George T. Wilkerson     2021

The Death Row Question

Think of it this way: If you could tell the world

one thing about Death Row, what would it be?

                                       -Dr. Robert Johnson

Robert Johnson and I were brainstorming an essay about the realms of Death Row and Poetry– and the sharp sparks they might create when banged together.

Calls from my cellblock’s stainless-steel payphone automatically terminate in fifteen minutes, and the digital guard had sounded the sixty-second-left alert. That’s when Professor Johnson hit me with the question: If you could tell world one thing about Death Row, what would it be? It’s been skittering around in my gut ever since.

In fact, I’ve been trying to answer the question since December 21, 2006, the day a jury sentenced me to Death. Friends and family, penpals, preachers, lawyers— every outsider I’ve interacted with, at length, since coming to Death Row has asked me a variation of that question. But, even prior to my arrival, before I’d heard the question, I grappled with its answer.

As a pretrial detainee I was housed with many other men charged with homicide. Four of my podmates were former Death Row prisoners, now waiting to be resentenced or retried, since they’d won their appeals. One of them had been on Death Row about ten years, the others closer to twenty. Before knowing where they’d been or how long, I could sense something alien about them compared to the rest of us. It went beyond the experience of even the veteran cons who’d weathered at least as much time in Regular Population. The four men carried an otherness in their eyes similar to battle-stained soldiers fresh from war. They had seen and felt things the rest of us had not. At the same time, they brought to mind the wearied demeanor of disaster survivors as they studied the shambles of their homes.

Though I was facing the Death Penalty if convicted, I decided not to ask the men about Death Row. I was hoping I’d never have to find out.

 The last time I had seen my tiny Korean mom was during my trial’s sentencing phase, when she took the stand (against my pleas) to beg for my life. She had to be escorted out the courtroom, a broken woman unable to walk on her own. It took nearly a year for her to find the strength to write me, asking for a visitor’s application. A few months later she came to see me, thinking we had contact-visits. She looked forward to hugging the son who most reminded her of herself.

Upon stepping into the cramped visitation booth, she recoiled when she saw the floor-to-ceiling cinderblock wall that had a six-inch-tall, two-foot-wide strip of dirty, graffiti-scratched plexiglass at hip level: our visitation interface. I was on the other side.

She grabbed her heart and collapsed onto the stool, sobbing wretchedly while pounding the glass wailing, “My baby my baby!” over and over again. Her torment sounded tinny after being filtered by the perforated-metal plate we had to speak through. Behind it was corrugated steel to block and trap contraband, then another perforated-metal plate welded on my side.

After about five minutes, she seemed wilted and exhausted. I zeroed-in on her wet hand as she splayed it against the glass. Hiccuping, she strained to ask, “My… baby… how is it… for you… back there?” Her perfume crept through the contraband trap, muffled to a whisper with her words.

It was the first time someone directly asked me a version of the question. Feeling spotlighted by my mom’s concern, I found myself face-to-face with my death sentence.

My jaw worked soundlessly; no words came out. I’d been here more than a year, crashing through the wilderness of prison life, meeting my basic needs and the demands of survival in a hostile environment. Eating, sleeping, navigating the Convict Code. I sensed my mom was asking more than just about the stale chow hall grum, the hardness of my bunk, or the bruises on my knuckles. Yet, I couldn’t see past the raw physicality of my surroundings, and I was unwilling to chronicle the litany of grittiness that Death Row consists of. It would only cause her more pain, I reasoned. It was bad enough we were on opposite sides of a plexiglass window at the edge of the known universe.

Thus, all I could do was drop my gaze and shrug around a mouthful of tears.

It is common for death row prisoners to receive unsolicited mail from churches, anti-Death Penalty support groups, compassionate strangers offering acceptance and friendship. By 2013 (seven years into my bid) I’d received dozens and dozens of such letters, some of which I responded to, accepting friendship. From my letters, some said, they’d never imagine I was on Death Row because I’d discuss anything but my incarceration. But, invariably, as we corresponded, they would ask the question, usually taking the form, “Will you tell me what a typical day is like for you in there?”

I always dreaded the question because I felt unable to answer it adequately, but also because I feared it would make me seem petty and selfish to basically complain about the mundane daily sufferings. I assumed Society in general, represented by the jury that sentenced me, felt I deserved whatever I got and that I had absolutely no right to complain, ever, about anything, no matter what.

