Louisiana executions historically had taken place in the community where the crime occurred, both to satisfy the local passion for vengeance and to serve as a deterrent to potential wrongdoers. But dwindling public support for capital punishment prompted the legislature in 1956 to transfer executions to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, in the wilds of central Louisiana. Under the new protocol, a condemned prisoner remained in the local jail until the Louisiana Supreme Court reviewed the appeal of his trial. If it was found to have been constitutional, the governor was then free to schedule an execution date, and the prisoner would be transferred to Angola.
Rogers, in the cell two doors down from me, had been there two years. Our quarters were about the size of a small bathroom, each containing a bunk, face bowl, toilet, and shower. The walls of the cells were made of solid steel, except for the back wall, which was made of bars, enabling us to talk to one another across the empty cell between us. When either of us was permitted out of the cell to go to court, to see lawyers, or for some other business, we would walk over and see the other through the small hatch in the front door of our cells. We were each other’s only company, segregated from the rest of the jail population and allowed only a Bible and religious material. Neither of us asked the other about the circumstances that brought us there. We accepted each other without judgment, glad for companionship.
Rogers had valuable advice for me about how to survive life in a cell, where the struggle against isolation is a battle for one’s sanity. I had already slipped to the edge of madness when I first met him. Without him I would not have survived. When I’d slide off into fantasy, he’d engage me in laughter, conversation, argument, whatever it took to pull me back to reality.
He did that for nearly eight months until he lost his appeal in the Louisiana Supreme Court and was transferred to Angola in advance of his December 1, 1961, execution date. I had grown close to him. When we hustled a candy bar through a sympathetic guard or orderly, we’d split it. When we were down to our last cigarette, one of us would smoke half and toss what remained down the walkway outside the bars to the other. He was my first real friend; I finally had someone I was able to confide in and talk to about my likes and dislikes, my problems, my failings. No one had ever known as much about me as Rogers did. We were both failed human beings, social outcasts who shared the same life experiences and were now facing the same fate. When they took him to Angola, leaving me in solitude and silence, I cried—for his loss and my own.
Without a court reporter’s verbatim transcript, it took Leithead and Sievert more than seven months to piece together what they felt were thirty-four constitutional violations during my trial. On November 29, 1961, they filed my appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which advanced the case to the top of its docket. On January 15, 1962, the court’s seven white male justices unanimously declared that I had had a fair trial.
No other institution has so fueled the imagination of the Louisiana public as the Louisiana State Penitentiary, more popularly known as “Angola,” the name of the largest of several plantations merged at the turn of the century to create the institution. Its name conjures up a cacophony of horrors. It was called “the Alcatraz of the South” in 1939 by a New Orleans Sunday Item-Tribune reporter; its history, which has been written in the blood of those locked within its bowels, earned it infamy throughout the mid-twentieth century as the most intimidating prison in America. When deputies shackled me and put me in a car for the trip there on April 11, 1962, I feared the prison far more than my death sentence.
After I’d been on the road for half an hour, my mind fastened on the passing landscape and I calmed down. Dead stalks of the previous season’s sugarcane harvest filled mile after mile of flat fields. Cows roamed free in pastures. Overhead, an occasional flock of birds took flight, whirling and turning in unison, then settling in another tree. I envied them their freedom.
Not long after we passed the state capital, Baton Rouge, the flatlands slowly gave way to rolling hills, and we came to the quaint antebellum town of St. Francisville, dotted with plantations worked by slaves a hundred years earlier. We left the main highway for a narrow, winding, rutted road that snaked through twenty-two miles of some of the most rugged and forbidding terrain in the state—a wilderness of lush foliage, swamps, and deep ravines. Some of the shrubbery lining the road was deceptive: It was the tops of tall trees rooted in the bottom of an abyss far below. The dead-end road had a singular purpose—to deliver human cargo to the front gate of the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
About sixty miles northwest of Baton Rouge, the maximum-security prison sprawls on an eighteen-thousand-acre enclave surrounded on three sides by the muddy Mississippi River. The rugged Tunica Hills, replete with snake-infested woods and deep gorges, border the prison on the remaining side, completing a formidable natural barrier that makes escape extremely difficult and isolates the prison, which is accessible only by boat, plane, or this one treacherous road. The prison has twenty miles of levees, built long ago by inmates, many of whom died from the grueling labor. The levees don’t always protect the prison when the Mississippi becomes swollen from melting snow and ice up north each spring.
