When Amber and Erica arrived, Grandma had been playing on the computer. She was a big Facebook person, in addition to her love of Farmville. She presently offered some advice on the game to Erica—to stop building so many buildings: “Just spend your time on animals and trees. You get more money off of animals and trees.” Erica moaned that she’d been doing it all wrong. “Get you some stuff planted,” Grandma said. “That’s how you’re making money every day.”
Madyson was staying with her grandma that night, as usual, and Amber, Maria, and Erica at their friend’s. It was probably their last time around a computer that day, and they decided to research bus tickets online.
Madyson, seeing the room’s attention turn away from her, took it as a cue to bring toys from all over the house and dump them on the living room floor. She was bright, full of joy, with so much evident promise. Even so, it was hard to ignore the miserable cyclicality of things. Sandra and Wallace had struggled to care for Mark, leaving grandparents to pick up the pieces. Then Mark and Tena had struggled to care for Amber, leaving grandparents to pick up the pieces. Now Amber and Maria struggled to care for Madyson, leaving grandparents to pick up the pieces. On and on it went, and it was difficult for anyone with any sense to look at the girl and assume that this time would be different.
Amber, Erica, and Maria said their good-byes, then drove over sparse, hilly country, and at last arrived at a trailer park. They said there was a good party going on there tonight. It was also where they had found a bed.
ALL THE WAY down 181 from San Antonio, the road swells and shrinks between four lanes and two, across the flat plains of southern Texas, past one-off barbecue joints, past the parched yellow ranch land for sale or lease, past the signs soliciting prayers for rain. A left on Farm to Market 632, and the John B. Connally Unit rises from the dust, shimmering through the curls of ground heat, a vast and squat hive of dues-paying.
Connally was maximum security, and still haunted by the bizarre and elaborate escape of the so-called Texas Seven in 2000—or, as they were alternatively known, the Connally Seven. To get to Robert Stroman, who had been inside six years, you had to cross a gate with a sign warning “No hostages beyond this point.” What it meant was that the good guys—visitors, ministers, even the guards—went among the bad guys at their own peril. Once you entered that gate, if a prisoner took you hostage, no deal would be made for your freedom, no prisoner release negotiated to win you back. It was said to apply even to the warden.
A prison official with a big smile and chirpy enthusiasm explained that Connally housed “the worst of the worst.” The corridors were weirdly silent, and the centralized air-conditioning sounded shrill amid the absence of other sounds. Occasionally, one heard a concerned groan: the opening and closing of the electric gates that locked the prisoners in. The place was eerie and sad—and also, for those in the industry, ripe with promise. On the wall, a poster reminded the guards of the possibilities: “The overtime earnings are increasing, last month one employee received $1919.88. Sign up now!!!!!”
Mark Stroman’s son, Robert, was waiting in the visitation room, a tattooed hulk, though much lighter than the four hundred pounds he claimed to have been when he got in. He was dressed in white, with a freshly shaven head. He had less of a facial resemblance to his father than Amber did, but the overall resemblance—the way he talked, those massive arms, the extensive ink work on his body—was just as striking. His most recent tattoo was of a Viking, with his father’s initials on it. He got it done on the inside by a fellow prisoner, which you’re not supposed to do because of the hepatitis risk, but which everyone does anyway. He chose it after he found out his father’s execution date. He hoped it might make him like the Viking, he said: “wise and hardened by going through it.”
Robert was twenty-four and hadn’t seen Amber in six years. He had seen Erica a few times, maybe. The family was too scattered, he explained. He didn’t blame anybody. Maybe everything would be different when he got out in a couple years.
Like his sisters, Robert was undergoing a change he didn’t fully understand in his relationship with his father. Stroman was once for Robert an elusive man to be longed for when he was away and relished when he came around and mimicked as much as could be. Now he was becoming something else: a ghostly reminder of a way of life that Robert knew would tempt him again and again but had to be avoided. It was perhaps useful to have this kind of foil in a dead father.
