“Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.”
—Roxane Gay
The books were a big deal. Nobody had books on death row. They had never been allowed, and it was like someone had brought in contraband. Only six guys were allowed to join Ray in book club (too many inmates together like that made prison officials nervous), but every guy on the row was now allowed to have two books besides the Bible in his cell. Some didn’t care, but others made calls out to family and friends to let them know they could send in a book or two. It had to be a brand-new book and be sent directly from a bookstore to the prison, that was how they tried to keep contraband from being smuggled in inside books. It was like a whole new world opened up, and guys started talking about what books they liked. Some guys didn’t know how to read, others had learning difficulties and had never been to school beyond a few grades. Those guys didn’t know why they were on death row, and Ray wondered about a world that would just as soon execute a guy as treat him in a hospital or admit he wasn’t mentally capable of knowing right from wrong.
The very first book club meeting consisted of Jesse Morrison, Victor Kennedy, Larry Heath, Brian Baldwin, Ed Horsley, Henry, and Ray. They were allowed to meet in the law library, but they each had to sit at a different table. They couldn’t get up. In order to talk to everyone at once, you had to kind of swivel around in your seat so no one felt left out. If someone wanted to read something out of the book, they had to toss the book to each other and hope that the guy caught it or it landed in reach of someone because they weren’t allowed to lift their butts up off the seats. The guards seemed nervous when they walked the men to the library. They weren’t planning a riot or an escape; they were five Black guys and two white guys talking about a James Baldwin book. Perfectly normal. Nothing to see here.
When the books arrived, one of the guards had brought them to Ray’s cell and handed them to him. Two brand-new copies of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. Ray had read it in high school, but he read it again so he could pass it on to the next guy. All seven of the book club members took about a week to read the book, so with two copies being passed, they were ready for book club in a month. That became the routine for each book. Some other guys had asked their families to send them the same book, so in Ray’s section of the row—with fourteen guys upstairs and fourteen guys downstairs—almost everybody seemed to be talking about the book.
Some people hated it because it talked so much about God, and others loved it for the same reason.
A couple liked it because there were some sex scenes.
For that month, it seemed like the row was transformed to another place. They were in New York City, in Harlem. Their parents had a complicated and sordid past, and no relationship was as it seemed to be on the surface. They were in church, waiting to be saved or feeling the glory of Jesus as it racked their bodies in convulsions.
They were victims of violence.
They were caught up in a strange family dynamic where they didn’t know who their daddy was or why they hated him. They were each John, the main character, turning fourteen and trying to figure out the world and make sense of what he was feeling. They were themselves, but at the same time they were different, and the book occupied their days and nights in a new way.
They weren’t discussing legal questions, playing pretend lawyers and trying to understand a system that didn’t make sense half the time. They weren’t the scum of the earth, the lowest of the low, the forgotten and abandoned men who were sitting in a dark corner of hell waiting for their turn to walk to the electric chair. They were transported, and just as Ray could travel the world and have tea with the Queen of England, he watched these men be transported in their minds for a small chunk of time. It was a vacation from the row—and everyone was a part of book club, even before the seven official members had their first official meeting.
When they finally did have their meeting, they sat at their respective tables and felt an awkwardness that wasn’t there when they were yelling to each other through the cell bars. Larry and Henry, the only white guys, looked especially uncomfortable. The guards had locked them into the library, so they were in there by themselves. There could be no violating the rules, no getting in any fights, no foolishness whatsoever. It was strange after so many years to have a change in routine. Every day, except for when they took you to shower, things happened at the same exact time. So when there was suddenly something new, especially for the guys like Baldwin and Heath and Horsley, who had been there over a decade, it was strange and they seemed on edge.
“So, what do you think?” Ray asked everyone.
“How do we do this, exactly? What’s the format?” Jesse Morrison was used to Project Hope, so he knew how to organize a group.
Everyone looked at Ray. “Let’s just talk about whatever we read that we want to talk about. Whether we liked the book or not. What we liked about it, what we didn’t. What left an impression. How does that sound?” He looked around at everyone, and they nodded. Henry looked serious. “You know what I liked?” Ray asked. “I liked this sentence: ‘For the rebirth of the soul was perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.’”
“What you like about it?” asked Larry.
“I like that it’s about hope,” Ray said. “It’s like your soul can be reborn. No matter what you’ve done, you can be new again. It’s a hopeful sentence.”
“Yeah, but Satan is right there, pushing you every hour on the hour,” said Victor. Victor was a quiet guy. “When I drink, Satan takes over; that much I know.”
The men were quiet. Everyone knew Victor had been drunk the night he had committed the horrible crime that had gotten him a death sentence.
