Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  Death row operated independently of the rest of Angola. All files and paperwork on us were maintained in the captain’s office, which was responsible for the direct management of the row. Our mail bypassed the normal process and was delivered directly to the captain’s office, and our money was kept in a safe there as well. Clyde “Blackjack” Morgan was the captain when I got there, and his word was law. Morgan was a clotheshorse who favored spit-shined shoes and was also rumored to drive a Thunderbird—all on a 1962 prison salary. Like all other prison security officers, he was a white man and a staunch segregationist, but he was also basically fair, treating everyone on the row, colored and white, the same. And he’d help us if he could. He routinely informed us whenever his wife planned to go shopping in Baton Rouge, so that if any of us needed something permissible, she would buy it and be reimbursed from the money his office held for us.

  Morgan was his own man. One weekend while the warden was away, a colored inmate reportedly raped or assaulted the wife of an employee somewhere on the grounds. Morgan learned that some employees planned to lynch the prisoner, who was being held in a Main Prison “Dungeon.” This was an era when captains were warlords, each commanding a small clique of employees and a larger crew of armed khaki-backs who stood ready to lie, steal, fight, injure, and kill at their captain’s command with no questions asked. It was a macho, arbitrary world, and captains ruled like gangsters, jealous of others’ power and territorial about their turf. Morgan’s authority was limited to the Reception Center, but that did not deter him. He boldly went into the Main Prison, accompanied by his own handpicked khaki-backs, snatched the offender, and immediately transported him to death row, locking him next to me in Cell 8. Angry employees stormed the Reception Center, but Morgan and his khaki-backs stopped them in the hallway, warning them that it was against the law for them to go onto death row. The employee mob dispersed unhappily. Blackjack Morgan had saved the prisoner’s life.

  On death row, living in such close proximity, we often got on each other’s nerves. We argued, got angry, cursed and threatened each other, but since we were confined to cells there were no fights. There were, however, wars of words, of silence, and of noise, like turning a radio up to full volume to wake one’s nemesis—not to mention everyone else. The biggest danger came when, on shower day, one inmate would come out of his cell and throw a glass jar or worse against someone’s bars, sending shards of glass flying into other cells. Indeed, on my first night, Andrew Scott was using a tin can set over a ball of flaming toilet paper to boil his feces mixed with syrup to throw on Emile Weston, a concoction designed not only to burn but to stick to the skin. Weston, a couple of cells down from us, overheard my expression of amazement when I realized what was happening and had his blanket covering the front of his cell when Scott threw the jar of foul brew.

  One condemned man tried to get another in trouble by telling Captain Morgan the other had contraband in his cell. That was a big mistake. Morgan put both inmates in the Dungeon, then came to death row to tell us he didn’t like “fucking rats, ’cause if you’ll snitch on your fellow inmate, you’ll snitch on me, too. But you fuckers ought not be trying to make trouble for each other. You ain’t got no business playing these little fucking penitentiary games. They sent y’all gawddam asses up here to kill you—all of you. The way I see it, y’all got too much shit to deal with to be snitching on each other. Y’all all in the same motherfucking boat. You need to be trying to paddle together.”

  My first lesson in life about unity occurred shortly after my arrival. The death row inmates staged a hunger strike. At each meal, we were asked if we wanted to eat, and we all refused. After the second day I was really hungry. Good smells drifted down the hall, robbing me of whatever willpower I had. When the guard announced fried chicken for lunch and asked who wanted to eat, I surrendered. After lunch, I attempted to make a joke of my weakness, but no one laughed. My calls to various guys were met with silence. Finally, I said, “C’mon, fellas, y’all not mad at me about that, huh? I was hungry, and that smell was killing me.”

  “We all fucking hungry, and we all smelled the same damn chicken you did,” Bo Diddley said angrily, “but we didn’t eat it.”

