The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [60]
Yes, I know you may be telling yourself: here is one more of those many lonely ladies who like to cultivate convicts, and who visit or correspond with prisoners, especially those condemned to die, and play upon the men’s desperate need for sympathy in order to gratify their own wish for an imaginative relationship safe from entanglement, safe from physical contact, and above all safe from permanence. Some of these women see themselves as substitute mothers or nurses or sisters, and they think they are purely altruistic and they glory in their charity, while other women—widows, spinsters, the jilted and the frustrated—who have had unpleasant experiences with men who were free to touch them and free to hurt them, are craving a liaison which now permits them to have the upper hand, to be free to say no, free to manage and schedule every aspect of the association, and free to quit at any moment.
Please believe that I have never before written to a prisoner…or, for that matter, written a letter as long as this one to anybody. And please believe that my only interest in you is a deep certainty of your innocence, and a consuming desire to prove it.
When I first knew you, I was disposed to hate you. Do you remember our first meeting? We were both members of the “audience” at an execution. Before I was permitted to enter that room, I was lectured by Mr. Harris Burdell, the warden, who only with great reluctance had acceded to the request of my employer, Mr. Thomas Fletcher, managing editor of the Arkansas Gazette, that I be allowed to make a drawing of the condemned man, a young Negro. Mr. Burdell warned me that I would be sitting next to you, and he told me the crimes of which you had been accused and convicted and for which you had been sentenced to die. I suppose that Mr. Burdell was simply trying to frighten me, having failed to dissuade me from experiencing the horrors of the execution itself. But I was not afraid of you, because I despised you so intensely. The Gazette had carried a story of your original trial, and although the details had struck me as a ludicrous miscarriage of rustic backwoods justice, there was no mistaking the nature of the offense itself: a girl of only thirteen brutally abused and raped. Mr. Burdell personally checked my hair to make sure that I was not wearing a long hatpin with which I might stab your heart or put out your eyes. But I had not even seen you! When you were led into the room and given your seat beside me, I steeled myself to behold in your eyes the corruption and savagery which would have permitted you to commit such an abomination, and thus I was greatly surprised to detect such gentleness, such goodness, and such compassion as would preclude your hurting anyone, let alone a thirteen-year-old girl.
And you remember, I’m sure, how you inveighed against that butcher of an executioner, Mr. Irvin Bobo, when the first charge of electricity failed to remove the poor Negro from this world. You called upon God to damn Mr. Bobo, and although I had the feeling that you were spontaneously invoking God without any real belief in Him, you conveyed exactly the words that I would have spoken myself if I had not temporarily closed myself off from all feeling.
Often at night when I am trying to fall asleep I hear your voice shouting those words. And when you yourself sat down in the chair and the warden lifted his hand and Mr. Bobo placed his hand upon the switch, I said aloud, “Goddamn you, Bobo, turn up the juice and leave it on!”
But you were spared! Although you weren’t pardoned or your sentence commuted, you were not murdered. I have learned as much as I can about the reprieve: I’ve talked to Mr. Cobb (hello again, Farrell!), I’ve talked to Judge J.V. Bourland and Judge Jesse Hart; I’ve even had a short audience with His Excellency George W. Hays Himself (although the governor,