The year 2013 signifies a turning point in my thinking and ability to communicate my experiences. I had a penpal named Gigi, who I’d been writing about a year. As we grew closer, she wanted to know more about my life “inside,” in more than one sense. She said, “How can I truly empathize with you, let alone sympathize, if you won’t share the details of your life with me, if you won’t tell me how you feel? You say you don’t want to seem petty or selfish but guess what? All of us are petty and selfish at times, and right now you’re being a selfish asshole because you don’t hesitate to pry into my life, and I spend hours describing the boring, the ugly, the painful parts. So how can you refuse to share yours?! Are we friends or not? I ask about your life because I care, dammit!...”

It had not occurred to me that for people to truly know who I am today, since I claim to be a different person from the boy who was arrested many years ago, the details of my daily life provided them the raw materials they needed. I realized the meaning of “sharing your life” entailed describing my inner and outer world. To refuse friends and family access to my daily grind is to rebuff their love. Where I called myself sparing them, I was actually hurting them.

Around the time Gigi demanded I at least try to answer her questions, the Mental Health Department here at Central Prison offered Death Row prisoners the chance to participate in a Creative Writing class. It was meant to be therapeutic, helping us to process our experiences by teaching us how to explore them through writing. It was structured so that we’d spend a few weeks in each workshop: essay, poetry, journalism, and so on.

As I began trying to describe my experiences I felt something was missing, like the difference between a doll and a real child. I could create an likeness, but they lacked the spark of life. My writing was mechanical, my descriptions dry. I couldn’t get inside my own head or heart. I was an outsider to my own stories.

Then poetry taught me how to breathe.

The instructor was a quirky middle-aged woman with untamable curly hair and enthusiasm. For our first poetry session she brought several gallon-sized resealable plastic bags filled with ransom letter ingredients: individual words cut out from magazines. She dumped them into fist-sized mounds on our tables, distributed glue sticks and posterboard, and told us we had ten minutes to “write” a poem using only the words piled before us.

It took me half the time to pick my words, then I scrambled to swipe the glue stick onto the backs of those tiny word-slivers and stick them onto the posterboard. It looked like I had confetti glued all over my hands. Finally, after everybody teased me, someone said “Hey, Genius, it works better if you smear the glue on the poster, then drop your words on top…”

He was right, it did work better. But now, with thirty seconds left, I discovered that one of my key words had disappeared! I can’t remember what the poem was about, but I’ll never forget my missing word was “sad”. I was frantic, scattering piles of words as I dug through them. I saw the backside of a word; it was just a solid blue color. I thought, “Blue equals sad, I’ll use that!”

In that moment, something inside me clicked into place. Necessity had forced me to think in nonlinear terms, to find a way to communicate indirectly because sometimes words fail. While words can describe life, sometimes life needs to speak for itself. Not everything can be neatly explained in a straightforward fashion. Where prose let me take readers from Point A to Point B, like railroad tracks, poetry let me move vertically, let me communicate three-dimensionally, to stack layers of meaning and create moments where “you just had to be there” to understand. As a result, I felt that poetry was much more flexible and versatile and dynamic, and could help me to share my experiences more effectively. So, between my letters to Gigi, the writing class assignments, and my newfound passion for poetry, I finally began answering the question.

Perhaps it seeped in slowly until I was so intensified by it I could concentrate on nothing else. While there was no exact moment the answer to the question came to me, I know it was directly related to the writing class. Remember, we had a stream of volunteers coming into the prison to facilitate our writing class, which expanded into other therapeutic classes for the next five years (Art Therapy, Anger Management, Meditation Therapy), until the prison remembered Death Row prisoners “are not here to be rehabilitated” and shut off all access for us. However, for the few glorious years we received therapy, a lot of outsiders came in. They were always visibly jumpy, nervous to be trapped in a room with twenty men convicted of murder (actual innocence or guilt is irrelevant at this point). I sympathized, feeling like I could understand their anxiety around us.

But I wondered, why was it understandable?

Then it hit me: Stereotypes. Hollywood depictions of prisoners, sensational news coverage of gruesome murders, ignorance, imagination— these altogether thread together into a one-dimensional conception of what ALL Death Row prisoners must be like. They demonize us. I get it. I mean, before I did research I didn’t know that one in ten prisoners is totally innocent. I didn’t know that with Capital trials lying witnesses, misbehaving prosecutors who hide evidence, overeager cops who bully suspects into confessing falsely, and many other wrongs are so common that five out of seven people who get sentenced to death ultimately have their sentence thrown out on appeal. None of us knew, until after we got here and saw guys leaving, alive.

Even we Death Row prisoners stereotyped each other. When I first arrived here, I too was jumpy and anxious, thinking, “Okay, Georgie, get ready to fight. You’re going into a jungle. These are the worst of the worst, the most vicious, brutal, savage animals and monsters in the prison system.” In my mind it was simple math.

