​My parents didn’t really have extended families or adult friends. Mom’s parents died before I was born and we only heard from dad’s parents by phone at Christmas. Both of my parents had brothers, but neither one communicated on a regular basis. In a manner of speaking our family grew up isolated on a dead end street despite living in a middle class neighborhood. This all changed with Aunt Vera.
 
We met Aunt Vera at a Catholic church where she played the organ and helped organize events for the Knights of Columbus and Sisters of Fatima. She was the only close friend I recall mom having, not that there weren’t others, just none as intimate as Aunt Vera. That’s why we called her “Aunt”, because the two might as well have been sisters. They talked on the phone, over coffee, practiced piano together and traded sheet music. Both were classically trained pianists and it was virtually all they talked about, or so it seemed. They traded recipes from gigantic heirloom cookbooks and extolled the virtues of having one’s own spice garden. They even plotted ways to evolve our CCD classes during mass, though I would later discover this last was the beginning of the end of Mom and Vera’s friendship.
 
Out of church Aunt Vera visited frequently, interested in everything our family did. She was supportive in the way I imagined relatives are, and on the days we went to her house these trips were an adventure. When not watching black and white movies on her top-loading VHS player, Vera kept my younger sisters busy with old clothes for dress up and me some broken gadgets to take apart. On two separate summer vacations we spent a weekend at her sister’s cabin on the lake, with its fresh water eels and muddy bottom that squished between the toes. On Halloween, Vera’s house was our last stop for roasted pumpkin seeds, popcorn balls and cold cider.
 
Aunt Vera was so involved with our family Mom gave her permission to occasionally take us out of school for lunch. Since she was a teacher at Hawthorne elementary this sort of thing was allowed so long as we were back in time for class. Thinking back on it I believe Vera’s position in the teacher’s union had a lot to do with how freely she moved between schools. That, and our principal’s desire not to cross her.
 
One day, while we were busy being kids, mom cut ties with Aunt Vera. The sudden change was left unexplained, and when we pushed for an answer all mom said is, “Vera has a life of her own to live. So do you.” Mom went so far as to change the church we attended, attributing the switch to a dislike for the way St. Charles did things. When my older brother and I complained about losing our jobs as altar servers, jobs she initially prodded us into, we were dismissed. It was the type of non-answer I grew to intensely dislike.
 
None of us believed the story about Vera having a life of her own to live. With no husband or children and only one sister with a nephew, we were her family. As kids who struggled to get more than a few blocks past the house, discovering the truth took years. What we eventually found out is that mom used “she has a life of her own” as an explanation when our oldest sister ran away. It was the type of statement we know to be a lie in the same way a child comes to understand there is no Santa Claus or Easter bunny. Another half-truth hiding the problems my parents didn’t want to talk about. I always felt this was their biggest mistake with us – concealing reality’s hard truths. The purpose might have been benevolent, but in the end it fueled my desires to rebel and explore all of the things they told me were bad.
 
Nearly four years after Vera went on with her life I was passing through her neighborhood and decided to visit. The last time I did so my hands didn’t shake from inhalant abuse and I’d never seen the inside of a reformatory. When she opened the door shock widened her eyes, but she recovered quickly and invited me in for tea and cookies as if I was twelve, not some sixteen year old delinquent. I don’t know why I stopped by other than curiosity. Vera left our family so abruptly and more than anything I wanted perspective beyond my parents’ sphere of influence.  When I said as much, the woman we came to know as Aunt Vera put her tea cup down and told me.
 
The principal at my grad school was gay. He decided to “come out” at a time when, in places like the rural northeast during the don’t-ask-don’t-tell era, this sort of thing was frowned on. As a teacher, godmother to my younger sisters, and stand-in aunt, Vera was offended by the principal’s decision. Her views were Old Testament and she believed such behaviors should not be modeled for impressionable children.
 
She said to me, “Your mother is more tolerant in her thinking and didn’t want my opinions picked up by her children.” The two argued over this and other biblical teachings, with mom championing the New Testament and Vera the Old. It all came back to the principal, though. As a member of the teacher’s union, Vera quietly began to exert pressure on the principal to resign and when mom found out she went ballistic. Her anger was all too easy to imagine.
 