His father was, like the men at Connally, like Robert himself, a stew of good and bad. What Robert admired in him, and hoped to find in himself one day, was his way of loving by protection. “I want to be loving,” Robert said, “because if you grew up with him and you was his friend, he loves you and he’d go to bat for you any way he could—any way.” Like the time they all went to the state fair together and Robert vanished among the rides and then saw, perhaps more plainly than ever, the depth of his father’s feeling.
“I knew he loved me because I could see the fear and the panic in his face when he realized I wasn’t around,” Robert said. “And he started hollering my name—‘Robert! Robert!’ And I said, ‘Here I am.’ And I remember him grabbing my arm and shaking me and saying, ‘Don’t you ever, ever …’ And I knew then.”
Robert was aware that his father was a racist, and this he wished to reject, but prison had also made him understand where his father was coming from: “When I grew up, I was never around blacks or stuff like that, so it was like a culture shock, you know what I mean—like, man, took a while to learn how to talk to them and stuff, and understanding why they act the way they do.” Robert claimed that it was the little things that alienated the races from one another: “I say ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir’ to everybody—my age, older, younger, because that’s the way I was raised up.” In prison the blacks, especially, behaved differently, at least as Robert saw it, often leaping into conversation too directly for his taste.
Robert came to Connally for aggravated robbery at eighteen. “It was a drug deal gone bad,” he said. “That was all. I didn’t know the people. My homeboy ripped them off and—Amber, it was her first car—they chased us, and they ended up running into my sister’s car, and the guy jumped in my window, and he started hitting me. So I stabbed him with a knife.” It was not all that unusual for a methland case. There were defense lawyers in Texas who reported that such cases now accounted for the majority of their work—if you included the various things people did to sell meth, buy it, smoke it, and protect their persons and honor.
“If I could change anything, man, it’d be doing drugs,” Robert said. “It’s definitely the tool of the devil, for real—it twists your mind.” With meth he remembers floating in the clouds, high above the earth but not flying, just floating, all the words coming at once, awake for days, invincible and alive.
Now Robert wanted to remake himself. This year he could feel the end drawing near. He had two years left if his behavior remained solid. He had so many ideas of how he could be. It was going to be different now, he swore. He wanted to figure things out: “Since I’m getting a late start on life, I’m gonna have to work. Maybe go to school, get a trade.” Maybe he would avail himself of the classes inside to learn a skill before he got out, but it was complicated: “There’s certain stipulations.” Those stipulations involved how much time you had done, when you were due out, and the quality of your behavior. This last had gotten Robert removed from a class once before.
Above all, Robert wanted a family—and a family that was “normal,” as his had not been. “To an extent, we won’t ever be perfect because we’ve already made mistakes and stuff in life,” he said. Still, he felt a need, even before he had the rudiments of a good life, to have children of his own: “I want kids, man, and I want my kids to know their aunts, my sisters; their grandma, my mom—all that. And I want them to see me doing good. And I want them to love their aunts, and I want my sisters to love my kids, and I want it to go on for generations and generations.” He stepped back and consid
ered where he was: “I want none of this, man. And I regret these tattoos and stuff I got.”
A moment later, he tempered his enthusiasm for his future children’s contact with his relatives: “I know the errors of my way, and I know I messed up. And when I have kids, I’m not going to—I’m going to be there. And I’m not going to allow them to be around anything, and that includes—if my sisters and my mom’s messing up, I don’t want my kids or nothing to be around it, because I don’t want them to see that. And that’s why I worry so much about my sisters and hope they get everything together before I get out, man, because I’m going to try help them as much as I can. But I can only do so much because it’s time for me to start my own family.”
All this talk of a new life as a protective family man seemed to make Robert zoom out and think of politics. “America’s losing it, man,” he said out of nowhere. He was referring to “morals and stuff like that.”
“Same-sex marriage and all that?” he said. “That ain’t right, you know what I mean? That’s like that Sodom and Gomorrah: men was laying with men and all that. And what happened after that? Got blasted—you know what I mean? And now everything’s being accepted.”
