My Generation

by William Styron

  Now as we sat in the hot, still meeting room, it was Holland's task to present these facts to the board. One of the first persons he called to testify also made one of the most dramatic pleas of the day. This was Robert Satter, a prominent Hartford lawyer who had followed Reid's post-trial career with an abiding interest. It had for a long time been Satter's belief—shared by others—that of the multitude of injustices surrounding Reid's conviction one of the worst was that involving the sinister connection between Reid and the notorious mass-murderer Joseph Taborsky. It was Satter's contention that it had been the public furor and vengeful outcry attending Taborsky's trial that had infected Reid's own nearby courtroom and similarly sealed Reid's fate. A mild, scholarly-looking, sandy-haired man, Satter asked the board to consider a literary allusion. “You may recall the conclusion of Moby-Dick,” he said, “how, as the ship Pequod sinks beneath the waves, the arm of a sailor appears from the depths to hammer a pennant against the mast. Just as the nail is being driven home, a gull flies by, and its wing, interposing itself between hammer and mast, is nailed fast to the spar, so that the final glimpse of the doomed ship is this bit of fluttering life being dragged with it into the deep.” There was nothing histrionic about Satter and his manner; his words were splendidly afire. Pausing, he gestured toward Reid. If Benjamin Reid should die this night, he continued, his life, like that of Melville's gull, would have been sacrificed just as surely as if the arm of Joseph Taborsky had reached from the grave to drag him down into oblivion. It was a marvelously delivered speech, all in very low key, and when Satter had finished there was a long, rather uneasy silence in the room.

  The first hour or so of the general plea, including Satter's statement, was based on the question of equality of justice, and Holland had plenty of statistics at hand to show that the state of Connecticut had granted clemency or given lesser sentences to many criminals whose background and mental capacity were infinitely superior to Reid's, and whose crimes had often been far more cold-blooded and ruthless. But this was only the first part of the plea. Now, as the morning lengthened, Holland began to call witnesses to testify to Reid's fearful and blighted upbringing. There were a dozen or so in all, and they included a Negro policewoman who had been assigned to the slum area where Reid had been reared (she described the section as a “jungle”), various welfare workers and parole officers who had known and worked with Reid, and finally, a gentle-spoken middle-aged white woman named Mrs. Neva Jones, who had been the nurse at the Hartford County Home during the eight years Reid was there, and who had flown up from North Carolina to be present at the hearing. Partly due to the fact that he was at first barely literate, Reid had corresponded with no one during his long and lonely stay on death row, but late in 1961, as his execution approached, he and Mrs. Jones began to exchange letters. Excerpts from his letters were read at the hearing. They were remarkable, in style often resembling nothing so much as that of a man who in a general sense was quite lost but on the verge of a miraculous verbal discovery (actually, as he told Mrs. Jones, his main reading matter had been the Bible and a dictionary): “In your most recent letter you made mention of my vocabulary as being increase, well the reason is due to the fact that I do read quite a bit, and by doing this, I feel that I can express myself more clearly logically speaking, by studying neologistical expressions excerpted from the different literature I study.” But there was no doubt, as Holland pointed out to the board, that the letters were those of a man profoundly conscious of his wrongdoing (“I do not want sympathy, I just merely want a chance to show everyone that I have reformed and repented of my wrong that was done thoughtlessly senselessly”) and, even more important, were the expression of one struggling toward some kind of enlightenment. There was an unconscious irony in one questioning statement, which might sum up the thoughts of condemned, miserable, desolate, guilty men everywhere: “I know that I have done wrong but have I done worse than the worse or am I the worse period.”

  As the hearing began to draw to a close between noon and one o'clock, and with Reid's moment of execution only hours away, I became uneasily aware that all through the proceedings one member of the board had been in the habit of gazing abstractedly for long periods out the window. But there was no diminution of attention among the audience when the final witness appeared: Reid's mother, badly crippled with an arm adrift from her side like a helpless wing, who said, almost inaudibly, “I ask you, would you grant him life, please”; and Reid himself, who stood stiffly in his khaki uniform in a strained, awkward half-bow and, his voice almost a whisper, made a brief plea for mercy.

