“Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always.”

Psalm 105:4 (NIV)

Everyone knows small children rely on their parents for necessities, things like food, water, clothes, shelter.  But as an adult, I’d forgotten how much needier kids really are until I spent a day with my friend Kevin and his four-year-old son, KJ.  When KJ couldn’t open his soda, he brought it to Kevin.  After KJ brushed his teeth, he got right in Kevin’s face and grinned for inspection.  When we took KJ to the park, I noticed that whether he climbed on the monkey bars, slid down the slide or swayed on a swing, KJ constantly sought Kevin’s gaze – as if for approval.  Even when Kevin and I were lost in conversation, KJ would shamelessly run over, get between us, grab Kevin’s face and say, “Daddy!  Stop talking to Uncle George and look at me!”  Instead of getting irritated, Kevin seemed to actually delight in his son’s incessant need for attention.

Reflecting on that time all these years later, I believe KJ’s dependency on his dad can model how we adults should depend on God, our heavenly Father.  Perhaps it’s partly what Jesus meant when he counseled us to ‘become as little children’ (Matthew 18:3).  When weak, seek God’s strength.  Before making decisions, seek God’s guidance, wisdom and approval.  When hurt, anxious, or lonely, we should seek God’s comfort, healing, reassurance.  No matter how advanced our age, we should never outgrow our reliance on God – for we will always be his beloved children.

Amen.

For months when I was twenty-three, I sensed God calling me to live in a tent.  Actually, He called me to forsake my party lifestyle and selling drugs; and since part of me yearned to do this, I started fantasizing about being homeless and living out of a tent at a local campground.  My desire had nothing to do with some romantic, spiritual vision that saw connecting with nature as a way to connect with God.  Rather, it was the embodiment of my wish to be free of my attachment to creature comforts.  And it was a practical path to accomplishing what God was asking of me because without my ‘supplemental income’, I simply could not afford to pay all my bills.

My small town had few available decent jobs paying livable wages which didn’t require higher education and a clean criminal history.  With a felony on my record and a GED, I counted myself fortunate to earn $9 an hour building furniture; but even working full-time, I barely covered rent, power, water, phone groceries, toiletries, gas…  I’ve never had health insurance.  Without my extra illicit money, I couldn’t afford little luxuries like cigarettes or new clothes, or taking my girlfriend out to eat or the movies.  I was willing to stop partying, but I felt like God was asking me to stop living!  So, while camping in a tent to save money became a symbol of redemption for me, ultimately I chose to keep my creature comforts.

It’s been twenty years since I made that choice, one that ultimately led to a drug-related violent offense for which I received a death sentence.  Though I long ago gave my heart to God, I’d trade this concrete box for a flimsy tent outside any day – without the girlfriend, cigarettes, running water or electricity.  I realize now that God was not asking me to give up living.  He was trying to teach me how to live without those chains.

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Let me get this straight…

A bunch of old Christian white men coming to Texas death row to bring forth a Kairos conference for minorities held in chains within isolated cells?  I could hear tribal drum beats from my African ancestors telling me to run.  Flee the scene!  Avoid at all costs!  It was something I had successfully avoided for two decades, and I had never applied to join – until now.  

Over the years I had not refused out of penal dogma, nor was I convinced I would be radicalized religiously.  I am an iconoclast by nature, so I am not at all intimidated by people who have a different view on life than I do.  In fact, I cherish meeting people with different beliefs.  No, my lack of participation was simply based on my view of advocacy for Texas death row inmates and how it would look.  I believe that if one resident gets something from an outside organization, then all of us should receive the same thing or things equally.  Or none of us should get anything.  

When I first arrived on death row I learned this from former inmates who called upon unity and fairness as their religion.  Everything I do is done with the idea that I can make a difference in my environment, and my previous protests of Kairos were always done because I wanted everyone to benefit from it.  

