Chronicles from Parchman #2: I Got White Friends, Too (Until the State Kills Them)

A personal essay by L. Patri on a twenty-year friendship cut short

Photo by Justin Wilkens on Unsplash

In December 2022, the state murdered my friend and brother, a man called Tom. In my three decades on death row, Tom is one of a handful of men that I can say were truly special people who made living inside of a caged hell-hole bearable. For two years, leading up to his state-sponsored murder, I watched Tom suffer and struggle to breathe as his body wasted away with terminal cancer he had developed from his years of fighting America’s wars, yet his mannerisms, actions, and words remained respectful the same way he remained truthful. No better man or friend, White or Black, ever caused Tom to lose that faith that to be kind is to be humane. I had never experienced this shit when I came into contact with people, especially White males, as they were always fork-tongued and two-faced in words and actions.

When Tom came to death row, I don’t recall the exact year, I had been here for too many at that point, that years, months, and days didn’t matter to me, only decades. I was in cell 86 and they put him in #87. I mean. A tall, somewhat muscular White guy with a military-style haircut, and my first thought was, sooner or later, I’m going to have to bust his shit open to the white meat. He just had that look that screamed “a lily-white male,” you know. A few hours into him being there, I did what someone had done for me and asked him what he had, what he needed, you know. Hygiene, bed linen, food, etc.…and that’s how we began talking. He was quiet-like, soft spoken. I could barely hear him. He smoked, so I shared some cigarettes. They had been banned by MDOC a few years earlier, and cost like $20 a pack. I also had some alcohol, which I offered, and he accepted. He didn’t do drugs, so he refused the weed.

We stayed up into the night, as I told him what this place was like and how the state was not going to kill him in a month or whatever the way they make us think they will. I told him how they shackle and handcuff us, how everywhere we go, we go like that. Like for yard call, and sometimes how we’ll be strip-searched, depending on what guard is working that day. And about how yard call is in single man dog kennel pens out back. We got into where I was from, Natchez, which he knew about because he did some marine recruiting there, and I learned he was from Tupelo, Mississippi. I’d never been there. At some point, he fell asleep, because I found myself talking to myself. So I got up off the floor and laid down on the concrete slab bed. I didn’t sleep on a mattress. Just a sheet over the concrete.

Next day, we talked some more, drank some more, smoked some more, and I started liking this guy because he said shit that shocked me about what type of guy he was. He told me how he didn’t do the good ole boy thing, and his friend was his friend, no matter what race. In my mind, I’m like, bullshit, you come from Tupelo. But I just listened.

Weeks turned into months, and then years. We talked every day. Inside and outside. I learned about the wars he fought in and a few of the special-ops in Africa. Really horrific shit about the ways his Marine brothers were killed. He learned some things about me, too. For over twenty years, up until Mississippi murdered him, he had become the closest friend I had in here. That gave me a new perspective on White people, because I’d never been close to one like my own Brother. I’d never cried over one until Tom, or still to this day, miss one the way I do him. I used to tell him that it took me coming to death row to actually have a White Brother, and it did. I don’t know how long it’ll take to find another.

During the latter part of 2021 and throughout the year 2022, up to the date my friend was murdered by the state via state-sanctioned execution, I tried to convince him that he should lean heavily on his extraordinary military career as a top Marine for the United States, because I was a witness to the daily pain and agony he was suffering as a result of the many, many tours of duty and covert missions he participated in for what we Americans would say was the betterment of America and the world at large.

But let me tell you about just how fucked up we are as a people and country. Allow me to remind you that “Thanksgiving Day” is actually a cover-up for this country’s mass murdering of Indians by Europeans whom they had saved from starvation. In a nutshell, there was a feast and then there was robbery, assaults, and murdering, yet here we are. Every year relaxing and enjoying this celebrated day of death. But there’s something I don’t think American people are conscious of, and it’s this. Every year our country pardons a fucking turkey bird from being killed; however, I have yet to see this damn country pardon a PERSON who’s on America’s death rows. If anyone should have been pardoned for Thanksgiving it was Tom, with as much blood, sweat, and tears he shed for this country as a top marine. Ha! He was all great White turkey. Now that, my friend, is some sad, twisted ass shit when you’re thrilled to pardon a fucking bird and overjoyed to execute your own citizens. Damn! Psych doctors, PLEASE! Ugh. I need to take a fucking break. I do.