As soon as I started interacting with the men here, it was clear I’d miscalculated. No doubt, there are some psychopaths here, but they are the minority. The rest are just men. Within minutes one guy brought me a box of Top tobacco, so I could roll myself some cigarettes, calm my nerves. Another man brought a bag of goodies, saying, “We received our Christmas packages a few days ago, and you won’t be able to order one until next year, so I thought you might like some snacks.” They loved sports and cars, had photos of their wives and kids taped onto their cell’s walls. They bragged about how good they were at, well, everything, told raunchy jokes, played poker and got pizzed when they lost.

In short, they were regular guys (besides the fact of where we were).

Many of our class volunteers confessed they too had come in with misconceptions. I remember at one end-of-semester celebration, over coffee and cookies, a speech class volunteer spoke up. A dirty-blond college student and psychology intern, she said, “I think I owe you guys an apology. Back when I started coming in here, I was terrified. I expected… I don’t know… Not this, not you. I feel safer in here with you than I do pumping gas— it’s crazy out there! I feel like you guys would protect us if anyone were to try to hurt us in here…” She tried not to cry, and the other volunteers nodded. Some of us prisoners were touched so we fought back tears too. Through interacting with us, hearing our stories and poetry, laughing and joking (and, at times, crying) with us, they saw we were just men. Not angels, but not demons either. Just men.

In fact, one such volunteer was so transformed by the experience, she decided to tell her story publicly, wanting to share our stories in hopes of replicating the experience in the broader public. Thus, she collaborated with four of us on Death Row and we coauthored Crimson Letters (Black Rose Writing, 2020), seeking to answer the question. If we could tell the world one thing about Death Row, it would be that we are human.

 Though Crimson Letters answers the question, it’s not where the story ends. I met Dr. Johnson while calling in to book promotion events. He teaches university-level criminal justice courses, but himself is a writer and poet and activist. He founded BleakHouse Publishing, a nonprofit geared toward using creative works or original scholarship to educate the public on pressing issues affecting the criminal justice system and larger society. Knowing professor Johnson had read Crimson Letters, when he asked me the question in August 2021, I immediately inferred he was asking me to approach the answer from a new angle.

For ideas, I read books of poetry about prison and by prisoners, and a couple academic articles analyzing the creative writings of prisoners to reveal what those writings can contribute to the Big Picture understanding of incarceration.

In many ways I felt like what I read answered the question well enough. After all, Death Row is just another wing inside a huge prison, and a cell is a cell is a cell. Right? Those writings captured the universals of prison life, of doing time, of scraping tally marks on concrete walls, of men shanked in shower stalls and guards breaking inmate bones with steel batons. I thought, “What can I possibly add to what is already circulating in the aether?”

I shared my thoughts and reading material with Frost, an athletic brother on the pod next door who the year before had felt the thunderclap of love when he started writing and reading poetry. Though relatively new to writing, at 32, he was by nature very observant, analytical, introspective, and could express himself coherently. His inner life was so rich, I could sense numerous books of unwritten poetry waiting in line to come out of him. After he digested the material, when the guard booth announced, Med Call! and opened our pod doors, we slipped into the hall for the five minutes before they reshut our doors.

Usually very laid back, he surprised me by how animated he became, his neat dreadlocks swaying and bouncing. “Don’t get me wrong, I agree that what we read captured the prison experience, but…” he said, sighing in what seemed to be frustration. He took a calming breath and continued, “...but this stuff doesn’t really cover Death Row— all this!” He waved his hands around to encapsulate our world, then placed them like parenthesis on either side of his head saying, “—or this. There’s lots of blanks that need to be filled in.”

I asked him if he could give me a couple of examples. Right away, he said, “Like executions. Now, they haven’t had any since I’ve been here, but I’m kind of new compared to these other guys around here. I can’t speak on that aspect but they can. They had to watch twenty or thirty of their friends get carried to the execution chamber. That’s got to do something to your head, right?”

He went on to list several other characteristics of Death Row until our pneumatic pod doors hissed, prompting us to bump fists and spring into our pods before the doors banged shut.

I had spent the last eight years actively trying to answer the question, spiraling around it with my words, but I had concentrated on only one answer: we are human. I’d operated on the principle that before people would care about the particulars of the environment, they’d have to first acknowledge we were human beings. I had written about childhood abuses, my dad’s schizophrenia, the racism I experienced being bi-racial, our home burning down days after Christmas when I was 6. I’d written about my suicide attempt in the jail, watching two men on my pod devoured by cancer, the Convict Code. But, I realized, very little about Death Row itself.

And yet, in the two weeks on the task, my friend Frost had intuitively reframed the question, which I deduced from his answers:

What makes serving time under a death sentence distinct, as opposed to serving time in Regular Population— especially with a release date?

