Memphis is where Dr. Martin Luther King gave his Mountaintop speech, and where a white supremacist murdered him for being a leader in the struggle for civil rights. The Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King died, is now the National Civil Rights Museum.
Memphis is also home of one of the predominant regional styles of barbecue, and Memphis pork ribs and shoulder are among the greatest of the many contributions black folks have made to American cuisine. The Memphis tradition is to rub the meat with garlic, pepper, paprika, and sometimes brown sugar, and then slow-cook it over hickory wood for upwards of eighteen hours. You can get Memphis barbecue wet or dry—either cooked with sauce, or just with the spice rub—but either way, the meat is so tender you can cut it with a plastic fork. The folks at Jim Neely’s Interstate Bar-B-Que are among the finest practitioners of this art on the planet.
And I know you’re listening, Ed, and I’m sorry, and I acknowledge the grievous wrongs perpetrated on livestock animals—which are sentient beings—by the American food industry. But some of us just ain’t strong enough to practice ethical veganism. Not in Memphis, anyway. Those ribs. My God, those ribs. They serve them on plastic cafeteria plates with white bread, baked beans, and macaroni and cheese, and they are worth the drive down from Nashville all by themselves.
But if all that isn’t enough for you, you can go to Graceland and check out Elvis’s Jungle Room, which is a monument to the aesthetics of 1970s design. Green shag carpeting, wood-paneled walls, and earth-tone window dressings. Dude had a couch upholstered in fur. And there are a bunch of statues of monkeys in there for some reason. And all his weird, kitschy junk is maintained in pristine condition, like his fur couch is a holy relic.
I’ve been to the Smithsonian and seen the first ladies’ inaugural gowns, and the lace is all faded. There’s a touch of discoloration. If you look close enough, you might suspect that dust has touched those garments. Not so, however, with the relics in the Jungle Room; they are immaculate. In the Jungle Room, it will always be 1973. Time has not been permitted to soil or tarnish the King’s sacred trinkets. I would be remiss not to point out, of course, that nobody bothered to preserve the home furnishings of Otis Redding and Rufus Thomas with such care. But the white people in the group I toured the house with were awestruck by the experience of being in the place where Elvis lived and died. A lot of visitors find it worthwhile to add this to their itinerary; Graceland gets about five times as many annual visitors as the Civil Rights Museum.
If this sounds a little bit like a travelogue, there’s a reason for that; I persuaded NPR that American Justice could do with some local color, a sense of place. Just because Chester March has spent the last thirty-five years in an utterly featureless eight-by-ten cell doesn’t mean that this program needs to feel like being shut up on death row. And just because we’re documenting the process by which a state slowly and inexorably prepares to kill an old man for no good reason doesn’t mean that listening to this broadcast needs to be a totally soul-crushing experience. Beyond the high walls of Riverbend, there’s good music, and there’s delicious pork shoulder, slow-cooked over smoldering hickory and pulled by hand. And, if you’re into that kind of thing, there’s Graceland.
If you ask me, I deserved to listen to some music and eat some barbecue after my hours of interviews with Chester and with Ed Heffernan and my days of sifting through the boxes in Ed’s office. It is demoralizing to pore over the X-ray images of Chester’s smashed skull and the transcripts from his sham of a trial, or to read the perfunctory opinions in which indifferent judges dismissed his appellate lawyers’ futile bleats of protestation against the state’s plan to murder their client. But we shouldn’t have to forget about life’s joys when we think about the people who are locked away from them. Indeed, it is necessary to remember the pleasures of living free in order to comprehend the magnitude of the injustice that is perpetrated upon the victims of the prison-industrial complex.
And it was in that spirit that I convinced NPR to put me up in the lovely Peabody Hotel while I was down here. Lest you fear that your generous donations to public radio are being ill-used, I should point out that the Peabody, for all its grandeur, was surprisingly cheap. A standard room only cost $250 per night. Memphis is an affordable town, though. A platter of pork with two sides at Neely’s costs only ten dollars; in New York, you can only eat at Wendy’s for that much if you forgo the upsize on your combo meal.
