Chronicles from Parchman #8: Endure

Incarcerated writer L. Patri on "what it’s like to live in isolation, to watch people you become close to get executed," and still, to survive.

This is the latest installment in the Chronicles from Parchman series, a monthly column by the talented and prolific writer, L. Patri, who has been fighting his wrongful incarceration on Parchman’s death row for over thirty years. Read L. Patri’s interview in Rooted from November 2024.

Photo by thom masat on Unsplash

Saturdays are usually quiet days around the zone, as men sleep into the late morning after being up all night watching their programs or talking. Weekends are sport nights and last night, we watched MMA fighting and boxing matches until past 3 a.m. It’s a strange feeling to get dressed and walk out of this cell with no restraints. To have the guard come and unlock the door is still weird to me.

Only four or three months ago, I had to be in handcuffs, behind my back no less, just to go take a shower. I couldn’t envision just walking out of this cell and walking downstairs alone, without restraints or guards. This is like some drastic shit, you understand, and it’s still something I need to adjust to. Being about to sit down beside or across from another person, passing a cigarette between us and talking, is still surreal.

None of these things were remotely possible a few short months ago. I guess in a thief’s terms, it’s like you’re taking a diamond that someone said you could have, but you can’t stop looking around to see who’s watching.

Tony B and I are sitting at the table area drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, talking quietly because guys around us are still sleeping. Pitts, dressed in boxer shorts, no shirt or shoes, is on his hands and knees cleaning the floor. A morning ritual that he does each morning after his prayers.

Tony B is in his wheelchair wearing red pants, a white t-shirt, and black shoes. I have known Tony B for years. He’s close to sixty years old, and living life inside a cage has left him in bad medical shape. He used to exercise and be active constantly before being stymied and suffocated for decades by previous Admin who kept him locked down in solitary for twenty-three of twenty-four hours a day with nothing to do to keep motivated physically and mentally.

For all of us, the man in the cell next to you is having these same thoughts and feelings about how miserable their lives are. All we do is sit around, lay around, and become inactive, unhealthy, eventually we suffer and die from lack of care or supervision by those in authority.

Tony B has diabetes, high blood pressure, three or two shoulder replacement surgeries, and a host of other medical issues that plague his waking and sleeping hours. He’s in constant pain. He was forced to wear shackles and handcuffs for yard rec when it was forty to thirty degrees, and he had only flip-flops to wear because Admin mandated death row was not allowed to have tennis shoes after some state prisoners escaped. The waist and ankle scars are still visible on Tony B.

He falls asleep. He’s sitting under the industrial fan to help cool this morning’s heat and ward off these pesky mosquitoes that seem to enjoy attacking us. There are so many. He tells me that the chair is more comfortable than the bed, and I can believe that because they are steel beds, no boards, and the mattress becomes lumpy and hard over time. Tony B can barely stand the pain of standing. So I get up and take his coffee to the microwave for two minutes.

We are talking about our concerns for “Joe.” We have always admired Joe’s willingness to take the time and help those around him. On Saturday, August 12th, I noticed that he seemed despondent and looked to be ill. Joe has been pushing himself hard. I had a talk with him, and he said he believes that a great opportunity has presented itself, and he would die trying to make the most of seeking this much-needed help. After days of watching Joe walk around talking to other guys about events they have gone through, getting up at three or two a.m. and seeing his light on, and him pacing back and forth from bed to door, ten steps each way, wearing red pants and no shoes, talking with himself, I asked him if he needed help. He said, “Sure, as long as you believe in it.”

I tell Tony B that we should check on Joe, who at that moment comes out of his room, closes the door, shuts off the light and turns left, walking toward the second floor landing steps wearing only white pants that he paid someone to make for him and no shoes. Coffee cup in the right hand. He stands at the threshold’s landing. Eighteen steps going down, and he’s debating whether it’s worth it. Watching.

I see him grab hold of the stairwell’s bar and then he begins to step down, one step at a time, slowly, as though it pains him to set his foot on the floor. Turning left at the bottom step, he fills his cup with coffee from the cooler that sits on a push cart for coffee and juice. He walks to the microwave and opens it. I remember then that Tony B’s coffee is still in there. I had forgotten, but Joe hands it to him and then sits on the table stool next to me. His coffee warmed up, he cradles his cup in both hands, lowers his head, and stares into the cup’s blackness.

Tony B, the one being closest to Joe, asks him if he’s okay. As Joe starts talking, an image of a lonely man, haggard-looking and bone-tired from age and a life of stress living on death row pops up clear as day. He speaks:

“Y’all know it’s the 14th. In two days, on the 16th, it’ll be Tom’s birthday, and y’all know how close he was to us before Mississippi executed him. Tom would be really happy to see all the progress we’ve made since being allowed out from 8 a.m. til 6 p.m., and to be around each other. Tom was the hopeful type. Optimistic, even under these conditions. So these past days, Tom has been on my mind because of his birthday coming up, but also because I have been afraid that this ‘new way’ won’t last long.

“Nothing has ever lasted long here that was good for us. I had so much that I want to write, to talk about. The food has improved since the previous Admin, but it’s still an uncooked breakfast of oatmeal and pancakes and lumpy, doughy bread rolls. We still know what we eat every day at every meal of every week because we are fed the same meals on the same days. We’re able to walk to certain places and be around certain people without being in iron restraints, but then an hour later, we’re restrained in iron chains or locked in a one-man cell for days.

