Craig kept the world waiting for weeks during that early spring. He at last issued his decision on April 12: “I cannot say that in this case the judgement pronounced against the defendant that he be imprisoned for 30 years was any miscarriage of justice. I do not believe that the demand for justice would be satisfied by a punishment of 12 years’ imprisonment for this atrocious crime…A great number of people have asked for his pardon. It is apparent that many of them have no conception of the evidence. There is only one voice raised against it, and that is the cry from a mother’s heart that is always constant. She, with justice on her side, is the majority.”
Locke Craig retired from politics when his term ended in 1917. The campaign to pardon Wilcox resumed with his successor, Thomas Bickett. In his first decision, Bickett wrote, “It has been suggested that there may have been mitigating circumstances and that James Wilcox has already suffered enough. If there are mitigating circumstances James Wilcox is the only man alive who knows what they were and he refuses to open his mouth. The plea before me is for mercy and not judgment; but repentance comes before salvation, and there is no suggestion that James Wilcox has in any degree repented of his responsibility for the death of Nellie Cropsey. For these reasons a pardon cannot be granted.”
Yet Bickett was not as resolute as he seemed. More than a year later, a letter written by the prison superintendent, H.T. Peoples, arrived on his desk. “I have been connected with the state’s prison for the past 18 years, and this is the first time I ever asked the Governor to pardon a prisoner,” he wrote. “He has a clean prison record. I believe I would be safe to saying there never would be a prisoner in the state’s prison [like] Jim Wilcox. I have known him myself for the past 15 years and I have never heard aught against his prison record. If a prisoner is due any consideration for a clean prison record I think Jim is due all you can give him.”
A second letter, written by Jim himself, arrived during the holiday season of 1918. It made a deep impression. A message went back: Governor Bickett was sympathetic, but needed to look Jim Wilcox in the eye before reaching a final decision. He would therefore come to the work camp where the prisoner was held, to meet with him privately. Jim’s fate would depend on what the Governor saw.
III.
It was remarked how close confinement agreed with Jim. The observation had a malicious implication, as if he were a born criminal destined for a cage. In fact, idleness and the meals brought by his family combined to make him plump; after missing his regular routine at first, liberation from work at Hayman’s came to seem like not such a bad thing. As for the worst that could happen—he fretted over it, to be sure, but his certainty of his innocence made all that seem like such a remote prospect, it was just possible to put out of his mind. His biggest worry was not over himself, but the effect the case was having on his family.
Transfer to the state prison brought a different reality. The penitentiary in Raleigh was already old-fashioned when it was built a generation earlier. It had something of the appearance, and half the warmth, of a medieval castle. He now shared a cell with three other men, two younger and one very much older, and two of them were sick when he arrived. The old timer was a railroad man on a long stretch for pushing a colleague between two coal hoppers. He coughed up so much blood it was hard to understand how he had any blood left at all. His chronic hacking made it hard for Jim to sleep, until by some miracle it paused on the fifth night, and Jim was able to hear all the other sounds his coughing had hidden—the sounds of men self-abusing, and more distantly, of worse sins.
There were no more meals from his mother and sister, but instead a steady diet of institutional slop. Where idleness came as a relief in the county lockup, it quickly wore out its welcome in the face of a three-decade sentence. He was not up to the manual labor assigned the prisoners—digging fence-posts, clearing brush, moving rocks. He was reduced to collecting night buckets from the cells too old to have plumbing. As the prison ‘stoolie’, he got to know every inmate not from their faces, but by the quality of their bowel movements.
Then came that charmed day when the prison’s fancy new electric light system went out. As lamps and candles were forbidden, the prisoners languished in the dark for days as the wardens awaited qualified technicians. Jim volunteered to have a look at it. The problem turned out be a simple short-circuit from rat-chewed insulation.
“You got any experience in the trade?” asked Hank Peoples, the superintendent.
“I fixed the wires sometimes at Hayman’s.”
“Fair enough. You’re on the day shift, then.”
With that, Jim was promoted from stoolie to house electrician. And for the next decade, the lights at the prison burned bright on his watch.
As the years passed, Jim came to understand that prison was not the end of life, but only another kind of routine. Before, he felt confined if he didn’t get out on the river now and again. Inside, his sense of space altered, so that the fifty-seven steps from his cell to the mess hall, or the one hundred and twenty-two to the threshold of the yard, seemed like weekend excursions. As physical space contracted, the space between his ears expanded: he became capable of disappearing into chambers of his mind as vast and varied as a Vanderbilt mansion. His taste in reading grew beyond trash Westerns and detective novels; he sampled Twain, Poe, Sir Walter Scott. He toyed with the idea of setting pen to paper and composing his side of the whole sad story. But when the time came, he became discouraged. If nobody believed him when he told them he didn’t murder Nell, why would he convince anybody writing it down?