You will need to forgive me in that it has taken well over a year to express this circumstance and situation, as I find it difficult to recall my friend without the pain and sorrow taking effect or without the bitter resentment I have about the way our country used and abused him and then decided because of one regrettable event that he deserved to be killed at the hands of the very country that sent him into other lands countless times to murder on our behalf. There is no amount of sugar on a goddamn spoon that can make this pill easily swallowed by me or the many men around me who came to respect and love Tom.

Honestly. How does someone describe what it is I need to say as opposed to what I want to say. Because I can go on and on about what a good, true, honest man Tom was to me and those here that knew him. For many years, he and I would talk daily for hours, outside in dog kennel pens next to each other, and I watched how he would begin to cough and how that cough would turn into a life-threatening moment where he couldn’t catch his breath and I could only sit or stand and helplessly watch him struggling to breathe before he began to spew up blood from his cancerous lungs. He’d have an inhaler in his hands, but he was so fucked up that he couldn’t even attempt to use it. I am describing shit that was happening to a man who exercised every day or attempted to exercise so that he could find a way to better his health even though his health should not be this way because he is a fucking health nut, you understand.

Now. I began this way so that you can understand that even this horrible shit he was going through every day is nothing compared to the days leading up to December 14, 2022, the date that Mississippi chose to carry out his murder. And also to help you understand that, for me, even this is nothing compared to the day that the prison officials came into 29J Building and stood at his door to read him the execution death warrant as we all stood on our individual cell doors and watched and listened. If you never had a death warrant read to you or heard it read to anyone else, I count you damn lucky, you hear me, because I have personally had one read to me in March 1998 before I was taken to Unit 17 death house to await my execution at the hands of the state. I could hear the words, yet I could not comprehend them because the shit is so surreal and it does not have an effect only on the person it’s being read to, but to every fucking man within earshot.

But this isn’t about my near execution. This is Tom’s, so listen. It was on a Friday, December 9th, 2022, when officials, K-9, and others walked to cell #17 and the superintendent called out Tom’s name, for which he answered and came to stand at his cell door. It was read to him that on December 14, 2022 at 6 pm, he was to be executed for the crime in which he had been convicted and sentenced to death from so and so county that he had been tried and convicted within. I mean, this reading doesn’t take but a few minutes, but it feels like an hour, and it’s so fucking quiet during that time as though any noise would shatter the moment and cause it to end but it doesn’t and the prison officials leave the same way they came, displaying no emotions even though most of the officials/guards that came in were very familiar with Tom. They liked him. Thought he was a wonderful guy. But this shit is so sanitized that they have to conduct themselves within a job capacity even if they feel the wrongness in it all.

In the days and weeks that lead up to this moment, everyone on death row is aware that a date for execution has been granted to be set by the state’s highest court. So, for men such as myself, we know what is to come. But for men who have never experienced such a thing, this moment is an eye-opener and mind-blowing, because we can feel that maybe one day, a day such as this will come for each of us.

But during the months of November and December 2022, at least I was able to go on the rec yard outside in kennel cages and spend time with my friend. Because the death warrant was read to him on a Friday, we knew that come Sunday at 6 pm, administration would come for Tom and we wouldn’t be able to sit and talk over that weekend before they came inside 29J Bldg twenty-men-deep to chain him up and snatch him away from us. That in itself is another experience that none of us will ever forget even if we wanted to, because this thing has a way of digging itself into our core being. I still can’t shake it.

On the Saturday after they’d read his death notice, Tom and I talked out loud over the zone area, and we shared a meal and things, but it was a very somber moment. We didn’t want to, but we had to say our goodbyes, even though a huge part of me wasn’t accepting that he would be murdered. We relived our time together that entire day and night Saturday, and come Sunday, it was so quiet around us as I couldn’t find any more words to say, so I sat and hoped. Hell, maybe I even prayed. I can’t say for sure, but the likelihood is that I did and you must understand that I am not, and have not been that type of man to pray in all of thirty to twenty-nine years I’ve been in here. Not even for myself when I personally faced the execution table back in 1998. That is odd shit, yeah, that I would pray for Tom and not myself, but tell me honestly, who among us wants to see someone close to us taken away, never to be seen or heard from again? It’s fucked up and it fucked me up mentally, because I sat in my lonely cold cell and I literally counted down the time on that Sunday, December 11, 2022, without saying anything to anyone. Smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, smoking weed, drinking coffee, just thinking and wanting to be to myself.

About 5:30 pm Sunday, they came for Tom, and if there was any consolation that made me feel a little better, it was that the people who came to take him away were people who had become familiar with him and respected him, I guess you could say. But that didn’t prevent them from carrying out whatever duties they had been assigned to come in to perform. I guess people on the outside looking in would think this moment was very chaotic, loud, messy, but like me, the men housed on A-zone all stood at their bar doors and watched, listened, as Tom was placed in waist chains with his hands cuffed to the chain. When they opened his door and stepped out, they placed leg irons on his ankles.