  “Rideau, they do this all the time,” Ora Lee said kindly. “Whenever there’s a hunger strike, they cook fried chicken or pork chops to tantalize you with the smell.” Alton Poret yelled for him not to explain anything to me, but Rogers insisted this was all new to me, that I didn’t know any better.

  “I just got here,” I said. “I don’t know anything about how y’all do things. I don’t want to be at odds with y’all, but somebody’s got to teach me how things go and what to do.” Several of the men began telling me about strikes, what was expected of everyone, and explained the need to act as a collective body and stick together. Afterward, I felt like a jerk and was ashamed of my selfish weakness.

  Morgan eventually rose to become the head of Angola’s entire security force. The captain who replaced him was a poor administrator, and we petitioned the local district court with grievances in a handwritten letter signed by most of us and sent through the mail. Then we staged a hunger strike and rebellious behavior that almost resulted in a physical confrontation with the guards. Morgan stepped in and resumed control of death row, resolving many of our grievances. He allowed us to get newspapers and magazines through the mail, and stopped guards from bringing inmates down from the second floor—where they were held in extended lockdown in isolation cells for disciplinary or security reasons—to scrub the death row hall at night, sadistically beating them before returning them to their cells.

  Victor Walker was warden in 1962, but we rarely saw him except when he stood before someone’s cell and read a death warrant. He would announce the date and time the governor had scheduled the inmate to be killed, then ask the inmate what he wanted done with his body. The warden performed this ritual twice in 1962, five times in 1963, and once in 1964. Executions generally took place two to three weeks after the issuance of the warrant, once as little as eleven days. They were always scheduled for a Friday, at midnight.

  A hush would descend over death row when the warden departed, reflecting an unspoken understanding that Death had to be respected as it approached its prey. At some point, the executioner would come to look at the inmate and size up his physical dimensions in order to make the correct adjustments to the straps on the electric chair. Generally, the man scheduled for execution didn’t sleep much. I could not fathom what he might be feeling, even though I was sitting on the tier awaiting my turn. But it was an experience that allowed some of the condemned, if they possessed any decency, to contemplate the damage they had done and feel true remorse. For some, it was a religious experience.

  In my experience, the traditional last meal requested by a doomed man reflected the preferences of his friends on the row, because they would actually eat the meal; condemned men usually lost their appetites in the face of imminent death.

  We discussed and debated how we would go to our deaths. Some vowed to force the guards to carry them physically to the chair, fighting and screaming all the way. “I’m gonna make them fight me, then drag me, ’cause I’m not going to cooperate with them killing me,” Bo Diddley declared. Others, like me, pointed out that all we had left in life was our personal dignity and that we should not let anyone take that from us. “You don’t give them the opportunity to later laugh and talk about how you squealed like a coward, afraid to die,” Ora Lee said. “Make them respect you for at least being able to handle something that many of them doubt they could.”

  None of us died in 1962, marking only the fourth year since 1930 that no one was executed in Louisiana. All death warrants issued in 1963 and 1964 were also stayed. On a tour of the prison, newly elected governor John J. McKeithen stood before our cells and candidly told us, “If your DA doesn’t push me to do it, I won’t sign a death warrant and you can sit here as long as you want to, because this is not something I want to do. Do we unders
tand each other?” We did. He advised us to get our relatives to enlist the aid of their ministers to lean on the district attorney to let our cases “just sit.”

  On death row, we had to build our day-to-day existence in a vacuum. The existence was senseless; we were just waiting to die. For a long time, indeed, I didn’t care whether I lived or died. I had little reason to live.

