, both of which I remember vividly, but neither of which I can explain. The first happened while I was still living in the Mayfair apartments.

One evening as dusk approached, my mother told me not to leave the walkway right in front of our apartment door. Being the undisciplined heathen that I was, I beat a hasty departure the moment she was out of sight. I ran around to the very back of the complex, where a huge mound of sand was located, and proceeded to dig a hole with my bare hands. This was one of my favorite activities, in which I invested a huge amount of time as a child. I would get out of bed in the morning, have a bowl of cereal for breakfast, lick the spoon clean, and carry it outside with me. I spent the day digging, nonstop. The front yard looked like a nightmare, and my mother would always step out on the front porch and screech, “Boy, you fill in them holes ’fore somebody breaks an ankle.”

I looked up from my digging that evening only to realize it had become completely dark. I could see the streetlights on in the distance, and the night was deathly silent. No crickets chirping, people talking, or cars driving by. Nothing but the silence that comes once the movie is over and the screen goes blank. Knowing that I was now officially in trouble, I dusted myself off and started to make my way back to our apartment.

As I walked home I had to pass a place where two sections of the building came together to form a corner. The last time I had noticed this corner the apartment there was empty. Now it was dark, but the front door was open.

The inside of the apartment was as void of illumination as some sort of vacuum. Standing in the doorway, propped against the frame with his arms folded across his chest, was a man in black pants and no shirt. He had black shoulder-length hair and wore a shit-eating grin. His eyes followed my progress as I passed, until I stood right in front of him. “Where you goin’, boy?” he asked in a way that said he was amused, but didn’t really expect an answer. I said nothing, just stood looking up at him. “Your mamma’s looking for you. You know you’re going to get a whipping.”

After a moment I continued on my way. When I encountered my mother, she had a switch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I did indeed receive a whipping.

I didn’t think about this incident again until a day or so before I was arrested and put on trial for murder. I was eighteen years old, and the cops had been harassing me nonstop for weeks. My mother asked me one day after lunch, “Why don’t you take your shirt off and go in the backyard so I can take pictures? That way, if the cops beat you we’ll have some before-and-after photos.” Nodding my head, I made a trip to the bathroom, where I took my shirt off. When I looked in the mirror over the sink, it hit me that I looked exactly like the man I’d seen all those years before in the dark apartment.

When I was seven or eight, I saw a man shot in the head. We had moved recently to a two-family house in Memphis. One summer afternoon we left the front door open so a breeze could blow through the house. I was standing right at the threshold looking out at my father, who was standing in the front yard. His hands were in his pockets and he was staring at the ground but not really seeing it. I’d been watching him for a good amount of time and he’d never blinked even once. In his mind he was a million miles away, doing who-knows-what. He did this quite often, but it was different this time. Like an omen.

We heard a small, distant-sounding popping noise, nothing like the gunfire on television. My father later said he first thought it was a car backfiring on the next block. We both looked up at the same time to see a man crossing the street, coming toward us. His hands were holding his head and he was covered in blood.

My father turned toward me and started barking like a Marine drill instructor—“Go! Go! Go! Move your ass!” I retreated into the house with my father right behind me. No sooner had he closed and locked the door than the man hit it running full force. There was a tremendous impact, then nothing. All was quiet. My father stood looking at the door while my mother ran into the room with a scared but questioning look on her face. When he told her what had happened, they stood around trying to figure out what to do next.

We didn’t have a phone, so it was decided that my mother would run out the back door and over to the neighbors’ house where she would ask to use theirs. The only problem was that the neighbors wouldn’t answer the door. My mother stood on the porch hammering and yelling, “We need help! Please let me use your phone!” It was all to no avail, as the neighbors refused to respond. After the cops arrived, the neighbors said it was because they thought my mother had shot my father and was trying to get in to them.

In the meantime, the man smeared blood everywhere. By the time the cops showed up with an ambulance, the man had collapsed on our steps. There were bloody handprints all over the front door and all over our white station wagon. The ambulance drove away with the man in the back while the cops questioned my mom and dad. My paternal grandmother and grandfather, Doris and Ed Hutchison, arrived to take my sister and me away for the night, and tried to keep us from seeing as much of the mess as possible.

My young mind bounced back from the incident without a mark on it. The next day I was able to go back to playing childhood games with all the other kids. There was zero lasting trauma. However, if I were to undergo the exact same experience at my present age I would need counseling for the rest of my life. The nightmares would rob me of precious sleep, and my nerves would be frazzled.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when I began to lose my flexibility, my ability to bounce back from an unsettling incident; I can only look back and see that it’s gone. Going on trial for a crime I didn’t commit screwed me up a bit, no doubt. But I survived it intact, more or less. Don’t get me wrong—my heart, soul, body, and mind all have scars that will never properly heal. Still, I survived. I’m not so sure I could do that if the whole thing had happened to me later in life. I believe it would have been entirely possible for me to drop dead of shock and trauma right in the courtroom.

If I hadn’t been sent to prison at such a young age there’s no way I could ever have adapted to it. Prison is bad enough, but it’s a million times worse when you know you did nothing to be here for. That fact magnifies and amplifies the shock and trauma. As it is, I grew up in this place. Perhaps that’s what robbed me of my inner flexibility.

I no longer approach each situation in life with an open heart, ready to learn. Instead I come like a wary old man scared of being knocked on his ass again. An old man knows that at his age those bruises don’t heal as quickly as they used to. I used to learn as a youth because I was curious. I didn’t necessarily even think about learning; it was more like being one of those baby animals you see on the nature shows. They almost learn by accident, just from being wide-eyed and playful. Now I hoard knowledge out of fear. I figure the more I know, the more I’ll be able to control a situation and keep from getting hurt again.

*  *  *

I
hate it. I hate the signs and symptoms of age I see more and more in myself as each day passes. I’m now the same age that Hank Williams was when he died. Our situations and circumstances made us both old before our time. Don’t think me cynical, though. I believe it to be wholly reversible. I believe love can fix damn near anything. Love and iced tea. I just need larger doses of both than I can get in here. Perhaps soon someone will correct this injustice and rescue me from this nightmare. Until then I have no choice but to struggle on as I have been. “Saint Raymond Nonnatus, hear my prayer . . .”