He talks and talks and talks, and I am easing up inside because I was wondering how much I’d have to keep the conversation going, and now I can see that all I have to do is listen.
“Daddy took me to a bar when I was twelve and told me to pick my whiskey and there were all these bottles behind the bar and I pointed and said I’d take the one with the pretty turkey on it and the guys in the bar laughed and Daddy laughed too.” He laughs. “We got drunk as a couple of coots and there we were at one in the morning trying to make it home on our bicycles, weaving and hitting every garbage can along the road.”
He has feelings for his father, I can tell by the way he speaks of him, and he says that when he and his cousin, Robert, had been arrested for stealing a truck (the plan was to run away to Texas and start a new life) Robert’s father had come to the jail to talk to the authorities and had gotten his boy off, but by then his own father was dead — cancer of the liver — and so Pat served time in Angola. “But you can bet your bottom dollar that if Daddy had been living, he’d been there to get me out,” he says.
The guard announces that visiting time is over.
I rise to leave. I thank him for the picture frame and promise to come back in a month, and again he thanks me for making the long drive. “Be careful on that highway,” he says. “People drive crazy.”
I have a roaring headache when I emerge from the prison, and I take two Bufferins before I begin the drive back. Pure tension. I have never been in such a strange place in my life. When I get home, I promise myself, I’m going to take a bath to wash the place off me.
Freedom. How blessed it is to be outside the bars, and the windows are down in the car and the road is open before me and I take deep gulps of the fresh, good air. I wonder how I would bear up day after day, month after month in such a tiny cell.
I notice — the omission is glaring — that Pat said nothing about the crime. Maybe he’s blocked it out or feels no remorse for what he did. Or maybe he just can’t talk about the worst thing he ever did in his life to someone he meets for the first time. I have no right to demand that he confess to me his terrible sin. That kind of revelation demands trust and should be freely offered. I respect that.
His words drift back: what he said about his ex-wife turning him in to the police and his getting drunk and smashing furniture and her warning the sheriff that he was dangerous. If I had lived in St. Martinville I probably would have been terrified to meet him on the streets.
But I am not meeting him on the streets. I am meeting him in a crucible, and I am surprised by how human, even likable, he is. Despite his friendly letters I had half expected Charles Manson — brutish, self-absorbed, paranoid, incapable of normal human encounter.
But even if he were unlikable and repulsive, even if he were Manson, I still maintain that the state should not kill him. For me, the unnegotiable moral bedrock on which a society must be built is that killing by anyone, under any conditions, cannot be tolerated. And that includes the government.
Ten years have passed since I first met Patrick Sonnier. Over the years I have clarified my perspective. Back in 1982 I was an exuberant activist, having just joined the fray against social injustice, and I see now that I devoted my energies exclusively to Pat Sonnier’s plight when I should have shouldered the struggles of victims’ families as well. I should have reached out to the Bourques and LeBlancs immediately and offered them love and comfort, even if they chose to reject it. Now, as I befriend each new man on death row, I always offer my help to his victim’s family. Some accept my offer. Most angrily reject it. But I offer.
I also realize how naive I was about the criminal justice system. I had always known, of course, that there were imperfections in the system, but I honestly thought that when a person faced death, he or she would at least be given adequate legal defense. I thought the Constitution promised that. It took me longer than it should have to realize the shamefully inadequate legal counsel that Pat Sonnier and others like him get. By the time I sought remedial legal help for him it was too late. If I had acted sooner, I believe he would be alive today — imprisoned at Angola where he should be, but alive.
“The truth arrives disguised; therein the sorrow lies.” So wrote Jimmy Glass, executed by the state of Louisiana in 1987.
Pat Sonnier and I continue to write, and every month I visit. He talks to me often about Eddie. The prison doesn’t allow the brothers to visit each other, and I figure that since I’m making the long trip to the prison I can visit two people instead of one. Eddie keeps receiving disciplinary write-ups, which land him in the “hole,” a stripped-down disciplinary cell with no TV or radio, nothing to read except the Bible, minimal writing materials.