  Angola introduced me to the idea of reading just to kill time. The first book I read was Fairoaks, a historical novel by Frank Yerby that Thomas Goins recommended. “It’ll give you an idea of how white folks been messing over our people as long as this country has been here,” he said, handing me the paperback through the bars. “They wouldn’t teach this in school.” The enslavement of Africans in the American South had never received more than a passing mention in the history classes I attended. But this book brought it to life and ignited something in me. I wanted to know more—about slavery, about history, and, ultimately, about everything. From then on, I lived inside my head, in a world of books. It helped me survive the maddening monotony and boredom of the cell. Except for the unrelenting need for sexual relief and the periodic need to stretch my legs and exert myself physically, I buried myself in books. Reading obscured the dismal future I faced. Initially, I read whatever was available on the black market—smuggled books—or those owned by other death row inmates. After a prison library was created, I could be more selective, choosing what I wanted from the book cart brought in by a trusty. The more I learned, the more I sought; the more I reflected, the more I grew and matured. There were no lightning bolts, instant revelations, or overnight conversions; it was a long growth process in which I began to shed the ignorance, anger, and insecurities that had governed my previous life. I learned more from my reading on death row than I had during all my years of formal schooling, which had left me literate but uneducated. Eventually I came to see that there was so much more to life and to the world, so many options available that, as bad as things might have been, I was never as trapped in life as I had believed. I realized that my real problem had been ignorance and, as a result, I had thrown away my life.

  Reading ultimately allowed me to feel empathy, to emerge from my cocoon of self-centeredness and appreciate the humanness of others—to see that they, too, have dreams, aspirations, frustrations, and pain. It enabled me finally to appreciate the enormity of what I had done, the depth of the damage I had caused others. I came to understand that the problems that overwhelmed my teenage mind could have been sorted out but instead led to a spur-of-the-moment decision that had devastating, permanent consequences. That I did not mean to kill Julia Ferguson did not change the fact that she had died because of what I did. Her family and friends lost someone they loved—in a violent manner that would pain them the rest of their days. My own family also lost someone they loved and would find it much harder to live their lives in peace.

  My father fled to California and my brother Raymond joined the army, but the rest of my family, their options limited by poverty, remained behind to face the repercussions of my rash act. It was a fearful time for my mother, her existence marred by obscene phone calls and white youths drinking, firing guns, and yelling obscenities in front of her home. Welton Semien had been trying to get her to marry him for some time, to no avail, but after one terror-filled night, she accompanied him to the courthouse, where they quietly married, and he moved in, giving her and the children a little protection. The presence of his car parked in the yard helped. But he couldn’t shield her from the pointing fingers, the whispers, the hostility, or the shame she bore as my mother. Yet she never complained, never reprimanded or rejected me. She stood by me unflinchingly, demonstrating a commitment, courage, and fortitude so powerful that I realized this woman loved me unconditionally, even when the world despised me and wanted to obliterate me from the face of the earth. The dreams of her girlhood had long ago been crushed by the ugly realities of her life. Like many mothers, she had transferred her aspirations to her children, especially her firstborn, and I had destroyed them just as surely as my father had done before me.

  I knew there had to be moments when my mother wondered if how I turned out was somehow her fault. Once, feeling especially sad for her, I reached through the bars, put my hand over hers, and said, “You need to know that my ending up on death row—it had nothing to do with you or how you raised me.”

  “I had wondered,” she said.

  I may not have cared much about what happened to me, but I did care about my mother. As she scuffled to make the long trips to Angola and to provide for my needs out of her meager funds, I witnessed her quiet heartbreak, her suffering; and I experienced almost unrelenting guilt for having let her down, for having been responsible for her difficulties. In the wake of these feelings, though, as if one led inevitably to the other, was the blossoming awareness that the collateral damage my mother experienced paled in comparison to the loss suffered by Julia Ferguson and those whom she loved and was loved by.

  Everything in me ached to make up for the devastation I’d caused, but of course I couldn’t. Weighed down by guilt, remorse, and the impossible situation I found myself in, I contemplated suicide, seeing it as the least I could do, as it would not only end my mother’s prolonged misery and allow her and the kids to move on with their lives, but it would also serve as atonement for the life that I had taken. Why postpone the inevitable? Why not give everyone relief, including me? Why suffer one day just for the sake of suffering the next?

