“It is the judgment of the court that the defendant, Anthony Ray Hinton, in each of these cases is guilty of the capital offense in accordance with the verdict of the jury in each of these cases. And it is the judgment of the court and the sentence of the court that the defendant, Anthony Ray Hinton, suffer death by electrocution on a date to be set by the Alabama Supreme Court pursuant to Alabama Rules of Appellate Procedure 8-D (1).
“The sheriff of Jefferson County, Alabama, is directed to deliver the defendant, the said Anthony Ray Hinton, into the custody of the director of the Department of Corrections and Institutions at Montgomery, Alabama, and the designated electrocution shall, at the proper place for the electrocution of one sentenced to suffer death by electrocution, cause a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death and the application and continuance of such current to pass through the body of said Anthony Ray Hinton until the said Anthony Ray Hinton is dead.”
I dropped my head. Judge Garrett banged his gavel, and my attorney said some things about an appeal, but my stomach was in my throat and there was a buzzing in my ears like a swarm of bees had been let loose in that courtroom. I thought I heard my mom crying as if in pain, and I looked back to see Dollie and Rosemary circled around her. The bailiffs were leading me toward the door that led out the back of the courtroom, but I turned and started to walk toward my mom. One of the bailiffs grabbed my arm below the shoulder, and I could feel each of his fingers digging in hard. There was no going to her. There was no way for me to comfort her. They would kill me if they could. I couldn’t let them. I needed to get back to my mom, and she needed to get me back. I was her baby. Dear God, I was her baby, and I was innocent. I watched as if underwater as Lester and my mom both stood. I saw the tears on Lester’s face, and my mom reached her arms out to me just as they pulled me through the door. It was all too much for one man to bear.
Dear God, please let the truth be known.
Dear God, do not let me die this way.
Dear God, I am innocent.
Dear God, protect my mom.
I am innocent.
I am innocent.
As they hurried me through the back hallway behind the courtroom, I remembered the grim look in Lester’s eyes as I had testified. He knew what I knew. What every poor person tangled up in the legal system knows. McGregor may have won, but I don’t think he or the judge realized that by sentencing me to death, they were giving me the only shot I had at proving my innocence. Now that I was sentenced to die, I would be guaranteed an appeal and guaranteed some representation by my attorney. If I had been sentenced to life, I would have had to hire an attorney to appeal.
The best chance for my life was to get sentenced to death. There was no money to prove my innocence. I was headed to Holman Prison. The House of Pain. Dead Man Land. The Slaughter Pen of the South. It had a lot of names. I was terrified, but I knew the only way to fight this injustice would be from inside.
God have mercy on my soul.
2
ALL AMERICAN
Do any of you have any bias or prejudice that would influence your verdict if you were selected to serve as a member of this jury?
—HONORABLE JAMES S. GARRETT
West Jefferson High School, May 1974
I blocked out all the noise and ground my left foot a little deeper in the dirt. Even with my helmet on, I swear it felt like the May sun was burning a hole right through the top of my head. I took a few practice swings, looking the pitcher right in the eye. He met my gaze and then spit over his left shoulder. I heard the catcher mutter something behind me, and the umpire gave a little snort, but I didn’t care what he said or what the umpire thought was so funny. I had been called names before and I would be called names again, but I just let the names roll off me like water rolling over a rock.
I watched as if in slow motion while the pitcher lifted his left leg and cocked his right arm back. I knew this guy. We had been here before. Season after season we had faced each other down. He didn’t take it well when he lost. He liked to throw his glove. Or his hat. Or kick the fence alongside the dugout. I was taught to remain calm. When you win, you stay calm. When you lose, you stay calm. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wanted to win. Nobody likes to lose in baseball or in anything. But my mom always taught me that if you have a tantrum out there on the field and let the other team know they’ve upset you, it’s like losing twice. “They may beat you now and then,” she used to say, “but that don’t mean they have to break you. You don’t change who you are and how you was raised for anyone. And I didn’t raise no child to have a tantrum in the middle of a baseball field or anywhere.”