Another four years passed before I heard from Aunt Vera again. News of my death sentence had rocked my small home town up north as if it had happened there, not in North Carolina. Vera wrote and asked after my wellbeing and let me know she would be praying that God spare me. “I still remember the day you stopped by to ask what happened between your mom and I. Thank you,” she said. “Though you may not realize it, you did this old biddy a world of good. I love you.” It was a heartfelt message; gratitude for my curiosity. She loved me for a simple act of being tolerant and willing to listen and has written to me ever since. One outcast to another. 

It was 1991 and “Smells like Teen Spirit” played at every junior high dance I attended and was all over the radio. The song, so new and revolutionary that many kids forgot Axl Rose and his Paradise City, repackaged rebellion and teen angst in a way that made dysfunction sound cool. The idea of rebellion resonated with me; I knew there had to be something better than mindless obedience. As authoritative as my parents were, there was a tiny part of me that knew they cared for my safety. The problem, in my thirteen year old mind, was that safety meant suffocation. “ . . Where are you going? Not in my house! You wear what I tell you! Who are you talking to? Hang up. Go get my belt! If you don’t like it you can live somewhere else!” This litany controlled my life as surely as any good so I got a feeling for what prison might be like well before seeing the inside of one. My sisters were content to obey my parents and my brother was the golden child who did no wrong, but I needed out. I had to escape the role of whipping boy before the “safety” of my parents’ rule smothered my spirit.
 
Earlier that year, prior to getting run over by some fish-eyed old man in a Dodge Dart, I slipped from beneath the chore-heavy thumb of my mother by taking on a paper route. It took easing into—a little leeway here, some extra time there—before freedom from adult rules and the dawn of my delinquency made itself known to me. I found that on my own the world became available, and the intoxicating potential of doing whatever the hell I wanted had me drunk with wildness. If I felt like setting a fire or stealing some cigarettes, smoke trailed in my wake. My pockets stayed full of the things my parents wouldn’t or couldn’t give me and I reveled in the feeling. Disobedience showed me an isolated area where rules and laws are abstracts rather than chains and I liked it. Little did I know this sort of life has more people trying to escape its influence than run into its embrace.
 
On my way to the outer limits of what can be considered acceptable behavior, I met a girl who would serve as my first wake up call. Initially, it was more of a nod in the direction of another human being than any real introduction, but it was enough acknowledgement to remember. It occurred in school during band practice – I was an offbeat snare drummer with little talent or patience and more interest in the lighter in my pocket; she played the trumpet, her prosthetic right arm ending in a hook that held the instrument in place.
 
If we shared other classes I don’t remember, ours was a separate existence. While most kids at school fit beneath the labels jock, prep, geek or skater, Krissy and I were outsiders. My status as such was a choice, hers was not. Where I preferred to be alone or hang out with a couple of guys from another school, Krissy’s deformity and natural shyness automatically detached her from other kids. When we finally got to know one another it was a unique experience beyond the halls of junior high, free from peers who ridicule the smallest difference or eccentricity, making life more difficult than puberty and social awkwardness already did.
 
The paper route was a miserable little job that paid in tips from stingy old French Canadians who retired in Maine, and the bits of time I could steal for myself. Fridays were the worst because the papers were thick with inserts and I had to slow down to collect the weekly fee. At one apartment, in a building that stank of rotten cabbage and soiled diapers, I knocked on the door but nobody answered. “Times Record! It’s Friday, Mrs. Griffin!” The door was yanked open, surprising me, but not nearly as much as Krissy in a t-shirt and jeans, her prosthetic arm absent. She looked naked without it and I stared at the soft flesh of her stump, also realizing the baggy sweatshirts she wore hid a quickly developing figure. She rolled her eyes, went and got the money, then handed it to me. Struggling for something to witty, I said, “I didn’t know you live here.”
 
“Well now you do” she said and slammed the door.
 
Thus our first conversation was brief, so when less than an hour later I bumped into Krissy at the library (one of the few places I was allowed to be unsupervised) I was ready. Curtis Memorial is a small place compared to some libraries, but a lot of kids went there to research projects or attend one of the reading programs. For me, the library was a convenient alibi to do as I wanted; Krissy used it to escape the tiny apartment she shared with her mother’s current boyfriend. She looked up and shook her head when I walked over. “Go away.”
 
