As a Boy Scout grasping the basics of wilderness survival and hiking through buzzing, mosquito-infested forests while life as I knew it faded behind, I first had to grapple with transience and the pain and fear interwoven with impermanence.   Everything I carried served a practical function, and after being rolled up, tucked, folded, stacked and packed, it altogether occupied six cubic feet, or so my canvas rucksack advertised.

An object’s value was the sum of its utility minus its volume and mass, measured in cubic inches and ounces.  The less I had, the freer I felt.  My sense of liberty kindled when I was limited to basic necessities, my creativity sparked to life by the demands of simple survival.  One of my handiest items was twine, a fat spool of the sturdy kind for starting fires, building snares, catching fish, dangling food from a tree branch, wrapping tourniquets, and generally for binding.  Many things find a higher purpose when bound.

Now I camp in a cell with the square footage of a tent.  According to prison policy, I should be able to fold tuck, roll, stack and pack all my belongings into three boxy, flimsy, white plastic shopping bags about the size of brown paper grocery bags, all amounting to a total of six cubic feet.

Books qualify as personal property, no more than ten.  It takes ten books to adequately study my faith, but it also takes ten law books to adequately work on my legal appeals and get my body off death row. That’s 2.5 cubic feet of mental and spiritual acuity for me.

I own one cubic foot of hygiene items, luxuries to prevent odors, rashes and to preserve dignity, to soothe my itchy need to feel neat and clean. Two more cubic feet are crammed with my creativity – paper, pens, poetry, essays, drawings, notebooks full of ideas.

That leaves half a cubic foot for commissary food and sentimentality.  I own a large brown envelope packed with tattered pages scrawled on by my dad before he died and crappy-but-cute kindergarten drawings by my nieces who swear I’m the world’s best uncle even though I was already here when they were born.  I also have a two-inch stack of photos of my brothers and me when we were little boys, of our parents prior to their divorce, of people I’ve never met and places I’ve never been but that are important to my friends or family and therefore important to me.

That’s how I fill and maintain my six feet of cubic space, carved from a hard place.  Technically, then, my commissary food is actually considered contraband and could be confiscated.  To keep anything new is to discard something old. 

I keep my life packed up in bags that tear easily, which is fine by me.  In the end my real treasures – my faith, my memory, my love and my creativity – they all inhabit the infinite space inside my soul, incorruptible, ethereal, eternal… and free to bloom.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR. George Wilkerson lives on Death Row. He is a talented writer and occasional contributor to WITS. Mr. Wilkerson is also a co-author of Crimson Letters, an eye-opening book released in 2020, sharing the voices of those living on North Carolina’s Death Row.

Mr. Wilkerson can be contacted at:
George T. Wilkerson #0900281
4285 Mail Service Center
Raleigh, NC 27699-4285