Living Nightmares: A Chronicle from Parchman

A personal essay by L. Patri on maintaining dignity amidst the horrors of Parchman's death row

Photo by aj_aaaab on Unsplash

If you ever hear the phrase “stupid is as stupid does,” think about some of these silly-ass people I have to live around and endure. You would think that anyone who has the problems we do and situations we are in would, at the very least, have their priorities half-ass in order. But no. In some cases, I can say that I know why. Many of us came here when we were in our young twenties, and for others in their teens, so many didn't actually mature, and this place doesn’t allow many to do so. However. If I have to go past tomorrow without fixing this problem with the televisions, so that they cut back on all this bullshit yelling and fake-ass fighting, I’m going to scream and bite my tongue just so the guards can take me to hospital at Unit 42. 

In case it hasn’t dawned on you yet, I am in prison. Right now, men around me are driving me nuts about what they each think they would be watching on televisions. Ugh! They watch the same shit constantly. One cartoon show or the other. Bugs Bunny, Family Guy, and some Futurama shit with the oil tin can character. What the hell you get out of that, I do not know, but to each his own. Do it a little quieter though. Some of us have to concentrate, especially an old ass mf like me. 

I have been on Mississippi death row for thirty-one and a half years, plus days. Yes, I count every fucking day because I don’t want to forget anything that has happened to me or is happening to me. One day, I hope to repay this debt to the State of Mississippi (Natchez in particular), and these people, living and dead, who were the instruments and the cause of so much pain and loss in my life. If at all possible, I would happily see them spend their golden years rotting in a cage, the same way they want to see me, if not strapped to the execution table, as I almost came close to being after my direct appeal and the United States Supreme court denied my certiorari writ. I was one week close to being murdered by the State of Mississippi on March 25, 1998. So excuse the hell out of me if I talk a certain way, live a certain way, and fight for my life in the best ways I see fit. Trust me. You will have no need to judge who you think I am, because I am in your face. 

First things first. I like the colorful language.  I do not bite my tongue if I choose to talk to you, and I most definitely do not sugarcoat shit I say. I talk how I talk, and I like talking my way. I’m not menacing or threatening in my talk, so your sensibilities are your own. Keep them to yourself because these days, only truth matters to me, as it should you, and nope, I'm not a cold-hearted asshole, as some want to presume. Suffer as I have. Then come talk to me.

Second thing. If I am talking to you, or about you, I will give you enough hints so that you don’t get confused. It is what it is. Take it or leave it, because I am not seeking a handout. This is not a welfare line serving up cheese and powdered milk. I’ve spent thirty-one years plus, and I’ve earned it all locked in a steel cage with bars that has a slot cut into the door so I can feed like an animal. But to avoid any backlash to the men I write about, I’m not going to use their names in the events I describe. They’ll know who they are, but you won’t. That is to shield them, and for you to keep your focus on me. 

I digress. One guy has been here forty-two plus years. Mississippi reversed his sentence over five years ago, maybe ten years, yet he sits on death row in the very same cell. Another man has been in here almost just as long as the first, and this place has mentally fucked up both of them. This one guy who has recently come to death row, been here ten to fifteen years, had no business in courtroom trial, much less on death row, and the worst part is that the very people tasked with keeping them knows this, but don’t tell their bosses. Really?

These are men who have each had a room full of roaches that had time to nest. They were literally sleeping in the bed with these things. Two of these guys used to shit in the toilet and play in it. So, you walk around and see shit all over these men’s cells, where they’ve rubbed it all over them, and they’re yelling bloody murder shit at all hours of the day and night, yet you are more concerned with a paycheck than you are human life. If guys around me now think it’s fucked up, trust me, they would not have wanted to be here around 1995 to 2007 or ‘08. Like I said, the guards back then didn’t care at all. It was as though these guys meant nothing to them, you understand. Man. Get the fuck out of here. You sound like a man with a paper sack, asshole. 

The notorious Unit 29 Parchman Mississippi is where I now reside. MDOC moved the death row prisoners from Unit 32-B Bldg to here, 29-J Bldg in 2010, as they claim to be shutting 32 Unit down as a whole. ABCDE are the buildings at 32, and it was a new building, maybe twenty-five years from opening to closing, compared to the infamous 29 Unit. This raggedy ass unit was made in the 1980s and MDOC has the audacity to tell Mississippi’s public that it’s much better than Unit 32. I guess us Mississippians believe that garbage when you say “death row prisoners.”