My initial research indicated that Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest had stayed at the Peabody, but when I asked the desk clerk about that, he testily informed me that the original Peabody Hotel, built in 1869, had been demolished in 1925 in preparation for the hotel’s move to its current location, a block away. Those towering figures of American racism may have, admittedly, found shelter at this hotel’s predecessor, but he assured me that the current facility had entertained no Confederate visitors.
While I was quizzing the clerk about the hotel’s checkered history, a gaggle of white people gathered around a large fountain in the middle of the elegant lobby. There was a noticeable excitement among the crowd, as if these folks were anticipating a visit from Jimmy Buffett or the start of a slave auction. Then a gentleman in a full livery with tassels on his epaulets and little gold buttons on his jacket unrolled a red carpet leading from the elevator to the fountain.
My curiosity was piqued. Who was about to appear? Was it Martha Stewart? Or the ghost of Elvis himself? What could justify such pomp?
When the elevator door opened, a procession of mallard ducks emerged, waddled in single file down the carpet, climbed a little staircase into the fountain, and began splashing around in the water. All the white people applauded, and I could see why; it was whimsical, delightful, and a little surreal. I watched the ducks until they climbed out of the fountain and returned to the elevator. After the door closed behind them, the man in the livery rolled up the red carpet.
The state of Tennessee will put Chester March to death in less than three weeks.
14
The neurologist held a deck of vocabulary flash cards, made for teaching little kids to read. He laid four of them out in a row on his desk in front of me. The first had a picture of a car on it, with the word “C-A-R” written beneath it, in big block letters. The second had a picture of a fluffy white cartoon cat, with “C-A-T” written under it. The third was a picture of a cartoon bus, anthropomorphized so that its headlights were eyes and its front bumper was a mouth. It leered out of the image with a hideous rictus grin, and I couldn’t help but think of Bernadette Ward’s description of Chester’s Buick Skylark. “B-U-S.” The fourth was a picture of a house with red shutters on the windows and a bright blue door and flowers in front of it. “H-O-U-S-E.” House.
“Car, cat, bus, house,” the neurologist said. He picked up the cards and put them back into his deck. “Do you think you’re going to be able to remember those?”
“Sure,” I said. “The car I can’t drive anymore, Schrödinger’s cat, the bus I have to ride because I can’t drive my car, and the house I had to leave to go move into the retirement home.”
“You don’t take the bus,” Rose said, looking up from the magazine she was flipping through.
“How come you Indian guys are all named Patel?” I asked the doctor.
“My name isn’t Patel,” he said.
“Well, I can’t remember what your name is, so I am going to call you Patel,” I told him.
“You can do whatever you need to do to feel comfortable, Mr. Schatz,” he said.
As you get older, you have fewer friends left with each passing year, but you get more doctors. The less time you have left to you on this planet, the more of it you have to spend in sterile rooms waiting for bad news. Needing a dementia specialist wasn’t a good-news situation, but at least this doctor didn’t make me take my pants off, most of the time.
“So how come you Indian guys are all named Patel?” I asked him.
“Why don’t you tell me what was on the cards
we just looked at?” Patel asked.
I could do that. My mind wasn’t completely gone. “The car I can’t drive anymore, Schrödinger’s cat, the bus I have to ride like a schmuck because they won’t let me drive, and the house I wanted to die in but I had to sell.”
“For God’s sake, Buck, nobody makes you ride a bus,” Rose said.
“It’s the principle of the thing,” I told her.
“That doesn’t even make any sense.”
Patel took the cards and put them carefully in the drawer of his desk.
“Mr. Schatz, can you tell me what day of the week it is today?” he asked.
“I mean, the days all blend together where I live,” I said. “Maybe one night is hamburger night and one night is Salisbury steak night, but it’s the same meat either way, and there’s nowhere to go and nothing worth a damn on the television.”
