Dead Man Walking (41 page)

The report cites one such highly publicized case in Columbus in which the homicide victim was the daughter of a prominent white contractor: “D.A., William J. Smith, phoned to ask the contractor personally what punishment he wanted the D.A. to seek. When the contractor told him to go for the death penalty, Smith told him that was all he needed to hear. He secured a death sentence and was rewarded with a $5,000 contribution — his largest single contribution — to run for judge in the next election.”
²¹

In cases involving black victims, however, the report states, “not only did none of the murders of their relatives lead to a capital trial, but officials often treated them as criminals”:

• Jimmy Christian was informed by the police in 1988 that his son had been murdered. That was the last he heard from any officials. He was never advised of any court proceedings. When an arrest was made, he heard about it on the street. He was not informed of the trial date or the charges.
  
• Johnny Johnson came home from church in 1984 to find the body of his wife, her throat cut. His one contact with officials occurred when he was briefly jailed on suspicion of her murder.
  
• Mildred Brewer witnessed the shooting of her daughter in 1979. Instead of being allowed to accompany her in the ambulance to the hospital, she was taken to police headquarters and questioned for three hours — during which her daughter died. When a suspect was arrested, tried and sentenced, Mrs. Brewer heard nothing from the D.A.
  ²²
  

And so it goes.

The Survive meeting ends, heads all bowed in prayer. Later, people cluster in small groups, chatting and sipping drinks that some of the women have provided. All the sorrow and loss is overwhelming, yet I don’t feel devastated. There’s something in the women themselves that strengthens me. I think of the rallying cry of black women of South Africa: “You have struck the women. You have struck the rock.” Maybe it’s because black people, especially black women, have suffered for such a long, long time. Seasoned sufferers, they have grace, tenacity, a great capacity to absorb pain and loss and yet endure.
God makes a way out of no way
. For these women this is no empty, pious sentiment. It is the air they breathe, the bread they eat, the path they walk.

A ripple of laughter bubbles up from one end of the room and I see Shirley Carr slip her arm comfortingly around another woman’s shoulders. Shirley was the first to speak tonight, telling of her two sons killed five months apart. She’s worked through the paralysis of her grief and is now able to accompany others through the phases and seasons of denial and guilt, rage and loss, withdrawal and despair. Mary sees that when her term of service is up, Shirley will likely take over directorship of the group. Development of self-help and local leadership is important in the Mennonite philosophy.

Mary Riley and I have become friends, and we look for ways to build bridges between our two organizations — Pilgrimage, our abolitionist group, and Survive. When people join Pilgrimage, besides inviting them to become pen pals to death-row inmates, we also encourage them to volunteer their services to Survive or to other victim assistance groups in their town or city.

Lloyd LeBlanc, the father of young, murdered David. With him, I end this narrative.

In the years immediately after Pat Sonnier’s Pardon Board hearing, my encounters with Lloyd were friendly but tentative. We talked on the telephone, wrote notes. I paid a few visits. My first visits to his home in St. Martinville had been especially difficult for Eula, Lloyd’s wife. The thought of someone coming into her house
who had befriended her son’s murderers was at first too much for her. When I would come, she would leave the house. It’s better now.

One day two years ago in a telephone conversation, Lloyd said that he goes to pray every Friday from 4:00 to 5:00
A.M
. in a small “perpetual adoration” chapel in St. Martinville, and I asked if I might join him. He said he would like that very much. I know I want to do this, even if it’s four o’clock in the morning. Words of Rainer Maria Rilke come:

Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work.
²³

I drive into Baton Rouge the night before to shorten the distance of the drive, and Louie comes to sleep over at Mama’s house so we can save time in the morning. Good brother that he is, he says I should not make the trip alone. We have figured that if we leave Baton Rouge at 2:45 we can reach St. Martinville by 4:00. Louie fills the thermos with coffee.

Riding in the dark across Acadian Louisiana reminds me of when I was eight years old and I would get up with Mama during Lent to go to early-morning Mass. I remember the still, cold air, the feeling of mystery that is always there in the dark when you are awake and the rest of the world is asleep.

In his note Lloyd has told me how he prays for “everyone, especially the poor and suffering.” He prays for “the repose of the soul” of David and for his wife, Eula. He prays in thanksgiving for his daughter, Vickie, and her four healthy children. It is the grandchildren — little Ryan, Derek, Megan, and Jacob — who have brought Eula back to life — but it has taken a long, long time. For a year after David’s murder, Lloyd had frequently taken her to visit David’s grave. Unless he took her there, he once told me, “she couldn’t carry on, she couldn’t pick up the day, she couldn’t live.” For three years his wife had cried, and he said the house was like a tomb and he found himself working long hours out of the house “to keep my sanity.”

Once, during one of my visits, he took me to his office — he is a construction worker — and showed me the grandfather clock he was making after his day’s work was done. “It’s good to keep busy,” he says.

Lloyd LeBlanc prays for Loretta Bourque and her family. The Bourques had been more anxious than he to witness the execution
of Patrick Sonnier. The day before the Pardon Board was to hear Pat’s appeal, members of the Bourque family had visited Lloyd to urge him to attend the hearing and press for the death sentence. A few months earlier, trying to evade witnessing the execution, Lloyd had asked his brother to take his place, but the brother had a heart attack and couldn’t.

There, at the Pardon Board hearing, Lloyd LeBlanc had done what was asked of him. Speaking for both families, he asked that the law of execution be carried out. But after the execution he was troubled and sought out his parish priest and went to confession.