Fear mongering is a true thing, and MDOC has used it twice that I’m aware of. The first time was 2006, when they moved death row after some state prisoners escaped from Unit 32C Building. This was in 2005, maybe. About four or three state prisoners escaped from Unit 32-C building. One death row guy was in on the plot and cut his cell window out, but he chickened out and didn’t escape. So, death row took a big hit. Lost shoes, got put inside dog cages, you name it. Then around 2012, I believe, a commissioner bled the public for a cool million or so by putting up the black fence netting like the kind fishermen use, claiming drugs and contraband was being thrown over the fence. One serious ice storm and that shit had holes in it so big you could drive a truck through it. Shit, contraband had been flowing through in all the years I’ve been on death row. It was drug central in the ‘90s and early 2000s. The netting is gone now, so Mississippi got fucked twice, and death row prisoners still haven’t escaped or killed inmates. You see, people can save preaching shit to me about what I do, how I live, and how I talk. 

Thirty-one years in solitary. Twenty-three, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Truth and facts are the only things I care about, and if you are foul, and I know it, stay away please, because if you’re around me, I’m going to put that ass on blast and let people know. You don’t mean anyone any good in my opinion. So. As I said, I don’t bite my tongue and I don’t sugarcoat anything simply because you might have sensitive feelings. I talk how I talk because I like how I talk, so don’t take it personally. My language problem isn’t what you should be focusing on. My situation, and how I came to be in this situation, and what I’ve endured since being in it, should be the focus.

I’ve lived in a hellhole for over three decades, so excuse the hell out of me if I talk vulgar, okay? I am not threatening, menacing, or angry. My truth just sounds that way, so it is what it is, and you would feel and think the same, I am sure. As my religious friends like to quote, “Those that have eyes, let them see. Those that have ears, let them hear. Those that have tongues, let them speak.” So don’t close any of these goddamn things, because I desperately need you to use them to help save me. You can believe as you like, but let’s do the “show and tell” game, as I don’t have any need to criticize what you think or say, as I’ve learned over the years in a cage. People believe as they choose to believe, no matter what is put before them. Take the Mississippi State Supreme Court. No matter what I put before that court, evidence-wise, it makes no difference to them. That’s not just me, that’s pretty much everyone around me. No matter what we do, it’s not good enough. There’s always some other loophole, some other reason they come up with that it’s not enough. At the conclusion of this telling, you will come to realize just how fucked up Mississippi—and America—truly is. 

Shit! There they go again. Banging on the metal covering above the doors, and yelling. Making noise just to make noise. My dad, Charles, was right. “Too much television will make you silly, as you are always wanting to act out the characters.” Play-acting, he called it. Dumbass shit, I call it. Took me to live in here just to learn that lesson. Ha! Thanks, Pop!

I am L. Patri, age fifty-five, standing at six feet, two inches tall and weighing 190-185 pounds. I am Black American mixed with Natchez Indian. Dark German chocolate complexion, dimples on both face cheeks, and brown eyes. I like talking shit and smiling, even though I live in a very serious, dire situation. I believe that if I can’t find the humor around me, then I will lose my mind and be like many mentally ill men around me. 

I was born in Natchez, Mississippi, November 18, 1968, on a very cold day, or so I’m told. I sometimes go by River-Ratt, as I like to play in the river waters, any waters for that matter. But whatever waters I play in, I believe that I can swim, that I will not drown. (I’ve been swimming in the waters of death row in Mississippi for thirty-one years.) I am the fourth child and the third son of Edna T. My father’s name is Abrams H. He had many children. I only knew some, but that's not at issue here. Four brothers and two sisters are who I was raised with. Their names are unimportant as well. I say this because my parents and my siblings have nothing to do with why or how I came to be on death row in Parchman, Mississippi. 

