Between Two Kingdoms

by Suleika Jaouad

  Stretching out on the bed, I begin skimming the stack of letters in anticipation of our visit, now only a sunrise away. Lil’ GQ had been an excellent pen pal: earnest, funny, quick to respond. He’d had a lot of practice, cultivating correspondences with dozens of people over the years. He said it gave him something to do, something to look forward to when the prison guards came around on “mail call” each night. I enjoy writing letters and learning new things from other folks who’ve done way more than I have. You see, I’ve been locked up ever since I was 20 years old and I’m a high school dropout. The epistolary form, he confessed, also served a practical purpose: I stutter so writing letters allows me to express myself without feeling insecure and pissed off when I’m having a hard time saying what I want to say.

  Lil’ GQ wrote to me about all kinds of things. He wrote to me about his hobbies: Books are a solitary confinement prisoner’s best friend. He told me about his first car, a stolen brown Cadillac: I used to get up early in the morning and sit on the hood of my car and watch the projects come alive. For breast cancer awareness month, he sent me a handmade card with a pink ribbon drawn on it that said: Courage! Survivor! Friendship! Warrior! Strength! Lil’ GQ’s tone was cheerful for the most part, but at times I could sense that he was writing from a defeated place: Life around here has been the same ole routine for a brotha. He admitted it was difficult to find the motivation to keep going on certain days, but he was always careful to steer clear of self-pity: I know that there’s a lot of folks who’d love to have as much free time on their hands as I do, just under a different set of circumstances.

  Lil’ GQ was thirty-six now, and had spent almost half his life on death row. A lot had changed “out there,” he knew, and he was insistent that I tell him all about the world. I did my best to send him updates on my travels. I wrote to him from a Motel 6 in rural Iowa. I wrote to him by the fireplace of a mid-century modern mansion in Jackson, Wyoming. I wrote to him after speaking to a class of eighth graders at a public school in Chicago. The students had written poems inspired by the prompt “where I’m from,” and when I shared this with Lil’ GQ, he took a stab at his own poem: I’m from where you didn’t always feel a lot of love in the household. I’m from where you see nothing but gang members, drug dealers and addicts everywhere. I’m from where you are always being told that a hardhead is a soft behind.

  As I got closer to Texas, Lil’ GQ put me on his visitation list and filled me in on the rules: Visiting hours would be from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. It would be a noncontact visit, meaning we would have to sit on opposite sides of a plexiglass divider and speak to each other through telephone receivers. When I asked if I could bring Lil’ GQ books or anything else that he might need, he responded: Your time and presence is good enough for me. I can look at it as an early Christmas present.

  * * *

  —

  Hooting and hollering outside the window interrupts my reading. I set the stack of letters down on the bed and stand up. Peeling open the curtains, I spot the group of men from earlier. They’ve migrated from the recesses of the parking lot to my car, and two of them take a seat on its back bumper as the others stand around clustered in a half circle. I watch as the ringleader of the group, the same guy who came after me, lets out a drunken roar as he pours the dregs of a forty of beer over his head and then smashes the bottle against the pavement. Uneasy, I pick up the room phone and dial reception, explaining the situation. A few minutes later, I see a security guard stroll over. I can’t hear what he says, but within minutes, everyone scatters.

  Closing the curtains tight, I turn off the lights and climb under the covers. I’m nursing yet another cold and it’s hard to fall asleep when I can’t breathe so I stand up and root through my duffel bag, searching for a bottle of leftover NyQuil. I take a couple swigs and pull the comforter over my head, my thoughts soon growing sluggish. I don’t know how long I’m out, but I’m awakened in the middle of the night by a dull, repetitive sound bludgeoning through my dreams. I groan and roll over onto my stomach, pulling a pillow over my head. The sound stops for a moment. Then I hear it again—Bam. Bam. Bam.—like a fusillade. I sit up with a start, and Oscar leaps off the bed, growling and barking. Without my contact lenses I can’t see anything and I blindly fumble after him in the dark. The sound appears to be coming from behind my hotel room door.