THAT EVENING RAIS was at the mosque in Richardson, the one where Mark Stroman had dreamed of slaughtering dozens of Muslims all those years ago. The congregants were celebrating the end of Ramadan. Rais wore a blue embroidered shirt in the back-home style and donned a golden cap as he entered the building. The worshippers ranged widely in age, ethnicity, and even dress, wearing everything from T-shirts and shorts to dress shirts and khakis to mesh Cowboys jerseys. Children were everywhere, frolicking in knowing and unknowing defiance of the solemnity.
Rais joined the other men in the waves of bowed prayer, in a building whose decor blended the acoustic ceiling tiles of institutional America with an Islamic dome painted pastel blue. After the prayer, the crowd spilled out into the heat, which was relenting at last, into a courtyard where sweets were on offer to mark the fast’s end. Volunteers gave out plates filled with Japanese party snacks and quarter doughnuts and such, to be washed down with a syrupy pink juice.
Sitting in the courtyard, Rais was talking about work—his job at the travel company. He was thriving there and had climbed to the point where he supervised a small army of engineers in Britain, the Philippines, and India. His phone endlessly rang with calls from foreign numbers: people needing his troubleshooting skills. Something that worried Rais, though, was that only his kind of position—supervisory work—seemed likely to stay in America. He saw it in his own company. The managers were here, but all the new engineers they hired were overseas. The low rungs on the career ladder that had allowed him to build his American life were disappearing, and what good was a ladder with rungs only at the top?
Sometimes it had been Rais’s job to figure out how to shift work from his adopted country to countries not unlike the one he had left. He did what he had to do. But he said, as the sunlight slipped from the courtyard, that his campaign to save Stroman and his deepening understanding of, and commitment to, America had prompted him to push back against offshoring whenever he could. He had pressed his boss to consider more local hiring. If his engagement with the Stromans had shown him anything, it was that people starved of life chances are faster to hate. Rais had realized, much to his alarm, that he might be toiling at night to heal wounds that he was responsible for cutting by day.
Then, rather suddenly, he stopped speaking. He closed his eyes and began to pray. After some minutes, returning to this world, Rais observed that the end of Ramadan was “sweet and sour” for him: sweet because he could eat with gusto again; sour because the time of blessings had passed.
PowerPoint
The following May, ten months after the execution, Rais found himself on tour in the woodlands of central Connecticut. These had been punishing, exhilarating months for a new fixture on the lecture circuit. Any gathering discussing peace or interfaith harmony or the like seemed to want Rais Bhuiyan on the platform. It wasn’t quite his dream of co-lecturing with Mark Stroman, but it was something. There were high school events in Dallas itself; talks at Stanford and DePaul; an Amnesty International anniversary in Los Angeles followed by an Amnesty International anniversary in North Carolina; a foundation gig here, a United We Change event there, a talk at Georgia State University, and of course repeated panels at Professor Halperin’s own Southern Methodist University. Fueling the invitations was press coverage: Rais had granted interviews to everyone from the BBC to NPR to CBS to a Farsi channel in Iran. He had taped his first thirty-second television advertisement, advocating peace and forgiveness on behalf of an Islamic charity. He had received various honors, including from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Dallas Peace Center, and Esquire magazine, which named him one of its Americans of the Year for 2011. He had taken his roadshow to Italy, where he spoke about the themes of hate and mercy in high schools and town-hall meetings. He had more trips planned for the summer—Indiana and Alaska. He dreamed of Israel and Africa, although the requisite speaking invitations had yet to come.
“Since I can’t afford to go anywhere on my own,” he said, “people ask me, and I go.”
The event in May, in Middle Haddam, Connecticut, was especially thrilling to Rais. An English teacher at a local high school had learned of Rais’s story and written a play about it. The play was to be read aloud by a group of students this week at Christ Episcopal Church. The day before, in preparation, the church was hosting a Q&A with Rais, followed by a wine-and-snacks reception. This was the kind of impact Rais had once only fantasized about: a devout Muslim from Bangladesh talking in the middle of Connecticut to a church full of Christians about peace, Islam, and mercy.