But situational circumstances can be reason to make exceptions to the rules.  Sure, perhaps a bit manipulative, depending on how you look at it, but that became my dilemma, I was given a choice I had to make – “Join Kairos or be moved to another cell in another section.”  

A cell is a cell, I am sure one would assume.  True to some degree.  However, I have invested financially in the cell I currently occupy.  I have faux wallpaper on the walls.  It’s clean.  It is not as draconian looking as other cells due to my efforts.  It’s comfortable as far as death row standards.  So, I was reluctant to part ways with my current cell.  Starting all over is a mentally daunting task for me since the administration has done nothing to maintain our cells’ appearance and condition for over eighteen years. 

So, I agreed to take part in Kairos, convincing myself that in the worst case scenario, if I didn’t like it, I would only have to endure it for two days.  I mean, realistically, I have wasted 9,490 days in a solitary cell.  So, what are two days?

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

A section of one of our pods consists of fourteen cells with a recreational dayroom in front of all the cells.  On this morning, the dayroom was cluttered with crane-neck microphones, speakers, guitars, an electric piano – instruments that would be played by population inmates who had sufficient musical skills.  A few other population inmates, penal-certified Field Ministers and Life Coaches, arrived around 7 am to set up the area with chairs for the guests and decorate with colorful ribbons attached to short messages.   

The inmate-band did a test run on their instruments while another inmate began brewing Folgers coffee, filling the air with an aroma that had been absent from my nostrils since my youthful days living with my grandmother.  Another inmate walked around taking photos of death row inmates in cells.  I refused to have my photo taken at first until I saw that everyone else had theirs taken.  If you ever see the photo, you may notice my wallpaper in the background.  

At around 8 am, about twenty-five Kairos representatives arrived.  They were a casual bunch, not on the far side of over-the-hill, but having passed its summit. With their thinning gray-to-silver hair, they appeared more suited for a M.A.G.A rally than sitting alongside the condemned.  Never judge a book by its cover…

The not-knowing drove my expectations, and I would later learn the same not-knowing faced these Kairos men.  They heard that in my section resided enigmas.  We’d offered up nothing much for attempted spiritual support in past events, and they were told to be unsure of how we might react.  So when they came in, they prayed.

After their group prayer, two of the inmate Life Coaches rolled in breakfast and passed a plate to each death row inmate consisting of breakfast tacos, boiled eggs, oranges, apples, Folgers coffee, assorted cookies and real sugar.  Don’t even get me started trying to recall when my pallet last tasted real, uncut, diabetic cocaine…  sugar.

Once we had all eaten, each Kairos man introduced themselves, and we quickly learned these were not Jim Jones disciples.  Some were former military, including two who fought in the Vietnam War.  One was a scientist, another a mathematician, another a New York liberal, a pastor of a growing church, etc…  All were well off.

Then a Field Minister went to each cell and introduced each death row inmate and explained to them why we took part in the Kairos activities.  Some of us were truthful about not wanting to move.  A few said they wanted to build on or explore their faith and fellowship with Jesus Christ, one had no response, and another said he simply wanted to try something new.  

After the introductions, they sang three songs, encouraging us to sing along.  Then two men took center stage and gave their testimony and explained who they were as Christians.  All were passionate.  I think what grabbed my attention the most was how brutally honest their revelations were, from being used by the military as a Special Ops killing machine to a manipulative womanizer to a reckless alcoholic who nearly killed his entire family in a car accident.

Once these men were done, a group narrator divided the men into ‘families’, naming the groups Matthew, Mark and Luke, and groups of three men were assigned to come talk to inmates at their cells.  Conversations could be about the testimony given and how it moved us, if it did.  Or they would just listen to us talk about carnal stuff – sports, penal injustice, our delusional egos, and so on.  Nothing was forbidden.  Nor were they trying to judge us.  The talks would last for fifteen minutes before they were called back to the dayroom.  More songs were sung, more coffee passed out, and different men would then stand and talk.  Around noon, lunch was passed out, and afterwards there was more singing, more testimonies, and more family meetings at door cells.