  “Open up,” a man says on the other side. “Open. The. Fucking. Door.” I recognize the voice from somewhere, the slurred speech, and a shudder ripples through me as I realize it belongs to the man from the parking lot. Scooping Oscar into my arms, I muzzle his snout, trying to mute his growls.

  “OPEN THE DOOR. IF YOU DON’T OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR…” For the first time since I’ve been on the road, I feel in acute danger. I know all too well that it takes only one bad night or one bad-news bearer to revise the way we remember everything that happens before and after. The man slams his fist so hard against the door that it rattles, his voice growing louder, angrier. Cowering behind the door, my whole body shaking, my brain tries frantically to make sense of what is happening. The man must know that I was the one who called hotel security on him and his friends. Maybe I got them in trouble. That’s why he’s so angry. My thoughts go to the small red can of pepper spray I have tucked away somewhere, but I can’t remember if I brought it in from the car. I want to believe that if this man somehow manages to break in, I will be able to fight him off if I have to, but I can’t seem to move my limbs, much less think straight.

  “PABLO! OPEN THE DOOR. OPEN THE MOTHERFUCKING DOOR, PABLO!” the man shouts, and it’s only then that I understand. This man hasn’t come for me, he is looking for one of his friends—he is looking for a man named Pablo, and in his alcoholic stupor he’s mistakenly arrived at my door. With a final, furious bang of his fist, he gives up. I watch through the peephole as he staggers down the hallway. I stand there for a long while. Everything is okay, I tell myself, hugging Oscar tightly against my chest. I am okay. I am safe. He is gone now. But no matter what reassurances I whisper to myself, I can’t seem to stop shaking.

  I’ve been traveling alone for nearly three months, sleeping in campgrounds and truck stop parking lots, staying at the homes of Internet acquaintances, and crashing with strangers I have met along the way. At every turn, the world has opened its arms to me and treated me with nothing but kindness. The road trip has rekindled a sense of strength and independence I thought I’d never recover, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it’s reaffirmed my trust in humanity. In the last weeks, I’ve felt clearer, braver, more open to the unknown than I’ve ever felt in my life. But tonight, I realize that I’ve also been fortunate. It’s something I can’t stop thinking about as I return to bed.

  * * *

  —

  The Allan B. Polunsky Unit is the notorious, all-male facility where Texas’s death row inmates are housed. Located five miles outside of Livingston, in a heavily forested area known as the Piney Woods, it isn’t the kind of place you stumble across by accident. Turning left off the highway, I follow my GPS through farmland, passing a mobile home park, a handful of churches, and fields of horses and abandoned cars under a flat, gray sky.

  As I approach the prison’s entrance, I see chain-link fence topped with concertina wire, and beyond that a regiment of squat concrete buildings with hundreds of tiny slit windows. Somewhere, behind one of these windows, Lil’ GQ is in his cell, preparing for our visit. I roll up to a guard’s hut, where a uniformed man circles my car and raps his knuckles against the window, motioning for me to roll it down. “Inmate ID number?” he asks.

  I don’t have Lil’ GQ’s ID number memorized, nor do I have it written down, my first of many missteps that day. The guard tells me not to worry and offers to look it up himself. “You drive here all the way from New York?” he asks, examining my driver’s license.

  I nod.

  “Now, that’s commitment!” he whi
stles. “You must be visiting somebody real special.”

  “You could say that,” I reply.

  “I went to New York City once. I did my military service in Germany in the seventies and passed through the airport. I didn’t like it much. I’m a country boy. You from the Big Apple originally?”

  “Yes indeed,” I say, nodding.

  “You seem like way too nice a young lady to be a New Yorker. Well, there it is. A nice New Yorker and a nice Texan. Who woulda thought?”

  The guard assigns me a parking spot in the nearby lot and wishes me a Merry Christmas. I am heartened by our exchange, but once inside the prison I can’t seem to do anything right. As soon as I set foot into the main building, a lady in a uniform with bright red hair coiled into a topknot stops me. “You can’t bring all that stuff in here,” she says, pointing to the pen, notebook, driver’s license, and car keys I’m carrying. “Everything needs to go in a clear baggie. You got one?” I shake my head. She motions for me to follow her and we march back out to the parking lot where she pops open the trunk of her car, pulling out an industrial-sized box of clear plastic bags. “We here at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice keep Ziploc in business.”