He was widely acknowledged to be a model prisoner. Yet he was no tool of the wardens. His readiness to use his fists to defend his name did not go away, which in no small part explained why he never had to use them. He suffered, at worst, occasional remarks—murmurs in the chow line like “You get in her knickers before you clobbered her, Jim?” or “You should have married her, Jim. Then you could have killed her anytime!” He pretended these were beneath his notice. He was sent up for a crime only a little bit less reviled than child-killing, but he never had a serious fight in all his time behind bars.
Even as his memory of Nell began to fade, and he had trouble conjuring up an image of her face, she figured often in his thoughts. She would come at him abruptly, out of some dream, and rouse him with such violence that he would sit up and bang his head against the upper bunk. He saw her at her needle, face shining by lamplight, corona of curl-papers in her hair. Blanketed and furred, nestled under his arm for a winter’s buggy ride, she laughed at something he said. “When’s the last time you read a real book?” she asked. She tilted her head, piled her hair on one side, and let him kiss her neck.
Jim had not grieved over Nell since the morning her body was discovered. Suspected, reviled, he felt no room in his heart for the softer sentiments. But the luxury of time in prison turned him into a wet, palpitating wound. A year into his sentence, he woke up from a dream about Nell with tears in his eyes. She was at the rail of an Old Dominion steamer as it stood off the banks of the Pasquotank. She wore that red and white traveling dress she and Carrie had shown at the Pratt students’ show. He ran into the shallows, calling to her, as she reached up and untied her hat. Then she grasped the ends of her hair and, as if feathering a chicken, depilated herself handful by handful. Blood ran down around her ears and down her cheeks.
He shouted, “Nell, it’s getting cold!” When she answered, it was as if she was right beside him, and said…
He woke up as his bunkmate kicked him in the ribs.
“You were talking in your sleep,” he said.
“What did I say?”
“You were saying ‘Pull’.”
His father visited him most often, several times a year. His sister and mother came twice, for the holidays and on his birthday late in August. They bore loaves of homemade bread and cakes and other savories, which the guards were obliged to inspect and confiscate if they were too tempting. There were also hand-sewn articles to keep
him warm. Annie Mae went too far, embroidering little flowers on her gifts. If he couldn’t tear these off, he had to throw the whole things away, because he couldn’t be seen in the prison yard in a muffler sprinkled with pansies.
Seven years into his sentence he heard that his mother, Martha Elizabeth Wilcox, had died. She was only fifty-nine. The news seemed like some cruel joke—he had just seen her for his birthday the previous week. He only accepted it when he got a second telegram with the particulars about her funeral service. He requested leave to attend, but was denied: letting the reviled murderer of Nell Crospey back into Elizabeth City would cost the State too much for security.
And so, on the day his mother was buried, he was at his post in the generator room. His eyes rested on the switches in front of him, but his mind was consumed with the thought that his misfortune—indeed, his foolishness—had put his mother in an early grave.
His father followed five years later. This grieved him every bit as much, but by that time there was simply less of Jim Wilcox to hurt. Though he had always been short, he had been powerful, and rarely sick. He dwindled now to a mere one hundred and five pounds, and coughed up blood every morning. The prison doctor diagnosed tuberculosis, which struck him as mildly interesting but not worth his personal concern, like war news from Europe. He again requested leave to attend the funeral, and was again denied. Even his fellow inmates grumbled at the injustice of this: if a well-behaved fellow like Wilcox couldn’t get a fair shake, what hope was there for them?
There was also less of him in mind. As his appeals for pardon were denied, notions like ‘hope’ and ‘the future’ came to seem like heirlooms left by some better ancestor. He would never live to see Paris, or Niagara, or the gorge of the Yellowstone. Thoughts of such losses were heavy—so he dropped them. He discarded them in various places around the prison, like moons of overgrown fingernail.
Soon the toll on his health was apparent even to his wardens. Hank Peoples, who by then had known him for as long as anybody outside his family, noticed the deterioration of Jim’s health after the denial in ’17, and worried.
“Jim, you need a change of scenery. How about you go up to mountain camp for a spell?”
“Thanks Hank, but I don’t think I could handle that kind of work just now.”
“Don’t worry about that. We’ll find you something to do.”
Before he left, Peoples gave him a ball pen.
“What’s this for?” asked Jim.
“It is for you to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Write. That’s an order.”
The next week he was sent up to the prison work camp outside of Boone, two hundred miles west of Raleigh. He rode in a carriage reserved for prisoners, with bars on the windows. He was not prepared at first for sudden exposure to the view outside, with the lowlands spread before him, or the scenes of regular life as the train slipped through the towns. The space and activity were unnerving, the changes since he went away, unfamiliar. There were now many more motor cars than buggies, and paved roads. And along the latter, tangles of wires strung from glass crosstrees stacked eight, nine, ten high. Men in olive uniforms loitered on the platforms. Beside them, young women wore dresses that exposed their ankles.
Peoples was as good as his word about the convict camp. Most of the men broke their backs pulling up stumps for roadbuilding, but he was assigned to the mess hall. For the next two weeks he did nothing more strenuous than paddle cauldrons of soup. For some reason—maybe because it was supplied by the local farms—the food at the camp was better too. Between that and the fresh air, he got some of his color back, and gained a few pounds.