“He’s got to learn to control his temper in this place. He blows up too easy,” Pat says. “That’ll get you killed here, you can’t afford to have enemies, but he just won’t learn, and I can’t be there to calm him down the way I used to on the streets.”
Since his arrival on death row three years ago, Pat has never received a disciplinary write-up. No small feat in such a confined space where tensions run high, not only between inmates and guards, but among inmates as well.
“You have to learn each ‘free man’ [guard],” he says. “You learn which ones you can tease and which ones you can’t and which ones blow hot one day and cold the next.”
Pat has written to Eddie about me, preparing the way for my first visit. “She’s a nun, but she talks natural and doesn’t quote the Bible all the time.”
In March of 1983 I visit Eddie for the first time. He reminds me of a caged panther. He is thin, tight, his eyes narrow slits. His hands tremble. He makes me feel tense, wary. I feel afraid of him and sorry for him at the same time. Clearly he’s a tortured man.
He’s on a lock-down tier, not yet in a “big yard,” where inmates sleep in a sixty-man dormitory, eat in a cafeteria, and have access to a recreation room. He shares a cell with one other person and he stays in this cell at all times except when he works in the fields. Meals are served in the cell. This is the normal track when inmates first come to Angola. Prison authorities keep a man in the fields until he “adjusts.”
“Adjusting” does not come easily to Eddie Sonnier. Later, when I know him well, I will ask him why he got all those write-ups and he will answer with a wry smile, “Because I didn’t have no understandin’.”
A stack of Eddie’s disciplinary reports will be among Pat’s personal possessions, shipped to me by prison authorities after his execution.
The visiting room in the main prison where I visit Eddie is much more agreeable than the death-row visiting room. The room is spacious and air-conditioned. You can have a private conversation at a small table at the far end of the large room. You can touch. You can get a hot dog or hamburger and a cold drink at one of the concession stands run by inmate clubs. You can get a Polaroid picture taken. You can get an ice-cream cone.
But the visiting room does not give Eddie much consolation. First of all, because he doesn’t see much of it. I am his first visitor. Prison is torture for him. He hates waiting while guards do the “count.” He tells me how every inmate at every minute of the day has to be accounted for. Before going to work you wait for the count. After work you wait for the count. Before eating, before you go to sleep, when you first wake up at 5 A.M. He hates being thrown side by side with “all kinds of people.” On the streets he had kept to himself, avoided crowds. He is afraid in “this place.” You never know, he says, when someone might “lose it” and stab you with a radio antenna or a blade someone’s buddy made for him in the welding shop. He’s already been sent to the “hole” because someone with a grievance had put contraband under his mattress. He had protested his innocence but to no avail. “You got no defense in this place.” And he says it’s okay with him if they keep him on a lock-down tier forever “because you only have to deal with one cellmate, but in the dorms, if you have enemies, they can follow you when you go to the bathroom at two or three in the m
orning and beat you up or stab you or rape you and if the free man on duty isn’t quick to intervene, you’re dead meat, you’re history.”
Periodically, inmates are strip-searched. Eddie points to the door in the visiting room through which inmates return to the prison. Behind that door is a room and a guard. After a visit the inmate removes all of his clothes. He opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue. He turns his head from side to side so the guard can check his ears. He raises his arms above his head and stands spread-eagled, then he turns his back to the guard, bends over, and opens the cheeks of his buttocks. Finally, his back still toward the guard, he raises his feet one at a time for the guard to inspect the soles of his feet, his toes. If a guard suspects drugs he may do a “finger wave” of the inmate’s rectum.
I shudder to think of myself in this type of situation, and I remember reading Dorothy Day’s account of her experience in jail for civil disobedience. She told how the woman who conducted her physical exam had been “brutal” and how shocking it was to hear other women inmates shouting vulgar invitations to her and her young companions as they were led down the tier to their cells.