So I stared the pitcher down, and I let the catcher and the umpire roll off my back like water because I was a hundred times more afraid of my mom than I was of any of these three jokers.
I never took my eye off the ball, and while I wanted nothing more than to swing and to swing hard, it was an out-of-control curveball that just barely landed into the catcher’s glove far outside of the plate.
“Strike!”
I looked back at the umpire. Had he lost his mind?
“Let’s go, boy,” he said, and this time, the catcher laughed.
So that’s how it was going to be.
I looked up and around at the stands. It was a sea of white faces, and no one seemed to be overly concerned or protesting the call. I looked over into the dugout, but Coach Moore had his back turned to me as he talked to our first baseman. When this county finally gave in and integrated its schools, we were bussed from Praco to the white school. Over the past four years, it had pretty much been just like this—people either completely ignored us or they muttered slurs under their breath when we walked by. The white boys were braver when they were in a group. Because both Lester and I were big guys, no one ever called us names to our faces. They were afraid of us, which was funny, because both Lester and I had been raised to be afraid of them. Before the first day I got on the bus to go to West Jefferson High, my mom had sat me down and told me not to talk to any white girls. “Don’t even look their way,” she warned. “You study. You keep your head down. You keep your eyes down. And when the teachers talk to you, be polite and follow the rules. You go to school, and then you get home. Fast.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I had heard this before, but I knew better than to mention that to her.
“I’m not playing about those white girls,” she added. “You pretend they don’t even exist.” I nodded, but inside, I was laughing. My mom was no fool, and she knew that not only were girls my weakness, I was their weakness as well. Girls loved me. Grown women loved me. I was almost eighteen and I had always been tall for my age, so the girls around Praco and in church had started noticing me right around seventh grade, and it had only increased the older I got. I wasn’t looking to mess around with any white girls, though. They may have cheered me on in basketball and occasionally in baseball, but that was as far as it ever went. One thing I had learned in my new school—the better a season you had, the less racist everyone around you would become.
I was graduating soon, but Lester still had two more years to go. I worried about him walking home without me. It was almost five miles, and neither of our moms knew how to drive. Even if they had known, it wasn’t like we could afford a car. My mom had a hard enough time earning the $44.29 she paid every month for our house.
I hadn’t seen Lester before the game, but I knew he was around somewhere, watching and waiting for me. The bus took us to school, but if you played sports, you had to get yourself home at night. Sometimes walking home felt like being in the middle of a war. You had to be on alert at all times—ready to defend yourself or take cover. It was barely tolerable if you had someone with you, but if you had to make that walk alone, it felt like you were watching a horror movie the whole time, just waiting for the killer to jump out from behind the door. Lester always had my back on that walk, and I always had his.
I looked around Tiger Field, which was brown and dirty
and not much to look at compared to most big high school fields in Alabama. The dugouts were made out of thick, gray cement blocks, and you felt like you were in a prison when you sat in them and looked out at the old chain-link fence surrounding the field. Our field wasn’t even at the school; it was a couple of miles away. This was the “Home of the Tigers.” And it did feel a little bit like you were in a cage when you played.
Rumor had it there were some college scouts from Georgia at our game. The last scout who had come to a game had talked to me after and told me he was impressed with my .618 batting average, but he needed someone with more speed. I was a power hitter, and nothing felt as good as setting a ball free from Tiger Field. Sure, I would’ve loved a baseball scholarship, especially if Auburn called me up or maybe a school out in California. USC, UCLA, Cal—I would happily sit on the beach out there—but graduation was a month away, and it didn’t seem like I had that many chances left to impress the scouts. I knew I was at least in the top ten of all high school baseball players in the state, if not the top five, but nobody in my family had ever gone to college. I was the youngest of ten children, and after they had graduated high school, pretty much every one but two of my sisters had gotten the hell out of Alabama. Lots of folks were leaving the South for Cleveland, and my brothers and sisters were no different. In Cleveland, white people weren’t bombing the churches or bombing the black neighborhoods like they had been in Birmingham since I was born. The whites lived in Birmingham, the blacks in Bombingham. The people here had no problem letting the dogs loose on kids. I had grown up hearing the adults talk about it. Four little girls killed at a church bombing. Almost a thousand kids put in jail. People living on Dynamite Hill having to hide in their bathtubs because bombs were being thrown into their houses. People refusing to serve you if you were black. Hell, I couldn’t even go to Woolworth’s in Birmingham and sit at the counter and order a cheeseburger and shake until a couple of years earlier. Even now, you could tell people were only serving you because they had to. They were not happy about it. And 1974 wasn’t too different from 1954 or 1964.