Heath spoke like a preacher, so Ray expected him to have something to say about the church folk in Baldwin’s book. He was strangely quiet, though.
“Everybody talking about being saved in this book,” said Henry. “I’ve never been to a church where people are falling on the ground getting saved.”
Ray laughed. “Well, you never been to a Black church, Henry. When we get out of here, I’m going to take you to a church where you will see the Holy Spirit come down and take over a person’s body so much that it looks like that person is going to fly right up and out the window of that church!” He started laughing. “You are not going to believe how people carry on in a Black church. The only problem is it’s going to last all day and into the night, so you’d best be prepared to eat before you go and be ready to sit there until the Spirit moves you. You are going to be singing and praising the Lord like you’ve never praised the Lord before!”
Henry looked around the group. “I’m not sure they’re going to want me in there—you know, not everyone is like you guys.”
“Well, we will have to show them, won’t we? We will have to show them how a man can change.”
Henry smiled at Ray and kind of shook his head and shrugged a little. They all knew the row was different. Outside of the prison, the world was still different. Ray looked around at his unlikely group, locked in a library in Holman Prison. A few of them were innocent, a few were not. It didn’t really matter.
“This is what I liked,” said Baldwin. “The part where John’s having to clean the house. Do you remember? Right in the beginning?” Baldwin unfolded a piece of paper he had brought with him. “I wrote it down while I was reading.” He straightened out the paper and cleared his throat before he began reading, softly and carefully, like he had been practicing and didn’t want to get it wrong.
Everyone was quiet when Baldwin finished.
“Are you like the guy pushing the boulder up the hill?” asked Victor after a while.
“Yeah, pretty much.” Baldwin cleared his throat. “Aren’t we all pushing the boulder? Every day, all day, week after week, year after year, we push that boulder up, and then the giant just pushes it back down. And we’re going to keep doing this until the giant crushes us to death with that boulder, or someone comes along at the top of the hill and gives us a hand. Someone tells the giant to make way, and we get to push our boulder up and over and then sit down and take a rest or something? Isn’t that just how it is?”
A few guys laughed, but Ray nodded at Baldwin. Horsley just looked down. Ray had been pushing his boulder up the hill hoping that Perhacs, or Santha, or now Alan Black was going to move the giant out of the way. Or at least hold him back so Ray could get to the top. He knew what Baldwin meant. He knew how helpless he felt. Ray felt the same way.
“That’s a good quote, Brian,” Ray said. “That’s something we can all relate to.”
The others nodded.
Horsley raised his hand to speak, and they all laughed. “What you want to say, Ed?” Ray asked.
“I like how you think the people are all a certain way, but then you find out their stories, their histories, and you see how they got to be that way.” He went on, “It seems like the more you know of their story, the more you kind of forgive them for what they do. You know? It’s kind of like that here, right? We all got a story that led to another story and led to some choices and big mistakes. All these characters make mistakes, you know? Nobody is living this life perfect.” Larry hung his head, but the other guys grunted in agreement.
Then it was quiet, and Ray wondered who was thinking about their own mistakes. Ray had made mistakes, no doubt about it. Wouldn’t anyone do things over if they could, when they knew better? There wasn’t a guy in this library who wouldn’t have chosen differently if he could have, Ray knew that for sure.
“Who else read a passage that meant something to them?” Ray asked. He wasn’t sure if this was how a book club was held in other places, but he didn’t have a study guide or a printed list of questions from anywhere.
Ray had talked to Sia and Lester about it on their last visit, and Sia had said to just let people talk about what moved them. “Everybody feels something different when they read the same thing. You just have to see what made people feel something and then talk about that,” she’d said. “Don’t try to be the teacher; just talk about whatever the guys want to talk about.”
Ray had nodded. The point was to get them thinking about anything but the dark, grimy, hot hell of the row. It was a gift to spend time in your mind away from your own reality. Ray could take his private jet anywhere around the world. He spent his week between visits having dinner with the most beautiful women in the world. He had already won Wimbledon five times. He was just this week being recruited by the New York Yankees. Ray was busy in his cell, too busy to think about the giant at the top of the hill pushing his boulder down. That’s all he wanted for these guys, an hour of freedom and escape. An hour away from the rats and the roaches and the smell of death and decay. He felt like they were all slowly dying from their own fear—their minds killing them quicker than the State of Alabama ever could.