Both days at around 2 pm the Kairos men would sing the song I’ll Fly Away, forming a single-file line, spreading their arms out like wings and flapping them as if birds, unashamed, sharing the biggest and warmest smiles I have ever seen in my life.  They were intoxicated, yet not under the influence of any alcohol or chemical agent.  Though I laughed at their ‘funky chicken’ dance routine, I was more appreciative of their genuine display than I thought I would be.  

And at around 5 pm each day, they ended with prayer, feeding us again before saying their good-byes.  

On Day 2, the final day, they explained that their wives, family members and church members had prepared the meals for us.  They even did all the baking.  This revelation touched me – then and now.  I’ve learned over the years that on death row, the majority of us receive support from strangers, non-family members, from different countries even.  It moves and humbles me.

They also gave us a little tote bag filled with notes and letters from Kairos men and their families, even from incarcerated men and women who took part in previous Kairos events.  I read every one.  Some were written with a formal message, but there were a few personal messages from the men I spoke to.  I’m sending them home so my mother can read them too.

When it was finally over and the lights were no longer bright on the section, when every instrument, chair and person was long gone, the most fascinating thing happened…  the air was filled with happiness, not the wild tension that normally fills up this place like a powder keg waiting to ignite.  If I had to describe it…  Recall how the green menace stole all the presents from the Whos in Whoville?  He was so proud of himself, thinking he had ruined the holiday for everyone as he patiently waited to hear screaming and crying coming from the small town.  Instead he heard singing.  Praise. 

Well, after the Kairos men left, IT WAS LIKE WHOVILLE UP IN THIS MUTHER…

Details surrounding Charles’ case have been shared extensively on this site. If you would like to contact Charles Mamou, you can do so at:

Charles Mamou #999333
Polunsky Unit
P.O. Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400

He can also get messages through: https://securustech.online/#/login

And any messages or comments left here will be forwarded to him.

Close to thirty-three years ago, at the age of twenty-two, I became the newest addition to North Carolina’s Death Row.  There were about eighty-four others here then, and since that time our disparaged population grew to more than two hundred.  Also over time, I became lost, with no conscious direction.  I had no sense of hope in my life and fell into unfathomable darkness, with many of those I once knew lost – my grandmother, my parents, aunts, uncles and cousins.  Those I had left became strangers.  I staggered through the sands of my sanity, clinging to the delusion that I was merely existing and not really alive.  I became the embodiment of the walking dead.

At one point in my stay here on Death Row, I tried to bring an end to my remaining appeals…  Thankfully, I was unsuccessful.  There came an ‘awakening’ here on the row in the form of two classes – Creative Writing and Houses of Healing.  The following year new classes were added and greedily devoured.  In these classes, we began to experience parts of ourselves we hadn’t known we’d lost, and before long we hungered to change the narrative of who we were, how we imagined ourselves and how society perceived us. Those very words,  Change the Narrative, became our mantra and our movement.  

We began to counsel ourselves and monitor each other’s actions, challenging each other to excel and take pride in our accomplishments.  Some of us wrote newspaper op-eds and magazine articles.  Some wrote books.  Some even began community outreach programs to encourage the youth to believe in themselves and succeed in life.  We are even – to the best of my knowledge – the only Death Row in the United States to ever put on a live play, Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose, and we also created a play, Serving Life, which was adapted into Count and performed by student actors at the University of North Carolina.  

We worked hard, many of us for the first time in our lives.  Classes became safe spaces where we could open up and be ourselves.  They were places we could leave the negativity and degradation of incarceration behind.  We forged new and deeper bonds with each other, and I learned things about people I’d known for years.  For example, a guy I’d known for twenty-four years once attended nursing school.  Another I knew for nine years had completed three years of college trying to become a social worker.

