Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States - Rilegato

Prejean, Helen

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0679403582 ISBN 13: 9780679403586

Casa editrice: Random House Inc, 1993

Riassunto

A Catholic nun shares her unique perspective of the death penalty gained through her counseling of death-row inmates, her shock of the brutality of their crimes, and her sympathy with their pain. 30,000 first printing. $30,000 ad/promo. Tour.

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Recensione:

"Destined to become the most influential anti-capital punishment statement since Albert Camus wrote' Reflections on the Guillotine ' in 1957...This unblinking book about the deliberate killing of human beings refuses to turn a blind eye to the sins of the murderers--be they prisoners or prison officials. The author, Sister Helen Prejean, is a Roman Catholic nun who has lived and worked with poor black families in New Orleans. Walking explores her personal and spiritual evolution into both a death penalty opponent and victims advocate, an evolution that begins when she serves as the spiritual advisor to two condemned men." --Washington Post Book World

"This arresting account should do for the debate over capital punishment what the film footage from Selma and Birmingham accomplished for the civil rights movement: turn abstractions into flesh and blood. Tough, fair, bravely alive--you will not come away from this book unshaken."--Bill McKibben
From the Trade Paperback edition.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

CHAPTER

I

When Chava Colon from the Prison Coalition asks me one January day in 1982 to become a pen pal to a death-row inmate, I say, Sure. The invitation seems to fit with my work in St. Thomas, a New Orleans housing project of poor black residents. Not death row exactly, but close. Death is rampant here-from guns, disease, addiction. Medical care scarcely exists.

I've come to St. Thomas to serve the poor, and I assume that someone occupying a cell on Louisiana's death row fits that category. I had learned that back in 1977 at a lecture by John Vodicka, one of the founders of the Louisiana Coalition on Jails and Prisons where Chava now works. I had also learned that the death penalty in the United States has always been most rigorously applied in Southern states-mostly toward those who kill whites. The Prison Coalition office is near Hope House, where I teach high-school dropouts, and Chava and I run into each other fairly often.

After he has written the name of the death-row inmate he says, "Maybe I ought to give you someone else. This guy is a loner and doesn't write. Maybe you want someone who will answer your letters."

But he's already written the name and I say, "Don't change it. Give me his name." I don't know yet that the name on this tiny slip of white paper will be my passport into an eerie land that so far I've only read about in books.

I look at the name and address that Chava gave me: Elmo Patrick Sonnier, number 95281, Death Row, Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola.

Almost all the killings here in St. Thomas seem to erupt from the explosive mixture of dead-end futures, drugs, and guns. But when Chava describes what Sonnier has done, my blood chills. On November 4, 1977, he and his younger brother, Eddie, abducted from a lovers' lane a teenage couple, David LeBlanc and Loretta Bourque. They raped the girl, forced the young people to lie face down, and shot them in the head.

I look down at the name in horror. Do I really want to know such a man?

"He's a Cajun from St. Martinville, Louisiana," Chava says.

Which makes the murders all the more vicious, because St. Martinville, at the center of Acadiana, is one of the friendliest, most hospitable places on earth. Here and in the surrounding towns French-speaking people, mostly farmers and fishermen, cook good food, swap stories and recipes, and dance the two-step and the zydeco. They love to talk, even to strangers. If murders are prone to happen anywhere on the face of the earth, this is the place one would least expect.

I wonder what I can say to this man. What will he have to say to me?

"We have files at the office," Chava says, "if you want to read about the case."

I take the piece of paper with the name on it back to the apartment in the project where I live with five other nuns.

A year ago, in June of 1981, I had driven a small brown truck loaded with my personal possessions to the apartment on 519 St. Andrew Street and hoped to high heaven I wouldn't be shot. We were practically the only whites-all women-among one thousand five hundred residents in the six square blocks of beige brick buildings tucked between the central business district and the garden district. After my first night in the project apartment, I wrote in my journal:

"Didn't sleep much. Noisy until about 3:00 A.M. People standing on the corner talking and drinking. Feel nervous, unsettled. Heard a gunshot. Had checked when I got into bed to make sure my bed was under the windowsill in case a bullet came through.

"Is this New Orleans? I feel like I'm in another country."