  The next-to-the-last presentation was made by Louis Pollak, professor of law at Yale, who capped even this morning's mountainous evidence of injustice with a brilliant analysis of the possibility of constitutional infirmities in Reid's case. He pointed out that although it was true that the United States Supreme Court had declined to hear Reid's appeal, there had been, in the long history of the case as it proceeded from court to higher court, enough dissent and doubt (as to whether Reid's rights had been violated) on the part of a few distinguished jurists to make it incumbent upon the board to consider this grave aspect of the case before consigning Reid to oblivion. It was a masterly plea, and it seemed difficult to surmount in terms of force and effect, but it was at least equaled by the presence of the final person to speak. This was a tall, athletically built, trimly tailored man, very grim, who approached the board and formally identified himself as Judge Douglass Wright. He had been the prosecutor in the original Reid trial and has since become a judge. The hearing room was utterly still, for this was a spectacle almost unique in American jurisprudence: a prosecutor interceding in behalf of the prisoner only hours before his doom. Wright was brief and to the point: there was no doubt of Reid's guilt; the trial had been conducted with strict fairness. But such factors as Reid's youth at the time of his crime, his slum background, his marginal mentality, had caused Wright, in the years since the sentence of death, to feel that execution would be an injustice. He joined therefore with the others in making a plea for clemency.

  After this, the case for the state seemed almost anticlimactic. The state's attorney, John D. LaBelle, an owlish, methodical man who kept shuffling through his notes, was quick to indicate in the strongest terms that Reid had been guilty, that in this “classic case of first-deg ree murder,” justice, insofar as the state was concerned, had been done. But, like Judge Wright, he conceded that the board, constituted to dispense mercy, might grant such mercy in this case, and he added, “Whatever you do, it isn't going to upset our office one bit.” The proceedings were ended. The board would announce its decision at three o'clock that afternoon.

  Downstairs in the prison reception lobby a large group of God's underground, the Quakers, had assembled. They numbered a score or so. Some of them had attended the hearing, and all of them were now prepared to participate that night in a vigil at the prison should the appeal for clemency fail. I spoke to one Quaker, a Hartford businessman. “We will pray for Reid,” he said, “which is all we can do.” He began to speak with a kind of fury for a Quaker. “It is a fearful thing, isn't it? What right has the state to coop up a man—a boy—in a tiny cell for five years, and then exterminate him like a dog?”

  Outside, the day was still blooming with summer and sunlight, and along the streets of Wethersfield, one of the supremely lovely New England towns, the children were still pedaling their bicycles. I met Louis Pollak; he was chatting with the Reverend William Coffin, Jr., the chaplain of Yale University, who had taken a personal interest in the Reid case. We were joined by Mrs. Jones, and the four of us decided to have lunch in a coffee shop on one of Wethersfield's elm-lined streets.

  At lunch, Mrs. Jones, seeming only a little nervous about the outcome of the appeal, said, “Oh, I knew Ben real well. He was a sort of lonely little boy. And a bit lazy, I guess. But there was nothing mean about him. He was really so proud of himself whenever he accomplished anything good. You know, he was a trombone pla
yer and assistant leader of the band. He was a good trombone player, too. I'll never forget how proud he was, dressed up in that band uniform.”

  “How long did you know him, Mrs. Jones?” Coffin inquired.

  “Oh, the whole time he was there. It must have been eight years. Imagine, eight years in the County Home! I guess he was sixteen when they let him go. But, you know, he wasn't ready to go back—back to that terrible slum. It's society's fault, really. I mean, all of us. People should know more about this situation, where these poor abandoned children are taken in for a while, and then sent back just at the wrong age to that awful environment. It's just a shame, really, and people should know about it.”

  At around two o'clock, as Coffin and I drove back to the prison, we saw Reid's mother. Quite alone, she was hobbling laboriously down the deserted, elm-shaded sidewalk in front of the prison toward a small sheltered enclosure that serves as a bus stop. There she sat down and began to fan herself. Coffin went up and greeted her. It was rather difficult to make conversation but I couldn't help asking where she was going.

  “Well, I expect I'll just go on home,” she said. “The Lord done answered my prayers, so I expect I'll just go right on home.”

  “Then you think the hearing went well?” I said.

  “Well, I figures if they was going to do anything they would say so at the end of it. But they ain't said nothing, so I figures they going let Benjamin off, praise God. I knew Ben has repented, so the mercy's coming to him. The Lord sure done answered my prayers.”

  Of course, she hadn't gotten this quite straight, and no one seemed to have advised her of the board's operations, but neither Coffin nor I, exchanging glances, could figure out a way to correct her. In the end it didn't seem to matter, for as she left us with these words and the bus came lumbering up, I had the feeling for the first time that day that all was going to be well.

  The decision, which came to the gathering in the reception room of the prison at 4:05, was that Reid's sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment, with the possibility of parole. There would be no necessity for the Quakers to keep their vigil. And a rent had appeared in the veil of immutable law.