Bring in the books, he thought. Let every man on the row have a week away, inside the world of a book. Ray knew if the mind could open, the heart would follow. He’d seen it happen to Henry. Henry, now sitting there in a locked room with five Black men who had nothing to lose. Henry had been taught to hate and fear Black people so much that he had thought it was in his rights to go find a teenage boy and beat and stab and lynch him just because of the color of his skin. Ray had no anger toward Henry, because he understood that Henry had spent his life learning to fear Black people. He had been trained to hate. It sounded bizarre, but: Death row had been good for Henry. Death row had saved his soul. Death row had taught him that his hate was wrong.
“What about you, Ray?” someone asked.
Ray looked around at the guys. “You know how he’s walking in the city, I think on Fifth Avenue, and he knows it’s not the place for him?”
“Where’s that part at?” asked Victor.
“I don’t remember exactly, but he’s being taught that the whites don’t like him, but he remembers a white teacher being nice to him when he’s sick. He thinks someday that the white people will honor him. Respect him. Do you guys remember that?” Ray said.
Henry cleared his throat. “I remember that part because it was like the opposite of what I was taught, but just the same, you know?” He looked around a bit nervously. “I wrote it down too.” Henry took out his own paper—a piece of inmate stationery with the lines printed on it as if the inmates were too dumb to write straight. “Can I read it?” he asked.
Everybody nodded. “It reminded me of my dad. I thought of him, so I wrote it down.”
“You go ahead and read it,” Ray said. “Let’s hear it.”
Henry began: “‘This was not my father’s opinion. My father said that all white people were wicked, and that God was going to bring them low. He said that white people were never to be trusted, and that they told nothing but lies,’” Henry read. He went on reading aloud about all the ways white people had tried to destroy Black people, how the world told Black people that “‘For him there was the back door, and the dark stairs, and the kitchen or the basement. This world was not for him. If he refused to believe, and wanted to break his neck trying, then he could try until the sun refused to shine; they would never let him enter. In John’s mind then, the people and the avenue underwent a change, and he feared them and he knew that one day he could hate them if God did not change his heart.’”
The book club was quiet when Henry finished. They all knew why Henry had picked that passage. His family was KKK. And here was this kid’s dad teaching him the same exact thing, only opposite.
“It’s a shame,” said Henry. “What fathers teach sons. It’s a sin to hate, ain’t that right, preacher man?” Henry looked over at Heath.
“That’s right. It’s a sin to hate, but God can forgive our sins. And the sins of our fathers.”
“That was a good passage, Henry,” said Victor, and both Horsley and Baldwin nodded. Five Black men in the South were trying to comfort the white man who would forever be known for doing the last lynching of a Black boy.
“I don’t believe the world is not for him,” Ray said. “Or for anyone. We are all God’s children, and this world belongs to all of us. I know the sun will never refuse to shine. We may not see it, but I know it’s there. I’m not going to have hate in my heart. I spent some dark years here with nothing but hate in my heart. I can’t live like that.”
“You are not a hater, Ray,” said Jesse.
“My mama didn’t raise me to hate. And I’m sorry for anyone who was taught to hate instead of love, to fight instead of help. I’m sorry for that and for anyone in this room who feels shame for what they were taught.” He looked at Henry. “God knows what’s in each man’s heart. What someone did or didn’t do is between a man and God and is none of anyone else’s business.”
Everyone nodded, and Ray could see the guard walking up to unlock the door. Book club had been a success. They had spent an hour talking about something that mattered.
“Someday, when I get out of here, you know what I’m going to do?” Ray asked.
“What you going to do, Ray?”
“I’m going to tell the world about how there was men in here that mattered. That cared about each other and the world. That were learning how to look at things differently.”
“You’re going to tell it on the mountain, Ray?” Jesse asked. The other guys laughed.
“I’m going to tell it on every single mountain there is. I’m going to push that boulder right on up and over that giant, and I’m going to stand at the top of that hill, and on the top of every mountain I can find, and I’m going to tell it. I’m going to tell his story, and I’m going to tell your story. Hell, maybe I will even write a book and tell it like that.”
“Everybody up. Back in the cell. This here is over right now.” Two guards rounded up the men and walked them back over to our cells. Ray watched as Henry grabbed his paper where he had carefully copied down a whole page of James Baldwin’s writing and folded it back up. Who would have thought those words would have mattered so much to him?
Larry Heath was the first member of book club to die. He didn’t have a last meal for dinner, and when Charlie Jones asked him for any final words, he said, “If this is what it takes for there to be healing in their lives, so be it. Father, I ask for forgiveness for my sins.”
On March 20, 1992, at a little after midnight, the guards put a black bag over his head, and the warden who had allowed him the privilege of reading a book and meeting with six other guys to talk about it … electrocuted him until he was dead.
At the next book club, they left his chair empty.
THE BOOK CLUB BOOKLIST