Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [345]
She thought Rockefeller was shooting the fish in the barrel that day.
She worked with the Alliance to End Repression.
Then the company moved her husband to Utah. Out in Salt Lake, the ACLU was the only game in town. Julie wanted to start another Alliance to End Repression, but the energy was no longer there. Utah depressed her. She felt that she and her husband were living in a deteriorated relationship, and her young son, ripped from his native soil at the age of twelve, was not happy. It just about took Julie down. She became so occupied with her son's problems that she felt defanged on social issues.
She thought she was in an extremely right-wing place. The Church and State were deeply entangled. Julie went to visit the opening of the Legislature and here was this trio of sour-faced old men sitting up front. They did the opening prayer. She was there that day to testify against capital punishment, and the chairman of the committee, a Mormon, said that as long as he had to listen to the Episcopalian point of view, he would like to read something to close the meeting, and opened a red-bound book and quoted Brigham Young.
Those who shed blood must pay in blood. It chilled her. The Church was the State. She would have liked to tell that chairman, we live in a world of fallible people where prosecutors decide whether the charge is second-or first-degree murder and nobody knows who or what is influencing the prosecutor. They don't have the right to take an individual's life under the protective coloration of the law.
She might have a problem with her child, and her marriage was dead, and she loved the pleasures of seclusion, and the nourishments of reading. God, she loved to read the way others would insist on three meals a day, but when the call came from Shirley Pedler to help in organizing the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty, she knew she would go out in the world again with her freaky blond hair, blond to everyone's disbelief-at the age of fifty-four, go out in her denims and chin-length-hanging-down-straight vanilla hair to that Salt Lake world where nobody would ever make the mistake of thinking she was a native Utah lady inasmuch as Utah was the Beehive State. The girls went big for vertical hair-dos, pure monuments to shellac.
So she went to the meeting for a Coalition Against the Death Penalty and twenty people showed up to see what they could do about convincing Gary Gilmore that he was 100 percent wrong in wanting the State to shuffle him off this mortal coil. The Coalition would seek to get the idea across that the State should not be able to kill anybody. Gilmore was a sensitive artist, but he was also, thought Julie Jacoby, acting like a very selfish man.
Shirley Pedler had been intending to organize the meeting herself, but came down with a terrific case of semi-pneumonia, so Julie discovered a fellow named Bill Hoyle from the Socialist Workers' Party had been handed the bill. He was there, he said, to do the legwork. There was a pastor from the United Church of Christ, the Reverend Donald Proctor, and the Reverend John P. Adams from the United Methodist Church who was on the Board of the National Coalition Against Capital Punishment. They discussed what sort of action they should take.
Don Proctor had ideas that Julie thought were something Alinsky-esque. He wanted a highly visible rally, a get-together, say, in the center of a busy shopping mall on a Saturday.
No one was comfortable with that. For one thing, you had to get permission to go on private property. They finally decided to have a mass meeting in a hall prior to January 17, and then a vigil on the prison grounds all through the night before the execution. More ministers might turn out then. Right now was Christmas week, a time of heavy business for reverends.
In the meantime, they had $100 in working funds contributed by the Society of Friends. Bill Hoyle said he'd get some flyers printed and they could count on buttons from the Fellowship of Reconciliation