Monkeyfist.com
Participate in the Dream
Monday, 04 September 2000
.....
Since the reinstatement of the death penalty on January 1, 1974, more than 230 people have been executed by the authority of the State of Texas. I have lived in Texas my whole life and since the reinstatement of the death penalty more than 230 people have been executed in my name. The first, John Devries, was condemned to death a month before I was five years old. This year the machine is on a record pace with 32 inmates executed so far, and seven scheduled to die before the end of the year. Of those inmates currently awaiting their death at the Terrell unit in Livingston, Texas 40.4% are Black, 36.4% are White, 22.2% are Hispanic and .9% are listed as other.
Once when I was 12 years old -- the same year that Charlie Brooks, Jr. was executed in my name -- my brother and I found a kitten that someone had "ditched" in our front-yard. It was too young to eat on its own, so we took turns feeding it with an eyedropper that we stole from a bottle of cough syrup. It slept in a box in the kitchen, and we were debating on a name. I was pushing for Tolkien, but my brother insisted on Oddball, because the kitten had an unusually large head and no tail. The debate was made irrelevant a week later, as my brother was walking through the living room. He stepped over a pillow that was lying on the floor and didn't see the kitten. We didn't even know that it could climb out of the box.
I can still clearly remember the kitten's agonizing scream as my brother's full weight came down on its tiny body. I ran into the living room from the kitchen with a terrible sense of what had happened. John was white and alternately yelling that he "didn't mean to" and "that he didn't see it" interspersed with "oh, my god." I immediately knew that the kitten was going to die. It was panting as it tried to breathe around the entrails that blocked its throat and between breathes it let out muffled wails. I scooped it up and took it into the kitchen so that the blood wouldn't stain the carpet, and without thinking -- running on adrenaline and pure instinct -- I wrung its neck.
Since that day I have had other occasions to kill; out of mercy, by accident, or for sport. While each is rationalized according to its own pattern, none of these is an easy memory; but no other has marked my psyche with the same permanence and clarity. Of course it was an accident, of course it was the humane thing to do, but as with most matters of death, it was more complicated than mercy. What I now recognize, and admit with trepidation, is that along with mercy, my actions served some measure of convenience. Instinct doesn't stop to consider blood stains on the new carpet.
I have always respected the value of personal accountability, but it is with the same feelings of trepidation that I consider race and death in America. The death penalty is much more complicated than accountability, and I shudder with the painful knowledge that each person the State of Texas executes, they do so with some small measure of my personal authority, and in some small way for my convenience.
This is Participate in the Dream <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/646>