Natchez is a historical little tourist town that sits on the western bottom end of Mississippi on the banks of the Mississippi river, across from Vidalia, Louisiana. On a clear day, you can stand on the bluff overlooking the river and see close to two miles inside of Vidalia. Once the crown jewel of Mississippi, as its first capital, Natchez is well-known for many things. Amongst them is Natchez Under-the-Hill, which was once a trail-path that stretched from end-to-end and on into Louisiana, where “highway men” lay in wait to rob the passengers on stagecoaches and horses of their possessions. Natchezians have always had thieving in their blood. You can’t be untouched. Slavery, klansmen, lynching, burnings, and any atrocity known to man has its roots in Natchez. This is where you’ll find the Devil’s Punchbowl that held thousands of newly freed Blacks, whom Natchez’s white citizens forced into concentration camps there, where they were starved, beaten, and shot to death by local residents and authority figures, then left in the Punchbowl amongst those living to fester and rot in the hot, humid heat and sweltering soil of moist damp waters from the river’s edges.

The human carnage and desperation was so unthinkable that the Blacks tried desperately to dig their way deeper in to the Punchbowl looking for a way to escape because they couldn’t climb out for fear of being slaughtered by white businessmen, ordinary citizens, law officials, or whoever enjoyed perpetrating unspeakable evils upon the Black people. Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee type people. The Ku Klux Klan ran rampant in their killings and tortures. Kidnapping Black residents and taking them into wooded swamps where trees grew so huge a man could stand inside it two to four  people deep, and they committed unspeakable rapes and murders of Blacks there, till this very day. People call it the “Bone Tree.” In the 1950s and ‘60s, Klansmen locked around fifty Black party-goers in a dance barn. Nailed it shut and set it ablaze. The song “The Natchez Burnin’” by Howlin’ Wolf recounts that act where some people today, of a certain age, claim that they can still hear the screams of these people long gone. White Natchezians were not alone; there were Black Natchezians who were in cahoots with this evil also, and to this very day, law officials and residents in Black communities continue this vile deed upon the Blacks of Natchez. I am one of many who have been subjected to these acts.

Natchez is not alone in these cruel, inhumane acts. In the ‘90s, a man called “Firefighter,” from Jackson, Mississippi, came to Parchman’s death row. Whatever acts he may have done that led him here was nothing in comparison to what the Jackson law enforcement committed against him one night. Firefighter was housed at Parchman’s Unit 32-C Building in cell #88 across the wall-hallway, two doors from where I was housed in cell #94, in A-zone, tier #4, 2nd floor. On this particular day, he was advised by MDOC Correctional Officers that he should pack his belongings because he was going to be transported to Hinds County, Jackson, Mississippi, as a court order was issued for him to appear in court there. Whatever the details of what happened going there, being there, and returning to MDOC some days later, I cannot say, as I do not know, but what I do know is that the night that he was returned to 32-C Bldg, he had been badly beaten to the point that guards had to carry him up nineteen steps to the 2nd floor landing. Two by his underarms, two by his legs, as they navigated their way to the cell. They eventually dumped, not laid, him onto the concrete floor, midway between the door and steel concrete bed rack, where he lay for two days, suffering until he died. From Firefighter’s head, swollen as big as a pumpkin, down his body, were severe bruising and contusions around his lungs, liver, pelvis, stomach, and back. His hands looked like ground up sausages the way his fingers were mangled. The commander over Unit 32-C Bldg and the staff under his command, neither gave nor called for medical assistance. He lay there in his urine and feces and suffered till death. To this day, no one has been held accountable, nor taken responsibility for what the Jackson police did to this man. 

Now. When I tell you that I am not a believer in any religion, though I do respect those around me who are believers, you can take it for whatever you think it’s worth, because I say this here and now. If my being some “believer” is what you expect, and I am not, is this a red line for you? I crossed it years ago and you’re welcome to leave, here and now. That way you don’t miss your bus ride home. If this fits you and you feel any need to use this excuse to criticize and refuse to accept the Truth I am going to tell you, or to judge what I say or do in my life, let me tell you here and now. Drugs, drinking, fighting, prostitutes, and cursing, or any vice you deem morally sinful and wrong. Please. Head toward the door and be safe as you leave. For those who have chosen to continue on with me. Again. My lifestyle in 1992 and in 2023 is my life. I’ll live it as I see fit. I have done no wrong and no harm in either year or the years in between. Standing or kneeling. I do not beg. The wrongs have been done to me, not the other way around, and until you have experienced what I have, don’t judge me. Judge the facts and proof that I set before your eyes.

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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.