After miles of hairpin turns and breathtaking scenery, a massive dull gray, two-story building crouching against a bluff rose out of nowhere. Its sudden appearance jolted me like a crack of lightning. The prison loomed ominously against the skies, an image of awesome power. Dread replaced shock as we grew nearer and the cast-iron front gate came into view. To the right of the gate stood a wooden guard tower that looked like an outhouse on stilts. Others were scattered nearby. My stomach clenched when I saw the colored guards. These were the infamous khaki-backs, whose rumored brutality was the stuff of legend. They were trusty prisoners armed with rifles and pistols, vested with the power to kill.
Nineteen sixty-two was an especially bad time to be entering Angola. The legislature had slashed the prison’s operating budget by one-third, shutting down what few educational and vocational programs existed there and laying off 114 employees from Angola’s all-white staff. The penitentiary was manned and operated by an army of khaki-backs supervised by a small contingent of actual employees, generally referred to as “free people.” The Baton Rouge State-Times predicted that the reforms gained in the 1950s after 31 white prisoners slashed their Achilles tendons to protest conditions at Angola would be lost, and the prison would deteriorate to the point of once again becoming the nation’s worst. The Shreveport Times saw it returning to “the medieval slave camp of the past.”
Eleven men were executed at Angola from 1957 to 1961, only one of whom was white. The most recent execution had taken place in June 1961.
We drove through the front gate and parked. The deputies took me down a long walkway and into the office of the security captain for the Reception Center. I stood silently, cuffed and chained hand and foot, dreading whatever would come next.
“Well, Cap’n, we brought you another boy,” one deputy said, handing over some paperwork and removing my shackles. The other deputy set down the sack of belongings I’d brought from the local jail.
“What’d he do?” the captain asked.
“Murdered a white woman.”
“Okay. We’ll take him off your hands.”
I knew from the jail grapevine that Negroes convicted of raping or killing a white person typically got a brutal ass-whipping by Angola’s white guards and their khaki-backs to “teach them their place.” So when a white guard and his two trusties came to the captain’s office to take me away, I was terrified. But I was spared the whipping, as I later learned, because I was going to death row. I picked up my sack, and the khaki-backs guided me down the hall, where other trusties collected vital data on me, took fingerprints, and made an official mug shot. After stripping and squatting so the khaki-backs could make sure I wasn’t smuggling any contraband in my body cavities, I was given a blue-and-white pin-striped denim uniform and a new identity. I was C-18, the C signifying �
��condemned,” the 18 signifying that I was the eighteenth man to be housed on Angola’s death row. We headed there.
It was a makeshift affair. In 1957, when executions were moved to the prison, the expectation was that the condemned would be brought here only to die. Seven did meet their end in the electric chair that year, but three New Orleans Negroes were unexpectedly spared. Thomas Goins’s execution was halted by Justice Hugo Black to allow an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Alton Poret and Edgar Labat, abandoned by their attorneys, smuggled out an appeal for help that was published in the Los Angeles Times; a sympathetic reader hired new lawyers, who rescued them from their date with the electric chair. No one had anticipated this wrinkle in the new execution protocol. Nor had anyone anticipated that the federal courts, historically reluctant to interfere with state criminal cases, would begin staying executions frequently so they could review the fairness of state proceedings. Angola authorities were forced to create a place to house the surviving condemned, as there was no legal provision to return them to the local jails. A tier of fifteen cells on the first floor of the Reception Center building facing the bluff was designated “Death Row.”