Now, Lloyd LeBlanc prays for the Sonniers — for Pat and for Eddie and for Gladys, their mother. “What grief for this mother’s heart,” he once said to me in a letter. Yes, for the Sonniers, too, he prays. He knows I visit Eddie, and in his letters he sometimes includes a ten-dollar bill with the note: “For your prison ministry to God’s children.” And shortly before Gladys Sonnier’s death in January 1991, Lloyd LeBlanc went to see her to comfort her.

Louie and I drive Interstate 10 West, then turn off at Breaux Bridge for the last twenty miles. We go through Parks, the last place David and Loretta were seen alive, and drive into the parking lot of the very old wooden church of St. Martin of Tours. Light shines in a steady slant from the tall stained-glass window of the chapel. Red, green, and yellow speckle the grass. All around is darkness. Nearby, large hundred-year-old oak trees spread their branches.

I tap the door of the chapel and a young woman with long dark hair lets us in with a quiet smile. She has a blanket around her. Her hour of vigil has been from three to four o’clock. We find out that she has eight children. Her husband preceded her in prayer earlier in the night. Louie and I are glad to get out of the cold. The fall weather is setting in.

Inside the chapel I see a sign hand-printed in black letters on white paper, a quotation from the Gospel of John: “Because you have seen me, you believe. Blessed are those who do not see and yet believe.” The round wafer of bread consecrated at Mass is elevated in a gold vessel with clear glass at the center so the host can be seen. Gold rays, emanating outward, draw the eye to the center. Two pews along the back wall. Two kneelers, four red sanctuary candles on the floor. On the wall a crucifix and a picture of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

At five minutes to four Lloyd drives up. “You made it,” he says, “I’m glad you’re safe, you know those highways,” and I introduce
him to Louie. The chapel is warm and close and filled with silence and the smell of beeswax. Lloyd and I kneel on the prie-dieux. He takes his rosary out of his pocket. Louie, in the pew behind us, already has his rosary in his hands.

We “tell” the beads, as the old French people used to say.
One at a time — Hail Mary, Holy Mary, Hail Mary, the mysteries of Christ and our own, life and joy, suffering and death — we round the beads one by one, a circle and round we go, dying and behold we live, the soul stretched taut, the soul which says: No more, I can take no more. Hail Mary, Holy Mary, breathed in and breathed out, linking what eyes cannot see but what the heart knows and doubts and knows again
.

Holding a rosary is a physical, tangible act — you touch and hold the small, smooth beads awhile and then let go. “Do not cling to me,” Jesus had said to Mary Magdalene. The great secret:
To hold on, let go. Nothing is solid. Everything moves. Except love — hold on to love. Do what love requires
.

We pray the sorrowful mysteries. Jesus agonizing before he is led to execution. Jesus afraid. Jesus sweating blood. Were there beads of sweat on David’s brow when he realized the mortal danger? Was it when the kidnappers turned the car down a road that he knew ended in a cane field? Was it when he was told to lie face down on the ground? His mother had bought him a new blue velour shirt that he was wearing that night. Standing by the kitchen sink, he wrapped his arms around himself and patted the new shirt and said, “Mama, this is going to keep me warm at the game tonight.”

And Loretta … her last evening of life at a football game … She had seen friends there, laughed and talked and cheered her team, safe in the globe of stadium light, unaware of the dark road soon to be hers.

Lloyd LeBlanc has told me that he would have been content with imprisonment for Patrick Sonnier. He went to the execution, he says, not for revenge, but hoping for an apology. Patrick Sonnier had not disappointed him. Before sitting in the electric chair he had said, “Mr. LeBlanc, I want to ask your forgiveness for what me and Eddie done,” and Lloyd LeBlanc had nodded his head, signaling a forgiveness he had already given. He says that when he arrived with sheriffs deputies there in the cane field to identify his son, he had knelt by his boy — “laying down there with his two little eyes sticking out like bullets” — and prayed the Our Father. And when he came to the words: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” he had not halted or equivocated, and he said, “Whoever did this, I forgive them.” But he acknowledges that it’s
a struggle to overcome the feelings of bitterness and revenge that well up, especially as he remembers David’s birthday year by year and loses him all over again: David at twenty, David at twenty-five, David getting married, David standing at the back door with his little ones clustered around his knees, grown-up David, a man like himself, whom he will never know. Forgiveness is never going to be easy. Each day it must be prayed for and struggled for and won.

P
OSTSCRIPT

Since the publication of this book in 1993 the states of Kansas (1994) and New York (1995) have reinstated the death penalty and Congress has enacted the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994), which expands federal crimes punishable by death to about 60 offenses.

*
Georgia, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia. For New Mexico, the option offered was thirty years before the possibility of parole instead of twenty-five. See note
21
to chapter 5.

NOTES

C
HAPTER
O
NE

1
. Dorothy Day established soup kitchens and shelters for the poor in New York City. With Peter Maurin she published a newspaper,
The Catholic Worker
, (Current address: 36 East First Street, New York, New York 10003). Her life story is told in
The Long Loneliness
(San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1952).

2.
Statistical Abstract of the U.S.
, 110th ed., Washington, D.C. 20402: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988.

3.
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele,
America: What Went Wrong?
(Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1992), p. xiii.

4.
The Louisiana Weekly
(New Orleans), a black-owned newspaper, told of the U.S. Department of Justice survey in an article by Jeff White, “Black Leaders React to Police Brutality Survey,” May 30, 1992.