Now. As I’ve said, this shit is a surreal moment, but inside of it all, I did notice a human component to the officials who came to take him away. They stood back and didn’t crowd my friend or rush him the way you may think. They allowed him to walk around to the front side of the guard watch tower and stand there, then they allowed him to look around the entire A-zone at the men he had come to know and love and respect. We were able to tell him how we loved him too, and that he would come back on Wednesday, if not on that Tuesday, because that was the hope within us all. It was all we could hang our hats on, you understand, and in many ways that helped me to continue throughout the next three days, because I wasn’t ready to lose him.

Sunday night seemed very long indeed without sleep. Come Monday morning, we were allowed to go outside, but what was the point. Tom wasn’t there to talk to. So, I remained inside, and I tried my best to keep my mind occupied with some thing or the other and again, I will count myself lucky that at this time, I had to stay focused on my own case and life here with some court motions I was filing on my habeas petition in federal court. Yet the day dragged slowly by.

Eventually I did sleep, or at least I assumed that I had slept, as it’s hard to tell because Monday passed and then Tuesday afternoon came and a guard who had to “stand” watch over Tom the night before came back to her assigned building with words that Tom sends his love and hellos to all of us and that he’s holding up pretty well under the circumstances. Administration did allow him to receive his commissary canteen food and smoke order, so that was good, and I took it as a sign that maybe shit was going to work out for him, and for us, and he might be coming back that Tuesday evening. But no such luck. Shit! Another long, sleepless night leading into Wednesday the 14th, and we were now on institutional lockdown because today is killing day, you understand. So, there was no yard, no shower, no anything, except me sitting alone with my thoughts.

Listen. If anyone has ever told you that time has a way to slow down, believe that shit, because this day was the longest by far. No matter how I tried not to count down the time, I found myself doing just that. Counting down time—seconds, minutes, hours from breakfast to 6:30/45 pm that evening. And inside of that counting I had only one thought, one wish, one hope, and that was for Tom to walk back through these goddamn steel doors. Believe me, I know just how fucked up that sounds, that I would wish so fucking bad for my friend to be alive and living in a cage. But truthfully, I admit that is what I wanted, and it didn’t matter to me that he would cough up his useless ass lung to breathe along with blood and shit. I didn’t think nor did I care to think about how much I had watched him suffer that way, and I sit here writing this shit knowing how fucking selfish I sound to want him alive with me and suffering. But shit, I swear I would rather have my motherfucking friend alive than dead, and if that’s wrong, then sue me, shoot me, what the fuck do I care as long as he could be here.

That, looking back, has got to be the saddest damn shit to wish for, and I get that. I understand that, yet you tell me. Who among us wouldn’t have thought to have such a wish granted, as long as we can still be with the ones we love on this sorry ass planet. So yes. All Wednesday, I paced the floor and smoked and tried to read and never said a word to anyone around me. I sat on my iron bed, but I didn’t sit long, because I couldn’t. I needed to move around because the closer 6 pm came, the more I was losing hope yet the harder I was gripping that one fucking string of hope that there was still time. I’ve seen men go all the way to that eleventh hour and be brought back. Hell. I did, so I knew there was a chance. Man, I have never drank so much fucking coffee or smoked so many cigarettes. Two goddamn packs that day, and my fucking stomach felt like an empty wine jug with a knot rolling around inside as I had not eaten shit in two days. 6 pm passes, no word. But around 6:30 a guard came to my door with Tom’s possessions that he wished for me to have, and I knew then that I would never see him again.

A first time ever type shit took hold within me, and I cried over a fucking White man being murdered. But Tom was not just some White man to me. Tom was my first closest White friend, my brother, and, like right now, I have no shame crying for missing him and wanting him to be here so I could continue to enjoy our friendship and brotherhood. I’ll always be grateful to him and for him for that love and knowledge and kindness and openingness he brought into my life.

Overall. I guess the handful of White people I know, or knew, is enough to satisfy me because I have great ones who see me for me, and they understand how I see other White people without taking offense. I guess they wish that one day I can let go of my hang-ups about their race, and I understand that, because if a day came and I met someone in their family who I felt a certain way about, they might run for cover. But I know the White people I am truly friends with will just let me be me, because their people will be exactly as they are. Open-minded. Fair-minded, and with plenty of faults of their own.

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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.