To get there, we passed through several gates and doors unlocked for us by khaki-backs. After the final door, we entered a narrow steel-and-concrete netherworld. At the free man’s instruction, the khaki-back worked a crank that opened one of the cells.
“Okay, Rideau. Go down to number nine. That’s your cell,” the free man said.
I picked up my possessions and passed by the cells of somber men who nodded to me as I passed. I was startled when I got to Cell 5 and saw Ora Lee Rogers sitting on his bunk looking at me. The governor had stayed his execution when his lawyers filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Man, I thought you were dead,” I blurted out. “They told me you were dead. You’re here!”
“In living color,” he said, flashing the broad smile I remembered so well.
“Rideau!” the free man yelled. “Move on down to Cell 9.”
I didn’t move. I wanted to talk with Ora Lee.
“Go on,” Ora Lee said softly. “Go on, and we’ll talk later.”
I went to Cell 9 with a spring in my step, as hard as that may be to believe. My best friend, my only friend in the world, was here. I wasn’t alone.
Seventeen men had escaped death since executions were moved to Angola, but only twelve were on death row. The other five, all blacks, were at the state mental hospital at Jackson, in a wing for the criminally insane. Moreese Bickham was one of them. He’d been transported to Angola for execution in 1961 for killing two white police officers. His lawyer told him the only way he could see Bickham surviving was for him to feign insanity; the state wouldn’t execute an insane man. So he played crazy. Judge H. R. Reid halted the scheduled execution and ordered a lunacy hearing for Bickham, who was transferred to the state mental hospital. In 1963 he was returned to death row.
On April 11, 1962, the day I walked onto death row, there were nine colored and three white men in the cells for the condemned. The whites were all there with murder convictions.
Delbert Eyer had shot a woman in the back of the head at point-blank range during an armed robbery of a dime store. He had managed to garner considerable outside religious support because he had since “found God;” an effort was being made to get his sentence commuted based on his “rehabilitation.” He was a clean-cut but standoffish young man who kept his interactions with colored prisoners to a minimum.
Brodie Byron Davis was a burly, six-foot, 220-pound ex-convict on parole from Angola when he killed an elderly man during an armed robbery. The victim was bound and beaten to death, then thrown in a river. An ex-GI, Davis was friendly and the wealthiest man on the row by virtue of a monthly disability check from the Veterans Administration.
Roy Fulghum killed four people: his wife, both of her parents, and her teenage brother. He was just a typical, everyday working stiff—until he “lost it.”
Those condemned for rape were blacks: Andrew Scott, Alton Poret, Edgar Labat, and Emile Weston. Their victims had been white.
Of the other blacks there the day I arrived, Edward “Bo Diddley” Davis had been convicted of murdering a white police officer who had gone to Davis’s home with other officers after Davis’s wife called during a domestic dispute. Davis had previously served time in Angola for shooting his father-in-law.
Freddie Eubanks was condemned for beating and stabbing to death a seventy-year-old white woman during a burglary. He was fifteen at the time of the crime.
Thomas “Blackjack” Goins was convicted of killing a white man during an armed robbery that netted thirty-five cents.
Parnell Smith had come to Angola with a life sentence for a murder in 1956, and killed again while in prison, for which he was given the death penalty.
And, of course, there was Ora Lee.
Cell 9 was six feet wide by eight feet deep, smaller than my cell at the Calcasieu Parish jail. It contained a white ceramic face bowl, a lidless ceramic toilet, a metal table and bench affixed to the wall, and a narrow metal bunk, its hardness barely relieved by a one-inch-thick, cotton-batting mattress made at the prison factory. An electrical wire threaded its way into my cell from the hallway, connecting to a bare bulb that lightened or darkened my space as I screwed it in or out. The cinder-block walls of my cell were white on the upper half, gray on the lower. The front of the cell consisted of bars facing a ten-foot-wide hall that ran the length of the tier. On the far side of the hall there was a wall of windows that looked out onto a small grassy area directly in front of us, then the prison fence, beyond which lay the bluff. Occasionally I saw a cow or two, or an armed khaki-back walking outside the fence. Most of the prisoners would hang a sheet or blanket across the front of their cell to spend their day free from the eyes of passersby in the hall, shutting off the view outside the windows. The guards respected the crude attempts at privacy; when they needed to talk with a prisoner they would stand in front of his cell and ask the occupant to move the curtain aside.