“So you don’t know what day it is?”
I shrugged. “Tuesday or Wednesday, I think,” I said.
“Who is the president of the United States?” he asked.
I snorted. “Nobody I voted for.”
“Jesus Christ,” Rose said.
“Jesus Christ holds no sway here,” I said. “We’re Jews, and Dr. Patel is a Hindu.”
“I’m actually Muslim,” said Patel. “That’s why my name is Dr. Ahmed Mohammed.”
Had I known that already? I couldn’t imagine I had. But how could I not have? “I’m going to keep calling you Dr. Patel,” I said.
“Behave yourself, Buck,” Rose said.
“Do you know who the president is?” asked Patel.
“Barack Hussein Obama.”
“Very good,” said Patel. “You got his middle name and everything. Do you remember what was on the cards we looked at a minute ago?”
I nodded. “The car I can’t drive anymore, Schrödinger’s cat, the house I wanted to die in, and the garbage truck they’ll haul me away in when I finally kick the bucket.”
“Okay,” Patel said. “If this were an ordinary checkup, I would say Mr. Schatz suffers from mild to moderate dementia, but I am not seeing much of a change from where we were at our last visit six months ago. But you say his condition has worsened significantly, Mrs. Schatz?”
“He’s having severe lapses in his memory,” Rose said. They were doing the thing again, where they talked about me like I wasn’t there.
“Do you find he is lucid some days and incoherent on others? Or is he lucid at certain times of the day, like in the mornings, with his mental state deteriorating in the evenings?”
“It’s not that he’s incoherent, exactly. He just forgets important things,” Rose said. “He can remember all the details of a police investigation he worked on fifty years ago, but he can’t seem to remember what happened during a doctor’s appointment yesterday.”
“Does he forget lots of different things, or does he forget the same things over and over?” Patel asked.
“Mostly certain things, over and over. Things about our son. Medical things. But he remembers every ridiculous thing he hears on talk radio. He can’t shut up about that.”
“It’s not my fault the liberals are out to destroy this country,” I said. I reached into my pocket and found the pack of Lucky Strikes.
“Quit it,” said Rose, putting a hand on my wrist. I put the cigarettes away.
“I’m going to refer you to a specialist, and see if we can find out what’s going on in that head of his,” Patel said.
“Is there any point to that?” Rose asked. “You can do the CAT scan or whatever, but regardless of what they find, nobody’s going to be doing brain surgery on somebody as old as Buck.”
“That’s true,” Patel said. He crossed his legs at the knees and leaned back in his heavy leather executive office chair. “But I’m not referring him to a radiologist. I’d like for him to visit with a psychologist.”
I pulled my Luckys out again, and this time, Rose didn’t stop me. I lit one. “See? Just like I said. Liberals destroying this country.”
“And how is that supposed to help us, Doctor?” Rose asked.
“I think it’s worth exploring the possibility that Mr. Schatz’s memory lapses have causes other than the progression of Alzheimer’s-type dementia.”
“What else could be causing it?”
“Well, that’s what I think Dr. Pincus might be able to help figure out. I’ve had some suspicions about the causes of Buck’s difficulty for a while, and I talked to my colleague after you called and scheduled this appointment. He agrees he might be able to help, and he’s holding an appointment open for you this afternoon. I can’t promise his intervention will provide relief. As I’m sure I’ve told you before, dementia is a progressive condition that we try to manage but cannot cure. But what my colleague proposes is an entirely noninvasive procedure.”
“Depends on your definition of the term,” I said.
Rose turned toward me. “At least he’s Jewish.”
“And he’s clearly very busy,” I said.
“I think you’ll like him,” said Patel.
“Do I have a choice?” I asked.
“No,” said Rose.
