Authors: Helen Prejean
The red block letters say “Death Row.”
My stomach can read the letters better than my brain.
I pace slowly back and forth in the room and keep trying to take deep breaths, to settle down. I am allowed two hours for my visit. That seems like a very long time. I’m doubly tense. One, I am locked behind four — I count them — doors in this strange, unreal place. Two, I’m about to meet and talk to someone who killed two people. Letters are one thing, but just the two of us like this talking for two hours?
I hear him before I see him. I can hear the rattle of chains on his legs scraping across the floor and I can hear his voice. He is laughing and teasing the guard. I detect a Cajun accent.
“Hi, Pat, I made it,” I say.
“Am I glad to see
you
, Sister,” he says.
He is freshly shaven and his black hair is combed into a wave in the front. A handsome face, open, smiling. Not the face I had seen in the photo. He has on a clean blue denim shirt and jeans. His hands are cuffed to a wide brown leather belt at his waist. He has brought me a gift: a picture frame made out of intricately folded cigarette packages. “I made it for you,” he says, and he explains that the biggest challenge had been collecting enough of the wrappers from the others on the tier. He is bright and talkative and tells me of some recent letters from college students whom I have referred to him.
“I was always a loner growing up. I’ve never had so many friends,” he says, and he tells in detail what each pen pal has said and how he has responded. He keeps a checklist: “letters received — letters answered” and the date next to each.
He smokes one cigarette after another and he has to lean his head far down to reach the cigarette because his hands are cuffed to the belt. He is obviously very happy to have someone to talk to. Contact with someone in the outside world goes a long way in this place, where, as I soon learn, mail is rare and visits rarer.
As we talk I find myself looking at his hands — clean, shapely hands, moving expressively despite the handcuffs as he talks. These hands that made the nice picture frame for me also held a rifle that killed. The fingernails are bitten down to the quick.
He tells again of receiving the first letter from me and how the name Helen had made him think at first it was from his ex-“old
lady,” and he wanted to have nothing to do with her because she was the one who had told the sheriff where to find him, warning that he was dangerous and heavily armed, and the scowl is there and he stares past me as he talks. He can’t believe his good fortune, he says, that I have come into his life out of the blue like this, and he thanks me profusely for making the long drive to come and see him.
The way he was teasing the guard and the way he thanks me and is talking to me now — I can tell he likes to please people.
He hasn’t done well with women, he admits — lived with several but always “busted up.” He has a little girl, Star, eleven years old, but she is with foster parents and her mother is in Texas and he says that his child was born when he was serving time in Angola for stealing a truck, and the first time he laid eyes on her was the day he got out of prison because he went right to where his “first old lady” was living and there was the child, playing in the front yard, and he had swooped her into his arms and said, “I’m your daddy,” and her mother had appeared at the front door with a shotgun because she thought someone was trying to kidnap the child and and he had called out to her, “It’s me. I’m back. I want to see my kid.” But the first thing he had done when he stepped out of the gates at Angola was to get a case of beer, and by the time the Greyhound bus had pulled into St. Martinville he was pretty “tanked” and he and the woman had “gotten into it” that night and he smashed up some furniture and she threw him out and he had gone to his mother’s.
He never has been one to share his feelings, he says, because when he was a kid growing up his mother and father used to fight a lot and they separated when he was six and his sister was three and Eddie was just a baby. His mother went on welfare because his daddy never did come through with child support and the welfare check would run out and they’d be hungry and he and Eddie would hunt deer and rabbit. He chuckles remembering how his mother would help them with the rabbit hunt and it was always her job to put the dead rabbits in a sack and to “finish them off with a stick if they weren’t dead yet. “And we’d be stalking along and behind us we’d hear
whack, whack, whack
— Mama beating the hell out of those rabbits.”
I cringe, but he tells the incident nonchalantly. I am thinking of the clobbered rabbits. He is thinking of the food.
Once, he says, he and Eddie couldn’t find a deer so they shot a neighbor’s cow and skinned it and brought it home. “Mama knew
this was no more a deer than the man in the moon, but she didn’t say nothing ‘cause we were all so hungry. She fixed us up a good roast that night and you could smell it cooking all through the house.”
They often hunted at night. “Isn’t it against the law to hunt at night?” I ask. “Yeah,” he says, “but we didn’t worry about that.”
As kids they moved from mother to father and back again, he says, and by the time he was fourteen he had changed schools seven or eight times. He got only as far as eighth grade, dropped out when he was fifteen, forged his mother’s signature on an application form, and went to work as a roustabout on the oil rigs. Later, he got his license and drove eighteen-wheelers and he had liked that best. From the age of nine, he says, he was on probation with juvenile authorities for burglaries, disturbing the peace, trespassing. “Mama couldn’t do anything with me and she’d have Daddy come get me out of trouble.”
His daddy was a sharecropper and one of the best things he got from him, he says, is his love of work. At the age of seven he picked cotton, potatoes, and peppers alongside his father, and as he got older, when it was harvesting time for the sugar cane, “there I’d be walking to school and see those open fields and I’d drop my books on the side of the road and head out into the fields.” He hopes that maybe some day he can “hand back the chair” and work in the fields here, driving one of the tractors.
He stands up and I try to adjust my view of him because it is hard to see through the heavy mesh screen and he tells me to look down sometimes. “This screen can really do a number on your eyes.”
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 morning 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.”