We inspired each other to believe we could achieve great things.  We not only changed ourselves, we also changed the culture here and our way of thinking.  There was a major drop in write-ups and speech and debate made arguments fun instead of stressful.   We were truly changing the narrative.

Yet…  If there is ever a constant in this life, it is that reality is paved in the unexpected.  The classes were shut down, and like Dante’s leopard, lion and she-wolf, we were confronted with obstacles we needed to overcome.

Our leopard came in the form of custody staff, many of whom don’t recognize any value or potential in us.  Our lion, the program department, did not provide programs and was unwilling to allow others to do so.  And our wolf lived among us, haters, unhappy with their lives and intent on sabotaging the growth of others.  

But in the end, we’ve learned that it is only ‘us’ that holds us back.  Knowing that, we will never give in or give up.  We will and are achieving great things.  We are still writing creatively on our own, publishing books, short stories, poems and magazine articles.  We are becoming versed in modern technology, learning new languages and working towards achieving our dreams.  We no longer accept merely existing in a state of learned helplessness.  We inspire each other daily and we have changed our narrative.  Now it’s time to live our new stories!

ABOUT THE WRITER.   The author writes under the pen name Resolute, and has placed Second in our most recent writing contest with this essay. Resolute answered the prompt, eloquently sharing the inner strength and community building among his peers, describing members encouraging and uplifting one another to change their narrative.

Any comments left on this page will be forwarded to the author.

Present Day, Death Row.

I recently studied a photo of Stephen Hayes’ exhibit, 5 lbs., featuring a wall of dark dinner-plate-sized frames, each filled with brass shell casings.  Emerging from the bullets,  hands that seem to be reaching from underneath – or maybe surging up through – a flurry-flood, breaking the surface like drowning men and children.

The first message is cerebral.  As a series, the lots of dinner plates and lots of hands suggest a widespread pattern of violence.

The second message is emotional.  Wide-spread fingers and clenched fists speak a language I recognize – DESPERATION – showing that ultimately each of us suffer fear and death alone.

I’ve been incarcerated twenty years, but even now, at forty-one, my breath quickens as if those fingers are mine, screaming at me from the past.  When I was twelve and living in the projects, I suddenly realized that before I turned thirty, I’d either be dead, serving a life sentence, or waiting to be executed.  When I told my homies, they looked at me coolly, like I’d pointed out some obvious and natural law, the way gravity pulls all bodies toward earth’s center.  

February 1993.  The Projects.

You need to call the cops…  What?  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  Call the cops!  That was taboo in the projects; we all knew the consequences.  My homie’s mom draped her heavy arm around my shoulders, lifted my chin to examine tonight’s damage.  I had thick red welts from where my dad’s fingers had encircled my neck.

“George, sweetie, I know we not s’posed to, but if you don’t call the cops, yo daddy gon’ kill you or one of yo brothers.”

She said it so tenderly, I started sobbing again.  Though I was scared of my dad, I was terrified of the po-leece. 

As boogeymen, police had supernatural powers to make people disappear.  Adults threatened children with them, like, if you don’t take yo li’l ass to bed, the po-leece gone take yo li’l ass to jail.  Our campfire stories centered around THE LAW – run-ins with them, running from them, getting captured by them.  I didn’t want to call the cops; I didn’t want to die either.  

She dialed, then pressed the cordless phone to my ear.  A stranger’s voice said, “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”  

Finally, desperate, I told on my dad.  I told about the years of beatings, the broken bones, how he’d tried to kill me, that my brothers were still in the apartment with him.

By the time the cops came to rescue me, I felt better.  I figured my brothers and I would either go live with our mom (wherever she was) or go into foster care.  Either way, we’d escape the projects and our dad.

The cops were kind.  Both were middle-aged, one White, one Black.  They took me to confront my dad who stood shirtless on our stoop, smoking a cigarette.  He smirked when he saw me walking up between two brawny officers.  