I can’t imagine.
Sometime in July 1983, I receive a phone call from Pat. That morning a guard had entered the tier, stopped in front of his cell, and handed him a paper to read and sign. The paper was entitled “Warrant of Execution in Capital Case,” and he had found himself reading his own name after the words “the condemned person to be put to death,” and the date of his death, “the 19th day of August, 1983.”
His voice cracks. “This is my second date,” he tells me, and I remember that Chava had mentioned his receiving an execution date shortly after his arrival at Angola.
On my fingers as I talk to him I count the days. How many Fridays left? Thursdays? Sundays?
“I’ll be moving to Cell 1 any time now,” he tells me. An inmate on “countdown” for execution is put in the cell nearest the guard station. That way the guards, trained to spot desperate behavior — suicide, escape — can look in on him and make notes in a log book on how he is bearing up. Tranquilizing medication is offered to the inmate if he desires it. Pat refuses medication.
I step up the visits and begin seeing Pat once a week. I write to him more often and tell his other pen pals about the execution date so they can write to him also. A week or so after the delivery of the death warrant he tells me that a couple of guards had appeared unannounced at his cell one morning. They had shackled his hands and feet and taken him to a scale. “What’s this for?” he asked. “Vail starting a Weight Watchers program around here?” But the guards had not answered and did not smile. One guard recorded his weight while another measured his height. Then the guards returned him to his cell.
“What was that all about?” I ask.
“They wouldn’t say,” he answers. “Some of the guys on the Row say they’re measuring us for our coffins.”
Later, Warden Frank Blackburn will explain to me that a guard, matching the inmate’s height and weight, does a dry run from the cell to the chair to make sure the “Tactical Team” can “contain” the condemned prisoner should he put up a fight. “Some of these guys are pretty big and strong,” he explains. “Once the guards get the inmate in the chair, they use the leather straps on the chair to hold him, then remove the leg irons and handcuffs.”
Albert Camus:
Long in advance the condemned man knows that he is going to be killed and that the only thing that can save him is a reprieve … In any case, he cannot intervene, make a plea outside himself, or convince. Everything goes on outside him. He is no longer a man but a thing waiting to be handled by the executioners … This explains the odd submissiveness that is customary in the condemned at the moment of their execution. (pp. 201-202)
Pat is scheduled for execution on Friday, August 19. That really means the evening of Thursday the eighteenth, because the execution is scheduled for just after midnight. I go to visit him on Wednesday the seventeenth. Warden Ross Maggio has granted me a special four-hour visit. Just before entering the prison I use the public telephone outside the gates to call the Coalition office to see if perhaps the courts have issued a stay of execution. Execution is about forty hours away. They have not yet moved him to the death house, where the electric chair is located about five miles deep inside the prison.
Pat looks thin, sallow. He has dark circles under his eyes. He has not been able to keep his food down and has lost thirty pounds in two weeks. He keeps going on coffee and cigarettes.
“My stuff is packed, ready to go,” he tells me when I walk in. Any minute the prison authorities might summon him to move to the death house. He has packed what they allow him to bring: a toothbrush and toothpaste, a change of underwear, cigarettes, his Bible, his address book, some stationery and a ballpoint pen. No radio. Music stirs emotions, and prison authorities want as little emotion as possible in this process. There will be a television for him to watch. There will be a telephone on the wall near his cell from which he can make collect calls. Some men on the Row have recently made this move to the death house, but they have all come back alive, receiving stays of execution from the courts. There hasn’t been an execution in Louisiana since June 1961.
I tell him that I have just spoken with the Prison Coalition by phone and Tom Dybdahl, who has replaced Chava, has told me to assure him that his attorney has filed his petition and he will surely get a stay from the courts any minute now. I tell him I will visit with him for a couple of hours, and if by then word of a stay has not come, I will ask the major to let me use the phone in his office to call the Coalition office again.