Rais was staying at the home of the teacher, Linda Napoletano, and her husband, Dick, in the nearby town of Portland. It was a charming exurb with homes in the Federal and Colonial styles, set on rolling acres of green, which had been enhanced by recent rain. The area was actually rather dense—this was hardly rural living—but its planners had cultivated the illusion of frontierlike solitude and rugged independence, with plots just big and shaded enough to make you feel wholly your own. People came together, of course, as they planned to do that very evening in church, to cook things and pray for things and raise money. Still, the landscape spoke of an American longing that bound Connecticut to Texas despite all their differences: a dream, which had outlived the frontier itself, of being alone.
Rais was sitting at the kitchen table pecking away at his laptop. His phone, tethered to a hands-free cord, was right beside him in case India or Austria or the Philippines called, which they often did.
Rais’s focus these days was on building his organization, World Without Hate. He had invested $1,000 of his own money in hiring a Web designer for its site. He had poured a few thousand dollars he had earned through speaking engagements into the organization’s coffers. The goals of his effort were becoming clearer by the day. World Without Hate would undertake a number of endeavors: to host speeches by Rais and other anti-hate-crime campaigners; to develop an anti-hate curriculum for school-age children, in a workshop format; to stage an annual essay and art competition for high school and college students; to create a conference on hate crimes; to develop a robust online and social media presence for the group; to provide scholarships “to students who wish to pursue studies in human rights at the college and graduate level who are committed to bringing peace to their place of origin upon completion of their studies”; to offer financial aid to hate-crime victims who struggle to get help; and, underpinning it all, to raise funds to support this work on a sustainable, ongoing basis.
Rais had recently tacked on to these extensive ambitions a further one: becoming a teacher of human rights. He was hoping to enroll part-time at Halperin’s SMU in its brand-new program granting bachelor’s degrees in human rights. Unfortunately, they were saying it would cost $55,000, which he did not have. He was hoping Halperin might be able to he
lp him devise a solution. One idea was to get the media relations people at the university excited about Rais’s attending as a kind of human-rights brand mascot, to “carry the logo of the program on my back,” as Rais put it.
He had continued to hear from Amber, although his optimism about being able to help her had waned. A few months earlier, she had texted him. She was planning to move back to Stephenville and said something about needing gas money to move her trailer down there. Rais had heard all about Stephenville and its meth heads, and he advised her to stick with her treatment. She asked for $15. He sent her $50. A few weeks later, she called again. This time, she was hoping she could get Rais’s help to buy a uniform she needed for a new job. Rais had begun to worry that his money was funding unworthy causes, and one of Amber’s aunts had actually called and asked him to stop giving Amber cash. Thus Rais suggested that Amber ask her new boss to lend her the uniform money, and then he would drive to Stephenville himself to see her and pay the boss back. This offer Amber declined.
Rais, meanwhile, had emerged as a sought-after public speaker. From the earliest days of his campaign for Stroman, Rais had struggled to balance the inherent humility of his quest with the need to get attention for it, to play by the rules of this below-world that he knew to be a mere trailer for the real show. In time the balance had tipped toward attention, and Rais was ever more comfortable in his role.
Rais remembered that when Halperin was advising him the year before, the professor warned him not to get used to this attention, predicting that it would all vanish if Stroman were executed. Rais had responded, “Rick, you know that I’m not doing all what I’m doing right now for any media connection. Purely what I’m doing, it comes from my heart. I won’t be surprised if no one even calls me after Mark is executed. I’ll be fully fine. I’ll be OK with that.” Now Rais was happy to note that Rick was wrong: “It seems like people are getting more and more interested around this story because it’s something unique, and last week Rick was telling me that, ‘This country has a history of four hundred years of killing and revenge and hatred. And your message is coming something new, that we had enough. Starting from the founders of this country, we needed more forgiveness and peace than killing and revenge.’ So it’s a unique message and people are getting that.”
The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas Page 29