I was seven when Martin Luther King was locked up in our jail, and I remembered when the church was bombed and how my mom made all us kids stay home that day. It was the only Sunday I can remember that we didn’t go to church. She told us to run if any white men in a car pulled up next to us. We sat up on the dirt hillside overlooking Praco and talked about what we would do if they came for us. My brother Willie said he would fight, and my sister Darlene said she would run into the woods and hide. Lester and I sat shoulder to shoulder. He was only five, so I watched out for him most of the time. The Hintons and the Baileys. There were sixteen kids total, and neither family had a dad at home, so we liked to think we were our own little army keeping guard over the town. We never figured out what we would do if they came for us that day, but up on our hill, at the edge of a forest of turkey oaks and longleaf pines we could run to if we needed, we were brave and strong and ready to defend what was ours.
Everyone who lived in Praco either worked in the coal mines or for the mining company in some way. The coal mining company owned our town. Owned our houses. They had a store—a commissary—where we bought our groceries, our clothes, and anything else we needed. If our roof had a leak, the company sent someone over to fix it. We had a church, and really, except to go to school, we never had to leave town if we didn’t want to. My dad had worked in the coal mines until he got hit in the head and had to go live in an institution. Then my mom was in charge of the ten of us and had to pay the rent and feed us and buy our clothes and keep us together. Lester’s dad was gone too, although I never asked him why or what happened. We were all the same in Praco. The blacks lived up on the hill, and the whites lived down below in the flat areas. The company owned everything, and the only difference was that the white houses had indoor plumbing and real kitchens and bathrooms. We had an outhouse and a number-three tub in the backyard for our baths. Our house had four rooms, one of which was a kitchen where we ate and did our homework and watched television. We would sleep three or four kids to a bed in each room. Two of my sisters would sleep with my mom. We were happy in Praco. We ate good food our mothers cooked for us. We played outside until dark. And we went to church. Everybody had the same, so nobody felt like they were better or worse off than the next person. Our community was close, and we all loved each other, like a giant family. Any adult could tell any kid what to do and he did it. Everybody watched out for everyone. If you got in trouble three streets away, your mom would know about it before you could even get home to tell her. The adults handled adult business, and if two adults were talking, you were supposed to make yourself scarce. We used to hide out and listen when we could, but mostly we just played and ran around and didn’t know too much about how the outside world was operating except for what we saw on television.
And then they integrated the schools.
Now, a senior in high school, not a day went by that I didn’t hear someone yelling “Nigger!” in my direction. It didn’t matter if I was just walking down the road or standing at my locker or even if I was playing baseball and helping the team win. I was about to graduate, and what I’d learned most in four years besides biology and arithmetic was just how much people can hate you because of the color of your skin. People can want to hurt you for no good reason other than you look different or talk different or live different. Oh, I got an education by going to the white school, just not the kind of education the politicians and lawmakers had planned on.
“That’s my baby!”
I heard my mom yelling and saw her standing outside the chain-link fence next to the bleachers. I had no idea how she had managed to get from home to the ball field. She cleaned houses to make money, but there was never enough time or a car to get her to my ball games. She waved a white handkerchief at me and yelled again.
“Go, baby! That’s my baby!”