TRANSCRIPT: AMERICAN JUSTICE
CARLOS WATKINS (NARRATION): So, several episodes of American Justice have aired now, and y’all are getting to know Chester March and his plight as I’m continuing to report on this developing story. You have been sending lots of e-mails and tweets, and I love that. I love when people engage with these vital stories, and I love hearing what listeners have to say. I can’t respond to everyone, but we’re reading everything you send us, and we’re seeing some questions recurring. So I want to take a moment to talk about some things folks keep asking in the e-mails, and on Twitter, and in the comments sections on the articles we post on the NPR website.
Everybody wants to know if Chester March is innocent. And, look, I’m down here in Tennessee doing the reporting. I’ve got drafts of the scripts I am working on for the next couple of episodes here. I’ve got all the information I’ve presented, and a lot of what I am going to tell you. I’ve read the court transcripts and the appellate briefs and the newspaper articles and all the primary sources. And I am sorry for those of you who consider this a spoiler, but I just don’t know.
I am not in possession of any new evidence that will exonerate Chester. If I had anything like that, I wouldn’t keep it under wraps while the state is already beginning its preparations for the execution. I’d turn that evidence over to Ed Heffernan, and he would get it in front of a court right away. If I learn anything new that materially changes my understanding of these crimes, you’ll probably hear about it first when you see me in The New York Times or on CNN. This is a story with a real person’s life at stake, and I’m not messing around or holding anything back.
There’s not going to be a twist ending—at least, not one that I have planned. There’s no reversal. There’s no big surprise in the works. My sleeves are empty, folks. This is a story about a man who was convicted of murder thirty-five years ago and whose time has finally run out. It’s a story about his lawyers filing his last-ditch appeals. If Ed Heffernan can’t get a court to stay this execution, or if he can’t convince the governor to put a moratorium on the death penalty in the state of Tennessee, then this story is going to end with Chester March getting a lethal injection.
And if you’ve become emotionally invested in Chester and his story, you need to be prepared for the idea that this is how it’s going to end. I have already got my press credential to attend the execution. Don’t think that I won’t let it happen. Don’t think that NPR won’t let it happen. There is nothing we can do to stop it. I’m trying to change the world by shining a light on horrible things. But I can only witness these things and relay what I have witnessed to you, the listener.
Is Chester March a murderer? Maybe. And as far as I know, there’s no evidence that will change that assessment. But can we be so sure he did it that it is unreasonable to doubt his guilt? I don�
�t think so. And that is the question we’re asking here: Can we say that this process and this evidence are sufficient for us to feel comfortable killing this man?
What we’re trying to do here is a little different from a typical true-crime program. We’re not exploring or analyzing the crimes Chester allegedly perpetrated but, rather, the crimes he is a victim of. We’re looking at systems: the police investigation, the interrogation that yielded his confession and the trial that ended with him being sentenced to death, and the appeals that affirmed that sentence.
American Justice is, to borrow a cliché, a story about putting the system on trial. Because if this system puts Chester March to death unjustifiably, the system will be guilty of murder.
Of course, if you know anything, if you have any new information about Chester or his alleged victims, get in touch with us. Right now.
15
The ride back to Valhalla was tense and quiet. I didn’t like being pushed into doing things, I didn’t like people trying to get inside my head, and I didn’t like talking to strangers. And with my memory steadily degrading, almost everybody was a stranger. I was so upset about having to go talk to Patel’s headshrinker that I didn’t even bother to antagonize the aide who was driving the car. This seemed to worry her a great deal. She insisted on holding my arm as I lifted myself out of the backseat, and after she parked the Buick, she followed us through the lobby, into the elevator and down the hallway to our room, hovering behind me all the way, as if she was scared I might collapse. Which, in all fairness to her, was a real possibility.
I shut the door in her face, pushed the walker over to the bed, sat down, and kicked off my shoes. I used to care a lot about my shoes. You can tell a lot about a man’s character by looking at his shoes; they tell you about the kinds of choices he makes, whether he is fastidious or sloppy, and about how he sees himself and what he aspires to.
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