Society + Culture,

The Following article was written on November 29, MWC

A Monologue
By WALTER A. DAVIS

Unless Governor Schwarzenegger grants clemency Tookie Williams will be executed at San Quentin on December 13th. (Those who do not know about Williams and his work should consult www.tookie.com. And for a petition on his behalf and other actions see www.savetookie.org.) One reason arguments for clemency based on rehabilitation so often fall on deaf ears is our lack of knowledge of what it is like to live on death row and what happens existentially to human beings in that situation. (I'm hopeful that I can find some way to get this essay into Governor Schwarzenegger's hands. And any help from readers will be appreciated. The holiday season begins: wouldn't it be wonderful if this year some of it were about peace on earth and good will toward all human beings?)

The following essay takes the form of a dramatic monologue. It is based on two meetings I had in May of 2005 with a man who's been on death row in San Quentin for the past 15 years. The meetings (one lasting 75 minutes; the other two hours) were face to face in booths over a telephone with a plexi-glass partition between us. I was not permitted to take either pencil and paper or a tape recorder to the meetings. Indeed, had the authorities known I planned to write this work I would not have been permitted inside San Quentin. Additionally, I met with the lawyer who represented the inmate in the appeals process for 10 years, a private investigator who does field work in connection with the appeals process, and an attorney who has done extensive work documenting conditions within California's prisons. I also read the court transcripts of the inmate's original trial and penalty phase trial as well as a number of secondary sources on prison life. The inmate's appeal of the death sentence is now at the Federal level. For that reason I have been advised by attorneys not to use his name and to take other steps to disguise his identity. Within the terms of that restriction what follows is a factually complete document. There are, of course, over 600 inmates currently on death row in San Quentin.

Stage Direction. The following chronology will appear on the screen center stage as lights rise. The text will run like a scroll on that screen. At end screen will rise to reveal the condemned man who is sitting behind a Plexiglas window with a phone in his hand.

1936-Both parents born. During childhood mother of inmate was physically abused by her mother who would tie her up and leave her in basement for long periods of time. Her father sexually molested her beginning at age 11.
Inmate's father grew up in impoverished and abusive alcoholic family. At age 7 he was sodomized by a man who then shared him sexually with other men until he was 12.

1962 ­ Inmate born. Has older brother and sister, born respectively in 1960 and 1961.

1964-Inmate's mother makes two attempts to drown him. Brother also attempts to smother him in crib.

1965-Inmate swallows bottle of baby aspirin and goes into convulsions.

1967-Inmate prescribed Ritalin.

1969-Inmate begins suffering grand mal seizures.

1973-Inmate begins sniffing glue.

1979-- Inmate first arrested. For burglary involving assault on elderly couple.

1980-Inmate and friend rape and sodomize a 13 year old girl. Inmate then takes her to his home and repeats these acts. Then gives girl a bath. Then puts bag over her head and pushes her head under water. Convicted of a number of violent sexual offences. Given indeterminate sentence at Vacaville.

Dec. 18, 1986-Paroled from Vacaville.

February 26, 1987-Following confrontation with 19 year old daughter of father's live-in girlfriend, inmate ingests "speed" (metamphetamine) at home of friend, Carla James. Later, driving Carla's friend Denise home, inmate pulls off road and forces her to strip. Later that night and in the following days inmate makes sporadic attempts to get his parole revoked.

March 2, 1987-Inmate met Rosalie Romans in Wild Peacock Bar in Barstow.

March 3, 1987, 9:30 a.m. ­Body of Rosalie Romans found near local beach.

February 14, 1987 Inmate found guilty of first degree murder with special circumstances (rape committed during murder).

May 1, 1987-Inmate given death sentence.

2005-Having exhausted State appeals, inmates appeal of death sentence is now at the Federal level.

Stage Direction: After the screen rises a spotlight hits the face of the condemned man. The moment it hits his face he begins speaking.

I fell off the edge of the world. That's what it felt like, the moment the bars clanged shut. My life over. Nothing now but waiting, without hope, for something that'll come someday, it doesn't matter when, because time is nothing now but this wall in front of me and her eyes coming out of it, following me all day, closest at night when I fight to keep mine open against sleep, knowing it will come again the way it does whenever I sleep, from as long as I can remember : I see myself under water looking up at Mother's face all twisted, her hands like claws, forcing me down, my eyes pleading, dying- then breaking the surface gasping in a shriek toward air. Only now it's other eyes I meet in dreams, and not darting wildly about but how they got just before I felt her body stiffen and release itself. She wasn't looking at me anymore but at it as it moved down upon her. Death. What it's like right before the end when there's nothing but death and consciousness arrested and forever alone looks into the brute finality of it. Everything goes into the eyes then-into the impossible No. They're looking at me that way now: coming at me out of sleep, pursuing me down every corridor of sleep-until I wake screaming but with no sound coming out of my mouth, only the knowing, that have to begin again, trembling in the cold of night, see it all again, live it all again, my life, but like a film running backwards, faster and faster, until all the images loop into one another and only one remains-- her eyes, looking at me, asking me why