I came to St. Thomas as part of a reform movement in the Catholic Church, seeking to harness religious faith to social justice. In 1971, the worldwide synod of bishops had declared justice a "constitutive" part of the Christian gospel. When you dig way back into Church teachings, you find that this focus on justice has been tucked in there all along in "social encyclicals." Not exactly coffee-table literature. The documents have been called the best-kept secret of the Catholic Church. And with good reason. The mandate to practice social justice is unsettling because taking on the struggles of the poor invariably means challenging the wealthy and those who serve their interests. "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable"-that's what Dorothy Day, a Catholic social activist said is the heart of the Christian gospel.1

In 1980 my religious community, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, had made a commitment to "stand on the side of the poor," and I had assented, but reluctantly. I resisted this recasting of the faith of my childhood, where what counted was a personal relationship with God, inner peace, kindness to others, and heaven when this life was done. I didn't want to struggle with politics and economics. We were nuns, after all, not social workers, and some realities in life were, for better or worse, rather fixed-like the gap between rich and poor. Even Jesus Christ himself had said, "The poor you will always have with you." Besides, it was all so complex and confusing-the mess the world was in-with one social problem meshed with other problems. If you tried to get a handle, say, on improving housing for poor people, you found yourself in a morass of bureaucracy and waste in government programs, racist real estate and banking policies, unemployment-a mess.

Enlightenment had come in June 1980. I can remember the moment because it changed my life. My community had assembled at Terre Haute, Indiana, to grapple with directions of our ministries for the 1980s, and the chief speaker was Sister Marie Augusta Neal, S.N.D.deN. A sociologist, she described glaring inequities in the world: two thirds of the peoples of the world live at or below subsistence level while one third live in affluence. Did we know, she asked, that the United States, which comprises about 6 percent of the world's population, consumed 48 percent of the world's goods? What were we to do about such glaring injustices? She knew her facts and I found myself mentally pitting my arguments against her challenge-we were nuns, not social workers, not political. But it's as if she knew what I was thinking. She pointed out that to claim to be apolitical or neutral in the face of such injustices would be, in actuality, to uphold the status quo-a very political position to take, and on the side of the oppressors.

But it was the way she presented the message of Jesus that caused the most radical shift in my perspective.

"The Gospels record that Jesus preached good news to the poor," she said, "and an essential part of that good news was that they were to be poor no longer." Which meant they were not to meekly accept their poverty and suffering as God's will, but, instead, struggle to obtain the necessities of life which were rightfully theirs. And Jesus' challenge to the nonpoor, she emphasized, was to relinquish their affluence and to share their resources with the dispossessed.

Something in me must have been building toward this moment because there was a flash and I realized that my spiritual life had been too ethereal, too disconnected. I left the meeting and began seeking out the poor. This brought me one year later to the St. Thomas housing development.

I had grown up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the 1940s and 1950s in as solid and loving a family as one could hope for-a mother and father who lavished attention and affection on their children and a brother, Louie, and sister, Mary Ann, whom I could spar with and tease and argue with and love. We grew up in a spacious two-story house, were educated in Catholic schools, and traveled extensively across the United States, Canada, and Europe.

As a child, at Mama's urging, I knelt by my bed at night for prayers and always included "poor people who have no place to sleep tonight." But poor people occupied a land somewhere out there with Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel. I did not have any direct experience with poor people.

I did not then consider the "colored" people who worked for us as poor. They were just, well, "colored" people doing what "colored" people did, which was working for white people, and living where "colored" people lived, which was usually in shacks out in the country or, in "nigger town" in the city. In my early childhood a black couple lived in the "servants' quarters," a small house behind ours. The man took care of the yard, the woman in a white uniform helped in the house. They never used the family bathrooms and they always ate in the kitchen. Only whites went to the elementary and high school I attended, and in our church blacks could sit only in a niche of pews over to the side and had to wait until last to receive communion. They had to sit at the back of the bus, and it was a great dare for a white kid to go to the back of the bus and sit with the blacks for five seconds. I had taken on the dare more than once, then rushed back to the front of the bus to amused, giggling friends.

Yet, even when I was a child there was something in black people that drew me to them. Once, when I was five years old, I remember making my way over to the group of black men Daddy had hired to remove a stump from our front yard, and I watched and listened as they swung axes in fluid motion and moaned bluesy songs and swapped stories about women and drinking and going to jail. This was life so raw, so earthy, so uncushioned, yet so vibrant, so tenacious, so enduring. I was fascinated. Mama was not. She spotted me and told me to get inside.

I was twelve years old the first time I witnessed physical violence against a black person. Elise Gauthier, my friend and classmate, and I rode the bus one December day in 1952 to Third Street to do our Christmas shopping. We were in seventh grade; everything was funny that year, and we had a grea...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Random House Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0679403582
• ISBN 13: 9780679403586
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 278