“It’s a free place.” I grabbed a magazine from the rack, dropped it on the table and sat across from her, unwilling to give in. She wore the hook, which seemed infinitely more useful than the stiff plastic hand her mother made her wear. Krissy hated both prosthetics, but unlike me she was obedient. She saw I wasn’t going to budge and her scowl softened.
 
“Don’t you have some homework or something?” She watched me pull a silver Zippo lighter from my pocket and play with it. She reached for it and, failing that, held out her hand.
 
“Sure,” I said, closing my hand around the prize. “It’s at home. I’m on break. You know those papers get heavy after a while.” I wrinkled my nose at her extended hand, then the lighter, not liking the idea of it leaving my possession. She smiled and I caved.
 
“You really shouldn’t play with these things around all this paper.” I watched her open it and look around, then close it and slide the lighter back across the table.
 
“Keep it.” I was delirious and didn’t know why I said it. I guess she seemed as fascinated with the shiny thing as me and I liked her smile. It wasn’t something she did in school, like go without her baggy clothes or prosthetic limb, and she seemed more human.
 
Krissy’s hand froze on the Zippo, then curled around it and put it in her pocket. “You’re not so bad after all. Now what are you gonna do?”
 
“Get another.”
 
“No. I mean here at the library. It’s obvious you’re not reading,” she said, and almost smiled.
 
I looked at her, wondering what she meant when it dawned on me Krissy was interested in talking. So we talked about band practice, teachers, and the kids we knew until I was almost late getting home. Stealing another lighter was the furthest thing from my mind.
 
After a few encounters like this I got up the nerve to ask Krissy about her arm—it seemed the only way to handle the elephant crouched in the corner rather than pretending it wasn’t a big part of her life. She glared at me, suspicious, but knew enough to understand I would not make fun of her or spread rumors.
 
She shrugged one shoulder, “There’s nothing too dramatic about it. My mom smoked a lot when she was pregnant and it stopped my arm from growing. I’m lucky it was only my arm.” She said, “It’s not a big deal anymore. I’m used to it.” I asked to touch the stump and she put the hook in my face, threatening. “Don’t get any funny ideas, boy.”
 
I don’t know if we were quite friends, though we generally like one another in an offhand way. Over a period of about two years, we talked when our paths crossed, but it was about simple stuff: complaints about teachers, parades and marching, and school projects. There were some unspoken things, like our feelings for each other, that we simply left alone. She believed I would end up in prison one day and said as much, something my father would echo a few years later when he kicked me out of the house. I scoffed and teased she would be married out of high school, wishing I had the courage to tell her what I really felt. We were both right to some degree. Where Krissy’s life continued on in normalcy, mine spiraled out of control. I fooled myself into thinking there would be no long term consequences for my lying, stealing and defiance. Where I should have felt remorse for thwarting my parents there was only a sense of vindication. Krissy’s appearance in my life and her reaction to my open rebellion was a warning, a sign post at the edge of delinquency that travel beyond this point would be difficult to return from. I ignored it as I would many other warnings, and viewed our connection as nothing more than a chance meeting on the fringe of society where so many people are eventually lost.

We knew a year in advance thing would be different at the new building. Not that they were great on the old Unit 2 death row cell blocks – just looser. Cramped as the space was with three double bunks in a dayroom with 16 cells, it was a comfortable cramp that dampened some of the institutional ugliness. In the new building we were told every inmate would have his own cell and plenty of space. The ready use of “inmate” was new also. It didn’t bode well.
 
I didn’t keep up with the newspaper articles describing the 20 million dollar Unit 3, but enough people talked about the new death house to where there was no need. Unit 3 would have cameras in every hallway, its own canteen and rec yard and it would be totally isolated from the regular population except when we were served at the chow hall three times a day. The building had its own lockup block (which would double as a quarantine for serious outbreaks within the prison) and jobs to be filled by a handful of death row inmates – pod and hallway janitors, barbers, clothes house men, and the canteen man. “State employees with death sentences,” grumbled the old head. “Making slave wages at .40 a day,” said others.
 
Total security was the design. Easy to lock down in the event of an “incident”. Simple to manage during executions. What they didn’t say, but was easy to figure out, was how much harder the time would be. How small privileges would be systematically eliminated until nothing remained except the executions.
 