We stopped about five feet away.  One of the officers rubbed warm circles between my shoulders.  They told my dad all I’d said, then got quiet.  My dad dropped his cigarette, stubbed it out with his bare heel, then growled, “Yeah, I did it.  All of it.”

The guy on my right looked down at me a couple seconds, then back at my dad.  Then he pressed me forward and said, “Well… you must’ve done something to deserve it.”

The cops nodded to my dad, then walked away saying, “Have a good night, sir.”  My dad sidestepped as I hung my head and went inside to rejoin my brothers.

Sometimes, after that night and just prior to or following a beating, my dad would drag me by an ear to the kitchen phone and thrust the receiver against my head.  “Here, call for help,” he’d say, chuckling.  I’d close my eyes and click the phone back into its cradle.

March 25, 1993.  The Projects.

I’d turn twelve at midnight.  I lay on my bed monitoring the sounds inside and outside the apartment, anxious. The corner where our sidewalk bordered our parking lot was a prime hangout spot for dealers, users, prostitutes.  Every night I listened to car stereos thumping, people laughing, bottles bursting (sometimes through our windows), the undulating tones of an argument that ended with the slaps and thuds of fists on faces – or gunshots.  After years of living here, like an inner city lullaby, these hypnotic sounds soothed me, rocked me to sleep each night.

But tonight was initiation night.  Despite having lived here so long, my family still wasn’t accepted.  At first, it was because we were only one of two nonblack families – my mom, Korean, my dad, White.  Also, my dad tried to keep my three brothers and me within shouting distance at all times, locking our doors for the day once the sun went down.  We were day-shift people.

During the day, the projects seemed mostly abandoned, withdrawn, guarded, like my dad.  Though we lived in the ‘hood, we weren’t of it.  My brothers and I were baited into fights every day.  People stole our towels, socks, even underwear off our clothesline; threw mud, burnt grease, piss and shit on our drying bedsheets.  All of it screamed, YOU DON’T FUCKING BELONG HERE!

So, I’d decided to join them.  My friends would help initiate me into the real ‘hood life.  What had me on edge was my dad.  I didn’t know the term schizophrenia yet; all I knew was that he was crazy, unstable, violent.  

He also oscillated between narcolepsy and insomnia.  Most nights, he’d prop up on the couch in our living room, in pitch dark, chain smoking Winstons… until he passed out for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.  I was waiting to hear his heavy breathing turn into snores.  I needed those loud snores if I was going to sneak out – and later, sneak back in – under their cover.

I was startled upright by screeching tires and, “FREEZE!”  A stampede of feet slapped grass and cement and rattled hedges outside my window as shadows flitted past.  A minute later, several ambled back and became menacing silhouettes outlined by strobing red and blue lights. They laughed among themselves.

“…like roaches!” one of them yelled.

Though the cops had cleared the corner, everybody knew the crowd had simply relocated to one of the other parking lots.  As kids, before we ever committed a crime, ‘hood life taught us to scatter reflexively at the sight of a police cruiser, period.  It was a joke, or a dangerous form of Tag.  You’re it.  

My dad’s lawnmower-snores rumbled through the apartment, unbothered by the ritual outside.  I laced up my sneakers. I was tired of being treated like an interloper.  I knew my family was too poor to move anywhere else, so I crouched on my bed, listening to dad’s steady snores, then climbed out my window.

Present.

Looking back, that was around the time I found the first gun I’d ever own, just laying in the grassy field beside my parking lot – the same field we’d cross to get to the bus stop, or when running from cops.

Last week, I heard on the news that someone there did a drive-by shooting, hitting three teens standing on the sidewalk near that bus stop, across from the police substation.  The assailant got away.  It seems nothing has changed except the generation.  I can’t help but wonder – was there so much crime, really, because our way of life in the projects was anti-police, or were we behaving criminally because police were anti-us, and we didn’t have anything to lose?