Even when I was a kid, I always wanted to understand why I was so agitated all the time and why I did the things I did. Remorse too. I always felt it right away. Hell remorse was part of the agitation spasming me from one deed to another. This was different. I was calm, for the first time in my life, if you can call it that, with something cold and unmoving in the center of me where before there'd been the blind effort to outrun what was always out ahead of me-waiting. But now there was no escape, no matter how often I told her how sorry I was. She knew better, knew that when death comes nothing remains of the fitful fever we call life. Nothing but what must have rushed through her in those last few seconds, her whole life in its furious passageThe same passage I repeat every night, drawing across time what she saw in an instant.

Life on the Row was different when I first got here. After they collected the trays from breakfast they'd open the cell doors so we could come and go almost like we were free, walk down the hall to a day room where there were tables with chess boards and chairs in semi-circles so men could sit and smoke and talk. That's how I got to know some of the older guys. I can't remember their names or even their faces because then I looked at everything with fish-eyes that registered nothing. But what they said reverberated in some empty place inside me, about how there was nothing for a man in here but the journey and the books I should read to get started.

It's funny, I started doing burglaries, when I was 12, but whenever I was in a house that had a Library this strange feeling would come over me looking at the books-that they were what I really wanted to steal, all of themIf there were just some quiet place where I could go and be alone and read I'd stop then, though my ears kept listening, run my fingers slowly across some of the titles, whispering them and the author's names, take one down and turn a page or two, getting that empty feeling in the pit of my stomach and something dreamy coming over me like Momma when she'd be cooking popcorn and we'd find her over in a corner or in the bedroom staring at the wall with the smell of burnt popcorn everywhere

That's how I got caught. I must have been standing there I don't know how long, reading page after page. It was like I was reading something that had been written only for me. Turning each page was like turning back layers of myself. Reading about how when it was children who were made to suffer cruelty, to see God's purpose in that offended everything decent in us. And how there's a hell in the heart of every man-- and that's where crime beginsI couldn't stop, not even to turn back and get the Title or the Author's name, and that's how I lost itThough I've been searching for it ever since, in every book I've read, hoping to find it again, knowing that if I could find that book and read those pages again it'd be for me something like what you call peace.

He was on me before I heard a thing, like a bear, forcing me into a corner, clawing at my pants. That must be how he got my wallet and ID. I brought the book down on his head, once, twice, felt his arms go limp and sprung free. There was just her then, a red faced old woman cackling and hopping in front of me like it was her turn and she was going to take a stab at tackling me too. I moved her to the side. Almost gentle. But she went down right away, crumbled in upon herself, like she was all straw inside. I ran-- knowing the fucking cops would be waiting for me when I got home.

A book has to pass a pretty stiff test to make it in here. The ones that do is where you can see the writing comes out of an urgency, where a life is at stake and every page a fight with something that can destroy you. Like in Melville and Native Son, Shakespeare in the tragedies, and Sophocles too, Beckett, Mailer sometimes, Freud and Sartre. Almost anything in Philosophy because there's something about it that's different like Socrates said, it's about learning to die and the only thing worthwhile then is thought that is clean and hard.

Soon I was reading all the time-the way I'd always wanted to-all day, one book after another, each book leading into another, forming an iron chain in pursuit of a single goal. Christ, sometimes whole days went by and I never left the cell, filling the yellow pads with notes, questions, quotes I had to write down to memorize later so I could make them a permanent part of the thing I was trying to create in myself. I was so caught up in it that soon I didn't have to work to screen out the noise-that din of despair that's the one constant here. I was living in the hush of a silence that drowned out everything else. I lived that way for 6 years, 6 timeless years, reading, questioning, teaching myself how to think, with everything driven by the one necessity.

Because I had it all now, all the pieces that made up my life, but strewn about the way chess-men lay on a board after the game is over, or pieces of a giant jig-saw puzzle But if I could fit it together I'd see myself for the first time in a mirror and not how my life had been, one long spasm trying to outrun something I never forgot. Not memory the way it is for you, but something deeper, something I couldn't forget because I felt it moving in me all the time, at school, in church, whenever things got quiet and I could hear myself breathingThere'd be this pop, right in the pit of the stomach and I'd feel all the air go out of me. As if life is breath like Homer says, and mine had gone leaving nothing but the struggle to hide the panic building inside meBecause I could see it now -- flashing in front of me-a blanket pressed down over my face, my mother's hands holding me down under the water, my eyes looking up at her, pleading, the whole thing whirling around inside me--until there was nothing but rage, blind rage, to explode out of myself-- as if bringing my fist down upon the world was the only way I could breathe.