It was self-evident to him that whether guilty or innocent, an anxious decades’-long wait to be executed had to tan one’s soul as surely as a desert sun would slow-roast any flesh laid bare beneath it for so long. That we are human is a given; he’d leapt right over that hurdle.

I had been trying to cinch my words tightly around an answer that was way too small given the enormity of this experience. I, alone, did not have the answer. The answer needed to be a collective effort. So, as I went person to person around my pod, I explained my goal and surveyed the men with that single new question about what makes Death Row time distinct. Most have been here at least twenty years, some closer to forty. I was newish, with “only” fourteen. Almost all had served time in Regular Population, giving them something to compare with.

Evidently, they’d been waiting decades for this journalistic opportunity, so quick and eager were their responses. At dinner I sat with two men, and while the first answered my question, the other kept shifting around on his seat like he had to piss. He was pressing his lips together mightily, holding back his answer, trying not to interrupt the first guy who was droning on and on. As soon as he finished answering, as I swivelled my attention to the second guy, the front of his answer streamed out in one long word, “IfeellikeI’minlimbobecausemycaseisinappeals.” He went on to describe a Schrodinger’s paradox, where he was neither dead nor alive, but in a state of suspended animation. Afterward, his body relaxed in relief.

As I compiled answers my brain hummed and tingled, electricity firing new pathways of understanding. I went around the pod discussing answers, expanding and elaborating. Altogether, each feature became a synthesis of multiple answers from various men, its origins untraceable to a single individual. We created a collective mosaic of life on Death Row. I was merely the note-taker, and what stood out to me was that guys were making clear connections between the outer environment and its psychological impact. Mostly, what makes Death Row distinct from serving time with a release date is the multifaceted mindfuck it gives you.

But no single feature, quality, or characteristic can capture what that’s like. Rather, it’s the cumulative effect of a couple dozen things, at least. Our list describes those factors, essentially saying, “This is what being sentenced to death does to a soul”

After eating, breathing, sleeping, and staring at our list for days, I became convinced that the essay Dr. Johnson and I were planning wouldn’t work as conceived. We’d intended to read as many poems by Death Row prisoners as we could find, try to bring into light a portrait of life on Death Row. Thing is, for the last fifteen years, I’d already been reading the only three publications dedicated solely to sharing the writings (and artwork) of Death Row prisoners in America. Two are based in the U.K., and the third in the U.S. In fact, I’ve been Editor of the third since 2014, affording me access to unpublished writings.

I have read thousands of poems and essays and stories by Death Row prisoners in America. I’ve been immersed in them, saturated by them, sprung leaks because of them. Of these writings that specifically tackle the question, I’d long ago noticed they tended to be variations on a handful of themes, such as feeling forsaken, ruminating on one’s imminent execution, and unrelenting depression.

If Dr. Johnson and I used only those poems to paint our picture, it’d be monochromatic, distorted. Though not exhaustive, the collective list in my hands showed a broader range of the color spectrum of experience, and would give a fuller, more nuanced picture. I don’t actually know why so few themes have appeared in our poetry, but I have a ramshackle theory. For many, poetry is the lava that erupts from our most intense emotional states, such as Love, Fear, Hate, Despair. Those recurrent themes in our poetry center on fear, abandonment, and despair.  I believe in the healing power of writing, and perhaps it’s a coping mechanism that many of us were seeking when we discovered poetry writing. As I showed by getting stuck trying to prove my humanity for eight years, it’s easy to get preoccupied with a theme. It’s only been through our recent collective efforts that I myself escaped a self-made mental chain.

 By the time I spoke with Dr. Johnson for our weekly call, I had a new idea. After explaining everything I described in this essay about the list, I said “...so instead of writing that essay about the poetry of Death Row prisoners, what if we used these notes, this list, as the basis for the poems themselves? What if we just wrote new poems? Each element on the list would require at least one poem, some two or three. At minimum it would be a chapbook, but potentially a full collection… It might take a couple years to complete though.”

Dr. Johnson agreed to the project. Before the call ended, he added, “I think you should write an essay about it.”

“About what?” I responded.

“About that list, the question, you surveying the men…”

“Well, I supposed it would make a good preface or introduction for the book,” I said.

“Yeah, that too, but it’s a story all its own, one worth telling, and I would like to post it on BleakHouse’s website now.”

“Oh, okay. I guess I could get to work on it.” The phone went dead. I thought, damn, he sure likes giving me assignments! I figured it was the teacher in him, but also his way of challenging me to go higher. I smiled to myself as I climbed the stairs to the tier, heading to my cell to sketch this essay.

END