For me, the art exhibit photo merges past and present desperations.  In the past, perhaps, one of those hands is mine, reaching toward the police for help.  Presently, those hands seem to embody the pervading fear of police that people of color have – hands held up defensively, pleading, STOP… ENOUGH… WAIT… JUST FIVE MORE MINUTES…

It’s as if those hands know that to keep their freedom and bodies intact, while facing impossible odds, they must learn to part the sea.  They’ll need a miracle. 

Growing up, I looked forward to holidays and family reunions because they meant we were going to visit Grandma in West Virginia.  She lived alone at the end of a long dirt road at the head of a holler.  Her two-story house had shingle siding, a tin roof, and no neighbors in sight.  It was where her in-laws lived before her and where she and my grandpa raised eleven kids.

Family gatherings there always began with the incessant slamming of car doors as uncles and aunts reached the end of a long drive and 29 grandkids scattered everywhere.  Some of us ran to the barn, some the creek or the woods, others headed straight to the house and the ceramic duck cookie jar resting on Grandma’s deep freeze where she stashed 5th Avenue and Zero bars.  Grandma watched us, smiling, as we ran every which way, and when one of our parents admonished us with a Slow down! or Stop being so loud!, Grandma would say, “Oh, let ’em play. They’re kids.”  She would remind them that they were once loud, dirty kids running through the same house.

As far as I can remember, she rarely raised her voice and only swung a switch maybe twice and only when one of us grandkids back-talked our parents.  That’s the one thing she didn’t tolerate… sass.  She was slow moving but first on the scene when it came to setting things right.  I remember her once telling my kindest uncle to cut a switch.  When he returned with it, she switched the legs of his son for sassing him.

Most of us knew better than to misbehave around Grandma.  We loved and respected her and knew the woods around her house were full of switches.  I thought the world of her, and it helped that my dad and others frequently told me I was her favorite grandson.  I’d do anything she asked and everything I found needed doing without her having to ask – chop and stack the wood, haul buckets of coal, cut brush, and pile rocks.  Sometimes there were several months between our visits, but upon arrival I would immediately set about completing whatever chores I could find.

I felt I received extra hugs, and Grandma would whisper in my ear that there were Nutty Bars (my favorite) in the cabinet, and I should get some when my cousins weren’t around.  Feeling I was her favorite, I didn’t want to disappoint her, while also feeling like nothing I could do would disappoint; a foolish mistake on my part.  One fall when I was fourteen, my dad and I went to visit Grandma for the weekend to do some squirrel hunting.  Grandma always beat the sun up when she had company, cooking as if all her children were home and hungry.  This particular morning was no different, and the smell of bubbling gravy and sizzling sausage drew us downstairs to the table.  As we ate with gusto, Grandma did as she always did, nibbled a biscuit and watched us enjoy her food with a smile on her face.  When my dad finished, he stood, grabbed his shotgun and walked out.  As I stood to follow, Grandma told me to put some sausage biscuits together.  Knowing we would be in the woods all day, she wanted to make sure we had something to eat for later.

After whipping the biscuits together and tucking them into the large pocket on my hunting coat, I said, “I better go catch up with my old man.”  She could’ve beaten me with a two-by-four and it wouldn’t have hurt as much as the look she gave me.  I felt I’d instantly become her least favorite.  After a long pause, she scoldingly said, “He’s not your old man.  He’s your daddy.”

Her words were evergreen, influencing how I treat elders and my father to this day.  I muttered, “Yes ma’am,” lowered my head, and skulked out of the house and up the hill to catch up with my dad. 

ABOUT THE WRITER.  Jason Hurst has a talent for writing and a desire to pursue productive and creative endeavors. He was recently one of the subjects of an article by Waverly McIver regarding parenting from death row, Dads of Death Row, has worked with Prison Pod Productions, and is currently working on a podcast project to raise awareness regarding death row.
Jason can be contacted at:

Jason Hurst #0509565
Central Prison
P.O. Box 247
Phoenix, MD 21131
OR
textbehind.com