There were few avenues of relief from the boredom and idleness of life in a tiny cage. We spent every minute of every day in our cells, except twice a week when we were permitted out one at a time for fifteen minutes to shower at the head of the tier, near the entrance. In those precious minutes, men would take a quick shower and rush down the row to talk to other prisoners. If the need to talk or conduct business was urgent, the shower was skipped. The guards didn’t care how you spent your fifteen minutes.
To feed the body’s need for exercise, some of us did sit-ups and push-ups or paced the small patch of floor beside the steel bunk. Full of youth and testosterone, we found masturbation a daily necessity as we passed sunless days and sleepless nights in too-hot or too-cold gray cells, waiting to die.
We were allowed visits only from our immediate family and our religious advisors. Many did not have these specific visitors and had to obtain a court order from a judge to enable others to come. A chair or wooden bench would be placed in front of our cell for visitors to sit on. There was minimal security supervision, which allowed a couple of the white guys to occasionally sneak a little sex through the bars. Unfortunately, the rest of us either had no wife or court-approved girlfriend, or the woman couldn’t afford the trip. Getting to Angola was a costly endeavor for poor people, and we all came from impoverished backgrounds. The ride in 1962 was a long one over bad roads: six hours or more round-trip from New Orleans, eight from Lake Charles, ten from Shreveport. Lawyers, understandably, came only when they had to. Visitors were rare.
When my mother visited, she usually brought along one or more of my siblings. My baby sister, Mary Arlene, a toddler, would run up and down the hall, playing peekaboo with some of the guys. Visiting me on death row would become a natural part of the social context she grew up in.
We were permitted to write and receive an unlimited number of letters, but they were monitored and confiscated if authorities found them of
fensive. When prison officials realized in 1963 that Edgar Labat was corresponding with a white Scandinavian housewife who was trying to help him, they ended the three-year pen-pal relationship by declaring that death row prisoners could have contact only with members of their own race. The ensuing furor created an international flap and a flood of letters and petitions from tens of thousands of Scandinavians to President Lyndon Johnson and Louisiana governor John J. McKeithen requesting Labat’s freedom. To avoid the charge of racism and similar problems in the future, state authorities thereafter restricted our correspondence to only those permitted to visit us—our immediate family, lawyers, and a religious advisor. While that reduced mail considerably for some, it didn’t affect me. My mother, who struggled to write letters with only a fifth-grade education, was my only correspondent. Except for her occasional visits and notes, I was completely cut off from the outside world. Never had I felt so lonely; never had life seemed so futile.
We were allowed to have a small electric radio, and a small electric fan to combat the stifling summer heat in the cells. With the two-story cinder-block building at our backs and a bluff looming up in front of us blocking any possible southern breeze, death row was an inferno from May to September. During the winter, icy north winds scooped up dampness from the Mississippi River and dumped bone-chilling cold into the cells. That’s when a curtain across the front of the cell proved its worth by keeping the air at bay. Our other trick for keeping warm was putting a layer of newspaper over or between the thin blankets on our steel bunks.
The radio and fan, and tobacco, were luxuries. The prison provided food, toothpaste, toothbrush, and toilet paper in restricted quantities. Everything else—deodorant, soap, hair cream, canned meat, and tuna—we had to purchase out of whatever small funds we received or could muster. My mother would send a couple of dollars regularly so that I could buy Bugler tobacco, my only indulgence. I tried to quit smoking several times to eliminate the expense, but failed. I needed the fleeting relief of a cigarette.
Wilbert Rideau Page 5