  “So you’re ready to quit,” Goins said angrily one day when I expressed these feelings. “You’re lucky them white folks sent you to death row, ’cause your little ass wouldn’t survive this prison. You won’t fight. That means you’d be pussy, some man’s old lady. You got yourself in a situation that you don’t want to deal with. So you want to creep out of it like a little bitch. How is your dying supposed to benefit your victim? Or your momma? You can justify it any way you like, but it’s all about you, not the people you jerked around. How can you make up for what you did if you’re dead? If you wanted to do something for them, you wouldn’t let their suffering be in vain. You’d fight to make some good come of it, and try to make things right. Nothing’s impossible, man—until you quit. That’s what cowards do. They turn tail and run. Be a man, for once in your life.”

  Given who I was, what I had done, and where I was—as far down in life as a person could get—that seemed impossible. I could no more change my lot than I could change the color of my skin. My prospects in life were hopeless. I had no future, and my debt could not be repaid. Yet I knew Goins was right. Suicide was a coward’s way out. To be a real man, an honorable man, meant to carry on.

  His words resonated in my head: “Nothing’s impossible—until you quit.” I had read stories of men—Malcolm X, Otto von Bismarck, Mahatma Gandhi, the nameless English convicts exiled to Australia—who rose from ashes, faced great challenges, impossible odds, and won; scoundrels who had been as empty and worthless as I, who had gone on to re-create their lives, redeem themselves, and become respected by their fellow human beings for their good works. Maybe I, too, could be resurrected. I began to identify with these individuals and, through that newfound identity, I found hope, a burning need to live to redeem myself, to do something meaningful with my life in partial payment of the debts I owed—to Julia Ferguson and her loved ones, to my family, to society, and to God, who gave me free will to make better choices than I had.

  The world could define me as “criminal,” but I did not have to live its definition of me. I resolved that I would not let my crime be the final definition. I knew there was more to me than the worst thing I’d done. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. I would have to survive, and that was possible only if I regarded my present circumstances as a challenge, a test. I had to prove my sincerity and determination to redefine and redeem myself, to make amends.

  In the face of the Louisiana Supreme Court having affirmed my conviction and death sentence, Sievert and Leithead appealed to the
U.S. Supreme Court, even though there was next to no chance my case would be one of the handful selected for review. It took them a year to prepare the petition. The crux of the appeal was the covertly filmed interview Sheriff Reid and KPLC-TV had staged and the prejudice that flowed from it. They argued that “the film so permeated the people in this area generally that it made a conviction of the Petitioner an accomplished fact, and there was no need for a mob to pound on the door of the jail demanding the prisoner.”

  It surprised everyone when the Supreme Court accepted my case. I did not understand at the time that, with mass civil disobedience challenging racial discrimination and the fairness of government throughout the South, the high court—which formerly had upheld many racist practices and winked at others—needed to send a symbolic message to blacks about its readiness to step in, be fair, and ensure justice. A hearing on my case, with oral arguments, was held on April 29, 1963. On June 3, the justices issued their ruling.

  Justice Potter Stewart decried what he called the “kangaroo court proceedings” in my case. He wrote that the Constitution guaranteed every defendant basic rights: “Among these are the right to counsel, the right to plead not guilty, and the right to be tried in a courtroom presided over by a judge. Yet in this case the people of Calcasieu Parish saw and heard, not once but three times, a ‘trial’ of Rideau in a jail, presided over by a sheriff, where there was no lawyer to advise Rideau of his right to stand mute…. No such practice as that disclosed by this record shall send any accused to his death.” My conviction was reversed and the case returned to the trial court in Lake Charles.

  The Supreme Court ruled that I could not be tried within the broadcast range of KPLC-TV. That created a problem, because Louisiana law forbade moving a trial beyond an adjoining judicial district, and all of those districts were within the station’s range. Judge Cutrer ruled that a judicial impasse had been reached: I was beyond the ability or authority of Louisiana courts to retry me.