“I believe our joy is only for a short time. We feel so conflicted about all these good things happening to us. We are so used to that other shoe dropping and that’s why our doubt is present even in the light of hope. Even when we hope, we despair.”

The black-and-white-pant State inmate who watches the new death row guys is walking by to peep into cell #11 and observe Lincoln as Admin has him on suicide watch. Why? I can’t say, but they’ve monitored Lincoln for months. A lady CO is sitting on the stool at the first table when you walk into the zone, and the guys that clean up bird shit and cut grass are heading out the back door toward the one-man yard rec pen and basketball pens.

I don’t actually think Joe notices any of these things, as his eyes seem to be glazed over in his thinking. Looking up from his coffee, he stares into our faces and continues:

“Every day I hurt in my mind when I talk to you all about myself and do what I can to help make life better. Desperation is around the corner and I’ve suffered it so much here. I saw a great opportunity to write a story that would help alleviate my pain, our pain. So for days, nights, I have been writing, thinking, and through it all, I have been in constant wondering if I can write a meaningful story of this abject pain. A feeling and thought so painful as to touch the coldest heart. A story so gripping that people can see, truly understand what it’s like to live in isolation, to watch people you become close to get executed, watch your friends growing old as their bodies give out from some injury or disease, and you have no voice or power to help them because those in authority see them differently, inhuman.

“I write a few lines and then ball it up and trash it because it doesn’t feel right, as if I can’t find that perfect word or phrase, so I push everything away from me and pace the cell, only to sit down again. I know I can tell this story. I live it. Every day. But it will not show itself to me, so I trash everything, take my lighter and set it ablaze… and I watch the flames.

“I begin to see just how urgent our fates really are. Many of us won’t live the next five years. Some will be executed by the state like Tom, some will just die from their illnesses, but a lot of us only have a short time, and that is what I saw in the fire’s flame. A chance to tell the world about Benny Joe who didn’t even know if his attorney was Black or white because the attorney never came to see him, never accepted his phone calls or answered his letters until he had been given an execution date. Someone Benny Joe depended on to fight for his life, who didn’t even think him worthy enough to meet him.

“William, who was elderly, in his seventies, who thought his best chance at not being executed was to fall down in the shower, busting his head to cause some mental issues because the state had ruled it couldn’t execute the mentally challenged. Or Matthew and Joseph B. who were taken to the execution chamber then given an eleventh-hour stay, only to be executed the next day. Howard, who was so mentally disturbed that he hid his food in drawers under his bed and built roach nests so huge they crawled all over him when he slept or lay down, but he wouldn’t eat, so he slowly starved to death in filth and trash, thinking that he was alright. So wasted in body that a single guard could lift him up and cradle him in his arms to carry him down eighteen steps with not so much as a grunt of effort.

“If people could just understand what it’s like watching a man you’ve known for twenty or fifteen or ten years being led away by guards with shock-shields and riot guns, restrained in chains from head to foot, by officials who just hours ago were standing at his door praying he would be alright, and knowing the chances of him coming back would be slim to none, because so many have gone through those doors: Edwin, Jan, Curtis, Rodney, Paul, Jesse, Howard, Matthew, Joseph, William, Benny Joe, and so many more. Dozens.

“Watching your closest friend, like Tom, suffer for years coughing up blood, barely able to breathe after coughing so hard you thought he’d pass out, being cried over by guards who know he was kindhearted and giving to anyone. If people could only understand the weight that puts on my shoulders, because I can’t do anything to stop it.

“No matter how much I learn, how much I teach, I can’t stop the people living around me from suffering and dying, and it’s killing me. Literally. I can feel it. Some days when I breathe and feel the sharp pains on my right side, or the headaches so bad that I need a cold wet towel to cover my eyes in a darkened room, I look in the mirror and see the skeleton bone cheeks others don’t see, because only I know what to look for.

“I see the weight loss from not eating and barely sleeping, or the hand cramps from the constant writing, and I see, more than anything, that pretentious, fake-ass face staring me down in the mirror because I know it’s a lying-ass face when it talks to the men around me about things being better, and how they can win in these courts, because I have not won anything except another day of misery and hurt and loss.

“For five days, I have written what I feel and believed to be best and this morning, I feel good about it. Last night, I wrote the final lines and felt a huge weight lift from my mind. I felt hopeful. Then I began crying. Even though there is so much good going right now. My mind is always lurking around the next corner to turn, and it all comes crashing down on us again. So I cried and cried myself to sleep.”

Like waking up from a coma, I look up. I realize there is no one around me. I am still in cell #35 on the top tier. My feet are shoeless, with only socks on. I’m in my boxers and a t-shirt. The coffee I got at breakfast has long gone cold, and the paper I’ve been writing on is full of chicken scratch. But I know I have just finished speaking with Tony B. and Pitts, even though they haven’t been out of their cells, either. How can something feel this real but not be real. My hands start to tremble and my note-taking becomes shaky. I know I am real. But is “Joe” real? Is what I’m saying now real? Who has read this? Anyone? Can someone tell me? Am I living inside my mind, talking to ghosts from my past? All the doors are still locked.

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L. Patri is of Black and Natchez Indian descent, and he is the father of one daughter and a grandfather of five grandchildren. He was born on the river in Natchez, Mississippi, and for the past three decades, he has been challenging his wrongful conviction of capital murder. He writes in multiple and hybrid genres, including thought pieces, journalism, short fiction, letters, and memoir.