  Back inside the prison, I fill out a couple of forms and I am buzzed through a maze of barred doors, leading to the visitation area. As I enter, I am met by a third guard, who takes my visitor’s pass and looks me up and down, her gaze narrowing at the sight of my Ziploc bag. “What do you have there?” she asks in a slightly accusatory tone. “You’re not supposed to have pen or paper.”

  “No one told me that,” I stammer.

  “If it happens again, you’ll be banned from visiting,” she says sternly, and confiscates them. “Take a seat in R28. The inmate will be brought out soon.”

  Feeling rattled by our exchange, I enter a room with dozens of white stalls resembling phone booths. By the door, there is a plastic tree decorated in ornaments and a small play area with a rocking horse and a couple of toys, which look out of place here and somehow render the setting even more bleak. I make my way to R28 and take a seat. There’s a phone receiver to my left and plexiglass in front of me, just like Lil’ GQ described in his letter. On the other side of the plexiglass is a cage-like booth and a stool where, I presume, he will sit. The stalls offer little privacy, and as I wait, I overhear murmurs of conversation. To my left sit three young children, talking shyly to their father. To my right is a graying couple revisiting favorite Christmas carols with their son. “Feliz Navidad, prospero año y felicidad,” they sing softly to him through a receiver.

  I’ve been waiting for nearly forty-five minutes when, on the other side of the plexiglass wall, a door clanks open. Lil’ GQ walks in. He gives me a jittery grin as a guard unshackles his hand and ankle cuffs. He’s shorter than I expected, about my height—five feet seven—handsome with a fresh number two fade. He wears a white short-sleeve prison jumpsuit exposing muscular arms covered in tattoos. As a guard locks the door shut behind him, Lil’ GQ takes a seat and picks up the receiver. “I s-s-stutter when I get nervous, and I’m real n-n-nervous right now, so I apologize in advance if that keeps happening,” he says.

  “I’m also pretty nervous,” I admit, which seems to put him at ease. “So, I’ve been meaning to ask you, what does Lil’ GQ stand for anyway?”

  “Black people all got nicknames, and mine’s short for Gangsta Quin. You got one?”

  “Susu. That’s what they called me growing up because nobody knew how to pronounce my real name.”

  “Susu,” he says, meeting my eyes for the first time. “I like that. Well, Susu, before we get started with this visit real good, I wanted to thank you for taking the time to come here. It’s been about a decade since anybody’s visited me, and I’ve been counting down the days. For real.”

  Over the next few hours, Lil’ GQ begins to tell me all about his life, anecdotes and memories tumbling out of his mouth as though I am a confessor and it is the last time he’ll ever tell his story. He tells me about his siblings, four out of five of whom have also been locked up at various points. He tells me about his mother, who was the first person to pull a gun on him: “There wasn’t a lot of love shared between us.” He tells me about the public housing project where he lived, and about “Agg Land,” a neighborhood on Fort Worth’s Southside that he repped. With his eyes downcast, he tells me about the relative who molested him starting in elementary school, and how nobody believed him when he spoke up about it. “It was then that I knew that if I wanted to survive in this world I was going to need to learn to fight for myself,” he says.

  Pressing his forearm against the plexiglass, Lil’ GQ shows off a gnarly scar, a welt of puckered skin in the shape of the letter C—C as in Crip, the notorious street gang, he clarifies. He tells me about how, from as early as kindergarten, he knew that’s what he wanted to be when he grew up: “Gang members command the most respect in the hood.” He tells me about how, at twelve years old, he heated the wire hook of a hanger over a stovetop flame to brand his own flesh as a pledge of loyalty. He shows me another scar, this one on his hand, from the time he fired a bullet clean through his palm on a dare, to the cheers of other gang members. He says he wanted to prove he was a badass despite his age and scrawny frame.

  “What makes a badass a badass?” I ask.

  He answers with one word: “Violence.”