His thoughts turned to what the Governor had said about him in the papers. Pardon was denied, he said, because Jim Wilcox had never shown any remorse. To which Jim wondered, “Remorse for what? Being falsely accused? Losing half a life on a trumped-up charge?” But in the clarity of his mountaintop vantage he understood that the facts were only half of what passed for justice. Maybe less than half.
He took out the pen Peoples had given him and wrote a letter:
Governor Thomas W. Bickett
Governor’s House
Raleigh
For 16 years, I have been unjustly punished and now, broken in spirit and health, I come to you asking for mercy.
Although you may think I am guilty and viewing it from a direction other than my own, I, too, can see that the circumstances are against me, for it is a very mixed-up affair, but I do not know any more about it than an unborn babe, and were it my last words on earth, I still would protest my innocence, and would not be going before my Maker with a lie on my lips.
For 15 years and seven months I have worked hard and been faithful, been submissive and obedient to those whom I have been under. That is what my prison record will show, and that is a record that very few ever attain. Fifteen years with nothing against it!
And now, dear Governor, it is with the same spirit that you ask the Heavenly Father for mercy that I come and ask you for mercy, and should you see fit to grant me a pardon, I can assure you I will not cause you one regret for having done so. Of course I know you viewed the other side of the case in every detail, but now I ask you to do this. Just stop and think, 16 years unjust punishment. Mother and father taken away during that time, was not allowed to see them as others have done, broken in spirit and health, not much longer to live. I ask you, do you not think that I have been punished enough?
He sent the draft to Peoples for his opinion. The superintendent didn’t return it with comments, but immediately had his secretary type and mail it. When it reached the Governor, he telegraphed back DID THE PRISONER WRITE THIS HIMSELF? To which Peoples replied, ON HIS OWN INITIATIVE.
It was a chilly afternoon in mid-December when Governor Bickett rolled into the camp in a forest-green Oldsmobile. Jim was summoned from the kitchen to the manager’s office. Coming in, he found the Governor sitting behind the desk, leaning back. There was no guard present—just the Governor and his assistant. Bickett’s face was clean-shaven, mild, benign in that way perfected by politicians.
“Come in. Sit,” said Bickett.
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
“I suppose you know who I am, and why I’m here.”
“I know, sir. And I can guess the reason.”
“I read your letter, and found much to praise in it. Did you write it yourself?”
“I did, sir.”
“Honestly, I had my doubts. I’ve read the court documents, and nowhere were you praised for your eloquence.”
“I suppose,” Jim said, delicately, “there is some grace in innocence.”
Bickett laughed. “Indeed! But of that, the courts have spoken. I’m here for a different reason. I wanted to look you in the eye and ask you the following question. Are you ready?”
“I hope so.”
The Governor leaned forward and folded his hands.
“Tell me why you never defended yourself in court. You hardly opened your mouth. Not even at the second trial, when you knew silence only got you convicted. Is it because you did it?”
Jim said nothing at first. He looked down, straightening his cap from the knotted mess he had made of it. The Governor’s assistant, a young fellow with a university look about him, was leaning against the file cabinets, staring. Bickett was staring. Even the sound of swinging picks and shovels momentarily paused outside.
“The first time, it was Mr. Aydlett who warned me against it. The second, yes, he changed his tune, and said I should testify. But I turned him down.”
“Why?”
“I suppose, the situation being such a mess, and a fine young woman gone…I decided the books must be balanced somehow. If God wanted me to hang for it, that would be His will. Words would never bring her back. Nothing devised by Man will bring her back.
“When she first disappeared, I thought she’d run off. That’s the Lord’s honest truth. We all knew girls who lit out from Elizabeth City on their own. I was sure she’d turn up some
time, so there was no reason to look for her. Nell was always headstrong. She sure wouldn’t be scared up by detectives—she would only come back on her own…on her terms.
“But when they found her in the river, I knew that I was as wrong as can be. I felt guilty for thinking the worst of her. I beat myself up pretty bad. I never wanted anything but the best for her, and when the time came…I let her down. I should have protected her, instead of thinking only of my feelings. I shouldn’t have left her there on that porch, crying, just for the sake of Len Owens. If I’d stayed, she’d be with me now, or with somebody else. But she’d be alive…”
His voice was unsteady now, and his eyes unfocused.
“I said nothing because there was nothing to say. In the only important way, I was guilty. Not in the eyes of the court, but in the eyes of the Heavenly Father.”
“So you were silent because you left your fate to the Lord.”
“That was the idea.”
“And did you kill her?”
“I did not.”
“Did you have someone else do it?”
“No sir.”
“Did you drive her to do it?”
“Honestly—I can’t deny that.”
Bickett rose to his feet.
“Come here, son.”
The Governor took position right before Jim. He then looked to his assistant who, after a moment of not understanding what he wanted, approached the other two in the center of the room. Between the desk and the filing cabinets and the dictaphone machine, the three men joined hands. Bickett bowed his head and recited:
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