It began with shoes and jewelry, much like the events preceding a historic act of genocide. We were forced to throw away or send home any sneakers, boots, or shoes that were not state issued. Any jewelry – aside from wedding bands—was also collected, though many items never made it to the designated mailing address because they were “lost”.
 
Next came the $10 administration fee for rules violations and the implementation of urinalysis tests. To prisoners who have no income and only receive money every once in a while because of loving family members and friends—ten dollars is a lot of money. The write up tax was also punishment in addition to time in the hole, but it was meant to help staff enforce all of the new petty policies for Unit 3. The urinalysis was insult to injury: we have no contact with anyone but correctional officers or prison staff yet we are punished for the drugs and contraband they bring in.
 
The last major privilege to be eliminated before the move was the ban on pornography. No pictures of woman engaged in sexual acts or exposing breasts and genitalia. Not even Playboy—and everybody knows you read Playboy for the articles. It may sound lowbrow, but porn in prison has an important role as a neutralizer of stress, tension, aggression, and sexual urges. Without it the time gets much, much more difficult. It also reduced the risk of incidents involving female staff. The only relief we had remaining were cigarettes, and these too were on the way out.
 
The day of the move we packed all of our property into 3 white plastic shipping bags half the size of a 5 gallon bucket. Books, magazines, clothes and legal material were counted, searched and searched again. We were strip-searched. Anyone who resisted was written-up and charged the new tax. Jabbed and aggravated and frustrated some more, the exodus of over 180 death row prisoners took about three months.
 
Unit 3 is horrible. Sure, there’s more space, but this makes room for noise, amplifying the cell doors opening and closing every hour on top of the hour. Blinding fluorescent lights induced headaches and vision problems. Even the night lights were brighter than the day lights of our cells in Unit 2, and they never go off. As grating on the nerves as everything else was, the intercom is the single most maddening, pull-your-hair-out-and-scream piece of equipment in Unit 3.
 
“COUNT TIME! COUNT TIME! COUNT TIME!” It squeals at 6:00 am.
 
“INMATES RETURN TO YOUR PODS!” It bawls after meals.
 
“FIRST AND LAST CALL FOR WORSHIP SERVICES!” It screams like some demon reveling in the sound of it shrieking announcement. The worst are guards who hold conversations with other guards or prisoners while shouting over the intercom. The only escape is a radio on blast, both ears numb with noise. Within our first week the number of people seeking psychiatric medication quadrupled. Complaints were ignored. The guards were all smiles.
 
Unit 3 brought another novelty: tour groups. Criminal justice classes, politicians, law enforcement personnel, various college and high school classes – they all passed through the hallways and stared into the large plexiglass windows as prison guards lectured about our lavish lifestyle and doomed existence. On the other side of the glass we stand back and wondered about the propaganda and lies.
 
From the end of 2001 to the end of 2002 there were no executions while we moved and settled into Unit 3. Then, in back-to-back weeks our first December here, Ernest Basden and Desmond Carter were put to death. In an office on the way out of Unit 3 a huge spread of food was set up on two long tables. Cake, soda, chips, dip, cold cuts and crackers, cookies—the sort of thing you see at a New Year’s Eve or Christmas party—except this smorgasbord was for the guards on the night of an execution. That it was displayed behind a window for every row death inmate to see on his way to a miserable mystery meat in the chow hall was a special kind of torture.
 
With the arrival of 2003 and our first full year in the new building seven executions were scheduled and carried out: Willy Jones, Henry Hunt, Joe Bates, Eddie Hartman, Joseph Keel, John Daniels, and Robbie Lyons. Seven celebrations by the guard working our unit that evening. As if to make up for the brief hiatus, 2003 became a year of precedent. It was the autumn of state-sanctioned murder at a level heretofore unseen. A macabre parade of death as we spun within the axis of our torment. This is Unit 3, our home for the foreseeable future.