  It is of course important that Reid's life was saved. It is more important that he will not be left to rot. Whether the five years spent in the shadow of the electric chair have worked irreparable damage upon his spirit is something no one can say for sure, but judging from his letters alone, there is a sense of something struggling and questing, and therefore salvageable. At some time in the future he will be eligible for parole, and in the meantime the Trinity group has pledged itself to help him in his search for an identity. It may be said perhaps that in prison a man's identity cannot be much, but we who are on the outside looking in—we who are so prone to forget that all men must be given at least the possibility of redemption—are in no position to judge. Not only capital punishment, but all punishment in general, is one of our most crucial dilemmas; the death penalty is the wretched symbol of our inability to grapple with that dark part of our humanity which is crime. Equally as important as Reid's own salvation is the fact that his case and the struggle to save his life, which attracted so much attention, will have caused people to rearrange entirely their ideas about some of our penal and criminal processes. Certainly the law in Connecticut in regard to capital offenders is archaic and monstrous; and already, largely asa result of the Reid case, there is talk in some circles about pressing in the legislature for a “triple verdict” law, now in effect in California and Pennsylvania (1, to determine guilt; 2, to determine sanity; 3, to determine sentence), which will permit evidence to be introduced at trial that was generally denied to Reid, this denial contributing greatly to the fact that he was initially sentenced to death. If just this act is accomplished, Reid's anguish will not have been in vain, and the simple victory won that afternoon in Wethersfield—the victory of life over death—will have been transformed into something even larger in our unending search for justice.

  [Esquire, November 1962.]

  Aftermath of “Aftermath”

  This may be a good place to examine briefly certain aspects of the power of the written word. I have never wanted to claim credit for having saved a man's life, but as I was reminded years later by George F. Will (the “young Trinity College student,” mentioned in “Aftermath,” who has become a celebrated national columnist), the original essay did have the effect of causing the Trinity people and others to spring into action. So I suppose it may be inferred that had I not written the original essay, Ben Reid would most likely have gone to his doom. On a somewhat less dramatic note, I was pleased to learn that the second piece I wrote on Reid had the effect of changing the Connecticut law regarding capital punishment along the lines I detailed in the concluding passage. Robert Satter, now a judge, whose wonderful speech about Moby-Dick still lingers in my memory among the bright moments of that day, later became a state legislator. It was he who, taking a cue from my article, introduced legislation that eventually brought about a more equitable procedure regarding capital offenders. So I felt that my initial ventures into journalism had hardly been wasted time.

  But what about Benjamin Reid? Rereading the two pieces I wrote on his case, I became aware of how important to my argument against the death penalty was the Christian doctrine of redemption. This interests me now, because I thought that by the time I was past thirty-five—at the very least agnostic and surely swept by the bleak winds of existentialism—I had abandoned the Presbyterian precepts of my childhood. But I can see that the Gospels were as much a mediating force in my attempt to save Reid's life as were Camus and Heidegger. And how sweet it was to see this candidate for redemption come alive from his benighted dungeon in a way that would quicken the heart of any Christian salvationist. How beautiful it was to witness this outcast victim flower and grow, once rescued and given that chance for which those honest Quakers had prayed on their knees. For the simple fact is that Ben Reid—now that he was snatched from the electric chair and released into the general prison population—demonstrated qualities of character, of will, and above all, of intelligence that defied everyone's imagination. All of the people connected with Reid's case had been deluded about his mental capacity, which was as much a victim of having been underestimated as Reid himself was a victim of foster homes and deprivation. Far from being the borderline defective he had been described as by many observers (including myself), Reid, it turned out, was quite bright, in certain ways even brilliant, and the metamorphosis he underwent in prison was something to marvel at. He became a star baseball player, a leader among the inmates; he secured his high school equivalency diploma, began to take college work. A model prisoner he was—in every sense of that worn and risky description. A triumph of faith over adversity. Maybe someday a winner.

  Reid spent eight more years in prison before his time came up for parole. In the middle of March 1970 I received a telephone call from some of the people at Trinity College who had taken an interest in Reid and had followed his career through prison. It was highly probable that Reid would be paroled in April, they said. What they proposed to do was enroll Reid as a special student at Trinity, where he would begin courses at summer school. Would I be willing, they wondered, to let Reid stay in my house in Roxbury for a few weeks while they put things in order at Trinity and began to ready a permanent place for him there? My willingness would be a not inconsiderable factor in obtaining the parole. I immediately replied that I would indeed take Ben in. Although I had never visited Reid in prison, we had corresponded quite a few times over the years since his commutation. His letters were well-reasoned, grammatically correct, persuasive—so impressive, really, and showing such signs of growth and blossoming that I could not stop reproaching myself for having helped cast him as mentally deficient. A week or so before he was to be released into my custody, I visited him in the new state prison at Somers, near the Massachusetts border. I was impressed by his poise, his verbal agility, his warmth, his intelligence.
The idea of my studio in Roxbury becoming Ben Reid's halfway house filled me with pleasure, and I understood the blessings of redemption.