I hope Tom knows what he is talking about. I know nothing of legal issues. I’m practicing blind faith that the attorney knows what he’s doing.
“How sure are you about the stay?” I had asked Tom. “Ninety-five percent sure,” he had said. That reassures me. But he had also said, “You’re never absolutely sure about what the courts will do.” How does one deal with this kind of waiting? How keep one’s poise, one’s sanity? Even if he had said 99.9 percent sure, there’s that one tenth of 1 percent.
The simplest surgery can go wrong. Delivery of babies can go wrong. Anything that human beings do can go wrong.
To pass the time I do what I do best. I talk to him. I ask him questions, tell him stories. He talks about hunting in the woods, driving the big trucks, working on a hog farm in Texas, how his mama cooks venison and rabbit stew with a lot of onions and thick gravy, what it is like to work on oil rigs and what makes it dangerous work, some close calls he’s had, some bad accidents he’s seen.
We talk for two hours. We do not talk about death and dying. We will if the time comes, but for now the talking helps pass the time and maintain sanity until the time when the phone will ring and the guard will come in and say, “Sonnier, you got a stay.”
Pat is hyped, at times full of bravado. “They want to see me break. Well, they’ll never break me.” He had talked to one of the guards about getting some barbecue corn chips and a Dr Pepper from a snack machine for me. “We’ll celebrate when we get news of the stay,” he told me. “Ole Maggio [the warden] thinks he’s got me this time, but I’ll show him. My attorney will pull off the stay at the last minute. Maybe I’ll even get a good ‘last’ meal off of him,” and he laughs. But the laugh is forced. It comes from his diaphragm. He is talking and laughing like this and I can see the terror in his eyes.
“Be a man my son.” The line from Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” wells up in my mind, the words of a priest to Sam Cardinella, who loses control of his anal sphincter muscle on the way to the gallows.
As if one can be brave by simply willing it. I wonder what kind of dignity I would muster if I were facing my executioners.
It’s surreal, all of it. My mind keeps casting about for something familiar to reassure myself that it is just a question of time before the stay of execution comes, that this is all a bad dream. Unreal.
At about two
o’clock I go to the major’s office to make the phone call.
“Sorry,” Tom says, “no word yet from the court. You just have to help him wait it out.”
I go back to the visiting room. He is standing up, peering eagerly through the heavy mesh screen. “No word yet,” I tell him. “Would you like to pray?”
He nods his head. I don’t remember the exact words of the prayer — a prayer, I’m sure, of essentials: forgiveness, courage, sustenance for the final big step if it should come.
When the prayer is over I say to him, “If you die, I want to be with you.”
He says, “No. I don’t want you to see it.”
I say, “I can’t bear the thought that you would die without seeing one loving face. I will be the face of Christ for you. Just look at me.”
He says, “It’s terrible to see. I don’t want to put you through that. It could break you. It could scar you for life.”
I know that it will terrify me. How could it not terrify me? But I feel strength and determination. I tell him it won’t break me, that I have plenty of love and support in my life.
“God will give me the grace,” I tell him.
He consents. He nods his head. It is decided. I will be there with him if he dies.
He says, “If only I knew I’d die right away when the first jolt hits me. Will I feel it? They say the body burns. [Later, his death certificate will record that death took four to five minutes.]2 My poor mother …”
Yes, his poor mother. She had been raised by her grandmother, lived out in the middle of cane fields, and at a young age had married an older man. The marriage had brought a trail of sorrows, no companionship, just poverty. Once, Eddie, her “baby,” had cried for two days and two nights with a toothache because she had no money for a dentist. And then had come the ultimate tragedy — her sons’ terrible deed, the trial, the sentencing. She did not come much to Angola, but when her sons were awaiting trial in the parish jail close to home, she had brought them home cooking. She had earned money by sitting at night with an elderly sick man so she could get them cigarettes and warm winter clothes. But she has been able to visit death row only once or twice. It makes her ill to see her son here.
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