  When the guards aren’t looking, Lil’ GQ unbuttons the front of his jumpsuit to show me a whole story map of scars and tattoos and burn marks on his chest. He tells me about another self-inflicted gunshot wound, this one on his rib cage. But in this account, there are no cheering bystanders. Instead of becoming the revered gangster he’d imagined, by the time he was fifteen, he’d turned into what he described as “the lowest of life-forms inhabiting the hood”—a drug dealer turned drug addict, siphoning from the supply. One day, while walking alone down the street, he took out his gun, aimed it at his own chest and pulled the trigger. He woke up in the emergency room, as his wound was being sutured.

  “Why’d you do it?” I ask.

  “When you’re abused by someone you trust, it confuses you. When you stay confused, you start to hate yourself.” He falls silent for a minute, a cloud passing over his face.

  This seems as good a time as any to ask him about what landed him here. Lil’ GQ tells me point-blank that the murder he is on death row for isn’t the only one he’s committed. “I don’t feel bad about those other murders because they were gang-related,” he says. “When you’re from where I’m from, the law of the jungle goes like this: If you don’t shoot, they shoot. That’s just the way it is. As for that last murder, the one they got me for, that was messed up because it was a person I loved. I was high on drugs and needed more. But I don’t blame what I did on the drugs. It was my fault and for a long time I believed I deserved the death penalty.”

  I don’t know how much of what Lil’ GQ is telling me is true. I’m not searching for holes and inconsistencies, contradictions and repetitions; I’m just listening. This man has already been judged for what he has done, and that’s not why I came here, anyway. And so I nod, and occasionally I pipe in with a question or an “I hear that,” but mostly I listen. I can’t pretend to understand much about his reality, but the fact that Lil’ GQ has a need to share all of these stories and is trying to make sense of the things that have happened to him, even now, even on death row, is something I can understand. When you are forced to confront your mortality, whether it’s because of a diagnosis or a state-mandated death sentence, there’s an urgency to lay claim to your life, to shape your legacy on your own terms, in your own words. To tell stories about your life is to refuse to be reduced to flat inevitability. As I sit here, listening to Lil’ GQ talk, I’m reminded of that Joan Didion line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Except that in the case of Lil’ GQ, he is telling himself stories in order to ease the passage of d
eath.

  “How many appeals do you have left?” I ask.

  “One more,” he says. A vein pulses in his forehead as he explains the process that leads up to execution. The legal notice that is delivered to your cell, notifying you that a date has been set. The special unit where inmates are transferred in the sixty days before execution and kept under 24/7 surveillance because there are so many suicide attempts. “Some people ask their family to be there when they get executed, but not me. I want to be remembered like this, not lying strapped to some table and put down like a dog. Nobody needs that image in their head. I came into this world alone and I’m gonna leave it alone.”

  * * *

  —

  When I return the next morning, I come prepared. I have Lil’ GQ’s inmate ID number written down on a Post-it note, a clear plastic baggie for my wallet, and twenty dollars in coins for the vending machines in case I need a snack. I navigate the labyrinth of hallways and checkpoints, and to my relief, I manage not to get yelled at by any guards. All seems to be going smoothly until Lil’ GQ appears on the other side of the greasy plexiglass divider. He looks distraught and I notice puffy bags under his eyes that weren’t there yesterday.

  “How you feeling?” I ask.

  “Honestly? I didn’t sleep,” he tells me, fidgeting with the cord of the receiver. “I was so nervous yesterday that I started running my mouth like a fool, trying to impress you and whatnot. When you left, I thought for sure that I’d offended you or that you thought I was some crazy deranged killer,” he says. “I told my homey in the cell next door that I was sure you weren’t coming back. I stayed up all night writing down my thoughts and organizing them so that I’d be able to better express myself in case you did.”

  Lil’ GQ bends over and reaches into his shoe. He pulls out a piece of paper folded into a tiny square. As he opens it, I see that it’s covered with notes. He begins to read off a list of questions. He asks about my health and my family. He asks what my favorite book is so that he can read it, too. He asks what breed of dog Oscar is and what kind of music I enjoy. He asks what I did during all that time in the hospital. “I got really, really good at Scrabble,” I tell him.