Anticipation builds, and as I sit on the metal stool, my elbows propped on the table jutting from the wall, my mind races with a question: who is it? Who is coming? It’s hot in this cement box they call a visiting booth. The ventilation system is a smothering figment of the imagination. Sweat trickles down my spine, the blood red jumpsuit I’ve worn for seventeen years clings to my flesh like a second, uglier skin. Behind me a guard shuts a door and turns the deadbolt. For all that comes I’ll be trapped in this suffocating closet with its fetid odors. But it’s worth it. I would sit there for half a day if it meant a longer visit. Thirsty, hungry, back aching, hard seat biting – none of it matters once the visit begins.
 
The wall before me frames a window and a small metal screen through which sound travels in a tinny sort of way. It is the window above that holds my attention. The filthy, scarred plexiglass that covers thick safety glass. And bars, but only on my side. This bridge between the inside and outside is the length of my arm and as wide as my foot is long. Hand and lip prints decorate the surface. This little window is the closest I will ever come to the free world, that place I forget about sometimes, until, at last, the door opens on the other side and the visitor enters.
 
I am transported. Death row is temporarily forgotten and my troubles pushed aside as we talk – conversation that informs, relieves and excites. As I watch this person oh so closely, my chest aches with a longing that cannot be fulfilled except here, through this window between worlds. That need is only satisfied by my visitor’s smiles and laughs and gestures. The weight of my sentence never leaves, but for a time the burden eases and I feel relief, pleasure. A genuine smile reaches my eyes; a laugh escapes with my grin.
 
Time is heartless though, blind and deaf to my hunger for humane contact. The visitor senses it, the grinding pressure that will close the connection between our worlds. When the visit ends it’s difficult to see the walls and the bars of that filthy little window that heals and strengthens as much as it pains me to remember where I am.

They stood huddled against the cold grey weather, jumping up and down to stay warm despite the lack of snow in late December. Winter was an odd thing to witness in the south when a few inches of fluffy snow would disrupt regular TV programming with emergency weather reports and mad runs to the grocery stores as if a hurricane was on the horizon. A state of emergency for a bit of snow.
 
“Who are those people?” I asked Roper, grinning. My breath curled in the air through the open arrow slit window to mix with the smoke streaming from my cigarette.
 
The old man, a moonshiner in his past life, picked his head up, red-faced after a choking cough that left him breathless and panting. “Eh? They who?”
 
“The people gathered on the railroad tracks.” I watched as they unfurled a banner. “Look!” I waved him over, but Roper was having none of it. He and physical activity did not get along.
 
He made a shooing gesture. “Some church people wishing us a merry Christmas, I reckon. You feel merry, Yank?” His bearded cheek twitched into something of a smile. Humor, however dark, was all we had.
 
“No.” We were barely two weeks removed from back-to-back executions and though I wasn’t totally green, they still left an oily emptiness in the pit of my stomach, as something disgusting had been digested and there lingered an unclean film on everything. The kind of feeling that never goes away. I saw the bright red and green lettering on the banner and wondered if they could ever understand. There was nothing fancy or artistic about the sign, it was just big enough to be seen from the railroad tracks several hundred feet from the section of the prison where death row eked out its existence. “How do we know it’s for us?”
 
“Can you see it?”
 
“Yeah.”
 
“Then what’s it matter who it’s for?” He lit another cigarette and looked at me. I looked away as my eyes misted, suddenly homesick.
 
The banner seemed like a nice gesture, but it reminded me of the dozen or so protestors who stood under glowing street lights across from Central Prison whenever one of us was put to death. Utterly useless however good it made them feel, like throwing money in a well instead of saving it up for something worthwhile. “Are those the same people who stand vigil at executions?”
 
The old man inhaled cigarette smoke and let it roll out of his nose. “Some. Others are friends and family of the condemned. A bunch of them come from that church group.”
 
“People of Faith Against the Death Penalty?”
 
“That’s the one.”
 
 I watched the banner people in their winter coats and hats, jumping and laughing. It wasn’t quite freezing, but the wind made the air feel raw. Even through the haze of a morphine pill the old man gave me I appreciated the effort it took to leave the comfort of their homes on Christmas day to wish us a merry Christmas.
 
The old man grabbed his cane and grunted to his feet, shuffling to the window. “They still there?” I stepped out of the way. Roper looked and smoked. Looked and smoked. He shuffled back to the bunk and slumped on it with a sigh. “Well.” We looked at one another and he raised bushy white eyebrows. “Merry Christmas, Yankee.”