I smiled. It didn’t matter that I weighed in at 230 pounds and towered over her. I was her baby. I would always be her baby. I eyed the pitcher and took another practice swing. Maybe there really was a scout around watching today, but unless he said, “I’m going to pay for your college education, drive you there, and then come back to help your mom get to the store and do her chores while you’re gone,” it didn’t look like I was going anywhere but into the coal mines come graduation.
But then again, I did have the best batting average in all of Birmingham and maybe even in all of Alabama. Hank Aaron was from Alabama. So was Willie Mays—he was from right here in Jefferson County. And I was raised to believe in miracles.
I watched the pitcher shake his head at whatever signal the catcher had given him for the next pitch. They didn’t want me to hit the ball, and it didn’t seem like the umpire was going to call it fair, but that didn’t bother me. I had been playing baseball as long as I had been walking. We used to get pieces of cardboard and paper from behind the commissary and mash them together, then wrap black electrical tape around the clump until it was the size of a baseball and almost as hard. For a bat, we would use an old broom handle, and the bases would be a shoe or someone’s shirt or more old cardboard if we could get it. They could play by the rules, or we could play us some street ball. It didn’t matter to me. One way or another, I was going to hit that ball. I was going to make my mom proud. She had come all this way to see me, and I wasn’t going to let her down. Sure, I cared what a scout thought, but I cared what my mom thought more.
The pitcher spit again and began his windup dance. What was it going to be? Curveball? Fastball? Knuckleball? I could hit them all. I was going to swing and hit it whether it was outside, low, inside, it didn’t matter. Street ball never had the nuances of organized baseball. You had rules, but you didn’t argue the small stuff. If a pitch made it anywhere close, you swung and you swung hard. Playing in the dirt in Praco, we never waited for the perfect pitch to take a swing. You swung at the pitch you were given, and you made the best of it.
; I was more than ready. I could feel the weight of the bat in my hands, smell the ashy pine odor of the wood. I checked the bat to make sure the Louisville Slugger name was straight up, because this meant the sweet spot—the place where the grain of the wood was the strongest—was facing the pitcher. He finished his windup, and I kept my eye on the ball as it released. It felt like the bat was vibrating in my palms, and I couldn’t hear the crowd or my mom or the cheating ump or the catcher. It was just me and my bat and the ball. I watched as the ball came closer and closer, and I pulled the bat back a little so I could let it rip even harder, but the next thing I knew, the ball was heading right toward my face. I dropped the bat and then flew back and down as fast as I could, but I swear I still felt that ball skim across my cheekbone. I landed on my left hip into the dirt, and I put my palm down to catch my fall, and it felt like a drill went straight from my wrist to my shoulder. The catcher laughed as he turned to retrieve the wild pitch, and I could only hope that the ump wasn’t bigoted enough to call that one a strike as well.
“Ball!” he yelled as I stood up and brushed the dirt off my pants. My arm hurt bad, but I didn’t say anything.
“Come on, baby!” I heard my mom yell.
The pitcher was smirking as I got back in my stance and pulled the bat back. He could smirk all he wanted, but if he got that ball anywhere near the plate, it was gone. If he threw the ball at my head again, I would fall down, but I would still get back up. No matter what, this was going to end the same. He was going to hit me or I was going to hit the ball—either way, I was going to get on base.
The next pitch was a changeup. I knew it even as he released it. Most people would have thought fastball, but I can read a changeup a mile away. I brought my weight back, and I paused. Most guys miss the changeup by swinging too soon. They can end up swinging themselves in a complete circle from missing a changeup. Nothing funnier than that, but I was done being a source of amusement today. I waited and I waited, and I put all my weight into my swing, and I swear I saw the moment that ball slowed down and I swung for my team, and for my mama, and for Lester, and for every kid in Praco who was going to be called a name today, and I heard the only sound that a batter wants to hear. It’s that sweet and sharp sound of the ball hitting the bat right where you want it. I’ve had dreams with that sound so loud and clear, it’s woken me up. It sounds just like thunder on a hot day in August. I didn’t even look to see where the ball was going when I heard that sound. I just dropped the bat, kept my head down, and began running.
The Sun Does Shine Page 3